Winter's Crown

by Alexandra Little

“Crowndan says that it looks to be mostly superficial, and that the tunnel looks to be intact. All of our equipment is still in place.”

  “How far from here to the main hall?” Dalandaras asked.

  “Another three miles,” I replied.

  “Dalandaras,” Lorandal called. “Havan da.”

  “I think he likes you a little,” Zarah leaned in close to me as the prince joined his companion.

  Zarah and I followed slowly. “This really isn’t the time for that.”

  “He’s better than Crowndan.”

  Nearly anyone was. “Not having any man at all would be best. And he’s an elf.”

  “You haven’t seen the way that he looks at you.”

  Yes I had.

  Whatever Zarah was going to say was cut off by the grinding of stone. For a moment I thought there was another collapse, but Sir Aros’ men had managed to slide aside one of the heavy doors. Crowndan appeared to be right—any rubble seemed to be superficial, and the main shape of the hall was still intact.

  “It’s still a long ways to the final drop,” Aerik was telling Sir Aros. “We will need your men inside to help with the ropes.”

  “How did we miss all of this?” Crowndan emerged from the tunnel, his eyes wide. “It really is spectacular.”

  “Shall we go in, then?” I asked nobody in particular. A queasiness began to build up in me, and I forced myself to enter before I lost any will. But there was no apparition waiting in the darkness, no sense of its oily shadow.

  “Here.”

  I jumped, but it was my father. He passed me a lit lantern. I almost refused it, but he didn’t know that I could see in the darkness.

  “Are you all right?” Aerik asked behind me.

  I managed a shrug. “It looks the same as before.”

  “I can barely believe that we saw a ghost in this place.”

  Dalandaras came up with a torch that burned a strange white flame. I thought it would be hotter than our lanterns, but I did not feel much heat from it.

  “Is this what you expected, Prince?” I asked.

  “There is little to expect,” he replied.

  “Don’t worry about getting lost,” I said as the others filed in. “The tunnel leads straight there.”

  The journey passed in whispers. The tunnel was wide enough to fit four abreast, and wasn’t much taller. It sloped gently, almost imperceptibly downward. The walls were covered in murals, swirling, dramatized images of mountains and valleys and forests and hills and waves. There were people. No faces or features were shown, any detail hidden by hoods and cloaks, or by the people facing away. The murals slowly evolved the farther we advanced, turning into scenes of blizzards and storms and mountains exploding in fire and smoke. There were great figures different from the people, figures carved as simple block shapes that could not be identified as elf or human or other. They were featureless giants.

  “What do you think of them?” I whispered to Dalandaras.

  “They are, as your companion said, spectacular,” he replied, bringing his torch close to the wall. “But I cannot tell whose history they show.” He reached out a hand, and let his gloved fingers skim over an image of a storm-tossed sea. Impressions of shells and seaweed bordered the image. “They are far away from both our sea and yours. Have you seen many images like this?”

  “Of the sea? A few here and there, but this is the largest.”

  “You have a shell on your collar.”

  My hand went to my throat; even through my gloves I could feel the pattern of the embroidery. “Yes.”

  “Your have a bull as well; I presume that is your father’s. But the shell—”

  “My mother’s. And mine. I am head of house now.”

  “My apologies, if it is painful.”

  “People die.” My voice was curter than I meant it to be.

  We kept our conversation to the murals. For an hour voices barely went above a reverent whisper, and then we finally came to the ledge. Our ropes and hooks and pulleys were still in place, having been pounded into the stone.

  “Sir Aros, stay up here with your men, and help Tunir and Iasul,” my father ordered. “Crowndan, with me.”

  “Zarah can help me with Aerik, with the ropes and his arm,” I said. “And if we need to get out in a hurry.”

  “I’m not crippled, girl,” Aerik said with a hint of embarrassment.

  No thanks to I. “I worry for you. And Zarah has more experience than the others with climbing.”

  Sir Aros nodded reluctantly.

  “Lorandal, remain here with them,” Dalandaras said. “Assist them in whatever they need.”

  We unloaded our ropes and strapped on our harnesses. Tunir and Iasul, with help from the soldiers, made short work of rigging extra ropes over the side. It was a tight fit, but nobody wanted to have to wait at the bottom if things went wrong.

  The two elves proved adept, controlling their descent with one hand and holding their torches in the other. Father and Crowndan were less at ease. We inched our way to the bottom, the scrape of rope against glove and harness the only noise. We stayed silent even on our landing, and trekked through the blackness to our doors. I slipped through, the others following.

  A great column had fallen, scattering more large stones across the way, but strangely I did not fear the entire mountain coming down. There was no sunlight anymore; the skylight was blocked and even though we held our lanterns as high as we could, we could not see even the faintest of outlines of the arched ceiling.

  “It is truly massive,” Eliawen said, her eyes scanning in all directions. She held her torch away from the direction she was looking. I got the impression that the elves’ sight was much better than ours. Maybe even like mine was. “You never said how long this hall is.”

  “We could not see its length,” I replied. “Even with the light from the sky.” While I knew that the apparition was not here now, I could feel the taint of it. I could sense the doors, and the broken seal. It was more than a sense; it was as if there was a humming in my mind, which changed was always a beacon towards the ward and the unknown beyond it, whichever way I turned.

  “Is this where it happened?” my father asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Where is the room?” Dalandaras asked.

  I gestured with my lantern, and the tainted hum only grew louder. “Not far that way. Must we go in?”

  “I must,” Dalandaras said. “And I think you do as well, Evalandriel.”

  “It’s Eva, not Evalandriel.”

  “Have you ever seen any names in these ruins?”

  I thought about it, but realized that I couldn’t think of any. Not for any person.

  “But it knows your name.”

  And it knows about my mother, but even as the urge to say so was on my lips, I could feel my father lingering nearby and was aware how loudly our voices seemed to echo in the quiet. “I’ll go,” I said quietly even as I cursed myself for my cowardice. “But after you.”

  “Behind us both,” my father corrected. “If you sense the creature, warn us.”

  We stepped carefully around the glass and the rocks and the snow, and the fractured pieces of one of the doors.

  “I hope you didn’t need that to contain the apparition,” I said to Dalandaras.

  “It would have been helpful,” he replied calmly.

  My father glanced back at me, but whatever was in his eyes was concealed in shadow.

  We came to the doorway of the apparition’s home. One door still stood. The light from our lanterns didn’t seem to penetrate into the darkness beyond.

  “Be on your guard,” my father said quietly. “Crowndan, stay with Lady Eliawen and Zarah. Aerik, my daughter.”

  My guardian came to my side as we entered. There was no apparition, and yet it felt as if was there. The room was cavernous and something oppressed our light. I heard nothing but the soft, cautious touches of our footsteps, and the frantic beating of my pulse in my ears. The slick, unclcean oppress
iveness lingered all around, but there was nothing so tangible as the tendrils of shadow.

  Dalandaras halted, but he gestured my father forward. My father hesitated, but lifted his lantern higher and went onwards.

  As Aerik and I came upon the elf, I saw that he had closed his eyes. He inhaled deeply, and his lips curled ever so slightly in a sneer.

  “You feel what I do, I think,” I said quietly. While my voice had echoed outside, in here it was almost muffled.

  “Some.” Dalandaras’ eyes flickered open. “It is resting.”

  Father came upon the first body. I had seen death and corpses, but they had mostly been washed ashore, sailors whose ships had been caught in the storms. By the time they floated ashore they were bloated and deformed, and had been chewed at by fish and crabs. Sometimes there was a noticeable shark bite, and limbs were missing. The stench, of rotten eggs and pungent cheese, was overwhelming, and traveled for hundreds of yards.

  This was the opposite. Instead of bloated, this body was thin, brittle, and dried out. Its clothes hung too loose, the outline of bones showing through taut leathery skin. The weakest of the joints already seemed to be pulling apart from one another, one hand connected only by what had once been a tendon or some other inner tissue.

  “Spread out,” Father ordered. “But do not stray far from each other.”

  I followed Dalandaras and Aerik as they both took a closer look at the corpse. I couldn’t identify which man it was. The skin was stretched over his cheekbones, his lips thin and twisted away from his teeth. His eyes were gone entirely, the lids sinking inside his skull.

  “How are you doing?” Aerik whispered in my ear.

  “Fine,” I replied, and I was for the most part. While I knew it was a corpse, it didn’t feel as if I was looking at one. I couldn’t feel much of anything, except that slickness.

  “One over here,” Crowndan’s voice was muffled and faint in the darkness. “He looks much like yours, all thin and dry.”

  “And the last two,” Eliawen replied from a little farther away.

  “Then that’s all of them?” Father asked me.

  “Yes,” I replied. “But what did the apparition do to them? I had thought they simply disappeared.”

  “I’m not certain what happened,” Dalandaras said.

  “There are some magics that could do this,” Eliawen said, Zarah and Crowndan trailing close behind her. “But they have not been taught in centuries, and are nearly forgotten.”

  “I’d rather not end up like the looters,” my father said.

  “We are not helpless, or we would not have ventured down here,” Dalandaras replied.

  I heard a whisper, or I thought I did, and turned my lantern towards the darkness beyond the corpse. “Did your grandfather tell you any more about the construction of this place?”

  “There are wards to help me contain it.”

  “Like the circles outside?” I hadn’t seen anything yet.

  “No, only I and Eliawen can see them. It is…a different magic from the ward you used.”

  How many magics were we dealing with?

  “Eva, I don’t want to stray too far from the door,” my father said.

  But I was already heading into the darkness, following the whisper of sound. Two urges warred inside of me, the same as I had felt yesterday. I was torn between the urge to know this place, to find what was in it, and yet there was something that told me to leave and never allow anyone to ever set a foot inside of it again. The urge to know this place won out, and I continued farther inward.

  “Eva,” it was Aerik this time, his footsteps hurrying up behind me.

  In front of me, the edge of a wide circle began to appear. Only when we neared the edge could I make out its true shape. It was a hole, nearly sixty feet wide, with concentric steps descending ten feet down to a platform, all made out of the same pale stone. There was some type of dark liquid in a channel circling the platform.

  “What is that?” Aerik asked as he held his lantern aloft.

  There was some type of faint design on the platform. I took a step downward, but a hand grabbed my arm, yanking me away from it. “Do not,” Dalandaras said, his eyes wide. There was the slightest hint of fear in his voice.

  “This is not good,” Eliawen said as she and the others joined us.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “It will help your apparition gain strength,” Dalandaras said. “Much more strength than your looters gave it. This is forbidden magic.”

  “I think it’s time to go, then,” Aerik said.

  “Back to the door,” my father said.

  The floor shifted, just a little. I halted. Everyone else did as well.

  I looked at Dalandaras. “Did you…?”

  The floor shook, stronger than before. The whole cavern echoed with the growl and grind of shifting rocks.

  Eva, the voice of my mother whispered past my ears.

  I spun, and collided with solid darkness, my hand striking hard. It burned and I cried out, the lantern flying from my hand into the pit.

  Hands grabbed me again. I fought back, but it was my father. “What is it – what happened?”

  I held out my hand. Three gouges ran down the back of it, penetrating through my glove.

  “Ael val…” Dalandaras pressed his hands around mine, and the sting lessened.

  The whisper came again, but it was not my mother.

  “Can you hear that?” I looked between Dalandaras and my father.

  “Take her out of here,” he said to my father. He lifted his lantern high and murmured under his breath. Eliawen copied him. Their flames flared bright.

  My head exploded in pain. I fell down, yanked from Dalandaras’ grip. Knees, shins, ribs, elbows—nothing seemed immune from the sharp angles of the stairs as I tumbled into the pit. My foot splashed in liquid, my boot wedging itself between rock. My ankle twisted. I landed, my ribs and shoulder slamming into solid stone, my head against a sharp edge.

  “Eva!”

  “Eva!”

  They shouted my name, but I had no strength to breathe, much less answer. The shadows and flicker of light spun around in a slow haze. My ears were filled with the sound of water rushing past. It began to pulse faintly, quickly, and I realized it was my own heartbeat.

  “Eva,” my father said, his voice faint and gentle against the quick pulsing of my blood. Cool hands cradled my face.

  “No, stay up there!” Dalandaras shouted from somewhere above me.

  “Is she alright?” Aerik asked, his voice as close as my father’s.

  “She’s alive,” my father replied. “Eva, can you here me?”

  “Yes,” I managed to whisper, as the rush of blood subsided and the world started to right itself. “Don’’t move me.”

  “Take your time,” Aerik said.

  “Keep your lanterns bright,” Dalandaras said, his voice much closer this time.

  I was lying on my left side at the bottom of the stairs. My head had hit the ledge of the ring of liquid, and my forehead and my eye was wet and sticky.

  I tried to lever myself up, but my arm shook with the effort.

  “Hold on now,” Aerik said. Between him and my father, they sat me up. Aerik supported me as my father wiped at my forehead with his sleeve. His sleeve turned red quickly.

  “That’s a lot of blood,” I murmured.

  “It’s a small cut,” my father replied. “You’re going to be even more bruised.” There was worry in his eyes.

  It was unsettling to see the emotion. I glanced up at Dalandaras. The others had obeyed his orders and had not come down, their forms half illuminated, half shadowed beyond Dalandaras.

  “I think I can stand.” My voice was stronger, and the shakiness in my arms had faded.

  Between the three of us they managed to lift me up, but I had to be supported between Aerik and my father. My head was heavy, and I could barely stand upright.

  My blood was smeared on the ledge of the platform. A ve
ry little of it had run over the side and into the channel of dark liquid.

  “You should not have come back down here,” Dalandaras said. “It was my mistake. I apologize.”

  “This isn’t the time for apologies,” I replied.

  “There might not be another. Very carefully move her up the steps.” He knelt in the center of the platform, spreading his hand flat against the stone. His lips moved but I could hear no sound. It was then I noticed the design in the floor. Unlike the wards in the outer hall, this was all sharp angles and straight lines, but for one curving letter I could barely make out under his hand. I could feel the power within Dalandaras, a soft warmth flowing out against the taint underneath our feet, and I could almost swear that I saw a faint light, too, flowing out into the stone.

  “Carefully now,” my father said, and he steered us towards Eliawen and Zarah and Crowndan.

  Between us and the steps, the apparition was there. Its hollow eyes were on me.

  “Elf,” Aerik whispered.

  Dalandaras saw, and rose.

  “No!” Eliawen shouted from above, and beyond the apparition I saw her and Zarah holding Crowndan back.

  The apparition advanced over the stone, almost floating as it moved towards us, a bony hand reaching out.

  “Galandah,” Dalandaras said firmly, his voice deepening in a way that echoed against the stifled air. “Galandah nara.”

  The apparition slowed, but it still crept forward

  “It’s not working,” my father said.

  “Back up the steps, slowly,” Dalandaras ordered.

  “Why isn’t it attacking like it did before?” I asked.

  “Evalandriel,” the apparition said in its rasping voice. I could heard the echo of my mother, as if she were down here with us.

  I shook my head, curling back against my father. “Leave me alone.”

  “What is it?” Aerik asked.

  “It’s saying my name.”

  “Evalandriel hasal na dor,” Dalandaras said in the same echoing voice. “Se hasal na dor.”

  It took no steps, but it still seemed to come closer. Father and Aerik hauled me backwards, my feet stumbling on the stairs. I clung to my father’s arm as tightly as I could.

  Eliawen’s voice joined Dalandaras’s and their words halted the apparition.