The tunnel was large enough for me to crawl through, but not any larger than that. The stone surrounded me, rough and irregular, a naturally occurring cave. I had wondered if maybe this was built here, but the farther I crawled, the less that seemed to be the case.
I reached a branch point.
One side was narrow, small enough that I’d have to crawl on my belly, and I had no interest in attempting that. Plus, there was the possibility I’d get stuck, and without anybody else with me, I had no idea that I’d be able to escape. The alternative was going down a narrow tunnel, though not nearly as narrow as the other side. I could still crawl.
That was the side I took.
I suspected that branch point guided me toward the city.
I continued crawling, keeping the band of light in front of me, and made my way through the tunnel. It didn’t get any easier for me to figure out where I was going, yet the tunnel didn’t narrow any more than it already had, so I kept crawling.
I wasn’t going to be able to turn around. The tunnel was far too cramped to attempt that. Maybe this had been a mistake.
Finally, it opened up.
It was enormous.
It looked as if it were some grand hall, with a curved ceiling that was carved with strange symbols. Djarn symbols, I suspected. I could practically feel the power in this place, and understood why Eleanor would keep it protected with a seal over the door. This was a place to study.
From the outside, it looked like nothing.
Distantly, I heard water running, though I couldn’t tell where it came from.
I crawled forward, wanting to get closer and deeper into this space, but hesitated.
I still had my task.
I crawled back and reached the branching tunnel. Curiosity won out.
Starting down it, I followed the other tunnel a bit longer. Now that I was no longer in danger of having to back out of the tunnel, I could take the time to explore. I reached a dead end.
I ran my hands along the wall, feeling the stone and the earth, the dampness of it, and couldn’t help but think that this would be a great place to hide were there to be another attack. With a barrier over the doorway, if I were ever to master that technique, I could seal it off and no one would be able to get in. Or better yet, it could be used to seal any attacker inside.
I wasn’t given the option of hiding throughout my experience with attacks. And I doubted that if there were another attack—Vard or otherwise—I would get the chance.
There was a steady dripping of water, and nothing else.
I looked around for any other opening. The water had to go somewhere, though I couldn’t tell where. I crawled forward, heading out of the tunnel I had come through.
As I neared the entrance to the tunnel, I realized something was wrong. It took a moment. There was light there.
It glowed in the distance, just bright enough for me to barely make it out, and it seemed to drift into the tunnel more clearly than it should.
This was a barrier in place over the entrance to the cave.
My breath suddenly caught.
If Eleanor had come, thought I had left for the day, and replaced a barrier over the opening . . .
“Oh no,” I whispered.
I continued crawling, and when I reached the entrance, I realized that was exactly what it was.
A barrier blocked me. It was the Eleanor.
I thought about what she had done, and how she had overpowered it, but there would be no way for me to get past it.
“Hello?” I called out into the garden, but worried I wouldn’t be heard. Even if I were, what would the gardeners do? I supposed they could go for Eleanor. I hadn’t been down here all that long, and if she knew she had trapped me inside, I had to think she would come for me and remove the barrier so I could escape. “Is anybody out there? I need Eleanor to come let me out.”
I waited for a moment, listening, but there was no sound from anybody. There was nothing.
“Hello?” I called out again, this time louder.
As before, there was no answer. I waited, but I wondered if perhaps it was late enough in the day that the gardeners had already ended their work and gone inside.
Which meant I was going to be stuck here until I figured out a way to escape.
I called back the power and started to focus on it. Eleanor had proven I couldn’t break through it, but that was from the other side. What if I could break through it from this side? It had been an outward facing spiral when she had placed it which left me thinking that maybe another burst of power—maybe even an inward facing spiral—would permit me to overwhelm it.
I didn’t believe I’d be successful at forming one. I had barely formed an outward facing spiral, and even then, it had not been enough to seal the doorway.
To begin with, I used a binding of power and whipped it at the seal, but as before, nothing happened. I tried again, and again. Each time was the same.
I needed something more powerful.
If I could use the inward facing spiral, maybe that would be effective enough.
I took in a deep breath, then started to spin my hand, holding on to power as I did, readying for the release. I didn’t need to have nearly the same level of control. All I needed was to unleash the power upon this opening. It didn’t have to be held quite as taut as when I had otherwise.
I continued to send the spiral outward, then released it.
It struck the opening, sizzling out as it carved past it.
This pattern was too powerful.
I could try something else.
I crawled back toward the larger opening, and when I reached it, I turned around, and then back down the tunnel until I reached the branch point again. I lowered myself to my belly. As much as I didn’t like the idea of trying to crawl through it, there had been the sound of water in the larger opening, and I thought I could follow that—perhaps it came from a stream or some other groundwater source I could follow until I got out.
I pulled myself forward, crawling and slithering across the ground. It was difficult, but the farther I went, the more I could feel the tunnel opening around me—at least, enough that I had a sense of how I might be able to escape.
So far, I hadn’t gotten stuck. Getting out would be difficult if I had to back up again, but hopefully I could find a way through here so that wasn’t necessary. I lost track of how long I was crawling. The tunnel never got any larger.
Then it started to narrow.
I tried sliding forward, but when it felt like my shoulders were squeezed on either side of the tunnel, I knew I had to back up.
The tunnel squeezed around me, making it difficult to move. Though I pushed myself backward, trying to back out, I felt a moment of panic as I feared I was actually stuck. Then the tunnel loosened, and I was able to crawl backward.
I continued moving back, increasingly quickly, and finally reached the branch point again. I debated backing up to the opening, but if I did, I wasn’t going to be able to see anything or get out.
Either way, I was going to be here until Eleanor released the barrier.
I crawled into the main chamber. At least I could stand up. After having been cramped for as long as I had, it was difficult for me to do anything, and I could feel the pressure upon me, as if the tunnel wanted to constrict me even while I was standing.
I gathered myself, trying to take deep breaths, and focused. If I were here for the night, then I’d have to find a dry place to rest, and when I awoke, I could call for help.
It wasn’t that I wanted to spend the night trapped in this cave, but at the same time, I had slept outside plenty of times in my life, and I wasn’t afraid of it. It was just that the cave itself wasn’t comfortable.
I could stay in the larger chamber while waiting. I rested up against the wall, my head propped up, and sat, thoughts racing through my mind.
With nothing else to do, I decided to practice. What better way to spend my time? I thought about what Eleanor had s
hown me. If I could create that pattern, then I could loop power outward enough to create a barrier that would protect me, and perhaps even seal off the entrance to the cave, should I need to do so. I focused on it, spiraling power out from me, throwing it toward the opening of the cave. Each time I did, I thought it would hold, but it still never did.
I didn’t have the right technique, and I wasn’t sure what it would take for me to have it, but it seemed I was somehow close.
What had she done differently?
I wasn’t sure of that either. There was something about the way she threw power at the wall. That was what I had to replicate, only each time I tried, I could tell some aspect of it didn’t work. Eleanor had used a single band of power. I had been there when she’d done it, and had seen the way she threw that power from her hands outward.
Unless she hadn’t.
Could she have divided it, braided it, and then used it?
I hadn’t attempted to do that. Maybe that was the key. It was possible the reason that I had failed so far was not so much because of my inability to create the spiraling pattern, but more about how I had not quite replicated what she had done yet.
Hadn’t I seen her using the division before?
When she had placed the crisscrossing pattern over the opening of the cave, that power had divided away from her. It suggested to me she had enough control over the power so she could also use it to remove the seal.
Smiling to myself, I got to my feet and split the strands out of my hands, twisting them together. I didn’t think she had done anything more complicated than that. Once that was done, I looped it, sending it spiraling out from me, and then pushed it at the entrance to the cave.
It stuck, and in that moment, I thought I was going to succeed, but then it faded again. Either the spiraling pattern wasn’t quite right, or she had added more to it than I had realized.
What if I tried a third strand?
I pulled on that power, twisting it together, and then sent it spiraling out from me. When it struck the opening to the cave, it stuck, lingering for the briefest of moments.
This time was longer than the last, but still not long enough.
I doubted she had woven many more strands into it than that. Splitting the power was a difficult technique, and had she done so, I expected I would have seen it.
Wouldn’t I have?
The way she had formed the crisscrossing pattern over the opening to the cave suggested she had a tight control. Perhaps it was even more tightly controlled than what I gave her credit for.
I split the bands into five different strands, twisted them together into a more powerful band, and then spiraled it out before throwing it at the entrance to the cave. I didn’t expect it would do anything. I had failed so many times now that one more failure wouldn’t surprise me, but this time, it stuck and solidified.
My breath caught.
The pattern held, remaining stout and in place.
I headed over to it, traced my fingers around the spiraling pattern that formed a barrier over the entrance. As I pushed on it, I could feel resistance pushing back against me.
Five strands were the key, at least for me. Maybe they weren’t the key for her, though. I still didn’t know if Eleanor had that much control, though if she did, she hid it well.
It made me uncomfortable when the Academy instructors hid things, especially as we had already dealt with too many who had done so. At what point would we start to run out of instructors who were not corrupted?
Now that I had placed the seal around the opening to the cave, I needed to see if I could remove it.
I focused on the power, and pulled it toward me. There was a bit of resistance, as if something within the pattern made it challenging, but it faded, gradually unraveling as it rejoined the cycle of the other dragons, and flowed out from me and into them.
It had worked. I had placed my own barrier. Then I had removed it.
Could I do it again?
Taking a seat, I focused again on the five bands of power stretched between my hands, twisting them together. They stretched from each of my fingers, streaming out, and as I rotated one hand, the entire band twisted around itself. I took that, looping outward, and created the spiraling pattern I threw toward the opening in the cave.
When it attached, it held again.
I got to my feet and headed over to it, pulling it away as I had the first time. Drawing that much power off and forcing it back into the cycle should be more challenging than it was, but perhaps it was because of how many dragons were now a part of the cycle, all of them connected, and all of them sharing the distribution of power.
What about the other technique she had mentioned? If I could create something similar to that, I might be able to send out something that would be slightly more defensive.
I focused on it and sent a swirl of power out from me, but used a bit of a different technique than the last time. In this case, I spiraled it outward, and held the tightest path closer to me. When I pushed it, it struck the stone, and there came an explosion as the rock started to tremble.
I braced myself for the collapse of the tunnel. I hadn’t expected it to be quite that powerful, though perhaps I should have. Eleanor had shown me that the pattern itself was incredibly potent, and now that I knew the trick, I understood why. With five strands woven together, of course it would be powerful.
The tunnel didn’t crash around me, though I worried it still might.
It was even more reason for me to try to get out of the tunnel.
Crawling toward the entrance of the tunnel, I wondered if I might be able to use the outward facing spiral to break free. I hadn’t tried that on her spiral pattern before. If they both were equally potent, then perhaps one cancelled the other out.
I lay in the cave, trying to get myself positioned well, though it was going to be difficult for me to hold my hands up and create the spiraling pattern given the tightness of the space.
I first separated the power into five separate bands and twisted them before spiraling them outward. As I did, I could feel the energy radiating toward the opening, but I wasn’t able to create quite as large of a loop as I had before. The cramped cave made it difficult for me to hold on to the band as well as I wanted. I attempted to loop it around, but each time I tried, I could feel the cave itself making it difficult for me to do so. At one point, my hand struck the top of the cave, and it caused the pattern to go awry, needing me to reset and try again. The second time, I again didn’t create as large of a loop, and it fizzled quickly when I pushed it out.
Finally, I focused and went slowly, sending the spiral toward the barrier in front of the cavern, bracing myself. When it struck, the cave trembled for a moment, but nothing collapsed and it didn’t break through the barrier.
I had to try again.
I looped another band of power around, swirling it as tightly as I could, and when I pushed it outward, it slammed into the seal around the door, and there came a shimmering, a quake, but then that faded.
It wasn’t going to be enough.
I had to try again.
I forced even more power out, trying to twist the pattern in a different way. The way I wove the strands together often influenced how strong they became. In this case, if I braided them in a certain way, it might create enough strength to overwhelm the barrier Eleanor had placed, and if it did, then I could blast my way free. I had no idea what would happen to the cave itself if I were to get free, but at least I wouldn’t be trapped here.
I carefully braided the strands together, weaving them from one hand to the next, and then spiraled the band out, creating the tight pattern I knew could create the seal. I was careful as I did it, cautious in drawing that energy around so I didn’t do it too quickly, not wanting to disrupt the pattern before I had completed it. In this case, I thought I needed to hold on to it as tightly and carefully as I could, mostly because I didn’t know if I’d have an opportunity to do it again. It took considerable concen
tration on my behalf to hold on to this pattern, on to this braid, and if I lost it now, I didn’t know if I could regain it.
I squeezed as much as I could, and as I looped it around, I felt the shifting of power as it started to flow out from me. I pushed with a burst of energy, throwing it from me.
It slammed into the opening.
There came a thunderous crack, and the sound of sizzling flames mixed with a hissing of steam. Smoke drifted from where they connected. The inside of the cave became far too smoky, difficult for me to see much of anything. When it cleared, I coughed, looking forward, expecting I’d be able to crawl to freedom, but the barrier remained in place.
It was far more powerful than I had expected.
I had thrown everything I could at the opening, and it still held?
What had Eleanor done?
Had she wanted to place me here?
I had spent quite some time searching for others who might have infiltrated the Academy, but I had never thought Eleanor could be one of them. Could I have been wrong?
When I had dealt with Jerith, I hadn’t thought he had betrayed the Academy. It had even proven difficult for me to know whether Donathar had been involved.
And now . . .
I just didn’t know.
That didn’t seem like her. But what other explanation would there be for how tightly I was bound into this place?
I lay down, no choice but to wait. I was tired from using that much power, more tired than I would’ve expected. Perhaps it was the braiding, or perhaps it was the tightness of the spiral, but either way, I had exerted myself almost as much as I had after working on the farm for a full day.
I rested my head. A little sleep wouldn’t hurt.
13
A thunderous explosion jerked me awake.
I sat up and immediately regretted it. I hit my head on the ceiling of the cave, and I winced, crying out. It was dark everywhere around me. It took a moment for me to orient myself, remembering where I was and what had happened, but I soon remembered I was trapped within this cave, having drifted off after attempting to break myself free.
The Lost Dragon (Cycle of Dragons Book 3) Page 17
