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It seemed like any old cave.
Right until a rock moved.
Not like, rolled because she had kicked it. But it—there was only one word for it.
The rock scampered.
It literally just took off in a direction like a rodent, only it was entirely rock-shaped. It ran away from her like a mouse might.
She stopped.
And stared.
“A scampering rock. Great. Just fuckin’ great.” Shaking her head, she continued on, working her way through the winding paths. She had another realization, about half an hour in.
How the hell was she going to get back out?
She stopped and slapped a hand over her face. “I should’ve been marking the walls. God, I’m such an idiot.” Better late than never, she supposed. She summoned a piece of iron into her hand and scratched an arrow onto the wall, pointing back in the direction she had come. She did that every fifty feet or so, making sure that she carefully marked any splits in the path.
It might not get her all the way back to the entrance, but it’d get her closer than…well, wherever she was now.
The walking gave her time to think, as she wove her way deeper and deeper into the mountain, picking paths at random, having no way of knowing if she was heading closer to Grinn or farther away.
There had to be some way to track him. Some way of knowing where he was. She was a witch, right? A witch with the ability to summon a little of any element. But what else could she do? Was that it? Mordred had magic on top of his elemental powers, but that had come from his mother, he had said.
Could she do real magic?
Stopping, she figured it didn’t hurt to give it a try. Nobody was around to make fun of her for muttering uselessly to herself in the dark, after all. She extinguished her fire, plunging her back into complete darkness. She took a deep breath. Maybe it was just like using her elemental gifts. Maybe it just took focus and intent.
She tried to listen, in the deafening silence of the caves. In the complete absence of light, shapes seemed to appear around her—twisted, strange monsters. Claws and talons, skulls with gaping eyes and distorted proportions watching her.
Taking another slow, careful breath, she tried to steady her heartbeat and ignore the monsters her mind—or the island—were conjuring for her. Avalon was made of magic. It had to be there, somewhere in the darkness—in the silence.
Reaching out her hand in front of her, into the emptiness, she pretended she was reaching out for a strand of yarn. She didn’t know why she picked that. But she let her instincts guide her. Show me the way to Grinn, she grasped the thread in her hand. Guide me to him.
The thread in front of her began to shimmer and glow—barely there, but she could see it! It flickered like dew caught on a spider’s web. But it stretched off into the darkness of the cave.
Maybe she was going insane. Or maybe, just maybe, the island was listening to her. Maybe her magic was real.
Or maybe she was completely hallucinating and was going to step off a cliff into a forty-foot drop and shatter both her legs.
Place your bets, kids. She started walking, following the strange glowing line that wove its way through the nothingness of the cave. When she didn’t smash into a wall or fall to her death for the first hundred feet, she began to feel far more confident that the glowing thread was real.
It took her a few moments to realize that the thread was starting to fade—but only because there was light creeping in to replace it. It was a deep, eerie orange-red, and began to reveal the craggy surfaces of the rock.
The air quickly became thick and hot, and she wrinkled her nose at the smell of sulfur. It was about fifty feet later that she took another left turn, and found the area illuminated by fire. Specifically, lava. There were holes in the floor that stretched down below to another chamber that was boiling with it. The glow of the molten rock cast the room in bizarre and unsettling up-light. It made the whole situation somehow worse.
But that wasn’t the only unsettling thing. There was writing on the walls—or at least she assumed it was writing. It was in a jagged, slashing language that she couldn’t understand—something that was designed to be made with sharp objects. It covered the walls on both sides, and the writing was glowing red. Just a little. But enough.
Walking up to the wall, she reached out and touched her fingertips to the writing, and instantly regretted it. It…tasted bad. She didn’t know how, but touching it gave her a taste in her mouth like licking a battery. Sour and bitter, and gross. She took a step back, and decided she really didn’t like the writing—whatever it was. It made the hair on the back of her neck stand up. It must be magic.
But it felt wrong. This wasn’t Avalon’s magic. This was something else. Something that didn’t belong there.
Grinn had to have something to do with it. She kept walking through the chamber, following the writing now, as it wound slowly deeper. The writing grew thicker and covered more and more of the walls as she went, until she finally found who she was looking for.
There he was. Grinn. The Ash King. Lying down on a rock that was glowing faintly with heat. He really was something terrifying when he was a full elemental—the cracks of his horns glowing, and smoke curling from his nostrils with every exhale. And around him, covering all the surfaces within his considerable reach, was more of the terrible writing.
It must be demonic magic.
