I abandon my search of the walls, wading over to them. I take the torch from Ronan so he can dig with both hands.
“I don’t see anything,” says Quinn. “If one of these bricks is a button, it must be buried already.”
“Try pushing the lower ones if you can reach them.”
“Fuck that. Help me!” says Seth, the sand up to his neck.
“Godsdammit,” says Ronan. “Hand me the sickle. I’m going to have to cut him out.”
“Don’t hurt me!”
“I won’t if you’ll stay still.”
Seth pulls forward, his hands swimming in the loose sand, trying to escape from the sickle Ronan is plunging down towards him. I reach out for Seth, pulling him by the arm as hard as I can, and then grabbing onto him with my shadows and pulling harder.
“Got it!” says Ronan, and Seth springs forward and into me, my head striking the wall.
“Sylvie!” cries Ronan, wading through waist-deep sand to reach me.
The room spins with the force of the impact, but Ronan is there in seconds with his healing light.
“I’ve got you,” he says.
“You always do,” I reply, kissing him.
Seth groans. “Where’s my dagger? Ronan, did you feel my dagger down there?”
“It wasn’t my top priority. Be careful over there. I don’t know what you got stuck on, but I’m not helping you again.”
I look at Ronan when he mentions getting stuck on something, making the same realization at the same time.
We wade through the sand together, having to dig deep now to reach where Seth was moments earlier.
“I’ve got it,” says Ronan. He pulls on something, and there’s a loud, metallic click.
A lever.
A door opens several feet down, the sand rushing out of the room and carrying us with it on a tide as a breeze blows into the room. “Hold on!” shouts Ronan.
We ride the wave into the largest natural chamber yet, and the first with a shaft of natural light illuminating it from outside. “Got everything?” I ask, shaking the sand from my clothes and boots and taking the sickle back from Ronan.
“Torch,” he says.
“Cane,” says Quinn.
“Dagger,” says Seth, pulling it from the heel of his boot and sheathing it once more. “Damn, I could have been castrated.”
“What a pity that would have been,” says Quinn. I can’t tell if she’s joking or not.
“Well, this room seems straightforward at least,” says Ronan, gesturing to a large gap between two sections of stone floor.
There’s a bridge across the gap made from rope and wooden planks. It’s half destroyed, but there are vines reaching towards it from gaps in the walls.
I slowly approach the vines, noting the vessel symbol on the ground in front of the bridge. “Nature magic. If we had it, we could fix the bridge like the priestess trained the wisteria over our wedding arch, maybe?”
I look back and see Quinn spinning around the room on her cane, calculating something. She pulls her own dagger from her belt and slashes at a vine.
“No. No way,” says Ronan, seeing what she intends before I do.
