Page 28 of Heart of the Desert

“Alza, no!” I shouted. She needed to back up or she would fall too.

“Alza! Daiti!” Elion’s voice boomed through the chaos, cutting through the roar of falling earth around me. The sharp tang of magic filled his tone—his power reached out to the animals’ minds from where he had ridden at the back of our group.

Relief warred with panic in my mind as gravity completely took hold, and we plummeted into the darkness together.

Pain dragged me from unconsciousness, the jagged sensation chasing away any lingering grogginess from the fall quickly. In fact, my mind felt sharper than it had for a while, the spike of adrenaline and pain from my fall clearing my head of its incessant chattering.

I opened my eyes to find myself lying on my stomach, cheek pressed into the hard-packed earth beneath me. The source of my discomfort was the wound on the front of my leg, seemingly reopened by my violent reintroduction to the ground.

I rolled over and sat up, gritting my teeth against the aches of other bruises and injuries. They were unimportant compared to…

“Keera?” I remembered holding on to her as we hurtled into the abyss.

“I’m here.” Her voice was hoarse, as if she had inhaled a handful of sand as she fell.

I groped around in the dim light, everything painted in muted shades of gray by the distant sunlight streaming in from a gash in the darkness an incomprehensible height above us. My hand landed on a clothed thigh, and instantly my heartbeat slowed. Keera’s familiar magic flowed under my fingers, telling me she was safe—for now.

“I’m fine too, thanks for asking.” Aderyn’s gruff tone came off from the other side. I squinted as my eyes adjusted, finding her rubbing her shaved head and looking around at our surroundings.

“Dhara and Elion?” Keera asked.

I squinted up at a crack in the darkness, surmising it to be the hole that had opened in the earth, now far above us. “I thought Elion managed to call the horses back to solid ground, but Dhara was right beside us.”

“She fell too,” Aderyn agreed.

I cast around for another figure but saw none. Dread rose in my throat, tasting bitter on the back of my tongue. The circular tunnel we were in was eerily familiar—the roughhewn walls made by earth packed together by the passage of large, skeletal bodies.

Keera and I had been in tunnels like this before, and suddenly I was certain of what had made the tracks.

“A tricrith lair,” Keera whispered, coming to the same conclusion as me.

The tunnel only stretched in one direction, with a large pile of sand and crumbled earth at my back, likely the result of our fall. I looked over my shoulder and eyed it warily. Dhara might be on the other side.

“I don’t think we can climb out,” Aderyn said, a tinge of despair working into her perpetually firm and practical tone.

Indeed, the slope of the collapsed roof was steep, and the shifting sand would offer no footholds. Besides, we were far deeper than the lair Keera and I had managed to climb out of last time.

Keera wrinkled her nose and squinted down the passage. Just before the shadows became too deep for the minimal light to penetrate, a few branching forks were visible.

“There might be a way around this collapse. We need to find Dhara.”

I nodded, but Aderyn looked wary. “The three of us alone won’t be able to fight off many tricriths.”

I grimaced. “Then we will have to try and remain undetected.”

Last time Keera and I had fallen into such a lair, it was barely five minutes before the monsters descended upon us. Then again, we had needed to find a tricrith and harvest its venom that time. Now, the fewer of the massive three-tailed scorpions we encountered, the better.

Keera pushed to her feet and dusted her hands on her pants before drawing her saber. “Move slowly. Even down this deep, the ground may not be stable. The tunnels are built on top of each other, and we don’t want to fall even farther.”

As I stood, my leg throbbed again. I covered the wound with my hand for a moment, only for it to come away dark and sticky. Keera glanced at me with her brow furrowed, but I closed my fist to hide my bloody fingers. The hollowness of guilt ate at me, but I steeled myself.

It would be easy to hide my injury in the dim light, and I didn’t want her to ask me where I had gotten it—and admit I had inflicted it on myself.

“Great,” Aderyn grumbled. “Let’s head even deeper into the monster’s lair. At least I thought to make these after our last encounter with the bone spiders.”

She pulled several long objects from her sash and gestured them at us—makeshift torches. “Can one of you light these?”

Keera took one and cupped her hand over the end, a spark dancing from her fingers to ignite it. “You’re shockingly prepared,” she observed as she did.