"Most of the scripts are too damaged." Heln was telling her what she already knew. He looked better, Bel must have slapped him with a cleaning script because most of the dust was gone. "But the warming script was woven into the lining, so it'll keep you from freezing."
"Thanks, Heln." She managed a smile at him. That hadn't been so hard to say. His return expression made her think that maybe she needed to work on smiling.
They ate what they could stomach. Their supplies were dwindling fast and setting up the water bottle before her failed watch the night before hadn't produced nearly as much water as she would have liked. She never thought that she would miss being damp.
Rhyss felt a little better once she had her armor on. It fit a little looser than it used to, but it would still protect her. She checked her reflection in her dagger blade. Her hair was a lot shorter and her cheeks were hollow. The armor looked almost out of place. Maybe she didn't deserve to wear it and maybe she didn't care. She had worked so hard just to feel useless. The drills, knowing how to march in formation, what dress uniform for which occasion… it was all so silly, such a waste of time when she could have been honing the skills that were actually keeping her alive.
"Thinking hard?" Bel put a hand on her shoulder and Rhyss almost stabbed her. She either didn't notice or was used to scaring people holding daggers. "Sorry to interrupt your introspection, but Heln isn't sure that he can sense the dragon at all, so we need to get moving."
"You are so stupid." Rhyss sheathed her dagger.
"Yes, you have informed me, multiple times, yet you keep asking me for information when you don't know something so I'm really having a hard time believing you." Bel beamed at her and Rhyss thought that maybe she should be a little nicer. More than that, she found she wanted to be a bit nicer. The sniping between them was little more than habit at this point. Rhyss wondered whether it ought to be a habit she changed. "Anyway, moving. We're going to start doing that. Are you okay?"
Rhyss gave her a look, not sure how to even start answering that question. "Why can't Heln sense the dragon?"
"Well, I can't yet, so I have to assume." Heln shrugged. "Maybe it went back to sleep when we left the room, maybe it's on the steps below us. I don't know."
"He's not clairvoyant."
"Yes, thank you, Bel."
The thought of the dragon dragging itself up the steps in the dark was enough to get her moving for several more hours, no matter how sore and exhausted she was. On occasion, Rhyss thought she heard something behind them and she honestly wasn't sure if it was her imagination providing those sounds or if something else was on the stairs. Bel was only a few steps above her and she didn't seem to hear anything. Rhyss had to grudgingly admit that her hearing was slightly better. Still, when they rested, she insisted on taking up the rear guard.
Even if every time she turned around to peer into the dark there was nothing there.
She was so focused on what was behind them that she almost fell down the stairs when Bel's
illumination bubble went out.
"Turn yours off, too. There's something ahead."
Rhyss nodded and stopped the trickle of magic to the bubble, winding it down into nothing.
At first she saw absolutely nothing but darkness, so complete that she might as well have had her eyes closed. She thought she would see the red light below them for an instant, but it must have been a trick of her eyes, or a spot in her vision, because when she looked again it was smooth, inky blackness.
After her eyes adjusted she saw what Bel was talking about. A faint, green light far above them. It brightened and dimmed, like a slow heartbeat.
"Do you think that's outside?" Heln didn't sound very hopeful.
"No," Bel said. "But it might be more of that moss, which I'm actually starting to miss. Still, it could be something… bad. Do you feel anything?"
"It all feels the same from here, there could be a barrier." A rustle of fabric was probably Heln shrugging. "Or it could be absolutely nothing. I don't know. But I don't feel any constructs, dragon, clay, or otherwise, so there's that, at least."
Rhyss wished that their biggest problem was clay constructs. She felt like she could take on ten without even a twinge of fear.
"What do we do?"
She started, realizing a moment too late that Bel's question was directed at her. "Well, what can we do? We can't go back, so like I said, all we can do is move forward and hope for the best."
"We're going to die," Heln muttered.
"If we die, we die fighting." Bel spun another bubble. Her expression was much grimmer than her tone had let on. "Well, honestly, if it gets me off of these stairs I am game for anything."
For once they agreed. Rhyss never wanted to see another set of stairs again.
They climbed the last steps up into the light.
The stairs opened up into a large chamber, a perfect dome with a rounded floor, like a bubble had been trapped when the rock was formed. Seven huge pieces of floating stone stood like pillars at the edges of the room. The walls were panels of pale, green stone that emitted a soft light. Each panel was framed by dark stone in straight lines that shot out from
