Jaxon only shrugged, as if he hadn’t any limits or cares.
“I’m going, too,” Karr said. “At this point, I can’t turn back.”
Sonara inclined her head to Markam again and raised a brow in challenge.
He chewed on his lip, then groaned and removed his hat so he could run his hand across his dark hair. “Fine,” he spat. “I’ll go. But I’m not happy about it. I’ll take up the rear.”
With that, Sonara turned back to the door.
The sighing wind carried its own scent, and it was then that Sonara noticed the wind had a rhythm. In, out, and back again. Not just a heartbeat, but breath. It was overpowered with the aura of shadowed blood. Something she’d carried with her for years, had sensed each time she met another like her.
“I feel it,” Karr said suddenly. “The pulse.” He had his eyes closed, his body leaning towards the open doorway.
That sametugcame to Sonara, the one that had drawn her back towards the rubble when she and Azariah first journeyed into the dark together, and Sonara heard the tale of Eona. She followed it now, stepping forward into the dark with the torch held before her.
Its light reached only a few paces ahead. The space was full of stones like those that she and the princess discovered elsewhere in the tunnels. But these were larger, columns and pillars that were marked with the same ancient symbols,only their bases visible as they walked past.
Beneath their feet, Sonara sensed the rot of crushed bones.
A graveyard.
Sonara lifted the torch, trying to see deeper into the space.
“There,” Markam said. “The torch, Sonara.”
Just to their left, along the rocky wall, sat a carved ledge; a small carved-out line that spanned along the wall at eye level, into the darkness.
Sonara could sense the oil, already; the sticky substance left behind ages ago. But when she dipped the flames into it…
A trail of fire came to life, spreading steadily along the lip in the wall.
It went twenty paces ahead.
Fifty.
A hundred.
Then it trailed upwards, snaking along the stone pillars themselves, which lined the walls of what was a massive, ancient-looking temple.
Slowly, the darkness faded. Now they could see piles and piles of bones leaning against the pillars and stacked against the rounded cave walls, ten bodies high.
This was a place where the dead could not rest.
A place that had Sonara choking back the aura of death.
The sound of a heartbeat came louder.
It joined their footsteps as they made it past the rubble. They clustered together closely as they walked, as if to ward away the awful feeling of death.
In the very center of the temple the ground sloped downwards.Wide stone steps were carved into the cave floor, each of the steps covered in those strange markings and painted a deep burnished gold.
They reflected the torchlight along the walls, and as Sonara and the others stopped atop it, she realized it was like a shining amphitheater.
More skeletons were strung along the steps, like they’d died trying to crawl towards the very center of the amphitheater.
Sonara trailed those steps downwards with her eyes, towards the middle.
Thump.
