It was a short blade, with wings for a guard. And though Ezer knew nothing of swordplay … it was comfortable in her grasp. It was covered in strange, angular markings. Symbols she’d never seen before, for they were not quite runes. She felt that they were somethingother.She ran her bare fingertips across one, surprised when a shiver ran through her body.
It was not from the cold, but from the feeling that she was skimming her hands across the gravestone of a loved one she had not seen for centuries.
Familiar.
But not enough to spark any sortof memory.
The air was bitter cold, tearing through her cape despite the lovely flame-shaped runes that had been stitched into the fabric.
‘This isn’t real,’ Ezer told herself. ‘I can wake up from my dreams any time I like.’
And yet, try as she might …
She couldn’t.
‘Nightmare, then,’ she muttered.
She angled her torch, searching for a way out. Strange, that she could not see without the firelight. That the darkness here was so deep, it stole even the small magic she had in her scarred eye.
The same damned tunnels were all around her, carved out of black rock and the ice itself.
She could not keep track of them, so identical that?—
‘Ezer. This way.’
The voice of the wind had come from just behind her again.
She spun.
And found herself on the threshold of another tunnel.
The darkness inside was full of doors.
Endlessly, they stretched on, lining the frozen, rounded walls. There was a groove to her right, filled with sticky black oil. Instinctively, she dipped her torch into it.
The groove blazed to life, snaking far into the tunnel until it illuminated the whole place with a soft orange glow that bounded off the frosty walls.
The doors were all ancient, dark as pitch, though a slight golden shimmer sparkled in each one. Like the darkness was webbed through with glittering veins.
They had no handles, no windows, no sign of what lay in waiting beyond.
But there were worn plaques on the stone walls beside each door, and the inscriptions had been carved in that same strange, angular language as on her sword.
At the end of the tunnel, the path forked two ways.
Ezer took a right and found herself at the threshold of another tunnel, identical to the last. Twist after twist, turn after turn, each passage was the same.
The deeper she went into the labyrinth, the worse the cold became, until she could scarcely move her fingertips for the ice now coating her veins. Even her torch protested, but she continued to dip it into oil-filled groove after groove, grateful for the path the fire made through the maze.
She came to another fork.
The tunnel on the left was undisturbed – and so thick with a curtain of ice-crusted cobwebs she would have had to sweep them aside to pass through.
She turned to the right instead, and found the frost had formed so thickly on the floor that it looked like snow.
And … it had been disturbed.
It was not footprints that marked it, but rather a thick, sweeping line, like the fringes of a long cape.
