Despite my command, he tugs upward again.
Again, I thump his neck, even though the dark wall of rock now rushing toward us is clearly impenetrable, and smashing into it will surely break his neck and ours.
The Oracle’s pale eyes consume my vision as she cranes her neck to see me.
“Don’t stop,” she whispers as we crash toward the mountainside.
Chapter Thirteen
Antony
The wall of rock rushes toward us, and I brace for the bone-shattering crash and descent into darkness.
A second later, we soar straight through what should have been solid stone.
I struggle to comprehend what happened, even as my eyes tell me we’ve entered a tunnel.
I try to rationalize how I didn’t see its entrance from the outside. It must have been the way the shadows fell across the side of the mountain, possibly the angle that the surrounding rocks jutted outward, concealing the tunnel’s opening.
Even with my acute eyesight, I didn’t know it was there.
Its dimensions are high enough and wide enough that my eagle can easily beat his wings and even rise further upward than he was before.
He still doesn’t slow down, but now his wing beats are more certain. My own heartbeats calm, but after a moment of relief, fear sets in again.
What if the walls are lined with vampyrs?
What if the tunnel is a dead end and we’ll be trapped?
What if that was the Oracle’s intention?
I scour the walls as we soar past them, seeking the next attack, but to my surprise, there isn’t a single moving form or dark mound that indicates a sleeping vampyr within this tunnel.
We seem to be completely alone.
More surprising, a soft glow builds ahead of us, a white light growing in strength.
Impossible.
No light exists within the bloodlands. None whatsoever.
But it’s there, and it’s growing stronger. Undeniably strong. If it weren’t so silvery in color, I’d imagine it was the sun shining at the end of the tunnel, and we were about to fly out into daylight.
I wince as it floods my eyes, my exposed skin stings sharply, and then?—
We’re past it.
Whatever the light’s source, it’s now behind us, and I can’t risk craning my head to see it. At the speed my bird is now traveling, I need to keep my focus forward.
The further we get away from it, the more the white light fades.
Quickly, I mentally replay the moment we passed the light source. The light reflected off my eagle’s eyes, danced across the Oracle’s hair, glinted off my armor, its rays like that of a diamond in the sun, but the form and nature of its source elude me.
The stinging in my cheek calms.
My eagle doesn’t slow or stop. In fact, his speed increases, as if he were bolstered by the light, a reminder of the sunlight we’re flying toward.
He may be monstrous, but his mind is sharp.
