“Do you hear the breeze sighing?” Stellen’s fingertips pause at my jaw, one of them brushing my earlobe. “The crunch of snow beneath Nara’s paws. The distant drip of melting ice off bare branches.”
I close my eyes andlisten.
The quiet sounds.
My right hand was already pressed to his heart and now my left hand rises to his neck, brushing the skin beneath his chin. The two places he told me to feel for sound when he taught me how to communicate with my armor.
Every breath he takes seems to audibly hum beneath my fingertips.
Every beat of his heart feels louder than the last.
Slowly, I remove my hands, slip away from him, rise to my feet, and turn to face forward again, feeling the burn of his gaze even more acutely now that my awareness of our surroundings is sharper.
Lowering myself to Nara’s back, I angle close to Stellen, my back to his chest, reaching for his arms again, drawing his right hand to my heart and his left hand to my jaw. His fingertips brush the skin beneath my chin.
“Will you tell me more about what you can hear?” I ask, sensing the hum of my voice beneath his fingertips and the way his tension seems to fade.
For the next two hours, we travel across the icy landscape and Stellen describes to me all the things I can’t see.
The maze of underground streams deep within the earth. The burrowing of field mice in fallen branches half submerged in snow. The small, green shoots that can be found in patches beneath the icy surface. The fields of tubers from which flour is made that sustains the population. The wind billowing from the dust-covered mountains far ahead of us in the east…
By the time we ascend the slope to the Sacred Stone Temple, listening to Stellen’s voice has drained all of the tension from my body.
But now the temple is near and with it comes an anticipation I’ve kept at bay.
Stellen said there were not only scrolls, but maps here. Pieces of information that could help me.
“Are there any magical protections I should be aware of?” I ask. “Any barriers to entry?”
“None. This temple is open to all. Although none but the foolhardy come here.”
“Why is that?”
“Because I come here.”
The moment Nara pulls to a stop, I move to slip from her back, only for Stellen to tighten his hold. “Thyra, what you find here could cause you pain. Go carefully.”
He opens his arms, and I slide more slowly to the ground, my warm boots crunching in the final snow before I step onto the path leading to the entryway.
The temple is a simple but beautiful structure, clean lines rising upward. As I make my way up the path, I cast around for any sign of the sacred stone that this place might be named after, but there are no rocks anywhere, neither small nor large.
Hanging back, Stellen murmurs quietly to Nara. Too quietly for me to hear. She snarls a response and then settles onto the snow.
Stellen approaches me more slowly than I was expecting, his footsteps heavy, and he doesn’t surge past me.
He inclines his head at the entryway and I hesitate only another moment before I step inside.
A simple hall greets me, an open space lit with alternating purple and pink light shining through stained glass windows along both sides.
“That way,” Stellen says, gesturing toward the back of the hall, where I spy a darkened stairwell. “Go down the stairs, but don’t touch anything. The shelves are coated with ice that will burn the skin off your hands. I will retrieve anythingyou want.”
Reaching the shadowed stairway, I descend carefully into a small alcove before I step into a large room.
Here, the walls are covered in shelves while two freestanding bookcases are bolted to the floor to the left of the room’s center.
My breath catches at the sight of the rest of the room.
Broken wood and papers are scattered across the space. What might have been two more bookshelves lie in jagged pieces all the way to the other side of the room.
