𝔸 ℂ𝕠𝕦𝕣𝕥 𝕠𝕗 𝕃𝕠𝕧𝕖 𝕒𝕟𝕕 𝕎𝕣𝕒𝕥𝕙 (Book 2)

Thirty-Nine

The one gates swung open without so much as a whisper, revealing a cavern so deep and inky that not even the sensory deprivation cells I'd been locked in could compare.

    My hand clutched the amulet that hung from my chest—useless and yet it brought me some form of peace. I would get out. I could do it. I really would this time.

    Rhys put a steadying hand on the small of my back, slowly leading us inside.

    I could. I could. I could.

    "Breathe," he said into my ear. "One breath."

    I listened. It took a moment but I did it. My other hand found Rhysands arm as I stopped for a moment just to breathe. I hated to admit it, but his presence helped. It was a point of focus, a constant for a moment.

    I stood tall again, straightening my back and pushing my looming panic down into the well inside me. "The guards?" I managed to ask.

    "They dwell within the rock of the mountain," he murmured, his hand finding mine and wrapping around it as he tugged me along into the darkness. I squizzed his hand as if it was a lifeline. "They only emerge at feeding time, or to deal with restless prisoners. They are nothing but shadows of thought and an ancient spell."

I refused to look at the rough rock that surrounded us. The rock that held keepers of the prison. The silence was deafening. Utterly consuming as it wrapped around us in a thick blanket.

    I focused on my breathing. On the breath that went in and out of my lungs.

    Paths plunged deep into the dregs of the mountain, I clutched Rhys's fingers to keep from losing my footing. I wondered id how hard I was holding his hand hurt.

    "Do the other High Lords have access to the prison?" I questioned breathlessly as I tried to distract myself from the twisting caverns.

    "No. The prison is a law unto itself; the island maybe even an eighth court. But it falls under my jurisdiction, and my blood is keyed to the gates."

    "If you ever wanted to, could you free the inmates?"

    "No. Once the sentence is given and a prisoner passes those gates...They belong to the Prison. It will never let them out. I take sentencing here very, very seriously."

    "And you have sentenced people here."

    "Yes. And now is not the time to speak of it." he squeezed my hand.

    We wound through the gloom.

    There were no doors. No lights.

    No sound.

    But I could feel them. Sense them.

    Ancient. They were ancient and cruel in a way I'd seen very few times. They were infinite. Patient. They learned the language of darkness and turned it into their own.

    "How long was she in here?" Torture. It would have been torture.

    "Azriel looked once. Into archives in our oldest temples and libraries. All he found was a vague mention that she went in before Prythian was split into the courts—and emerged once they had been established. Her imprisonment predates our written world. I don't know how long she was in here—a few millennia seems a fair guess."

    I blew out a disbelieving breath. Gods. "And you've never asked." It wasn't really a question.

He answered anyway, "Why bother? She'll tell me when it's necessary."

    "And what world did she crawl from?" I knew the legends, probably more than I was supposed to.

    "I don't know. Though the legends claim that when the world was born there were...rips in the fabric of our realms. That in the chaos of Forming, creatures from other worlds could walk through one of those rips and enter another world. But the rips closed at will, and the creatures could become trapped, with no way home."

    The tale was familiar, and yet it never ceased to be amazing to me.

    I looked at Rhys, "Do you think she's one of them?"

    "I think that she is the only one of her kind, and there is no record of others having existed. Even the Suriel have numbers, however small. But she—and some of those in the prison...I think they came from somewhere else. And they have been looking for a way home for a long, long time."

    I thought so too.

    Down and down we went, the darkness claiming our vision and our minds. The creature's presence was like someone breathing down my neck. Time lost its grip on my shadowed reality. Rhys never let go of my hand, holding it in his as though the walls might swallow me up if he let go.

    We went lower, and lower only the small fae lights kept me from falling down into that very darkness. For no more than a heartbeat, my cell under the mountain clanged through me.

    Rhys's hand tightened on my own, "Just a bit farther."

"Are we going to the bottom of the damn rock?"  I snapped at him as I squeezed his hand in a death grip.

"Past it actually. The bone carver is caged beneath the roots of the mountain."

"What exactly is he?" He'd only briefed me on what I was meant to say and do, and not exactly what I was walking into.

"No one knows. He'll appear as he wants to appear."

"So he's a shapeshifter?"

"Yes and no. He'll appear to you as one thing, and I might be standing right beside you and see another."

"And what about the bone carving part?"

"You'll see." Rhys stopped walking. We stood before a large stone slate in the shape of a door. The hallway continued down into the ageless dark. My breath chilled the air around me, creating small tendrils in the air.

Rhysand finally released my hand, laying it on the bare stone in front of us. It rippled beneath his palms as though reality ceased to exist and we lived in water.

Like the gates we had walked through, it was made from an array of bones all made together into a twisting door. The surfaces were etched in countless carvings all resembling things I'd seen every day of my life.

The door swung back. It was pitch black inside, no light to be found.

"I have carved the doors for every prisoner in this place," said a small voice from within, "but my own remains my favorite."

"I'd have to agree." Rhysand agreed. We stepped inside, a small light forming on the side of the wall Illuminating the creature in front of me.

But I wasn't staring at a creature at all. It was only a little boy.

─── · 。ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───

A/N: ahhhh, I feel like its been foreverrrrr. I missed you guyssss