𝐒𝐖𝐀𝐍𝐖𝐇𝐈𝐓𝐄 || Narnia x The Hunger Games Crossover

Chapter Thirteen

Lucy coaxed Jill to her feet, eyes vacant, unresponsive when she murmured that moving would be better than wallowing here. 

Perhaps she needn't even have bothered, because the girl put up no resistance when Lucy took her hand, now both caked with dried blood between their fingers that didn't belong to them, and followed Caspian into the darkness, leaving the single distant skylight behind as their eyes adjusted to the deep, cavernous tunnel.

For the first several minutes the muscles in Lucy's chest ached with apprehension, expecting Edmund to appear at any moment out of the pitch black, or whoever had sent the rope down here in the first place, but no sound reached her ears save for the muffled echo of their own footsteps, and slowly, at least marginally, she relaxed.

Every now and then a thin shaft of light pierced down through a crack in the ceiling, cutting through several dozen feet of rock to splash over rough, earthy walls more than wide enough for all three of them to walk abreast, though Lucy trailed slightly behind Caspian, and Jill trailed slightly behind Lucy.

But little by little these patches of light became fewer and further between, and Lucy realized with a faint chime of alarm that they seemed to be moving downhill.

The temperature dropped off dramatically from the sunbaked land above, too, and she zipped up the front of the jacket she'd left loose and open for the past several days of sweltering heat.

"Well," murmured Caspian. "That's no good."

He stopped, boots scuffing on the stone, and she stopped beside him, blinking as the dim path ahead came into view.

Or rather, two paths.

The jagged rock wall split down the middle, two arched tunnels stretching off in different directions on either side, both too dark to see very far down.

"This isn't a way out," breathed Lucy. "We're just going deeper."

"I know," said Caspian, and his confirmation sent her stomach plummeting. "But who knows, maybe one of them goes back up."

"Or neither of them do."

He sighed. "Or neither of them do."

Lucy bit her lip, wondering for a moment if their skylight had really been so high up, if perhaps they could find a way to climb to it, or maybe Caspian could boost her up on his shoulders and she could try to reach—

But even as she thought of it, she knew it would never work.

"Which direction are we facing?" she asked, taking a breath and trying to think back to the way they'd come and where the tunnel had begun.

"East, I think." He glanced down at her, only the faintest outline of his face visible in the dark, but even without the usual expression cues, she knew he understood. "Are you sure?"

She nodded, and he took a step toward the right-hand tunnel, testing it as if something nasty might slither out from its mouth at any second, but the uneven rock proved no different than any part of the pathway they'd already traversed, and soon their footsteps echoed like they'd never stopped, now heading south, or something akin to south.

If either tunnel really led back to the surface, Lucy didn't fancy coming up near that forest again, and aiming as far away from that rocky maze as possible almost felt like a comfort, even if she'd only traded it for a different maze.

The claustrophobic weight of stone built the deeper they walked, and for a long time nobody spoke, as if the depth of earth itself had crawled into their throats and stuck there.

Just like their last morning in the Capitol, when that corrosive silence had bubbled up between them, she wished Caspian would speak, if only to distract her from the ruby-red pools leaking into her mind, from the loose sandy blond hair against hot stone.