Rose, Wilted: Book 1

Chapter 26 - Everything Ends

A thousand tons of rock crashed from the ceiling and I lunged out of the way. Everything was plunged into darkness and the ground shook. My ears were filled with the sounds of rock hailing down, scraping against each other. Debris sprayed me, pelting my arms. I coughed and coughed, struggling to find enough air to breathe through all the dust.

But as suddenly as the disaster began, it quieted.

I was blind in the dark, and for a moment I lay on the floor, stunned and scraped. Everything stung and I quivered. But the next second my shock had passed and I pushed myself to my knees. I found my voice again.

"Beast? Adam?"

I got up and stumbled smack into a wall of rocks.

"Ug."

I felt my way up them, but they seemed to go as high as the ceiling.

I tried to tell you.

What else had I missed? Stupid. I was so stupid. He was always right in front of me.

Something crumbled in my fingers. Dirt? I scratched at it and found something leafy and slick. Grass. How-?

Yes, how? How could I not have seen it? It was staring me in the face the whole time.

"Beast! Adam! Can you hear me?"

I scrabbled at the dirt and tried to pry some of the rocks away. I wrenched and tugged and scraped the skin off my fingers trying, but I just wasn't strong enough.

I had to get to him. He wasn't dead, not now that I'd just figured it out. He couldn't be. That wasn't allowed.

"You're not allowed to die, you hear me, Adam? You are not allowed to die!"

My chest was heaving badly now, my heart slamming faster and faster and fought to control the overwhelming panic. I couldn't give in to it. Not now. There was too much else I had to do. I didn't have time to be scared. There were a million and one things that were more important.

I scraped at the dirt faster, and my hand broke through a gap. There was no resistance. Air.

I pulled my hand back. A bare amount of light streamed in. And then I realized how close it was to dawn. The sky had gone from inky black to bruise blue, and it was lightening fast. Too fast.

There's only one rose left, and at dawn it dies.

But what if I had already broken the curse? I must have. I'd figured out who he was. He'd never been allowed to tell me. That must be it.

But I had to find him to know for sure.

I widened the hole, but then I realized something. If I could feel dirt and grass, then that must mean the dungeons extended beneath the courtyard. The ground had fallen in outside. Maybe I could dig him out from the top of the mess.

Luckily, the stairs behind me were still clear. I raced back up them, into the castle and back out the door that led to the grounds.

Outside it was a mess. A giant section of the ground had fallen in barely beyond the castle wall. The pit was deep, but didn't have a very definite edge. It was a slope down into a mass of rubble with broken clumps of dirt and grass strewn across it. I scanned it, looking for anything that could give me a hint at where to start.

That was when I saw the holes.

There was one spot that looked kind of like a hole, and the rocks around it were scored with deep gouges and spattered with crimson. But there was another hole too, smaller, but definitely there. It was closer to the edge of the pit. It looked like a cavity or a cell. The bars of the cell walls must have sheltered that part of the dungeons from most of the damage.