They walked for a long time through the tunnels without reaching an end. Aphen was surprised to discover she remembered almost all the twists and turns she was meant to take. Only once was she required to employ the Elfstones to reassure herself she was making was the right choice. The rest of the time her memory was good enough that using the Elfstones wasn’t necessary.
Even so, she was carrying them in her hand now, ready to help Cymrian if matters suddenly turned dangerous. They had come so far and gone through so much that she was not about to let anything stop them now.
It was this determination that led her to reflect on the fact she was leading her sister to the very fate she had promised to save her from. She could pretend otherwise, could say she was only doing what they had all agreed on and what Arling herself had decided, but the end result would be the same. When they reached the Bloodfire and the Ellcrys seed was immersed, Arling’s future was as certain as the rising of the sun. She would become the Ellcrys and cease to be human.
And Aphenglow would have helped bring that about.
She sensed this was wrong—a twinge of recognition amid all the thoughts and deliberations on why it was both right and necessary. She sensed it even while telling herself she shouldn’t. It made her want to turn around and go back in spite of everything that insisted she do otherwise. It made her want to abandon reason and resignation and give in to the white-hot mix of emotions she was experiencing.
The guilt that tore at her deep inside.
The despair that filled her at the thought of losing Arling forever.
Turn back. Give up on all this.
They reached the opening to the stairway leading down into the earth, and with her emotions still roiling and her feet moving as if of their own accord, she started down. They heard no sounds other than the ones they were making as they walked. No one had spoken since they had set out. There was a disconnect among the three, as if they were strangers on a journey that could not be discussed and was being undertaken for reasons that were not entirely clear.
At one point, Aphen found herself in tears and was forced to wipe them away surreptitiously, to muffle the sobs that kept rising in her throat.
Their descent continued for a long time. They traversed hundreds of steps, perhaps thousands. She lost track of time. She only knew to keep going, to place one foot in front of the other and try not to think about what she was doing—the first an endless struggle, the second a hopeless task. She did it because she knew there was no other choice now and because she had lost the will to resist. Her fate was inescapable. She was her sister’s guide and accomplice both; she would be the source of both her salvation and her undoing.
At the bottom of the steps was a passageway, and they followed it to a huge chamber constructed of stone blocks and supported by massive columns within which ancient benches spiraled out from the raised platform at the chamber’s center. The cavernous space smelled and tasted of stale, damp air. Large pieces of it lay in ruins. Together the Elves navigated its debris and crossed to the dais and from there to the massive stone door Aphen had described. It stood ajar, just as it had in her Elfstone vision, and they slipped through its opening to where a short set of additional steps descended to another passageway.
At the end of this new passageway was the second cavern, this one very different from the one they had just left—a rock chamber formed by nature’s hand, carved out over endless amounts of time, rugged and damp with moisture. Huge stalactites hung from the ceiling in clusters, stone spears poised to impale should they fall. Chunks of broken stone lay scattered about the uneven floor, the leavings of earlier formations that had already given way and shattered.
The Elves glanced around, searching the gloom with the glow of their torches.
Then Cymrian called out and pointed, and all three focused their lights on a glass door set into the far wall between a pair of towering boulders, its smooth surface rising to where a rippling dampness higher up revealed a steady flow of water.
“That door isn’t glass,” the Elven Hunter said after a moment’s study. “It isn’t even a door. It’s a sheet of water.”
Aphen saw it, too. The supposed door was actually a thin, smooth screen of water that spilled from a trough in a curtain so still it barely shimmered at all.
“The Bloodfire is there,” Arling said suddenly, pointing at the opening. She took a step away from the other two. “Beyond the waterfall, inside that opening. I can feel it now, tugging at me. It senses the presence of the Ellcrys seed.”
She took another step away. “I have to go to it.”
“Not without me,” Aphen said at once, and started after her.
But her sister held up her hands. “No, Aphen, I have to go alone. I have to do this by myself. I want you to wait for me here. You and Cymrian both.”
Aphen started to object, but then saw the determination mirrored in her sister’s eyes and thought better of it. Of course she has to go alone. Of course she has to do this by herself. She understands the importance of finding the strength she needs to carry this through. She knows how hard it will be, and because she knows she will face it on her own terms and prove to herself that she is ready.
“Aphen?” her sister whispered.
Cymrian was looking at her, waiting to see what he should do. “All right,” she said finally. “We’ll be waiting for you.”
Arling turned, crossed the chamber to where the waterfall waited, ducked through its thin curtain without a backward glance, and was gone.
Twenty-four
When she was through the thin curtain of water, Arlingfant paused a moment to brush the droplets from her hair and shoulders before continuing on down the short passageway that opened before her. At its end she found yet another cavern, although this one was much smaller than the other two and considerably warmer and drier.
It was also empty.
The floor of the chamber sloped upward before her, ascending gradually in a series of broad shelves that wrapped right and left of where she stood from wall to wall. She shone her smokeless torch into the gloom before her, but there was nothing to be seen higher up but more shelves and deeper darkness.
There was no sign at all of the Bloodfire.
But it was here. She could sense its presence, even without being able to explain why. It was calling to her soundlessly, continuing to tug her forward into the chamber.
So she began to make her way upward from shelf to shelf, using her torch to light the way, searching carefully as she went. Even though she wasn’t entirely conscious of what she was doing, she stretched out her right hand and her fingers groped at the air as if there were something of substance to which she might cling. She continued on until she was almost to the back wall of the chamber. She was far enough along that only two more levels of stone risers remained when she stopped on one that was much smaller and set at the exact center of the larger one beneath it.
Just to one side of the shelf was a large boulder.
Here, she said to herself. The Bloodfire is here.
She knew it instinctively. Acting on her certainty, she moved over to the boulder and touched it experimentally. Nothing happened. Then, on a hunch more than anything else, she placed both hands on the huge rock and put her weight behind the effort. To her surprise, it began to move, even as slight as she was and as massive as it was. It rolled smoothly out of its shallow seating and her momentum carried her after it so that now she was standing where the boulder had been.