After several minutes of searching I was still coming up empty-handed, but eventually, Finn found something in the lake that pointed us in the right direction.
“I already checked this wall though, I couldn’t find anything.”
He climbed out of the water, and stepped up next to me, after a moment he pulled down on a rock, which slid and caused a mechanism to reveal a keyhole. “Maybe it just needed a man’s touch.” He joked with a grin.
“Ok, smart guy… Where’s the key… You can’t pick a magic lock.”
He sighed. “I can… Actually… But it would take a few hours. It would be nice if there was a faster way through.”
I started to rub my fingers together as I generated heat with my manna until they started to glow. “Well, I mean, I can try blowing it up.”
He raised his eyebrows at me before backing away. “Hey, go for it. Just don’t make the ceiling fall down.”
‘I doubt I’m powerful enough to do something like that…’ I walked up to the lock and took a closer look at it. After manipulating water into the mechanism and throughout the entire wall I froze it solid, creating an icy doorway and weakening the rock as the water expanded.
“Hurry up and put your clothes back on…” I grumbled, blasting him with a wave of hot air to dry him off as I stepped back as well. ‘I’m probably the only mage that can actually use fire and water magic together, so I doubt many people know about this.’ taking a deep breath in I breathed out fire as hot as I could, flooding it across the ice, and as it rapidly turned to steam inside the enclosed spaces I started to hear the wall begin to rumble. I increased the heat of the flames again and it quickly reached its boiling point, with a single rather anticlimactic pop the whole wall slightly moved forward, slowly tipping over and crashing into the water.
Finn slowly nodded, buckling his jerkin and patting me on the shoulder again as he stepped past me. “Or a woman's touch, that works too.”
“Not exactly what I’d call blowing a door off its hinges… But sure…”
He continued on into the newly opened passageway and created a tiny flicker of light like a wisp shooting out of his fingers like a blow dart down into the tunnel. “River flows downstream to this cave, but it’s almost level so the current is weak. It’s wide too, I bet they put the beast on a raft and sailed it down.”
“How do we prove that though.” I stepped past him, taking the lead again.
“We follow the tunnel.” His voice echoed through the tunnel next to the sound of the gently moving stream as we walked through the dark.
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‘He could totally kill me right now and no one would ever know.’
“We make a pretty good team you know.”
I paused for a minute. ‘Is that like, what a normal person would be thinking right now? Is my brain that far off?’ “Yeah…” I thought back to how efficiently we made it to where we were. ‘Well, we're not a bad team at least.’ “I wouldn’t know, I’ve never been on one before. Isn’t this normal though? With two of here, we would be twice as effective.”
He laughed, slowing down his pace, staying just behind instead of taking the lead again. “Yeah, that’s not normal at all… If anything it’s more common for you to be half as effective.”
“Huh…” I continued slowing down, starting to get anxious from the dark because of how close he was. Using my magic I created several more little sprites and sent them out into the air around us. After that, we walked for what felt like miles in complete silence. He seemed perfectly content with that, but the longer it went on the more awkward and nervous I felt.
“Hey.” His voice echoed through the tunnel again, shocking me to my core, and making me inhale so fast I thought I might die. “If a fight does break out I want you to stay behind me alright… I know it probably sounds like I’m only saying this because you're a girl, but I’m not. You’re pretty banged up right now, so don’t do anything stupid. You already proved you're as good as I am ok.”
I leaned against the wall taking a short rest and making sure I breathed slowly till the pain died down again. “Hey, if you want to be some knight in shining armor or whatever go ahead, less work for me. It might be fun to kick back for a while and be protected for once. But… I’m not going to hide behind you either, especially if you end up needing help. You know, Posy actually told me to do all the fighting for you because you sucked at it…” A long pause hung in the air before I finished. “I’m sure she's just worried but… I guess what I’m trying to say is. Just watch my back and I’ll watch yours, deal?”
He let out a sigh of relief that I couldn’t fully understand. “Deal.”
After a short break, we continued, eventually making it to the end of the tunnel. There was no secret door, just a straight shot out into a massive open plane covered in snow. Just the sight of it almost paralyzed me as we continued following what little was left of the tracks.
Eventually, I came to a complete stop, my chest tightening up until I couldn’t breathe. I heard it crunch under my boots, I felt the weight shift as it compacted with each step. Just the noise left chills running down my arms. ‘There’s still snow here… We should have waited… We could have…’
“Chika?”
I slowly turned to look at the cliff, tracing a trail around it in my mind, thinking back to how my parents died. They went hunting in the snow, but they didn’t die in the great forest, they died on the trail around the mountain, no one ever found their bodies… I saw the scene myself thanks to some of my parent's friends, there was so much blood mixed together I couldn’t even tell how much of it was from my parents, but it was pretty clear they weren’t coming back. Still, a part of me almost felt like I would find them if I just walked that way, retracing their steps. It was a paralyzing thought I hadn’t had in a long time, brought about by the pure white wilderness.
“Are you alright?”
His voice echoed through my ears but I might as well not have heard it, staring off into the distance. I looked down and my chest tightened even more. ‘Bad footing…’ I slowly swallowed trying my best to keep breathing. Rather than taking me in my parent's friends searched for them, holding out some faint sense of hope even though the monsters in that area were known for not leaving behind bodies. In the end, they died too, I never saw it but I heard the stories. ‘Pushed off a cliff… Eaten alive… Skewered, ambushed… You can’t fight in the snow… What if that’s what we're walking into, what if there's
“Get down!” I suddenly felt my head hit the ground, cushioned by the snow crunching underneath its weight.
Hitting the ground shocked my system enough for me to come back to my senses, and ironic though it may be, the burning pain in my lungs took my focus away from my tightening chest and helped me to keep breathing.
As I looked up I saw a massive bird fly clear over us, silent as a gust of wind, kicking up snow and dusting us with it as it passed by. Without thinking I jumped to my feet and pulled my spear.