He ignored her and kept running, cursing the delicacies of his current situation. In due time, she began to writhe and kick in a way that made it impossible for him to continue carrying her.
Pausing his steps for a desperate moment, he snapped, “Can you stop? We’re being chased by the church’s people!”
Hearing this, she immediately froze up.
He resumed running.
“You…you’re the boy from before. You died!”
An arrow flew past his head, close enough that he could hear it hiss. “Ask me later!”
She closed her mouth, though seemed to realize something before crying out in a frantic voice. “Where’s my brother?”
Alistar didn’t answer, for the ground was becoming more difficult to traverse and he couldn’t spare a moment to talk. They were drawing closer to the base of the nearest mountain, the bishop’s men closer to him than ever before. After a few more minutes of running, it dawned on him that he was within the general vicinity of Mt. Barosh, one of the first mountains that he had seen after leaving the mines with his uncle Raidon. Inadvertently, he was now only a day or two away from Crystellum, at least if he followed the meandering path of the Winding Road.
His pace began to falter in the coming moments, for no matter how well-trained someone was, it was impossible to not succumb to fatigue after several hours of carrying another person, regardless of how light they were. His swordsman’s aura was all but depleted, though a silver lining was that a good deal of his energies had returned to him.
“Ah,” the girl cried as a low-hanging branch scraped against the slick, raw skin of her right arm. She quickly kept quiet, as she could clearly see the dozen or so people that were closing in on them. Farther back, Alistar was acutely aware of over a hundred more auras that had since branched off from the Winding Road, all for the sake of catching the one that colluded with the demon that had destroyed Mayhaven and killed countless citizens of the empire.
What should I do?
Alistar tried his best not to panic. Now that they had arrived at the base of the mountain, the ground was sloping significantly. At his back, the group of pursuers were stretching out into a wide net in case he decided to alter his course to the left or to the right, which would soon be his only options aside from continuing uphill and scaling the earthen mass.
His stomach sank as he tripped over a gnarled root at the foot of an old tree, he and the girl tumbling to the ground with mutual discomfort. She was quick to help him up, and this time it was she that supported him despite the severity of the burns that covered almost half her body.
“There!” she said desperately, pointing to a partition in the mountain’s base that was wide enough for an adult to squeeze into.
A cave, he belatedly realized as he stumbled forward with all his might, arm draped around the girl’s uninjured shoulder as they hurried along on frantic feet.
He could sense that the cave ran far into the mountain, meaning that they wouldn’t be met with a dead end anytime soon. With no other option, they arrived at the earthy opening and scrambled inside. After a few steps, Alistar rested a hand on the cave wall and cast an advanced earth-shifting spell that quickly sealed the entrance shut behind them.
“That’s convenient,” the girl commented in the darkness.
He was taken aback by her candor, especially in their current situation. However, a loud voice quickly caused them to stir with a start.
“You can’t hide in there forever, demon worshipper! Even if it takes years, there’ll always be someone waiting here to receive you!”
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He and the girl subconsciously scurried forward.
“Ah,” she cried, having bumped into the wall in the pitch blackness. “Can you cast any fire magic? I can’t see a thing.”
“Not if you want to keep breathing.”
When she didn’t understand, he cast a basic illumination spell, having gotten the hang of said technique after practicing the invisibility spell that Aglain had taught him. Hovering above the index finger of his right hand, a tiny, vibrant ball of energy flooded the area with bright light as if he had just summoned a miniature sun to the tip of his finger.
“Keep going,” he urged as muffled voices became audible from the other side of the sealed entrance.
The cave wall was studded with rocks of all sizes, though unlike the crevice where he and Kaila had happened upon his ancient crystal, this tunnel was relatively uniform and not too difficult to traverse.
After covering another twenty paces or so, he cast another earth-shifting spell to create a second barrier behind them, a process that he repeated every dozen steps from that point onward.
Over time the uneven pathway began to broaden until they eventually emerged into a sizeable cavern that served as the focal point for several broad tunnels. These looked very familiar, which told him that they had likely been carved out by the same danger beasts that had left behind the tunnels of Crystellum’s lower levels.
“I don’t like it here,” mumbled the girl, who instinctively kept close to him.
“Keep an eye out for cave lizards,” he advised. “I can sense a few life signals up ahead.”
The girl suppressed a shudder.
After sealing the entrance behind them, Alistar collapsed to the ground like a puppet whose strings had just been cut. Sweat pouring from his face like meltwater from a glacier on a muggy, hot day, he sucked in as much air as he could manage.
When he had finally caught his breath, he wiped a large amount of moisture from his brow and immediately mended the girl’s burns.
“This is amazing,” she said as she inspected her perfect, unblemished skin in the light of his illumination spell. “It doesn’t even look like I was hurt.”
Alistar’s lip curled at the sight of her slave limiter, which drew her attention to her wrist. Without warning, he reached out and used the last of his swordsman’s aura—at least the last that he could spare without endangering himself—and tried his best to snap the tight-fitting metal, but it was of no use. He couldn’t get a proper grip on it, and even if he could he doubted that he would be able to snap the chains with brute force.
“Your sword,” said the girl, motioning to the weapon at his hip with her dark, emerald eyes.
He pulled it free from its scabbard with a loud screech, revealing a dull, rusted, scarred blade that looked as if it had been dug up from the depths of an ancient battlefield.
Seeing this, she frowned. “Maybe not…”
“Hold out your arm. We might as well try.”
She did so, at which point he carefully laid the flat face of the blade atop her wrist and slowly wormed it between her skin and the metal. As expected, the blade didn’t leave so much as a tiny nick on the iron links. When the girl made to pull her arm back, Alistar held up his free hand and then instilled a bit of energy into the weapon as he had done with the dagger that he’d gifted to Corrie. The moment he did so, the sword shed its outer layer of dull, marked metal as if it were a molting insect, revealing a length of gleaming steel that looked as if it were fresh from the forge. Sliding it over into the metal, it severed the links as if they were made of soft cheese.
“Interesting,” muttered the girl, elation in her eyes as she stared at her naked wrist. Looking down at the book and the packet of paper that he’d dropped after they entered the cavern, she put on a curious look. “I was wondering why you didn’t let go of those things the whole time we were running. Are they also enchanted?” Picking up the packet, she mused, “Does this produce an unlimited supply of food, or something?”
He snatched it out of her hands with a displeased expression, wiping the smile from her face.
“Sorry,” he said after a moment. “This…it’s just ordinary parchment.”
Seeing how closely he held it to his bare chest, the girl didn’t comment on his sudden rudeness. Instead, her eyes settled on a nearby wall of the cavern before they narrowed slightly.
“Hey,” she said, striding over to a seemingly random spot, “bring that light over here.”
He approached the wall and extended his index finger as requested, the girl scratching at a large protrusion of some shiny, jet-black mineral with one of her dirt-crusted, untrimmed fingernails.
“I’ve never seen such a pretty rock,” she whispered, eyes lowering in sudden despondency. “If only Alen was here to see them.”
She thinks this is pretty?
After inspecting the mineral for a moment, Alistar’s heart sank. He had seen this before, albeit only a tiny fragment that his uncle had brought home one day after a brief trip to the frontiersmen guild.
“That’s night iron.”
There was only one place in the area where this rare mineral had been discovered, a location that was currently off limits to citizens of both empires. Looking back at the broad tunnels that branched off in different directions, Alistar had a harrowing premonition.
End of Book Two