“But the glory.…”
“Glory? There hasn’t been a war in this land for centuries. All we have are fancy stories, and it’s one thing to play pretend, swinging a branch like it’s a sword. ‘In the mind there are heroes,’ my father once told me. ‘But in the world there is only life and the struggle to keep it.’ Those might be simple words, but they’re true. I’m beginning to like you a lot, Kindren. The last thing I would want is for you to run off and play champion while I’m at home with young babes. It wouldn’t be fair.”
She crossed her arms and huffed.
“And if you did, the least you could do is bring me with you,” she added.
Kindren laughed.
“What’s so funny?” asked Aully, squinting.
“You’re only twelve, huh?” he said.
“Yeah. What of it?”
“Only that you speak with more wisdom than those twenty times your age. You truly are an extraordinary girl.”
Aully felt her cheeks flush. “Thank you,” she replied.
“I mean it. You’re wonderful.”
She slipped her elbows off the podium and snaked her hand through the crook of his arm. “So are you,” she said. “But I’m serious. If something bad happens, we fight together. Understood?”
“Understood,” laughed Kindren.
They continued their exploration, wandering through cavern after cavern. Aully marveled at the craftsmanship of the sarcophagi and the untold riches that had been buried with the deceased. In a couple of the chambers torches still burned, remnants of the last mourners to visit their particular ancestral burial nooks, but mostly they had only Kindren’s oil-soaked bundle of twig and twine to light the way. Kindren told her the crypts were rarely visited any more. Given the lifespan of elves, he said, many regarded death as the last stopover on the way to returning to Celestia’s bosom. With the great length of their lives, the end, by the time it came, was greeted openly by both the dying and those left behind. The only tombs called on with any sort of regularity were those containing the unfortunate who had been taken before their time or those of the great heroes of old.
Aully didn’t really understand that line of thinking, as the thought of losing her own parents, who themselves had lived long lives, paralyzed her with fear, but she kept her objections to herself.
As the floor sloped further downward, there came a constant plink-plink of dripping water. Though the passageways grew narrower and more claustrophobic, the chambers they opened up into became grander and grander in terms of both size and the amount of treasure they contained. Here they found no lit torches, no signs of visitation.
“The ghosts of the dead murmur here,” Kindren whispered softly, yet down here his voice still carried. “These caverns have been here since time immemorial. The deeper we go, the older the crypts. We’ll soon come on the most ancient of the burial sites, those of the earliest elves, Celestia’s first creations, before the dawn of language. The spirits are restless in these chambers, so far away from the light of their creator, and if you hold your breath and listen, you’ll hear them lamenting their loss.”
Kindren said that last bit with a sly smile on his face. Aullienna knew he was only trying to scare her, but she felt an ethereal chill that had nothing to do with the moisture or coldness of the deeper tunnels.
They stayed silent after that, the only sounds the sloshing of their footsteps over the damp stone floor, the crackle of the torch, and their own repetitive breathing. Aully gazed up at the stone figures and sarcophagi surrounding her, which were much more crudely constructed than those they had passed earlier. The faces were barely recognizable as elven, and the figures’ poses were twisted by the artists’ misunderstanding of body structure. Here there were no jewels or gold, no treasure of any sort save for piles of domestic items-cups, bowls, utensils-all primitive and carved from wood. She thought of Noni’s words when the nursemaid told her of the age of her people. Elves had existed for a little over two thousand years. Aully did the math in her head. Given their average lifespan and slower rate of reproduction, that meant they were in the fifteenth generation, twentieth at most. All considered, elves weren’t all that much older than humans as a species. The thought made her head spin.
“This world is so young,” she whispered. “I’m a babe in a land of babes.”
“What?” asked Kindren.
“Nothing.”
The path continued onward. Kindren had led her in a straight line, bypassing many side chambers. Finally they reached the end of the line, a sparsely filled hollow devoid of any carvings or even caskets. Here the corpses were laid out on the ground side by side, their moldy bones green with fungal growth. The light of Kindren’s torch illuminated a hundred lifeless, empty eye sockets staring at the darkened ceiling.
Aully shuddered in the middle of them all. She knelt down and scooped up a stone from the damp ground. It was glossy and black, polished by time and sediment. She flipped it between her fingers, feeling the stone’s perfect smoothness. She uttered a silent prayer to Celestia, infusing the stone with her words of love, before placing it down as tribute on the breastbone of a small pile of skeletal remains. Kindren remained silent behind her, but she felt his curious gaze. She closed her eyes and tilted her head back.
And then, just barely over the trickle of distant water, she heard the whispers.
“It’s them!” she exclaimed, keeping her voice as low as she could. “They’ve awoken!”
Kindren’s mouth twisted into a half-frown. He stared back at her, one eyebrow raised and his nostrils flaring. Under different circumstances, Aully might have found the expression adorable.
“They?” he asked.
“Listen,” said Aully. She stood and placed a hand on his arm, hoping his touch would help keep her calm. “You can hear them.”
Kindren closed his eyes and held his breath. His pointed ears twitched ever so slightly as he struggled to hear what she did. Eventually his eyes snapped open, and that funny-looking frown reversed.
“That’s not the ghosts,” he said, grinning now. He was careful to keep his voice pitched low. “There are others here with us. They’ve probably been down here the whole time.”
“Really?”
“Yes. I recognize that voice.”
He grabbed her hand and began to pull her along behind him.
“What are you doing?” Aully protested.
“Come on now,” he said, his grin mischievous. “Whoever they are, they scared my betrothed. It only seems fair for us to put a bit of that same fright in them.’
That grin won her over. This was something Brienna would do. And if Brienna would do it, so would she.
They tiptoed through the inner sanctums until they caught sight of a gentle glow emanating from a passage on the right. Kindren led her toward it, snuffing out his torch once they reached the entrance. They passed through the adjacent tunnel cautiously, their footfalls soundless-a remarkable feat given the exhilaration that made Aully’s entire body shiver.
When the chamber opened up before them, they found themselves enshrouded by darkness save for the faintly glowing light at the far end of the hollow. Kindren steered a narrow path through the stacks of caskets, moving slowly, not wanting to spoil their surprise by tripping over some unseen artifact or toppling over a burial mound. Aullienna followed, doing everything she could to not give away Kindren’s game.
The voices grew louder and the light clearer, until Aullienna could plainly make out four male figures standing around a single, elegantly carved sarcophagus. One held a burning torch that illuminated their faces as they spoke. Two of them she identified right away. One was Joseph Crestwell, the human; the other was Conall Sinistel, Neyvar Ruven’s cousin, who had won the fencing competition at the tournament. The other two she vaguely recognized, but judging from how similar to Conall they appeared, with straight hair the color of darkened wheat and slender, haughty facial features, she guessed that they were more relations of the Sinistel family tree.