Page 36 of Joy Guardian

My eyes were opened now, but it made no difference. The darkness was impenetrable.

“Where are you? I can’t see you.” I shifted in worry.

His arm hugged my shoulders.

“Shhh. Don’t move yet. Your newly healed bones may snap if you do. Rest just a little longer. It’s dark in this cave. But I’m right here.”

I felt his body pressed to mine and turned toward him.

“My bones? Did I break something?”

My body felt like it had been run over by a truck. Every bone seemed to ache. But the pain wasn’t nearly as bad as what I imagined a fracture would feel like.

“We fell…” I remembered.

“We did,” he echoed. “We got hurt, but we’re healing. The pain is much less now, isn’t it?”

“Are you hurt too?” I reached for him in the darkness. He caught my hand and pressed his lips to the middle of my palm.

“I broke a few bones too and bruised a few muscles. It was a long fall. But we’ve had some time to recover. I’ve been feeling well for days now.”

“For days? How long have we been here?”

“I’ve been awake for five nights now, but I slept for two before that.”

“Are you saying we’ve been here for a week?”

“Just over a week, yes.”

“And those snakes…the centipede, where are they?”

“There are none here anymore. But I will feel much better when we get out of here.”

“How are we going to get out of here?”

“Well, that’s still a question.”

He shifted to rest my upper body on his lap, then lifted something on his right hand. I heard him mutter a few words, then a green glow spread from his hand up to the ceiling that was so high, it almost seemed like we were outside under the open sky.

The illusion was made even more real by the glow of little dots that formed constellations above us.

“What is it?” I asked, relieved that I could finally see his face again in the light of these artificial stars.

His green eyes reflected the glow, looking like two more stars in the darkness.

“It’s a navigation crystal.” He raised a cluster of onyx black crystals in his hand. “It shows the stars in any weather and at any time of the day. According to this, we should be going that way to get to Himerum.” He gestured to the right where there was nothing but a wide wall of rock. “But as far as I can see, the only way out of this cavern is through there.” He pointed in the opposite direction where a blot of darkness in the rock must mark the opening of a tunnel.

“How far does that tunnel go?” I asked.

“That I don’t know. I didn’t want to move you before you fully healed, and I couldn’t leave you to explore.”

Only now I noticed the black smoky ropes of his tendrils running from him to me.

“Is that how I’m still alive?” I asked as it dawned on me.

If Kurai was correct about the time, then I’d been without food for ten days now. I felt hungry, like I could eat an entire cow if given a chance. But the exhaustion and the dizziness that had accompanied me at the beginning of this journey were now gone. The fuzziness in my head had cleared too. Even the ache had been slowly melting away from my body.

“Are you…supporting me through them somehow?” I touched his tendril in my arm.

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