Page 136 of A Crown of Tears and Treason
Fourteen.
Fif–
I dropped the glass sphere, hoping against all hope it wouldn’t shatter on impact. Or worse, be swallowed by some monster.
A clink later, I barely saw a wink of light, before the vines tightened again.
My shoulders tensed. Long way down, but not impossible–as long as I didn’t touch the vines.
Questioning all the decisions that had brought me here, I waited for the next gap. I tensed my muscles to the point of pain.
Thirteen.
I shouldn’t do this.
Fourteen.
Go back to the surface. Forget about this mad plan and save yourself.
Fifteen.
I jumped.
Chapter
Forty-Two
EVIE
Idropped into a tumble, bones rattling.
The vines hissed closed behind me a breath later.
My hands and feet dug into something soft. Sand?
No. The sphere illuminated enough to make out a layer of dust thick enough that it swallowed my boots up to my ankles.
All the humidity from up above was replaced with stale and dry air that scratched my throat. I looked up. The vines must have been acting like a natural moisture magnet to protect the oldest texts.
The underside of the vines was almost desiccated, small pieces raining down like dandruff as they shifted.
“Disgusting,” I whispered and instantly regretted it.
All the dry particles in the air rushed into my lungs. I covered my mouth and nose with the collar of my armor, tensing my ribs to swallow my cough.
A small flutter of pride beat in my chest. I’d done it. If I’d gotten this far, maybe I could–
I picked up the sphere and turned, deflating.
The shelves before me…there were no books here.
Only clay tablets and scrolls, carefully positioned inside the niches carved inside the stone. Thousands of scrolls, rolled up and bound with red twine, edges frayed and sandy. Where to evenbeginsifting through all of them?
My first instinct was to reach for the tablets. The Quoriliths carved their spells on stones, right? But my fingers froze a breath away from them.
The Quoriliths were too suspicious for anyone to see their writings. They’d carved them inside the temples that had sunk eons ago and these tablets didn’t look like chipped remnants. Their edges were straight and precise. These hadn’t been damaged in travel. They had the reddish sheen of the dust in my front courtyard.
These were local.
