Page 227 of A Dagger of Ice and Intrigue
“Your eyes,” he whispered, mesmerized, like a man unsure if he should approach a miracle or run away from it. “They turned silver. All silver.”
He took a step toward me and raised his hand to touch my cheek, as if checking if I was still me.
“It must’ve been a trick of the light.” I shook my head. “They’ve never done that before.”
“And your voice,” he went on, undeterred, lowering his voice. “It didn’t sound like you. It’s like a thousand Huntresses chanted as one.”
I kept shaking my head. That explained the sudden soreness. But I had no answers to give to his unspoken questions.
I wondered the same as him.
“That’s–that’s never happened before,” I said, even as I turned my right palm, watching it. “Maybe my magic is still adjusting as it’s coming back.”
Even as I said it, it didn’t feel right. My gaze travelled to the rim waiting for us.
“Or maybe the crater is changing my powers.”
Chapter
Fifty
ALLIE
I’d never believed in the legends of giants roaming the land, their tracks creating the valleys and their swords dragging on the ground giving birth to river beds.
Yet standing at the bottom of the crater’s rim made me question those beliefs.
I had never felt smaller or insignificant in this great world than now.
The wall spread above and beyond, almost suffocating in its greatness.
It was seamless, the earth scorched into impenetrable stone millenia ago by the might of the gods and the sky. The eerie silence crept from the ground, up my heels and settled at the base of my spine, alerting every sense.
The blood pumping in my veins sounded too loud in the forbidden stillness.
All I saw was rock, all I smelled was ash, and all I tasted was metal.
I’d never been struck more by just how mortal I was.
And I stood among other mortals, our breaths turning to mist, our teeth chattering, but not from the cold. But because we dared to enter the crater’s bowels, as if we had the right to step inside hallowed ground.
But for the sake of the realm, we had to.
Ryker had said the fallen star was bleeding. The passage might have been the wound.
There was just one problem–I didn’t see an entry in the great big rim.
I looked around at our group, all mighty warriors staring at the stone as if they were ready to face it.
Ryker’s face was stone, as if carved from the rim itself. A true son of the crater.
Nobody spoke and I didn’t dare. The moment felt too sacred, too full of promises and omens.
Our shadows, as hazy and faded as they were in the early morning hours, shrunk against the stone as the sun began to peek over the horizon.
I stared at my own shadow, watching it dwindle at the cusp of night and day, fading into the ground as if running scared from the rim.
Then a glimmer in the stone caught my eye.
