Page 231 of Feralheart

We flew out of the darkness, into a broad, bone-white valley, the entrance magically closing behind us.

Vertical walls of blood-veined stone rose on every side of the canyon, climbing so high the peaks disappeared into clouds that looked solid enough to land on. The jagged slopes had been cut at angles that shouldn’t exist, each face jutting outward below the next, forming a staircase. Narrow ledges held debris that had fallen from above.

Bones covered the canyon floor so thoroughly the ground itself was invisible. They were layered like sediment, generations of them pressed flat by the weight of whatever had come after. Dragon ribcages the size of cottages thrust up through the accumulation, their arches worn smooth by weather. Between them, I spied smaller shapes. Some still wore armor rusted to the color of old blood, fused so completely to the remains that the metal had become part of the bone.

The canyon walls held more of them, dragons and riders embedded in the rock. Stone had grown around them, their necks stretching toward the summit they’d never reach.

Skeletons of people at every stage of decay punctuated the surface and lay on ledges. Some still gripped crumbling weapons. Others sat, their legs and arms splayed wide.

“No exit,” Eradin said from Selira’s back where she flew beside Aristus, Lyndie and Reece just beyond her.

Lyndie and Reece stared upward, Reece pointing.

We’d flown into a fist of stone, and the only opening was whatever waited at the top, assuming anything waited at all.

Eradin’s horror hit me though the bond.

She was counting. Doing the math I couldn’t make myself finish.

How many Scorchings had fed this place?

My father might be in one of these walls or lying on the cavern floor, his armor rusted the same color as the rest, his bones as anonymous as all the others.

I made myself look. Really look at the armored shapes closest to us, scanning for House Lancifer colors. For anything. But I recognized nothing. There were too many.

I tightened my grip on Aristus’s neck spike until my knuckles stopped feeling like mine.

“Fen.” Eradin’s voice pulled me back. “Look.”

Strange structures protruded from the rock face at regular intervals, rising in pairs from the stone on either side of what might be a path if you could call a vertical climb a path. Stone pillars, each one twice the height of a man, anchored directly into the canyon wall. The rock had been carved around them, or it had grown to hold them in place.

Runes covered every visible side of them, different from the runes the elite inscribed into our dragons’ tack. Dense, layered, and carved so deep into the stone that the grooves created slices of shadow beneath. Some runes I recognized from the texts I’d studied. Most I didn’t.

They glowed the same faint blue as the collar fused to Aristus’s neck.

They looked almost ceremonial.

Ancient.

Like someone had built a road and marked it with monuments to make the path feel sacred.

I didn’t trust anything about this place.

“I assume we need to get to the top?” Lyndie asked.

Reece grunted, squinting upward. “Why not fly there?”

I was thinking the same thing. That was the only direction that made sense. The Oracle might wait above the cloud line or more of this final trial. But we wouldn’t find an answer down here other than death.

Even spaces jutted between the structures. The higher they climbed, the closer they stood together, the corridor narrowing as it rose. The trail had been built to be followed carefully, not rushed.

The eight remaining elites flew their dragons back and forth through the valley, their heads tilted back.

Most of the dragons wore full tack.

They’d left them to sleep in it.

When I got out of here, things were going to change. Assuming I lived long enough to change them.