Total pages in book: 92
Estimated words: 87781 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 439(@200wpm)___ 351(@250wpm)___ 293(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 87781 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 439(@200wpm)___ 351(@250wpm)___ 293(@300wpm)
“This is it!” I cry out. “This is what she said to look for.”
Death grunts and reaches out with his bare hand, hesitating for a moment before he places his palm over it.
He turns the black handle and pushes open the door an inch, then presses his shoulder against it until it opens the rest of the way.
On the other side of the door is another tunnel, this one level.
And there’s light at the end of the tunnel. Not a metaphor or platitude—literal light.
“This must be it,” I whisper.
“Possibly,” Death says. “The passageway I know of runs straight to the caverns. My mountain lair.”
“Castle Greyskull,” I comment.
His eyes squint under his mask. “It’s a journey of several days in complete darkness. This light, though…it seems to lead right to the outside.”
“So let’s go!” I tell him. “Anywhere outside is better than here. And what if Raila can’t hold the spiders back?”
He nods slowly. “Alright. I’ll go first, but we’ll have to close this door so we aren’t followed. There’s a good chance once it closes, we’ll never be able to go back in this way.”
“Can’t go back to Hell? What a shame.”
He gives me a wry grin and then turns to close the door shut. It groans on its hinges, and the moment the door becomes flush with the dirt wall, it disappears before our eyes, like it was never there at all.
“No turning back,” he says.
“No turning back.”
We start walking quickly down the tunnel toward the light. It gets brighter and brighter, and for a moment, I think perhaps we’ve taken a wrong turn and are heading up to Amaranthus instead, the light is so white and glowing.
Yet, the closer we get to the end, the more familiar the light seems.
It’s daylight.
We come to the end of the tunnel and peer out. It’s daylight alright, a cloudy, cold, snowy white day.
We’re standing on top of a forested hill, the snow thick on branches of pine, the smell of balsam in the air. I immediately take deep gulps through my lungs, the fresh air never feeling so good.
“Where are we?” Death grumbles suspiciously, looking around. From where we are standing, the only view we have is of the trees, though, through the rows, you can see how the forest slopes downward.
“I have no idea,” I say. “You mean to say you can’t recognize a forest from the trees?”
He shakes his head and speaks in a low voice. “Perhaps we’re not too far from Shadow’s End, near the Iron Mountains. We’ll have to get to a more open vantage point for a better look. The last thing I want is for us to be ambushed by Louhi when we least suspect it.”
He turns around and sighs.
I follow his gaze. The tunnel we just stepped out of is now a solid rock face, like there was never anything there at all. I kick at the rock with my boot for good measure, but it doesn’t budge.
“Looks like we’re stuck here no matter what,” I say.
“It won’t take long for me to find some allies,” he assures me, pushing his mask up on his head. “There are many spies for the Forest Gods. The next bird I see, I’ll be able to pass a message off to Tapio and tell him what’s happened. Hopefully, I’ll get my bearings soon and figure out where we are and where we need to go next.”
I nod and follow him as he starts trudging through the snow. We walk a while through the strands of trees, but we don’t come across any animals at all, no tracks in the snow either. It’s just us in the trees. Normally, I feel like there’s a million eyes watching me here, but that’s not the case now. I feel like we truly might be alone, and there’s a strange comfort in that.
Finally, we come to a bit of a clearing, where a rock juts out over a gentle drop. Death climbs up on the rock and then pulls me up alongside him.
Below us is a valley of pine trees, a glimpse of a rushing river before it rises into a hill on the other side. Not quite the Iron Mountains, though. More like iron hills.
“Smoke,” he says, and I look to see a puff of smoke coming up from the tree line below. “Someone has lit a fire.”
I squint at where it’s coming from. A metal pipe. From a roof. “Is that a…house? Whose house is that?” I ask him. “It looks so normal.”
I hear him audibly swallow. “I don’t know,” he says quietly. “This doesn’t make sense. None of this is familiar.”
And that’s when I notice the thin gray line between the river and the rising hill on the other side. At first, I thought it was a crack in the rocky face of the hill, a place where snow hasn’t gathered.