Violet
The silence that followed us back to the cave was different now. It was awkward, but a careful middle ground I could manage. And for so reason I found myself thinking more about Kael alongside Rowan. I wanted to see him again.
Or maybe it was a growing desire to ground myself against the acute awareness I was starting to have of Rowan.
It was the following morning. I was seated near the pool and had just finished putting on a change of clothes when Rowan returned, looking excited.
He had found a way out through a far but connected network of tunnels eventually leading upwards to the surface. The only issue was that the route there was heavily guarded and had several checkpoints along the way.
The journey would be a bit far
I thought about the underground city with its glowing crystals and winding streets. The old woman Aris who had reminded of my grandmother, how Ogas had walked around without fear, and the grotto where Rowan had kissed and I had kissed him back.
Twice.
I thought about Kael, sowhere far above, probably worried sick about . The guilt was still there, but alongside it, there was sothing else I wasn’t ready to na.
[ - ]
The next morning ca too quickly.
We gathered our things and left.
Rowan led the way through the winding streets, moving with a lot more confidence now due to his animal scouts mapping the routes over the past several days. We made brief stops along the way, and handed out so of the money we had. We wouldn’t need a lot of them out there.
The entrance to the tunnel system was hidden in an older section of the city, tucked behind a row of crumbling buildings that looked long abandoned. The crystals here were dim, barely flickering, and the air slled of dust and disuse.
No one would look here and think the inner parts were heavily guarded.
The passage was tight at first, forcing us to turn sideways in places. But it widened as we went deeper, opening into a rough-hewn tunnel that stretched ahead into darkness.
We walked for what felt like hours.
The blue glow of the city faded behind us, replaced by true darkness. I extended my syzygy carefully, trying to map the space around , but the strange mineral in the rock still resisted. The sensation was disorienting, like reaching for sothing that should be there and finding only emptiness.
I relied on my other senses instead. Rowan and I had done our very best to mask our energy throughout the duration of our stay here, and we had taken it to an even more extre length this mont just so we wouldn’t be noticed by the guards ahead.
The first checkpoint appeared without warning.
One mont the tunnel was empty; the next, there were wolves blocking the path. Five of them in their wolf forms, resting, but at the sa ti despite their relaxed positions, they seed alert at the sa ti.
Rowan didn’t slow down.
I watched his shoulders shift slightly, saw his head tilt in that particular way that ant he was extending his consciousness outward.
I was stunned. Was this how it worked?
One of their eyes snapped open and he stilled the mont its gaze locked on us. Then its bright glowing eyes went slack as its pupils dilated.
The others roused up and they soon t the sa fate and it was astonishing having to witness what was happening. I stopped and stared.
They stepped aside chanically, pressing their sides against the tunnel walls to let us pass.
"Keep walking, Violet," Rowan murmured. "You don’t need to look at them."
I did as he said, keeping my eyes forward as we moved past the motionless guards. The hair on the back of my neck prickled, but nothing happened. They didn’t move, didn’t speak, and they didn’t even seem to breathe until we were well past them.
"How long will that last?" I asked.
"Long enough. They won’t rember us."
There were more checkpoints after that. Three more, each one handled the sa way. Rowan extended his influence, the large guards went blank-eyed and compliant, and we slipped past like ghosts.
It was unsettling to watch each ti he did it.
I had known he was powerful. But this was different, and for so strange silly reason, I wondered who would win if he and Kael were to ever clash with each other.
And would this insane level of brainwashing even work on him?
It was a strange thing to reach into another wolf’s mind and simply... turn them off.
I wondered if he could do that to .
The thought sent a chill down my spine, but I pushed it away. He wouldn’t. I knew that with a certainty I couldn’t explain, but I still didn’t like the thought.
Just when we thought there wouldn’t be more, we encountered five more actual checkpoints. Two wolves resisted and it had resulted in a light battle that I helped Rowan with. By the ti we had moved past, the tunnel began to slope upward more steeply.
My legs burned with the effort of climbing, but I didn’t complain. We had been moving without stopping or rest for hours upon hours, but I started to get a bit more hope when I sensed how much the air was changing.
The faint staleness of the underground was giving way to sothing else.
Sothing that slled like open sky.
"We’re almost there," Rowan said quietly.
I watched his back. He had sounded tired. I guessed using sothing that powerful would have taken a lot of energy and ntal strength too.
The tunnel narrowed again, then curved sharply to the right. I followed him around the bend and stopped.
There was light.
Not the blue glow of crystals or the amber warmth of underground lamps. This was sunlight, pale and distant, filtering through a crack in the rock ahead.
My chest tightened.
I hadn’t realized how much I had missed the outside world until that mont.
Rowan reached the crack first and turned sideways to slip through. I followed, scraping my shoulders against the rough stone, squeezing through the narrow opening, and then I was out.
I blinked as the world opened up around .
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