3. Chapter 3

Chapter 3

C yril spent plenty of her life on horseback, sometimes days at a time traveling to other guild contracts, but on the fifth day of their trip to Reykr? She contemplated her odds of making the journey on foot.

She hadn’t been able to feel her backside for about a day, and a miserable, achy pain pulsed up her spine with every step Attie took.

The terrain did her sanity no favors, either.

Their cabal reached the base of the Stygia Mountains the previous night, enjoying what would be their last meal of fire-cooked game for a few days. As the first warm, pink, and blue whispers of dawn washed over them from the east, they began their alpine ascent.

Long gone were the gentle slopes of packed earth trails leading them from the dense forests into the copse-dotted foothills. All that carried them now was a cragged stone trail winding up to the Obsidian Rift. Cyril missed the soothing sounds of the forest and its denizens, the soft bubbling of the creek running beside them. Now the only noise that filled her ears was that of hooves on loose rock and the brutal wind howling all around them.

Even donning a thick cloak with a heavy cowl, and gloves she rifled from her saddlebags hours ago, Cyril felt like a block of ice. Her uncles, both blood and borrowed, seemed unphased by the drastic change in weather, and she did not know how.

Hells, they even seemed to enjoy themselves now.

What a cruel turn of the tides.

Ahead of her, Bron and Dion rode together and held some semblance of casual conversation for most of the day—guild business from the bits and pieces she overheard from them. The first time they laughed, it startled her and made her wonder if the cold had gone to her head.

Behind her, Tyr and Rendall rode a bit more staggered, but one occasionally caught up to or fell behind the other, discussing things she could never quite hear over the wind.

And then there was Cyril.

Nestled in the middle for safekeeping, as always.

With a frozen body, a numb ass, and one hell of an ache in her back.

Her mind had just drifted to the delightful and cruel thought of a hot bath or savoring Sebille's stew on the cozy armchair by the fire in her room, when Dion suddenly yelled, “There it is!”

Cyril squinted. The brutal wind left her eyes both watery and dry somehow, and she hadn’t bothered looking further than Dion’s back for most of the ride.

It was the Obsidian Rift, and Cyril gaped at it beneath her cloaking layers. The injustice Dion committed when he described it at camp the night before…

A shortcut, he explained, hewed from the stone of the mountains that significantly reduced travel time to Reykr. A utility gifted to them by nature in a raw form, refined by the travel of Carinae’s denizens over the millennia.

He didn’t mention what a fucking marvel it was though.

The last ridge they crested gave way to the first unobstructed view of it, and the rift was breathtaking in its brutality.

It was as if a god of eld tore the peak of one of the tallest mountains in the range in two. From this distance—at least a few hours away, from the ridges still lying ahead—the rift looked like a jagged and wicked pathway to one of the hells, and not at all like a marker of safe passage.

Despite the gray and overcast thing the sky had turned into, Cyril could see the faintest sheen of slick black stone lining the inside of the rift—its namesake, obsidian.

A thread of excitement wound its way through Cyril, and she grasped onto it for dear fucking life. Anything to get her through the next few days would be a miracle.

“Will we reach it before sundown?” she yelled up to Dion, their entire group having slowed its pace to take in the wonder they approached. “And where the hells are we sleeping?”

Cyril wasn’t confident in any of their abilities to navigate the path after dark. One wrong move on the loose rock would spell disaster.

Dion turned back to her and nodded, a whisper of a grin on his face.

“We’re camping in the rift tonight.”

Up close, the Obsidian Rift bore a striking resemblance to the gaping maw of an incomprehensible beast. The skyward opening running its length was much wider than Cyril thought when she first glimpsed it hours ago, and the thin base she thought it tapered down to was in reality wide enough for their entire merry cabal to ride alongside each other three or four times over with ease.

Tyr, Ren, and Bron all opted to fall back and let Cyril ride down the center of the rift in awestruck silence beside a sort of wistful-looking Dion—which she would not question at all.

A single glance back told her their surroundings even impressed the rest of their cantankerous rogues. Not that Bron was usually one to mask his appreciation for anything, but to see a bit of wonder in Tyr or Ren’s eyes was a remarkably rare treat.

The interior surface of the mountain passageway spoke volumes about how well-traveled the rift was through its history, with sweeping spans of the rock worn glossy and smooth from curious hands or traveling bodies brushing by. If the damn thing wasn’t so wide, Cyril would have veered over and passed a hand along the surface herself.

Down as low in the rift as they were, only scattered traces of late-afternoon light crept over the looming height of the mountain’s peak. What few rays made it over, though, did marvelous things to the scattered bolts of obsidian veins running through the otherwise gray mountain face.

Cyril hadn’t known the usually abyssal, black stone could look like glittering, inky-blue stardust. Remarkable in its difference from the small carved statues and stone idols she often saw being peddled in the city.

“Has the rift always been here?” Cyril finally asked Dion after what had to have been an hour of gawking at her surroundings.

The curved path the rift followed made for a merciful break in the relentless winds, and let Cyril push back her cowl and hoods. Communicating became a whole hell of a lot easier.

“It predates any written history we have of Carinae.” Dion’s gaze slid over to her. “Remarkable, with how thorough the archivists of the Great Kingdom were.”

Cyril didn’t have words.

Carinae had thousands upon thousands of years of written history, if the sometimes soul-sucking lessons from her governess were to be believed. To think of how many people had traveled this passage in that time, how many sights and sounds the stone surfaces had laid witness to…

Far too much for her to comprehend, at least while she was this hungry, cold, and tired. Which reminded her…

“Where exactly are we going to sleep tonight?”

So far, Cyril had not glimpsed a single crevice or inlet that might make a hospitable camp.

Dion smiled at her. “Patience. You’ll see soon enough.”

It turned out that Dion had a wildly different opinion on what soon enough meant compared to Cyril and the rest of her uncles.

Frigid darkness bathed the rift almost in its entirety by the time Cyril noticed Dion veering from the middle of the passageway, towards shadowed openings lining the outer edge of the bend they traveled.

Carved openings. Not jagged splits in stone.

These were smoothed and squared with purpose.

Cyril sagged with relief.

Dion was the first to dismount, with the others following close behind. Cyril's struggle to dismount Attie against the vehement protests of her stiff body went unnoticed, thankfully.

She hadn’t known what to expect when she crossed through the threshold of the angled stone entryway behind Bron, but it sure as fuck wasn’t a hallway carved into the rock.

Wide enough for the horses to move about with ease and twice as high as Ren was tall, the hallway had several posts hewn right into the walls, which her uncles had already begun tethering their steeds to.

Dion must have noticed her gaping.

He took Attie’s lead from her hand, passed it off to Bron, and steered her further into the mountain.

“Better than some inns we’ve stayed in, hey?” Dion chuckled, and Cyril could only nod as her eyes swept around the cavern they entered. She didn’t even care that her uncle conjured a flame in his palm to light their path. That minor fact would circle back to gnaw at her later. But for now…

The cavern had to be three or four times the height of the hall, and easily as wide as it was tall. A pit sat in the center of the imposing space, perfect for the fire Dion already set about starting, and—

Cyril looked at her uncle and blinked.

Dion had a fucking log in his hand. They had packed nothing of the sort, and gods knew nothing could grow in the middle of a damn mountain.

“Where did you get that?”

He pointed at a cubby carved into the stone wall.

Full of logs.

Cyril gave him a sheepish smile. She may have been a well-prepared rogue, but she sure as fuck wasn’t an observant one.

“Reykr royal patrols make sure the basics stay stocked for any travelers, even though they’re scarce.” Dion looked amused at her bewilderment. “You didn’t see the feed for the horses, did you?”

She blinked back towards the hall.

“…I didn’t.”

Truthfully, her mind was struggling just to wrap itself around the fact that the refuge existed in the first place, let alone was stocked .

“It’s almost like those freaks aren’t as bad as everyone thinks.” Dion cocked a brow at her as he rose from the fire pit, his flames now engulfing the logs and kindling.

“You can set your bedroll down into one of those—” He nodded over to a row of shallow basins carved into the stone floor. “More comfortable than they look, and you won’t have to worry about Ren rolling over and smothering you in the middle of the night.”

She wished that was just a joke, but it had happened twice already, and Cyril was dying for a single damn night of uninterrupted sleep.

“I’ll take your word for it.”

Cyril glanced between her uncle, the beds, and the fire.

It was all mighty fucking weird.