She stood, and called her wings.
They flared golden, and she lifted a hand’s breadth off the ground. A vast ceiling vaulted so high that its peaks lay in shadow. Above, frozen spears of lightning glistened, rock formations hanging from the ceiling like so many points. The cavern was immense, its far walls lost in dimness. The floor stretched smooth and unbroken.
Except there.
A narrow, black spire, somewhat taller than a man, rose out of the floor, so far from her that it was barely visible in the gloom. Blue fire flickered along its length where the aetherical glamour cast by her wings brushed it. Like a shadow, a second, insubstantial pillar blossomed into existence beside it, a burning stone through which she could see
“Liat’dano! Where are you?” The shaman speaks to her from beyond that gateway. The centaur woman is insubstantial but nevertheless present. She shades her eyes as against a harsh light and peers through the gateway toward Liath.
“I am here, at the Heart-of-the-Mountain-of-the-World’s Beginning!” Liath cries.
“I have been looking for you, Daughter, but the aether is thin and the gateway closes. Come to me! Quickly!”
The pulse of the aether was too feeble, even here, to sustain her wings. They withered, and she dropped the hand’s span to Earth and stumbled as too much weight came down on her injured leg. The glowing illumination faded and the burning stone dissolved into a pale nimbus, rapidly dissipating.
Caught in the last lambent twilight, a figure hunched out of the shadows and scuttled to the spire. It turned, and she saw that it was not human. It had luminous bulges where eyes ought to have been. Its skin had the look of granite.
Blackness swallowed her, and it. She heard two scrapes, that bellows sigh followed by two scrapes, and then nothing.
She dug deep, and fought to call her wings again, but the first effort had taken its toll on her and they only flickered, like the spark of a wick catching for an instant before snapping out. She could not get illumination enough to make her way to the black spire.
She had not hallucinated that creature. Indeed, she had a good idea of what it must be, because Mother Obligatia had told her of the inhuman creatures deep in the rock beneath the convent of St. Ekatarina’s whose charity had sustained the sisters for many months. In legend, humankind had many names for them: goblins and “Old Ones” and more besides.
Creatures who lived in the earth must have some means of moving around, just as moles shifted through tunnels. Where they could crawl, so could she. It was only a matter of having provisions and steady light.
Ai, God, if only the gateway of the burning stone had not collapsed so suddenly. If she could step through—reach Li’at’dano—she could gain her freedom and be reunited with Blessing, if her girl lived.
She must live.