Admittedly, it was a sketchy plan. But it was what Sora could do with the very limited information she had. She just had to trust herself to adapt to the rest.
They followed the path of ryuu particles deeper into the tunnels. As the hours passed, the sweet perfume of winter berries faded, replaced instead by the strangely dead, hollow smell of cold, stale air. The hairs on Sora’s arms stood up. Everything about these barren ice caves felt like a cemetery.
Broomstick pointed at a part of the glacier wall that was recessed, with six long icicles like spears stabbing the labyrinth floor. “Is it me, or does that seem ominous?”
A sprinkle of ice fell on them from above.
Sora and Broomstick jumped. But in the same second, they had knives and throwing stars in hand.
Silence.
Was it the ghost faces? Or the snow monster? Or another threat they didn’t know about?
“Get some of your bombs out,” Sora whispered to Broomstick. He palmed a few of the smaller ones from his bag.
They waited.
No more ice falling.
No monstrous footsteps.
Nothing.
Sora exhaled.
And then they heard it. A steady pounding—no, a beating from the tunnels above them, growing louder as it approached.
“What in Luna’s name is that?” A chill as cold as the ice caves themselves ran up Sora’s back.
“It sounds like a monster,” Broomstick said, eyes wide with fear. “I say we run.”
They sprinted down the tunnel. The noise behind them grew.
“It’s gaining on us,” Sora said, putting on more speed. She took a corner too quickly and slammed into a wall of ice. Broomstick crashed into her, and they tumbled to the icy ground.
“Dead end,” she said, scrambling to her feet. They had to backtrack.
She ran the way they’d come. There had been a fork in the tunnels not too far up—
As soon as they reached the intersection, over fifty owls with pale, white faces met them. The owls shrieked in unison, wielding talons like blades on their feet.
Oh stars, it wasn’t a single enemy. Ghost faces, plural.
The synchronized beating of their wings echoed through Naimo Ice Caves like the rhythm of a death march.
Holy heavens, what have I signed up for?
“Show me where to go!” Sora shouted.
“What? I don’t know!” Broomstick said.
But she wasn’t talking to him. She was yelling at the ryuu magic around her. Sora focused her thoughts on an icy lake, hoping that would be enough for the ryuu particles to go on.
The owls shrieked again and dove. Several reached Sora, stabbing with their razor-sharp beaks and slicing with their claws.
Broomstick swung his sword, and they swooped off.
The emerald dust coalesced into a glittering path down the ice tunnel to Sora’s right.
“This way!” She made the sharp turn and began to run. Broomstick was on her heels, but so were the owls.
“We need to get rid of them,” he said as he tried to keep up. Because Broomstick couldn’t see the green trail the ryuu particles were showing her, he was a fraction of a second behind on each sudden turn as they sprinted deeper into the tunnels. Sora tried to shout the turns to him ahead of time, but sometimes the path zagged so suddenly, she hardly had enough notice to adjust herself. The small lag helped the owls stay on their trail.
“I don’t want to hurt them,” Sora yelled over their shrieks, which had reached a bloodcurdling pitch.
“Yeah, but they don’t feel the same way about us. I think they’re trying to murder us.”
But what if the owls were just regular animals, albeit ones enlisted by Zomuri to discourage anyone from going farther into the caves? That would explain why the tunnels were so confusing; they were built to look natural but also to make people lose their way. After encountering the labyrinth and the owls, most people wouldn’t venture deeper.
Most regular people. Not taigas or ryuu.
Sora remembered then that she’d had a plan for these ghost faces.
The emerald path veered to the left up ahead. She purposefully ran the wrong way, to the right.
A hundred yards later, she skidded to a halt. “Broomstick, stay close. I’m making us invisible.”
She dropped to the ground and curled into a ball. Broomstick ducked right next to her. Sora commanded the ryuu particles to infuse them both.
The rush of magic flooded their cells at the same instant the owls swooped into that part of the tunnel. She checked on Broomstick. He stared at her intently, as if afraid that losing sight of Sora would loosen her magic on him.
The owls flew past them.
Sora exhaled.
Broomstick stood, looking a bit intoxicated from the feel of ryuu magic on his skin.
“You need to blow up this tunnel to block it,” Sora said. “Then we’ll go the way we came and take the other turn.”
He looked at her but with a goofy smile on his face, as if he wasn’t quite seeing her.
She slapped him on the cheek. Nicely. Or as nicely as possible in this situation.
“I know ryuu magic is a bit of a shock the first time you feel it, but I need you to get ahold of yourself and set off your bombs.”
“Oof, sorry.” Broomstick rubbed his cheek but held out his hand. There were three small explosives shaped like eggs.
The owls’ screeches and beating wings were getting louder again.
“They’re coming back this way!” Sora said. “Throw them now!”
He flicked a match on the bottom of his boot and lit the fuses.
As the first ghostly faces reappeared in the tunnel, Broomstick hurled his bombs one after the other at the ice above them. The bombs burst on impact, and the tunnel ceiling crashed down in a fury of icicles and smoke, trapping the owls on the other side. The ground quaked, and Sora fell.
Broomstick grabbed her hand, pulled her up, and they sprinted.
After a minute, though, the rumble of the cave-in stopped, and Sora and Broomstick did, too. She leaned against the wall. Her throat was raw, and her side ached from running.
“Let go of the invisibility spell on me,” Broomstick said. “You need to conserve your energy.”
She did as he said, but she was also distracted by something else. The shimmering emerald path now branched off in three different directions.
“What the hells does that mean?” Sora said aloud.
“I can’t see what you see,” Broomstick reminded her.
“Right, sorry. I don’t know which way to go. There are three paths.”
“Then I think we just choose one, before the owls find an alternate path to us or something else decides to chase us.”
She gave herself another moment to catch her breath, then chose the third route, since three was her lucky number.
The tunnel wound down endlessly. Just when Sora was convinced that it would never end and that the Lake of Nightmares didn’t exist, the tunnel stopped abruptly and spit them out into a colossal cave.
“Good gods,” Sora murmured.
The ceiling was hundreds of feet high, and the other side of the cave was so far away it was almost out of sight. But there were definitely two other tunnel openings over there. That must be why there’d been three emerald paths, because there were three different ways to get here.
And most important: in the center of the cave was a vast pool of glacial water clear as glass.