I understood the noise now. Not a scream, but my name drawn out.
“Aaallliiiii!”
Sacred gods. Galin was alive?
With one hand, he clung to the wall of the cave. With the other, he reached out for me. I extended my arm, but too late. Our fingers brushed, and then he was gone.
I kept falling. Sleek rock rushed past me, a gray blur only a foot away. And something else, black and sinewy, twisting in the cracks. Dark tendrils like the bodies of snakes. The roots of Yggdrasill.
I doubted they’d hold my weight, but I grabbed one anyway. My fingers wrapped around the wood. My arm jerked, and I slammed into the granite wall. The air rushed out of my lungs; my arm nearly wrenched free of its socket. Yet somehow, my fingers remained locked on the root.
I hung for a long minute, trying to catch my breath.
Then I looked up. My Night Elf eyes could pierce the darkness, but still, I couldn’t see much—gray stone and the World Tree’s roots twisting along the wall of the well, forming a ladder.
Galin was up there, somewhere.
I began to climb the roots. My shoulder and chest throbbed painfully, but I was able to make it work. Slowly, I made my way up the side of the well.
Above me, a violet glow began to illuminate the shaft of the well. It came from a hollow in the rock, a sort of cave. And standing in front, silhouetted against the violet glow, the muscular body of a High Elf I’d come to know very well. He waited for me on a narrow ledge.
My heart started beating faster, harder, hope lighting me up. “Galin?”
“Ali? Is that you?”
“Who else would have been thrown into the well?” I climbed towards the light. There were fewer roots here, and I had to find handholds in the rock itself. My forearms burned with fatigue.
When I was a few feet below him, Galin pulled me up onto the narrow ledge, then wrapped his strong arms around me, practically crushing me into his steely chest. Warmth radiated from his body over mine.
I looked into his golden eyes, not quite believing he was real. “I thought you were dead. But I guess it’s not the first time you survived a fall into the Well of Wyrd.”
“Are you hurt?” he murmured.
I shifted away from him, rolling my shoulders cautiously. There was some soreness, but no serious pain. “A little banged up, but nothing major. Did you know your sister is in love with you?”
He shuddered visibly. “I’m not sure love describes it. She wants to control me. I’m a thing that she wants.”
I wondered if Revna had managed to survive. “I, um … stabbed her in the stomach.”
His eyes widened. “Did she live?”
“I don’t know.”
“There’s something very wrong with her.”
“I realize that now. How’s your hand?”
He held it up, and I was shocked to find that his finger was still there, albeit mangled and with a jagged red scar at the bottom. “I whispered a spell to heal it, but the spell only worked partway. As soon as I climbed up here, it stopped working.”
I frowned. “Wait, so you could have healed my finger all along?”
He shook his head. “It had to happen right away.”
Behind him, violet light bloomed from an opening in the rock. I had the vaguest recollection of seeing something like this when we had first descended the well on the moth’s back.
“There’s something in there.” I stood on the narrow ledge, gripping a strand of Yggdrasill’s root for balance.
I moved in quietly, keeping to the shadows. Who knew what else lived in the well—I distinctly remembered how I’d nearly been eaten by a Nokk in a subterranean lake. All sorts of creatures could be lurking in the darkness. Quietly, I tiptoed into the glowing mouth of the cave.
I could feel my eyes widen as I surveyed the interior. It was full of glowing purple crystals, like the inside of a giant geode. And these were not any crystals, but vergr crystals. More than I’d ever seen before. If I’d found a cache like this when I’d worked in the Audr Mines, I’d have been immediately granted my freedom.
“Hello, hello, hello,” said Galin, his eyes wide. He stepped inside the cave by my side.
“Galin,” I said excitedly. “Do you know what this means? With this many crystals, we could outfit every soldier in the Night Elf army with a vergr crystal. Can you imagine that? We’d be unstoppable.”
Galin ran his fingers along the crystals. “The magic in this place is like nothing I’ve seen before. Simply amazing.” He turned back to me, and the violet light illuminated his golden eyes, his finely sculpted cheekbones. The cave went about twenty feet in, then ended abruptly in a curved dead end. But there was so much crystal in here, it could change everything for the Night Elves—even after we lost the Winnowing.
Maybe I was the North Star after all.
Galin flashed me a sly smile. “Alright, where should we go?”
Someplace no one will find us. “The Prudential Tower?”
Galin nodded and began to trace the air. I’d seen him do it enough times now that I recognized the portal spell.
As he finished, I waited for the static pop of the portal materializing, but it never came.
“Hmm …” Galin frowned. “I must have missed a rune.”
Quickly, he scribed the spell a second time. Again, nothing happened.
Galin moved back to the entrance of the cave and tried again. This time, for a brief second, a portal appeared before it disappeared with a hiss of static. He tried again and again. Nothing.
He turned to me, frowning. “Something is interfering with my magic.” He held up his hand. “Just like the spell was interrupted when arrived here. My magic isn’t working down here.”
Oh, no. “Try something else,” I said desperately.
Quickly, Galin scribed kaun, but the fire only appeared for an instant before disappearing. Galin’s eyes widdened suddenly.
“What is it?”
Galin didn’t answer. Instead he reached up and gently touched the Helm of Awe. Then he took it off.
“Did you just—”I began.
Galin nodded. “The spell is broken.I can’t even hear Ganglati.”
He held the helm in his hand a moment longer, then with a hard flick of his wrist he threw it into the well.
Watching it drop into the depths gave me an idea. “Maybe we can use one of the crystals. Do you know how to enchant one?”
Galin shook his head. “Even if I could, how would we get it out of here? There’s no way to get it to the surface. The roots stop soon, the walls smooth out. And if we dropped it down the well, it would shatter …”
“And if we teleported to it, we’d simply reappear in a thousand pieces,” I finished grimly.
I sat down on the edge of the ledge, my legs swinging over the abyss. Quietly, Galin sat next to me. For a long time, we looked out into the darkness of the well without speaking.
“Let me see your finger again,” I finally said.
He held it out, and I grimaced. It had started bleeding again.
I tore off one of my shirt sleeves. “Here, let me bind it for you.” I took Galin’s hand in my lap, then picked up my sleeve. “This is going to hurt.”
“I was dead for a thousand years. I’ll withstand a bit of your shirt.”