Rivin is wearing somebody else’s shirt when they leave. It smells of iron and dirt, and it’s far too big for him, and so he has to roll it up in a heap and tie a knot at his hip, tentative — even now — to bear the smallest vulnerability, even to a turned back. Roach is busy amongst her papers and containers, stuffing pockets full and topping up her pack.

  The shirt may once have borne a logo at the centre, a tacky picture of some lost band or motto, but the remnants have been plucked and replaced with two crude faces sharpied in with a fat marker.

  One is obviously Roach, bold with strikes of messy colour and sharp teeth, braid whipping out like a razor blade. The other is the familiar figure from the journal with two black and round eyes; he’s holding up a sign that reads in bold, outlined writing:

  THE INVINSIBLE DUO.

  Spelt wrong yet entirely confident in stroke.

  Rivin wonders where the other half is now.

  He reaches for his blade, still sharp but bearing the brunt of his terrible clash with the knight in the tunnel, metal bent and scratched in new places. It’s at the very least clean now and polished a dozen times over like the true-slayer already strapped to his back — the shortsword that had saved his life.

  He can still hear the visor topple down the waterfall. Clunk. Clunk.

  Roach hikes her pack into place, double-checks the straps before pulling them taut enough to wrinkle up her jacket. She sniffs and avoids his eyes. She’s been quieter since his final declaration — the decision to leave. She’s also been playing with the bone in her hair like it might provide answers or comfort. Maybe both.

  “You’d like The Hole,” Rivin breaks the silence and sheathes the long blade at his waist.

  Roach wrinkles her nose. “The Hole?”

  “Yeah. That’s what she—” That gurgle again. In his ears like death’s tease. Rivin swallows thickly before continuing, “That’s what they call it. The crew.”

  “Your crew?”

  Rivin hesitates again. “I guess so.”

  “Hm.” She skips around him and double-checks the medical satchel before depositing it into a fanny pack looped by several feet of rope around her waist. He’s not sure why he was expecting an argument. Something at least. She’d seemed unhinged enough to pose a serious risk to keeping him captive, and yet she uses one arm to hold the door open and the other to twirl a gesture towards his freedom. “Are you ready, hero?”

  Rivin furrows his brow and quickly saunters past her to step into the courtyard, and when he pauses at the bottom, the air feels different. Not in any real way, but in a way that lifts some weight from his chest. He’s going home.

  Roach taps a peculiar code — or rather war drum — on her arms with her hands before gesturing both laced palms towards the darkness. “To the sun!” She bellows, suddenly launching past him like some wild, rabid thing, flailing her limbs in wide circles.

  Rivin doesn’t follow immediately, not until she’s gotten far enough away for him to realise that she isn’t playing. He curses beneath his breath and tries not to clutch his side as he jogs after her.

  Generations of darkness have granted cursed souls such as them with better vision in the shadow than most, but Rivin is thankful for the headtorch strapped to his scalp, quickly clicking it into life as he navigates the strange pocket of her land.

  Before long, he’s reached her side, sending the grinning child a quick glare as he approaches.

  “The sun is the other way. We’re headed deeper.”

  “Good eyes. Stay close!” And then she was off again, scuttling over rock and debris with quick grace.

  Eventually, Rivin’s able to match her pace, a languid jog for him in reality, especially with the difference between their strides. As he’d predicted, they appear to be heading further down, and the air begins to feel thick and smell strongly of sulphur.

  Soon the once mossy depths ebb away and the algae prevais, shifting over a circular chamber gouged deeper into rock. Once the temperature changes, rising up and up until clothes begin to stick, Rivin notices that all the life has begun to die off completely. He’d seen his last living thing twenty minutes ago by the time they come to walk side by side.

  “The secret way?” He asks, catching his breath. There’s sweat dripping down his spine, and a gauze has already come unstuck from his back; he can feel it trapped in the folds of his shirt.

  “I’ve got others,” Roach chirps, reaching into her pocket and retrieving a familiar bottle; she shakes it, and the sound is a meagre rattle. She empties out the final two capsules, appears to count them, and then hands them over.

  Rivin shakes his head. “I need my wits about me.” The girl shrugs, downs one pill before returning the other to its canister. She swallows it dry. “Other what?” He follows up.

  “Names!”

  “Go on then.”

  She shares a sly smile. “Patience, cadet.”

  They walk for a while longer, ducking under old beams and sunken-in tunnels. Rivin might spy the remnants of old bathhouses collapsed into deep pits, but the darkness is vast even beyond the light of his torch, and eventually everything comes to narrow and funnel into a deep chamber.

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  It smells like battery now — an acid-laced breath expelling from searing lungs. The walls are dripping and marbled the further they go in, with stalactites biting out from the roof with jagged, beautiful teeth. Before long the stagnant thrum of life and then its absence is replaced by the whistling turbine of humid wind growing ever louder.

  Rivin’s never been this far away from home before. There was never a point unless you meant to die a terrible, lonely death. It’s all alien to him, this strange beauty trapped in the earth’s hollow throat and arteries, the lost cities buried into nature’s breast like ribs, but Roach’s fingers skim the wall, gathering warm water on the pads; she doesn’t stop to marvel, but her eyes do gleam, flickering over it all with a reverence he’s only just beginning to understand. To feel himself.

  It’s a good hour before they reach another clearing. Roach whistles and hums, sings songs he’s never heard before, and often mutters under her breath like she’s speaking with someone else. It’s a while before Rivin realises she’s using them to map out their path, like the moment she spies a rock sharing an uncanny resemblance to a bird in flight and she whistles and pivots left.

  Or two lines deep into a nursery rhyme over a ravine to sing, ‘and the little rat almost forgot to JUMP’ as she leaps over a crack that Rivin narrowly misses himself. By the time they find light again, she’s muttering in a gravelly voice about dragon’s breath, and so of course it’s a tinted red glow that greets them in the end.

  It looks like the birth of flame, the beginning of devastation as it grows in the throat.

  Rivin’s heart is thudding loudly in his ears, in his chest, in the stitch he might have already popped on his side. Was he really ready for this?

  Roach finally stands still, with her hands proudly upon her hips at the edge of what appears to be an impossibly deep and circular vent, at least fifty feet wide and hot with amber breath. He approaches her side, stopping only when the tips of his toes kiss the emptiness, steel eyes staring down into a vast metal oesophagus.

  His hands feel clammy. His mouth is parched. “Let me hear it then.” He hopes he doesn’t sound as nervous as he feels.

  Roach smiles wide, and her hands stroke the air like she’s imagining a sign into existence.

  “The No Option Drop.”

  He clenches his fists. Nods. It’s fitting.

  “Or…” The girl drops to a crouch, hunches up her shoulders and screws up her face like she’s eaten something sour. She sniffs, wipes her nose with her sleeve and speaks in that low voice again, “Down,” she jabs her thumb down, “and around,” twirls her hand with her pointer finger extended. Then she pops up and beams brightly. “The secret way! Ta-da!”

  Hot air catches the end of her braid, and it floats in the sour breath. Rivin’s fingers itch to pull her away from the drop. “Have you been this way before?”

  “Never alone,” she barks and then leaps like she might have wings rather than legs right over the ledge. She disappears in seconds. Less. Hot air spews upwards.

  “Roach—!” Rivin gasps, reaching out with a desperation that strikes him cold.

  However, not all is lost — the tip of her braid is still floating there, just above the mouth, and when he looks down, she’s grinning and awash in crimson light, gripping the flimsy ladder rungs that descend down the tube, face already flushed and pink from the heat.

  Rivin relaxes with a sharp exhale. “Idiot! You could have died!”

  “No, this is the other option!” The girl cackles, throwing back her head.

  There’s a pause between them, a dare that sprouts like a weed. Her eyes are golden coins, and Rivin feels suddenly very small. He stands taller to steel himself and draws a breath to choke his fear. The coppery taste of Hell stings his parched throat.

  No Option Drop.

  Rivin clenches his jaw.

  He thinks of Mouse—dying and now gone, yet still an echo in his ear, her gentle laughter just as poignant as that last sputter of breath.

  He thinks of Chip—hands too gentle for scrap and pain, always folding his socks just right, smiling crooked when he hasn’t been listening.

  He sees Slink blowing up grief and Ricket waiting by the door with untied shoes. They’re all waiting — and they need him.

  I’m coming.

  The decision must reach a verdict in his eyes for Roach quickly shuffles further down to make room on the ladder. Rivin doesn’t hesitate when he descends. The rungs are hot. Burning. He grips them tighter. Climbs deeper down.

  “Into the bowels,” she hollers.

  The air grows thin quickly; most of it gushes past them, and so the pair keep their heads up, watching the ceiling fade into nothing. It might as well be the night sky up there.

  The metal itself is hot and damp and hard to hold onto, but Rivin’s grip is as sure as his will. His palms are already bound in gauze that assists more than hinders, and despite the ache blooming everywhere now, they both move quickly into the gorge.

  The climb? It might last forever.

  Hot, pungent air billows up hotter and with stronger force the further they plunge. At one point Roach holds on with one hand to lean into the wind, hair billowing up around her, mostly free of its confines — white finger bone, spoon ends and other junks all dancing amongst her head.

  “Fly, Rivin!”

  “You’re crazy!” He shouts back, too panicked to hide his nerves. He looks up again and pinches his eyes closed. Her certainty relaxes him in an insane kind of way, like any call of the void — but his instincts tell him to prepare for anything. To hold on tightly and not be reckless.

  It feels like a lifetime has passed by the time they reach the bottom.

  Rivin is trembling but staunching through flaring pain, and his breaths come fast and shallow. There are blisters forming beneath the gauze on his palms, and although they’d climbed through earth for hours, Roach merely waits patiently besides him, her hands laced behind her back and her chin tipped up. When he’s ready, they turn towards an impossible sight.

  Light. Golden.

  Sandstone towers that climb the impossible height of the cavern before them, spikes of glittering clear jewel jolting from high ceilings, warped and melted but shining like torchlight over a desert of marble and ruin, all crushed high like stacked heaps of a devoured civilisation. He doesn’t know where the light comes from, but it’s warm and fair and so, so real.

  Is this the sun? Rivin thinks, stepping forward and lifting his face as though compelled.

  It doesn’t make sense. He knows that. But it’s so cosy. His skin is burning but this heat tickles like a featherlight kiss. He sighs and feels his shoulders sag. He’s never been this kind of warm before.

  The hot wind is gone — replaced with a dusty breeze that feels almost pleasant and cooling over damp skin. It smells only of lost places, something indescribable but strangely dense.

  Rivin’s eyes, which had fallen closed to bask, flutter open sleepily, as though woken from a dream. He looks to his side, and Roach is right next to him — his reflection with her head tipped back, her lips curled up and her arms splayed out to catch rays of precious glow. He can see all of the freckles on her face clearly now. The scars and the history. She looks peaceful. Youthful. A girl in the sun.

  Roach sighs deeply and with great satisfaction, “Ahhh-”

  “What is this place?” There’s astonishment in his voice, lingering on each breathy syllable.

  Roach walks slowly forward, and he follows, approaching the edge of a vast cliff-face together.

  “I wish I had the words.”

  He’s surprised by that. “Where—”

  His question is cut off and stolen by a gasp.

  He must be dreaming.

  For beneath them and nestled in the pits of the earth, a war wages.

  Check out Aetherscorned by Ghostwheel's Grimoire, a gripping progression fantasy following jaded protagonist Liam through a rich and merciless world with stunning battle scenes and intriguing characters. If you're in the mood for a good fight and a pretty strange boy from another world to say all the things you think in your head while reading, follow along!