The shift from the Second Circle to the Third was marked by the scent of old iron and cold, damp river-silt.
The passageway narrowed into a jagged fissure cut through strata of black shale. It was flanked by ancient ossuary niches where the skeletal remains of royal legionnaires were stacked like cordwood. Thousands of yellowed skulls peered out from the dark, their empty eye sockets packed with dry embalming moss.
Ren walked carefully, his boots testing every flat stone slab before committing his weight. Beside him, the hand-cart rolled with a muted rumble, its iron-shod wheels muffled by strips of boiled felt that Artificer Ren had tacked to the rims.
“Draft’s changing,” a wild, whispery voice muttered from the shadows above.
Ren looked up.
Perched atop a six-foot pile of stacked thighbones, crouched like an anxious gargoyle, was Ren-the-Cinder. The Fourth Summon was wrapped in a ragged, grease-spotted dust-cloak, his leathers bristling with hidden sheath-straps and skeleton keys. His eyes darted with wild, twitching paranoia between the ceiling fissures, the floor drains, and the dark corners of the passage.
Whenever Mira glanced in his direction, the Cinder flinched wildly. She pulled his hood down so low that only his twitching, stubble-rough jaw was visible. The memory of the timeline where he had abandoned her to burn in the falling city remained an open, weeping wound across his conscience.
