The stone chute beneath the black red stone altar was narrow, slick with hundreds of years of water drops, and steep enough to drop a falling body forty feet in three wild heartbeats.
Ren Prime tumbled out of the darkness onto a mound of rotted thick parchment trimmings, his elbows catching the brunt of the landing. The air that rushed into his lungs was dry, icy, and smelled intensely of stone-hard sheepskin, sulfur, and five-hundred-year-old animal glue.
Beside him, Mira was already on her feet. Her linen smock was torn at the shoulder, but her balance was easy. Her smoky quartz right arm glowed with a faint, violet soft glow in the pitch black. She cast many-sided sharp-angled patterns across the vaulted ceiling above them.
“Ren,” she whispered, her voice tight. “Are you broken?”
Ren groaned, pushing himself up from the mound of parchment scraps. He checked his ribs, his wrists, his knees. Bruised, battered, covered in grey ash and dried blood, but intact. In his right hand, the four-inch mammoth ivory awl was still firmly gripped, its silver tip dulled but unbroken.
“I’m here,” he rasped, coughing out a mouthful of chalky dust. “Where are we?”
Mira raised her crystal-clear arm, the violet light expanding across the chamber.
