Roche emerged from the portal into pure darkness.
"What?" she muttered in confusion, spinning around to face the crumbling portal behind her. Frustration flared through her. "I said Moiris! Moi! Ris! Not a creepy dark cave!" She rolled her eyes and huffed, ready to make another portal or call Circe when a sound rumbled through the pitch dark.
Roche stilled, straining her ears. The sound bled through the air faintly, muffled by walls nearby. But Roche recognised the bellow of a large group, and she certainly recognised the sound of clashing steel that followed. The ground trembled ever so slightly with the pounding of feet and falling bodies.
Roche's mind whirred as the unmistakable sounds of battle filtered through the air. The battle must have begun. And if she could hear it, she must be close. The portal must have deposited her somewhere in Moiris. She just needed to get out of the darkness and into the open plains where the queen currently was.
"Gwylluxi," Roche muttered, using a verbal incantation to minimise the strain on her overflowing reserves of inkblood. She wanted to save her strength for battle. Light bloomed in her hands, the same shade of green as Tigris' eyes. Roche cursed as the light cast upon her surroundings.
She was in a cellar of some kind. Thick grey stone walls surrounded her. They looked like they were glowing with radioactive mould in the greenish light. Roche scanned the ground, noting abandoned barrels and broken bottles littered across the icy ground. Her eyes caught on a weathered set of stairs in the corner of the cellar that looked moments away from crumbling. The unforgiving stone groaned and rumbled unhappily as Roche placed her foot on it, but thankfully it didn't crumble away.
Roche carefully darted up the stairs, freezing every time the castle trembled from the ensuing battle outside. Her nostrils tingled with the scent of rot just before she glimpsed weak, champagne coloured light up ahead. It came through a wooden trap door in thin beams, the wood heavily moulded and broken. It clearly hadn't been used or taken care of in a long time.
Roche had no qualms smashing through the door with her fist, eagerly climbing out of the cellar. Her mind was already racing with plans to find Tigris on the battlefield, on how to ward away the most uska possible. Her inkblood bubbled in her veins with her thoughts as she burst back to ground level...
...and promptly shouted in frustration.
Because the walls around her were made of ivy covered rock, stained and chipped with time. It looked like a precarious pile of pebbles that did little to shield her from the howling winds seeping through the many holes in the crumbling exterior. It wasn't the precarious, clearly weathered structure of the building that made Roche want to scream. It was the fact that she recognised the dark, aged stone from her scry.
"You've got to be kidding me," she grumbled as she spotted another set of curving stairs on their last legs. She sprinted up them, frustration billowing in her, "Of all the places... I could have gone anywhere in Moiris but here..."
The stairs let out onto a balcony. Roche scrambled onto it, swaying as stormy winds slammed into her body. The damp air sliced at her eyes, making her tear up, but not before she got a glimpse of the entire battlefield she stood over.
That's right, the entire battlefield.
Because Roche was on top of the thin, broken down tower she'd spotted in her scry. And looming over her head was the portal.
"You've got to be joking," Roche muttered, a headache pulsing behind her temples. She ducked as a fresh round of uska dove out of the portal. She swept them away with a breeze made of fire, sending them shrieking back into the portal.
YOU ARE READING
The Way We Fall
Fantasy(Inspired by the hit BBC show Merlin) One thousand years have passed since humanity fell. From its ashes, the Faultless Kingdom rose. For many centuries, it was prosperous. Then the king enacted a new law: inkblood is a crime punishable by death. Ro...
