Rise of a Queen

Chapter 38

He must have lost more blood than I thought.

    I glanced around the room, just to be sure, but still I noted no difference; the same walls, same floor, same disheartening results. My tone was bleak at best, "No, Dustin. Nothing happened."

    He eased his hand off of the pedestal's sharpened point and cursed through a grimace when the metal slid out of his skin. A deep cut was left in its wake from where the point had nearly severed entirely through his palm, but Dustin hardly noticed. He swiped his hand over his jeans a time or two, smearing scarlet against denim, and knelt down beside the column.

    With the same hand he had sacrificed only moments before, he reached under the bowl.

    I crouched beside him and looked under the bowl, to where Dustin's fingers were wrapped around a small handle sticking out from the very bottom of the column where the base met the ground. It was the same color as the dirt below our feet, practically camouflaged by its appearance and hidden below the blood filled basin that sat above it.

    Dustin looked to me eagerly, "Should I?"

    It was foolish to be hopeful but I saw it there in his eyes, bright and lively.

    And it broke what remained of my heart to see him this way.

    I could not bare the burden of telling him how slim our chances of succeeding were, especially when only moments ago we were so sure we had failed. So I shrugged weakly and hid my concern through false optimism, "What have we got to lose?"

    Dustin smiled, he thought I was still fighting.

    He didn't know I had given up.

    Dustin pulled the handle, probably harder than needed. Something inside of the column clicked and his blood quickly drained from the basin into a network of tubes that had previously been occluded at the bottom of the collection bowl. Dustin briskly lifted me away and we fumbled several steps back. Suddenly the room was filled with odd sounds; thumping and sliding, dials turning, gears grinding, metal against metal, rock against rock. It came from beneath us in the ground and all around us in the walls, growing louder and louder, stalking closer and closer.

    Behind us, near the farthest wall, a sound similar to thunder began erupting.

    As I was turning to find the source of the sound, Dustin's hands closed around my hips and jerked me backwards just as the wall itself loomed forward and collapsed where I had been standing seconds before. The epicenter of this chaos was centered along the farthest wall which was now crumbling entirely, with chunks of dirt crashing down and bursting into splintered pieces against the ground.

    Behind the dirt as it fell away, a seamless stretch of stone was revealed. It was constant, without any cracks or marks, and it followed the curve of the room. I then realized that the room was not cut from dirt as we previously thought, but from stone. The entire room must have been chiseled from rock and then buried beneath dirt, either by accident ... or purposefully.

    To hide the what we now saw.

    The apex of these strange sounds narrowed and directly in front of us, the stone wall cracked. A section was pushed out from the smooth surface and a large circular outline appeared, taller than Dustin and I combined.

    Even as we gawked, the wall began to shift.

    It fiercely growled, like a beast of all beasts. Its movement sent vibrations through the ground, into our feet and up our bodies, as raw explosions clamored throughout the room. The circular portion of wall began to stretch ... no, it wasn't stretching. It was widening. It was opening.