A RED ROBE

Chapter 1

glitch

Day 97 of 108, The Dark Season

The caves were dark and cool, barely a ray of light within. They kept running, laboured breaths and footsteps echoing endlessly. The tunnel had to be endless, for the darkness gave way to nothing but rock, slick with glittering black slime. After minutes, or perhaps an age, they finally slowed to a stop. Sae closed her hand around her other trembling fist, trying and failing to stop red burning light spasming from the skin. Tiny licks of flame escaped her hand too, and she tasted it in her throat as she tried to catch her breath. As she tried to tell her curse to go away.

When she looked up, she expected to find the winged stranger panicked and shaken, but instead he was rooting through his backpack, his small gold wings beating. She watched for a quiet, disbelieving moment as she realised that they were both alive.

Then Sae blinked. "What are you doing?"

He pulled out a little pouch and a peculiar looking object; a bar-like thing that changed from black to white in a pulsing rhythm.

"You can either follow me," he began, tracing a slow arch in the air with the pulsing object, "Or die here. Your two choices." A line of purple light glowed. It traced the wall from the floor, curving along with the ceiling and coming back down the opposite wall.

"Follow you where?" Sae whispered, utterly confused.

He took a handful of something from the mysterious pouch and tossed it through the air. Sparkling light suspended within the line of purple, moving delicately, like tiny bugs in the dark, creating a sheet of glitter. "Away," he replied, and his voice was so steady and calm, she wondered if he remembered that he'd almost been killed.

She shook herself out of her daze. "I cannot leave Iris—" she wobbled. He picked up the bottle of clear liquid from the ground, and threw it. But instead of passing through the sparkling arch where it would smash against the floor, the glass shattered when it met the empty arch. Her breath caught at the sudden sound, and she stepped back when the loose liquid spread within the arch, turning a dark purple. It filled up every sparkling space until an arch of swirling purple clouds glowed before them.

"What is that?" she breathed.

"A portal," he said.

Sae stared, wide-eyed, mouth open.

It seemed a living thing, breathing and seeing and listening with its arched face. Peering cautiously, she watched how it moved; the purple clouds within were of many shades, sliding past and merging into one another in a way that defined natural, despite the absurdity of its existence. The portal was a menacing storm of light; its noises were of unchecked anger, distant but furious all the same. Sae wondered if she could ever re-imagine the way its varying lights reflected off the ground, ending bluntly at a certain point—like a glass-less mirror, she thought—rather than fading into the dark.

"It looks...scary," she confessed, overwhelmed by the energy pouring from it. She could feel it press against her. "I cannot leave Iris behind."

She looked at him fully for the first time since their escape, and there wasn't much expression on his face. He seemed slightly tense. His brown dragon eyes flicked to the endless dark of the tunnel, and then rested on her again. "Well, you can come back for her," he said. "When you're not being chased."

She remained sceptical, and he raised his brows. When she said nothing, he released a half-sigh-half-groan, throwing his head back. "I don't have time to prove I'm not sketchy."