The Traitor's Heir

Chapter Fourteen

Lina didn't see the drop off as they approached it, and if Quara hadn't grabbed her arm and drawn her back she wasn't entirely sure if she would have noticed it until she'd come to the very edge. Up until that moment the stairs had been wide. Now the staircase abruptly descended, in a corkscrew that disappeared beyond what they could see in the glow of the Egg's light.

"What choice do we have?" Lina spoke softly when she saw her sister's expression and sensed that she wanted to go back to that safe little room "There isn't a way to get out back there. We have to keep going forward. It's our only hope."

Down and down and down they went around and around in tight little circles until Quara pressed the back of her hand against her mouth and wondered if she was going to be sick. She thought of an image in a book that she had once read that showed a ship being sucked under the sea by a swirling vortex of water and she imagined that she was trapped in a whirlpool, traveling around and around deeper and deeper beneath the waves.

"Lina," she whispered her sister's name. The sound, which she had barely breathed aloud, echoed down the staircase into the darkness below.

"Quara!" Lina's voice was loud and exasperated as she stopped midstep and turned to peer into her sister's face. The motion, however, wasn't as smooth as she had planned and for a moment she teetered on the edge of the step. Quara clasped Lina's smooth, cool hand tightly, but Lina had already cast her free hand out to the side to catch the cold coiling rail of the staircase. She realized her mistake even before her fingers wound around the metal, but it was already too late.

The Egg slipped from her grasp and she struggled to free her hand from Quara's tight grip as she threw herself forward, reaching for the small glowing orb as it plummeted downward into the darkness. Quara clung to her hand all the more tightly and pulled her back away from the bannister's edge, which she had been far closer to going over in that moment in an attempt to recover the egg, than she had been a few moments earlier when she had believed that she was falling.

They stood, side by side, hands still clasped, in the complete and utter darkness that descended the moment the little Egg disappeared from sight.

"What were you going to say?" Lina spoke first this time, in a small, tight whisper.

Quara let out a slow breath and tried to remember the thought that had weighed so heavily on her mind only a few moments earlier. For a moment it was hard to think of anything other than the Egg and the blackness of the cave that had closed in around them with a suffocating perfection. Quara raised her free hand before her eyes and wiggled her fingers. She could see nothing at all.

"Did you hear it hit the bottom?"

"No. But that doesn't meant that it hasn't. And that can't be what you were going to say because I hadn't dropped it yet when you said my name." Quara was surprised that her sister's voice sounded entirely matter of fact, without even a trace of bitterness or blame.

"I was going to ask you if you thought that we were headed in the right direction, since our path was taking us down and down and down and it didn't seem to me to be the best way of getting out of here."

"And yet we're without any sign of any other path, or even a hint of a way out, and so I think it's best if we keep on." If Quara had been able to see her sister in the darkness she would have seen her shrug. "Hold the bannister with one hand and my hand with the other and we better keep on. Hopefully we'll find the egg at the bottom of the staircase. I don't see much of another option right now, although it would be best not to stray from the staircase until we can see it. I wouldn't want to be lost in these caves without any sort of light."