The Traitor's Heir

Chapter Eighteen

"There's no lava!" Lina's words nearly sounded like a complaint, as she peered down, obviously hoping to see bubbling liquid down below. Quara, whose eyes were closed again, squeezed her sister's waist.

"Thank goodness for that," she whispered while Lina rolled her eyes.

"The volcano is slumbering for the moment and has been for several hundred years. But she won't be forever. Even now when we were down below I could feel the pressure within the earth growing. But I think Quara is right and you two aren't missing out on all that much."

Gathering all her courage Quara forced herself to open her eyes as Ausfela launched herself forward, out of the tunnel and into the air above the crater. Throwing her head back Quara looked up and gasped while Lina, who was staring straight ahead found herself laughing with delight as she saw the same sight stretching on and on towards the horizon, over the edge of the volcanos great crater.

It was the first time either girl had ever seen the sky.

The day did not disappoint. A dazzling, unblemished blue stretched in every direction as far as the girls' eyes could see. As they stared in wonder, Ausfela's wings raised them up, just barely above the top of the crater's edge, before she began to fly down the volcano's side, rapidly accelerating as she raced close to the ground, headed straight for the tree line.

Outside of the shade of the crater both girls found themselves nearly blinded by their first taste of direct sunlight. It was hot against their skin and eyelids as they squinted, eyes watering against the newly met brightness of the world above the caves. Squinting they peered out at the enormous world of the lands above the ground, wiping tears from their eyes over and over again.

Far below in the distance, Quara could make out the dark line of the forest, marching away as far as the eye could see in either direction. Feeling bold as her eyes began to adjust to the bright new sky, Quara raised her head and stared off to their right, still clinging tightly to her sister as they hurtled down the mountain. After a few seconds her eyes found exactly what she was searching for and she said her sister's name to draw her attention to the sight, although she wasn't certain if Lina heard her at all, as the wind that was all around them seemed to snatch sounds and carry them off.

The mountain that held the Caverns wasn't attached to the volcano itself, although they were closely related in some ways. Both had risen up ages earlier, when the land that was now a dense forest had been entirely underwater. The great granite spires of the mountains that made up the shell that surrounded the Walemont Caverns, were now known as the Castle Spires, to those who had long since forgotten that the legends of a city deep within the ground was anything more than a story that had been told to their great, great grandparents.

The volcano was splendidly spectacular, there was no denying it, but Quara felt her heart swell within her chest at the sight of her home. She realized that in all their sliding and walking down under the ground on the previous day that they must have crossed a considerable distance, because there were several smaller mountains between the volcano from which they had just emerged and the Spires. Inside the mountain she would never have guessed that they had traveled so far.

The ridges between the volcano and the Spires were not very tall, so that even their peaks were below the tree line, and apparently they weren't made of solid rock like the mountain to the west, so they were almost entirely covered in a dense forest that mostly consisted of towering evergreens. The volcano itself was much larger on the outside than Quara had ever imagined a mountain could be.

It took longer than she expected for the small group to reach the tree line, but as they slipped past glaciers and enormous boulders many times larger than Ausfela, she began to realize that it was unlikely that anyone in the forest below would spot them, for they wouldn't have looked like much more than a tiny speck flitting down the side of the mountain, unless someone was watching from close by, on the volcano itself.