Lysander's crystal led them into a cave.
He felt it before he saw it, a pulse, low and steady, like a second heartbeat beneath the earth. The Grass Sea had begun to change, the brown blades giving way to patches of bare, cracked soil, and the soil gave way to stone. Black stone, veined with something that glowed faintly in the dead yellow light.
The entrance was hidden beneath a curtain of brown grass, invisible unless you were looking for it. Kaelen pushed through, Lysander behind him, and the darkness swallowed them whole.
Lysander raised a hand. A small flame kindled above his palm. It illuminated the cave in slow degrees.
The walls were alive with crystals.
Not the pale blue of the dungeon's weapons. Something else. Something Kaelen had never seen. The crystals grew in clusters, in spires, in delicate branching formations that caught the silver light and shattered it into colours that did not have names. A blue that was almost black, so deep it seemed to pull the eye inward. A green that hummed, low and resonant, like a cello string plucked in a cathedral. A purple that moved, slow waves of colour rippling across its facets like clouds across a bruised sky.
The system flickered:
[Resource Detected: Null Crystals – Unknown Classification]
[Properties: Mana absorption. Spatial distortion. Temporal dampening.]
[Note: These crystals do not belong @#$%%?.]
Again?
'What was that'
[Host lacks enough authority to view]
Kaelen reached out, his fingers brushed the nearest cluster, the blue-black one, and the fragment in his palm sang. The hum beneath his skin surged, crested, and the crystal answered, vibrating against his touch like a plucked string.
"Don't absorb it," Lysander said sharply. "Not yet. You don't know what it does."
Kaelen pulled his hand back. His fingertips tingled. "What are they?"
Lysander stepped closer, his silver light playing over the formations. His pale eyes reflected the colours, turning them strange and otherworldly.
"I don't know," he admitted. "I've never seen anything like them." He paused. "We should take as many as we can carry, for research."
Kaelen looked at the crystals, then at his empty hands, then at Lysander. "Carry them how? We have no bags. No packs. I'm already half-dead from fighting, and you're wearing a coat with…"
Lysander reached into his coat and produced a ring.
It was a simple band of dark silver, unadorned, dull as old pewter. But when the silver light caught it, Kaelen saw depth, as if the ring were a window into a room that should not fit inside such a small circle.
"A space ring," Lysander said. "Extradimensional storage. Approximately the volume of a large room." He held it out. "Take it."
Kaelen stared at the ring. Then at Lysander. Then at the ring again.
"You're… giving me a space ring?"
"I am lending you a space ring," Lysander corrected. "Until we escape. Then you will return it." A pause then a sudden smile. "But I will let you keep it, if you ask nicely."
"No thanks."
Kaelen felt his face go hot. The blush started at his collar, crept up his neck, flooded his cheeks. He hated it. He hated how his body betrayed him, how the softness of Caelus Verant's skin showed every flicker of feeling like ink on wet paper.
Lysander watched the blush spread, and something in his pale eyes darkened.
"Your hand," the Duke said.
Kaelen extended his hand. Lysander took it, his fingers were cool, dry, steady. He turned Kaelen's hand over, palm up, and slid the ring onto his ring finger.
The fit was perfect. As if it had been made for him.
And…and it had been placed where the wedding ring should go.
Kaelen's breath caught. The ring was warm against his skin, warmer than Lysander's fingers had been. He could feel the space inside it, a dark pocket of nothing that yawned and stretched and waited to be filled.
"There," Lysander said. He did not release Kaelen's hand immediately. His thumb brushed once across Kaelen's knuckles, a touch so light it might have been accidental. "Now you can carry things."
Then he let go, turned, and walked deeper into the cave, his silver light bobbing ahead of him.
Kaelen stood frozen, the ring heavy and light at the same time on his finger.
He put it on me, Kaelen thought. He just… slipped it on. Like it was nothing. Like…we ar married.
"Curses," Kaelen muttered under his breath while pinching himself. "Curses on his whole bloodline."
But he did not take the ring off.
Sprite, perched on his shoulder, made a sound as if agreeing.
The cave went deeper than Kaelen had expected.
They followed the crystal through narrow passages and wide chambers, past crystal formations that grew larger and stranger with every step. The colours shifted blue to green to purple to a red that pulsed like a dying heart. The air grew thick, heavy with mana, each breath tasting of copper and something sweet.
And then they found the footsteps.
They were not old. That was the first thing Kaelen noticed. The footprints were pressed into the dust of the cave floor, sharp-edged, clear made recently, within days. Bare feet, small, perhaps a child's. Leading away from the crystal formations and toward the deeper dark.
Lysander crouched beside them. His expression was unreadable.
"Someone else is in this dungeon," he said. "They were here before the rift opened."
Kaelen's blood went cold. "How is that possible? you said the dungeon was new."
Lysander stood. He looked toward the darkness where the footprints led, and his hand drifted to the knife at his belt the first time Kaelen had seen him reach for a weapon.
"Dungeons can be new," Lysander said quietly. "But that does not mean they are empty."
They followed the footprints.
The passage opened into a chamber larger than the rest, its ceiling lost in shadow, its walls glittering with crystals of every colour. And in the center of the chamber, arranged in a neat circle, was a camp.
The camp was empty.
The kind of empty that was worse than a grave.
A bedroll, still rumpled, as if someone had just risen from it. A small cookpot, cold, with traces of dried porridge crusted to its sides. A leather satchel, open, its contents spilling out bandages, a water flask, a child's drawing of a flower. A fire pit with ashes that were still warm.
Kaelen's blood ran cold as he bent down and picked a familiar object and placed it in the space ring. He then looked a round his breath faulting.
He crouched beside the fire pit. He held his hand over the ashes. Heat rose from them, faint but unmistakable.
Lysander moved through the camp, his silver light touching everything but lingering on nothing. His face was still unreadable, but his shoulders had gone tight, the posture of a man who did not like surprises.
"There are no bodies," Lysander said. "No signs of struggle. No blood." He picked up the child's drawing, turned it over. On the back, written in a shaky hand: Don't trust the light.
Kaelen's skin crawled.
The fragment in his palm pulsed, with warning. Something was very, very wrong.
"We need to leave," Kaelen said.
Lysander folded the drawing and tucked it into his coat. "Agreed. But first we take the crystals. If someone else was here, I want to know what they were looking for."
Kaelen touched the ring on his finger. The dark pocket inside it yawned, waiting. He reached out and pressed his palm against the nearest crystal cluster the blue-black one that had sung to him and pulled.
The crystal dissolved into light, streaming into the ring like water into a drain. The dark pocket bulged, settled, accepted.
One by one, he harvested the crystals. The green humming ones. The purple moving ones. The red pulsing ones. The ring grew warm against his finger, then hot, then hungry—but it did not stop accepting.
When the chamber was stripped bare, Kaelen stood among the ashes of the abandoned camp, the ring throbbing on his hand, the fragment quiet in his palm.
Lysander was watching the dark passage that led deeper into the cave.
"We should go," the Duke said.
Behind them, from the darkness where the footprints led, something moved.
Kaelen did not look back as if afraid.