Sapphire waited until it was dark. She would have to be quiet. Without a doubt, Cree was standing guard outside her door. Despite how good her sister’s hearing was, once Emerald was asleep, a dragon’s roar wouldn’t wake her. There were soft snores in the hammock across from her. She quietly arose and grabbed her sword from where she had left it beside Emerald’s rifle on the table.
She couldn’t go through the front door, but they were staying in a giant plant. She could easily cut a new door herself. Pressing the point of her sword against the organic wall, she leaned against the hilt, pushing the blade into the wall and dragging it down. Once she had created a long enough slit, she stepped through into another room.
“Who’s there?”
Sapphire gasped and turned to see one of the Loom brothers lying on a hammock, although she couldn’t tell if it was Gloom or Bloom in the darkness.
“Ah . . . you’re dreaming,” she said, desperate to find an excuse for why she was in his room. “Would a beautiful woman really come magically through your wall into your room in the middle of the night?”
“Yeah . . . You’re right, that would never happen to me.” He grumbled and closed his eyes again.
Even from the little time she had spent with the twins, she could tell it was Gloom from the pessimistic tone of his voice. The elf rolled over and murmured to himself before going back to sleep.
Shocked that it had actually worked, Sapphire tiptoed through the room, brushed aside the leaf-door, and made her way out into the darkness. Even during the night, the smother mushrooms lit the Grove with sparks every time a burst of flame erupted from the spores. The guards patrolled around the town.
Wait, aren’t elves supposed to have really good eyesight? Surely those sudden lights would affect their night vision.
She waited for a few minutes before running down the road, watching for the bursts of fire so she knew where the rings of smother mushrooms around the town were. Once she had located the majority of them, she took off through the Grove, sticking to the shadows and avoiding the bursts of the flames wherever they plumed. Her strategy seemed to work, for no one called out to her as she sprinted from shadow to shadow.
She dashed in the direction she had seen Nier lead Aelyph, but after she reached the outer wall, she couldn’t find anything resembling a prison. She scanned the wall until she found a hollow in the interwoven dead trees, curving outward to create a wide, open space.
Inside the large indent in the wall were several rings of smother mushrooms, each plume of spores lighting up the darkness. Above the mushrooms were thick vines that climbed the walls; empty, cylindrical, metal cages hung from the vines. She could only assume the cages that were occupied were inside the walls, acting like a kind of prison.
This might be the place.
She scanned the wall, looking for an entrance. A large root came up from the ground and went into the wall, acting as a bridge into the prison. There was a guard posted outside, striding to and fro in front of the prison’s main entrance. She continued searching for another way of getting in. The thick vines of ivy that held the cages also crept up the side of the wall and into an opening high above. Sapphire could see from the cages dangling from vines outside that the opening was used to shift cages over from the prison to the smother mushrooms for interrogations.
Looking around to see if anyone was watching her, she grabbed hold of the ivy and began to scale the wall, climbing up to the opening. As she caught the edge and hauled herself inside, a burst of fire lit the many cages hanging from the vines inside the prison. Unlike the ones hanging over the smother mushrooms, these ones weren’t empty.
She walked down the hallway of cages inside filled with the prisoners of several different races, most of which appeared to be sleeping. She searched for Aelyph among the many prisoners, stopping to look into the cages each time there was a moment of light from the smother mushrooms. After managing to avoid walking into several guards—even having to hide behind a cage as one passed by—she eventually came across Aelyph’s cell.
The next flame burst revealed him lying behind the bars, but his eyes were open, their red irises piercing the darkness.
“Aelyph . . .”
Like the last time they talked, there was a moment of prolonged silence before he replied.
“Have you come to free me?” he asked.
“No.” Sapphire grinned. “I’ve come to make a deal.”
His eyes shifted to the ceiling of his cage. “What could I possibly have to bargain with?”
“Information.”
The next plume of fire showed an amused smile. “That I will give freely, just like I have with the elves. It is up to you whether you believe me or not.”
Sapphire shook her head. “I don’t think what I want to know can be learned over the course of a night, so here’s my plan. If I free you, you will come with us and be our guide through the Nether Rifts and the Midnight Tower.”
“I see . . .” he murmured. “I could guide you through the Nether Rifts, but I would rather be trapped in here than trapped inside the Midnight Tower again. I would rather die than return to such a place.”
“Why? What happened to you there?”
Aelyph’s eyes widened and he looked away. “There is a place at the base of the Tower, the deepest, darkest chamber. The closest place to the Rifts. It is called the Oubliette. You see, there is a madness about the place that infects your mind, and the closer you are to the Rifts, the worse it becomes. I was trapped in there for two years, only sustaining my sanity and spirit by clinging to the faint, uplifting songs that drifted to me in the absolute blackness. Even then, it is a place of nightmares.”
“How did you manage to escape?”
Aelyph sighed. “With much difficulty.”
“I see . . .” Sapphire trailed off, sensing Aelyph didn’t want to bring up such a memory.
“Who’s the pretty lady?” a slow voice asked in the cage beside Aelyph’s. “She woke me up.”
Sapphire turned to see a form that looked like a giant made entirely of pointed roots and moss.
“Who’s that?” she asked, regretting her question almost immediately.
“Trent!” the thing called.
Aelyph sat up against the bars of his cage and shushed him. “My cellmate.”
“He doesn’t look happy. Why did the Rangers detain him?”
It seemed Trent wanted to tell his own story, because he was the one to answer her. “I had a friend.”
Sapphire glanced at Aelyph. The Riftling rolled his eyes, clearly weary of the “I had a friend” story.
“I had a friend,” the huge tree-beast continued. “But I messed up. Like always.”
That last part sounded so wistful that, against her better judgment, Sapphire responded. “I’m sure it’s not that bad.”
“That bad,” Trent confirmed. “Was my friend. Called me ‘buddy.’ Didn’t want to lead him down the dark tunnels, but I had to. Can’t cross the Forgotten King.”
Does he mean the Forgotten King? In the next bout of fire, Sapphire looked more closely at the monster. He was huge, all curled up inside the bars. If he stood up, he would burst right out of that cage.
“Tried to help him. But the big, white dog came and bit me.” Trent pointed a branch at a large scar on the bark of his trunk. “So I ran away.”
Sapphire opened her mouth to continue her negotiation with Aelyph, but Trent wasn’t finished.
“So I ran away,” he repeated. “And when I came back, everybody was gone. My friend was gone. So I went to look for him, to tell him I was sorry. And I went to the town where . . .” The Treant looked skyward for a moment. “. . . Where the bad things happened. And I tried to fix it like my friend did. I took leaves and scrunched them up and dropped them all around. But nothing happened.”
“You were trying to heal the evil in the land?” Sapphire couldn’t help but smile at the big oaf. “But that only works with Deeproot leaves. And only if you have a Druid to make them.” She remembered being told this by Emerald.
Trent’s face fell even further. “Messed up again,” he whispered, then continued in a stronger voice. “Then the Rangers were there, and the still-living people, and they were all yelling at me, yelling ‘There he is, that’s the one who did this.’ And they took me and put me here, and now I’ll never find my friend. Never tell him I’m sorry.”
Sapphire sighed. “That’s not true, Trent,” she said. “You’ll find him someday. I know you will. And when you do, he’ll forgive you. Of course he will, because that’s what real friends do.”
The hope on the tree-beast’s face threatened to tear Sapphire’s heart in two.
Aelyph cleared his throat. “The Tower . . . The Rifts.”
“The Rifts . . .” Trent repeated ominously.
Sapphire turned at the sound of a guard’s footsteps. “I have to go, but I will return.”
“I will be held over the smother mushrooms tomorrow,” Aelyph said.
Sapphire nodded and stood. “If things get out of hand, I will stop it myself.”
She went to escape the prison, fuming that she didn’t have enough authority here to simply free Aelyph. She was also baffled as to why the elves would go this far. An elven guard began to patrol the corridor, walking from cage to cage with what looked like a glowing branch. Sapphire lay low, trying not to be spotted.
As she waited for the path to clear, she recalled what Gloom and the elven soldier at the meeting at the Rain Court had said about the battle on the front lines. Had the battle really become that bad? The guard didn’t leave for a long time, and she didn’t make it out until morning was approaching.