The shadows cling but do not hinder his digging.
With a few moments of fumbling and another sobbing call from Lor, Iohmar’s hand finds a face, then a shoulder, then a familiar hand. A rough tug brings the boy into his pocket of air. Lor coughs and cries as Iohmar curls him into an embrace. His tiny arms grasp tight, and he nuzzles his face into Iohmar’s neck.
“It’s all right. I have you, dearheart,” Iohmar whispers. Lor grips his horn as he did when the ripplings frightened him, his skin shedding pale leaves and petals.
Their space in the soil is hardly large enough for Iohmar to curl within, legs still buried, Lor pressed against one wall while Iohmar’s back is cramped against the other. His horns are snarled within the loose earth above his head. The shadows swirl through his hair and between his fingers, attempting to worm within the nonexistent space between his chest and Lor’s. They no longer take shape, and his skin crawls, trapped within the confined space.
“Ascia?” he asks, unable to raise his voice above a whisper.
His head spins. How could it have happened? He searched for her for so long. So many years he spent wandering tunnels and spreading his magic far as it would reach into the darkest depths.
In the end, it took her own magic to find him, even if she didn’t recognize how greatly he’d changed.
The shadows tighten, and Iohmar’s stomach plunges as the soil beneath him gives way. With a sharp drop and a cry of surprise from Lor, Iohmar crashes to a solid floor. The air is knocked from his lungs, and his head rings. Pebbles dig into his back. His shoulder blades ache.
He groans and thinks vaguely of cursing.
King beneath the earth, indeed.
Lor’s breaths are quick, but a brush against his magic confirms he isn’t hurt so much as frightened, held safely atop Iohmar’s chest. Iohmar sits and gazes about now that Lor’s soft glow has returned.
His own skin shimmers as it did in childhood, though the dark of his talons and stained fingertips remains.
“Daidí . . . ?” Lor hiccups. “You’re glowing too.”
“Yes . . .”
The boy’s hands comb Iohmar’s hair with great gentleness. “Your hair is a different color.”
Pulling a handful over his shoulder, Iohmar gazes at it in the pale light. It is indeed the color it once was, autumn hued. For a moment, panic reaches him, and he tests the bonds of magic with his son. But they remain strong and stable as ever. Stronger, perhaps, with the streaks of rot fading and his strength returning. He is alive, powerful, Lor a tiny mirror to him.
Lor sits back enough to look into Iohmar’s face. His hands touch his temples. “Your horns are different.”
Other fae alter their appearance, but Lor is unused to it in his father. His eyebrows pull together as he inspects the change.
“Are they paler?”
Lor nods. “Like your hair. And those trees atop the mountain.”
Birch trees. Before his magic changed, his horns were autumn hued and streaked with the color of birch bark, as Lor’s soft skin. Unwilling to release the boy, he gets his feet under him. Hesitantly, he stretches his magic into the surrounding cavern. It responds happily to his call, the sharp and intense presence of his forest and mountains and rising sunlight and all his fair folk above them. Warmth spreads at the rising sun, and he lets his mind return to the dark of the cave.
“What is it you wish to show me?” he asks the gathering shadows, and they press into him. Iohmar turns and allows them to guide his steps. Lor doesn’t flinch at their touch, but his arms are tight about Iohmar’s neck.
Darkness reveals great pillars of pale bones. Iohmar knows this place, recognizes it now. This place he forgot.
He stares up at the great pillar of a rib he once stood upon.
“It’s a dragon,” Lor whispers, head turned enough to see, cheek pressed to Iohmar’s.
“Yes.”
The shadows push and push, and Iohmar allows himself to be led among the bones and past the great skull. Toward the end of the cavern, he finds the second half of the rib cage buried in the wall. Boulders are piled, and it takes Iohmar a moment to realize the skeleton was not always buried.
Once, two children played down among dragon bones and were buried deep.
Spreading his palm to the fallen rocks, he stretches his magic. The shadows press him near flat against the wall, and this place has a soft, strange magic he did not find when last they fell. It’s the faint familiarity he sensed but was unable to identify.
“Was there another cave-in after the one that buried you and your friend?” Lor asks as Iohmar kneels and sets him on the ground.
“I believe it’s the same one,” Iohmar murmurs. The shadows hum, and his fingers tremble once more. What do they wish me to see?
Lor touches the rocky wall as Iohmar does, but his eyebrows furrow. “I don’t feel anything.”
“You’re young.”
Iohmar moves the largest of the rocks he can budge without collapsing the pile surrounding the bones. A waiting quiet falls across the cavern, only the crackle of rocks coming loose. The shadows dip in and about the crevices before Iohmar’s hands, shifting the earth in small liquid movements, the same way they pulled him into the cavern. Lor watches him with wide, serious eyes before digging at the smaller stones alongside him.
The magic grows stronger. Pausing, Iohmar listens to the spark of warmth. It is much the same as testing his bonds with Lor. He finds a flame of life, smothered in its place buried so deep.
Tears blur his vision.
Stepping back, he brings his magic from the warm light of the surface, digging deeper and deeper through layers of mountains and tunnels and earth. The ground rumbles. Stones crack. Lor weaves one arm around his knee.
Roots crack the ceiling and sprout from the walls, entire trees undoing themselves to answer his call. Little burrowing creatures he has no name for wriggle about his feet and into the collapse of cavern before him. No light makes its way so deep, not yet. Vines and roots weave through the walls, stabilizing uncertain earth the shadows could not shift alone, removing boulders and stones until there is nothing left but a pocket of soft earth where the magic is sharpest.
He lets it rest.
Lor squeezes his knee. Not even when they were first trapped did his son see such a display. Iohmar realizes how inhibited his magic had been. The illness was creeping upon him without his realization, but now it is fading.
