“I think the egg is some sort of way to decode the glyphs. But what other glyphs would my grandmother have been trying to decode?”
She shook her head. “You knew her much better than I did.”
Laric stared into the trunk, reached for the egg, and traced his hand along the surface of it. The thing was slightly scaled, unlike the previous one, which had been smooth, unlike the others which had indentations of glyphs on it. It also had an innate warmth to it. In the fading light of his spellslip, he was able to see striations of color along it, a hint of orange and red, making it look almost metallic.
“I thought I knew her, but now I’m not so sure,” he said. “There is far, far too much about her that I never knew.”
“So you have two eggs.”
“And the glyphs that we don’t have any answer to, and…” He sighed heavily. “And I wonder what else my grandmother might have been hiding.”
“Was this what the dragon had seen?” Rowan asked.
Laric shook his head. “This was buried.”
“No. I mean the potential. You said that you saw a burst of potential down on the ground, and you assumed that it was Talia. What if it wasn’t? What if this was what the dragon had actually seen?”
Laric stared at the egg. Finally, he pulled it out of the trunk and held it. As he did, he thought about what he had done with the other one. He thought about that one’s purpose, and power, and benefit. He also wondered if maybe there would be something more that he could do with it.
“I don’t know. I’ll have to ask—”
Laric didn’t get to finish saying that he was going to have to ask Sashaak once they stepped out.
The ground trembled. The walls around them began to crack, crumbling down even further, and he immediately began to focus on a spellcraft form, trying to use a bit of earth to firm up the walls. Even as he attempted to do so, Laric didn’t know if the spellcraft form was going to be potent enough. He could feel it washing outward, holding up the walls, but they might not have time to make it out.
“Go,” he shouted at Rowan. “Get out of here.”
“Not without you,” she said.
“I cannot hold it,” Sashaak said, breaking into his mind. “You must find your way.”
All around them, the stone continued to crumble.
Chapter Seventeen
Laric focused on the spellcraft form, trying to hold on to what he thought would be necessary in order for him to push upward to keep the structure of the cavern in place. Gradually, as he did, he could feel the power around him starting to settle, but only a little bit. There was enough still lingering here that it made it difficult for him to do all that much. He could feel the power, but so far, he hadn’t been able to do anything with it, and increasingly, he worried that he wasn’t going to be strong enough to withstand the collapse of this space.
Withstanding it was what he needed to do.
“Go,” he urged, pushing Rowan forward.
“I told you that I’m not going without you.”
“I don’t know that I can hold on to this,” he said, the pressure getting to him. “I feel the power of this, but I can’t maintain it the way that I think I need to.”
“Then just hold it around you. Well, and me.”
He wasn’t sure how to do that. He wasn’t sure if he could do that. And more and more, he started to wonder if it was even going to be effective for him. He needed to try something here, didn’t he? Hold on to it in a way that would allow him to control what was happening, and maybe try to trap it. But even if he were to do that, he didn’t know if it would hold.
The spellcraft form was one of stone, of earth, and it was something that Talia had taught him. Strangely, however, it was one that felt fortified by something that Sashaak was giving him. Laric wasn’t entirely sure if the power was going to be enough for him, and he didn’t know if there was going to be a part of it that would be effective here, as he questioned if Talia’s spellcraft form was going to work. But maybe it didn’t even need to—not the way she had done it. Maybe all he really needed was to use the same spellcraft form that he had learned from Sashaak.
And distantly, while he had that connection to Sashaak, he was even better connected to an aspect of it that he had not anticipated.
There was a part of it that bloomed in his mind, gifting him more of the potential that seemed to linger there with him, allowing him to trap some element of that as well.
And he used it.
Everything fell still.
It was black around him. The stone had collapsed, leaving them in darkness.
“I don’t suppose you can use a light spellslip,” he said, looking over to Rowan. “I can’t do more than one at the same time.”
“I can try. Will it make a difference?”
He shrugged. “Honestly, I have no idea, but I want to see where we are and what’s around us.”
She nodded. Far too gradually, the light spellslip that she formed began to drive away some of the darkness.
He felt the pressure pushing down on him, and when he looked around, he saw that his spellcraft form had created little more than a dome that had sealed shut around them. Had he not formed it, they would’ve been crushed by the cavern walls.
“Can you dig us out?” she asked.
“I’m still trying to hold on to this one,” he said. “It’s difficult to do.”
“Then can you try to shift how you’re holding it?”
“What do you mean?”
