The stairs went down forever.
That was how it felt, anyway — step after step after step into a darkness so thick it had weight, so old it had teeth. The torches on the walls were spaced too far apart, their flames thin and blue, gasping for air that the stone had been swallowing for centuries.
Caldan went alone. He'd told Ryven to wait at the top. Ryven had looked at him with those steel-gray eyes and said nothing, which was Ryven's way of saying this is a terrible idea and I'm noting it for the record.
He wasn't wrong. Going into the dragon crypts alone, at night, with Dhaelon's army camped outside the walls and the palace in a state of barely controlled panic — it was the kind of decision that got men killed. The kind of decision his father would have mocked, his mother would have forbidden, and his grandmother would have filed away as evidence of genetic weakness.
But Caldan wasn't going down there for them.
He was going for Vaelrix.
