With the labyrinth behind him, the journey through the outer passages was easier than Corvan expected. Following Tsarek’s final instructions, he kept keep moving down the main corridor, ignoring smaller tunnels that branched off or climbed upward.

  When he first started out, he had to slowly pick his way between the tall stalagmites that had grown up from the floor. It was obvious the large buraks must have taken a different route and he didn’t need to worry about them following him. After a while he noticed tracks in the dust made by smaller animals he could not identify. The individual lines of tracks eventually became a path winding ever downward through the main passage.

  The hammer’s insignia emitted enough light, but after a while it appeared to be fading. Maybe, just like the electric miner’s lamps, it would need to be recharged. It could be that the hammer and the disc Kate had stolen from Tsarek, functioned together to re-energize the battery. For the time being he decided to leave in in the holster in case he really needed its last bit of light in a really dark spot.

  From that point on, he walked as far as he could while there was enough faint light from occasional patches of purple moss. Whatever the hammer had done to heal his eyes from the flash of the firestick, it had also sharpened his night vision and that made it relatively easy to navigate. During the times that the moss faded to its lowest ebb, he would rest and gnaw on a small piece of the beef jerky, then slowly melt ten of the chocolate chips in his mouth, one at a time. He was continually hungry, but at least there was a steady supply of water. It dripped from the stalactites overhead and pooled in small depressions that gathered and eventually ran in a small stream alongside the downward path.

  His mind was so full of questions and worries, it was almost impossible to sleep and when he did, the vision from Tsarek’s crystal haunted him. He couldn’t escape the image of the woman murdering his parents with her fire. If that person was a future vision of Kate, how was it possible for her to change that much? At times she got very mad, but how could that grow into wanting to kill everyone around her? All he could come up with was that the vision was warning him if Kate was taken by the black band to Tsarek’s master, she too would become evil.

  He lay in the darkness, listening to the sounds of dripping water and the pattering of feet—either small animals or incredibly large insects. He hoped they weren’t spiders. He hated spiders.

  Laying on the cold damp floor would have been unbearable except for the warmth of his grandfather’s cloak. He often thought of his grandfather, wondering what he planned to tell him about this underground world. Was his plan that they would have gone through the portal together and return to this place call the Cor?

  He gave up on sleeping. Supporting his sore arm he sat up against the passage wall and looked across the path at a lumpy stalagmite with the appearance of a person sitting on a stone stool. “At least, if you were here,” he said quietly to the stone figure, as if it were his grandfather, “you could tell me why you wrote my name with a hyphen in the middle and also why my father had spoken it that same way. What exactly is a Cor-Van?” The strange word echoed down the passage.

  Tsarek was afraid of having anyone hear his name spoken that way and had asked to use Kalian instead. The lizard said it was from his mother’s lullaby and was a translation for the words, “only one” in the song. He began to hum a stanza of the song, then stopped himself. The lullaby did not fit the situation and besides, he was likely now fifteen years of age—an adult. He needed to put the thoughts of being a small boy in his mother’s arms aside and, like his father often told him he needed to focus on the job at hand instead of daydreaming.

  His father’s words from their night on the western slope of Castle Rock came to mind. His father’s voice was full of sorrow when he related that their people had never seen the moon and stars. Now Corvan understood just how difficult that was. Without any light, the darkness was overwhelming, crushing him with its vacant weight. If these dark holes were what those people lived in, it was fortunate that his grandfather’s father had found a way to escape into the world above. The sooner he could find Kate and return to a place of bright sunlight during the day and the stars at night, the better. He never wanted to come down here again.

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  Corvan retrieved the ice disc that had formed at the base of Tsarek’s musical crystal. Each time he rested; he had been studying the tiny pinpoints of light. They reminded him of the constellations he would identify while lying on the rock on warm summer nights, through the fall and also from the entry into the igloos he would build from the packed drifts on the top of Castle Rock in the winter. He was almost certain he could make out Orion and the Big Dipper in the sparkling dots. At his last resting place, he had noticed a brighter glow above the handle of the Big Dipper.

  This time, he was shocked to find that the glow had become a tiny full moon that was making its way along the edge of the glass. “How is that possible?” he whispered. “Tsarek’s crystal showed me a vision for the future so what is this supposed to tell me?” As he pondered and thought through the phases of the moon and what Tsarek had told him about the light of the lumiens and their connection to the world above, he realized that the ice disc might be reflecting what was happening at home right now. It was showing him the stars because he was thinking of a starry sky at home, but could it also show him his house?

  Cupping it in his palm, he concentrated and imagined walking into the gap in the Castle Rock facing his house. The stars in the ice glass slowly spun, the moon slipped off the side, but then moonlit outline of his home came into view. A tiny yellow square flickered, and his mother appeared in his bedroom window. He focused on her face and the scene moved closer in the glass until he could see that tears were running down her cheeks, but she was singing. He could not hear the words, but her hand rose toward him, as if she knew he was watching.

  “I’m here, Mom,” Corvan said. A tear slipped down his cheek and splashed on the glassy disc.

  His mother stopped singing and stared out the window. A puzzled expression flickering across her face. Wiping her eyes with the back of her sleeve, she turned from the window and his bedroom light went out.

  An overpowering loneliness welled up inside him. He was trapped deep inside the Earth, as far away from his home as if he were on the moon itself and looking through a telescope at his home. He needed to get back but even if he could find the temple building that Tsarek had mentioned, that didn’t necessarily mean he would also find Kate.

  He looked intently into the ice disc. Could the glass also reveal Kate’s whereabouts?

  He turned his thoughts to Kate, and memories flooded back. Days of building forts, riding bikes and hiking through the coulees. He smiled. Kate was his best friend, at least in the world above. His smile faded. Down here, he wasn’t sure he knew who she was anymore. Pushing the negative thoughts aside, he concentrated on the Kate he once knew.

  A fond memory crept into his heart and brought the smile back to his face. He and Kate were lying on the rock, watching for falling stars when a coyote barked nearby in the field. Kate had moved closer and reached for his hand. It barked again, then the night fell silent, but they lay there a long time, hand in hand, looking up at the stars without saying a word, until his mother called him in. Neither he nor Kate had talked about that night or had held hands again, but he often thought about it, and wanted to be that close to her again.

  The glass went dark, and he was about to put it away when he caught a glimpse of Kate’s face in the darkness. Tears were running down her cheeks.

  “Hang on, Kate, I’m coming for you,” Corvan called out, and the image in the mirror looked at him in shock, then called his name so clearly he almost dropped the glass. It went dark again, and he tried refocusing his thoughts on Kate, but there was nothing more to see. Returning the glass to his pocket, he lay back and wrapped the cape tightly around him. A sharp rock poked into his ribs and he wondered if it were possible for things to get any worse than this.

  His father used to say, “Cheer up, Son, the worst is yet to come,” reminding him to be thankful for what he had in the present instead of focusing on what could and would go wrong in the future. Listening to the rhythmic drip of water falling around him in the cold darkness, Corvan tried to come up with something positive. The only thing that he could come up with was that his collarbone had healed quickly and he didn’t need the sling anymore. It barely hurt to move his shoulder so perhaps the hammer healed bones after all; it just took a bit longer. It could be why its light energy had been used up so quickly.

  With a heavy sigh, he sat back up. It was no use trying to sleep. He might as well walk a little farther and hope the moss would begin glowing soon. For the time being, he would try the hammer again. Pulling his pack onto one shoulder, he released the hammer and followed its feeble glow down a long slope and around a corner.

  The passage abruptly ended in an T intersection with a larger passage. He peered downward and was about to step out, but this new passage was large enough for the buraks and there was a clear wide trail.

  Pointing his light up the steep slope, a distinctive shape caught his eyes.

  A pair of running shoes were sticking out at the base of a tall rock.