To Hell and Back by L.B. Gilbert
Chapter Nineteen
She waited, but Rhys didn’t move or speak.
“Aren’t you going to fry me?” she asked, holding her invisible shield of magic a little higher.
One thick black brow rose. “Do you think I could?”
He crossed his arms, leaning against the tunnel wall. “Or would you be protected by your reflective ability?”
He sounded more curious than angry.
“I honestly don’t know.”
Rhys pushed away from the wall. He gestured to the cavern behind him. “How did you find this place?”
“I was walking, and I stumbled on the entrance.”
“Now that I have a harder time believing.” Rhys reached down. Valeria dropped the shield, letting it dissipate just before he pulled her to her feet.
“There are several safeguards in place to prevent that sort of thing from happening.”
He began to move down the stairs, his hand holding hers tightly. Afraid of letting go in this pitch blackness, she followed.
“What kind of safeguards?” she asked.
“Traps, misdirection. Good ones, too. But, somehow, I am not all that surprised you were able to circumvent them.”
When they reached the bottom of the stairs, he let go of her hand. After a lifetime of avoiding touch, the loss left her suddenly bereft. She wrapped her arms around herself to keep from reaching out to him again. “I didn’t do it on purpose.”
Rhys moved away. She started to call out to him when he breathed fire at the cave floor. Valeria’s eyes widened as a channel filled with an unknown fuel blazed to life.
Fire raced along the groove, going from one end of the room to the other, before looping around the back wall located about a hundred yards away. When it was lit, it illuminated a perfect rectangle twice as wide and long as a football field.
Rhys grabbed an unlit torch from the wall behind her. He dipped it into the liquid on fire in the channel and moved, lighting a series of braziers laid in an X-shape in the middle of the room.
Spinning on her heel, Valeria took in the space with open-mouthed dismay. Now that there was light, it was obvious what this place was.
“It’s a tomb.”
The central space was filled with sarcophagi. That was the only word for the coffin-like structures that raided out in concentric circles.
“Yes and no.” Rhys came to stand beside her. “This is the inner sanctum. Once it was the most important, most secret, and most sacred place of our clan. But now it holds only the dead, or close enough as to make no difference.”
Startled, she looked at him. In this light, his carved features were harsher, more brutally handsome.
“Is she here?” Valeria whispered.
He turned to frown. “Is who here?”
She studied his face, looking for a hint of softness, of human caring. She didn’t find it.
“The woman you think I am,” she said. “Is she buried here?”
Rhys stared at her for a very long time. “No.”
At least he didn’t lie.
Valeria approached the ring of sarcophagi in the tightest circle. Each was carved with drawings and symbols clumped together. They were more elaborate than Egyptian hieroglyphics. She gravitated to one that looked just like all the others, aside from the way it made her skin prickle.
Tracing one with her finger, she glanced up at the too-silent dragon. “Who is buried here?”
He gave her an arrested glance as he shook his head. “I don’t know how you do that—cut to the heart of the matter.”
Rhys joined her at the sarcophagi. “Tell me, what were you doing when you found the tunnel mouth?”
“Nothing.” She frowned. “I was just walking…and thinking about you.”
He brightened. “Is that so?”
Her lips flattened. “I was wondering what secrets you were keeping from me.”
“Oh.” His expression darkened.
Valeria turned back to the sarcophagus next to them. “Who is bur—er…entombed here?”
Rhys smiled humorlessly. His hand swept up to encompass the room.
“This is where we once slept,” he said. “That’s our way, you see. My species is very long-lived. And time can be unforgiving. Sometimes, we just need to rest. The somnara is an exceedingly long slumber. You would call it hibernation, but it can span decades, even centuries.
“It was never widespread. On our homeworld, we’d live our lives and fall into somnara sparingly, and only once we reached a certain age.”
His index finger stroked the carving at the top of the lid. “Then came the great wars. Not one, but a series. Our people were decimated, our lands laid waste, rendered unlivable.”
“Then you came here.”
He glanced at her, his dark eyes hungry for something he’d never ask for. “Not right away…but yes.”
There was a long pause before he spoke again. “Compared to some places we found, this world is a paradise. There are abundant waters, cold and warm seasons, and life. So much life. We’d grown accustomed to endless barren vistas.”
He rolled those big shoulders. “It was a shock.”
“But a good one?”
After what he described, wouldn’t it have been a relief to come to be in a peaceful place? The land they’d chosen to make their home was idyllic and wild if a bit cold for the current thinness of her blood.
He took a long time to answer. “You’d think so, but our people had just come through a century of war,” Rhys confided, his eyes on some distant vista in his mind. “For some of us, it was difficult to appreciate or accept our new state.”
He looked up. “After all that time, the endless fighting, we were too warlike to be at peace. But peaceful is what we needed to be according to the treaty we signed, the one that allowed us to stay here.”
“You signed a treaty to stay on Earth?” Valeria asked in consternation. “With who?”
A corner of his mouth life. “That is a story for another time, I think, but suffice it to say we had a difficult time adjusting. There had been too much blood, too much loss.”
He held up his hands as if he could still see it. “Despite the discipline instilled in me by my training, my impulses were too aggressive, as were those of the other men. Even our women were having issues. The only thing we were fit for was warfare.”
“You could have conquered this entire planet.” She knew it for a fact. But someone or something had stopped them. And… “Your people were tired. So, they slept.”
“In unprecedented numbers,” he confirmed. “We found a suitable unoccupied territory and built this sanctum deep in the highest peak, a safe place for the community to fall into somnara.”
She tried to count the number of sarcophagi, but gave up after sixty. “Is it my imagination or are there more, um, beds than…”
Her voice trailed off at his bleak expression. “Yes. We lost more than two-thirds of our original colony.”