"Must we Sisters?" Veda sighed, glaring baleful at the stone doors which had been her vexation since they three were all but fillies. Pythia and Polaris both knew how she hated these riddles. It was just like them to put her on a path through one, but there were five wayward lives at stake-- surely they did not find it so amusing that they would commit five sacrifices to the dark to have their joke? "There is no time for this! Or would you have Daybreak...

They passed this way. Dzvezda smelled them in the dust, heard the echoes of the hoofbeats on the stones all around her. They were not the first... not even among the first to lose someone in this chamber. Veda picked her way delicately over the grooves of liquid gore. It wouldn't hurt her, of course, but that did not mean she enjoyed viscera clinging to her gilded hooves. Pensive, silent, she approached the deepening pool in the sarcophagus to stare at her own rippling reflection. ...

There were traps and pitfalls galore in the dungeon. Daybreak was no stranger to them. He had scars wrapping the circumfrance of his hock from a ring of spikes he'd stepped into as a foal, and a sizable gash across one side of his neck where a swinging blade had caught him just high enough to be anything other than lethal. He had been lucky for a few years, all spindly limbs and knocking knees and wild-eyed fright. Then, in time, he learned to recognize the warnings. What had been l...

"Take a deep breath, li'l one. We'll be out of this soon enough." Daybreak lowered their head to whisper into Marinell's ear, as though in confines this tight everyone could not hear what he was saying. The others, at least, had the good grace not to comment. That was Jasmine's influence, no doubt. God-Prince Cyneric had found it less than productive to snark and snipe around his lovely fiance. She had a bite about her, particularly since her dear Melite vanished into the smoldering ...

That voice... they'd all heard it a dozen times, now, shrill with fear and sourceless. Taunting. The first couple of delves after the disappearances of Cyneric's loyal knight and Jasmine's dearest friend, every hint of a scream in the distance had sent them careening through the halls in a harried search. They never found so much as a hair of either of their friends. Now, they knew better than to chase the dungeon's voices. It wasn't worth getting lost in search of ghosts-- and the...

They had been searching for hours. No one dared ask whether anyone else knew where they had come from, where they were going-- down the featureless spiraling halls no longer familiar to any of them. They set out with a mind to find their missing comrade, whatever condition Melite might be in. Privately, Jasmine feared her lady's maid had been eaten alive. Sucked into the floor of this strange, haunting place, or dissolved into a pile of goo. She tried not to let that stifling fear consume her...

When the echoes of screaming died, they found nothing. No trace of flesh or bone or scattered gear where a delver might have fallen, no blood on the walls. At least, they were fairly certain that the rivulet running thick between the cobblestones could not be blood. It came from nowhere, trickling through a groove they swore up and down hadn't been there before, pooling in the basin of an old sarcophagus-- and that was where the 'nothing' became a major concern. Everything...

The silence which followed that echoing, agonized shriek could have been cut with a blade. Whatever they had been arguing about-- and they did spend most of their time together arguing-- died unacknowledged as they stood, four statues in the dark and staring toward that unfamiliar voice. There was no mistaking the source. Or, at the very least, what the source was meant to be. Somewhere deeper down the twining tunnels a Courser cried out in pain, in desperation, and unspoken among t...

Jasmine was a mess of sweat and ash. The stink of burned hair filled the little chamber Logue swore up and down would be safe for resting. She wasn't sure believed him-- neither did she have much choice. All Jasmine had, she'd spent. The very thought of clambering back to her feet and pushing on made her head spin, and so she lay flat to the warm stone and did her best not to breathe too deeply of the burning.  Logue, meanwhile, seemed perfectly accustomed to the trials of t...

The furnace was no place for a lady like Jasmine. So she'd been told more times than she could count-- by her mother, by her tutor, by the delvers who'd laughed when she asked after their stories. She was a delicate thing. The dungeons had not called her family's blood in generations, but this was the first time she'd wondered if, perhaps, all those naysayers had a point. Her slender doe's legs trembled, yet she stood frozen. Wide-eyed. Staring at the well of rising red ben...

How long had she been here...? Jasmine couldn't say. All sense of the coming and going of time had escaped her, standing still as stone in the gilded glow of a crown.  The crown.  Were it not for the constant flickering of her moth's wings across the light, Jasmine might have said no time had passed at all. She'd only just come upon it... this jewel-studded thing in a bed of velvet and polished wood, glowing even beneath long-tumbled stones. Who could have left...