Rio and Kewyn had not landed gracefully, either. The half-blood got up and dusted himself off, then walked over to help Kewyn to her feet. I blinked up at Levent, not sure how we had survived.
“I thought we were dead for sure!” Rio exclaimed. His voice was a little higher than usual.
“Did you feel the wind grow stronger?” Kewyn asked, looking down at the floor. There was barely any light at the bottom of the pit, but our eyes were slowly adjusting.
Rio quickly pulled up his eye patch and squinted at the ground. “There’s a big grate here,” he said. “There must be something huge underneath that kept us from falling too fast, but that’s impossible.”
“Seen impossible happen before,” I said. Whoever designed this tower only intended to scare people to death, not drop them to it. I did, however, hate them. That fall seemed to take years off my life, and I was immortal.
“I’m just glad it worked, whatever it was,” Kewyn sighed. We all nodded.
“What do we do now?” I asked, looking up. I could barely even see the top of the tower, just a white speck at the end of a long tunnel. How far had we fallen? “We must be underground.”
Rio looked around. “Looks like there might be something over here,” he said after a minute, walking into the darkness.
Reluctantly, I got up and followed the sound of his footsteps, my legs wobbling under me. My eyes still had not adjusted to the dark when I heard the half-blood stop. Feeling like a blind idiot, I stretched my hands out and slid my hooves forward until I heard Rio chuckle and a gloved hand around my forearm. He pulled me to his side.
“This way, m’lady.”
I flushed in the darkness, hoping that I was not the only one whose eyes were taking so long to adjust. As we shuffled forward, a familiar blue glow began to reach my eyes.
Ahead of us was yet another hallway full of overgrown icicles, twice the height of the ones before. The blue glow of more lamps shone through the ice, the light reflecting and dancing in the dark.
The half-blood still clutched my arm, leading me through the forest of ice even