Tahninym’s temple.
This statue was wingless, and her eyes closed. It was one of the first depictions of the goddess I had seen that was at all calm. She held another orb in her hands, but this one seemed to be genuinely made of ice. Something dark was frozen within its depths, but I was not going to walk across the water to find out. I had enough of falling through ice today, and I was not going to fall into water on top of it.
Levent, however, did not share my reluctance. He was stepped over the strip of ice and approached the statue.
“What are you doing?” Kewyn asked. She seemed about to dash forward and pull the kin back bodily.
“Let the man work,” Rio chided, grasping the blonde around the arm. He patted her hand. “If we start fighting here it will be most inconvenient.”
“Speaking of getting out,” I said, despite the fact that the subject had not at all been addressed. “How are we going to get out of here? I didn’t exactly see a ladder.”
“Let’s worry about that after we trip whatever traps they have set up for us in here. How’s it going, dragon?” Rio shouted at Levent, who had put his hands on the ice orb in the statue’s hands and already begun to melt it.
The kin let out a grunt and shrugged in reply, which I suppose meant it was going as expected. I peered around to watch the orb melt, trying to catch a glimpse of the mysterious object it contained. As soon as the top half shrunk down, the kin reached in and dug the artifact out with his fingers. Making a fist around it, he picked it up and paused. I looked around, waiting for any sign of a trap or hazard. Rio gripped Kewyn’s arm so tightly she winced, but said nothing.
After a solid minute, there was still no ominous rumbling, no sound of the mountain coming down on our heads. I sighed in relief, walking over to Levent as he stepped back across the moat.
“Success?” I asked. He did not nod, but walked toward the entrance.
“You going to show it to us this time?” Rio’s question was more of a demand than anything. Levent stopped, turning to the half-blood with a well-disguised glare.
“Yeah,” Kewyn insisted. “What is it you found, exactly?”
The dragon-kin looked away from them to me, but my face was not exactly saying anything different from theirs. I smiled childishly.
Levent’s frown deepened and his shoulders stooped as he gave in to the