Sebastian assumed he had fainted.

Again.

Halorium was surely a cursed place.

Before he could feel embarrassed by it, however, he realized it couldn't be plausible because he somehow stood on his own two feet. He had never heard of an unconscious person standing upwards unassisted. Not to mention, if he had been unconscious, he would not have been aware of the heated flush stealing up the back of his neck.

Sweat gathered under his arms.

His breaths hovered close, fetching up against a heavy, thick piece of cloth that had been placed over his eyes, nose, and mouth. All the important bits for regulating oxygen consumption. It stank not of Hel's abyss, but a vanilla soap and his own breath.

He hadn't been knocked unconscious; he had been blindfolded!

His manhood felt a little more confident knowing he hadn't actually blacked out.

Unfortunately, his confidence didn't last long.

"Ow!"

The small woman-guard had shoved him in the shoulder, propelling him straight into the hard stone of the alleyway outside the Halorian Library that he could only assume they still stood in.

"Oops." Her tone was irritatingly bland. "You missed the entrance."

"I can't even see—"

He didn't have time to protest further before she grabbed him by the elbow and pushed him over a slight dip in the ground. Instead of ramming into a wall again, Sebastian felt himself stumble straight through whatever entrance she had claimed he had missed.

It somehow felt colder and darker here. Wherever here was. And though he couldn't see, Sebastian felt stone all around him. Above his head. Under his worn boots. Closing in at his sides. A strong scent of musty soil seeped through the pores of the blindfold and straight down his throat. Something tickled his fingertips, so he stretched them out to gather his bearings. They brushed against the damp rock on either side of him. Water dripped from the ceiling that surely stretched overhead. Close to his head. In fact, he swore the tips of his dark, messy curls brushed its claustrophobic jaws.

They had to be underground. Definitely under something.

A heavy weight clunked shut behind him.

"Are we in a tunnel?"

His question echoed around him. He wondered if she had locked him in a cell to die by himself for a crime he knew he had not committed, but then she shoved him again.

"Your constant questions are rather cumbersome."

"We are." He could analyze the way their voices bounced off the enclosed space. "Or a cave," he amended. "I can tell by the sound of the water from the mountain's melted snow, no doubt; it drips from the stalactites overhead."

A loud huff brushed against the exposed bit of his neck.

"Stalactites..."

Not for the first time, his brain refused to shut up. "Yes, mineral formations that hang from—"

Another puff. More aggressive this time. "Curse the skies for bringing me this!"

Sebastian yelped, his spine slamming into rock (the rough walls of the tunnel, he was sure of it). He felt the girl's presence in front of him, her arm braced against his windpipe, her knee between his legs in a prime position to incapacitate him.

He wondered how badly it would hurt.

Pain hardly agreed with him. 

Sebastian tried to lean away, but the rock wall behind him was, unfortunately, unforgiving. Such was the nature of stone, he supposed.

Not unlike this crazy woman.

He imagined her teeth bared as she pressed against him harder. "You're not fighting me back?"

He blinked, perplexed, against the dark material over his eyes and cleared his throat. The pressure of her arm against his trachea was strangely commendable for one of her stature. "What would I fight you with?"

"The elements, of course!"

"Magic?" Sebastian gaped, his heart jumping, which must have been the only explanation why a short laugh burst from him. "But there's no such thing."

"There is," she countered. "Your soul's thread attacked my own—"

"My soul? Threads? I don't—"

"I stopped your magic from also attacking your so-called friend—"

"You mean Abel?"

She growled at him, for interrupting most likely, and shoved her face into his. Their noses nearly touched through his blindfold. He sucked down a breath as her hand tightened around his throat. Sebastian could feel her anger hot against his cheeks as she all but spat, "Yours flung my captain's sword across a field while you were unconscious. So stop playing the bumbling village idiot, and tell me the truth!"

Captain's sword?

He stilled against her. "You were in that snowbank! I remember now. You held a sword to my throat."

"Surprisingly, I did not have a part in that," she drawled, "though I wish I had now. Honestly, stalactites?"

"You took me back to the inn." His memory connected all the missing dots so rapidly, it left him almost light-headed. Though, in all fairness, that could have been due to the lack of oxygen. "You...helped me."

"I did not help you," she snapped. "I stopped you."

His memory caught on something else she had said when they had first met in the library: Has your male ego forgotten about the girl you were killing on your bed?

"Abel." Her name came out half-choked. I stopped you, she had just said. A force...Sebastian's thoughts sputtered in outrage. "But I wouldn't—I couldn't have done that! She was sick!"

She tapped his jaw with a quick flick of her fingers. "You speak of her quite a lot. Abel. You spoke her name when I found you bleeding at the bottom of that ditch."

It wasn't hard to miss the coy tone to her words. Sebastian scowled. "Of course I did. She's my closest friend."

The girl's tongue clicked against the roof of her mouth—tsk, tsk. It seemed to mock him. "Do you make a habit of murdering your dearest friends?"

"What?" An unexplainable mass of emotion stuck in his throat. He felt impossibly hot. "No! I would never!"

"But you did." She ran a slow fingernail along the base of his neck. "Your magic fed off that poor girl to garner strength for itself." She pressed closer, his heart thumping wildly between them. "You allowed it."

Anger exploded from him, and it roared. It dislodged the emotional glob that choked him. His wrists twisted and yanked from underneath the girl's grasp. In the back of his mind, the part that still tried to explain what was happening, he heard her say, "I knew it."

His hands snapped out, shooting beneath her barriers and crashing into her chest.

Someone—him?—threw her across the tunnel. He heard her clatter against the opposite wall.

The sound jarred him, and his palms split as he fell to the ground.

Sebastian's breaths tore at his lungs. What the hell had just happened? A survivor's instinct had him ignoring that question and clawing for the blindfold instead. Before he had even touched it, the richly made cloth tore before his eyes. He cried out, thinking the girl had attacked him. Sebastian swung out a clumsy leg but hit nothing but air. The tearing continued, the sound harsh, matching the erratic beats of Sebastian's pulse. He scrambled away, but he was unsure from what to run.

Yourself, a voice answered within him. It's you.

Run!

Invisible claws ripped the blindfold until it was nothing more than bite-sized pieces of black cloth. Sebastian's brain screamed, his head falling between his knees, fighting against the panic and nausea. But he could still see the pieces fluttering around his head before they fell to the earth in a neat circle around him.

"You owe me another cloak."

Sebastian snapped his attention to the girl, his chest clenching and heaving. Her sarcastic attitude clashed with the war taking place inside Sebastian's skull. He scowled at her, but it froze in mid-formation.

For the first time, her hood was down.

In fact, her hood was nowhere to be found. Sebastian glanced at the ripped threads of his former blindfold.

"You gagged and blinded me with your cloak?"

She sighed. "Must everything be my fault?"

He looked back at her.

She stood over him, hands on her round hips as she kicked at the shattered remains of her cloak as if everything that had happened—whatever had just happened—was as normal as fish breathing underwater. But it was her eyes that gave her away. They flickered over him, unsure, their shade of blue making him feel as if she were freezing him in preparation to dissect every one of his innards.

Perhaps she was capable of such a thing.

He met her stare. "Who are you?"

"Most gentlemen would have asked such a question ages ago." She knelt across from him and grabbed his wrist. "You can call me Astrid."

She hauled him to his feet. His head swayed, so he hardly registered it when she bound his wrists behind his back with two bronze wrist cuffs. They clamped into place, and the pressure in his head sank to his stomach instead.

Astrid prodded him forward. "I do hope we can be friends," she said. "Or perhaps mere acquaintances will do. I cannot allow you to entertain any murderous thoughts towards me if we grow too close, after all."

Sebastian let that snide comment slide, suddenly too tired to argue against her any longer. His spine slumped. He was even too stunned to realize his initial theory had been correct; they were in a tunnel.

Her finger poked him again to keep him walking. "So, are you going to tell me who you are?"

"I told you." He tried to look back at her. "My name's Sebastian."

With another huff, Astrid turned him back around. "I already know that. Though, it hardly sounds like a Scribal name. I suppose I should have asked: what are you?"

Well, that hardly made any more sense. "What I am? Well, I suppose I'm a fisherman. My family's from Eilibir." He was very much aware, since she was an Iced Guard of Rainier, that he should claim no blood-relation to the Scribes who Queen Davina had defeated so thoroughly in the Purge. "I have no Scribal ancestry."

"You have the magic of the elements."

His hands curled into fists against the cuffs. "I do not!"

The ground beneath them rattled. He heard Astrid inhale sharply and followed her gaze to his feet; the ground had split open before him. A jagged crack shot down the length of the tunnel, cracking and tearing the earth apart. It was, perhaps, why the walls began to rumble. The tunnel moved. Sebastian caught himself against one of lower hanging stalactites. He spun, staggering towards the girl, positive that this had to be her doing, when a scream erupted from the depths of the tunnel.

Astrid's lips pursed, sealed resolutely shut as she stared at him, wide-eyed.

The scream intensified.

Sebastian clamped a hand to this raw throat.

It came from inside him.

He screamed again. It tore from him as easily as that cloak had been shredded by—by what? The sound erupted from everywhere, dirt falling in clumps from the roof of the tunnel, and surely his head was about to implode. Through the pain, he caught a brief glimpse of Astrid's pale face right before she rammed the hilt of a dagger into his temple.

_ _ _

Thank you for reading! Please feel free to leave a comment, offer feedback or a funny thought, or vote for this chapter. 

Here's to hoping none of us faints today! :)