“This baetyl shares similarities with mine.”
I waited for him to elaborate. He ducked his head and looked away, and I realized he didn’t want to say anything else. The fact that I was here, inside a baetyl, didn’t make a difference. Baetyls were private, even from gargoyle guardians. Only the extreme extenuating circumstances had forced Celeste to reveal their existence, but it hadn’t changed the gargoyles’ instinctive secretive nature. Not even for Oliver, my stalwart companion.
“How high up?” I asked.
“The biggest should be near the top.”
I tilted my head back. The ceiling here was at least twelve stories high. Contemplating that height, even while standing on solid ground, made my legs weak. I pressed my fingertips into my stomach to quiet the butterflies.
In an ideal world, Celeste would have been able to carry me up and through the wall. She outweighed me by at least four hundred pounds and was larger than most mules. If she’d been a real gryphon, she wouldn’t have had a problem. Gryphons and gargoyles both used air magic to fly, but the differences in how they did so was the speculation of scholars. All I knew was that for gargoyles to use their stone feathers to lift their solid rock bodies, they couldn’t also carry anything much heavier than their own heads. Even a gargoyle as large as Celeste wouldn’t be able to lift me. Her magic wouldn’t support both of us.
“You’ll have to climb,” Celeste said.
I worried my bottom lip, eyeing the crystal wall. The smallest branch of quartz was thicker than my thigh; the largest could have fit three of my studio lofts inside. All were packed so densely at the base that I couldn’t fit more than an arm through the gaps.
“To the top?” I asked.
“Not that far. You might fit through about halfway up.”
I closed my eyes and swiped sweat from my forehead with trembling fingers.
“I’ll go with you,” Oliver said.
I gave him a tremulous smile. He knew how scared I was of heights, even if he didn’t understand why.
“Thank you.”
“I’ll try to guide you through from the other side.” Celeste walked a few paces away to give herself room to unfurl her wings, then launched into the air. She had to fly back the way we’d come first to give herself time and room to gain the necessary height. I lost her among the crystals, her dark black and purple body disappearing in the shadows. When I spotted her again, I almost mistook her for an apparitional gargoyle swooping out of the dark gap between a dumortierite crystal and a shadowy cluster of smoky quartz crystals. Her flight path should have looked erratic and cumbersome as she wove through the crystals; instead, her movements were organic. Every flap of her wings and turn of her body was timed for her to soar gracefully through the upper reaches of the baetyl.
Observing her, I saw the baetyl’s design with fresh understanding: I’d been traversing the baetyl as a human, clumsy and crawling, but it had never been designed for two-legged movement. It was a place for wings and flight.
When Celeste closed in on the wall near the ceiling, she tucked her wings and plummeted into an opening not visible from where we stood. I waited to hear the sounds of her progress, but if she had to touch down, none of her footsteps were loud enough to reach us.
I glanced back through the crystals behind us, ignoring the pull of the baetyl telling me I was facing the wrong way. Overlapping quartz of every color and size disguised the way back, hiding the cave-ins and the exit. I tried to picture how deep we were inside Reaper’s Ridge. A half mile? A mile?
If Marcus were at my side, he would have already started climbing the wall and finding a way through for us. But he wasn’t with me. Lost amid the crystals, he lay helpless and tortured by nightmares, dependent on me to save him.
I stopped stalling and turned back toward the wall.
“Let’s see if we can find a way through.”
Oliver scampered across the sharp crystals to the left and I walked the opposite direction, taking great care with my footing. When neither of us spotted any openings near the bottom, I selected an accessible-looking section near the right wall and began to climb. The crystals comprising the wall were some of the largest in the baetyl, and their girth meant not every angle was razor sharp. Unfortunately, it also meant I had fewer handholds on the slick surfaces.
Oliver had a harder time than me, lacking the traction provided by fingerprints and leather boot soles. After falling off twice, he flapped to a narrow ledge above me and guided me up the wall.
I did my best not to look down. Sweat and blood slicked my hands, and the tips and edges of crystals cut into my stomach and hips as I scaled the uneven surface. In a few places, the crystals were wide enough for me to walk along like uneven stairs, but more often, I clung to fragile toeholds and inched my way higher.
I almost cried when I reached the first opening large enough for me and looked through: Beyond the gap crisscrossed another layer of interlocking crystals too tight for me to navigate.
“How thick is this wall?” I asked, eyes closed. A tear escaped after all, but I didn’t have a spare hand to brush it from my cheek.
“I don’t know,” Oliver said. He draped from a rose quartz crystal above me, brows furrowed with sympathy.
“Guess. More than two feet?”
“Definitely. Probably more like twenty to forty.”
Another tear slid down my face. “Okay. We keep going up.”