I balanced precariously on the slanted edge of an agate crystal thirty feet above the sharp baetyl floor when I finally found a promising hole large enough to wiggle through. I squirmed through on my stomach, then lay there, panting, savoring the reprieve for my tired arm muscles. When I’d regained my breath, I pushed myself to my feet and carefully stood.
Crystals jutted from every angle around me, and when I looked down, I forgot how to breathe. I stood on an aventurine crystal, and despite its almost jade color and the glow it emitted, I could see through it to the crystals below it—and the crystals below those, as if I stood on a plane of glass three stories in the air. My head went light and my heart beat its way up my throat. I crouched and closed my eyes. When vertigo tilted the crystal beneath my hands, I jerked my eyes open and stared straight ahead.
“Are you okay?” Oliver asked, peeking at me from the other side of the opening.
I nodded, my throat too dry to form words.
“The crystal is strong. You won’t fall.”
I nodded again and forced myself to look around. The opening wasn’t a dead end—I could go up.
Lucky me.
Oliver tried to squeeze through the opening with me, but his inchworm way of walking bunched his body up too tall to fit through the gap. He shot me a worried look.
“Maybe if I fly and use my momentum to slide in,” he suggested.
I shook my head, but it took me two tries to get my voice to work. “You should take a safer route. Like Celeste.”
“Are you going to be okay without me?”
I thought about Marcus lying helpless near the entrance, being bombarded by the baetyl’s fractured magic. I thought about the dormant gargoyles growing weaker, depending on me to save them.
“Yes.” I pushed to my unsteady feet, almost grateful for the pain of my injuries to focus my thoughts. “I’ll see you on the other side.”
Through a beam of smoky quartz, I watched Oliver launch into the air and fly away.
*
I’d never felt so alone and foreign in my skin as I did while inside the crystal wall. I’d worked with quartz my whole life. I’d identified as an earth elemental since grade school, but I found myself missing wood. A blade of grass, a patch of moss—any hint of growing greenery would have soothed my taut nerves. There wasn’t even dust. Surrounded by all the shiny, glowing geometric planes, my flesh looked strange, too pink and rounded. I couldn’t even take solace in the elements. I continued to hold quartz even though I hadn’t seen a phantom gargoyle since I’d touched the wall, but the element had grown brittle and fragmented. Knowing it was a reflection of the baetyl was no comfort. I’d never had a place change the nature of the elements, and being perpetually in touch with the flawed magic screwed knots into my shoulders. Only fear of not being able to take hold of it again and being powerless against the apparitions prevented me from releasing the element.
I hurried and it still took a century. Sweat dripped down my face and stuck my shirt to my back. The cuts in my hands stung in a peripheral way until I slipped and grabbed for purchase on the slick crystals. Most of the time, I was forced to crawl, contorting myself around the overlapping branches of quartz. With the crystals so close together, I no longer feared falling to my death; instead I developed a new phobia of getting a foot or arm stuck and being trapped until I starved to death.
When I heard Oliver and Celeste, I thought it was a hallucination. I inched through a gap so tight I couldn’t lift my head, moving mostly by gravity on the smooth slant with a little help from my feet. Then stone paws wrapped gently around my wrists and pulled me through.
Oliver curled around me, halting my descent with his body. I lifted my head, spotting Celeste first. She stood beside me, fitting easily on the rose quartz ledge. Gratefully, I got to all fours, then grabbed Oliver’s wing when I caught sight of the drop-off beyond him.
“I’ve got you,” Oliver said.
“Thank . . .” I forgot my own words as I took in the heart.
The wide open, perfect sphere of the heart was defined on all sides by thousands of crystals of every size, as if it were an enormous woven quartz basket—one that could fit two or three city blocks with room to spare. Hundreds of crystal ledges like the one we stood on protruded from the walls all the way around the heart, the enclosure designed to fit droves of gargoyles.
The structural beauty of the quartz sphere was surpassed only by the central crystal. It thrust from the floor nearly to the twelve-story ceiling, its girth so broad a dozen gargoyles could have stretched out on the sloped top. Unlike all the other crystals in the baetyl, which were each made of a singular type of quartz, the towering heart crystal swirled with every variety of quartz in a riot of color, the pattern never repeating.
I was so mesmerized by the beauty of the heart that when I spotted the enormous crack running through the multicolored crystal, I physically recoiled. The culprit was obvious: Another cave-in had split the ceiling directly above the crystal. I followed the length of the crystal back to the floor, spotting the pile of dirt and boulders near the base.
I didn’t need to look further. I’d found the crux of the problem.
A laugh bubbled out of me. We’d made it. After months of fruitless searching and experimentation, I had a cure. I was finally going to save the dormant gargoyles.
Excitement overrode my vertigo, and I crouched to search for a way to the floor.
“There’s an easy way down over here,” Oliver said.
Thanks to the frequency of the protruding crystal ledges, descending was almost as simple as walking down stairs. Oliver stayed at my side, between me and the drop-off, and Celeste trailed behind us. I did my best not to notice the empty space below the see-through crystals, but I didn’t take a full breath until I stood on the floor that was so densely packed with evenly sized crystals it was almost smooth.
Oliver touched down beside me, then hissed, flapping back up to a ledge.
“It hurts worse here,” he said.