The Elves of Cintra (Book 2 of The Genesis of Shannara)

Kirisin glanced back at her. The runes carved in her staff glowed faintly in the dark, pulsing softly. Her face was tight with concentration, and her eyes shifted restlessly as she descended, her footfalls soundless in the near silence. Perhaps in the company of a Knight of the Word, they needed no other protection.

He listened to his own breathing, which seemed to him the loudest sound in the stairwell. He tried to quiet it and failed. The pumping of his heart was a steady throbbing in his ears, and he tried and failed to quiet that, too.

The air grew steadily colder with their descent, changing from a dry woodland smell to the scent of damp rock and rain-soaked leaves.

Somewhere farther down, he could hear water trickling over rocks. It reminded him of the mountain caves he had explored as a boy and of the graves of the dead on days when burials had to be held in the rain.

The stairs tunneled downward for a long time before ending in a narrow corridor that leveled off into what appeared to be a natural opening. Burning torches continued to mark their way, small flickering dots disappearing into the darkness. They moved ahead cautiously, listening to the silence that surrounded the soft sounds of their breathing and their footfalls, their senses strained and their expectancy heightened. There was something down here, something they were meant to find once they had made the decision to enter. The still-unanswered question, the fuel for their doubts and fears, was whether it was something that would prove dangerous.

Suddenly Simralin held up her hand, bringing them to a stop. “Wait.”

They stood silently, listening. After a moment, they could detect a faint sound from somewhere ahead, a soft, sibilant whisper. Kirisin tried and failed to identify it. He felt instinctively and for reasons he could not explain that it was a warning, but he could not tell what it warned against.

Simralin held them in place a moment longer, glanced back to make certain they were alert to the strange sound, and then started them forward once more.

The passageway turned sharply left and straightened right again. It began to open up, the ceiling rising and the walls widening.

Stalactites began to appear, small at first and then large enough to dwarf the people passing beneath them, huge stone spears from which droplets of water fell, stinging with cold as they struck Kirisin on the face. He glanced up and found himself staring into a forest of tapering stone spirals clustered so thickly that he could no longer see the ceiling at all.

The passageway ended at a cavern dominated by a black water pool that filled a broad depression at its center. The surface of the water was flat and still, as if it comprised not liquid but opaque glass. The chamber itself was so large that its walls receded into blackness, invisible save where tiny pinpricks of torch fire burned bravely in the heavy gloom.

But it wasn’t the chamber or the pool that drew everyone’s eyes. It was the cluster of stone crypts and sepulchers that sprouted from the cavern floor. Those that were closest had writing that could be read in the flicker of the torchlight. Some had been carved with the letter G. Some bore the name GOTRIN.

Kirisin stared openmouthed. How many of them were there?

Dozens and dozens, it seemed. Perhaps more than a hundred.

“They are all buried down here,” he said, speaking aloud the words he was thinking, words that had come to him unbidden. “Those from Pancea’s time, they are all buried here. The tombs aboveground do not belong to them.”

He didn’t know how he knew this; he simply did. He was already walking ahead, moving into that stone garden, feeling his way in his mind to the tomb he wanted. He couldn’t have said why, but he felt it calling to him, drawing him on as if a voice speaking. He moved in response to that silent voice, conscious of almost nothing else. The others followed, glancing at each other in bewilderment, but letting the boy go where he chose.

He walked down almost to the edge of the pool and stopped before a triangular-shaped block of stone. Carved into its head, on the short, flat side of the triangle, were the letters P, R, and G.

He became aware suddenly that the whispering he had heard earlier was coming from here. But the pitch and tone had changed, and now it was less an unidentifiable sound and more a recognizable voice.

“She is here,” he said.

Even as he finished speaking the words, the torches all about them began to flicker and dim and the pool of black water to swirl. There was wind where before there had been only stillness, a sudden rush that whipped down out of the ceiling rock and swept across the cavern floor. It was momentarily fierce, causing the four intruders to drop into a crouch and shield their eyes. Kirisin took refuge behind Pancea’s tomb, bracing himself with one hand against the cold stone, head lowered to protect his eyes.

“Kirisin!” he heard Erisha gasp.

–Why are the living come to me–The voice was low-pitched and gravel-rough, and it echoed through the cavern in the wake of the wind’s departure, the silence returned anew, deep and abiding.