The Ashenell was huge. It had been transported along with the city when Kirisin Belloruus used the Loden Elfstone to rescue his people after the Great Wars. In it were hundreds of thousands of Elves who had died over the centuries, some buried in huge stone mausoleums that held as many as a hundred members of a single family, some buried in the earth in layers that ran twenty to thirty feet deep, and some even buried standing up beneath inscribed flagstones measuring no more than three feet square.
There were hundreds of thousands more who had been cremated and had their ashes stored in urns, sometimes entire families, preferring that their remains be joined for all time. No one knew for sure how many Elves were buried here. Some markers had been shattered or their inscriptions damaged so badly they were unreadable, and those to whom they were dedicated had been lost. Some of the tombs had collapsed, and some of the grave sites had been rededicated. Keeping track after so much time in a city that had existed since the dawn of Faerie was impossible. There were records kept in the palace archives, but even these had not survived entirely intact.
But it wasn’t this that made the Ashenell such a forbidding place for Phryne. It wasn’t the dead or their tombs and markers.
It was the dark magic that resided in the earth.
Everyone had heard the stories. Elves who had disappeared without a trace while venturing into the tombs after sunset. Elves who had tinkered with the markers and the writings and been found burned to a crisp. Elves who had wandered in thinking to find their way out again and been lost. Elves who had encountered things so terrible that it had cost them their voices and their sanity. Elves who had been changed into something unrecognizable.
She did not necessarily believe all those stories. But she had witnessed at least one incident firsthand, and that was enough. When she was a little girl, she had gone into the Ashenell on a dare, leaving behind her two cousins, Pare and Freysen. Girls like her, though older, they had given her a dare and she had been stubborn enough to ignore common sense and her own instincts and accept it. She had gone in with the intention of touching the tomb that housed the most recent members of the Amarantyne family.
Her word that she had done so would be good enough for them, her cousins had agreed.
Phryne would not have lied in any case—not about this or anything else that had to do with accepting a dare. She was still trying to find her place in the family, her mother recently dead, and her father already beginning to drift away. What confidence she possessed derived in part from her legacy as part Amarantyne and part Belloruus and from an iron resolve that got her through everything difficult. She employed that resolve on this night and went into the tombs and touched the one that belonged to her father’s people.
She was on her way back again, feeling strong and steady as a result of her accomplishment when she encountered the dog, a creature fully six feet high at the shoulder and perhaps a dozen feet long. It came out of nowhere to confront her, blood dripping from its jaws and eyes burning like live coals. She froze where she was, unable to move, unable to do anything but stand there and wait to see what it intended. For a long time, it regarded her, as if measuring her value against its interest. But in the end, it turned away and vanished.
She came out of the Ashenell shaking in terror, unable to do anything but run home and cower under her sheets. When morning came she was herself again and decided it must have been an apparition.
But then she heard that a man engaged in breaking into one of the tombs had been killed that same night, his wounds indicating that he had been torn apart by a creature the like of which no one could even imagine.
So she did not discount the presence of magic and of things born of that magic. She did not think the Elven people brought such things to life intentionally, but she did think their use of magic left a residue and a legacy that allowed such things to come alive on their own.
“You should wait here,” she told Xac Wen, looking at the dark shadows of the mix of trees and tombs and markers.
“You should stop talking and just follow me,” he answered back.
Without waiting to see what she would do, he walked right through the gates and into the Ashenell. That boy’s got more courage than good sense, she thought. But she hurried after him.
She caught up to him and took over the lead. She knew in what section of the cemetery the Belloruus family was buried; she had been there more than once, although always in daylight except for that one unfortunate time. She also knew about the Belloruusian Arch. Constructed not long after the city and its populace had been carried out of the Cintra and resituated in this valley, it was the monument that defined the section reserved for the whole of the family and its various members.
They reached it quickly enough—it wasn’t that far from the southern gate—taking a direct path through the tombs in an effort to reach their destination while it was still dark. Phryne found herself searching the shadows the entire way, memories of her encounter with the ghost dog suddenly as fresh as the day it had happened. But they encountered nothing and no one, and arrived without incident.