“No, it’s empty,” Antonio said. “And Leonardo is not talking, because he’s trying to shift the rock behind us to make it look like we went in another direction.”
“He can do that?” Zamek asked. “That’s incredibly powerful alchemy. Actually forget that. What he’s doing is dwarf-level alchemy.”
Leonardo stopped walking and turned back to face the rest of us. “Thank you for the compliment. I assure you, it took many years of practice. Also, I should inform you that those sorcerer’s bands can be removed whenever you wish. I didn’t put explosives in them like the Avalon ones. I tend not to want to put cruelty into my inventions anymore.”
I pulled the sorcerer’s band from my wrist and tossed it to the floor; the others did the same. My magic flooded back into me. “Thank you. I did wonder how long I had to wear that blasted thing.”
“We’re almost there,” Leonardo said, completely ignoring me once again and walking off to move more rock.
“It’ll be worth it,” Antonio promised. “He’s been excited and terrified in equal measure about this thing since we found it.”
“If it’s Asmodeus’s prison,” Lucifer said, “I’d be more terrified than excited.”
“So, have you finally told everyone you’re Lucifer?” Leonardo asked as he moved several tons of rock out of the way, creating a new passage.
“How long have you known?” Lucifer asked.
“I figured it out when I found the prison a year ago. You’ll see why.”
We were silent for the rest of the journey until Leonardo led us into a gigantic cavern. Purple writing glowed across the walls, and in the center was an empty dais that was big enough to put several dozen people. I walked over and found that it had similar writing to what was on the walls, although there was no color to it.
“What is this place?” I asked.
“What is this writing?” Selene asked at almost the exact same moment.
“There’s no prison here,” Sky said. “Unless it’s invisible, which is a distinct possibility considering the weird shit I’ve seen in the last few days.”
“It’s further on,” Leonardo said. “I just wanted you to see this, too.”
“It’s elvish,” Lucifer said. “I can’t read it, though.”
“The only elvish I know is from blood elves,” Zamek said. “And this isn’t anything like that.”
“I recognize this word here,” Lucifer said, pointing to a long mass of swirling patterns. “It means ‘moving,’ or ‘forward,’ something like that. It’s hard to explain, as elvish writing is a difficult thing to master. The elves kept their language a secret. There were no manuals, or people willing to teach it. What you learned you had to figure out on your own.”
“We believe that Shadow Falls was once an elven kingdom,” Leonardo said. “A shadow-elf kingdom to be exact.”
“That would be quite the coincidence,” Selene said.
“I think whoever came here first and named this place Shadow Falls knew it was always called that. I’ve found information that suggests this mountain was always known as Shadow’s Peak. So, whoever first came here probably knew the history of the realm.”
“So, if shadow elves lived here, it would have been before the elven civil war,” Zamek said. “Long before.”
“Thousands of years before, yes. There’s evidence of old ruins to the north. I think it was an old city that was razed to the ground at some point. It’s hard to say exactly when. I can’t read all that much elvish. There’s something you need to see, though.”
Leonardo led us under an archway at the edge of the cavern, and down a long, winding slope to a second cavern, which made the first one look about the size of a matchbox. Dozens of crystals in the ceiling lit the room, casting a blue-and-pink glow over everything.
“You could fit an aircraft carrier in here,” Sky said.
The cavern was the largest I’d ever seen outside of the dwarven realm, something Zamek appeared to think, too, considering the look on his face.
“You okay?” I asked him.
“It’s like home. It’s a lot to take in. Are you saying this isn’t dwarven, Leonardo? Because elves aren’t alchemists.”
“No. These caves were probably made by dwarves. I have no way of confirming that one way or the other, though. Do you notice there’s no writing?”
“What the fuck is that?” Sky asked, pointing to the center of the cavern.
In the center of the cavern was a cell. It resembled a huge bell with a metal door and several barred windows on what appeared to be two floors. Chains ran from the ceiling to the top and sides of the cell. Separating us was a twenty-foot-wide gap. I walked to the edge and looked down.
“Seven hundred feet deep by our last estimations,” Leonardo said. “There’s a bridge just there.”
I looked where he’d pointed, and indeed there was a sturdy-looking metal bridge.
“It’s the giant statues I’m more interested in,” Selene said.
Four fifteen-foot-high stone elf statues stood around the cell, all looking down on the cell. Each held a sword and shield that were taller than most people, and if the idea was to intimidate whoever was inside the cell into behaving, someone had certainly gone to a lot of effort.
“We don’t know what they are,” a voice from behind us said.
I turned to see Caitlin, Galahad, and Harrison enter the cavern. “Glad to see you made it down here okay,” Galahad said.
“Look, if you’re here to fight—” I started.
“We have a lot of explaining to do,” Harrison assured me.
“Those statues are one of the reasons we think that this was an elven realm,” Leonardo continued, as if the three newcomers hadn’t entered the room. “We’ve found plenty of items that we’ve taken from here showing drawings of elves, various pieces of writing. There’s a lot we don’t know, but we’re almost certain Shadow Falls was an elven realm.”
“What the hell is going on?” Sky asked.
“You might all want to sit down,” Galahad said, pointing toward a nearby workbench. “There’s a lot to go through.”
Once we were all seated next to the lengthy workbench, Leonardo picked up an old leather-bound book, passing it to me.
I flicked open the first page and found a drawing of Lucifer. “You’re in here,” I told him, showing him the picture of someone who looked almost identical to him.
He took the book from me and flicked through several of the pages. “Abaddon,” he said, showing me the picture of her. “And this is Asmodeus.”
Asmodeus looked like the kind of suave, sophisticated vampire that people wrote books about. He was handsome and in any other walk of life would probably have graced the covers of modeling magazines or would’ve been a big-name actor. He didn’t look threatening, or menacing. In fact there was a small smile tugging at the corners of his lips.