Rhyss stared at the barrier. It might have been a trick of the blue color of the pond, but she swore it seemed brighter than it had a few hours before. At least, she assumed it was a few hours. Her wrist guard was supposed to tap out the time to her, but it hadn't for long enough that she was certain it was malfunction rather than her sense of time being skewed.

Bel had sprawled out on the moss and Heln had curled up into a ball, using his satchel as a pillow. At least it wasn't too cold with her cloak draped over her and the barrier dampening the worst of the chill. Bel had been surprised that, as a Guard Trainee, Rhyss didn't know any warming scripts. She pointed out that Bel didn't know them, either. That had started a new round of bickering that had been interrupted by Heln calmly saying that if anything didn't know they were in the tunnels, it probably would if they kept fighting.

Still, despite the soft moss underneath her and the quiet sounds of water that sounded like her listening crystal at home, sleep wouldn't come for her, not even after she ran through her breathing exercises for the fourth time. Vin's face, the monstrous construct and the way Heln's eyes had glowed kept flashing through her mind, yanking her out of dozing every time sleep nearly became a reality.

It felt like hours before she gave up, pulling her armor back on. The snaps pulled together by magic, locking securely into place. Even if it was bare minimum armor, made from scripted willow, it still made her feel more secure. Rhyss stood, stretched carefully, and stepped out of the barrier.

It was always a strange feeling, like a gentle humming at the back of her mind was silenced before she was even fully aware of it.  Maybe that was a very watered-down version of how sensing magic felt for Heln. She'd never even given a thought to it.

On the outside the barrier looked like a giant soap bubble. Heln and Bel were just barely visible inside of it, still asleep. She thought about leaving them a message, but she doubted they would wake up. She didn't plan to be gone for long.

She started walking, picking the tunnel the stream continued into. The odds of her being so deep underground again were slim to none. Her odds of continuing her Guard training might be slim to none, too. Her mother would be disappointed.

Her wife not quite as much. Rhyss's step-mother had always hated the Guard for how hard it had worked her mother and for taking her leg in an attack on the edge of the city, at one of the weaker points of the barrier. It had ended her career. She insisted that the magical replacement worked almost well enough for her to continue her duties as Captain, but she had settled in as Dean of the Eleti Academy of the Magical Arts like her grandmother had before her. She hadn't even tried to stop Rhyss from signing up to be a Trainee, saying her children could make their own decisions, but she'd seemed proud.

Her injury hadn't stopped Rhyss, either. She respected her mother and her sacrifices. If Rhyss was injured or died protecting her city, then that was a burden she was willing to bear.

Saying that and seeing Vin, bleeding and hurt trying to protect them felt like two very different things. Her stomach churned. She wasn't a coward, but seeing the violence of the construct up close and how it had taken down her mentor was a world away from stories around a campfire. Or having a bag of rocks strapped to her back and told to climb to the top of a tree.

All of that training, talking, and polishing her armor seemed so useless when the reality was a few brutal moments.

Her boot splashed down into a puddle, jerking her from her thoughts. At some point she had started jogging and stopping nearly sent her face first into mud.

The stream was backed up here. A swirl of silt and water became what looked like solid mud. Rhyss sent her illumination bubble forward. Farther down the tunnel a set of steps rose from the mud, rising sharply into more darkness. The mud leading up to them looked deep, especially with the way the tunnel was sloping towards the base of the stairs, but that had to be the stairs that led back out to the Temple.

She didn't want to find out how much mud was there while she was by herself, even though it was killing her wondering if freedom was just at the top of a flight of stairs. She would get the siblings and drag them up there; no sense in wading through the muck twice. That decided, she turned back the way she had come, the bubble coming back to meet her, and the shadows moved strangely in the corner of her eye. She whipped back around, but the tunnel was just as empty as before.

It took a moment for her heart to stop pounding. Once it had she began trekking back to where she'd left Bel and Heln, trying to ignore the mud sucking at the bottom of her boots.

It didn't take long to get back to what counted as solid ground and she began scraping her boots uselessly against the moss. They were Trainee regulation and made to withstand a lot more than a little mud, but she'd kept them nice for so long.

"Stupid Bel," she muttered, dragging her foot and probably actually making the mud worse. "Stupid shortcut. Stupid, stupid, stupid idiots."

There was no way the two siblings could hear her from here but that didn't matter. She nearly fell over with how vehemently she moved her foot and saw what she had missed the first time she had gone down the tunnel. The muddier parts of the tunnel had been perforated with deep dents that dwarfed her own footprints.

When she looked closer she realized what they were. Tracks, large ones, spaced nearly as wide as the tunnel itself. It hadn't been visible in the round chamber because of the moss, but something clearly was living down there, something wide and low enough to the ground that it had disturbed the stream banks very recently.

She ran back to camp. She had gone a lot farther down the tunnel than she had thought. What kind of Guard was she? Bel and Heln were civilians and she shouldn't have left them, not even for a moment. Especially since she had seen no evidence of animal life in the tunnels despite all of the plant life. That had been one of the first things she learned — if the little things aren't there it's usually because something bigger was living off of them.

The room was exactly the same as she had left it and she felt relief burst like a balloon inside of her. Bel and Heln were still asleep when she charged into the barrier, nearly stepping on their faces.

"Get up." She hissed, loudly. "We have to go. Now."

"What happened to sleeping?" Bel opened one eye and glared at her. When she sat up she looked almost put together and Rhyss had to wonder if she had slept at all, because Heln's short red hair was standing on end when he sat up and blinked owlishly at her

"You slept. Let's go." Rhyss was glad she had packed her own satchel, swinging it over her shoulder and shoving Bel's belongings into her own, throwing it at her. She made a noise of protest but Rhyss didn't bother to see if she'd hit her, concentrating on Heln. "Do you sense anything?"

"The barrier script is sort of like… that cottony feeling you get with a cold." Heln was at least moving and gave a nudge to Bel, who was groaning piteously about how Rhyss had murdered her. Somehow Rhyss got her standing without too much fuss. "Why? Is something out there?"

"I don't know, but I really don't want to find out," Rhyss admitted. Ice was in her veins and it made her numb to anything but fear. "Leave the barrier up, just in case."

"Fine." Bel seemed to be taking things seriously enough. At the very least she didn't sound completely like a petulant child. "May I ask in case of what? More constructs?"

Heln shook his head. "No. There's nothing here that I can sense."

That didn't make Rhyss feel better, somehow. She drew her dagger, pressing her thumb against the script in the hilt and activating the magic in the blade before she stepped across the barrier line.

Heln crossed it last and nothing disastrous happened. "I still don't sense any of those things, before you ask."

"Fantastic." Bel smiled, but she must have seen something in her expression. "So… are we heading back or…?"

She barely heard the noise over Bel talking, but it was there, like the soft hiss of a breath. She shoved Bel backwards just as something dropped heavily from the ceiling right where they had been standing.

It was big, that was her first impression. Then it lifted its head, nearly lost in the darkness of the cave, and she realized that big didn't quite cover it. It looked like a massive black snake with a bird's beak. The pale plating over its head looked like a skull and large, white spines jutted out of the back in a thick row. Vin had always told her to look for the eyes and go for the soft tissue in the joints, especially when something had scales, but she didn't see either one at first. A moment of panic hit her, the thing was shaking its head and making the spines rattle like dead tree branches in the wind. It lunged at her and she saw the legs, small, but definitely there, the claws scoring the ground.

Rhyss dove out of the way, rolling into a crouch. The beak scraped a long, dark line in the moss. The head swiveled towards her again. This time, when its head snapped forward with frightening speed, she was ready and slashed at it with her knife.

It bounced harmlessly off of the creature with a spray of sparks and magic, startling it enough that it jerked away from her, knocking her onto the ground.

If she lived through this, she was going to shake Heln until his teeth rattled.

"Follow the stream!" There were no other options. The thing was blocking the only other exit; every time she tried to sidestep it weaved into her way even though she still hadn't figured out where its eyes were. If she had any luck at all the stairs would lead up to the Temple so at least Bel and Heln would be safe.

It looked like she might to die in the line of duty after all.

The monster chittered at her, sounding eerily like one of the birds in her mother's garden. It clacked its beak with the harsh sound of bones snapping. The inside of its mouth was a vivid blue, almost the same color as the pond.

"Hey, ugly!"

That was Bel's voice, just before a ball of magic flew over her shoulder. It would have missed the creature entirely, but it swiveled around to catch it in midair, the magic shining through the nostril slits in its beak before it swallowed the script.

Rhyss turned and ran, not waiting to see if Bel had helped or hurt her immediate survival. She caught up to them easily, shoving a hand between Heln's shoulder blades and pushing him forward.

Bel made a loud noise of disgust when they hit the mud and Rhyss thought she might have to haul her through it, but her self-preservation instincts must have finally kicked in and she waded into it with a face that in any other time or place Rhyss would have wanted painted, framed, and put in a hall of portraits of her enemies so she could laugh at it forever. 

"This is by far the worst day of my life."

"Shut up, Bel," Heln told her, his voice a lot quieter, though Rhyss didn't think the volumes of their voices made much of a difference with all of the splashing they were doing.

She was quickly up to her waist in freezing cold mud. It made her movements sluggish. When Heln stumbled, she barely managed to grab his hood to keep him from eating mud pie. A moment later, her own boot hit the stair that had nearly tripped him up and she scrambled up onto it.

They were out of the mud and up several steps before she realized that they weren't being followed.

"I think it's eating your barrier, Bel." Heln looked faintly ill.

"That. That is disgusting." Bel was shivering on the step above her. The end of her blue ponytail was black with mud. "These stairs had better lead directly to the Temple or… or I'm going to be really, really upset."

"I think they do, but wherever they lead we should get there. Now." Rhyss deactivated her dagger but kept it in her hand. The familiar weight kept her focused. She thought about bringing out her second, non-magical dagger, but she didn't want to give it to either of them, so it stayed in her boot for emergencies. Bigger emergencies.

The stairs were easy to climb. She kept getting too far ahead of her companions and finally settled with being at the rear, trusting that Bel would at least yell out a warning of anything ahead before her untimely demise. There were two tunnel entrances halfway up, dark like empty sockets. Bel ignored them so Rhyss did, too. If Heln had any comment he let it go to focus on breathing.

The stairs evened out and Bel sat down, gasping like she'd been running for hours. Rhyss was suddenly glad for all the times she climbed a tree with a bag of rocks on her back. Her breathing was still even and the hike had warmed her up. It took Bel minutes before she could even talk. "I… I think we lost it. Right?"

They both looked at Heln, who sat down, curling his knees up to his chest. He looked startled when he realized they expected something from him. "Don't look at me, I didn't know that thing was there, why would I know where it is now?"

"Well, maybe now that it's eaten—"

"Your barrier is gone, that's all I can tell you, but I think we would probably hear it coming if it was after us again. If you're hoping that I can sense an absence of magic in a place full of magic then you're going to be really disappointed." Heln shrugged.

Maybe Rhyss wouldn't make his teeth rattle as much as she had initially planned. Once they were out of this she still planned on a good shaking.

She settled for punching his arm. "Well, tell me if you do sense anything."

He just glared at her and rubbed his arm.