The Luna Queen's Rebirth (Ellie and Dominic) novel Chapter 473

Chaphe 473

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Chapter 473

Ellie’s POV

Bastian was pounding on the clinic door before the sun had fully come up over the peaks the next morning. When I opened it, I found him standing there with a pack slung over one shoulder and a pickaxe in his fist.

“You said to come at dawn,” he said when I gave him a withering look, my eyes still half-closed from sleep.

“I said to come in the morning,” I clarified.

“Same thing.” He looked past me to where Dominic was coming down the stairs, still shrugging into his coat.” Good, you’re both up. The weather’s supposed to turn after midday, so we should get moving.”

I’d filled Dominic in on everything days ago-the legend, the riddle, the opal deposit, the dry basin sitting at the heart of the ruins. He’d listened the whole way through without laughing once, and when I finished, he’d asked exactly one question: “When do we start digging?”

Apparently, the answer was now.

The climb was easier in daylight, without the wind trying to shove us off the mountain and without my heart in my throat over a missing seven-year-old. We reached the gap in the rocks within the hour, and Bastian went through first, lantern raised, squeezing his large body through. I went after, with Dominic grunting behind me.

The cave hadn’t changed. The etching sat exactly where we’d left it, the arrow still aimed at the summit’s eastern shoulder.

Bastian got to work immediately, pulling out his rubbing and a compass and a notebook, measuring the angle of the arrow against the real mountain and muttering numbers to himself. Dominic held the second lantern for him. I wandered the edges of the chamber with the first, sweeping the light along the walls, the corners, the floor.

I tried the Seeker ability on the place out of pure curiosity. Nothing. The cave was too dry and rocky for anything other than a few weeds.

So I searched the old-fashioned way instead.

The cave floor was natural rock, uneven and rippled the way stone got when water had shaped it a long time ago. Except for one spot near the back wall, directly beneath the etching, where a flat slab sat flush with the ground. The seams around it were straight. Too straight.

I crouched and ran my fingers along one edge. Tool marks.

“Bastian.”

“Busy.”

“Someone cut this.”

That got him to look up. He crossed the cave in three strides and dropped down beside me, holding his lantern to see better. His eyes went from the slab, to the etching directly above it, and back down again.

“Move back,” he said, already reaching for the pickaxe.

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It took the two of them working together, Bastian chipping away at the stone with the pick while Dominic wedged his fingers under the lip and hauled. The slab eventually came up with a grinding scrape and a gust of stale air, and we all leaned over the hole at once, three lanterns crowding for the same view.

The cavity underneath was small and lined with flat stones, and in the center of it sat a bundle. Waxed leather, stiff and dark with age, tied with a cord that crumbled the moment I touched it.

“Careful,” Bastian breathed.

I lifted the bundle out with both palms, set it on the cave floor between us, and peeled the leather back one fold at a time.

Inside was a cup.

It was carved from a single piece of stone, shallow and wide, more of a ceremonial dipper than anything you’d actually drink out of. A band of what looked like opal had been set into the rim, and even down here, in nothing but lantern light, the stone caught fire-blues and greens and a flash of orange under the surface when I turned it in my palm. Waves were carved around the outside in a repeating pattern.

The same waves that were carved around the rim of the dry basin.

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