my imagination. I could smell him again: the faint, strangely comforting scent of wood smoke and sage.
We flew down and down, deeper and deeper into the seemingly bottomless pit. Slowly, the walls narrowed, till after an hour I could almost reach out and touch them. The moss disappeared, replaced first with mushrooms and fungi. Then those too vanished, and we were left with bare stone.
But the rock wasn’t endlessly gray. Cutting through it were great veins of quartz, shadowy caves that led into darkness—once, we even passed a massive cavity filled with glowing crystals as tall as men. This was Night Elf territory, though I saw no sign of my kind. It got darker, too, but that wasn’t a problem for me. My silver eyes pierced the shadows with ease.
We must have been descending for a least an hour before I noticed the first root. Initially, I didn’t know what it was—a brown serpent that seemed to cling to the rock? But as we continued to descend, they became more and more frequent, and it was obvious they were the woody extremities of trees.
It was strange to see roots this deep in the earth, and I was about to ask Marroc about them when suddenly the walls of the cave disappeared and we passed into an absolutely enormous cavern. The roof was stone, but as far as I could see, there were no walls, just blackness that even my Night Elf eyes couldn’t penetrate.
One glance at the cavern’s floor answered my questions about the roots I’d seen twisting through the well’s walls. It was covered in a massive tangle of them. Giant and tuberous, they wrapped and twined amongst themselves like the entrails of a gutted beast. We flew lower and lower, and I was awestruck by their size. Even the smallest ones were humongous, as tall and wide as houses.
Marroc directed the moth toward a bare spot amongst the roots, and we landed. Stepping off, he offered me his hand, which I took. The moth rose into the air, and the now-familiar flapping of its wings quickly faded into silence. Looking up, I saw that shadows obscured the ceiling. There was no sign of the Well of Wyrd.
“Is this the roots of Yggdrasill?” I whispered. Awe washed over me. It was the cosmic tree that bound the Nine Worlds together.
Marroc’s pen scratched for a moment on his notebook. Yes. Now we must find the great Shore of the Dead, where the dragon Nidhogg dwells.
I nodded, my skin going cold. “Okay. Sounds like a great time.”
I’d do whatever I had to if it meant getting my ring back.
Chapter 21
Marroc
I had crossed the northern seas, traveled the astral plane, once visited the mists of Niflheim, but nothing had prepared me for the vastness of Yggdrasill. The power of the cosmos flowed through the intertwining roots, humming up my legs. Even if we failed—if we died and our souls were sent to Helheim—this trip alone would have been worth it. Few elves had visited the place where the gods used to dwell.
“I don’t see any sign of the ring.” Ali interrupted my thoughts, and I realized I’d forgotten about the ring.
The ring was now worth only the weight of the gold from which it had been cast. The true prize was Ali herself. She was the one who housed my soul. But I couldn’t explain that to her; I’d taken her with me under the pretense of finding that ring.
Ignoring my curse, I inscribed sowilo in the air, and light bloomed. With a flick of my wrist, I cast up the glowing rune so that it hovered above us, giving me light to search the overgrown floor.
With the glow in the air, I could see that we stood atop a massive root, wide as a Viking longboat was long. It was nearly black, and slick with water. A few pale mushrooms grew on the bark, dotting it like stars, but I saw no sign of the ring.
“Are those bones?” asked Ali.
She was pointing to something on the opposite the side of the root. My eyes followed her finger to what was, in fact, a massive mound of bones. It took me a moment to work out how they’d got there. Piled higher than any of the nearby roots, they made me wonder how many thousands of years the High Elves had been throwing their enemies into the abyss.
And this meant we were likely in the right spot—the place where objects thrown in