The Luna Queen's Rebirth (Ellie and Dominic) novel Chapter 495

Chapter 495

Ellie’s POV

The corridor split before I’d gone a hundred steps.

I stood at the fork with the fruit glowing against my chest and looked between two identical black mouths. The draft felt a little stronger on the left, so I went left. Fifty steps later, the passage split again.

Then again.

After the third fork, I started leaving marks. I’d picked up a sharp rock somewhere along the way, and at every split I scratched three quick lines into the wall before choosing a direction. It made me feel clever.

For about twenty minutes.

Then, when my light caught the same three lines that I had just made ten minutes before, I finally stopped walking and let my hands fall to my sides.

“Fuck,” I whispered.

The passages were looping, I realized. They doubled back and crossed themselves and spat me out into round chambers with five exits apiece and nothing to tell them apart. Some corridors narrowed until I had to shuffle through sideways. Others ended in blank stone for no reason at all.

This wasn’t a tunnel system. It was a labyrinth.

My ancestors hadn’t just hidden this place behind riddles and traps. They’d built it so that anyone who got in would never find their way back out.

To keep people out, maybe.

Or to keep something in.

I thought about the last panels on the rim. The sister, sinking into a well with no bottom. Then I shoved the thought down, because it wasn’t helping, and reached for the bond just in case.

“Dominic?”

It was still too dim to reach him. But it was there, which was reassuring.

He was alive. I kept repeating that to myself. He was alive, and so was I. We’d find each other, just like we always did, against all odds. Besides, this labyrinth couldn’t go on forever. There had to be an exit somewhere.

Right?

The cave on the other side was small and damp and ended immediately, just a tiny pocket likely formed from ancient magma flows, but it was noticeably warmer than the corridors. The walls were somewhat slick with water that was dripping down through a crack overhead, and the air was slightly humid. I immediately felt a little less cold.

The Seeker pulled me toward the far corner of the cave. On my hands and knees, I shuffled over, and spotted its source-a small cluster of tiny white mushrooms.

Eat, the Seeker seemed to say.

I sat back on my heels.

“You can’t be serious,” I said out loud.

Everything I knew about medicine said otherwise. Unknown fungus, no way to test it, no one to help if it went

wrong.

But the Seeker had never steered me wrong. Every plant it had ever dragged me to had a purpose, even when I couldn’t see it yet. It told me to take the fruit, and the fruit had given me light when everything else went dark.

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