Her Cinder Throne (Completed)

Chapter 64

They moved toward the opening of the tunnel in order to get the light from the torches mounted on the walls. Tanwyn pulled the dagger they had bartered for out of his bag and used its small blade to hack at his billowing sleeves. The silk ripped ragged and uneven, hanging in loose threads across the pale skin of his biceps. He tossed the scraps back into the tunnel and then flipped the knife over, holding the blade in his palm and offering Cole the handle.

Cole took it and waited for Tanwyn as he turned around. His long hair that she had once seen as liquid and silky as ink, now was matted and tangled. Dirt and dust took away its lustre and left his once exquisite appearance to look little more than that of a beggar.

"Are you sure about this?" she asked, taking a handful of his hair in her other hand. "It had to have taken you years to get it this long."

"It's fine," he replied, but his voice was tight.

"No Eldritch has short hair, Tanwyn," Cole said. "This isn't just you getting ready for a battle. You'll be even more removed from them if I cut this all off." No wings and short hair. He might as well have been a human to anyone looking at him.

"You don't need to tell me what my people do or don't do," he snipped. "Just cut it before I do it myself."

She exhaled through her nose but gripped his hair in a handful at the base of his skull. Her fingertips grazed his neck as she combed it into place and rested her knuckles against his skin. It felt strangely... personal to be holding his hair. A flush rose to her cheeks but she quickly tamped it down. She wasn't accustomed to touching anyone, let alone the back of someone's neck. She was just touched starved, and that was it.

She nodded her head in confirmation of her own judgment, and then held the blade to the top of the bundle she'd made of Tanwyn's hair. The dagger wasn't that sharp, and Tanwyn's hair was thick and matted. It wouldn't be clean or pretty, but it would get it out of his way. She winced as she hacked at his hair, severing chunk by chunk to land with soft thumps in the dust. It felt like blasting the paint off a picture to leave nothing but the canvas. He had taken such pains to be as beautiful as all the other Eldritch, and now he was as ratty as she was herself.

When the largest portion of his hair was on the ground, Cole let go of the rest. It was now just below his chin and flopped forward into his eyes. He sighed.

"More," he said, his voice slow and defeated.

Cole sawed away until his skull was barer than her own. While hers had had the chance to grow a bit of length since leaving her mine, his was now freshly shorn down to the skull and glistening with blood in the few places she had accidentally nicked him. She ran a hand over his head, dusting away the left behind hair and hoping to soothe the cuts. As her palm traced its way over his skull, she felt him shift beneath her, sagging. She looked down, her eyes meeting his, and saw in them something deeper than just his hair lying on the floor. She held her breath, her hand still pressed on his skin just above his forehead.

He reached up, gently grabbing her wrist as if to pull it away. But he only held on, still staring at her. "If Thijs finds the Sparkstone before we do, he'll kill us all. Eldritch or human, no one will survive."

"Well, he hasn't found it yet, has he?" Cole asked, attempting brevity but ending up sounding more uncertain than she had wanted.

"He hasn't and he has an army. What are we going to do as just two people?" Tanwyn asked. "We should go back to Avallen and get the support of the Eldritch people behind you. They could come here and use their magic to easily get the Sparkstone-- monsters or no monsters."

Cole shook her head. "Your aunt wouldn't let me claim her throne so easily. We'd be fighting just as hard a battle in Avallen as we would here." She smiled softly. "But we're going to get through, Tanwyn. You're an Eldritch and I'm a miner. We're tough as iron."

Tanwyn sighed, finally pulling her hand down from his head and letting it drop back to her side. But he still held loosely onto her wrist. "The monsters have these soldiers terrified. There's a reason Thijs hasn't been able to access the stone yet, even after all the time he's had this mine open."

Cole smirked. "His soldiers aren't bound heart-to-heart," she said, reaching out and rapping his chest on his left side. "They'll run as soon as they see danger to save themselves. But I've got to worry about you, and you've got to worry about me. We won't be running or succumbing to the monsters."

Tanwyn nodded his head, his shoulders straightening back out and his fingers finally uncircling from around her wrist. Her hand felt strangely cold and light without the weight of his palm against her, but she rubbed it against the side of her shirt and busied herself with packing away the knife and tossing Tanwyn's shorn hair deep into the tunnel where it wouldn't be discovered. 

Tanwyn ran a hand swiftly over his new hair and grimaced. "Let's go before I start to realize what I probably look like," he said.

With that, the two stepped out of the tunnel they had been hiding in and looked down the tunnel with the marks of wagons and fresh dirt on the floor. This was the portal to either their doom or their salvation. Down the long tunnel, the countless ladders leading further and further into the depths, the clammy air, and the smell of rot, they walked. And with each step they felt a growing brooding of despair and fear that seeped across their skin and into their bones. This was not going to be a simple theft mission. This was a test of their very souls. And Cole felt lacking. She reached out as they walked through yet another tunnel, and grabbed Tanwyn's hand. They needed each other to pass this trial.