The Rising Stones (Ihale Book 1)

or spiders. Fainting from hunger would not be the best way to do that.
The moss tasted faintly green and quite a lot like dirt, but the worst part was how stringy and tough it was. It wasn't as slimy as she first thought, which would have actually improved the texture. Instead it felt a little like chewing on damp cotton. Swallowing it wasn't much fun, either.
"Well, I'm calling it. We're going to die down here." She accepted Rhyss's canteen. Despite the purifying ring around the mouth piece, the water still tasted bad, too. She realized her little joke had turned a gloomy atmosphere into a downright melancholy one and winced a bit. "Sorry."
"Time and place, Bel." Heln didn't look up from the floor.
"Not to say anything of audience."
"True, that's always an important factor."
"Both of you, shut up and eat your moss."
They did that, entering a sort of numb, tired silence in the absence of their banter. Bel watched the snail for a while, but it wasn't really that extraordinary in the long run. When Rhyss became a fully-fledged Guard, she would meet all sorts of fantastical creatures. No one knew if the monsters in the forest were left over bits of magic that had gained sentience, or just creations of the ancient war that had raged around Old Ihale City for longer than memory could know. Either way, no one wanted them on the streets. The new city itself was ringed with defenses and a permanent barrier, but keeping something that large maintained and powerful enough to stop any threat took a lot of magic. Bel had looked into being a barrier specialist, but decided being called out at all hours and suffering possible intense magical burnout and death wasn't really the direction she wanted her life to take.
Besides, it meant working closely with the Guard, and that just wasn't in the cards for her.
Rhyss ate her portion of moss and curled up under her cloak. "I am sleeping. I don't care who takes watch but someone had better take watch."
Bel supposed that was fair, the creature from the night before was proof that Heln was not going to be infallible when it came to anything down there, but she was bone deep exhausted.
"Not it." She said, quickly.
"I was going to offer, actually, you made the barrier." Heln smiled a bit and Bel immediately felt bad.
"No, I mean, I can—"
"It's fine," Heln told her. "Besides, I was going to… get the lay of the land, I guess. Yes, with my weird mind powers, thank you for your clarification. It'll be easier if it's quiet."
"I'm not even going to touch upon the implications of that sentence, but know it's only because I'm tired, not because I'm ignoring it." Bel told him, feeling something that felt a lot like regret curling in her gut. It must have been the moss.
Still, the odds of being nicer to Heln actively causing her untimely demise were pretty abysmal.
"Goodnight." Heln told them.
"Technically we don't know what time it is." She just couldn't seem to help herself.
"Shut up and go to sleep," Rhyss practically snarled.
Bel nodded even though she was turned away from her and curling up between two tree roots. It was cold, but only vaguely uncomfortable with the padding in her coat and her satchel propping up her head.
She thought she would fall asleep right away with the exhaustion hanging off of her bones the way it was, but she found herself watching the snail for a while. It made its way steadily across the root to the tunnel wall, leaving a glittering trail like it was followed by stars.

Chapter Seven
At home, Heln's room overlooked the garden.
He'd always found it too quiet compared to his place in the industrial part of the city with his mom; a tiny, cramped space right next to a buzzing and spitting light that was dim more often than not. His entire childhood could be mapped to the heartbeat of it running out of magic and the months it took for someone to refill it.
At his father's house, he could still feel the magic lamps, but they didn't make any noise and they were regularly maintained.
It wasn't until he was in the tunnel, the only noise the sound of two other people breathing, that he realized how much he was missing the sound of the wind through the trees, the crickets that would assault his room with noise as summer gave way to fall, the sounds of creatures moving quietly through the garden that his grandmother so lovingly maintained, even after she moved at the beginning of the summer to the senior community. His dad smiled and said it was just an excuse to see them. Heln hated gardening, but he would sit outside with her sometimes, listening to her talk about the way things used to be while she worked the soil with fingers that looked like old tree roots.
He shook his head a bit and broke himself out of the doze he had been falling into. With nothing to distract him here in the cave, silence pressed against his ears. He wanted to hum, or maybe even attempt to sing despite being tragically tone deaf, but even if Rhyss wouldn't have killed him, the sounds were still stuck in his throat.
Eventually he stood, taking his light stick and stepping outside of the barrier and sitting with his back against one of the larger tree roots. The barrier was safety, but the change in scenery was a balm against his raw nerves. Outside of the barrier he could see the glow of the strange little forest that had cocooned the tunnel. The whole place was alive with magic, even through his shields, feeding off of the scripts that had kept the tunnels preserved for possibly hundreds of years. He wondered if the roots had brought the moss, or if it had always grown there.
It was beautiful, in its own way, and when he had been sitting still