The Rising Stones (Ihale Book 1)

into it. The light shattered across its shoulder and it grunted, but didn't stop.
Bel grabbed her arm and started dragging her before she ran on her own.
The entire tunnel was shaking, dust raining from the ceiling. Heln held the light stick out in front of them, orange light bouncing wildly off the walls.
"Hey ugly!"
Heln turned in time to see Vin hit the thing in the back with a ball of magic. It spun around to face him with a shower of loose soil.
"Vin!" Rhyss skidded to a stop on the smooth floor and started to run back.
"Get going!" Half of Vin's face was covered in a sheet of blood that gleamed in the light of the next volley of magic he was reading. "This tunnel should lead straight to the Temple! Run!"
Rhyss bit her lip, squared her shoulders a bit, shoved Heln's shoulder and began running again.
There was a loud crash behind them. When Heln looked back he couldn't see anything, not even moonlight filtering through the cave entrance.

Chapter Three
Rhyss ran until it felt like someone had stabbed her in the side with a hot poker. She stumbled to a stop, leaning against her knees and trying hard to breathe, but each gasp for air strangled out of her like a sob.
Vin was probably dead.
He had been her mentor ever since she became a Trainee when she turned fifteen the year before. Maybe she wasn't always the best student, and maybe he wasn't always the best teacher, but they'd always gotten along.
Why had he come alone? She'd said it was an emergency in her message to him. Even if it was her first time out on patrol by herself he knew that she took her duties very seriously. Maybe he hadn't taken her as seriously as she thought.
She shook her head, trying to dislodge that thought. Vin could still be alive, maybe he hadn't been alone, there could have been back up behind him. It had been so dark that she couldn't be sure.
That thought was like a steel pillar she could cling to, letting stillness settle into her core as she slowly stood up straight just as light dashed off of the tunnel walls. Heln and Bel had finally caught up. She blinked at them, shielding her face from the illumination bubble Bel had brought up.
"You shouldn't run off like that, what if there had been a hole or something?" Bel's face was white.
"You're too slow." She glared at Heln. He was still holding his useless light stick and breathing like he was dying. "What did you do?"
"I didn't do anything." Heln looked up at her, genuinely confused. "I'm sorry about Vin. I'm sure he's okay. It didn't look like he got hit hard."
She was sure that he wasn't okay, deep down, but she had to know. She absolutely had to know. In two steps she was in front of him, grabbing his shoulders a little too tightly. "Can you sense him?"
Heln stepped back from her grasp and looked away. "Maybe. I don't know his magical signature, and if there are too many of those… those things back there then I'm really not sure."
"Well, sense for magic that isn't those things back there." She took a deep breath, getting angry and lashing out at the only person who could give her answers was not going to help anything, even if it did make her feel better for a moment. "Just try. Please. He's my mentor."
Heln nodded. "Bel, take out the bubble, I don't want it to confuse me."
Bel nodded and the bubble disappeared, the light turning orange until Heln deactivated his light stick, too, the glow fading slowly from the crystal.
For a moment it was dark. Her eyes adjusted and she realized the moss that clung to the tunnel walls was glowing. Faintly, just enough that she could make out the general shape of the tunnel and see the silhouettes of the DoVan siblings. Heln's eyes were glowing, too. They were half closed, cat slits of bright green, his head tilted to one side like he was listening to something far away.
It was creepy, and she couldn't keep herself from shuddering a little bit.
His head jerked back up and his eyes stopped glowing, at least enough that she couldn't see them anymore. "We need to get going, there are… more things behind us. I thought I sensed Ihalin magic back there but it's different when it's not actively being used, so it's really hard to tell. I'm sorry."
It was good enough for her. Vin was alive and she was going to grip that thought with her teeth if she had to.
"Work on it." She told him instead. "That could be useful. Maybe you could even join the Guard someday."
"The Guard doesn't allow low Ihalins." Heln's voice was too even for her to know if that upset him.
"Besides, why would he want to?" Bel cut in. "We're both joining the Enforcers when we get out of school, y'know, so we can actually be useful."
Rhyss shrugged even though they couldn't see it.
Bel had been in almost all of her classes since she started school. They'd butted heads for as long as she could remember, but Heln was more of a mystery. Rumor had it that his mother had dumped him on his father's doorstep one night, saying she couldn't deal with it anymore. Bel had done nothing to squash those rumors. All Rhyss could do was assume there was a grain of truth, though she'd heard her mothers talking about how he had been awfully old for it after Heln started school.
Low Ihalins couldn't use magic the way high Ihalins could. They could use the amulets and items with an already activated script, but they couldn't use script on their own. Their ears weren't nearly as pointed and long as a full high Ihalin and their hair colors were usually more on the warm spectrum, like Heln's red. Some low Ihalins had the ability to sense magic script. That