Chapter Thirteen: The Underworld
He lay in a drowned cathedral. Or a cave.
Have you been here before?
“No,” he replied.
You’re not the first.
“I think I guessed that.”
It was like the dark interior of a temple, with windows and colored sunbeams in the ceiling, with rafters or branches thick before it. A labyrinth of small lights, glittering green and blue and violet. All else was dark.
Columns lifted toward the roof, spreading at their tops and bases. This might be a cave, Ranglen thought, a purple cave though most of it was black. And inside it the soft lights drifted. He couldn’t tell if they were insects or birds or some other kind of creature. Pixies? Fairies? Each in its little glowing globe. Or maybe they were plants, flowers in flight.
Sometimes a shaft of light came down am
