No matter how much I wanted to hold Sam, there was only so much pain I could take.

That limit proved to be one of Sam's long fangs breaking through the skin of my unpierced ear.

If he knew how close I had been to throwing him over the cliff in pained panic, he likely would have regretted bringing me there at all, but I overcame my instincts and threw him off of me backwards.

"Why are you so violent? I was thanking you for caring about me!" I screamed as I clamped my hand over my ear and struggled back to my feet.

Sam was already sitting calmly, his feline face looking far meaner than it usually did because of the icy wind that blew against him. "My care is compelled, it is not a virtue. My freedom is an after effect of your own. My desire to make you well is so I no longer have to suffer you being unwell. If you wish for something to hold, go and find your mortal."

Still holding my cloak around me like it was all that kept me from freezing to death, I started walking away from the mouth of the cave just in case the phantom bear returned.

"Are we really back to this? You are truly going to pretend that you don't care about me? After you dragged me all the way down here to let me freeze?" I asked my contemptuous familiar as I stepped over him and started hurrying back to the door.

I could run away again. Sam had made that possible. Even if I decided to, it would not be without Anna, and I would be wearing far more clothes.

Knowing that I would not be escaping Lun at that very moment, all I wanted to do was get back to the tunnel.

It wasn't any warmer, but at least the wind would not be cutting me to ribbons with its cold.

"If you were capable of hearing what I have said to you, you would already know. I have brought you here because I do not believe that Lun Arcanicil is safe for one such as you." Sam growled as he came bounding back across the jagged blue crystals.

"Because of Azeralphane?" I asked, The Walking Storm, that my guard still swore he did not lie about, being the most obvious threat that I could think of.

I remembered the words that had come through the working that had filled Sorceress Gell's mouth on the night of my second super secret training.

"Whatever he is, he wants the six treasures of The Mother in Blue, not me." I continued, my voice coming out high pitched and quick as my body began to shiver.

Sam growled as he padded over to the still open door. "That is a myth."

"Not you too," I groaned and nearly stepped on his tail as I pushed past him. "He is practically haunting the school. Alexei lying to me is one thing, I just can't take it if you are too."

"No, child. The treasures. They are myths." Sam said as the door slammed behind him and my momentarily forgotten werelight became useful once again.

I crouched down at the mouth of the tunnel and shivered. "So the demon that doesn't really exist is kidnapping sorceresses and torturing gatekeepers to obtain something else that isn't really real?"

"The way that they are spoken of by the students of the school and those that have heard mention of such things, they are wrong to think of them as treasures. There are many things here of great interest, but they are not some bauble or rarity that could be stolen." Sam explained as he prowled over to where I had curled up.

Looking at me with a deathly stare, he stepped into my lap and sat down atop it. He was not warm, exactly, but I was far too cold to care.

Slowly wrapping my shivering arms around him so I would not scare my way into bleeding again, I accepted what he must have thought to be some grand gesture of kindness.

He continued without meeting my eyes. "The demon is not the cause of my concern. From its deepest depths, there is a darkness here that defies my understanding."

"Why do you say that?" I whispered as I huddled closer to him underneath the blue light of my power

"The morning that your first precept washed you down the crystalline stairs, I felt that you were in danger. I have felt it many times since," Sam said as he hopped off my lap and ruined the almost warmth that I had been able to find. "There is something here that means to take you away."

He pawed at his face and gave himself a shake before starting back into the tunnel that had brought us there.

"Come. You must not be in the inner halls while others are." He commanded me for the second time that day.

I forced my frozen body into motion and followed after him. "You can't just say something like that and then walk off. I can think of at least one person that wants me gone, how do you know that it isn't Tana?"

"It is not her or her wolf. What I felt came from much deeper within the mountain than she has ever been." He said simply.

I shook my head in annoyance. "Then why don't you go that deep and see what it is?"

"I cannot." He answered.

"Why not? I asked again, annoyed.

He growled back at me, his own annoyance evident in his voice. "It is guarded. I cannot pass through the wardings without it being known that I have done so."

After that, most of my strength and attention went to climbing back up the tunnel. Seeming twice as long as it had on the way down, I was out of breath and sweating despite the cold when the wall of glamor came back into my sight.

"How have you learned all this?" I asked through ragged breaths.

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Sam stopped before the glamor and turned his deep blue eyes to me. "I listen, I watch, and I think. I know every detail of every battle you fought with the older moons. I know all of the insults that the arrogant child says about you to anyone that will listen. I know that the crippled knight has spent many a night singing your praises. There is very little that I do not know about Lun Arcanicil and I fear that I will grow bored once I understand it completely."

I took a deep breath and patted him on the head. "You should go away more often, you talk a lot when you come back."

He barred his fangs and hissed a bone chilling hiss before ignoring every word I said.

"Once we cross through, you must be silent. It is mostly The Mothers that use these halls, but the moons that have been discovered within them have been punished harshly." He explained.

I had many questions, but he evidently did not have the patience to answer because before I could speak, he had vanished through the wall of aura.

Just like I had been doing all day, I followed after him.

Through a confusing series of turns, stairwells, and doorways that I would have undoubtedly gotten lost in, he led me through the gradually warming halls until we came to a stop on the back side of a large painting.

He opened it for me, I stepped through, and it shut behind me just as I saw what the painting was.

A massive blue eye surrounded by stark white scales whose pupil was a silvery slit stared back at me.

I stepped back and found that I was walled in by long bars of white bone.

Fear took over as I ran towards the only opening that I could see and I came tumbling out of the horrid place Sam had brought me to with a chill running through me.

I had left the inner halls and found myself in the serpent skeleton that I had first seen through the wall sized windows when I had been standing in Lun's courtyard.

As soon as the bottom of my sandal left the bone of Zizicoltain's skull and touched the mirrored floor of the hall of conquest, the great doors at the far side of the hall swung open.

Before I could take a second step, Alexei appeared in front of me.

If I did not know him, I would have thought he truly was a demon.

"How?" He demanded, his mask of stone nowhere to be seen.

I had made him angry. I had made him angry enough that his blue had come to light in his eye and it would not have surprised me if he snatched me up by my cloak.

Despite his demand and enraged state, I stepped out of Zizi's open maw before starting for the door.

"I cannot tell you." I said, my sudden fear at being inside the serpent long forgotten.

He appeared in front of me again, his hand pressed flat against my chest to hold me still.

"This is no game, child. You consider me your friend, let us remain that way. How were you able to escape my awareness?" My white haired guard demanded but all I could think about was that he had never looked more like his mother.

Unfortunately for him, he was wrong, and I had spent enough time as Katarina to not be bothered by the resemblance.

"It is a game," I began, remembering all the times that Azza had glared down at me with her golden eyes and finding that Alexei's was nowhere near as terrifying. "You are just mad that I won."

Something shifted on his face.

I did not know what it was exactly, but his anger seemed to thin at the corners of his mouth and eyes. His jaw was still clenched and his brow was still furrowed, but everywhere else had wilted into obvious sorrow.

My hand went to his as I felt what he was feeling.

"Hey, no, wait, I didn't mean to make you sad. I'm still not going to tell you, but-" I started, my voice slipping into the soft tones that Anna used when I was upset.

He was my friend, I had decided that for him and that meant that I had to be there for him like Anna, Reese, and the new moons had been for me.

It could have been the light in the hall of conquest, but I had cried enough in my short life to know what tears glistening in someone's eye looked like.

I did not feel him snatch his hand away from me, but when I looked down to see why I was suddenly leaning forward, it was no longer there.

He was no longer there.

All I could see of him was the last of his reflection in the mirrored floor beneath me as the door swung open before him.

A second reflection joined him as Anna stumbled into the hall and barely managed to keep herself upright.

"Do," She said through heavy pants. "You," Her raven hair draped down over her face like a solid black curtain. "Have," At first I thought she was not wearing any pants, but when I saw her legs shaking, I realized that she was wearing the frilly shorts she had gotten me back in Erosette. "Any," sweat dripped down from her and splattered against the mirrored floor. "Idea."

She threw herself up, clutched her hips with her hands, and took the biggest breath I had ever seen somebody take.

Everything else she had to say came out in one single exhale. "How hard it is to follow someone that can just vanish, like actually disappear, like just stop being there with no warning?"

"You assisted her, didn't you? You realize this was only a game when her victory was an impossibility? If you truly have any love for her in your heart, you will tell me how she did it."Alexei threatened as he took a long step towards my breathless beloved.

"First of all, stay away from me, Creep," Anna panted and took a long step away from my infuriated guard. "Second, I don't even know what she did. You come storming into the library, knocking books everywhere and yelling at me, and then you disappear."

I could not help but smile at how angry Anna's words seemed to make him.

His hand was grilling the handle of his black sword so tightly that his knuckles had gone white.

"This will not happen again." He growled as the door slammed shut behind him and we were left alone with what remained of Zizicoltain.

I was the one who was supposed to get swept up in my emotions. He was supposed to lean against a wall and annoy me.

I did not like it when the roles were reversed.

From shock, to anger, to a confidence that I had rarely ever felt, I watched Anna walk over to me, still looking like she would collapse from exhaustion at any moment.

"What happened," She asked, her eyes wide and looking back over his shoulder. "That was almost as bad as when he started sinking into the walls."

I turned back to the serpent's gaping maw and shrugged my shoulders.

"You have been here for forever," I said as I sat down between its teeth and sighed. "Has he always been such a sore loser?"

Wind came howling out of the skeleton once again, and I took that as Zizi telling me that he had been.

"I didn't, uhm, realize how big this thing was." Anna said with obvious fear appearing in her face.

I patted one of Zizi's me-sized fangs. "It could swallow us both whole if The Mother in Blue had not slayed it. I escaped Alexei and he is not handling it well."

Her fear turned to surprise in a single blink of her eyes. "What? How?"

I smiled at her with wicked intent.

"When I tell you that I was right to let Sam wander as he pleased, you have to admit that you were wrong." I said, using the fangs on either side of me to lean back and stretch my still frozen shoulders.

Anna narrowed her eyes and crossed her arms over her chest. "Never."

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