Free Sky Warriors: Poleuthan's Thief (Sky Warriors Saga Book 1) by Nicole Pendragon Page B

cry. Her fate had been sealed the moment she entered the snowy tundra.
    Ange felt hopelessness overwhelm her, freezing her still far more than the blizzard that raged. Another shudder running through her body caught her attention and snapped her focus to the current situation.
    No I can’t lose hope. I can make it through this and avenge the Black Owls. She thought.
    An image of Daren and Jason flashed through her mind and anger seared through her, burning her insides with conviction, with a purpose, for a reason to survive the storm. She sat up straight against the force of the wind and gazed ahead over the flat lands that she could barely see with the turbulent weather. Her eyes traveled to the mountains that she could hardly see now. As she stared at them, she started to feel a strange sensation pulling from the center of her chest, toward the mountains…towards the sky that she couldn’t even see overhead heavy with storm clouds and snowfall.
    She grimaced and wondered if there was a cavern in the mountains she could shelter in. She didn’t even have food or any form of supplies.
    She gazed down and was amazed the rinorse was still walking even if it was a slow pace, she could hear the animal huff and breathe heavily into the air, its breath coming out in a vapory cloud that vanished an instant later as frost clung to its nose and chopped horn.
    Another shiver ranked Ange’s body, it was freezing, she had never felt so cold in her entire life as her limbs became slowly unresponsive as the warmth was sucked out.
    She gasped horrified as the sense of flat earth suddenly disappeared underneath them as the snowy floor howled and broke away. The rinorse screamed and flailed as it tried to run up the breaking mass of snow, nearly knocking off Ange.
    She didn’t think before her body instinctually reacted and she leapt up on the rinorse’s back and then ran up its neck in two steps as it thrashed underneath her. She leapt, her body falling through empty space. She screamed as she quickly plummeted down into darkness as snow avalanched down with her.
    She felt her hands hit something hard as she fell past, instantly she latched on, her body jerked and slammed against a rock wall, a sharp stone stabbing her side without piercing her skin. She squeaked in pain, her arms trembling with the effort to hold up her weight. Thinking quickly and hanging in the darkness she clacked her heels, the sharp blades under her soles shot out and she kicked into the rock wall, stabbing them in. Instantly her arms relaxed and sagged with relief as they no longer were required to sustain her entire mass.
    Ange stayed there for several moment, panting as her heart slowed from its exhilarated race of adrenaline. Her chest heaved for air, it burned as she sucked in cold air into her lungs. When her body finally calmed and stopped trembling from the shock she looked around. It was absolutely dark and as she looked above she could see she was many feet down a huge and expanding crevice that cut jaggedly through the land above.
    She guessed she was about forty feet down what seemed like a twenty foot wide crevice from where she hanged. The storm raged above, hardly any moonlight reached where she was in the horrible conditions.
    Ange suddenly remembered her illuminator on her belt and she let go of the rock her left hand clung too, she was surprised she even able to use her arm, as thought about it, her arm began to burn with pain.
    She cursed silently under her breath as she yanked the lantern from her belt and hugged the device between her body and the wall as her stiff fingers brushed off the frost and pressed the button to turn the inner mechanism and reveal the sheltered blue crystal. She sighed in relief as the metal shutters moved aside and the area was bathed in a decent radius of light.
    Ange held the lantern out and gulped as she looked below, over a hundred feet down she could barely capture the shape of the rinorse that had carried her so