Free Azurite (Daughter of the Mountain Book 1) by Megan Dent Nagle

range.  The caverns underneath the mountains ran deep and long, and a large portion of them had been opened up, carved out, and reengineered until they became a massive underground network of navigable mines.  Other, more remote caves still remained unmolested by human hands, and today that was where Zora was heading. 
    As a Daughter of the Mountain, she knew how to traverse the geology of the caves better than any miner and had been doing so since she was a child.  She could determine the direction she was traveling by the diverging gradient of the earth, ascertain her elevation by the feel of the air on her skin, and know how far she was from Mizra by the sound of rushing water through the underground springs.
    It was exploring these mines as a child that Zora first came across the fascinating cave paintings and corresponding runes that decorated the jagged blue stone. Since her discovery of these cave drawings, Zora had been obsessed with deciphering and translating the ancient runes of the dead Samarian language that accompanied the beautiful paintings.  It was a meticulous and assiduous process since the original Samarian language and alphabet were no longer learned or used. The subject of the tome Milo gifted her with was ancient languages, with a concentration of those used in the north.  It had relevant information on the definitions of several runes and what symbols represented an alphabet, sounds, or ideas.  To Zora, the gift of the tome was priceless.
    After hours of hiking, Zora finally came across the cavern that marked the halfway point of her journey for that day.  The air in the mines always blew ice cold, and it prickled Zora’s skin like needles as she took a seat on the floor between two conical stalagmites that nearly reached the low cavern ceiling.  She’d recently discovered this new cave with never before seen paintings, and it was a little ways off of the main passages the miners used for travel.  Zora had been going there each day for weeks, and each time she went further and further into the narrow passages of rock, adding their direction and shape to the maps she’d created in her mind.
      As she sat replicating the paintings and copying the runes, constant drips of water peppered the floor where small pools of liquid had formed and grown larger over the years.  While some parts of the caves were easy to walk through, other paths were barred by treacherous rock formations and hanging dripstone as sharp as a knife.  Although the space inside the cave was wide across, the darkness was so heavy, that without the meager light of the lantern, Zora would have been rendered completely blind.
    It was by flame light that Zora drew the strange cave runes in her journal for later comparison to what was in the tome.  In this cave she’d found a painting that illustrated her ancestors hunting gazelles along the banks of the Argent River.  It was basic artwork full of straight lines and little color, but Zora was more concerned about the language that went along with the story.  She knew her hard work was paying off since she was now able to recognize the symbols that represented certain words like snow, water, and fire.  She was now moving onto compiling the symbols that represented sounds so that she could read full sentences of ancient communication. 
    After an hour, Zora got a bit bored and decided to pursue her inkling to dig a little deeper into this new cave to see what else she could uncover.  She moved forward, climbing over large stones rubbed smooth by years of water movement through the cave.  She clenched dearly onto poles of dripstone as she felt her way through the constricting path, sometimes having to turn sideways, or crawl on her knees just to bypass an obstructive rock formation. 
    As she moved further underground, the air blew chill and damp, and the darkness moved in closer around her.  Finally the cavern widened, and as she traversed it, the young woman ran her