Ahren’s comfort, if he was to find any, would have to come from somewhere else.
As he walked deeper into the catacombs, the sound of the machinery grew louder, a steadily building whine. Without knowing anything else, he could tell that he was moving toward the power source that was the heart of Castledown. It was there that Antrax fed off the energy stored for its use by the safehold’s machines. Ahren felt himself shrink as the sound increased in volume, its dull roar filling up the corridors like a river at flood. He saw himself as tiny and insignificant, impermanent flesh and blood trapped inside changeless, unyielding steel walls. He thought again about his hopes in coming on the journey-to prove himself to be more than the callow boy his brother believed him, to accomplish something that would warrant respect and even honor, to become the man his father had wanted him to be. Foolish, impossible hopes in light of his cowardice in the ruins, yet he clung to them still. Some part of what he had dreamed of accomplishing could still be realized if he could keep himself steady.
He passed out of the corridor into a vast, cavernous room in which two giant cylinders stood side by side amid a cluster of smaller pieces of equipment. The cylinders were fifty feet across and a hundred feet high. Metal pipes and connectors ran from their casings to the equipment and surrounding walls. The sound of the machinery was deafening, a pounding throb that buried everything else in the wake of its passing. It was Castledown’s power source, and Ahren wanted nothing so badly as to get away from it.
Then he looked to his right and saw a pair of chambers similar to the one that had been used to contain Walker, except that they were much larger. The dark glass fronting them was recessed into the chamber walls, and the bulbous doors were rimmed with sleek metal bindings. He stared at them, and he knew without having even to question it that one of them contained the missing Elf-stones. He could feel it the same way he had felt the need to go there. The phoenix stone’s magic was still at work inside him, giving him his direction, telling him what to do.
Yet for a long time, he didn’t move. He didn’t know what to do, didn’t know how to do it, and didn’t really want to try. His fear returned in an enveloping wave. To go on was too much to ask of anyone; it was too overwhelming to consider. He stared at the doorways, the magic of the phoenix stone prodding at him, and fought to keep himself from bolting. He had never been so scared. His fear wasn’t of what he thought might be waiting; it was of what he couldn’t imagine. His fear was of the unseen, of the unknown danger that would cause him to flee once more. He did not think he could bear to have that happen again, and he did not know how to prevent it. He could sense the possibility of something lurking behind the dark glass, a predator, anxious for him to step inside and be seized. Anticipation alone was enough to freeze him in place, to render him hopelessly immobile. He thought in his unspeakable terror that he would never move again.
It was his sense of shame that saved him, reborn in the unavoidable memories of his flight from the ruins days earlier, recalled again and again in the long hours afterwards while he huddled in the debris and thought about what it would be like to return home after what he had done. His chance to redeem himself from that misery, his only chance, lay in recovery of the Elfstones. In the hauntingly inexorable nightmare of his failure to save his friends, in the cold realization of how frail a creature he was, he had come to understand that it was worse to live with fear than to die confronting it.
He remembered that, and broke free of his terror. He started forward without stopping to consider what he was doing, knowing only that he must go then or he would never go at all.