There weren’t just pillars and icicles either; here, the stone had formed into a kind of wavy, draped curtain. There it had been formed into a sort of gigantic mushroom. And there, icicle and pillar had fused into a ribbed column.

In the center was a lake, and they appeared to be walking along the “shore.”

The color of all this stone was a sort of soft cream, with a hint of translucence. It almost seemed to be alive.

“All right, le’s mosey,” she said to the lizard, which was the only touch of color here.

She kept her light at its brightest as they traversed the length of this cave, heading for a narrow passage ahead. It was with some regret and a lot of trepidation that she dimmed her guide and brought it down to about waist-height again as they entered another narrow tunnel.

Anna had lost track of time, and the big caverns with their stone formations had ceased to amaze. Fear drained away, grief dulled, and all she was really aware of was the untiring little green lizard scuttling in front of her and her utter weariness. She hadn’t slept at all last night, and hadn’t eaten since—was it dinner, yesterday? She just put one foot in front of the other in a mental fog, until she nearly stepped on the lizard and it chirped angrily at her.

She jumped back and went to one knee. “I’m sorry, liddle feller! I didn’ mean it!” she said pleadingly. “I were jest so a-weary—”

She held out her hand. The lizard regarded it suspiciously for a moment, then stuck out its tongue, licked its eyeball thoughtfully, and scuttled up onto her open palm. It raised itself up on its forelegs and jerked its head sideways. When she didn’t react to that, it did so again, punctuating the movement with a chirp.

She looked. And realized that, for the first time, there was light in here that wasn’t from her little floating ball.

She put her hand down and the lizard scuttled toward the light, taking her source with it. She followed.

She hadn’t had time to raise the light and strengthen it before the lizard slithered off, so she had to pick her way carefully across flows of stone so cold and polished they felt slick.

The light source ahead was behind one of those stone curtains. Whatever the source was, it was bright enough to light up the entire curtain from the other side; other than that, there wasn’t anything distinguishable. At another time she’d have stopped to admire the ripples, waves, and layers of subtly different colors—now she just wanted to get to whatever was behind that stone. Was it Jolene, at last? While majestic in its own way—this didn’t seem grand enough to be the setting for a queen.

She edged around the sheet of stone, led by the lizard.

There was a formation of four of those stone icicles, close together. Tucked up among them was a light that she instinctively recognized as just like her own, only the size of her head, and too bright to look at directly.