Chapter 55. Ritual of the Key

Lyra POV

It’s hard to move from this spot. Crawling through the cramped, dirty cave entrance, I’d thought the end of it would just be a box or something that we’d have to carry back out to open. For a while there, I was wondering how we were going to even turn around.

But this place... It’s huge. We must be a hundred feet underground to have the ceilings this high. The chamber is as big as the ballroom in the Maelie castle and far more impressive.

The walls are covered top to bottom in some sort of blue crystals that shine almost silver, the kind of twinkling light that Silanya used when she charmed the grizzly bear. The floor is solid stone—marble, I think, judging by the silver and blue veining meandering through it.

To the right of us is a gently trickling waterfall coming right out of the wall. It flows into a