Instead of leaving one whole side open to clean, fresh air, she left only a narrow slot that barely allowed starlight in. Always, she dug upward and toward the east. Eventually, Ivy asked to stop, so they did. Cazia broke a hole high in the tunnel for ventilation, then carved out a hollow, flat space large enough for them to sit up or lie down in. She turned a pair of roundish rocks into lightstones--a Fourteenth Festival spell that had been her first lesson in infusing magic into a solid object--and that was the end of the day. The most difficult part was pushing all the loose rock down the tunnel or out the hole in the side. And she felt fine. Maybe a little tired and jittery, but she certainly hadn’t gone hollow like Doctor Whitestalk. What had Doctor Twofin been doing with all those years of warnings? She couldn’t imagine. She woke in the middle of the night from terrible nightmares about falling endlessly through a narrow shaft, slowly starving to death, slowly dwindling to nothing.
