The Drowned Tomb (The Changeling Series Book 2) by James Fahy

him with upturned faces, their hands shielding their eyes from the sun.
    Robin looked out over the landscape beyond the lake. At the lush green forests and woods, the sloping distant hills and behind them the rising cragged moors, lost in a purple haze. He could see the angular outline of Erlking Hall itself from up here, and wondered, with a moment of pride, how wonderful it would be if Karya and Woad were looking out of a window right now, and just happened to see him, soaring in the air, wings flashing in the sun.
    Robin lurched.
    His mana stone had flickered, and without warning, rather than the hot and burning sensation, it was suddenly a dead and lifeless lump of coal against his chest, as if someone had just turned his power source off. His arms and legs were suddenly heavy, and he flailed, unbalanced in mid-air.
    “Wait … what…” he stuttered in panic, but before he could react, he found himself falling, plummeting out of the sky and back toward the island.
    His mana was gone, utterly spent. His head rushed with the roar of blood and his eyes watered as he spun downwards, giddily out of control.
    The wings he had formed so proudly were dissolving rapidly, become liquid, and he stared in horror as the ground rose up to meet him swiftly. He was going to hit the island. The solid ground. He may as well have jumped to his death from the tallest tower of Erlking.
    The last thing he saw, as he spun out of control, towards the hard and unforgiving ground, was Henry’s horrified look of shock, and Calypso’s slight frown of detached interest.
    Helpless, he braced himself for impact, at the last second drawing what was left of his watery magical wings around him like a rudimentary blanket.
    Robin fell back into the folly. He hit the earth hard … and to his surprise and astonishment, instead of shattering every bone in his body as he collided with the ground, he instead broke straight through it into blackness beneath. The languid voice of his tutor drifted down to him. “Ah, so that’s why one must practice…”

 
    UNDINE UNDERFLOOR
     
    “Rob! Are you okay?!”
    Robin coughed, spluttering in the darkness and the dust. The wind had been knocked out of him, but he felt only bruised, not broken…
    “Have any timbers pierced your lungs or other organs, Scion of the Arcania?” Madame Calypso asked lightly, sounding as detached and unconcerned as always. “I can fetch assistance if so, although it will be most inconvenient to stop the lesson.”
    “I’m … fine. I think,” Robin gasped, struggling up to his knees and blinking around.
    He had fallen through the centre of the folly and found he was in a small and damp chamber, filled with tumbles of stones and mossy cobwebs. It might once have been a sub-basement or cellar for the strange and ruined structure above. A cramped dark space that clearly no one had ever realised was here.
    Sunlight fell down through the broken boards above him, filtering in slanted beams and dancing with golden dust.
    “Bloody hell,” Henry’s voice echoed down. “All this water everywhere, the whole lake, and you have to crash land into the only solid part of it. You could have broken your neck. What were you thinking, trying advanced magic like that?”
    “Yes, thank you, mum,” Robin grumbled, rubbing grit and dirt off his hands as he sat up. Everything hurt. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he saw that he had landed on some kind of stone table, a grey, weathered block, smack in the centre of the hidden room. He swung his legs off the side and stood up gingerly. “There’s something down here,” he called up to his friend and tutor, whose heads were both backlit shadows above him as they peered down with interest. His voice was oddly muffled in the gloom.
    The stone was soaked and dripping. Robin’s Waterwings were gone. Clearly, he had landed on them when he hit the table with them wrapped, tightly and protectively around him. The impact had broken the cantrip,