Crystal Dragon

Crystal Dragon
She turned the problem over and frustrated that nothing came up that would help. 
The creatures oozed closer. She glared at it, then the crystal fire blazed past her.
It came from somewhere deeper in the dark, it 
burned clean and cold and hit the leading edge of the Choir following her with devastating precision.
The Choir screamed and scattered.
She turned toward the source.
The dragon that landed beside her was not enormous. It was not the vast ruined creature she had purified weeks ago when retrieving Celari. But it was crystal, genuinely and entirely crystal, its form built from faceted planes that caught and scattered light in every direction, and when it looked at her it looked at her like it knew her. 
Did it know her?
It bowed its head and lowered its body. She thanked it and climbed onto its back because there was nothing else to do. It launched upward through the dark with the ease. The Choir scattered before it, the crystal fire swept the path ahead clear.
She gripped its neck and tried to understand what she was riding.
The coin around her throat lit up.
She'd worn it so long she'd stopped fully registering it, the dark weight of Kaelen's remaining currency lit up now with a warmth she didn’t expect. 
She thought about Kaelen. About what he had been before he chose what he became. About the vision her mother had shown him in the cottage in St. Vale, the two of them in black armor and several rings between them, laughing above Laeryos, the spear that could have been his glinting in the same light as hers.
A crystal dragon.
The wolf he had been was obvious, had always been obvious, but the wolf had been Malrik's making, emphasized and cultivated because it was useful and the rest of him was not. What he had been underneath it had wound up in the underworld. 
The dragon banked hard, following the pull of purifying water and landed at the edge of a section of the underworld where the water ran in the wrong direction, flowing inward rather than outward, toward the living world rather than away from it.
She climbed down.
The dragon was very still beside her for a moment, its crystal form refracting the underworld's dark into scattered points of light around them both, and in the quiet before she reached for the water she heard it.
It was Kaelen’s voice. Keros voice vibrating though dead air and crystal, but it was clear.
“I'm sorry. Good luck, Keros Isorai.”
Her eyes burned.
She pressed her hand briefly against the dragon's neck, feeling the crystal cold of it and the warmth underneath that was not temperature.
“Thank you, Kael’.”
The dragon dissolved into light before she'd finished saying goodbye, the form of it scattering into the underworld's dark in long slow arcs that faded without leaving anything behind, and Isorai stood alone on the purifying water's edge and let herself have exactly three seconds of the grief that wanted to come.
Then she turned to the water, found the current running toward the living world, and dove in.
The transition from the underworld’s numbing currents to the realm of the living did not begin with light, but with an agonizing rush of air.
Isorai’s lungs screamed before her head even broke the surface. When she finally tore through the water's surface, she gasped, a violent, desperate sound that echoed off jagged stone walls. The water here was different from the heavy, soul-leeching pool she’d been in. This water was just as cold, but soothing with its stinging, sharp vitality. She felt it pricking her skin and settling into her open wounds.
She flailed for a moment, her limbs heavy as lead, before her fingers caught the slick, moss-covered edge of a stone basin. With every ounce of strength remaining in her aching muscles, she dragged herself upward. Her boots sloshed against the wet floor as she collapsed onto her hands and knees, retching up mouthfuls of clear, freezing water.
For a long time, she simply lay there, shivering violently. Her wet clothes clung to her like a second, suffocating skin. 
Slowly, Isorai pushed herself up into a sitting position and wiped the dripping wet hair from her eyes.
She was in a subterranean cavern. The walls were meticulously carved from a deep, obsidian-like stone that absorbed the dim light. High above, a narrow fissure in the ceiling allowed a single, pale beam of moonlight to cut through the darkness, illuminating the mist rising from the pool she had just escaped.
"Where am I?" she whispered, her voice sounding raspy and hollow in the vast emptiness.
She stood on trembling legs, using the walls for support as she navigated the path leading upward from the pool. The air grew warmer as she climbed, losing the stagnant scent of the underworld and taking on a fragrance that made her heart skip a beat: the crisp, clean scent of cedar, damp earth, and ancient magic.
The Grove, tinged with the off scent of the Southern Council lands.
The tunnel opened up into a massive, vaulted chamber. Isorai stopped, her breath catching in her throat.
She was standing inside another Moongrove temple. The grand, sweeping arches of dark stone interwoven with petrified wood was more grand than the one in Vuldra. 
This one had to be of importance.
The temple was eerily silent, yet it vibrated with a dormant, heavy power.
Moving cautiously, her hand instinctively dropped to her hip where she had a single dagger. She advanced into the main hall. In the center of the chamber stood a massive ghost marker, etched with intricate, glowing blue runes that hummed with a low, sub-audible frequency. 
Behind the ghost marker stood a portal door.
This doorway was an immense archway composed of two intertwined, fossilized trees whose branches met at an apex. The space within the arch was a stone slab, shimmering with silver energy rippling like the surface of a pond in a rainstorm.
Isorai approached the portal, her heart hammering against her ribs. If she could cross through, she might still have time to deal with the vroth rising. 
She extended a trembling hand toward the silver veil. The moment her fingertips brushed the surface, the magic reacted.
The portal violently flared, casting harsh, blinding light across the dark temple walls. A sudden, violent tremor shook the stone beneath her boots. Isorai stumbled back, raising an arm to shield her face as a sudden surge of raw, untamed energy rippled outward from the doorway.
The effect on the surrounding chamber was instantaneous.
From the cracks between the stones, bright green blades of grass sprouted with unnatural speed, stretching upward toward the faint moonlight. Along the base of the portal arch, thick, gnarled roots burst from the petrified wood, unfurling like waking serpents. The guardian trees forming the frame of the door began to flourish. Their dead, barren branches instantly erupting into a thick canopy of luminescent leaves.
The temple was waking up, but it was doing so aggressively, fueled by a sudden, volatile influx of wild magic.