Walking along a colored ground, Cobalt's eyes followed in the direction of the frosty breeze, whizzing past his ears, up over the tree canopies, and soaring over the forested mountain peaks. Dancing all around him, tree leaves of every color made their descent around Cobalt, dotting the chilly air and matted ground with hues of green, yellow, orange, and red.
Ever since the morning before his restless sleep, he had felt an expanse across his vision. The colors returned, and the very aspect ratio of his mind expanded to fill in the peripheral gaps he had forgotten about. Surrounded by an endless field of color plastered across his vision, he was wordless towards the encompassing world those hues invited him towards. But would it be enough? That he was unsure of. However, parading up the leave-littered winding paths, he found his feet carrying him on his own, and his mind distancing himself from his very thoughts. These colors, these hues, and these very feelings, Cobalt had forgotten about entirely. Each step breathed life closer and closer to reaching his sooted heart, as if he could feel the wisps of the expansive afternoon atmosphere call on him to bask in the autumn colors. The thought of this brought just the tracest hint of a smile to his face, but before that could fully form…
The leader of his autumn hue parade turned around, whisking her hands behind her back in a fluid motion. This girl, maybe 14 or 15 years of age, was the person Cobalt had found himself gravitate towards, by nothing short of a bizarre set of circumstances. This girl, named Arabelle.
"You're awfully quiet, ya know."
He looked on towards her and her vermillion hair blowing along in tangent with the leaves of the same color.
Her entire aesthetic matched with the orangeness around them extremely well, almost as if someone had painted her onto this canvas specifically for this moment.
That thought, too, could have furthered the budding smile on his face. But with a girl like Arabelle, any gesture out of the blue could have an unintended reaction. So for better or worse, he suppressed it to an extent, and pushed the blowing bangs out from in front of his face with his left hand, keeping a small empty lantern steady with his right.
"Sorry. Do people usually talk while on walks? I'm just sort of taken in by the scenery, that's all."
His voice was soft, as well as reserved. As if all the tension and angst he'd bottled up over the last several months had taken a break for once. What was left over was something more quiet, a trait often unexpected for someone like Cobalt. To say the feeling was similar to being hollow wouldn't be inaccurate, but it felt different than that.
"I guess it is pretty beautiful, huh?"
"You hadn't noticed until now?"
"Hmm… Not exactly? I guess you just sorta take this stuff for granted, you know? My mind's more set on the Tomb than anything else right now."
That's right—in this enchanting world of magic, knights, and castles, Cobalt has found himself not as a blacksmith, or a magus, or a knight, or a soldier, but as a "Tomb Raider's assistant".
Talk about a culture clash.
But in contrast to that, Cobalt's been more than preoccupied just taking in the scenery. Trees were a thing he had only seen enough times to count on both hands, after all.
"You never just stop to take in all the colors?"
"Pfft. You say that like you've never seen colors before."
That wasn't exactly inaccurate. It was in Cobalt's nature to be overwhelmed by the presence of various hues when he could see them.
At the thought of the repetition of 'colors', a certain visage came to mind.
Just how long had it been since Cobalt had appreciated colors?
"It's not that I've never seen them before. Sometimes, you can go a really long time only seeing grey. So getting to see all these colors at once… It's just… refreshing."
Trudging through piles of leaves, his boots scattered a pile of yellow, amber, and red with a kick.
But Arabelle, meanwhile, simply put a finger to her bottom lip in thought.
"...Only seeing grey-?"
Seeing his absurdist words lost on her, he immediately caught his mistake.
"Sorry—! Did I say something weird—? I was just thinking out loud—just forget I said anything."
"Hmm… 'Kay."
Those were the words that left Arabelle's lips. But despite that, she couldn't help fixating on Cobalt's own words, asking herself, just what exactly did he mean by that?
But that thought could only hang on her mind for a few seconds before it was replaced with another thought exiting her lips.
"Ah—we're here."
Before Cobalt could let those words process, his curious eyes followed the glow of the afternoon sun before being veiled by dark clouds. The colors of green, yellow, orange, and red faded as what replaced them shook Cobalt's understanding of this strange world even further…
In the middle of this clearing, clearly visible from all sides, the stone structures made up something much more than just a Tomb…
Cracked granite and mossy marble littered themselves up a slight inclined staircase, which was barely even recognizable as a staircase. It looked as if the entire location was destroyed, or rather, like it was crushed and buried for centuries. Ruins, would be the best word to describe what Cobalt saw. A few cracked and crumbled pillars lined themselves up to an entrance, where the trace shielded rays of sun gave up trying to conquer, deeming the infinitely dark expanse stretching downwards unreachable.
This… Was the Tomb.
"Let's go in then, shall we?" Arabelle tossed the rhetorical question to him, and he ventured across the pebbly and shattered staircase in wordless response. She made her way forward as well, poising her arms at either side to help her balance, almost like a child would. But to call this a Tomb wouldn't do the site justice—it was practically an entire city…
If he tried, he could make out what might have been a few houses. Maybe one to two dozen of them—maybe, at least. With the past destruction coating the landscape it was impossible to know what was the frame of a house and what was just coincidental rubble.
At last, he reached the top of the summit, and looked behind him with lantern in hand. The dark cloud masked a shadow over the autumn colors, and looking across the former civilization, he felt a sort of empathetic gloom hang over him, feeling sorry for the desolation of Crestia's predecessors.
With amber colors fading to a cobble grey, he swallowed those thoughts into a dark expanse in the back of his head.
Contrary to the autumn colors, what had struck Arabelle's fiery heart like a hammer on steel was the vastness lurking below the depths…
Below this long dead civilization graveyard.
When the squirrelly girl stepped forward, two perished torches on either side of the wall ignited themselves into blue flame, breathing life into the Tomb upon her entry. This ambiguous ambiance greeted the two explorers with a mysterious and unreadable omen for things to come. Following suit, several pairs of blue torches further lit themselves row by row, leading deep into the cave's intramural. Strikingly similar to what had occurred just hours ago, truthfully.
Arabelle, naturally, wore a look of pride, perhaps thrilled to finally share this with someone else. "Don't just stand there all day."
And that one person she finally got to share this ambition with, by some bizarre set of circumstances, was none other than…
"How did you stumble on this place…?"
He could only watch her with an extremely perplexed expression. It was so out in the open, and yet held so much importance. Was Arabelle really the only one who knew of its existence?
"Hm. Call it intuition."
With a smirking face to the left and an anxious face to the right, two vagabond explorers poised their resolve, and ventured into the dark Tomb ahead…