"Why did you split us up?" Marcus asked Tess. "Isn't it a stupid idea to split up in uncharted territory?"
"We need to find those people. This way covers more ground," she responded without turning around.
"Okay, why did you drag me with you?"
"No reason. I just thought we could use this time to talk. You know, considering..."
"Are you worried about your friend?" she asked after a brief pause.
"No."
"No?"
"No. She's smart, smart enough to survive anything."
"What is this place," Marcus thought aloud as he walked.
The narrow path that led to the town was also lined with statues, raised on pedestals, all facing the entrance that they had stumbled through. On the side closest to the entrance, the warriors were armed with melee weapons, primarily swords and hammers, each endowed with an odd thing barely visible in the handle of the weapon. On the far side, the warriors braced themselves with a variety of ranged weapons that were unfamiliar to Marcus.
Some were armed with bows, but they looked different, as if they had excess parts that added additional functions. Others held foreign looking projectile weapons, consisting of many small parts. Near the body of the wielder, those weapons housed a strange orb.
Upon closer inspection, Marcus found the armour of the warriors was also strange.
From a distance, the armour looked normal, but a closer proximity revealed many details and grooves that appeared to hold no purpose higher than aesthetics. The armour was thinner than regular armour, which also seemed counterproductive to Marcus.
"It's the final resting place of the spider king and his people. I saw the story mentioned somewhere in an old book, only about a sentence or so. It seemed like no more than folklore." Tess's response surprised Marcus, as he didn't expect his thoughts to leak out of his mouth.
"So, that was some sort of oversized crypt?" he asked.
"Something like that."
"Huh."
They travelled in silence for a few minutes, their progress along the winding path steady. As they travelled, the statues that lined the road became gradually closer together, the gaps between them decreasing by miniscule amounts each time.
"So... why are you here?" Marcus said, breaking the silence.
"Did you hit your head? We need to find the villagers," Tess responded in a sarcastic tone.
Marcus shook his head. "No. Why are you here, doing these things? Why did you join the shadowstriders?"
"Honestly, because of you," she said after a long pause.
'Dedicating your life to something for someone else, that's pathetic,' he thought to himself, but he remained silent, allowing her to explain herself further.
"Our mother died at some point during the birth, I'm not sure when, or what caused it. But suddenly the only parent I ever knew was gone, and I had a baby brother to care for. I was still a child, there was no way I could care for you, you understand that, right?"
"But I had to protect you. And the commander, he saw me later that day, while I was upset and afraid, and he offered me a path. A path to protect you. So I took it, regardless of whether it was the right choice or not."
"Then, I started having to protect the weak, to strike from nowhere to save the lives of strangers. I questioned it, doubted it. I thought that I would merely have to do things, and leave the protection of others to the Guard."
"But I was stood in Nosia, and I realised that I had to protect them, the innocent, to be able to protect you. And now... now I've done it for so long it's become a part of me. Now I feel like this is something I want to do, that I have to, no matter the personal cost."
"If I can, I should. Because there are some who would, but can't."
"Did you choose?" Marcus asked after a brief pause.
"Did I choose?" Tess repeated, asking him for clarification.
"Did you choose, or was it simply something that would happen? Was it a choice, or was it simply fated?"
She thought about her answer for a while, filling their journey with a cold silence.
"Can't it be both? What if we're destined for a lot, but only achieve what we do? At least for me, I'd like to think I had a choice, but that I would always make the same choice regardless. Call that fate or whatever. It doesn't matter. To me, I had a choice."
'Maybe other people are,' Marcus thought to himself, a hint of sadness in his internal voice. 'All I've ever done is move towards that goal.'
She let her answer sit for a while before speaking again.
"What about you?"
"It felt like the right thing to do, like I knew it existed, and I had to be a part of it," he lied half-heartedly. After all, how could he not. What was he supposed to do, tell her he felt trapped into a path that led him to fight some pre-universal horror?
'That would be a one way path to Marlgrove asylum,' he thought.
Soon, they reached the outskirts of the town.
Here, the numbers of the warrior statues begun to reach a peak. They were also starting to be joined by stone statues of people, although these statues were smaller, and were erected with less grandeur than the warrior statues.
However, the statues did hold some extreme detail in one area.
Their faces were perpetually trapped in various expressions of terror. Their bodies looked as though they had been running with all their strength, desperate to reach the safety of the town, behind the mob of warriors.
Surrounding the path from this point, close to the actual town itself, worn, rotted towers stood sentry, their presence acting as an ancient sentinel for the town behind them.
"These are expertly made," Marcus said, speaking to no one. "How did they get here?"
"I'm not sure, but I don't like it," Tess responded. "Doesn't this all seem a little... off?"
"Off?"
"I don't know. It just doesn't feel right to me. It's like there's something here with us. Something unnatural."
Marcus nodded in agreement.
Upon entering the town, lined with an aged, crumbling wall, they found countless more statues, all framed in different forms of terror. Inexplicably, both the statues and the buildings found inside the wall were in pristine condition, unblemished by the cruel touch of time.
As they wandered the quiet, lifeless streets of the town, something became glaringly obvious to them. Calling the place a town was an insult. Neatly interwoven with the expected homes and marketplaces stood grand buildings. The town possessed what appeared to be an amphitheatre, schools, medicinal facilities, and other buildings that seemed out of place in conjuncture with the word town.
As they continued their journey, they encountered a great deal of secrets of the place. Secret meeting spots of friends and lovers, hidey holes, and shortcuts through the city known only to those well versed in traversing the terrain were laid bare to their exploration, suffering from the lack of a population that served to keep their existence hidden.
Unbelievably, even the messages scrawled across the architecture remained, as clear as the day it was written. Upon finding such messages, the two would take some time to try and decipher what they meant, but they lacked the necessary knowledge in the long forgotten language to succeed.
Eventually, their journey brought them to a large building on the far side of the town.
"Is it a temple?" Marcus thought out loud, noting the shape of the structure.
The structure consisted of multiple floors, each smaller than the last, that stacked on top of each other like a pyramid. Housed tightly in the ceiling of the uppermost tier sat a large, unmoving orb.
"Hey, isn't that thing like a bigger version of what was in the weapons on those statues back at the road?" Tess noted.
"I think it is, but what exactly is it?"
"One way to find out," Tess said with a smile. "Shall we?"
Marcus nodded, before taking the lead and entering the building.
"This is... weird," was the first impression Marcus had of the interior.
The architectural design was seen on the inside, with the roof scaling far above them, and incrementally closing into the centre. The design of the building was deceptively sleek compared to outside, the constant white panels interrupted only by lines that seemed similar to some of the patterns of the armour of the statue warriors.
"What is this place?" Tess asked, with childlike wonder in her voice.
"It feels like a really sophisticated research facility," Marcus offered.
"Do you have any ideas what this place is?"
"Maybe... maybe it's a religious place?" Tess suggested, pausing as she spoke. "It definitely felt like a temple from outside."
Their thoughts were cut short by the sudden appearance of a large group of silhouettes around the building.
They stood like humans, but their uneven frames and faint movements and mannerisms that could be seen from below implied otherwise.
The two groups shared a period of silence as they studied each other. Eventually, the silence was broken by a visceral howl as the creatures began to move.