From the bottom of my heart, thank you to my p4tr0ns: Morpheaus, and RTB <3 <3 <3
Become a p4tr0n too and read up to FOUR chapters ahead!:
h t t p s : / / w w w . p a t r e o n . c o m / t r a s h w i t h g l a s s e s
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We finally reached it: a magnificent monadrock almost 500 meters tall into the skies lonely in the desert, its many ridges and crevices looking like carefully sculpted details. From that distance, it definitely looked like it could break free from the ground and fly upward. Yet, the air was thick with nervousness, and not excitement.
"Remember guys! I don't want you two stealing all the experience I can get from this adventure, so you better leave a few monsters for me to kill, okay?", Spruce said, his hands on his hips.
We didn't know exactly what he was going through in his head, but he definitely had seen better days, with dark bags under his eyes, and a psychotic smile on his face.
We walked nearer to the rock, but without seeing any signal of anything that resembled what I'd seen in my dreams, though we found signals of excavation attempts, we started to go around it. I touched the stone, was inquired by Ike, and even tried to meditate on the place, but nothing showed result of triggering my memories.
It was already the end of the day when we found a dark crack on the stone large enough to be entered.
I conjured a flame for light and tried to walk first, but Spruce insisted he'd guide us in. We walked for about five minutes inside the tight pathway, when suddenly, the ground beneath us changed from earth to metal. And then we reached a dead end.
"It was just like this", I said, looking at a massive silvery wall with unknown symbols written over it.
"It- It's a bit scary…"
"Yeah, yeah, wow, so impressive. Now, how do we get in?"
We had a little more space to breathe in that place, so we scattered around the room, and looked for anything that could help us to proceed in our journey. I approached some kind of box protruding from the wall and found a shinning red script blinking on the surface of the box. Uncertainly, I tapped the symbol, but nothing happened. Then, I remembered what Red Ochre told me, and I tapped it again with the rectangle, when, suddenly, a gush of wind forced me to close my eyes, and almost blew my flame away, the light not dying only because of its magical nature. When I opened my eyes again, the wall was splitting right on the weird scriptures in the middle, parting ways and showing only darkness behind itself.
"Yes! Now, where's the evil guardian I shall defeat?!", Spruce opened his arms right before what seemed to be just two very heavy doors. But, fortunately, no one nor anything came out of the opening.
"P- perhaps there's nothing scary guarding anything…?", Ike asked, gripping tight on his sword handle, looking extremely scared, but determined to follow after me once I stepped forward.
"That's what we're going to see."
Behind the heavy doors, there was a bridge also made of metal: it was as large as the doors, and full of little holes, and darkness surrounded it from all sides. After following for a couple of minutes, we came to an intersection, but with no clear objective, we decided to continue forward so as not to get lost.
"H- hey, can't you illuminate what's around us?"
"Perhaps, but I'd need to create a bigger fireball, and depending on the size of this space we're in, I might end up cooking us before revealing anything."
"Tch! Can't you just conjure the fireball further away?", Spruce asked, impatient.
"You aren't taking Principles of Magic, right? The stronger the mage is, the further he can conjure an object or force, and at the moment I can't conjure anything further than about three or four meters away from me", I explained. "I could shoot a fireball further, but what if I end up hitting wood or something, and burn this place to ashes?"
"Wait! You can illuminate this place for the same reason you can continuously burn this magical flame", Ike had an idea. "When your conjuration gets away from your range, it starts to decompose in magic again, but if you can keep feeding it magic, it won't evaporate! So, you can create a string of fire and slowly try to reach the ground beneath us", the awkward swordsman suggested, raising his index finger and smiling.
"Yeah, yeah, who cares if we end up burning this place? Just brute force your way through here, whatever, I don't care about your explanations"
"No, what Ike said makes a lot of sense. If there's something I'm talented at, is in how much magic I have!", I understood what he meant, and so I approached the edge of the bridge, gripped onto its cold handrails, and started to create a string of fire, slowly increasing its size. I did feel the magic consumption rate of the string greatly increasing as its tip got further and further away from me, but that didn't seem to be a problem for me… Perhaps, one day I would even discover why that was the case.
"Wuah?!", Ike stumbled backwards, and fell on his bum as my light reached the bottom of the space. "W- What- what are those?!"
Men. Cold, metallic men, about three meters tall, with rubbery tubes and silvery antennae for hair, and sharp blades for fingers, with their hands clasped together, and their heads bowing down. Thousands of them.
"Statues?", I suggested. "It's not like they're reacting to my light in any way", I shrugged, and let the string of fire disappear, keeping only a small fireball on my palm.
"What a shame. I feel like I could take on this entire army right now, man!", Spruce said, flexing his small arms.
"And I hope things won't get to this level", I helped Ike get back up, and we got back to walking.
After a few more minutes of walking in a straight line, the three of us reached another pair of doors, and I opened it the same way. Behind them there was a much tighter corridor, with solid silvery walls on both sides, and other than the mysterious scriptures, there wasn't much to be seen.
Again, we came across a couple of intersections, but we didn't take any of them. At some point the ground became covered in a rubbery mat, and I did start to notice one or two reference points in the cold metallic corridor, however, with signs on the walls and ceiling, arrows on the ground, and boxes on the walls. One of the boxes in special even started to blink in and out in red and emit a red light once we passed before it…
"You still haven't remembered anything?", Ike asked, then a little calmer once we got away from the metallic men.
Except we hadn't left the metallic man behind, for there was one standing right behind it, eyes shining red.