After the door shut behind them, they were welcomed by a long corridor that they had been walking down for the past ten minutes with no end in sight, and nothing but their own breathing and Geleb's scribbling pen to listen to.
This corridor had already extended for longer than should be possible based on the size of the temple from the outside, but Morne wasn't about to question the means of a long-dead race of powerful Spellcasters.
"So, boss?" Earl asked, unable to stand the silence any longer.
"Yes?" Geleb replied, eyes darting from his journal to the path ahead.
"Why did we need Morne, again? I mean, I get that we needed Necromancy, but why?"
"The Nasnami didn't discriminate back then," Geleb explained. "Magic was magic to them, and many of them viewed the School as one of the more powerful of the six. As for why it was needed here specifically, perhaps because of its rarity.
"Or perhaps it has something to do with the reward for the trials. If I'm not mistaken, 'Malkurai' is their word for the Dark Gods. Since the prize is related, they probably thought it fitting to lock it behind the very School the Dark Gods created."
"Dark Gods? All of them?" Morne frowned.
Granted, he wasn't well-educated in this field, but he had always heard that Jiklok was the creator of Necromancy. He had no idea that they all had a part in it.
Geleb nodded absentmindedly, still scribbling away in his journal. "Yes, all five Dark Gods came together to create the School, or at least that's what the majority of scholars believe. Each one made a single aun-School to be a part of the larger whole."
'An aun-School?' Morne thought, his frown deepening. The Coltha's book didn't cover them, but they sounded important. He had a vague idea forming of what they might be, but wasn't entirely sure.
Not ready to spend the next few minutes in silence again, Earl kept the conversation flowing by asking what they were. He himself wasn't a Mage, so he knew less than even Morne in this regard.
"It's like a miniature School within the School," Geleb replied. "Like how the Elemental School has Fire, Water, Wind, and Earth. I don't know what the aun-Schools for Necromancy are, though. The churches tend to frown on that sort of knowledge."
'Is that what it is?' Morne thought to himself.
As Morne sunk deeper into his thoughts, Earl continued to ask questions to fill the silence, and Geleb continued to answer distractedly.
Morne had noticed that over half of his Spells didn't exactly line up with what he had thought Necromancy would be. As of now, he had two distinct types of Spells.
The first included Bone Bullet and Marrow Memory. While not the raise-the-dead Spells he had expected, they did work with and utilize bones.
Then there was the second type, which included Splinter, Withering Touch, and Invigorating Touch.
These were where he was confused. They didn't seem to correlate to what he had known of Necromancy at all. They focused on spending, taking, and giving life force, respectively, and Splinter used that spent life force to inflict pain.
The two types of Spells appeared to be entirely unrelated to each other, and yet both were types of Spells he could cast using his Necromancy Tower.
He was starting to think that it was because of these aun-Schools Geleb had mentioned. If the two types of Spells were from two separate aun-Schools, their differences made more sense.
But then, there were five Dark Gods. What were the other three aun-Schools?
Unfortunately, he had no way to answer that at the moment. So he pushed such thoughts out of his head, focusing on the path up ahead.
The faintest trickle of light could be seen at the end.
Earl's face lit up when he saw this, and he wanted nothing more than to dash forward. He didn't, of course; his job was to keep Geleb safe and provide him with light to see. He could do neither of those things if he abandoned his post.
Luckily for him, Geleb's steps quickened with a similar eagerness, and Morne had to speed up in kind to keep up with the other two.
In seconds, they exited the hallway and came into a peculiar chamber.
The three had to shade their eyes with a hand. The room was lit with a brightness rivaling the sun outside, emanating from the stone walls around them. They stood on hard, packed dirt that one would be hard-pressed to dig through even with a sturdy shovel.
The room was half a mile wide and twice as long, with a blue "sky" high above them acting as a ceiling. At the other end was a stone-floored section with a door set into the wall.
"Tresek ot Em," the voice of the silver serpent statue hissed, and though Morne searched for it, he could not see it.
"Trial of Dirt," Geleb muttered under his breath, translating the serpent's words. His gaze swiveled to examine the room around them, but nothing he found satisfied him. "But where's the test?"
Swish.
Morne and Geleb turned to the sound. Having been on high alert and ready for something to happen, they easily noticed it.
Geleb blinked in surprise when he gazed upon where Earl had stood just a moment ago. Only his torch, sputtering with what was left of its flame, remained, rolling across the ground. With a hint of fear, his eyes shifted to Morne. "Where did –?"
Swish.
In a flash, Geleb fell into a newly opened hole in the tightly packed dirt below their feet. It swallowed him up and covered the hole before Morne could even blink, leaving nothing behind.
Taking a tentative step backward, he glanced behind him at the corridor they had entered from, only to find a solid wall of stone where it had once been.
'Shit,' he thought.
The ground opened up beneath him, devouring him like a starved beast. The bright blue "sky" above was soon cut off from his sight, and dirt pressed in on him from all sides.