"How much more do you reckon we should go?" Isaac asked, massaging his sore legs by the campfire.
"Not much more, I hope," Katherine replied, scrawling hastily with a pencil on an unfurled roll of paper. "We've been doing nothing but descend, so we should be approaching the deepest point of the city."
Isaac leaned in to see Katherine's map. Much of the bottom half was scribbled with diagrams of corridors and halls, but the upper half was empty. Wherever Elwin and Mirai was, and wherever Astinel's staff was, must lay in places they hadn't been.
They were so deep within that even the air felt petrified. Every granule of dust they breathed compelled them to cough, lest their lungs turn to stone.
"I thought they'd at least give us more hints before sending us down here," he complained. "It's like we're on an archaeological expedition rather than in a tournament. We haven't run into anyone else since we were split! Is this testing our luck, endurance, or both?"
"Perhaps both," Katherine replied coolly, eyeing the barometric reading.
Five hundred feet of solid rock separated them from the surface above. If the ziggurat was magically brought down to where they stood, its summit would only reach halfway to the sunny world above.
Why hold the last round of the tournament in a place this deep and inaccessible? She wondered.
"A sausage?"
"What?"
"The last sausage. Do you want it?" Isaac asked, turning over the browning sausage in the skillet.
Katherine sputtered in mild exasperation.
"What – uhm, no, no thanks," she hastily replied, trying rerail her train of thought.
She gazed at him devour the final sausage, an expression of deep satisfaction painting over his face. How he must've starved before coming to Aeternitas that a sausage she took for granted was luxury to him... a deep sympathy washed over her unconscious.
And just then, a strange, creeping sensation began to tickle her back.
Whatever narrow passageway they were in was lit only by the waning embers of the campfire and by Katherine's jury-rigged wicker-lamp; shadows danced about their figures upon the walls some twenty yards away, and it had always danced that way, but something made Katherine freeze in an instant.
The shadow of her hand didn't match hers in its movement.
She went pale and darted her eyes to Isaac; Isaac looked up from the frying-pan, cleaning it with a light cloth, when he noticed Katherine staring at him.
Without even asking what was wrong Isaac froze as well; for he was facing Katherine, he could see the tunnel that lay behind her seated figure. Normally he would have been able to make out the dim reflection of the campfire upon the glistening stone, but now, it was black, pitch-black, as if the darkness of the tunnel didn't simply mean an absence of light, but as if it absorbed it, was draining it.
Both of their bloodstreams ran icy-cold in that moment; they felt that something was witnessing them, appraising them, awaiting to pounce.
Isaac gripped Katherine's hand, and Katherine craned her neck in a creaky squeak towards the direction of the tunnel; they stared the shadow down, ready to dart and run in a moment's notice. An eternity seemed to fit in those brief seconds; and just as they were about to make their escape, sounds of footsteps tickled their backs, raising the ends of their hair. They stood up, Quans at the ready, and swung their gazes between the shadow from the tunnel whence they came and the footsteps from where they were going to go, braving for what could emerge from both unknowns. The footsteps grew closer now, closer still, and in them, yet another pair of shadows came racing – no, humanoids – no, people like them – wait –
"ELWIN! MIRAI!"
"The FOUNDERS bless us! Are you alright? Are you hurt? Katherine? Isaac?" Mirai yelled, recognizing their faces and colliding into them, hurriedly checking in on their exhausted figures, the little fire and wind spirits by her side.
"The shadow, the shadow – it's –" Isaac exclaimed, pointing to the passage behind them, preparing for the onslaught.
"Are you alright? What's going on? A shadow?" Elwin asked hurriedly, putting his hand upon his Quan, shielding his kismets.
But it was gone. The walls of that tunnel glistened with an interplay of light from the flames from their fingers. Only the drip-drip-drip of water punctuated the petrified air in predictable intervals. Did the darkness play a trick on their minds? Professor Aionia said that the challenge was about maintaining a steely sanity, but she also said that there could perhaps be things that prowled in the dark...
"It was there! Just now – my hand – it was –" Katherine stammered. "ACK! WHAT ARE THOSE? THEY?" Katherine recoiled, her Quan blazing to life, just noticing the platoon of spirits by Elwin and Mirai's figures, who had grown in number since they set off from the Great Spirit's altar. The spirits recognized what it meant for a Quan to come alive, and immediately took on the shapes of ferocious wolves and winter-wargs, growling and barking, shielding Elwin and Mirai from Katherine.
"Wait, relax, relax, relax," assured Mirai. "They're our friends. They led us to you!"
Even though she was frightened to her bones, Katherine trusted her friends; she extinguished her Quan at once, relaxing her stance against the protests of her mind. It was going to be alright.
Seeing her return to a peaceable state, the spirits returned to their innocuous selves again, stretching their little arms. At a second glance, Katherine thought, they looked strangely lovable. Perhaps she was too jumpy from the moment prior...
Quiet came around all of them. When it was sure that the shadow they thought they saw was not going to harm them, they slumped to the floor, heartbeats relaxing at last to give attention to the elation of the reunion.
"Oh goodness, we were so worried, we'd thought you were lost, that we were also lost..." cried Katherine, standing up again to embrace everyone like glue, only letting go when they began to protest for diminishing air.
"Fuah, thank goodness you're with us again. But what was it? What were you talking about? A shadow? What exactly did you witness?" Mirai inquired, her senses still honed.
"Our shadows near the campfire were – they weren't our own, and it felt like we were being watched, like it had a mind of its own. But when you arrived, it disappeared... or did it even exist in the first place?"
Elwin and Mirai looked to each other in concern, and back at the spirits, which were ruffling their furred ears, curious at the exchange.
"Well, perhaps it's the dark playing tricks on you. We've been down here for goodness knows how long. Wait a minute, I can check," consoled Elwin, taking a brief look at his pocket watch. "Almost 41 hours since we entered! Though it doesn't feel like it'd been that long..."
"How did you find us?" asked Isaac.
"A really long story, but –" Elwin held up Isaac's gift to him.
"My harmonica! Well, yours now, but –"
"It turns out there's more to this harmonica than meets the eye."
Mirai tugged on all of their shoulders. "We can spare the joy of reunion after all this. Elwin, tell them what we found."
"Ah, right," he said, placing the harmonica securely in his pocket, "we've got a bigger discovery on our hands. We came across this Great Spirit called –"
"The temple-chamber, Elwin! The prophecy will take us an hour to explain."
"The prophecy?" Katherine interjected.
"Never mind that yet. Isaac, Katherine, we think we found the temple-chamber at the core of the city. The one where Consul Astinel's staff must lie inside! There's a giant gate with inscriptions in Eltanic that seems to say that this is the Oracle of Astinel's domain, meaning whatever chamber that lays beyond those gates must be the heart of the city. But the gate and everything around it has been engulfed by rubble! I don't know when and how it came to be that way, but Mirai and I tried clearing it to no avail."
"How far is it?" asked Katherine.
"Just an eleven-minute run from here," Mirai answered.
"Do you remember the way?"
"As clear as day. I've sketched it on our makeshift map," said Elwin, beaming with no small degree of confidence.
"Then off we go to blast it apart! No time to dally!" Katherine exclaimed, hoisting up her carry-sack and helping Isaac with his. The sounds of clanging frying pans hanging by their sacks echoed across the walls.
"This way," Elwin added, gazing back at the dark tunnels that Isaac and Katherine had pointed in apprehension. He bowed deeply at the little spirits that guided them, and the spirits lowered their heads in return, beginning to fade into the air.
"After all this is said and done, we'll tell you all about our side of the story," he assured, picking up the pace.
***
They sprinted through another long, dark corridor and finally came out onto a damp and cavernous hall which must have been the grand central junction of the ancient city, its deepest and most foundational level. The air was so still and the silence so profound that only the bubbling water, running through the giant canal-rivers flanked by subterranean pillars, proved that time down here was not frozen.
"Over there," Mirai pointed in the dark, directing the kismets' attention towards faintly glowing outlines of boulders a minute's run away.
The four held their frying pans, jogging quietly now for they didn't want to disturb the sanctity of this spirited hall, and soon came face-to-face with a mountainous pile of boulders, stones, and gravel that obscured the gate to the temple-chamber proper. A thin ray of light must have been shining through a crack in the gate, because the contours of the boulders were illuminated by a hazy white. Above the great gate and above the great rubble, faint inscriptions of glimmering rune-green read:
"Hic requiescit Oraculum Astinel. Estote viri fortes, animaeque aureae, Pergite ubi omnia coepit."
"What does it mean, Elwin?" asked Isaac, wishing to confirm that this was indeed the destination they were searching for.
"I can't translate it finely, because my knowledge of Eltanic is just picked up from wayfarers' books, but..." he trailed off, matching the sentences in his head to the Mythrisian tongue he knew, "It should mean something like:
'Here rests the Oracle of Astinel. Be brave, souls of gold, and proceed to where everything began...' "
The kismets' altimetric barometer read their greatest depths yet. Combined with the inscription above, Astinel's staff must lay in the temple chamber, beyond these impassable wreckage of rocks. But this spelled troubled for them: because judging from the sheer height and mass of those boulders blocking the gate, not to mention the variety of clogged debris, rocks, stones, and gravel, it was evident at just a glance that they couldn't simply climb the rubble and hope to slip through the top, or blast a hole somewhere to do the same. They had to clear the rubble itself with no small effort.
"Oh... goodness," Isaac sighed at realizing that the destination they sought lay beyond this intimidating mountain of rocks. He understood that his power over Ayu was insufficient to contribute in a meaningful way.
"What did you say you tried?" inquired Katherine, feeling the smooth surfaces of the boulders with her hands.
"Dislocating the boulders with streams of water, to begin," said Elwin. "Then Mirai tried to crack and hew the boulders herself. But this is basalt. Too much effort for just two people."
"Then I'm glad to bring my fire to the mix," announced Katherine, wiping away the surface of the boulder with her finger, her eyebrows furrowing with curiosity. "Huh, no moss. Means these boulders are relatively new."
"Do you think the professors arranged it here, then?" mused Isaac.
"Most likely. They wouldn't want the first people to get to the center of the city to just pluck out the staff and leave, right?" added Mirai. "Otherwise, it'd mean luck will play too much of a part in who wins."
"Sound about right to me," remarked Katherine. "One final intellectual challenge that will make us use our Mahamastra to get the staff, huh? Step back a little – actually, a little further than that," she declared. "I'm going to use my Dance of the Apprentice's Flame for this."
The rest of the kismets retreated a number of yards back, expectant to see Katherine's newfangled skill which Professor Helen imparted to her after the mid-year exams. Elwin technically could have been taught the Dance of the Apprentice's Flame too because he had mastered the Dance of the Sparks, but he spent a month and more recovering from his injuries after his triumph over Ursus – another factor that had brought Katherine to met out her own penance until Isaac lifted her out of it.
As Katherine prepared her spirit for the demonstration ahead, Isaac stood a little closer than Elwin and Mirai, his Quan at the ready to pull Katherine back with air in case any of the boulders threatened to fall on her.
Katherine flexed her arms and cracked her neck.
"MAIOR FORTIOR!"