After stepping outside of the church, Emela encounters Oltes sitting cross-legged in the dirt, using his blade to crudely work a piece of wood. The hatchet head is lying besides him, motionless in the dirt and reflecting the sunlight into Emela's eyes. "So, what'cha working on?", she asks, with her everlasting smile on her face.
Oltes barely reacts, only moving his head a little to turn his ear a little bit closer to the person talking to him. "Trying to make a handle." His answer is calm and flat, as he is deeply focused into his work. Wood chips and splinters fly off the crudely shaped piece of wood, only to get picked up and carried away by estranged winds, never to be seen again. "I've never done carpentry, and this blade has gotten a bit dull with time. Haven't found a whittling knife in the supplies you brought, but I think I can manage."
Emela blushes a little as she reaches into her back pocket, still keeping her smile on her face. "Oops", she exclaims, turning her head a little in embarrasment. "I forgot to pull this out of my pocket. This might've helped you earlier." With a swift motion of her hands, she hands a little whittling knife to the man in front of her, who, for the first time during this brief conversation, looks up an into Emela's face.
"Oh yeah, thanks. That truly is useful. Well, can't do anything about the timing." He refocuses his attention back to the crooked piece of wood in his lap. "But this won't do. It's completely botched now. Might aswell start again." He tosses the failure of a stick into the dying embers of the campfire and grabs a new crude piee of wood from a small pile beside him, diligently getting to work once again.
While he focuses on his work, he simultaneously thinks about his current situation. He never was a craftsman, nor even remotely talented. If he was, he never would have taken the path he did, and never would have ended up here.
Yet here he is, whittling away and, to his surprise, actually managing to produce something decent, now that he has the proper tool for his project.
While he is deep in his thought, and focused on his work, a voice reaches the borders of his conciousness. "You need anything more? Can I help with something else?" It's obviously Emela's voice. She seems eager to help him, but in his opinion, having brough the proper tools is already more than enough help, and nothing noteworthy comes to his mind. All of the current tasks he currently keeps in mind require heavy manual labour, not something for a young girl like Emela. At least not in his opinion.
"Mostly just time", he ends up replying, "Why don't you check on Sana and the new person?" A small sense of pride fills his heart as he checks his work, halfway done turning this random piece of wood into a decently usable tool handle. There is no doubt in his mind about the future usability of this object, and he looks forward to being able to use the hatchet, at least a little bit.
Emela raises her index finger to enunciate her answer, a gesture that goes completely unnoticed by Oltes, due to him still being entirely focused on his work. "His name is Paun! You basically named him so yourself!" She lowers her hand and turns to look back at the church. "Also I'd like to wait outside here for a while. He kind of... needs a little bit of space right now."
As if to enunciate her words, ominous sounds can be heard coming from the inside of the church, of stone grating against rock grating against more stone, of wood splintering and breaking, all of it accompanied by cackling laughter interspersed with manly grunts. Whatever is currently happening in there, Oltes agrees that being outside right now is currently the most preferable option.
Meanwhile, inside the old, abandoned church, Sana is shielding herself from flying dust and debris by huddling behind a decaying pew. She meekly peers over the rotting boards, trying to get a glimpse of the scene unfolding behind the altar. Said altar luckily protects her from the worst that is currently happening just a fairly short distance from her, yet a few straggling pieces still fling her way.
It only takes a few more moments for the assault to subside, yet the mad cackling still continues, and the girl does not leave her spot, instead choosing to keep hugging her knees. She is scared, despite a voice in her head reassuring her that she will be all right, and that no harm can come to her inside these walls. Only after the dust fully settles does she find the courage to follow the mad cackling behind the altar, where she discovers that the whole space behind the altar has suddenly remarkably changed.
Where earlier just a plain stone floor used to be, overgrown with moss and detritus, merely a space to make the actual altar more imposing, there is now a significant hole in the ground, revealing a staircase that appears to somehow be older than the building she is currently in, yet in much better condition than the stoneworks around her, leading into an ominous darkness.
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She carefully descends the uneven steps, a feat made harder not only by the darkness that is slowly enveloping her, but also by the mad cackling that never stopped during this entire time. Even if she knows about the source of said cackling, it does not make it any less scary. Yet the voice in her head – or rather, The Guide – reassures her that it is alright, that this is nothing to be afraid of, that she is protected. So she clings to those thoughts and feelings to focus on while she keeps descending.
The stairs aprubtly end inside darkness, and she has to resort to feeling her way around. The walls feel rough and ancient, the pathway more mined out than built, filled with musty and stale air, subsumed with the smell of candles, old hay and something else she can't quite put her hand on, but it reminds her of the bookshelf of the shool she used to attend when she was younger.
Her slow walk ends even more apruptly, because after jsut a few steps, she can make out a light around a corner, and with nothing else to go towards to, she follows it into a small room, the cackling growing louder and lowder as she slowly draws near. The light helps immensely in disspelling her uneasiness.
Inside that room, she finds Paun hunched over a table that takes up the majority of the space, his nose deep inside an old, musty book that has been taken rather hastily from one of the various bookshelves lining the walls. He mutters something to himself while cackling occasionally, the sudden presence of Sana having seemingly dulled the volume with which he expresses himself. The source of the light now also becomes apparent, as there is a small candle right next to the book.
"This is Glorious!" Even though Paul did not turn his head, nor showed any other signs of having noticed her, Sana feels as if he adressed her directly. "A testament to the old! A time capsule, preserving of the past! So many secrets! Mysteries! Testimonies of those before! It's nourishing! The best weapons, right after taking apart the very seams of the universe and containing that power inside a metal cylinder! Simply Glorious!"
"Uhm... Okay... but can you..." Sana tries to catch a glimpse of the book that Paun is currently studying. Even though she learned how to read scripture, thanks to the few aforementioned books in the village's school, she has absolutely no idea how to decipher these completely unknown symbols. Even if she were, time and age has bleached the ink, and eons of moisture did the rest to distort the letters, so that even to someone proficient in that language it would be nigh unreadable aswell. "can you... even read that?"
"Preposterous!" The inflection in his voice makes it seem like Paun has just been heavily insulted, and Sana takes a big step back as he aprubtly turns around and stares directly at her, ranting ahead while sana desperately tries to break eye contact. "I am a man who has two worlds combined into one! My eyes have seen things which even my eyes never saw! I understand things which even I can not understand! Yet you dare to assume? To be unsure of your own perception?" Paun leans even closer, his face now only a breath away from Sana's, who, in turn, leans further back while trying to look for something interesting on the floor. "It is only natural that, with those symbols, I am unable to can! This world has a multitude of languages, more than this world can even hold! Yet it does! Yet with only a few of them, most limits are reached."
Paun turns away from the deeply intimidated girl, facing the book once again and giving her some appreciated breathing space. But his speech is not over yet. "Worry not though. This is merely a puzzle to solve, a code to crack. Not much harder than a cube dotted with colored squares, yet infinitely more so! Soon I will uncover more than has been covered, you shall see!"
Sana, feeling quite intimidated again by the haughty yet unnaturally energetic man, decides that Paun is best left alone for now, and knowing what he was after somehow puts her slightly more at ease. But just slightly, since her legs do not listen to her, so she is forced to simply stare at the man. Paun, on the other hand, is completely lost in that old, musty tome, and appears to have forgotten about even Sana's existence.
A shout from above rouses the diminuitive girl from her stupor. "Sana, are you alright? Are you down there? I'm coming!" Emela's energetic voice, somehow carried by the stone walls, reach Sana with a minimal amouint of echo, and the happy tone fills her with calmness, mixed with a small amount of shared euphoria. It is enough to let her turn around, to face the darkness she just came out of., and she starts to slowly walk towards her friend.
Shouting something back didn't even cross her mind, and Emela, as her friend, already expected as much. Therefore, Emela starts confidently heading into the darkness aswell, with one hand glued to the wall, and the other hand straight ahead. "I'm coming for you, Sana. It is dark in here, so try not to get scared when I touch you."
The hallway is rather short, and it doesn't take long for both of them to meet, with Emela finding Sana's head after her last statement in less time than it takes to blink. Unfortunately, in that exact moment Sana's mind had the random thought that something else down here might touch her, something which might not be her dear friend, and the sudden sensation in conjunction with that thought made her utter a small yelp.
"It's okay, Sana. It's just me." Emela's voice sounds reassuring, filled with hope and comfort, in addition to her constant happy undertone. It naturally puts Sana at ease again, and both girls embrace each other.
"E... Emela... It's so..." Sana tries to stammer something out, as always. It is always hard for her to find words, especially in stressfull situations. Luckily, both girls know each other, even though they did not spend much time together in their youth. But recent events formed a special bridge between them, and Emela seemingly instinctively knows how her friend feels and what to do. Almost as if something Guided her thoughts.
"It's fine. Let's get out of here! Oltes is busy chopping some wood, so I thought we both could try to cut away the last vines between us and the creek." With Sana hugging her arm, both girls shuffle out of the darkness, up the ancient staircase and back into natural light. "And yes, I know you're not strong and stuff, but just having you there while I chop away is good enough for me. After all," Emela turns her head towards Sana's uncovered eye, with a smile that seems to widen more than usually. An outsider would undoubtedly think of it as creepy. Sana's eye starts to brighten, the fate of the other eye staying unknown behind a curtain of hair, while Emela finishes her sentence. "I truly enjoy your company."