Adrith and Evelyn had begun to climb the stairs that had marked their meeting. The ascent was painstaking as it took multiple minutes just to reach the point where Evelyn asked, “How much further?”
Adrith rolled his eyes as his voice came through the helmet strangely clear, “Maybe another 5 minutes”.
Evelyn sighed, “It’s already felt like 10 minutes!” Adrith shook his head as he responded, “Better get used to this, the Depths are some of the tallest and largest areas, so we will be doing lots of moving just to reach the next floor”.
Evelyn then asked with a bit of hope, “Oh so you’ve done this before?”
Adrith shook his head as he dashed the little hope she had, “No. I’ve never been down here and returned to the surface”.
Evelyn seemed slightly saddened yet she then picked something else to ask, “So, you’ve been down here alive?”
Adrith nodded his head, “Yeah I have, though it was in a large party, so I can’t say how it will go for us leaving with how we are”.
Evelyn sulked a bit, yet continued to follow, feeling her breath slowly faltering, she was slightly getting winded, and knew she would slow down if she didn’t take a moment. Yet before Evelyn could call out, Adrith said, “Let’s wait here for a moment, make sure we’re ready, I can hear louder noises, we’re about to reach the next level”
Evelyn shook her head and sat down on the staircase, behind her stood Adrith as he had decided to say standing and watching towards the upper part of the staircase. A thought crossed her mind as she looked at him, ‘How is he able to do so much in that armor?’
Evelyn looked to his chest and helm to try and spot signs of any labor, heavy breathing, shifting of armor, building breath, ‘He doesn’t even seem winded. He isn’t using magic at the moment, he’s said it himself he is unable to perform unassisted incantations, so how?’
Evelyn’s concentration was interrupted by Adrith’s voice, “Focus on your breathing, we need to get moving, also you should cast a light spell with less intense light to conserve energy while we are now moving. You won’t only run through all your stamina, but also you’ll make us much easier to find”.
Evelyn shook her head, “I see, alright”, as she cleared her throat and began to chant, “Hear me, oh sparks of fire which light the night, answer me, Light”.
Her voice was much softer and with it came 8 small motes of soft white light which began to dance above her head.
Evelyn looked at them for a moment before lightly casting her hand towards Adrith and chanted one more time “Hear me, my starlight, enchant the night, answer me, Light”. With that, the 8 motes of light split between the 2 of them, 4 for Adrith and 4 for Evelyn.
With a bit of surprise, Adrith’s head tilted as he asked, “How’d you do that?”
A smile of confidence came across Evelyn’s face as she then began to explain, “What I performed was first my casting of a light magic. Using imagery I can associate certain parameters with my spell. So it is how I can have 2 very different effects with my Light spell. I associate different imagery for different spells”.
Adrith nodded and seemed to be mentally taking notes as Evelyn continued, “From there, once my spell was cast, I performed a combination incantation, where it will modify an already active spell. This is most effective for spells with lasting effects like light spells and enhancement-type spells”.
Adrith nodded his head as he listened, it took him a moment before he spoke, “So can you perform this on any spell?”
Evelyn winced slightly in thought, “I suppose you could, but to perform a high-speed incantation on something that was fast acting like an attack spell would require quite a bit of practice, and to cast a modification at that speed would be so ridiculous that you should just make the spell perform that effect from the start”.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Adrith nodded as he seemed to have taken in what was being said, Evelyn came over and looked at him more closely, maybe she could somewhat break his demeanor for the moment, “Oh? Why do you seem so curious now?”
Adrith answered without much thought, “Well I was still in training, so my skills and knowledge are quite limited, all I have are basic things to assist with my life when I was a knight in training”.
Evelyn looked his armor up and down, “In training? You seem quite well armed for a trainee”.
Adrith began to turn to start heading up the stairs, “Well, it was a different time”.
Evelyn felt she hit a nerve, she winced slightly as she could feel it, but still made note of it for later before she followed him up the stairs.
20 minutes had passed since they had started ascending the stairs, yet the concept of time did not truly matter between the two of them. Time was only a thought that would slow them down. The thought of how long had it been since they slept, how long they had until their clothing and armor was to fade away, or how long it be until they see the light of day. All these thoughts bred fear, and it was something neither wished to focus on.
The moment they reached the top of the stairs Adrith said quietly, “Alright, until we make it out of the depths, we can’t stop. Not for anything, you got it?”
Evelyn nodded her head as she said, “So do you know these floors?”
Adrith shook his head, “No clue of the exact layout, but I do know what’s here and a general idea, let’s pray to the gods we don’t see any of the ones that are truly dangerous”. Evelyn nodded her head as she let Adrith take the lead.
The duo began to quietly yet quickly move through the darkness of this floor. This floor seemed much different from the floor they just were on. Here it felt as if the once almost clean stone blocks were replaced with more roughly placed stone slabs. Instead of high ceilings that reached so high that not even the bright light of Evelyn’s magic could reach the ceiling,
the ceilings were much lower, somewhere in the range of maybe somewhere short of 10 men tall. The walls were much closer, somewhere about the same length as the height of the walls. The entire area seemed to be made of the same rough stone slabs that covered the floor but were stacked up rather than being set to be clean smooth walls.
As the duo moved forward they found multiple intersections, diverging and crossing paths which made the entire area feel more like a labyrinth or a maze rather than being that of a large open room.
Evelyn quietly spoke, “How are we going to get through here? Are we going to just blindly move until we find something?”.
Adrith shook his head as he lightly ran his hand across the wall, “No, there is a silent guide here” Adrith then lightly gestured for Evelyn as he gestured for her to put her head to the wall and begin looking down the wall.
She had to lightly stand on her toes as she realized the height difference she and Adrith had. Evelyn knew she was a taller woman, she often stood able to look directly into the eyes of most men and down on some.
Yet for Adrith this was a view he had to lightly bend down to see. It was when Adrith finally moved his hand to show her what he was using as a guide, that she was at first skeptical, it was just stones stacked in a way where he could run his hand between multiple areas without his hand being stopped or moved.
It was not until she looked back and continued to see the carved line continue almost perfectly that she asked, “Wait, how did you notice this?” Adrith answered quickly, “Call it intuition”.
With this guiding line, they began to move through the labyrinth, it was quiet, horrifically quiet. They expected enemies, and many, yet there were so few that it was hard to not feel nervous. Evelyn had to ask, just to cut the silence, “Where do you think the monsters are?”
Adrith answered in a soft yet almost loud whisper, “Not sure. Most likely further in. After all, this place is large”.
Evelyn needed to ask, he obviously had a clue on how big this place was, so she needed to know what he knew, “So when you came down here with your group the first time, how long did it take you to clear these floors?”
Adrith was quiet for some time, Evelyn felt like she hit another nerve and she winced as she felt the energy between them become awkward. It took maybe a few moments before Adrith then responded, “A day”.
Evelyn responded almost instantly, “What?” Adrith then repeated what he said, “It took us a day of nonstop moving to get from one side of the floor to the other”.
A deafening silence fell over the both of them, they walked, yet there was no noise, Adrith kept moving forward as the one who knew what he was doing. It was Evelyn who took a bit to comprehend what he said, “You mean for us to get through this floor, it will take us a day with no rest?”
Adrith quickly cut into the question, “No. It’ll probably take us less time because we are trying to leave without clearing the floor out”.
A sigh of relief came from Evelyn as she then asked, “So how long do you think it will take us to leave this floor?”
“Probably a third of a day”
“Hu?”