Our progress through the labyrinth was slow, as we had to stop every now-and-then to check the map, and I became increasingly worried about one of the Forlorn suddenly appearing in one of the halls, interred here on some eternal vigil.
“Don’t worry,” the Father said, reading me like an open book. “The Forlorn cannot venture down here.”
“Because of the True Flame,” I realised.
“Even the fragments that fill the braziers and torches on our path are sufficient to kill the Forlorn, though only the Flame itself can defeat their King.”
This revelation did ease my mind a bit, though not entirely. I still failed to see how a flame could kill that which a blade could not.
Our careful journey through the many twists-and-turns of the maze was ultimately uneventful, and, after what felt like hours, we found ourselves in a hallway that led to the exit. But then I thought about something. I’d been tracking the turns and what-not, in case I had to make it out of here alone, and I knew we weren’t facing the right direction.
“Where are we? This isn’t the exit.”
“Quite right. This is the stairwell to the True Flame and the Cursed Blade. The maze is the hub linking the prison and the chamber housing the blade.”
“And the exit we saw?”
“That leads up into the castle proper.”
We continued through this other exit down a long staircase very similar to the one that’d just recently led us up. However, it was much longer and seemed to go deeper into the cliff, below the prison cell and where we’d entered, as though reaching towards the underworld.[1]
The torches set into the walls of the stairwell seemed brighter than the rest we’d seen and their intensity increased as we delved deeper, reaching a point where it felt as if I was getting sunburnt from being exposed to their light.
“We’re close,” the Father commented, bathing in the bright rays.
At the bottom of the long stairwell we emerged into a chamber much wider than the trap ones, as well as longer. Except for half a metre in front of the entrance and exit of the room, all the tiles on the floor had curly letters on them that’d been chiselled into the stone with incredible precision. Across the room was a stone door with a keyhole in the middle. It seemed that not only was the map and key necessary, but so was the knowledge to bypass the puzzle.
I studied the letters for a while, but the solution was lost on me.
However, without any hesitation, Father Adam walked across the tiles, following the letters that spelled out Flammam Veritatis.[2] After he reached the opposite side of the floor puzzle, I followed behind him, recounting the spelling ad nauseam within my mind, stepping back-and-forth across the floor in a snaking pattern.
I was quite sure it would be possible to jump across the puzzle, if I could get a running start and bound off the wall, but something told me that such a solution would be punished by the design of this World’s Architect.
When I reached the opposite side of the floor puzzle, I realised that a different returning path spelled the same two words, and I was sure that should I try to retrace my original trail, spelling the words backwards, it would trigger whatever trap was hidden in the walls and floor.
The Father and I both studied the stone door keyhole for a moment. Part of me wondered if this was another potential trap, but I felt like the floor puzzle, the labyrinth, and the trap chambers were already enough to halt any would-be graverobbers.[3]
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
Father Adam didn’t protest when I simply inserted the key in the lock and spun it thrice. A heavy thud sounded in the wall as whatever bolt that had fastened the door came undone. It took the both of us to pull the stone door open, and we were breathing quickly when we entered the small chamber beyond.
Floor to ceiling was no more than two metres, and the walls looked far denser than the rest of the catacombs, likely combining with the massive door to produce a lockbox of sorts, impenetrable without the key. How the key and map had ever escaped these trapped halls in the first place was something one might wonder, but we were both too enthralled by the flame trapped within an opened glass lantern, which stood against the wall, to wonder such questions out loud. The flame danced within its confines like an elemental fairy or lightning in a bottle, and the small room was warm like a summer’s day and bright enough that too much exposure would turn you blind in minutes. Next to the bright flame lay sturdy-looking chains and an open metal coffin too narrow to fit a human, yet taller than me. The Cursed Sword, I thought. Whoever had locked the sword away down here had known the danger it posed, but, despite all their precautions, their efforts had been in vain.
The Father snapped me out of my stare as he shuffled across the room, with something akin to religious reverence, and carefully closed each of the four shutters on the side of the lantern holding the True Flame, hiding away the Flame so that only the lights of the puzzle room lit us from behind.
“You’ll need this,” Father Adam said, the catacombs map. There was some finality to his words.
I pocketed the parchment map. “Aren’t you coming with me?”
“No,” he replied soberly. To explain why, he lifted the heavy lantern off the floor, releasing the pressure on the tile it had stood on. Immediately the door behind us slammed shut, cutting off almost all of the light. I turned in panic, finding nothing but a wall, with a thin bright line across its length, the only source of light in the lockbox, but no keyhole.
Hefting the lantern, he moved it over towards the closed wall and sat it down. “Take it with you and shine its light upon the visage of the Forlorn King. Only then can you truly fight the evil that possesses him.”
“What about you?” I asked.
“I must stay here so that you may leave,” he replied and sat down on the tile, recessing it just like the lantern had done. With a loud scrape of stone-on-stone, the wall jumped open enough for me to put my hand through the crack. I quickly pushed open one side of the wall/door, fearing the Priest would accidentally release the pressure on the tile and crush my hands.
“I do have one last request,” the Father told me.
I looked at him expectantly.
“Would you mind returning to me the Book of Sermons?”
I’d left the last bit of food and drink I had with me, as well as the nondescript catacombs key, but by then the priest had already started reading from his book and suddenly looked as old as when I’d first met him. After a quick consultation with the map, I made my way out of the small room, then passed across the puzzle floor and into the adjacent chamber. I looked back once I was at the end of the chamber, but the wall was now closed again, with nothing but a keyhole in its façade.
The trek towards the true entrance of the catacombs was long despite the punishing pace I set myself. At one point I had to backtrack when I misread the directions on the map. It was hard not to get impatient when the going was so slow.
When I finally reached the end of the labyrinth I was covered in dust and cobwebs, and was so hungry that I could’ve eaten an entire horse by myself. I almost regretted leaving the remainder of my food with Father Adam. Almost.
I’d gone through about thirty different hallways in the maze and for some reason still remembered all the turns I had to take if I wanted to return to where the Father sat beyond the puzzle room.
As I climbed the many steps out of the tomb and into the darkness above, the background music changed from the ominous chant to a different kind of male choir, incorporating both light and deep tones, and with a clear guiding voice, which recited the chant and was accompanied by the other voices at various intervals. Word by drawn-out word, it told a tale which recounted the history of the Kingdom from its inception, and, I guessed, led to an eventual story about the current Forlorn King and the murder of his father.
At the top of the spiral staircase,[4] I was greeted by a decently-sized entrance hall leading into an antechamber. Thankfully, the catacombs stairwell was inside the keep itself, which made things a lot easier. The keep entrance nearby had a great set of doors that likely led to a courtyard outside, and opposite the catacombs landing another set of stairs led to what I imagined were the upper floors, and from there to the spires and towers I’d seen from afar.
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[1] Or, more likely, the shoreline of jagged rocks below the cliff.
[2] Latin for “The Flame of Truth”.
[3] Also, the rule of three.
[4] Which, I might add, took me seventeen minutes to climb in the darkness, since I couldn’t really use the lantern without giving away my plan.