As Enna started towards the door, Jiann held up a cautioning hand. "Careful. Some'a these here runes might attack ya just fer readin' em."

Enna jerked to a stop. "Seriously? How are we supposed to figure out how to open the door, then?"

"Didn' say we shouldn' read 'em. Just that we should be careful." Jiann turned back to the door, spreading his hands and raising them up in front of his face; a shimmering blue ribbon of light appeared, tinting his view through the field. Blue -- that's the vishuddha chakra color, mused Enna. Wouldn't he go with the ajna chakra if he's planning on enhancing his perceptions?

Jiann strode forward, pondering the door, then sniffed. "S'much as I thought. Buncha traps in these runes -- if'n you'd read 'em without protection, you'd be havin' all kinds'a problems right now."

Enna flinched, then looked down resolutely at the floor. "Like what? My face melting off my skull?"

"Nah, more like wanderin' off or gettin' stuck in a mindscape again." Jiann beckoned her forward, allowing her to view the runes through the safety of his veil. "Take a look. It's safe enough, now."

Enna shuddered. "I think I would have preferred a face-melting over a return trip to a mindscape." But, after a moment, she managed to master her fear, lifting her gaze trepidatiously up towards the carvings on the door.

Many of them, viewed through Jiann's protections, looked like living and very unfriendly things -- hissing, twisting shapes possessed of motion and intent -- and those she ignored as rigorously as possible (beyond hoping she wouldn't have nightmares about them later). The others seemed to be mostly descriptive scenes -- winged figures presenting a roundish object to kneeling recipients, a large number of people digging with picks and shovels, and eventually a rectangle surmounting five large circles filled with cryptic symbols: a twisting snakelike formation, a u-shape filled with wavy lines, a sequence of incomprehensible glyphs, a large number of clustered dots, and what looked to be a hand performing a strange action of some sort she couldn't really identify (but which looked a little risqué, she thought amusedly). "Wow. That's a lot of stuff to take in."

Jiann nodded again. "Felt the same, like. Got any idea what they might mean?"

She blinked. "No? I mean, am I supposed to?"

Jiann shrugged. "I ain't got no clue, but you break th' rules, 'member? Figgered mebbe I could use it to our advantage this time." Splitting his veil in two with a gesture, he left one part of it floating in front of her and kept the other before his own face as he strode up to the door. "S'pose first order o' business might be gettin' this thing open."

"It doesn't look like it's even attached to the wall," Enna pointed out. "Are we sure this is the right place?"

Jiann chuckled. "Young Padawan, this here door ain't likely to put us anywhere remotely like th' real world. If we're lucky, we'll be in some kinda liminal space partway in and out o' reality; if not, we'll be takin' a nice nap here while our minds venture into some totally other plane o' existence." He began patting the edges of the door carefully, mumbling to himself.

"But how would we bring back anything we found that way, if the whole thing is... I mean, seems... imaginary?" As usual, Enna was having trouble wrapping her head around things that didn't make the usual sort of sense. She was still occasionally nervous that a camera crew was going to jump out and inform her that she had just won the Guinness World Record for "Victim of the World's Longest Prank".

"Jus' wake up holdin' it, I expect," grunted Jiann, tugging on portion of the carvings which seemed like it might move, but eventually giving up and moving on to other areas. "States o' reality always synchronize in th' end." With a noise of satisfaction, he managed to find a hidden catch in the edge of the large rectangle carved above the five circles and pressed it; the door, in defiance of logical physics, swung inward to reveal a descending staircase.

Awed, Enna stepped cautiously around to the side to where a gap had clearly been visible between the door and the wall previously, but there was no sign of it in evidence now; the door appeared to be quite firmly mounted on the wall despite having not looked that way in the slightest a few seconds ago. She shook herself. "Guess I need to just embrace the crazy."

Jiann chuckled. "But only the right kinds. Watch yer step, it's pretty dark for folk whose eyes work th' regular way."

Enna started to conjure a light or enchant her own perceptions, but stopped herself; memories of Orton warning her against such things in their adventures beneath Venice came back to her, and guiltily she instead activated the flashlight app on her cell phone. "Hope my battery doesn't run out." Following Jiann, she stepped over the threshold into the tomb.

The steps descended interminably; after the first ten minutes, she was sure they were no longer fully in the Material realm despite the apparent solidity of the hewn rock walls; the air felt oppressive and heavy, and she kept catching glimpses of glittering lights out of the corners of her eyes. Eventually, the steps terminated in a flat landing in front of an unadorned sandstone door; when Jiann nodded to her after examining it, she took a deep breath and nudged it gently ajar.

The room on the other side was large and expansive, with circular walls curving away into darkness; a thin, winding strip of stone barely a foot wide curved away over a vast pit. At first, she thought it was bottomless, but her phone's bright light revealed a shimmering, watery substance far below -- at least, she hoped it was water. Queasily, she hoped she wouldn't have to find out for certain.

"Hope you been practicin' yer balancing lessons," chuckled Jiann as he raised a martial trance, stepping out with impossibly-precise agility onto the precarious bridge. "Looks like a long way down."

Enna crossed her arms. "That's dumb. It's got to be some kind of trick, where you get halfway across and then it crumbles out from under you or something."

Jiann paused, looking ahead into the darkness carefully, then sighed and walked backwards back onto the landing. "I conjure you might be right; all kinds'a bad astral fog blockin' any kinda divination. Don't see no other options, though."

"Hang on. Maybe the wiggly line doesn't refer to the bridge." She squinted down into the darkness, shining her light into the chasm below them a second time, then sighed and steeled her will. Raising her fingers to her lips, she blew out a long and warbling whistle; at first, there seemed to be no effect as the sound died away in the underground expanse, but after a moment it became clear that the surface of the shimmering substance far below was growing closer.

Jiann gulped. "You sure you didn' piss it off?"

"No. And I really wish I was." Enna was looking a little ill herself.

A few seconds later, the apparent depth of the pit had been cut in half; within half a minute, the substance below had boiled up almost to within a few dozen yards. Enna cringed as her suspicions were confirmed; the shimmering light had been reflected up not by any liquid, but by a teeming mass of hundreds of thousands of snakes. "Well, I sure hope you're not ophiophobic, Jiann."

Jiann covered his eyes with one hand. "Bein' dead, it ain't like I'm gonna need no first aid. But I ain't gotta like it."

Finally, the snakes crested the lip of the pit; slithering and flowing over each other, they filled the entire span like a living moat, treacherously solid-looking. Enna reached out and took Jiann's cold hand in her own, then began to stride carefully forward, her other hand weaving a spell of stillness and sleep around her as she approached the pit.

The first step was the most frightening -- she was all but certain she'd sink into the mass of snakes and endure an interminable period of agony before being mercifully bitten, constricted, or envenomed to death -- but her spell worked to perfection, charming and holding the serpents motionless like a living floor as they passed across their scaled backs. Without a pulse or breath, she couldn't be sure how Jiann was faring, but his tight grip on her hand as they walked told her more than enough.

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It took nearly five nerve-wracking minutes to cross the pit; when she stepped onto the far landing, her ankles and calves were already aching with the strain and stress of constantly expecting to fall. She tugged Jiann onto the stone in front of another door, and he sat down heavily, holding his knees and clenching his own forearms with obvious discomfort. She patted his shoulder, feeling very awkward. "Sorry. I wouldn't have joked about the phobia if I'd known you had it."

"I don't." Jiann shuddered visibly. "Turn aroun'."

Nonplussed, Enna looked back over the pit; it was completely empty, showing only a dizzying fall beneath them. She staggered back, aghast. "Shit. What the hell were we walking on?"

"Idea o' snakes. My astral vision could see right through 'em." Jiann shuddered again, then slowly clambered to his feet. "Hope there's a back door outta this place, cause I ain't doin' that again."

Enna cringed. "Let's both hope so." She stared back at the pit, trembling slightly, as Jiann opened the second door.

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The next two chambers were stranger, but less terrifying. The first had merely had some sort of puzzle with cups and a basin of water, which Jiann had solved almost immediately while muttering about a lack of imagination; the third had had a floor tiled with letters and symbols which she couldn't read at all, but Jiann had hopscotched across with great confidence, which had been irritating at first but abruptly immensely satisfying when he'd guessed wrong about the sequence and nearly gotten obliterated by a large stone pillar which came within a half-inch of squashing him flat. After about three minutes of watching him cling to a precarious ledge and grumble about Nešite grammar, Enna got bored and tossed out a shower of enchanted pebbles, setting off the rest of the traps all at once and revealing the correct path by default. Doing so had made the room a bit of a mess architecturally, but she figured that wasn't their problem. At least all the rooms after the first had mysteriously-still-burning torches for illumination; she had no idea when she'd next have access to a phone charger.

After a bit of undignified scrambling and crawling, they were through the next door and into the fourth room; Enna recoiled from the loud buzzing sound which greeted them immediately. "Ick. How are bugs still alive down here, a bajillion years after this place was sealed?"

Jiann chuckled. "Ain't you know the answer to them questions is always 'magic' by now?" He sauntered through the doorway, dragging her along with him as the door behind them slammed shut. The room, a large corridor filled with swarms of huge, angry-looking flies, seemed impossibly long and narrow.

As they began to cross the first few yards, the swarms of flies began to buzz louder and drift towards them; at first, Enna began making the signs for a cloud of smoke, but stopped abruptly when it became clear that the insects were coalescing into hideous, vaguely humanoid shapes of boiling malice. "I've changed my mind, Jiann. Let's go jump in the snake pit instead."

"Jes' keep yer mouth closed," Jiann grunted, drawing a revolver and firing a few shots into the body mass of the closest monster. The bullets sailed right through the creature, which didn't surprise him, but he always felt obligated to test the assumption; a remnant of Cameron's psyche, he supposed. "Looks like we cain't use brute force, neither."

Snaking a hand into a pouch on his belt, he withdrew a fistful of bright copper objects; flickering torchlight revealed them to be specially-prepared bullets, engraved with mystical symbols and runes. Breaking open his other revolver, he shoved them expertly with impossible precision into the whirling chambers of the cylinder, then took aim at the nearest fly-blob; it was already within a few yards, and would likely do something horrible to them in a moment or two. Sighting his gun towards the creature's chest-analogue, he pulled the trigger.

A gout of brilliant, gold-tinged flame erupted from the barrel of the gun as the lóng xī zǐdàn discharged its enchantment; the fly-monster burst apart instantly, its buzzing taking on a distinctly scream-like timbre as the delicate wings and bodies of the bugs curled and disintegrated into ash beneath the onslaught of superheated destruction. Enna brought a clawlike hand to her mouth and breathed out her own brimstone apothegm, catching it in her palm like a hot coal and hurling it with all the force of her disgust and revulsion towards the next creature. In a spray of crimson starlike bursts, it too crumpled and broke apart, a vile spilth of effluvia pouring out of it as it deliquesced. She fought down the urge to gag as she coughed out another invocation, not wanting a repeat of the incident which had cost her her grimoire, and moved forward to press the attack.

The battle was long and drawn-out; new swarms of flies kept appearing to replace the ones they'd destroyed, and there was a tense moment about three-quarters of the way through when Jiann ran out of flame cartridges and was nearly engulfed by one of the monsters before switching to more traditional spellcasting. But at the last moment, he poured energy into his manipura chakra, filling his belly with golden light an instant before vomiting it copiously into the creature's face. The two of them picked up their pace, blasting flames on all sides as they ran for the final door before hurrying through and slamming it shut behind them.

The last room was simple almost to the point of abstraction; a round, bare cylinder with no other apparent exits, and a small marble pedestal in the center which bore only a plain ceramic bowl. Jiann started to cast a divination, but stopped halfway through. "I cain't do nothin' in here. Cain't even magically scratch m' butt."

Enna took a deep breath, trying to send her awareness into her own mystical nexus, but felt only a leaden incapability she imagined was the same thing he was encountering. "Me too. Guess we aren't magicking our way out of here." Cautiously, she stepped across the room and approached the bowl.

She'd expected to find some kind of apples or something, but the bowl held only a thick, sandy profusion of dust; she sighed. "I guess fruit picked thousands of years ago probably rotted away before the Greeks discovered pants," she noted glumly. "It looks like we wasted our time."

"Mebbe not. Lemme get a closer look." Jiann stepped around her, tentatively poking a withered finger into the bowl. For a moment, he seemed to be simply tracing a pattern aimlessly; but after a few seconds, his face split in a wide grin, and his hand rose up with two fingers pinched together.

At first, Enna thought he was just teasing her, but as she squinted, she could tell he was holding something very carefully -- a tiny black dot, roughly the size of a tiny bead. "An apple seed, huh? Wow. Guess it wasn't a bust after all."

"Quince, I reckon," sniffed Jiann, then froze. The bowl lifted up ever so slightly -- surely, no more than a fraction of a millimeter -- then plummeted out of sight as a slab of marble snapped out over the hole into which it had vanished. The two of them looked at each other for a split second before two noises interrupted the silence: a loud boom as a huge stone pillar slammed into the floor behind them, blocking the door beyond all hope of opening, and a quiet but steadily burgeoning sound of trickling liquid.

"Oh shit," muttered Jiann as ice-cold, brackish water began to rise up underneath their feet. "You better figure somethin' out fast, Red. I ain't need to breathe, but I reckon you do."

"Oh, don't worry, I'm sure it's enchanted water that kills revenants too," shot back Enna as she scrambled around the room, looking for any sign of something that might be a way out; the surrounding walls and floor were smooth, polished stone, and the ceiling above seemed equally featureless (though it was hard to tell with the flickering shadows from the soon-to-be-doused torches around the ceiling's circumference).

"Well, I cain't spell us outta this either way," he shot back. "There's gotta be some other exit, or somethin'."

"Not that I'm seeing!" shouted back Enna, looking around the room in a near-panic. "There's not even anything to fiddle with down here!" Scrambling over to Jiann, she whipped her head back and forth frantically before settling on the space above them. "Here, boost me up. Maybe we have to pull on one of the torch brackets, or something."

"Just how I always wanted t' go out: furniture for a spoiled white girl," grumbled Jiann as he made a cradle out of his hands for her to step in. "Jes' don' make me drop th' seed." Enna planted her foot, hauled herself up by grasping the back of his neck, and stepped up with precarious grace onto his shoulder. Muttering, she tugged on each of the torches in sequence, but they refused to budge.

Cursing, she started to yell at him that it wasn't working, but a tiny black splotch caught her eye; looking back up, she noticed a miniscule black spot in the center of the ceiling. A button?, she wondered, reaching up to press it, but her finger encountered only a tiny hole. She sighed. "Well, unless you can make yourself about a half an inch wide, this might be it for us."

Jiann grunted. "Keep tryin'. Ain't no use givin' up afore we're dead."

She windmilled her arms, fighting furiously to keep her balance. "Try what?! If I had magic, I could turn us into mist, or..." she trailed off, looking back up at the hole. No, that's stupid. It can't be that simple. Biting her lip, she stuck her index finger into the hole and pressed as hard as she could.

For nearly a minute, nothing happened; she would have lost her balance several times over if not for her steadying grip on the nearest torch sconce. But eventually, it became clear that the trickling of the water was slowing and becoming fainter; after while, it stopped entirely. The sound of her breathing seemed very loud in the glassy silence, and she tried very hard not to think about how far underground they were or how long the air in this room would last.

Then, abruptly, it was over; a drain somewhere sprang open, the water gurgled noisily away through some hidden channel, and some ineffable void mysteriously vanished as strangely as it had appeared, flooding her being with the reassuring weight of her sorcery once more. Sighing in relief, she hopped down from Jiann with sudden grace. "Well. Thank God that's over."

Jiann scratched his head, carefully wrapping the seed in a small piece of cloth before sealing it inside an empty shell casing. "Not that I'm complainin', mind, but how in the H-E-double-hockey-sticks did you manage that 'un?"

Enna pointed up at the hole. "Air pressure. The water was pushing the air upwards out through that hole, so all I had to do was plug it and wait for the pressure to equalize. I guess then whatever mechanism resets the trap drained the water back out." She smirked. "I might not have won any science fairs in school, but even I know the old card-on-top-of-a-cup-of-water trick. The door didn't give us much of a hint, but it ended up being enough."

Jiann whistled, slightly raspily. "Dang. Looks like you might have a few tricks to teach me." He tucked the seed away in a pocket and sealed it carefully. "Feel like teleportin' us outta this deathtrap?"

Enna shuddered. "I thought you'd never ask."