On the other side of the shadow was a different world. A purple path stretched out ahead of me, branching off in several places into short staircases that ended in vertical pools of light. I assumed those were the ways back up into the real world, but wouldn't know until I tried going through one. I couldn't really think of anything else they could be, though, especially given that one of them was right behind me where I'd come into this place. The path split around it, presumably to rejoin itself on the other side, but I didn't bother checking. I'd have plenty of time to figure out how this place worked in all of its intricate details later. For now I just needed to finally - finally! - get into the Drakebarrow itself and see what was in there.

Phantoms, I hoped it was worth it. Anything that took me more than an hour to find out needed to have a major payoff, and this one had taken up most of the day. If it was a letdown after all of that, I was having serious thoughts about robbing the entire town to make up for it.

Okay, no, I probably wouldn't do that. Especially with the message that had gone out. Any attention was bad attention until I could figure out how they knew I was back and find a way to counteract it. Someone in Vaz Andax probably hadn't been able to keep their mouth shut, but that still didn't fill me with confidence enough to call it the sole answer.

I stopped wasting time and started moving down the pathway, resisting the urge to look over the side the entire time. There had to be something down there. There was always something down there, wherever "there" was in any particular case. Nothing was empty with these kinds of techniques and relying on it to do what I needed without understanding those specifics was a recipe for causing my own death. The image of one of my old friends getting pulped for accidentally transgressing against a hidden law in a god's pocket realm flitted through my head and I had to physically shake it off. I didn't want to see that ever again if I could avoid it.

I couldn't tell how far I went along the single strip of walkable area, at least in terms of how far I was traveling relative to the main world. It didn't feel very long, but if there was one of the little sets of steps for every shadow in the real world, I had to be going a long distance. I wasn't getting tired at all. The only changes in the scenery were the glimpses of the real world I got through the puddles of light. I kept going, inspecting all of them that I passed for something that might look like the barrow I was hunting down.

I had no idea how I'd notice it when I got there, but there were only so many ways the inside of a dome-shaped tomb could be configured. I'd probably know it when I saw it. Assuming, at least, that there was anything in there that I could travel back through and that I wouldn't just be wandering this place forever looking for something that didn't actually exist.

Ah well. Worries for a time when I'd actually been down here long enough to need to be concerned about that.

Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

*

I had narrowed it down to three options. None of them particularly looked like a barrow, but they all had round walls. That was the closest thing I'd found to being definitively what I was looking for.

In the furthest one from where I'd started, a family sat around a fire, so I felt pretty good about ruling that one out. The second finalist had a single chair sitting directly in front of it, faced as if whoever sat there enjoyed staring into the darkness for as much of their free time as was possible. The surroundings looked dusty through that one, which was probably a good sign. Maybe whoever was buried there was such a miser in their living life that they demanded to be buried with all of their worldly possessions. Or maybe that was just the fashion here. Or maybe they just hated whoever that had been so much that no one wanted to take any of their things after they died. The final one was positioned weirdly, a warped view from this side showing a line of halberds leaned up against a weapon rack and not much more. Not very helpful, all told, but I supposed it could have been the weaponry of the Barrowguard. I didn't remember them having halberds, but I had also gotten knocked out before being able to register anything about the attack so that didn't say much.

Wait, why was I pretending this was a limited resource? I could just hop back in if I went out of the wrong one. The practice creating the form would do me good anyway; there was nothing like repetition to really make sure it would sink in. And I very much wanted it to sink in. Needed it to, honestly, if I was going to have a hope of growing it into something permanent when my ternion was complete.

I slipped out through the pool of light in front of the chair, my feet kicking up a plume of dust from the floor and I stifled a reflexive sneeze. Something about my surroundings seemed more vibrant now that I was out of the shadows. I didn't know whether it was a difference of being back in a place with actual light instead of a single path with a small ambient glow or if it was just in my head, but it felt good to see. Reassuring, almost, though that was probably the familiarity.

New things were popping out to me with the restoration of the colors. I hadn't noticed that the entire room was outlined in maroon and gold, for example, though how I had missed that I had no clue. I also hadn't noticed that the chair was plush and extremely comfortable-looking. I felt like sitting down in that chair would solve all my issues, as if it would carry them away on a cushion as velvety smooth as -

Wait. Those thoughts weren't mine. Why was I obsessing over a -

It really would solve all of my issues. Just sitting down and staying there would make everything alright. The chair was waiting for me. The chair had always been waiting for me. The chair -

No. That. Wasn't. Me. I would not let myself become some slave to an inanimate object. My thoughts were mine.

I tore the cobwebs of control from my own mind and, for the first time, took in the true state of the room. There wasn't one chair, there were dozens, all but the last one occupied by corpses in various states of rot. The room wasn't lined in maroon and gold, there were a pair of dragons intertwined around the edges. The dragons were breathing and their eyelids were flickering.

Hellfire.