I hobbled my way back from where we came. Through the large hall where we were attacked; the vines there were inactive now. Through the doorway at the other end. There was the staircase that I had been thrown down, which Cris was climbing. I followed and called to her.
“Where are you going? It’s dangerous!” I yelled up at her.
“Then don’t follow!” she yelled back.
“It’s safer together than alone,” I countered.
“I’ll be fine, the danger is over!”
“Is it? Which is it?”
Cris tripped over the final step, affording me the opportunity to catch up to her. There was a gap in the vine cover, which had left the fire that had been blazing with nothing to burn, so it had died out.
“Are you really okay? Let me look,” I said to Cris, who was clutching her head. Parting her hair and ignoring her resistance, I could see that the wound she had gotten was bad enough to have bled all down her back.
“I’m not the doctor, but I don’t think this is okay,” I said. Cris sulkily brushed my hand away and said “It’s not as bad as it looks. I’m going.”
“Then I am too. If you want me to stay behind… then tell me what you’re thinking.”
Cris cast me a sulky glare. It was unlike her, but I could tell that it didn’t contain any actual anger.
“… Holly was one of my only friends,” she sighed sadly. “You know what I thought when I learned that she was missing? I thought ‘That idiot. I’ve tried so many things to help her with her addiction, yet she’s probably gone and fallen off a bridge while high’. I really thought something that awful.” Cris sobbed as she continued, “But she did listen to me. She shouldn’t have come here. So why the hell was she down here, why did this happen to her?!”
“The poppies, they… took over her mind,” I said. I didn’t understand how such a thing was possible, but it was the reality I had seen just minutes earlier. “There was nothing we could have done,” I assured Cris.
“You are right about that,” she nodded. “But, you saw Rea, didn’t you! If we can find her, and bring her out of here, then… I won’t feel like a total failure, at least.”
“I saw her,” I said, “but I saw a bunch of illusions. I can’t be certain—“
“Exactly. I don’t know how the poppies did it, but they used a brain… Holly’s mind… to think. To trick us and lure us. It knew how to muddle our perception and confuse us. Maybe it could even learn about Rea and show us an illusion of her. That’s why you stay behind, Syco! Because if Holly is gone, and if Rea is gone, I will have nothing, and I need… at least…” she trailed off, and then wiped her tears away.
I realized that I was rather terrible at consoling. I didn’t want to give false hope, nor did I think it acceptable to let Cris wander around alone in this place.
“Is that enough?” asked Cris.
“I also want to know why the bun had that effect,” I said.
“… There were mostwurm leaves used in it. That plant can be used as a deterrent against some things. Though it seems to be much stronger than I thought. It explains why the poppies have never overgrown out of here, since there are mostwurm fields right above. Now then,” she said as she stood, “I’ll be going.”
“Me too,” I said. “I changed my mind.”
“You mean you lied,” Cris sighed.
“If something kills me, the same will probably happen to you, so it won’t really matter, right?” I said. It sounded like a joke, but it was logical to me. “Besides that, I still have this. If what you said is true, it should clear your mind.” I handed her the bun.
She didn’t eat it, but instead asked me, “So, after all this… What will you do?”
“My plan hasn’t changed. I’ll travel to the capital and search for what I must find.”
Cris cocked her head to the side. “And you won’t tell me what that is?”
“I’m not sure I could, even if I’d like to.”
Cris still hesitated, for some reason.
“You’d prefer to stay trapped in an illusion?” I asked.
“It would be crazy to prefer an illusion over reality… even if the real world is the one where evil is born.”
It didn’t sound like a denial to my question, but she did eat the food. I waited silently until she was done.
“Do you feel better?” I asked.
“Slightly more clear-headed, maybe,” Cris said.
Cris was bothered by something. Not something as transient as the world around us right now, or something that mattered only at this moment in time. I understood that there was an inherent quality of the world that conflicted with her.
To me, the world was as it was. I felt surprise at seeing magic, and felt disgust at the cruelty of nature, but those momentary deviations were quickly incorporated into my world view. There was no event that could happen that would shatter my immature conception of the world, whether that was due to its puny size, or maybe its rigidity? The latter was preferable, but I wasn’t sure.
As such, I was unable to empathize with what Cris was enduring. ‘Your mind is hazy, so fix it with this’; such a basic link between problem and solution rarely truly existed in the world. This I began to understand, and it was only because it was Cris who disrupted this logical progression—a person who I understood to be, somehow, closer to the ‘root of all things’ than anybody else I had encountered. I could then question why I believed this about her, but there was no time for a journey down an infinite regression such as that.
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Anyhow. When Cris spoke of the world where ‘evil is born’, I was unable to offer any insight, for I could not see beyond the premise; that this world was the one that birthed evil, because it was the only world, was it not?
It might be possible to say that evil was birthed here because this was the only world. To surmise: living in this world means to live amongst evil.
Unfortunately, none of this pondering served to fulfil its goal, which was to attempt to console Cris who was distraught over this genus of thought. Why did she bring up ‘evil’, anyway?
We had been walking for a few minutes now—slowly, due to injuries. Fortunately for me, there were no signs of Karl’s presence, and Varus was nowhere to be seen either. There was only me and Cris, and the dripping of water. Much of the vines and poppies had become ash, so walking had become much easier.
“I’m starting to get a clear picture of this place,” Cris said. “I almost forgot how it felt to have a clear head. It’s a strange feeling. I wonder if this is what people feel like when they’re waking up from being knocked out for surgery.”
“I couldn’t guess. That gives me a question. What if you get sick, or need to be tended to?”
“Then I’d probably get sliced apart a minute later. And hey, that goes for you too, doesn’t it? Or does that whole madness just work on an entirely different principle to what I thought?” She sighed as she usually did when she had no answers. “That’s basically why I decided to become a doctor, anyway. To avoid the risk of anybody needing to come into contact with me.”
Cris pulled an object from her bag. It was a jagged piece of metal covered in blood.
“You still have that junk?” I asked. It was what I had been stabbed in the side with earlier.
“Notice anything?” she asked. I looked it over again, but it was just a bent piece of sharp metal, covered all over in dried blood.
“Nothing in particular.”
“Mm. Do you remember where you were when you were stabbed with it? Can you lead me there?”
“That shouldn’t be too hard…”
It was just around the corner from the large room with bookshelves in it where we had slept. It shouldn’t be too hard to find.
As expected, after some wandering, we came to a spot that I thought I recognized, and soon after that we rediscovered that large room. Cris peered inside through the soot-blackened doorway, but Karl and Varus were still nowhere to be found.
“They must have left out the top. I can’t believe the daylight reached here this entire time, and we never saw it,” Cris said.
Now that the poppies had been eradicated from around here, the hallucinogenic effect was fully dissipating. The previously green, crawling walls around here especially had been replaced with deep black remnants of an intense inferno. I counted myself lucky that the sheer heat of Karl’s attacks hadn’t downed me.
“Does that mean that our vision was manipulated to even miss daylight that was clearly there?” I asked. “Is that even possible?”
Cris shrugged. “It must be.”
We followed the hallway that circled the central room, and—following my movements from when I had run through the darkness—we turned into another doorway, then advanced through a few connected rooms.
“Ah, this room,” Cris said, recognizing the final one. It was one we had been in before; there was debris and metal strewn all over the floor, and the next doorway was followed by the large staircase that we hadn’t gone down.
Cris crouched down and inspected the floor carefully. After a moment she pointed something out to me.
“Blood?” I said.
“Right. The metal shard in your side was covered in blood, correct? But the shard itself was preventing much bleeding from happening; even moving around didn’t cause any sudden gushes of blood, right?”
I nodded, realizing that it was strange for the metal to be covered in blood.
“So the blood over the rest of it wasn’t mine?” I asked.
Cris nodded. “So the one who stuck it in you either cut themselves on it as they handled it, or something like that.”
“I heard a yell as I was chasing her… She probably stood on one of them.”
It made perfect sense. It had been pitch black, and some of the pieces on the floor had sections pointing into the air dangerously.
Cris followed the trail of blood. It continued on ahead, through the doorway, to the staircase, and then down its steps. I had doubted that this staircase was even real, considering the circumstances; such was its size and apparent depth. But it looked no different to before. Cris made her light shine brighter, and it penetrated deep into the darkness, but the steps seemed to never end. The stairs delved deep into the ground, much deeper than the rest of the dungeon.
“Will you go down?” I asked Cris.
“Rea is down there,” she replied. She took a deep breath, and began descending.
Before following her, I looked again at the message on the wall to the side.
“The ??? of seventy millennia forthward is drawn from thy will within”
It was identical to before, and remained obtuse.