We all climbed into the hole after Varus, after determining that we could get back out if needed by standing on his shoulders. The room was indeed a library or study room of some kind, with shelves upon shelves of books, tomes, and documents stretching into the distance. The walls couldn’t be seen—another effect of the hallucinogenic poppies, most likely. The floor here was stone, like it had been so far, but it was far smoother, as though it had been worn down by many years of pacing feet. Finally, the vines on the floor and ceiling were rather sparse, but poppies were not absent. This wasn’t a safe refuge that they had stumbled upon.
“Look at this,” Varus said, showing us a page of the thin book, which was more like just a bound stack of notes. From reading a few sentences, it seemed to describe the very dungeon they were in.
“The other page mentions the poppies, though it says that they only appear from cracks in the walls occasionally… This must be from some time in the past. Perhaps from when this place was built?” Karl said.
“Judging by the language, this was written at least 200 years ago,” Cris pointed out.
“Look at what it says here,” said Varus, pointing to one segment of the page. There was a description of the entrances that the place had. One entrance was above-ground, and from the description, it was clear that it was the one they had been in the vicinity of, and had likely entered through. However, for whatever reason, they were unable to find it again.
Apparently there was a second entrance, on the lowest level of the dungeon. This was a door that led out to the bottom of the ravine that they had passed over, several dozens of metres below.
“Haha… Delving deeper into this place? It sounds like a bad idea to me,” Varus said, and nervously laughed.
“That might be the only way out,” Karl said, and then before anybody could counter, he continued, “But there’s no guarantee of that considering what we’ve encountered so far.”
The fact was that they were all unprepared for this situation, and no choices could be said to be right or wrong.
“Who did you see, Varus? Was it Holly?” Cris asked.
“I’m not sure, heh, it was maybe a hallucination after all,” he replied sheepishly.
After a moment of silence, Cris spoke up. “Let’s split into two groups. Varus and Karl, you can head back up and search some more. If you find nothing, then Karl can burn everything to ash.”
“Is that safe?” I asked.
“They can jump back down here afterwards. The smoke shouldn’t spill down here.”
“And we have limited time. We didn’t bring any supplies,” Varus added. He looked ready to jump at the idea of letting loose with fire, while Karl looked apprehensive; but he didn’t say anything.
“And we search downwards?” I asked Cris. She nodded. The idea of wandering deeper into this overgrown hole of decay wasn’t appetizing to me either, but no fear threatened to overtake me. I felt that I should be more afraid of this situation, but perhaps this feeling made the most sense. I couldn’t recall my past—as though I had come from nowhere, without meaning, I could easily slip back into nothingness, without meaning.
That was how I felt when I talked it out with myself, speaking with my own inner voice about what my mind was doing and feeling in response to all these worrying inputs. But there was another compulsion in there; like a free-floating entity that barged into the cockpit, it pushed a sheet of writing in front of my face. It was the epitaph I had written—the instructions that existed within me, as though encoded in my very skin and bones. This intrusive deliverance ensured that I not take the potentiality of dying lightly, but it did not fill me with anxiety or fear at the thought of failure. It was just a drop of water in a cup, a suggestion; but an otherwise empty cup had little to do other than devote itself to containing that single drop.
Varus clasped his hands together and then slowly parted them; as he did so, pools of thin rope began to materialize between them. “We will keep track of each other with this,” he said, tying one end around his wrist. He gave the other end to Cris. “Tug on it tightly and it will become taut. Then pull on it three times to signal if something is wrong.”
Cris and Karl nodded, and just like that, a plan had been formulated. Despite dwelling in a peaceful small village, I had to recognize that they had some experience working together. I wondered if they had been in situations like this before.
I followed Cris through room after room, corridor after corridor, and the density of the vines gradually thickened. The rope tied around Cris’s wrist grew steadily as we advanced, always remaining at an almost taut length. It disappeared behind us into the darkness, and eventually connected back to Varus, who we had helped back up to the upper floor along with Karl. Varus was also able to generate a dim light of his own, so Cris wasn’t needed for them to get around.
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Cris stopped in her tracks. In the junction in front of us, the rope hung a few inches above the ground; it was a path that we had already travelled down.
“We’ll get nowhere at this rate,” Cris sighed. “I have to apologize for bringing you into this, Syco.”
I shook my head. “We couldn’t know that this would happen… but I would like to know what you meant earlier.”
Cris stared at me for a moment, and then sighed. “I don’t understand you. I don’t want to say this, but I don’t trust you either. But sometimes I can only believe that you have forgotten your memory, or something even more than that. Oh, that isn’t an insult! Um…” She seemed to be having trouble putting words to her thoughts, and then sighed again. “Maybe you don’t realize this yourself, but you’re clearly not the same as other people. But if you’re the one most befuddled by this, I don’t feel the need to make it more difficult for you.”
Her explanation just made things more confusing. “But, I am a human girl, right? And what is wrong with the others—why do they stare off into nothing?”
Cris closed one eye and tilted her head, probably thinking. “I don’t know the answer to either of those questions. In fact, when I saw that you were different, I had a tiny hope that maybe you would miraculously know why that happens.”
“I see… sorry to disappoint. I’m really like a newborn chick, aren’t I.”
“Hehe, a bit. Let’s keep going… standing around here gives me the creeps.”
Cris started walking again down the right corridor, so I followed.
“Don’t talk to anybody else about it in any case,” Cris warned.
“S-Sure. I’m sure I don’t need to seem any more suspicious…”
“It’d be worse than just that,” Cris said. “When I was younger, I questioned it too… it’s been happening for as long as I can remember. But when I was old enough to feel creeped out by it, and made a fuss, things got very bad for me. I decided that leaving it alone would be the best way to survive.”
I couldn’t find anything to say to that. I was unable to remember the people I had spent my time around before, but it was certain that this strange act made me deeply uncomfortable every time it happened. It wasn’t something that I was used to.
“I am glad to know I’m not crazy though. That there’s somebody else that recognizes this oddity in the world of people…” Cris said.
“These ‘poppies’ can warp our perception,” I said, “but we can recognize each other, and the rope, and our surroundings just fine. At least, it seems that way.”
“So it’s like they’re choosing to just confuse our perception of the building itself, to get us lost and confused,” Cris finished. “It’s highly unnatural. Drugs like these usually have a lot of noise and random effects, to say nothing of being airborne, so…”
“Is it possible that something else is going on here?” I asked. “What is this place, anyway.”
Cris handed over the thin book from before. “Feel free to read through if you want. I heard that it’s an old hideout of a magician who fled from a neighbouring country to perform experiments. He probably messed up and unleashed this plague of poppies. I can’t imagine what it’s like deeper in this place.”
We had just passed through a room filled with broken crates and piles of warped metal objects all over, and now stood at the top of a wide flight of stairs that seemed to lead not just to the next floor—and not just the one after, either. How deep did this staircase descend? One slip on the slimy vines that covered it, and death might await.
There was something scrawled into the stone of the wall, right next to me.
“Cris, can you read this?” I asked. She came beside me and shone the light onto the wall. The text was difficult to read, but it said something like:
“The ??? of seventy millennia forthward is drawn from thy will within”
The grammar was almost nonsensical, and I didn’t even recognize one of the words.
“Can you read this word?” I asked Cris. She hummed and hawed, then said, “I’m not sure what the word is, but the characters can be read as ‘machina’, right?”
I could agree with that. The meaning of the message was still entirely obtuse however.
As Cris was about to say something, a distorted scream, infused with terror, bounded down the hallway behind them and reached their ears. Immediately after, the rope attached to Cris was clearly pulled harshly several times. The others were in trouble.