I woke up to darkness. Waving my hand in front of my face, I realized I couldn’t even see that much. I closed my eyes and pressed my hands against my eyelids. Colors flashed across my vision. I opened them again, and after the colors slowly faded, there was nothing once more.

I slowly took stock of my other senses. My back was resting against something cold and hard. I had a slight ache where my pack had fallen under me. That was good, I still had my supplies. My ears reported the sound of breathing, all around me. Hopefully, that was coming from my companions and not some kind of cavern bear. I smelled dust. I couldn’t say what kind, other than that it didn’t make me sneeze. But then, I’ve got a pretty tough constitution.

As my wits started to come back to me, I cast back in my memories, trying to remember where I was or at least what I had been doing before I arrived here. The last thing I remembered was…

Oh. Right. We had been tracking down that Fragmented One. But we hadn’t realized how long he had been Fragmented until we caught up with him. His magic was fully developed. He had cast some type of spell that engulfed us in unnatural light…then I had woken up here.

I sat up, reaching one hand above me to be sure I didn’t bump my head in the process. It hurt, but I didn’t think anything was broken. Patting the ground I had been lying on, I concluded that it was stone of some variety. Maybe Azul or Dav could identify it.

Oh. Right. The others. Feeling my way across the ground, I tried to move towards one of the breathing sounds. It was slow going, in the dark, but after a few blind swipes crawling forward, I bumped up against a warm figure wearing some sort of coarse fabric. Patting it, I decided it was probably Azul. I gave him a slight shove.

“Hugh?” he grunted. Or at least, I think that’s what he said. It may have just been a noise he was making.

“Yeah,” I answered. “It’s me. That Fragment did something to us. I don’t know where we are.”

“It’s dark here.”

Well, that didn’t bode well. I always considered myself to have pretty good night eyes, but that was by human standards. Azul was dwarfkin; he could see by the light of a single star in the pitchest forest. If it was too dark even for him, we were probably deep underground, if we were even still in the natural world.

“I noticed. I hear the others breathing. Help me wake them up. We need to find out if anyone is injured and then figure out what to do about this place.”

Azul was silent for a second, and then, sheepishly, he muttered. “I was nodding, but I guess if I can’t see in this darkness you probably can’t either.”

“Nope. Don’t suppose you can make a light for us?”

“In a minute,” Azul answered. “There’s something…off…about this place. My senses are still adjusting.”

I didn’t ask what he meant by ‘off’. I knew more about magic than most people, but it was still next to nothing. If Azul said he needed a minute, he needed a minute.

“Wist usually carries a few torches. Maybe if we find her, we can--” I was interrupted by the sound of violent coughing, with whistles interspersed throughout. That would be Dav, waking up. For such a little guy, he sure was tough.

When the coughing subsided, Dav managed to get a few reedy words out in his native tongue. “No fire…” he coughed again, then his voice grew stronger. “Coal dust. It’s all over everything. If we light a fire, we might all go up.”

“Dav, glad you’re awake. Can you see anything?”

Dav hesitated, then answered. “Too dark to see. But I can see--” (I should probably explain. Dav’s kin have two words that roughly translate as seeing in the trade tongue. The first one he used was for seeing-by-light. The second is for seeing-by-sound. It’s some sort of special sense that his people all possess.) “we’re in a room. No doors, but there’s a table at one end. Some shelves carved into the walls. I think everything is all one solid piece.”

“Do you think you could create a flameless light?”

“It will depend on how many of my materials were lost. Have you found Azul yet?”

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“Yeah. He says there’s something off about the magic here.”

Azul cut in. “Is Dav asking me to work a spell?” Somehow, despite being the smartest of us, and knowing three other languages beyond his native tongue and the trade language, Azul had never bothered to learn Dav’s tongue. The rest of us knew it, because Dav found the trade tongue uncomfortable to speak, though he was fluent in it. I wondered how the two managed when the rest of us weren’t around.

“He said there’s coal dust in the room. Torches are too risky. He might be able to mix up a flameless light, but he doesn’t know how many of his ingredients are intact. So if you could work up a spell, that would be great.”

“I’m still working on figuring out why everything feels off. It’s like the Pulse has thorns. It’s somehow more powerful and simultaneously more dangerous than I’m used to.”

“Alright. Keep working on it. Dav can help me wake everyone else. Dav, can you see Wist or Suti?”

“Yes. They are both asleep, but I can hear Wist breathing. I’m less certain about Suti.”

“Let’s see if we can wake them.” With some direction from Dav, I managed to get myself pointed more-or-less in Wist’s direction, while Dav went to recover Suti.

Wist awoke the instant I found her sleeve, and I was fortunate that she couldn’t see in the pitch dark any better than I could, because she woke up swinging. I managed to throw myself backwards so I wouldn’t be struck accidentally, and there was a loud ‘clink’ as she chipped a piece of the stone floor away in a shower of magical vapor that vanished almost instantly.

“Easy, Wist. It’s me.”

“Hugh?” She asked. “Where the hell are we? Why can’t I see anything?”

“Two very good questions, for which I do not have answers. We’re working on it. Dav and Azul are here too. And Dav found Suti; he’s trying to wake her up now.”

“Trying, and failing.” Dav whistled from another part of the room. “She’s still alive. I found a pulse. I can’t smell any blood or see any significant wounds. But she seems weakened, somehow.”

I sat down on the stone floor, considering. “Dav, didn’t you say this room was sealed?”

“Seems to be, yes. At least, I didn’t detect any doorways or doors.”

Wist seemed to catch on to what I was saying. “And it’s pitch dark. Not even ambient reflected light, or Azul would be helping with the search, instead of doing whatever it is that he’s doing.”

“Meditating,” Azul answered. It was his go-to explanation for any wizarding he had to do that didn’t look like he was doing wizarding. It also sometimes meant he was taking a nap, but I doubt this was one of those times.

“Yeah,” I responded. “I think we’re probably underground. Maybe even in the Lost Realms.”

“We need to get Suti out of here,” Wist concluded, concern straining her voice. She and Suti were close. The diminutive warrior had been Wist’s roommate at school, back when both were Acolytes of Coin Magic.

“Agreed. Dav, you said there was a table. Could you sense anything on top of it?”

“Too high up to tell,” Dav answered. He might not be as miniscule as Suti, but he was the next smallest of us by a fairly wide bit. Gremmi tended not to grow especially large, and Dav was a runt even by the standards of his kin.

“What about your ingredients? Did you find any of them?”

There was the sound of a gentle chime, and slowly, a faint blue-yellow light began to creep into my vision.

“Aha!” Azul’s voice cried out. The light was emanating from a series of embroidered symbols near the cuffs of his sleeves, and his flinty beard exposed a smile filled with obsidian. “I figured it out. The Pulse isn’t more thorned here, we’re just further up the River than I expected. The thorns are the lines that run through our world, except their roots are still detectable from this side.”

Now that Azul had got his spells working again, I finally got a good look at the room. The whole thing was grayish stone. Tiny streaks of different colors--mostly blues, but there were also many greens and yellows and even a couple streaks of rich violet--chased each other around the floors and the walls. The room itself was roughly square, though the corners were all rounded, as was the entire ceiling. At one end, a large stone table, perhaps four or so feet high, seemed to have been carved from the same piece of stone, though how it was possible to make such delicate legs without breaking them I was not sure. Above the table, a series of small box-like shelves were carved into the wall. Dozens of them, each slightly bigger than my doubled fists.

And there was, in fact, something on the table. A pile of smooth-looking stones was neatly stacked on a tray that seemed also to be a part of the table. Four candleholders, their candles’ wicks long ago dried and crumbled, stood evenly spaced around the edge of the tray. The stones seemed to be about three inches long, and they were shaped like flattened eggs; a sort of oblong oval flattened down until it was nearly a lopsided plate.

The others all looked rather dissheveled; Dav’s feathers and fur were tangled together even though he usually kept such meticulous care of both. Wist’s bag had a tear in it, and her toolbelt was missing at least two items. Suti was unconscious, being carried by Dav. Her scales were dull and her four wings limply drooping. Cloudsnappers tend to do poorly when removed from the sky for too long.