Alonne made his way to the exit and sucked in his stomach. He sidled his way through the crevasse, inching sideways until he stepped out into a vast cavern. A few jutted rocks had scraped his elbows, but he was otherwise unscathed. Lit braziers lashed at the perimeter of this vast, high-ceilinged room, down a rocky slope. At the bottom, a few dozen prisoners sat around an open campfire, loudly swapping stories.
There came the sound of bones snapping from behind, a few grunts of displeasure from Khani. Alonne winced and held his sword close to his side. The prisoners did not move.
“This one time, I went home with a whore from Kurokawa. You should’ve seen what she did at the bar where I met ‘er,” echoed one tobacco-addled voice throughout the cavern. Alonne wrinkled his nose as he continued, “the things she could do with her mouth…”
There were no natural lights on this end of the cavern, and the trail of braziers only began several dozen yards away from where the trail of torches lead downwards. Alonne was grateful for the shroud of darkness. Even if he had a weapon, the last thing he wanted to do was start an outright prison brawl. The last time he’d seen prisoners war with one another, there had been at least a half-dozen faces splattered across the ancient sandstone of the Palisades, and a battalion of Paladins which had descended to keep the peace. They did not need that kind of attention.
With a final crunch and a sigh, Khani emerged from the cavern. Were there any doubt in Alonne’s mind that forbidden magic ran through this stranger’s veins, they were now erased. A man his size could never have made it through otherwise.
They crept along the perimeter of the room—Khani’s footsteps as silent as a cat’s where Alonne struggled just to avoid stumbling over loose pebbles, had to hold his sword high to keep from scraping it on the ground. It made his forearms ache, but they needed the element of surprise. Alonne would glance over his shoulder at Khani every few steps to make sure that he wasn’t alone, that he hadn’t been ditched out in the open.
This all could’ve been a trap—but whenever he considered the idea of imminent betrayal, he heard the same chorus of instruments and voices come from Khani, a symphony with a nexus in the center of his chest. They sang melodies that had no words but communicated all the same: Khani was proud, carried himself with honor and purpose. That these disembodied whisperings could’ve lied to him felt inherently wrong. They felt as easy and natural to Alonne as drawing breath. Was it from the same phenomenon that had conjured the stone sword? Perhaps he was simply going mad; he’d hardly be the last person to lose their marbles without sunlight and warmth.
The light of the encampment at the bottom of the valley faded as they slipped through a passageway leading downwards, deeper into the prison. There was no way that they would be able to pass through the main doors of the Palisades without ending up pincushions full of blessed arrows, but perhaps there was something in its depths.
“Why are we going down?” Khani asked, tone hushed. “The only way out is above us.”
“I don’t know,” Alonne said, still at the vanguard. “Something in my gut tells me that there’s something in the basement.”
“Khani grew quiet.
They walked for a long stretch of time, the only sound their footsteps and the intermittent rumbling of Alonne’s stomach. The passageway opened up into a vast cavern lit by luminescent mushrooms that grew from the upper regions, which exuded a cloud of opaque dust that glittered in the air. The air was filled with what looked like shimmering mist, nebulae cascading down from the ceiling before their eyes. Stone pillars as thick as tree trunks rose in a circular formation around a dais of cracked earth, which had countless arcane runes etched into the circumference.
“People had to have made that,” Alonne said. He had stopped to marvel at the architecture. The runes were baffling, but he could not read them. He could not read anything.
Khani stopped beside him. “A shrine, perhaps?”
“I don’t know.” Alonne looked around, “I don’t see any other prisoners. Or anyone else, for that matter.”
“The inmates don’t come here. I have been told it’s cursed.”
Alonne rolled his eyes, “superstitious idiots.” He took off towards the dais, curious as to where, if anywhere, it could lead. A stone staircase lead them down to the basin where the dais waited. They had to wade through an ankle-deep layer of dust and then climb onto the raised platform.
Flipping his hair, which was full of glimmering dust, Alonne looked down at the dais in wonder. They were standing on a piece of history, something the likes of which ordinary folk never got to see. Had it any magical properties, the Paladins would’ve neutralized them long ago. He could not fathom the idea of the clergy allowing something truly meaningful to reside within the Palisades—an icon of the Aerie’s cruel and judicious punishment.
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“Mum and dad used to tell us about the scions,” he tiptoed carefully across the brittle surface. There were countless, and indecipherable, runes etched underneath his feet, each one a remnant of ages past. “People that lived outside of the Church. The priests told ‘em that scions ate babies and sacrificed children to a horned god—threw virgins into volcanoes, and all that.” Alonne turned back to Khani, smiling impishly. “You think this prison is also a volcano? It’s built into a mountain.”
“Doubt it,” Khani huffed. “There are no tectonic plates in the area. I do not think that there are deposits of magma beneath this place.”
“What the hell are you even talking about?” Alonne laughed and shook his head. None of that sentence had made a lick of sense to him. “I wasn’t worried, anyways. Doubt either of us’re virgins.”
All that earned from the other man was a quiet chuckle and a roll of his amber eyes.
Alonne crept towards the center of the dais, nearly twisting his ankle on a cracked panel. How old was all of this stuff, anyway? There was no water, air, or wind beneath the earth to erode it; the tunneling Cicadoidea had not eaten through the platform as they did anything else. There was no dust resting on the dais, all of the glittering fragments floating through the air, and ultimately falling into the deep pile at the bottom level.
“Why isn’t it more beat up?” Alonne asked.
“It is probably enchanted,” Khani shrugged, resting himself up against a nearby pillar.
Alonne stopped in the center and turned around, looking out at all the runes. They were inscribed in interlocked circles that seemed to emanate from the central point, rippling waves in a pool of stone. It was artistic, if nothing else. “By who?”
“Hell if I know.”
“You’re supposed to know this shit, Khani.” Alonne put his hands on his hips, turned to him. “What’s up with your eyes, anyway?”
“What is up with your eyes?” Khani’s brow furrowed.
Alonne blanched. “Okay, yeah. That was rude. You know what I meant—they’re all cat-like and shit.”
“They have been altered by magic.”
Alonne’s eyebrow twitched for a moment. As he went to step away from the center of the platform, he tripped over a crack, and his sword went flying across the stone.
“Ow,” he winced, inspecting his scuffed elbows and wrists. With a groan, he stood up, turned to Khani.
The stranger was silent.
“Cat got your tongue?”
Again, silence.
“Seriously, you’re way too quiet.”
Khani pointed to the ground at Alonne’s feet. The runes he’d fell on were glowing softly with blue light, an ethereal hum reverberating from the dais beneath them. The glow was spreading, each rune lighting up to better illuminate their cryptic, incomprehensible message.
Alonne looked down, eyes wide, his jaw dropping. Was this his doing? Was it some latent power that he did not understand? Or was it simply an illusion, or the work of the devil? All the things his parents and priests had claimed were holy—all the things they had insisted were evil—felt ephemeral, meaningless. Khani was the only person he’d met in the Palisades who’d shown him respect; Khani was an unrepentant apostate and a mage at that.
None of it made any sense to him at all.
Alonne kneeled to place his hand on the glowing rocks and felt nothing. The song did not grow louder when he got closer; it wasn’t coming from anywhere, but it was coming from everywhere. Alonne looked up at Khani, “what is this?”
“Magic,” Khani said.
“I know that,” Alonne pushed himself to his feet. “What kind?”
Khani was silent for a moment. Then his gaze shot up towards the door through which they’d come, and he reached to grab Alonne’s hand, pulling him off the dais with particular haste. It was easy for him to yank the much smaller, skinnier man behind a pillar, the dais singing and glowing even without them standing on it. It seemed they had irreversibly triggered some mechanism, though the finer details escaped the both of them.
“What are you doing,” Alonne started. Then he heard voices coming from the aperture, the only entrance to their room, and went silent, freezing as Khani scrunched them both into the smallest space they could be in.
“The blonde one’s around here somewhere,” came the grizzled voice of a jailer. Alonne did not need to look up to picture a limping Paladin with unkempt hair, aged and covered in liver spots, forgotten by his own order. This was where the Paladins came in the wake of the Crusades when war chewed them up and spit them out, left them broken and shambling. They could still serve the clergy by keeping the inmates in line, by dragging their charges to the surface to meet the gallows. Alonne did not recognize the voice of the jailer but had a rough idea of his appearance regardless. He swore he heard impatient whisperings coming from the direction of the entrance—disembodied and discordant. Had everyone always emanated such sounds? Was he only just now hearing the truth?
“Does this room always glow like this?”
“Yeah, sometimes. Every hundred years or so, they say. Like a comet—make a wish.” The man coughed, “I don’t see nothin’. Let’s keep going down.”
Alonne could hear rusted armour clanking as the patrol walked back the way they came, leaving the fugitive inmates unscathed. He let out a breath and made eye contact with Khani. Their hands slipped apart.
Alonne rubbed at his sore wrist. “They’re already looking for me?”
“Seems so,” Khani said. “They want to execute you quickly.”
The color drained from Alonne’s face. He remained on the ground, hiding behind the pillar. “We really need to find that exit, then.”