Chapter 94: The tunnel

Felix Sythias’ POV:

I half jumped out of my scales when a loud thud rang out from behind us. I spun around to see the door closed, despite the fact we had left it open on purpose. How had it even done so? There were no other people here, and there didn’t seem to be any enchantments on the door. Were they in the door?

“Fuck!” I yelled and sprinted back to the door. I pulled on the handle, putting all my strength into it, but unlike before, the door didn’t budge in the slightest. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. Don’t tell me we’re trapped. Again.”

Alex hurried over to help me, but even with his help, turning the handle felt like moving one of the Academy’s floating islands with brute force alone—don’t ask me how I knew how difficult that was. I’m sure it was possible, but we didn’t have anywhere close to the strength to do it. Hoping I could maybe erode the locking mechanism away, I turned to my stone magic. Small changes like this should be well within my capabilities. But my mana just bounced off, like the door wasn’t even made of stone… Oh, it wasn’t made of stone, was it? Damn.

“It’s not stone, my magic won’t work,” I told Alex

“Try your lightning!”

I froze. That would certainly work, but I really didn’t want to destroy the carvings on the other side. They were the closest I’d ever gotten to learning more about myself and my species. I didn’t want to ruin them. But I would have to. At least Alex made several good drawings of the doors. I would still have something to study later.

With a sigh, I told Alex to step back. I also took a few steps back myself and began channeling my lightning breath. It went easier now than a few hours ago. I was beginning to get a handle on it, it seemed. A few seconds later, I released the attack and dust and debris flew around the tunnel. But when the dust finally settled a few minutes later, it revealed an undamaged door.

No, that wasn’t quite right. Where my lightning attack had struck, it had blasted off a thin layer of stone, revealing polished and slightly charred metal underneath. It had a green-ish color that reminded me of copper, but it had a strange sheen to it that was decidedly not copper-like. Weird.

I sighed again and turned to Alex. “In hindsight, perhaps we should’ve put something between the door and the frame.”

He shook his head. “You’re not wrong, but we couldn’t have known something like this would happen. Who expects the door to be the thing that’s trapped?” he said, then glanced down the tunnel. “I suppose we only really have one direction to go in, now.”

“Yep. But at least now we know for certain to expect traps, so let’s go slow.”

He nodded, and we started going down the tunnel. I scooped ourselves a few pebbles from the wall using my magic—at least the walls were still made of stone, though it was strangely dense—that we used to throw ahead to see if any traps triggered. But nothing happened, so we just walked down the mostly empty hallway.

In any other situation, we would’ve let the lack of danger settle our nerves, but now the lack of any traps only made us increasingly on edge and paranoid. At least the tunnel was well lit, as we put some mana into every other lamp we came across. It was only a small drain on our mana, and the comfort it brought was well worth every last drop of it.

When, after an hour of walking, it started feeling like every step we took might be our last, I decided it was time for a little break. Alex let out a sigh of relief and flopped down against the wall, though not before checking it for traps. Not for the first time since we got stuck, I wished Tiki was with us. She had a much greater understanding of traps and what they could look like. Compared to her, we were just stumbling around in the dark with our hands bound, hoping we didn’t accidentally step over a cliff’s edge.

Like had become tradition these last few days, we drank first, then ate. Alex even handed me a small bit of his most flavourful jerky after he saw me grimacing at the taste. I gratefully accepted it.

We continued down the tunnel not soon after. While we weren’t entirely relaxed yet, we were on a very strict time limit and couldn't afford to destress properly. At least it still helped a little.

After only another hour of walking—this tunnel was strangely long and straight—we finally came across something interesting and different. Someone had painted on the walls with bright colors. It was a scene of a mountaintop overlooking a desert with an oasis in the middle. At least, I was pretty sure it was that. The painting lacked detail and for the life of me, it looked like a child had made it. The most interesting thing about the painting were the letters in the bottom left corner together with a black handprint next to it.

The text, which was likely a signature or a name, was eerily familiar. I could almost recognize the language and the alphabet used. It was like waking up after a dream and not quite being able to remember what it had been about. The knowledge was right there, but I couldn’t access it. It was a lot like how I had known about how my lightning core or the new organ worked. It was more instinctual than intellectual knowledge. It felt strange and rather disconcerting.

I shook my head to get rid of the unpleasant feeling and focused on the handprint. Or more accurately, the talon print. Four claws and a ‘thumb’ on the back, it was almost exactly the same as mine, if smaller. I put my talon next to it and the talon-print was so small in comparison. It filled me with an immense sadness, tears welling up in my eyes.

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A hatchling had drawn this, I was sure of it. And now they were dead. Now they were all dead, wiped out by something no one even remembered, leaving only me. Why was I spared? Was there even a reason, or was it just pure luck? I really wanted to know. I needed to know. But I also knew I’d likely never find out.

Alex put a hand on my shoulder and leaned into me. “Are you okay?” he asked, and I shook my head, my words getting stuck in my throat. No, I was not okay. A child had died, and even if I didn’t know them, the loss stung. How could I possibly be okay? “That’s alright,” he said, “I’m right here if you need to talk, or if you just need someone to hold.”

I took him up on his offer and pulled him into a hug. We looked at the art together for a while, and I told him about who I thought had drawn this. By the time I finished my story, Alex was sad, too. He offered to copy the drawing into his notebook so that even when we left, we could remember it and the person who had drawn it. I agreed, of course. The memory deserved to be preserved.

While Alex drew, I looked down the tunnel. “How many dragons do you think walked these tunnels? Maybe it was their home at some point.”

“I don’t know,” Alex said. “But let’s find out together.”

Alex finished his drawing and carefully tucked it away, and we continued down the tunnel at our slow pace. It surprised me that the tunnel was so straight. Despite the kilometers we had walked already, it never turned or twisted. It was just a straight tunnel leading seemingly nowhere.

It wasn’t entirely empty, though. A few hours further into our journey, we came across a door in the wall. It was about the same size as the first door. When we went inside—this time leaving something in the doorframe to block the door from closing—it turned out to be a small barracks of some kind. There was something that looked like it had once been a kitchen, a small common space, and a bunch of small bedrooms. Well, I say small, but they were all dragon sized—like the ones on the doors. If there had once been furniture, though, it had long since rotten away.

But despite the age of the room and the lack of furniture, the whole space still felt lived in. There were large shattered plates on the ground, claw marks scuffed the floor, and one of the walls was covered in talon-prints. They were adult ones this time, though, with a few about the same size as my own talon, and most considerably bigger. Inside each print was more of the strange text we’d seen earlier, together with something that resembled numbers. Names and periods of service, maybe?

Alex copied some of the text, then we continued on. There wasn’t anything of use for us there. We weren’t tired yet, and the faucet likely hadn’t worked for at least a few hundred years, so no water, either. That last one especially stung. We had run out of fresh water before we even entered the tunnel, so we’d gotten all excited about finding the faucet in the kitchen, hoping to fill our bottles even if the water wasn’t the freshest. It would have still beaten the urine we were drinking.

“Wait, stop,” Alex told me after we’d walked for another hour. “I thought I saw something moving up ahead.”

I froze mid step and stared into the dark. I didn’t see anything, so I threw our light-orb down the tunnel. Something skittered back from the approaching light and I flinched. There was definitely something down here with us, alright.

“An animal, maybe?” I said, then shook my head. “No, how would an animal get down here… except if there’s an exit close by? Maybe we’re closer to escaping than we think!”

Hope welled up inside me and if it hadn’t been for the incident with the door earlier, I would’ve sprinted right ahead. As it was, I stopped myself from doing exactly that and instead forced myself to calm down.

“Or it was a monster,” Alex said. “The mana density is high enough down here that one might have formed. Still, that would mean there was at least some kind of life nearby.”

I quelled my hope. Alex was right of course, it could just as well have been a monster. But monsters only spawned when there was life nearby, even if that meant plants. It was a positive sign either way.

After going through our plans again and discussing how we would handle any monsters we came across, we started forward again. Soon, the creatures up ahead got tired of running, or maybe they just got used to the light. They attacked us, trying to ambush us from the ceiling, but as we expected something like this to happen, we took care of them with ease. It was a spider-like monster with the body of a house-cat. It was weird, and I hadn’t seen anything like it before, not even in books. I named them spidercats, a name which made Alex groan. But who cared, the name was very descriptive, and that mattered more than it being a terrible name—which it was.

We dissected one of the corpses, but it had little to no meat on it. Still, it was something, and so we stripped all the dead spiders. I had to use my magic to cook the meat since we didn’t have anything to burn. It took a lot of mana, but with Alex acting as my own personal mana battery, we made do. The meat itself tasted quite terrible, but it was nice to eat something fresh and hot for once, instead of jerky.

After we finished eating, we continued and soon came across more weak monsters. Mostly they were more spidercats, but we also came across spiderdogs, and spiderweasels. Lots of spider creatures. No normal spiders, though, which was strange. None of them were higher than level ten, but despite that, Alex still leveled up once. There were just that many.

After an hour and a half of fighting and walking, however, the amount of monsters suddenly trickled off, then stopped all-together. We were both rather confused for a while until we came across a break in the tunnel. Literally.

The tunnel opened suddenly and jarringly into a large cavern. It was larger than any of the previous caverns we’d come across. It was at least a kilometer high, and several kilometers long. Bushes and trees grew all over, though they got sparser and sparser the closer they got to our side of the cave. In the distance, we saw an opening in the wall where the tunnel continued. It seemed that the tunnel intersected the cavern just at the end, where the width was the smallest. The rest of the cave expanded further than we could really see.

And we could see. The ceiling was covered in brightly glowing moss, lighting up the whole cave and the monsters there-in. Suddenly, I understood why we had come across fewer and fewer monsters as we had approached the cave. They were scared. Scared of the big scary monsters that roamed about freely here. There were big hairy monsters, ones with scales, ones with feathers, and ones with no coverings at all. They ranged from about as big as a large dog, to twice my size at the very limit.

And just like the trees, they were clustered more towards the other side of the cave. At first I didn’t understand why, but as I tried getting a closer look, it became clear. There was a glittering of blue and distorted light painted on the far wall. A lake. The monsters and the trees were all clustered around a small lake all the way in the back corner of the cavern.

We’d finally found a source of fresh water, and all we had to get to it was to slaughter an army of monsters.

I sighed. This was going to be a long day.