Apparently, a while meant more than two hours because even that amount of time wasn’t enough to figure out how to open the door. At least it gave their wounds some time to rest, though.

Rhenor had no idea what Kaz was even doing, but he kept writing notes into a journal he had with him, muttering to himself, and crossing out things he’d written constantly. It made Rhen wonder just how rich Kaz’s family was if he didn’t have a problem wasting paper like this, but he held his tongue. It was none of his business.

They had set up a campfire by the door, mostly so that Kaz could see what he was doing—whatever that was. But if that hadn’t been a concern, Rhenor would have set up camp on the other side of the cavern room. That door unnerved him. When he concentrated hard enough, he could almost hear the magic humming within the stone cubes, and it was making the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end.

Rhenor didn’t trust magic of any kind, and yes, maybe it was because he just didn’t understand it, but even beyond that—magic was dangerous and oftentimes unpredictable.

Rhenor glared at the piece of bread he was eating as the ground shook yet again, hard enough to force Rhen to lean onto his injured hand.

“Dammit it!” Kaz snapped at his journal where now a thick smudged line was, no doubt from how the ground had shaken just now. Rhenor said nothing as Kaz sprung up and started pacing, pulling at his hair. It was kind of funny to watch, though Rhenor would be lying if he said the frequency and strength of the earthquakes didn’t concern him.

“How exactly is this door supposed to work?” Rhen asked, hoping it would distract Kaz at least for a little bit. He probably should have asked a while ago, but it was very clear by now that Kaz was much smarter than Rhenor, and Rhen was fine with not understanding everything.

Kaz turned around and breathed out deeply. “The concept is simple. These are draconic letters. All of them together are supposed to ask a question only a dragon, or someone they trust, would know the answer to, and you reply by touching the corresponding letters to make up your answer. But this….”

Kaz turned back around to face the amalgamation of stone cubes.

“This is just nonsense. I’ve tried all the possible ways I can think of to figure out the question, but it’s still just a random jumble of letters.”

He looked so miserable when he turned to face Rhenor again. And so guilty as well. Rhenor sighed, motioning to Kaz to sit down beside him. When the other man joined him Rhen handed him a piece of meat.

“This just doesn’t make any sense,” Kaz said through a mouthful of meat. “It’s not every other letter, it isn’t backward, it isn’t vertical…. It isn’t how it’s supposed to be.”

Rhenor frowned into the fire, trying to get this through his head. “This seems like an odd way to guard anything. Wouldn’t a key be better?”

At that, a bit of the usual spark reentered Kaz’s eyes. “On the contrary. A key can be stolen, and it would be cumbersome having to constantly pass it around. These doors are enchanted to switch between questions as well, and they can be about anything dragons generally don’t talk about around humans, so it’s next to impossible to prepare yourself ahead of time.” Kaz was grinning now, as if he was completely in awe of the dragons’ security systems. “Oh, and also it’s all in draconian, so very few people can read it.”

Kaz frowned. Rhen could almost see the gears in his head turning. “I suppose a barrier that would allow only dragons to cross would have been more secure, but sometimes they send trusted humans to check these artifacts.”

“Because the lizards are too lazy?” Rhenor grumbled, making Kaz grimace.

“Well, um, possibly,” he said, rubbing his earlobe. “But mostly because this system is too large for the dragons to deal with on their own. There are more than a hundred places like this one all over the kingdom.”

Rhen’s heart stopped working for a second. Over a hundred? That couldn’t be right. The kingdom wasn’t small, but it certainly wasn’t huge either. Wasn’t such a large number unnecessary? It also put a bit of a damper on Rhen’s plan of destroying the artifact here. He was still planning on doing it, of course, but if they had a hundred of these, would the dragons even notice if something went wrong with one of them?

Arlow hadn’t been visited by the dragons for at least a generation, from what Rhenor had heard from the locals, and even then, it had only been one dragon supposedly flying over the village, not stopping to even look at it. Well, there was that one rumor that came from the village to the west where someone had supposedly seen a large black shadow flying towards the mountains, but Rhenor would sooner believe that rocks were edible.

Almost every year someone said something like this, and it had never turned out to be true. And hopefully, it never would be because those infernal lizards were the last thing Arlow needed.

The earth shook again, however this time it was much more violent. And the next thing Rhen knew, from the darkness above them came the sound of breaking stone. Letting instinct take over, Rhenor grabbed Kaz and pulled him with him back, just as a rather large rock from the cavern ceiling fell right next to their campfire, only a foot or so away from Kaz’s leg.

As the shaking stopped and the danger passed, they both stared at the boulder for a moment, the only sound in the cave being their breathing and the constant noise of the stream in the background.

“That was...very close,” Kaz forced out, his voice strained. “Um, thank you.” He flinched when another part of the ceiling fell, much farther away from them this time. “This...this isn’t good.”

“No, it isn’t,” Rhenor muttered, unsure what else to say.

“I-I’ll figure this out. I swear,” Kaz stammered, pulling his journal out of the rubble frantically. Rhenor gripped his shoulder tightly.

“Calm down,” he said, gently but firmly. “I do believe you can do this. But you have to relax.”

Kaz visibly swallowed and nodded several times. “Okay, okay. Well, there is something I’ve thought of, but I’m sort of concerned it could, um, maybe kill us.”

Rhenor almost expected the ground to shake again, just to get across that they might die like this, regardless. That didn’t happen though, thankfully.

“What is it?” Rhen asked, prompting Kaz to let out a heavy sigh.

“Well, when I read about the sterkk, there was a note about some of the very old ones having a different system. You could open those by seeing a pattern and touching the letters that don’t fall into it. It used to be only one or two letters, as well, I think. But, um, I’m also fairly sure choosing the wrong letter ended with death.”

Well, that was…. He had no idea if this was good or bad, actually. What kind of pattern could letters fall into? Letters made up words, and that was all there was to them, wasn’t it?

“Except I’ve tried working with that idea,” Kaz continued in the meantime. “I didn’t get anywhere with it either. I couldn’t really think of anything, but if I could, I can’t even tell if this is what we are dealing with, with any certainty. There is no way of knowing.”

He kept going, beginning to ramble, but Rhenor had stopped listening. He was instead intently focused on the door. He didn’t have a head for numbers or letters, or anything like that, but he worked quite well with visual things. Maybe this was simpler than it seemed….

“The colors,” said Rhenor, interrupting whatever Kaz was going on about.

“Huh?”

“The colors. I think that might be the pattern,” Rhenor explained, getting up. “Do you see it? Red, orange, purple. It keeps repeating itself.” He waved his hands towards the entire door. And then pointed at the lower right corner. “Except here. There are two red letters next to each other.”

Kaz got up as well, leaning towards the spot Rhen had pointed out and scowled at it. “That...seems both too obvious, and suspiciously simple.”

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If Rhenor didn’t know any better, he would think Kaz sounded almost offended that he hadn’t come up with this himself. Rhenor just shrugged, reaching for the red letter that didn’t fall into the pattern. Kaz had said one or two, so this had to be it.

“Wait, no!” Kaz exclaimed, jumping between the door and Rhenor. “It could kill you.”

There was genuine fear in his eyes. At the idea of Rhenor dying? Rhen hadn’t thought Kaz cared that much about him.

The ground shook again, followed by the sound of more stone cracking as somewhere behind them, more of the rocky ceiling fell to the floor. “If we stay here, we’ll die, anyway.”

Kaz stared into Rhenor’s eyes a bit longer, until another earthquake hit, sending Rhenor to the ground. He groaned as he leaned onto his injured hand, but he immediately forgot all about it when he heard the sound of stone moving against stone. The door was opening.

He watched as the cubes slowly formed a line inside the corridor they had been guarding, letting them pass, still glowing, though the color scheme seemed to have shifted slightly. Now there were more red letters than before. Rhenor wondered if that was significant, or if the puzzle had simply changed once again.

But how had—

Rhenor’s eyes fell on Kaz who was grinning ear to ear from where he was sitting beside the door. Of course.

Rhen glared at him, getting up and picking up his bag and Kaz’s journal, taking a second to light another torch before grabbing the other man and dragging him inside the newly revealed corridor. He was about to go back to stomp out the fire, but the cubes already started forming a door again. They didn’t glow on this side, so Rhenor would assume opening it from here would be easier. Hopefully.

However, that was not the main concern right now. The main concern was what Kaz had just done. Rhenor turned to face the man, and judging by his guilty expression, Kaz already knew what this would be about.

“Why did you do that?” Rhenor snapped, pointing at the reassembled door. Kaz looked away from him.

“The, um, earthquake made me touch the letter by accident?” Kaz said, clearly barely even trying to lie at this point. Rhenor just gave him an annoyed look. “Okay, okay, I’m sorry. I was just trying to be...tactical.”

Rhen frowned and took a step back. “What does that mean?”

Kaz sighed, looking Rhenor straight in the eye. His face was now very serious, though there was sorrow in his eyes. “You’re clearly more capable of fixing this than I am. If one of us has to die, I’m the better option for it.”

“The better…. What?”

Rhenor was now somehow even more confused. Kaz waved his arms helplessly.

“You just solved that puzzle with barely any knowledge of it, while I wasted precious hours looking for something that wasn’t there,” he exclaimed as the ground shook yet again. Thankfully, this was a minor tremor, and they didn’t end up falling again. Kaz sighed, hugging himself. “You’re more useful than I am here, therefore you are more valuable.”

Rhenor groaned, rubbing his eyes. For someone who seemed to be much smarter than Rhen, Kaz was an idiot. “Think a little harder about what you are saying, Kaz. Do you really think I would figure out how to open that door if you hadn’t told me about the patterns?”

Kaz opened his mouth immediately, closing it a second later when he presumably couldn’t think of a rebuttal for that. Instead, he huffed and folded his arms. “Well, no matter how much I know, I wouldn’t have figured out the pattern in time.”

Rhenor tried not to sigh. He was quite certain Kaz knew that the things he was saying made little sense for the point he was trying to make, but for whatever reason, he kept holding onto his crooked logic.

“Yes, and I wouldn’t have looked for a pattern in the first place,” Rhenor said, shaking his head. “We are both necessary. Remember that next time you try something like this.”

Kaz glared at the ground, his arms still folded. The grimace he was trying hard to hide betrayed how much it must have hurt him to keep up this stance. Rhenor really needed to check on the other man’s arm.

“Understood?” Rhenor asked firmly when Kaz didn’t say anything at all. Rhen even leaned into Kaz’s personal space to make his point. Kaz looked up at him with something almost like shock before that quickly changed into a grudging agreement as he nodded.

He must have not been used to regular, lowly humans talking to him like this.

Rhenor berated himself. He really shouldn’t hold where Kaz was from against him. It wasn’t his fault. He could have been a bit braver, but Rhenor understood why Kaz had stayed out of the way until now. Dragons weren’t to be angered if one wanted to live, and Kaz had grown up in luxury. It couldn’t have been easy saying goodbye to that.

Though Rhenor couldn’t help but feel a bit bitter about that as well. So many people lived in poverty, yet the dragons and their sycophants were wealthier than most of the humans combined. He wondered how much money Kaz had on him, despite his banishment. Surely his family hadn’t forced him out with nothing.

Rhenor’s musing was interrupted by yet another earthquake, this one much worse than the one that came before it. He grunted as he was thrown against the rock wall, trying to hang onto it until the danger passed. When the earthquake finally stopped, Rhenor finally took a look around the corridor.

“We need to keep going,” Rhenor said, taking a step away from Kaz when he realized he was standing far too close to him. He must have automatically tried to protect the shorter man from falling rocks. “Do you think we’re getting close?”

Kaz followed when Rhenor started walking down the suspiciously neat stone corridor. It looked so different from the parts of the cavern they’d seen so far.

“I have no idea,” Kaz replied, looking around himself as well. “Maybe? It would make sense.”

Rhenor raised an eyebrow at him and kept walking. The ground continued to shake, but most of the time it wasn’t as terrible as before. Perhaps this part of the cavern was protected by magic, shielding it even from what was happening inside of it. For the most part, the ceiling wasn’t falling on their heads, and instead, it was just dust. Even though getting that in his eyes was quite the annoyance, Rhenor would take it over possibly dying any day.

As they continued their descent, the corridor got progressively more and more strange. Namely, there was moss growing on the walls, which wouldn’t be that out of the ordinary if not for the fact that it was glowing. Kaz seemed fascinated by it, but Rhen was just suspicious. Even though the glowing only came from small, green and blue spots on the plants, Rhenor wasn’t going to touch it. Nothing natural should glow like that.

“These are infused with magic,” Kaz commented, his hands all over the moss. Apparently, his injury didn’t bother him enough to stop. Rhenor tried to resist the urge to pull Kaz’s hands away from it.

“Couldn’t this be dangerous?” was what he settled on. But even as the words left his mouth, he knew Kaz would just brush it off.

“I doubt that,” he said, shrugging, finally taking his hands off the damned moss. “Magic itself isn’t dangerous. The power it can wield is.”

“I fail to see the difference,” Rhenor grumbled to himself, but he let Kaz be. As long as he didn’t get too distracted with this, Rhen supposed there wasn’t a reason for Kaz to stop inspecting the local plant life.

The amount of the plants as well as their glow grew the farther they went. Kaz kept gawking at them, his eyes sparkling, while Rhenor started considering trying to set the things on fire with his torch.

And then finally they arrived at the edge of a path leading down into another large cavern room. Except this one was huge enough to count as another cavern. Rhenor had to pause for a moment to take it all in.

There were crystals everywhere, of seemingly every size and color, some as tall as a man, others as short as a finger. Some were growing out of the ceiling, but most of them were concentrated down on the ground in clusters, surrounded by more glowing plants.

By Hermea, why did those have to be everywhere? Rhenor threw a cautious look Kaz’s way, but surprisingly, he wasn’t smiling anymore. He just looked confused.

“Kaz?” Rhenor tried getting his attention. Kaz’s eyes met his, and then he immediately looked back down at the glowing spectacle.

“This...is much more magic than I expected,” he said, gesturing towards the crystals. Before he could continue, another earthquake shook the ground, making them both lose their footing. A loud, rumbling sound followed, and Rhenor almost dreaded looking over the edge to check what had happened.

However, a morbid sense of curiosity made him do it, anyway. Instead of being horrified, though, he was mostly confused. He couldn’t see any change. That was until a small crystal popped out of the ground right in front of him. Rhenor yelped, jumping back and quickly getting up.

“Oh,” Kaz said but didn’t elaborate until Rhenor gave him an impatient look. “Well, the earthquakes aren’t actual earthquakes. Or at least they aren’t caused how a normal one would be. They are pulses of magical energy.”

Somehow, this managed to make Rhenor feel like he understood more while being even more confused at the same time. He watched as Kaz pulled the small crystal out of the ground and almost dramatically turned around to face Rhenor.

“These crystals are usually found in places with a large concentration of magic, like this one. I assume that is why the dragons chose this cave to hide their artifact in. Anyway, think of these crystals as physical manifestations of magic. That’s why they multiplied when another earthquake happened.”

The ground shook again, and this time Rhen did notice a few more of the large crystals growing. And fall from the ceiling. He flinched when two of the crystals broke off and crashed into the ones on the ground. The ceiling itself seemed stable enough, but those crystals definitely weren’t.

Rhenor swallowed. They would have to get through this part as quickly as possible and try to avoid walking beneath the ceiling crystals.

“Um, okay, we should…go,” Kaz said, putting the crystal in his satchel. Rhenor narrowed his eyes at that, but he didn’t comment. They had better things to deal with right now than to pick a fight.

“Right.”

They carefully walked down the stone path, trying not to slip on the moss and large-leafed plants that had decided to take up residence there. Rhenor was really starting to hate plant life.

They somehow managed to make it all the way down without falling to their deaths, despite the two more earthquakes that followed, and Rhenor could finally let out a relieved breath. Kaz didn’t seem all that interested in gushing over the manifestation of magic around them anymore and simply followed behind Rhenor as he walked towards what seemed to be another narrow corridor, just as artificial-looking as the one that had led them here.

Rhen did his best to ignore the way the ground was shaking, followed by the crashing of crystals around them, since he made sure to keep away from walking beneath the crystals above them, and therefore they couldn’t fall on them. Unfortunately, that didn’t mean it didn’t make him incredibly nervous, or that it was easy to walk during an earthquake without falling.

Just as he was about to make it to safety, a voice coming from his left made him jump.

“My, my, this place has gotten so busy lately.”