Sloping fathoms. Dead beasts that once were monks heaped among the Corridoor. Gruesome splatters. Their spine-eating faces sagged to their bellies this far along or ago. Clawed paintings clung to the water-damaged walls overgrown with clumpy moss. The smell was likely a Shadow’s doing, making noxious the air with breathable poison. An open window was wafting thin the sharp smell but Serib coughed, trying to fan away the stench with her hand.
“You’ve been crying?” Shay knelt by Serib’s side masked and cloaked, swords and all, and Serib completely jumped on her with joy.
∞
The two hugged each other for a good while. What matters most certain when surrounded most by uncertainty.
∞
“Finally, the team is-this back together.” Shay looked to the sunny window. “It would-should be nice to stay wherever here is.” Lavender and poppies swayed together in distant fields. Lured, lulled, she almost took off her mask to watch, strange their peace underneath the toxic cloud of her trap escaping through the window.
Woid leaned against a wall, realising the blood or worse of dead monks had ruined his sleeve. “We’d have to clean and clear this lot up, first. And you’d miss tunnel crawling too much.” He brushed at his sleeve uselessly, only making the stain worse and soon he reappeared with a new outfit, finding nowhere comfortable to recline, everywhere strewn.
∞
The tears would not leave Serib’s eyes, torn between sadness and happiness. She gasped:
“Your arm!”
Shay allowed Serib a closer look at the bony thing and she vowed that all would be told when their job was done, these vows we often make and cannot keep. The little shaman’s cheeks were shining by the window, her tusks dry and slightly smaller than Shay remembered them to be. In sunlight and a fresher breeze Shay looked at Serib in that Corridoor of butchery and poison clearing, looked at her eight thick locks of hair thinking how if her own hair was not so dyed, covered with wigs from job to job, masks, hoods and other props, hers once grew the same.
∞
“I doubt you’re that happy to see us.” Woid ruffled her lightning hood. “What was in that room you were backing out of, upsetting you?” he noted her eyes, complacently umbra-stepping into the same room’s shadows.
He soon recognised it as she had, and stared up at the now (or then) plain ceiling trying to find where he and Serib had been eavesdropping from:
“Right where that weird angel was…” he muttered to frescoes, trying to keep his mind off of the billowing smoke that almost caught and kept him mad.
“I accompanied The Dam’e to a similar loom-room as this.” Shay stepped through the regal archway with Serib, the flowering hills outside somehow reassuring them all the age would remain stable as they did so.
They perhaps forgot to even question that. They entered the room and to Serib's senses it was much unchanged aside from sunlight's touch rearranging what moonlight could only glow for, though Argus was nowhere to be found, nor the musty smell of his net-cape.
∞
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“A contract with one of the ring states.” Shay elaborated for Woid, whose eyebrows and lips belied his interest. “Newly conquered. Tribute being agreed.”
The shamanic girl Serib would go nowhere near the long cold fireplace while still being unable to take her gaze from it. Trying to find a sign.
“Which one?” Woid probed excitedly for more information from Shay.
In reply Shay held up her hand and wiggled her bony thumb. “She needed our protection, going-froing over her security.” Meanwhile she was looking over a deep cut in the open door her sword had made during the fight just outside, her gloved fingers tracing its groove.
∞
“What’s up?” Woid called over.
“Just trying-why to figure it out-about.” Shay coughed awkwardly, trying to shrug off her slurs. “These doors were closed while we fought-wrought. Do you remember them opening? How could Serib have stepped through them otherwise? And why are there slashes from my blade on this side?”
He shook his head as Shay tried to plan their next move:
“And the doors remained the same… and Serib leaving the loom-room changed the age-page for us, not only her. Was it sunny outside when we poisoned the monks? It all seems-or-seams nice here. I’m sure it was all candles and other fire light.”
“I’d say it was, too. More night than day.” Woid leaned into his thoughts of those older words. "Or they would've seen the wire."
∞
The three of them searched, moving through the room having examined every sunny corner of it. Eventually their scanning took them back out into the Corridoor; hoping soon they would be going forwards or towards wherever Lay’d Payn was being kept in this strange prison. There were no scratched or carved messages left in red, nor behind the gaping paintings they removed from their walls to check, nor under furniture all three of them heaved to move. It took a while, though eventually every room they entered was this same room and every Corridoor was splattered by a finished battle already fought through. The same bodies never decaying less or more than they already were.
∞
The sun remained in the same place they began checking, and winds of identical rhythms recurred; whichever way the group went under any arch or through every door. It all looping led back this way. The lavender sprigs were tall as they would ever be and the same poppies swayed in their destined directions to preordained breezes. Soon enough that breeze was not fresh, every mote of it being too well known and expected.
“I feel like we’re rotting.” I and other scholars are unsure if Shay said this gazing out of the window, or if Serib mumbled staring into the fireplace reluctant, or Woid whispered reclining in a dusty chair.
∞
As on they went to an ever deeper hopelessness nowhere going, still Serib dreaded every corner turned; dreading that Argus would be there suddenly and the sad room dark-again against a glowing flame. Unwilling to face his sorrow or her own fear.
“It’s not following the rules we know.” She finally spoke, sighing always away from the fireplace, always returning to it.
“Really?” Woid still had the strength to smile sarcastically.
“Another riddle of Lay’d Payn?” Shay asked, having a gut feeling. “I think we’ve been saying that as well. Rules we know.” She nodded at Woid.
“I think so. Loom-room, did you say before?” Serib asked.
“I’m not sure of half the things I slur-say. It’s been worse the closer we’re getting, or I hope we’re getting.”
“We’ve said a lot of things while looking for our way out…” Woid gave his eyes a break, reclining deeper into one of the more comfortable-looking chairs, searching for the best one.
∞
“Loom-room…” Serib pondered while Shay rested her elbows, bone and not by the repeating window.
The more our shaman dwelled on her problem the less she wanted to look at the fireplace, though it was to that place she most was drawn when feeling almost beyond the point of hope. The strange riddle-words carved old into its wood: ‘All souls are emotion, colour and sound.’ Serib dared her eyes bravely to where Argus had been and she saw singular and tiny, a reddish speck was sticking loose from wood or paintwork. She wanted to pull it free. As though to untie a neat bow. Unlock a seal. Unpick a seam.