Chapter 3 #3
And, probably not by coincidence, magic started vanishing from his world not long after that occurred. Here, it was the third step on the spiral.
Well, fuck.
The theories may not have been wrong. It was still a hell of a stretch, especially since this temple may have been ancient.
“Alsen,” Luna whispered.
Not now, damn it. The age of this temple just became critical to his conjecture. But how could he tell its age?
“Alsen!” Luna snapped.
Couldn’t she stay silent for twenty seconds?
Stone rumbled ahead. He looked up.
The stone wall ahead was splitting apart, the shape of another void-animated guardian coming out of it.
Luna stepped to his side. “Either pop one of the big spells, or we need to run.”
“I can’t cast that spell repeatedly.” For now. Alsen turned and bolted for the exit.
Luna darted alongside him. The monster screeched behind them. “Let me go first,” Luna shouted. “And dive how I do.”
Alsen slowed down a bit. Luna overtook him and dove headfirst into the next room, landing just before the slashing blade traps. Shit. He would have forgotten about them.
He dove after Luna, landing roughly on the stone with his face. With a grunt, he crawled forward. Stone rumbled behind them, and his pace got frantic.
They reached the end of the room with traps. Luna scrambled to her feet, but didn’t run. Alsen reached her, and she helped him up. The void-animated monster already floated across the room behind them.
They ran. The monster stopped by the bottom of the stairs.
They still ran out of the temple completely, sunlight welcoming them.
Alsen breathed in the fresh air. The scent of the forest washed away the run and stray thoughts. They didn’t find any treasure, but the spiral carving intrigued him. He had to find out how old this place was, and then return here to blast the monster and draw a copy of the place.
“By the way,” Luna said. “Looking at the mountain behind the temple, I think it looks like one of the carvings on the temple wall.”
He turned, not even annoyed. Indeed, he could see it now, the mountain towering on this valley’s side had the rough shape of the frame of one of the carvings.
The pattern mapped the mountain’s face, and he could roughly place it on the mountain.
“What could there be on the marked spots of the pattern?”
“Treasure?”
Or hints to what the spiral meant. Plus, it wasn’t like they were in a hurry. Without money, they couldn’t do much in town, anyway. “Let’s go.”
They marched out.
The forest gave way to rocky foothills, then to the mountain’s base. The terrain grew steeper, more treacherous. Luna led the way, constantly humming or talking while casually finding paths where there weren’t supposed to be any.
It took a while though. The sun was about to set when they started getting close to the first point. They found a burnt, destroyed shrine. They searched it, mostly, without finding anything. No symbols, no treasure, nothing but destruction, burn marks, and moss.
Was this shrine an exception or did they get all of them?
The question intrigued him. They set camp around the shrine, with Alsen setting bushes on fire and Luna hunting a mountain goat. Alsen didn’t have much power left, but he tried to create some spice with the food creation spell, anyway.
They spent the night, and continued with the search for the other shrines the next day. A water stream from the mountaintop served them fresh water, and Luna had no issues hunting food. The search took days, only to find all the shrines in the same condition.
Burnt down, destroyed, with nothing left behind. At one of them, they even found remnants of hammers. That proved the destruction had very strong intent behind it.
It took them six days to check all twelve shrines that covered the mountain. The days fell into an absolute repetition, though.
Luna hunted food, he made fire, they ate, they chatted about nonsense, they went to sleep, and so on and on.
He didn’t know how to approach her. Not since she spent every night crying herself to sleep.
He didn’t see any way to open a discussion about that. It gnawed at his insides. He wasn’t even sure what bothered him more, not knowing why or not being able to help her.
At least he had time for breathing exercises and meditations. He didn’t mind wasting time because of that.
What he needed, fundamentally, was to train this new body. He knew all the methods. He just needed time, so wasting a week climbing around the mountain served him perfectly.
Luna didn’t voice a word of complaint, which he strongly suspected was for the same reason.
She also needed to get used to a new body, in her own way. Neither of them had anywhere to be or anything more important to do, so checking the burnt-down shrines functioned as a perfect excuse for both of them.
After the last shrine, they descended to the forest path and headed towards the village. He felt ready for a bed, for any food that was not badly burnt or undercooked meat. He did figure out how to create salt, at least. An illusion, it might have been, but it made the food taste better.
His attempts to create pepper had yet to produce any meaningful results though.