Chapter 40 #3
They passed through a long hall whose walls were unbroken by doors or alcoves, and whose carvings, across both sides, told a story of the goddess descending on clouds. He recognized the pose.
She had the exact same pose when napping at the Pellicle.
After the hall, the stairs stretched downwards.
Stone steps worn smooth down the middle.
Alsen’s light orb painted them yellow as honey as they descended.
Fifty steps. A landing. Another flight. A chamber, small, empty, with three corridors branching off it.
Verathras chose the one furthest left without visibly thinking about it.
Alsen, who had spent rather a lot of the last weeks studying spiral temple schematics with what he’d pretended was academic disinterest, noted that he hadn’t the faintest idea which direction led to where.
They were hundreds of yards under the surface and kept descending.
Another corridor. Another short flight of stairs. After a long descent, they arrived at the start of a large hall.
It was the largest space they had seen yet inside the temple. Long, pillared, with a ceiling Alsen’s orb couldn’t quite reach, the pillars themselves ridged with the spiral motif from floor to cap. The air in here was different again: dryer, stiller, older.
The floor was one continuous carving.
A spiral, enormous, coiled from one end of the gallery to the other, its outermost turn running the whole length of the room. The grooves were deep and clean. The stone between them was pale, pale enough that in the orb-light it almost glowed. It was beautiful.
Even Verathras slowed down, observing the carvings.
Luna and Alsen caught up to him, the drakes a few paces behind them.
“Wait,” Luna shouted the second she stepped into the room. She slid to the entrance’s side. “This room has a trap. Probably something like blades, triggered in the second half. Or the last quarter.”
Verathras glanced over his shoulder. He spared Luna a glare and stepped ahead.
Alsen stepped aside from the door to make space for Xiir. The drake also stepped aside, looking around, stretching his neck up.
Vress pushed into the room and continued on, sparing his brother a snort.
Well, if Verathras went, they all had to go.
Omnidirectional shield.
The blue, segmented bubble popped into existence around Alsen. No experiments with this one.
Luna walked uncharacteristically slowly, eyes on the floor. Verathras marched forward. Vress almost caught up to him while Xiir took his time, wings stretched up, body and head raised.
They marched into the gallery.
Verathras crossed the center. He didn’t slow down. Three steps later, a mechanism rumbled underneath them.
Luna tensed, preparing to dodge. Xiir beat with his wings, jumping at the same time to throw himself up.
Long blades came out from the floor. They slashed through the entire room at once.
Luna weaved among them. Alsen’s shield stopped the ones that came at him. Verathras got hit, but the blades broke as they touched him. Vress got hit across the belly and throat, his skin slashed apart, together with muscles, blood spraying out.
Xiir also got hit, but over the legs, thanks to being in the air.
Alsen aimed his hand toward where the rumbling sound came from. Lance of annihilation.
A burst of pure energy dug into the floor, tearing through the floor. The mechanism spinning the blades lay underneath, and the lance dug straight through it.
Xiir screamed with pain, falling to the ground, blood pouring out from underneath him.
Vress only gurgled his own blood, body going still.
Verathras stopped, turning toward the drakes.
Xiir, lowering his scream, pushed himself toward Vress. His legs didn’t function, so he moved more like a snake, using his tail to push himself forward, and his head to pull on the floor. “Vress,” he forced out when he reached his brother, nudging him with his head. The word came out broken.
Vress didn’t move.
After one more nudge, Xiir’s vision darted around. His gaze found Luna. She only gently shook her head, closing her eyes for the moment.
Xiir released a mixture of a growl and a shriek, the pain so intense even Alsen’s eyes watered. He huddled against his dead brother, as if the shared warmth could revive him.
Verathras didn’t take a single step toward the drakes. He only looked over them. “Return to the surface the way we came.” He turned and continued marching down the hall.
While Alsen never liked the drakes, even almost killing at least one back at the library, this still tore at him. Something about seeing one brother die in front of the other one didn’t sit well with him.
But he didn’t have any healing magic, a revival spell, or even a pain-dulling spell to cast on Xiir.
With a silent sigh, Alsen headed his way as well, deciding to instead focus on the concept of the anti-fire shield. That grounded his mind in something he could do something about.
Luna lingered for a second longer and then followed Alsen.
They crossed the chamber and continued on ahead to the sound of Xiir’s sobbing.