The three reemerged into the main cavern. Raptor felt a rush of relief when he realized that the others were still in within a tunnel. As long as he didn't have to face the humiliation of running into that group again, he would be alright.
Finding that he was in the lead, he glanced back at the tunnels near them.
There were multiple ones to his left as he stood with his back to the last tunnel, but there was one off to the right. That seemed like a good one to go into. If it was another dead end, they could come back out and methodically go from one tunnel to the next.
(And he could easily remember the last one they went down.)
Nikolai was wondering if that was a good sign. If these were underground caverns, it probably was, unless the surface was somehow more dangerous than the caves. It could very well be, since whatever had brought them here clearly didn't mind if they hurt themselves. The trapped scorpion chest was proof enough of that.
They had to be here for a reason, he thought. Was it the missing heart? If so, then the other group had made the right call. But Nikolai didn't want to go hunting in the darkness for something he couldn't understand. He'd been terrified of this place the moment he'd gotten here, and so of course he wanted to get out and be free.
And where would you run to, once you got that freedom? a voice in his head taunted him. Where could you return to? Where is home?
Nikolai felt his heart clench a little at his own thoughts. He didn't know. He'd just been dropped off here with a gap in his memories, a pouch he wouldn't open and an odd outfit where the long dark coat looked strangely like robes. Everyone else here seemed to have some kind of purpose, or at least a usefulness to the group. If Nikolai had either of those, he didn't know what they were. Wherever he was from was lost and left behind, too difficult to track down with no information. He was like a used canvas that had been painted over so the artist could try again.
Home wasn't real. Home wasn't a place he could find.
Home wasn't for him.
His thoughts continued to spiral as the minutes went by and the three of them kept walking. He never said a word on the way up. Suddenly the stone under his boots was level again, and that was when he snapped out of what could have almost been a trance. The colorful lights from the ribbons cast a dim glow on what seemed to be a crossroads of tunnels. There were four to choose from. Nikolai turned to Eira and Raptor, hoping they could all come to a decision once more.
"I think we've got to take our pick again."
"silv is obsessed with heists" ~Omni
"silv why didn't you tell me you were obsessed with heists I thought we were friends" ~Ace
"y’all we outnumber silver let’s overthrow her >:]" ~winter
"Right," Mel said, smirking back at Ainsley. She found it amusing that he called the escapists the odd ones. They were a ragtag group of people trying to find the heart of a statue, yet the escapists were the oddballs. She fully agreed.
She hummed over other topics they could talk about. Ainsley didn't seem like much of a talker, but she didn't really want to listen to Aumrauth's and the doctor's incessant bickering.
The hallway ahead of them narrowed so much that they had to walk one in front of the other in a singular line with only the light of their ribbons giving them sight.
"So, do you have any special skills?" she asked him before she separated, going in front of him, but behind Elias.
Elias turned sideways as the tunnel's walls came a little too close together. It looked like this would continue for awhile. "My colleagues were not quite so eager to see medicine progress so quickly," he said curtly.
"The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words." --Ursula K. Le Guin
"That sounds like a very vague way of saying you did something outside the box," Aumrauth responded in a sickly sweet voice. "Risky. Perhaps, even mad. But you have captured my interest, sweet Elias. Please, do tell me more."
There had been a moment of false hope when they stumbled onto an empty storage room, but they quickly discovered that the end of this underground cavern was nowhere in sight. Part of Raptor wanted to check out the side tunnel branching off of the room then; there could have easily been something lurking within. But he had hoped that going straight down the main tunnel would lead to something.
It didn't.
It led to another branching point.
Maybe Raptor should have followed his earlier ideas. Going from left to right like in the main room was a good idea. Going straight was a good idea. But Raptor was getting to a point where he was missing the chaos of Dresden and Bartimaeus, so he was honestly a little desperate. When Eira started heading towards the right tunnel, he wasted no time in following. He also didn't object to going right again - this time down a smaller tunnel - when they reached another fork in the path.
To his surprise - and relief - it seemed like they were coming towards another room. He hoped it wasn't going to be another empty storage room, but he also couldn't shake the uneasy feeling that something was about to go horribly wrong fast.
Knowing that they couldn't turn back now and that he was the one with the armor and the weapon, he moved ahead of Eira and Nikolai.
He entered the room at the end of the tunnel with his axe ready.
Raptor promptly bounced off a wall of hard flesh pressed up against the doorway. Breathing echoed off the corridors, heavy and loud. Whatever was in that room was vast beyond comprehension and was blocking the entrance. The flesh was a grotesque off-white and appeared to be made up of leathery interlocking scales.
"I just met you," Elias pointed out coldly. "Is this the knowledge you seek in exchange for what I want?" He was reluctant to share his past with someone so obviously untrustworthy, but if his research could be furthered by studying Aumrauth's uncanny ability to survive the unsurvivable, he could be persuaded to make an exception to his values.
"The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words." --Ursula K. Le Guin
Raptor was so caught up in his determination that he failed to notice that the doorway was blocked. It wasn't until he walked right into it - and bounced right off - that he realized something was in his way.
He stared at it.
...And then he heard the breathing.
Whatever was there was alive.
Raptor stumbled back, nearly dropping the axe in the process. Part of him had enough common sense to check the planes, but it wasn't anything other than a solid wall of flesh. There was no demon lurking behind a guise.
Just the thought of a fleshy, scale-covered wall made Raptor feel nauseous. He felt like he was going to throw up, but he didn't have anything to even throw up with. He had grown up seeing demons in their true forms all of his life, but this wasn't anything like that. This wasn't even what was in Minecraft.
Raptor turned his back to the thing and started heading back down the hallway.
The wall of flesh did not stir, and the steady breathing continued.
"How convenient." The tunnel narrowed further, and Elias grunted as the walls pressed in around him. "Good God, how much longer is this tunnel?" It felt as if they had been walking for hours. He thought he could see faint light up ahead, but not natural light by any means. Flickering torchlight, he guessed. Either way, it didn't seem much closer than it had before.
"The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words." --Ursula K. Le Guin
Nikolai could have screamed, if he hadn’t thought he’d be waking the creature up.
Instead, he gasped, taking several large steps backwards and moving away from whatever was blocking the room’s entrance. The sounds of breathing rumbled and echoed off the walls like soft thunder, but it wasn’t nearly as loud as the thumping of his heart. Pure panic had flooded through him, and thoughts of danger were overwhelming him. He couldn’t stop himself from trembling.
It felt like there were sparks flowing under his skin, through the blood in his veins. Nikolai thought he felt it all heading towards his shaking hands, culminating in the tips of his slender fingers. He could have been imagining it. But the terror had made him all too aware of every little thing, including the tingling feeling in his fingertips. It seemed like there was power building up in his hands, but he didn’t know what it meant or what to do with it.
“That,” he panted, frantically pointing at the unknown thing blocking them, “it’s got— it has—” He’d forgotten the English word for scales. The Russian word for it was in his mind, but due to his panic, he couldn’t quite focus well enough to translate his thoughts. After a few moments of struggling to find the right word and wild gesturing, he choked out, “Crocodile things.” Hopefully they’d get it.
"silv is obsessed with heists" ~Omni
"silv why didn't you tell me you were obsessed with heists I thought we were friends" ~Ace
"y’all we outnumber silver let’s overthrow her >:]" ~winter
Hearing Nikolai behind him, Raptor came to a stop.
He wasn't supposed to care about other people. That was the thing about being a magician - you were supposed to ensure your safety first. But he couldn't help but pause when he heard Nikolai panicking, and couldn't help but wonder how he could ever convince himself that it was better to keep walking away.
"Scales aren't just a crocodile thing," Raptor said, panic still lacing his voice. He was eerily still in the hallway now, gaze flickering between Nikolai and the thing in the doorway. "I've never seen a crocodile that looked like that."
He also hadn't seen a crocodile outside of the zoo and few Netflix documentaries, but that was besides the point.
"It does seem to be getting tighter," Aumrauth said as he pushed forward. He looked back at Elias, noticing how he grew uncomfortable with the ever-narrowing tunnel.
"Either we'll hit a dead-end soon, or we need to lose some weight," Aumrauth said. "Or a few bones."
He narrowed his eyes to try and look back at the other two to see if they were still following them.
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