The darkness of the tunnel below slowly thinned, and for a moment, Kanrel was reminded of the Veil and how it scoured away from the lantern's touch, screeching and smoldering against its edges; a choir of torment disturbed by the presence of pure magic. But this wasn't the Veil, just the darkness instead, yet it still showed a vision one would've expected to see in the Land of Shadows Below.
The tunnel yet remained clean. Nothing had touched it since perhaps the last time Kanrel and Yviev had walked down it. But that was a thing he hardly noticed, as what soon came into his view, and into the view of the rest, were the engravings that fashioned the walls and the ceiling, depicting a history all four of them knew by heart.
Oidus pushed past Kanrel to inspect the walls, her eyes scanning them, searching for clues as to what or who had made them.
"It is the history of our people, or, to be more precise, the humanity united under one king and one pantheon of gods, instead of many. The moment in which said gods graced us with their presence and gave us a way to survive the onslaught of the Wildkin..." Kanrel spoke and walked forth, his flame lighting the way further ahead, soon reaching the black door at the end of it. Around him, the engravings on the walls showed depictions of the Wildkin as well as how they once besieged human cities, devouring and burning their way through lands, which once were lush and full of life, but now were only known as the Great Desert.
Oidus and Roslyn walked slowly behind, looking carefully at the walls. Yviev pushed past the two, having already seen it all once before. She reached Kanrel, who had stopped and stood in front of the door. She looked at Kanrel and saw how his expression shifted. "Is there something wrong?"
Kanrel swallowed. "The writing... I can understand it now. It..." His brows furrowed.
"Well? Spit it out then!" Oidus yelped from behind and quickened her pace, reaching the door as well.
The symbols, indeed, they had become something that Kanrel could finally understand. After all, they were written in a language he had spent much time learning.
"It is the Atheian, the language of the Otherkind..."
"What does it say?"
Kanrel glanced at Oidus with slight annoyance, but soon focused on the symbols again. He licked his lips and read it: "N'eu'k R'au'm M'eu Drau'n K'eu'rnau'n. G'ou'rn N'iu'k – V'ou'rn – Krau'n N'iu'k."
The three women stared at him. Oidus frowned and said, "Is your intention to burst into hymn and chant with us, or is this really what this so-called language sounds like?"
Kanrel nodded, to which Oidus rolled her eyes. "Then stop wasting time and translate it!"
Kanrel cleared his throat, having forgotten that obviously they wouldn't understand a word he had just uttered. "It is very old Atheian... the language has changed somewhat since, but what it roughly says is as follows: Here rests the God Who Hung; He who warned us; He who perished to free us."
It was silent for a moment. Kanrel glanced at the other priests, who all stared at him. He coughed, then added, "Though if you were to translate it more directly, it would say: Here rests the Hung God; warned us; perished; freed us..."
"Yes, we got it the first time," Oidus hushed him. "The language itself doesn't really matter, does it? There are more important things you should clarify instead..."
Kanrel blinked. "And what exactly would that be?"
Yviev, who stood to the right of him, sighed. "The contents of the text itself... Explain whatever god that might be, and... well, the rest of it..."
Kanrel coughed, then explained, "The God Who Hung was an ancient revolutionary in Atheian history, who rose against a type of slavery the Atheians have practiced perhaps since the dawn of their history. This 'god' came, and he warred against those who had enslaved them... though of course the revolution itself was a failure... This 'god' was hanged for his crimes, and so were many of his followers... and the reason why he was elevated to godhood was because of his body, for after his death, he hung from the city walls for weeks, and during that time, his body did not rot."
"Thus, those who had sympathies for the revolution and its now-dead leader found themselves gathering to pray in secret near this never-rotting corpse. Later, the corpse was moved into a tomb to await the day when their now-god might awake from the slumber of death and lead their people to freedom..."
"It is a very popular religion among the Atheians, even to this day. The servants of said god call themselves 'the Herd' and their priests walk around with a noose around their necks, depicting their readiness for martyrdom."
Yviev nodded along and opened her mouth to say something, but Oidus blurted out a question: "How would a corpse not rot? Makes no sense."
Kanrel shrugged. "No clue... It is something that probably happened thousands of years ago, long before humanity ever reached the Coasts of Zuria."
"And this is the tomb of said god?" Yviev got to ask her question at last.
Kanrel shrugged again. "Well, it might be... But I don't remember seeing any corpse, or anything like it..." He thought about it for a moment. "Though then again, I don't know what the funeral customs were like back then..."
"And these... Atheians, as you call them, what do they exactly look like?" Oidus asked.
"They are tall, much taller than humans; they have no hair on their bodies, not even on their brows, and commonly they have blue eyes, or a variation of it... They do look alien; it is difficult to do justice to just how magnificent yet horrific one of them looks. You'd have to see one for yourself..."
Oidus scoffed. "You're of no use... Let's move along," she demanded.
Kanrel shook his head, and with a quick code, he pushed the stone door open; what had once taken three now only took one to open. He led the way with his light, and they reached a circular room, filled with even more engravings... it was the room where they had found the blood of the victims. There were also the three doors through which they had to pass last time.
The three women entered with him and took a long while just staring at the depictions on the walls; now even Yviev paid much more attention to what she was looking at.
"The Atheians have a very specific way of recording their history. And what you see around us is exactly that. An empire, their empire, that sprawled through this whole continent which we now populate. With towers that reached for the stars, hence the name they gave themselves... The Atheians, or 'Those Who Reach For the Heavens', or above, since they no longer have a word for heaven, or the sky, at least not one that is commonly used..."
Roslyn had furrowed her brows; she seemed disturbed by either what she had heard or what she now could see. She scanned the room, making note of its depictions. The tall spires that began at the bottom of the wall, reaching toward the ceiling, taller than the depictions of the mountains in the background. "How could they build to such heights? Wouldn't their towers fall over because of the wind, or because of their own weight?"
Kanrel cleared his throat. "Well, there is the third kind of magic which I came across. The magic of the Atheians... Theirs, I found to be the most interesting of the three. It's something in between that of the Sharan and that which is ours, though given to us by the Sharan..."
"A scholar once explained it to me... Their magic is like... desire; it is the notion of a sensual moment shared with a lover, repeated as they use it. An addicting thing, much like alcohol might be to some. It is the reverse of our experience with magic, and thus the Atheians pitied me, and the rest of our priests, for having to deal with such things."
Yviev had gone very still. "Pleasure," she said. "Their magic gives them pleasure."
"At least at first..." Kanrel said.
She said nothing more. But she did not look at the wall again for a while.
"Magic, in itself, is a common thing in the everyday lives of Atheians. They use it for everything, though some naturally have more of it, and are more talented with it... They call it having a 'ceiling', one which you cannot break through. And when one meets their ceiling, and tries to overextend themselves... they lose the pleasure of it, becoming much like us, but only in the sense of having a yearning to feel that lover's touch once more, though instead of having it anew, they might only have the bitter parting instead and nothing past that. Otherwise, their emotional functions remain as per usual for their kind, though some have become suicidal because of their lack of ability and reaching said limit."
"Interesting indeed... but you didn't really answer little Roslyn's question..." Oidus complained.
Kanrel sighed. "Even below, they build such spires, reaching for the ceiling of the caverns below... I suspect they simply know how to construct such buildings in a manner that can survive the whims of nature, and they would've used magic to build such buildings instead of just their hands like we would."
"How many were there? Back then?" Roslyn asked.
A sight of Ignar descending upon the Atheians, slaughtering them, turning their cities into rubble flashed before his eyes. He shook his head, trying to rid himself of the memory, but he could not. Instead, he answered to the best of his ability, "Before their... demise, there must have been hundreds of millions of them..."
Roslyn's eyes widened. "How is it then that they perished? How did they find themselves beneath the ground, as you've said?"
Kanrel glanced at her, then at Yviev. "We'll get to that part in a moment... but first, these doors..." He stepped toward one of them, inspecting them now with the knowledge he had. On the floor before them, the text read as follows: To all directions; enter all at once.
But the doors themselves... they continued the depictions of the Atheian empire... but hidden in the engravings were symbols... the language of the Wildkin, the Kurikulai... or perhaps a version of it that the Atheians had adopted at some point in their history to construct magical devices. He wasn't proficient in either, but he knew the basics.
"Oidus, Yviev, you two will take the middle and rightmost doors. Roslyn, you'll come with me..." he said after a while of just staring at the symbols.
"Why?" Oidus asked. "Do we need to open all of the three doors at once? Like the text suggests?"
"It is something much worse, trust me," Yviev answered in Kanrel's stead and took for herself the rightmost door. Oidus stared at her, then shook her head, only to take her place in the middle.
Roslyn hesitated a moment, then joined Kanrel at the leftmost door. He grabbed her hand, which she looked at for a moment, then met his eyes, a question in her own. "You must not let go; in fact, it is better if you walk with me, shoulder to shoulder," Kanrel said. Roslyn stepped next to him.
"Alright, Oidus, Roslyn... We will be stepping through this stone door in a bit... The rules are simple: Do not stop walking until you reach the other side. Also... Your magics will be useless against it, so just walk; there is no point in doing anything else."
"Yviev... you know what is to come... Count us in, will you?"
Yviev sighed. "On three! One. Two. Three!" And they all stepped toward the solid stone before them...
He couldn't breathe as he submerged himself into the stone... It pressed him from all directions as he walked through a thing so solid that he could barely feel Roslyn's hand hold onto his; all of his senses were attacked simultaneously. His lungs burned more after each step, and he wanted to open his mouth and breathe in, but he could not. He could only walk forward.
There was only a sense of relief on the other side, where he found himself breathing in and out heavily, with a collapsed Roslyn at his feet. Her face had gone white, and she trembled and gasped for air as though she had just been pulled from beneath the waves. Yviev leaned against a wall and seemed sick, and Oidus just looked around, her expression disoriented as she held her head.
"Fun? Isn't it?" Kanrel asked and patted Yviev on the shoulder. She shook her head and almost vomited. "I'd rather suffocate... than... this..."
"You knew this would happen?" Oidus asked and stumbled toward Kanrel. When she reached him, she grabbed him by the collar. "What did I do to deserve such treatment?"
Kanrel scoffed. "Nothing at all! I hardly knew which was which and what would happen to each of us when we'd walk through each door."
"Lies!" Oidus snarled.
To which Kanrel only shrugged. "Perhaps." He turned around and peered at Roslyn, who had now managed to sit down, her face now its usual color, but she still breathed in and out.
Kanrel extended his hand to her, which she accepted after a moment's hesitation. He pulled her up. He muttered a quick apology to her, patting her on the back.
And soon enough, they continued walking down the seemingly endless corridor. Around them, the history of the Atheians kept unfolding. Depicting the peak of the Empire, then its slow erosion, and finally... its violent ending...
"This," Kanrel said, and gestured at the walls. "Is the ending of their time in the sun..."