Two entire days passed since they put Lumina in the ground. The remaining party members sat together in the common room of the local inn.
The small round table was covered in empty cups, but nobody said a single word. The heavy sadness still choked the air inside the room, so the entire group just stared at the floor or the peeling paint on the walls. The smell of stale food and cheap oil lamps filled the space, but no one had an appetite.
Alden rested his chin on his hands. Raze absentmindedly ran a small whetstone over the edge of his sword without actually looking at the steel. The sharp scraping noise was the only sound in the room.
Celia sat in the corner chair with bright red, swollen eyes while tightly hugging her knees to her chest. She had not eaten a proper meal since they returned to the surface, and she looked completely drained of life.
Kian leaned back in his chair while he stared at the ceiling.
Then everything changed in a single, terrifying second.
Kian suddenly felt a cold sensation crawl straight up his spine. His eyes snapped wide open, and his heart raced with a frantic speed.
It was a raw, primal alarm that he had never experienced before in his entire life. Every single muscle in his body was screaming at him to jump out of the chair and run far away from the inn.
He realized what he was feeling.
It was fear.
Lexi was sitting near the closed window when she noticed the sudden shift in the room. Kian always looked completely unbothered by everything, but right now, his face was entirely serious. Lexi did not feel what Kian felt but seeing Kian's serious face made her instinct take over.
Lexi knew something was horribly wrong, so she instantly rushed up from her seat and pulled both of her sharp daggers. She dropped into a low crouch and prepared her stance for a violent battle.
A few seconds later, Lexi felt someone was coming.
An overwhelming presence was walking down the inn's narrow hallway. A Life Force of a living. Someone strong was moving directly toward their room, and the footsteps echoed clearly through the walls.
Lexi held her breath. She tightened her grip on her weapons, while Kian slowly pushed his chair away from the table and stood up.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
The footsteps stopped right outside their door.
The doorknob slowly turned with a loud, metallic click, and the door swung open into the quiet room.
They all looked up at the entrance, fully expecting to see a curious innkeeper or a wandering traveler. But the breath was instantly knocked right out of their lungs. They stared at a figure they thought they would never, ever see again. A familiar face staring right back at them.
Every single person in the room was completely stunned as if the had seen a ghost.
It was Lumina
She was completely covered from her dark hair down to her feet in dirt. Her clothes were torn into ragged strips, and they hung loosely from her small frame like garbage. Severe, ugly burns coated her pale neck and arms. The skin was blistered and red, and the sickening smell of charred meat mixed with scorched earth flooded the small room.
Kian felt a cold sweat instantly freeze against his back. A terrifying, crushing weight radiated directly from the small nine-year-old girl. It felt like standing completely unarmed in front of an ancient, starving dragon.
Then the heavy silence shattered.
Lumina's eyes rolled back into her head.
Thump.
She pitched forward and hit the floor with a wet, heavy sound. The terrifying presence vanished in a single microsecond. The crushing pressure in the air disappeared completely, so Kian gasped for breath and grabbed the edge of the table to keep himself upright.
"Lumi!" Celia shrieked.
The elf Healer scrambled across the room on her hands and knees. She ignored the filthy mud and the terrible smell, and she frantically grabbed the small, ruined body.
She rolled the child onto her back and immediately pressed two fingers against the dirty neck. A steady, rhythmic pulse beat against Celia's skin.
Later that evening, a warm yellow light from the oil lamp flickered across the walls of the rented room. Lumina lay flat on the soft mattress.
She slowly opened her eyes.
Celia sat on the wooden stool right next to the bed. She had not stopped crying for hours. Her face was completely stained with salt and dirt, but she immediately threw her arms around the small girl.
"You came back," Celia cried, and her voice shook violently. "I thought you were gone forever, but you came back to me."
Lumina blinked at the ceiling. Her throat felt like it was full of dry sand, and her entire body ached with a dull, heavy pain. She did not say a word to the crying elf. She stared upward and waited for the pain to subside.
Alden and Raze stood near the closed window. They stared at the bed in complete disbelief.
"This makes no sense," Raze muttered, and he scratched the back of his neck. "She was cold yesterday. I saw her. You saw her, Alden."
Alden nodded. He does not understand what was going on either.
While the others stayed in the warm inn, Lexi walked alone through the cold woods just before the sun disappeared below the horizon. She needed to see the burial site with her own two eyes. Her instincts as a Thief screamed that something was terribly wrong, and she could not simply ignore the facts.
She remembered the complete void of Life Force from the dungeon. The girl had no pulse and had no breath. Definitively dead in the cavern.
Lexi stepped past the edge of the tree line.
She stopped walking instantly.
The quiet patch of land was completely gone. Instead of a neat mound of packed soil, a massive crater scarred the forest floor. The hole was ten meters wide, and it looked like a falling star had violently struck the earth. The surrounding trees were snapped in half, and their thick trunks were thrown meters away from the center. Black soot coated the remaining branches. A faint wisp of gray smoke still drifted up from the scorched rocks.
Splinters of cheap wood from the coffin were scattered everywhere across the bushes.
Lexi stared at the massive destruction, and her jaw dropped wide open in pure shock.
She blew it up, Lexi thought.
A cold shiver ran straight down her spine. Lexi walked closer to the edge of the blackened crater and looked down at the melted soil. She deduced the chaotic events of the afternoon.
Lumina likely woke up inside the dark, cramped box and panicked. The heavy soil pressed down on the coffin, so she used a big explosion spell to blast her way out of the grave.
The severe burns on Lumina's body came directly from her own magic. She had literally burned her own skin to escape the crushing weight of the earth.
But the mystery only grew darker in Lexi's mind. How did a dead girl wake up? Why did her heart stop beating, and what restarted it inside a wooden box deep underground?
Lexi clenched her leather gloves. She felt completely terrified by the sheer scale of the unknown power.
Back inside the inn, Kian sat quietly in a dark corner of the room. He rested his head against the wall, and his face showed a perfectly calm and bored expression. He looked like he was just annoyed by the noise, but his mind was racing with frantic, panicked thoughts.
What actually happened today? Kian thought while he watched Yellow feed water to Black. She died. I saw her turn pale and drop to the floor. Did the blue fruit do something to her chest? No, that's just a cheap wild snack from the bushes. Maybe her body just went to sleep to conserve energy, we buried her alive because we panicked.
He forced himself to believe the simplest answer. If he admitted that something supernatural had occurred, he would lose his mind entirely. He kept his face neutral and decided to just ignore the terrifying pressure he had felt at the door. He wanted to go back to his lazy routine. He firmly believed the kid would stay in bed for a few months, and the party would finally disband.
One week had passed.
The morning sun barely peeked over the stone walls of the city. Kian stood in the inn's lobby and casually adjusted the collar of his expensive coat. Alden and Raze checked their gears near the door. The group was getting ready to do a simple monster hunt, and they fully expected to leave the weak Mage behind to rest.
Then the wooden stairs groaned.
Lumina walked slowly down the steps. She wore her black cloak, and she gripped her staff tightly in her small right hand. Her pale skin looked completely normal.
She walked right past a stunned Celia and pushed the front door open.
"Let's go to the dungeon," Lumina said.