"Is this cave a labyrinth? Why is there nothing but dark passage after dark passage."
Atiya's voice carried in the enclosed space, bouncing off the rock walls and coming back slightly altered.
It was warm enough inside, relative to what they had just crossed. Warm enough that his face had stopped hurting and his mouth was working properly again and he could move without every joint lodging a formal complaint.
He was grateful for that much.
"The place the survivor spoke of lies deep inside this cave." Leishna brushed the remaining snow from her shoulder with her free hand, the other holding the lamp out ahead of them.
The light it threw was modest, carving a small circle of visibility out of the dark and leaving everything beyond it to imagination. "And I have an apparatus that repels yai beasts, so we are fine. Let's figure out what this cave is hiding."
The floor sloped downward beneath their feet, a gradual but consistent incline that suggested the passage went considerably deeper than the entrance had implied. Into the belly of the mountain, possibly.
The walls on either side were close enough that Atiya could have touched both simultaneously without fully extending his arms.
"Do you know who the survivor actually is."
It was a question he had been sitting on. The survivor had reached him through a letter, and the letter had reached him through Leishna. Which meant Leishna was the only thread connecting him to whoever was down here.
"I have brought many people into this village," Leishna said, the lamp swaying slightly as she walked. "As far as my knowledge goes, none of them survived long enough to matter. So." She glanced back at him. "I am as lost as you are."
She said it with the same lightness she said most things, which did not make it any less unsettling.
Atiya said nothing and followed the lamp.
Atiya sighed.
The idea of travelling further into the mountain did nothing good for his mood.
The Hollow Mountains had a reputation that preceded them even outside Inumaki according to Leishna, and whatever had earned that reputation was presumably still down here somewhere in the dark below their feet.
The only thing that consoled him was the slim possibility that the cave would open up sooner rather than later and they would not have to go much further.
They were looking for the survivor. Whoever had managed to last long enough to send a letter out of this place was either extraordinarily capable or extraordinarily lucky, and Atiya was not yet sure which he was hoping for.
He glanced at Leishna walking ahead of him, lamp in hand, moving through the dark with the easy comfort of someone who had either done this before or had not yet fully appreciated what they were walking into.
'Will I survive this.'
The thought arrived plainly and he did not push it away.
He was Ascension 2, stage 5 but with only one skill. His physical strength sat at a respectable average for his ascension level but he was not built for direct combat and he knew it.
He was a crowd controller by design, and a crowd controller with a single skill was a limited thing in the kind of situation a dark mountain cave tended to produce.
And Leishna. He looked at her again.
What she had was apparatus, knowledge, and an understanding of the beasts that lived down here that he did not share. Whether any of that would be enough when something actually came at them was a different question entirely.
The deep suspicion that she would betray him had not left either. It sat at the back of everything, quiet and persistent, the kind of feeling that does not announce itself loudly but refuses to be fully ignored.
All in all, what they had between them was luck. He hoped it was enough.
The deeper they went the more the cave complicated itself. Tunnels branched away from the main passage at irregular intervals, some narrow enough to require turning sideways, others opening into brief wide chambers before closing again.
They turned several times, always choosing the path that continued downward to underground.
"Do you even know where you are going."
Atiya had been holding the question back for a while and his doubt about Leishna's credibility over sense of direction was increasing.
Leishna did not answer and kept walking.
Then the walls changed.
It happened gradually, the way most things that matter happen. The bare rock gave way to surface that had been worked, smoothed and shaped and marked with intention.
Stone carvings covered every inch of the passage walls on both sides, dense and continuous, the kind of work that required not days but years.
"These are the drawings of Inumaki's people," Leishna said, her lamp moving slowly across the nearest section. "Before the curse. They used to explore these dungeons."
Atiya looked at the walls and it made sense.
This was what that looked like, the painting of the ancient people of Inumaki.
At first the carvings were purely decorative. Patterns of lines, geometric shapes, simple images of animals and figures arranged into borders and repeating motifs.
Beautiful in the way old things made with care are beautiful, and mostly unreadable beyond that.
But then, slowly, something about them changed.
The patterns gave way to sequences. The sequences gave way to something that had the clear structure of a record, of events set down in order by someone who wanted them preserved.
Atiya slowed his pace without realising it, his eyes moving across the walls, and then he stopped entirely.
His breathing had quickened.
The answers to questions that had been sitting in the back of his mind since he first awoke in Inumaki were carved into the stone in front of him, laid out with a completeness that should not have been possible to stumble upon this easily.
Which was precisely what bothered him.
'That this is just here. Exposed like this. Waiting to be found.'
He stood in the lamplight and looked at the walls and said nothing for a moment.
It was too convenient. And things that were too convenient, in his experience, were never accidents.
****
They made it back to the car and Zelaine was reaching for the door handle when her gaze snagged on something across the road.
Two men stood outside another car and was talking. One was old, another one middle aged, and neither of them paying attention to anything beyond their own conversation. It was an ordinary sight.
however Zelaine recognised the car immediately.
It was the one that had clipped them.
The annoyance arrived fast and she was already moving toward them before she had made a conscious decision to do so, crossing the road and it seemed like she was waiting for an opportunity to be unreasonable and has just found one.
She closed the distance to roughly a hundred meters.
And stopped abruptly.
gasp!
The breath went out of her in a single sharp gasp.
Her whole body locked. Every muscle, every instinct, everything firing at once and arriving at the same single output.
'Move. Move right now.'
She stood frozen for two, three, four seconds, long enough that it should have drawn attention, long enough that she was aware of how exposed she was standing in the open like this.
But luckily neither man looked her way. They finished whatever they were saying, pushed through the door of the restaurant in front of them, and disappeared inside.
Zelaine did not move until the door had closed completely behind them.
Then she exhaled a slow and deliberate breath, and became aware that she was sweating buckets.
'They are Ascension 3, both of them.'
Outside, the last sliver of sun slipped below the skyline and the purple twilight thickened into a heavy ink-black.
The city was shifting into its night phase. Streetlights flickered on one by one down the road.
Mavine grabbed her hand from behind.
"What happened? Why did you run off like that?"
"Don't ask. Just run."
"But—"
"Let's go plain girl."
Zelaine's grip closed around the back of Mavine's collar and she pulled her into motion, the girl's shoes scraping against the pavement as she scrambled to match the pace.
"Hey! My shoes are scuffing!"
She did not resist though. Whatever was in Zelaine's voice had been enough.
The street they stepped out onto was the same one they had walked down an hour ago and it was not the same at all.
The shadows stretched longer than the light sources justified, and their footsteps came back from the pavement with a hollow, distant echo that did not belong to two people walking on an ordinary road.
The air had changed too. What had been stagnant was now dense, thickening around them as they moved.
Zelaine's eyes cut sideways to the mirrors of the parked vehicles they passed. In each one, for a fraction of a second, blurred papery figures shifted in the shadows behind them. There and gone before she could fix her gaze on any of them properly.
She did not slow down.
"What is happening!" Mavine's voice cracked, her hand slamming onto the car door handle as they reached it. "What is going on!"
"To the car, let's go!"
"You are just scared, aren't you. You just wanted to get somewhere safe!"
"Yeah, whatever. Just come with me."
She didn't wait for Mavine to dig out the keys. Her hand closed around the door handle and her palm surged with yai, sharp and violent, and the handle snapped clean off with a hard metallic crack, the internal mechanism shredding behind it.
"Do you know how much that cost?!" Mavine stared at the dangling wreckage of the door handle with genuine devastation.
"Shut u—"
Zelaine stopped mid-word.
The streetlights along the road hummed all at once, the frequency climbing fast, rising from a low drone into something that pressed uncomfortably against the ears.
And the light they threw downward did not reach the ground. It stopped in the air at chest height and spread sideways, thin and perfectly horizontal, arranging itself into long glowing white lines that hung suspended across the dark like the ruled margins of a notebook page.
Zelaine looked at them.
"Mavine." Her voice came out low and flat. "Get in the back through the window."
The air filled with the sound of rustling paper.
It came from everywhere at once, above and around them, building fast from a whisper into a continuous dry roar. Books appeared in the air above them, dozens first and then hundreds, their pages fluttering open as they rose, multiplying until the sky above the street was gone entirely, replaced by a dense shifting ceiling of hovering books that blocked out everything above the roofline.
They were completely surrounded.
"Give me a break," Zelaine groaned.
But both of their gazes had already moved past the swarm to something higher. Suspended above all of it, enormous and still against the churning mass below, was a single gigantic book.
Its pages beating with a slow violent energy, and from somewhere deep within its binding a blinding white light pulsed outward in steady intervals.
Zelaine's palm flared.
"Open!"
The crimson cyclone tore outward from her, sheets of flame lashing into the surrounding swarm, incinerating pages by the dozen. For every sheet that burned ten more swept in to replace it, folding over the gaps before the ash had finished falling.
She gritted her teeth and kept the rotation going.
"Can you do it?!" Mavine shouted over the roar of the storm.
"We can do it with the power of friendship bullshit! Cheer me on!"
Then the gigantic book began tearing out its own pages.
The massive glowing sheets peeled away one by one and dropped into the swarm below, where the smaller books caught them immediately, folding and coiling around them, wrapping and clicking into places.
The whole mass was reorganising itself, the chaotic swarm pulling inward, condensing, taking on structure and weight and shape.
Zelaine watched it happen and kept the cyclone burning and felt her arms starting to complain about it.
The shape resolved all at once.
A towering colossal figure stood above them, filling the space between the rooftops on both sides of the street, constructed entirely from millions of folded and interlocked pages.
Every surface dense with layered paper folded into hard geometric planes. It looked like something out of a film. Exactly like something out of a film.
"Is this Power Rangers? What the fucking hell is that," Zelaine gasped, struggling to maintain the cyclone's rotation.
The figure shifted and the sound of a million pages adjusting simultaneously filled the street.
"Optimus Prime! Motherfucker, that is so cool!" The fear in her voice had been entirely displaced by something else for exactly one second. Pure unfiltered excitement.
"Look, Decepticons and Autobots are here to fuck us too!"
Mavine stood beside her and said nothing, eyes wide, hands clenched at her sides. She had no idea what Optimus Prime was or what a Decepticon was or what any of this meant.
It did look extremely cool though. She could not deny that much.