I wake up sitting upright, leaning on Elara, and her leaning on me, also fast asleep. I get up, holding Elara up so she wouldn't fall, and lay her slowly on the ground.
There is no way to tell how much time has past since I fell asleep since we are in a giant cave with no area for light to seep in, that being said we can still see here with perfect clarity even without light which is weird even though I am Silerkian and we can see with very little light we can't see with no light yet I have perfect vision in here.
Elara doesn't take long to wake up, and so we continue trying to find the exit of the maze.
"Airoh, are you alright now? You just passed out, and I couldn't manage to find anything wrong with you, so I decided I'll get some rest, but you're not wounded or anything, are you?" Elara rushes to me and starts checking my body with concern in her voice.
"Relax, I'm fine. I was just really exhausted, so I passed out, but I'm fine, really." I calm her down.
"What happened to you? Where were you?" She asks me as we start to explore the maze again.
"Alright, so do you remember when we were separated, you were chasing after a table with food, but you couldn't reach it, and then another one appeared behind us, so I started chasing it." I start to explain to her what happened.
"Airoh, there wasn't any table with food, you just suddenly ran off, and when I noticed it was too late, you were already surrounded by stone walls." She replies to my explanation.
"Anyhow, after that, the walls started enclosing on me, and then I fell into some hole where a man knocked me unconscious. I later woke up chained to the wall in a room with writing all over the wall, and all the writing was the man journaling his time in the trap". I continue explaining the story, summing it up to be as short as possible.
"But the writings became less and less understandable, and the writing became worse. It was hard to understand what was happening, but supposedly, a sort of monster took over his body and used him as a vessel. After all that, the man started to come towards me and began to rip my clothes off and eventually, he reached the legs, where he accidentally exploded a Flamiz,e which burned some of the man's face of and behind it was the monster and I made it mad so he started shoving my head into the wall over and over until I lost consciousness.
"When I regained my consciousness, he was writing on the walls again, and luckily for me, because of the immense force he used when he shoved my head into the wall, one of my hands released from the chains. The man was writing how sometimes he can control the monster, but it is becoming harder and harder to do so,o and in the end, he writes a plea for me to kill him alongside the monster using the Flamizes."
"And then the monster rushes towards me again, but I counter his move by throwing a Flamize in front of it, burning it even more and freeing myself, and then it was just a matter of how much I needed to burn him until I was satisfied, and then I exploded him from the inside." I finished explaining what had happened to me after quite some time, but it looks like we have a lot of that in here.
"Are you sure you're fine because it sounds like you were hit with quite some blows from the monster?" She asks again and again I have to reassure her that I'm fine.
We traverse the maze but find nothing except for a few wolves and other animals that we either ran away from or killed without any difficulty.
"This girl shows quite the resolve better than any other trial taker that we have had in the past one hundred years". The Ancients' voices are no longer booming, and this time are so quiet that I can barely hear what they are saying, much less make sense of the silent mumblings.
We continue to traverse the maze, soon enough doing a full loop and reaching somewhere we already were in, but for some reason, some of the exits have changed. The changes are very minor differences that I could have easily made a small mistake on the map I am drawing, yet it still sets me at unease.
As we continue to walk down the maze, the walls start changing to a different material than they were, and not from stone to wood, a new material, and this time it doesn't look like just a large slab of stone, it looks like brick, almost like the inside of a church.
The more we wander around this maze the more it changes the floor is now covered with a red carpet and there are symbols on the walls and the walls are starting to drift away from each other creating a much vaster area to walk in, but as the maze becomes vaster and vaster it feels more and more like we aren't moving at all and its just the walls and floor changing.
"Airoh, look, the walls are starting to grow taller and they are starting to curve just barely, almost like they're trying to create a ceiling for the m-". Elara gets cut off as the walls suddenly spurt u,p and the walls start moving to create a perfect church. Decorations and lights just come out of nowhere, creating something that looks like a throne room and a church were fused.
As the room finishes to form a beam of light emerges from the throne, the beam keeps on shining for about 5 seconds, and when it disappears, someone is sitting on the throne. I can't tell the shape of the being in the throne because the beam blinded me, but it is very clear that something is sitting on the throne.
Suddenly, my vision is clear, but the thing is no longer sitting on the throne.
"Calm down now, would you girls?" The thing that was on the throne is now standing behind us, somehow moving without either of us noticing. We both turn around and get into a fighting stance.
"Now, now, no need to fight." He says with a taunting voice as he snaps his fingers, and my bow, arrows, and Flamizes disappear and then reappear no hanging on one of the walls.
"I was sent here by the ancients to test you if you truly are worthy of passing the trials, but don't worry, I'm not here to kill you, that wouldn't be any fun, would it?" He says his voice is no longer taunting, just arrogant.
He sits down on the throne, and two chairs summon behind me and Elara. We sit down, and he starts to speak again.
"Alright, now that we've got all the anger out of the way, let me explain what I ought to do with the two of you". He leans forward towards us with a smirk on his face.
"The ancients have allowed me to do as I wish with you, and I must admit I am rooting for you to complete this dungeon. I have been watching you since you started, and you indeed are worthy of passing, so let me help you. I will make you stronger and reveal the truth of your race's powers to you". His expression turns serious as he gets up from the throne. He snaps his fingers, and suddenly the floor opens up, and we are now in a silk cave.
The cave is massive, bigger than any silk cave I have ever seen, and the silk is growing faster than any other, too. It's a beautiful sight how the light shines off the rocks and silk.
"Both of you are Silerkians, meaning your bodies are extremely durable and very flexible, but there is more to your kind. You have the power to absorb energy through silk and turn it into power, which is why you sometimes just gain a random surge of energy. It's your body helping you survive. The surge of energy fills your entire body, allowing you to survive with barely any food or water, or sleep for very long. But that's the least interesting part, usually on the brink of death, your body will release all of the stored up silk in an effort to save you. This can heal wounds, critical ones, and it also makes you far stronger, faster, and durable, making marks appear on your body. The marks will appear in various shapes and colors, but they usually have a pattern". We listen to him in awe as he explains the true capabilities of our kind.
"It is possible for the most powerful of the race to use this power at will, yet that is not something I can teach and can only be learned by truly understanding how it works, and for that, I will demonstrate how it works for you". As he says the words, he raises his hand up and then points down, and before we can react, we are both hit with a beam of burning light. The feeling of being burned alive is like none other that I have ever felt.
My body goes numb, and I pretty much lose all feeling in both my body and mind. I can feel my heart start speeding up, and then it stops. All the pain just gets washed away as my body is filled with a surge of power and energy, and all of my burns disappear with it.
The feeling is amazing to have so much energy and to feel so powerful, and sure enough, marks have appeared on my body, glowing white markings with some weird patterns. I touch them and they feel like silk. Next to me, Elara seems to be experiencing the same thing as I do, staring in awe at her markings.
"An amazing power am I, right? Anyhow, now that I taught you how your powers work, I should also tell you to be wary of the next trial. It is the final one, but do not grow arrogant, the last is meant to be the hardest one, the true and final test to see if you are worthy of witnessing the true world outside of the mountain. I wish you luck."
He snaps his fingers and my bow, arrows, and Flamizes return to me, he bows to us and then disappears in a beam of light along with the entire throne room, making this entire conversation nothing then a memory.
The curving maze is now just a straight line leading to a big door, which we can only guess is the next and final trial. The more we walk down the path changes into more of a path down into a castle, but this time it doesn't close in on us.
Soon enough, however, the light begins to dim, and before we reach the door, it becomes fully dark. Then, with a burst of warmth, on all of the walls now hang torches lighting up the room, giving it more of a castle-like feeling.
As I lift my hands to open the twin doors, the ancients' voices fill the room.
"Thou art now approaching the final trial, the one that shalt decide thy fate and the fate of thy brethren in race, continue only when thou art truly ready to face the final trial."
We both breathe out, step forward, and push the doors open. Behind the doors lies a vast circular room. The room doesn't have any decoration, just a singular patch of circular glass on the floor, giving us a clear view of our home chamber.
As I approach the glass pane, my stomach clenches as I see the ruin the chamber is in, buildings are burning, people lying dead on the ground, the only place that isn't in ruin is the entrance to the trials, where I can just barely see the faint movement of people.
Elara collapses on the floor next to me, her face filled with terror that overwhelms the tears. I stumble back and fall as I crawl away from the glass.
A sob escapes my lips as my vision blurs from the tear.
"Thou should not have entered unready, we specifically commanded you to only step foot inside here when thou art ready to face the final trial". The voices of the ancients echo around the room, those twisted, arrogant voices.
The floor beneath us disappears, and we fall into the chamber. As we fall, I curse at the ancients, but I can't even hear my own shallow screams because of the wind. Before we reach the bottom, we slow down and land without any wounds or injuries.
After some time, I muster the courage to stand up and wake Elara from her trance-like state, even though my vision is still blurred and Elara is still in some sort of trance. We wander the chamber trying to reach the trial entrances to find some hope that some familiar faces are still alive, but every path is blocked.
Eventually, we just give up on getting there and just try to get to my house because apparently, Elara doesn't want to see her family. As we try to find our way through the rubble and destruction, we can hear screams of women and children. The sound sends chills through my body and makes me want to puke.
Yet at the end, we manage to reach my house which is surprisingly still somewhat standing, we enter it but no one is inside, I climb to the second floor and check the rooms and then I hear Elara screaming I rush to her she was searching in one of the rooms where in the middle my brother Lack lays dead head crushed by falling rubble.
The shock and terror of seeing my brother's head crushed by a rock left me in a trance, but my body remains somewhat conscious as a man comes to grab me and Elara and brings us to the trial entrance, and then I fully lose consciousness.
I regain my consciousness to the sound of a child crying and screaming. I lift my head to see why, and the horror almost makes me pass out again, but I force myself to endure it. The child is screaming because one of the six preachers is cutting the throat of his mother right in front of him and forcing him to watch, and that's not the worst, they make him cut her eyeballs out and eat them, and they just laugh like a big joke that none of us understand.
After they finish with the child, they look our way and start approaching us.
"Well, look who's finally awake. You know, we waited quite a bit for the two of you to wake up. We were looking forward to playing with you, but it seems the ancients wish your bodies kept pure and innocent, but they didn't say anything about you being alive or hurt". The man spins the knife in his hand with a smug grin on his face as his eyes turn serious and he starts to walk faster.
"Why are you doing this? You are our brothers in race. Almost all of the chamber looked up to you to become a preacher, yet you do this to us, why?" I cry out at the moment, my hands and legs are tied, and so are Elara's, so we can't even fight for our lives.
"Your brothers in race? Don't insult us, we are not from this mountain, we are from the outside world,d sent here to help your race try to pass the trials. Yet your race was pathetic, not a single Silerkian to pass the trial in over two hundred years, so we decided to shut this chamber down and try with a different one." He speaks as though he is disgusted with us, the very people who worshipped and looked up to them.
And then in an instant, he is in front of Elara and slits her throat. I scream and cry and try to fight, but then he is in front of me too and slits my throat as well, and then everything goes black.