To his surprise, Kar landed on his feet without crippling himself. Dust and debris clattered to the floor around him.
Rats skittered away at the sound of his arrival, their alarmed squeaks echoing in the dark. He remained crouched, waiting for something to jump out and assault him. Eventually he realized the sound that he had heard while dangling from the ceiling above had been nothing more than the rodents he'd disturbed.
He stood and brushed the dirt from himself as best he could but realized it was kind of pointless. Between the tufts of missing hair, blood smeared skin, and tattered remnants of his shirt what difference did a little dirt make anyway?
He bent and collected his scattered belongings and took stock of the tunnel he found himself in. It was large, the arched ceiling and walls constructed of ancient stone blocks fitted neatly together. They curved from where they met the floor on one side in a continuous span overhead and back down again. A wide channel was cut into the floor down the middle of the tunnel and water trickled lazily along it.
What was this place?
The light he'd spotted from the basement above glowed merrily up ahead. Kar walked toward it eagerly. To his consternation, he saw as he approached that it was merely a light fixture similar to the ones Morrow had in his workshop. He looked down the tunnel and saw that it curved gently up ahead, lit intermittently by more of these lantern devices positioned at even intervals. Kar pocketed the shard he held and examined the wall lantern more closely. He grabbed hold of the fixture and tugged. It was secured to the wall firmly. He gripped it tighter and yanked more determinedly. It grated as he pulled it free from the wall, grit and dust scattering everywhere.
The light kept glowing. Huh. Kar wasn't sure how it worked. Maybe it used shards, too? He scrutinized it closely and found a small latch on the side. With a twist, the face of the lantern swung open to reveal a disc of crystal inside with a glassy globe above it. The disc shone that familiar light blue, but it was the globe that put off the warm, bright light that emanated from the lantern.
There was something Kar wanted to try. The disc looked awfully similar to the cryst chips Morrow had. He breathed in and Focused, drawing Energia from the lantern's disk into himself. The lantern's globe light didn't dim, but the disc below did as energy flooded from it into Kar. His eyes widened with the sudden influx.
OK, that was the first part.
Kar pulled out one of his shards and held it in his left hand, a finger placed inside the lantern's enclosure to rest on the cryst disc that powered the construct. He focused again, but this time did as Morrow had originally instructed him to, directing the flow from the shard into the disc within the lantern. Just as before with the chips at Morrow's workshop, the cryst disc barely brightened at all.
It was working. Just very poorly.
Kar jerked his hand from the enclosure, frustrated. He'd thought he could do it now. But there was still something getting in the way. He didn't understand. For now it looked like all he could do was heal and energize himself. Which, all things considered, was nothing to scoff at. He wanted to better understand what he was capable of though. What his actual limitations were. Regardless, at least now he had a steady light source he could bring with him.
He decided to follow the row of lights along the tunnel. There was no way for him to get back up to the hole he'd dropped through even if he wanted to.
It was hard to tell how much time passed the further along he went. The tunnel seemed to stretch on forever, no doors or points of entry other than regular, grated holes in the ceiling where trickles and streams of water cascaded and fell. At some point he realized that he was heading downwards at a steady but almost imperceptible degree. Which logically made sense he thought, without an incline the water in the channel beside him wouldn't flow.
This all had to lead somewhere though, right? The further he went however, the more he questioned that assumption.
He stopped to rest beneath one of the wall lights, the air chill but his body warmed by exertion. He didn't consider until after he'd eaten the remainder of his food that perhaps he should have rationed it.
He drifted off to sleep then—without intending to—and jolted awake disoriented. The lights remained unchanged, their glow constant. How long had he slept? An hour, a day? There was no way to tell. A rat nibbled at crumbs by his pack and Kar kicked it away. Then he stood again, gathered his stuff, and trekked on.
He took several more rest breaks, stopping regularly to refill his canteen where he encountered water showering from above. It wasn't clean by any measure, but he'd tasted worse.
He became so used to the monotony of it all—the only stimulus the sound of his own steps on stone and their answering echoes—that he managed to walk right past the hole in the wall across the channel.
He took five or six steps, then stopped in his tracks. What had that been? He turned and went back, stopping in front of the breach. There was darkness beyond. Kar jumped across the channel—his stomach grumbling painfully—and approached the hole cautiously.
He held out his lantern and grasped the broken stone along the hole's edge, then leaned through. There was a large, cavernous expanse beyond. Kar looked to the left, then the right. The darkness wasn't absolute, but even so he couldn't detect the ceiling or walls. All he could see was a rugged and slick rock and mud floor.
Was this a cave of some sort? Kar stepped out fully, careful not to slip. One of his boots squelched in the mud. Disgusting. He hated that feeling. At least it wasn't between his toes.
He looked around the cavern and took the measure of it. There was no telling how much further the tunnel would lead him, and he could always come back here if he found nothing else in this cavern. He was somewhat worried about getting lost, but an idea occurred to him.
He stepped back into the tunnel.
----
He returned to the cavern, toting half a dozen different lanterns he'd ripped from its walls. He would leave himself a trail of lights so he didn't get lost.
He considered which direction to explore first. For some reason he couldn't explain, he was drawn to the left. Perhaps the darkness was slightly less dim in that direction? It was hard to say. Either way, he didn't have an obviously better plan, so why not?
Kar trudged across the cave floor in that general direction with his lanterns in tow. The ground was treacherous and uneven and he had to pick his way slowly past obstacles and mineral flows that had dripped and hardened over who knew how many years. Kar placed the lanterns as he went, careful to make sure the the ones he'd positioned already were still visible.
The further into the cavern he went the stronger a pull he felt. It became an urge, compelling him to move faster, to come swiftly. To what? The way out? He felt alarmed at the intensity of the impulse.
The gloom gradually—almost imperceptibly—brightened the further along this path he went, until he was finally able to make out the silhouette of the cavern walls and ceiling. Massive blocks of stone appeared to have collapsed through the cavern's ceiling here. On closer examination he saw that they were the remains of buildings. Pieces of the ruins from the city above? Or something older?
Kar set down his last lantern and thought about returning, but found he desperately wanted to see what was beyond this next ridge up ahead.
He climbed, the rock slick with water that drip, drip, dripped from cracks far above. At the top of the slanted rock formation he hauled himself up and saw the distant glow of a crackling fire. There was a huddled, cloaked figure sitting beside it.