At first, the tunnel is inky blackness beyond the arch; but the moment the tip of your tail is through, light flares into existence. It ripples away from where you're standing and away from you on the walls and ceiling, illuminating a long domed tunnel that slopes slightly upwards. It takes you a moment to realize that the dim light is coming from the moss itself, which coats the stone completely, from wall to ceiling - though it doesn't encroach on the floor at all. Inspection reveals tiny channels cut into the floor on either side of the path, water flowing steadily through them.
The moss seems to breathe in a steady glow that rises and falls with gentle rhythm. The world is quiet and still, save for the sound of your claws on the stone.
As you begin to take steps forward, soft shifts in light and shade bloom across the spongy flora surrounding you. The light becomes lines, becomes a shape that could mean
dragon, with long tails and wide wings, and the colors around the lines resolve into shades that could be a landscape made of clouds and trees, telling a story through light and motion as you make your way through this long tunnel.
The shapes of the dragons are long and sinuous, following the songs of the winds (music notes are flashes of bright color across soft peridot with curling wisps of lime gleaming between them) in the mossy light show) to a place where magic sparks out of the very ground. It takes searching for almost a fortnight (the cycle of bright days includes a cycle of dark nights, and you watch the moon flash from crescent to full) before the expedition discovers a place where a wide river pours through a cavernous maw in the earth. As one, they dive for the wide, welcoming opening, their wings sparkling in the spray of the cascade --
Wind tears through the scene in curving lines of viridian, knocking the glowing dragons from the air. They crash in the lake below (the world around you is a rapid shifting that is dim light filtering through deep water) and are caught in underwater currents and sucked, helpless, through long, twisting flumes in the rocks. In the story you're being shown, the dragons are surrounded by green bubbles that protect them from the rocky walls - the glinting glyphs and shifting shades suggesting the blessing of the Windsinger on the dragons in their plight.
Soon, they emerge from the flumes with enough force to break the surface of the lake they've been fed into, breaching the water as a shining group. The view shifts with the expedition, spreading the landscape of the cavern before you like a painting - the strange fungal forest on one side, the uneven windswept steppes on the other, and the massive river that bisects it all, water going from lake to falls and back again in one massive underground aquifer. Here, in this imagery of ancient times, the twin columns - ruby on one side, emerald on the other - are rough-hewn, their tops ultimately supporting the dome of the cavern's ceiling.
The moss ripples, no longer following the expedition that discovered
and was subsequently trapped in the cavern, instead showing you the change of the cavern from hidden magic to secret city, until finally you come to a place where a glittering map is spread out on the walls around you, the landscape arranged as though you were standing where the emerald column itself is. The shifting luminescence settles, glimmering, shaping the cavern you have been exploring in miniature around you, a map made of light.
You find that you are standing in a domed chamber, another
ARCHWAY before you. Beside it, in the wall, there is a place where the moss has relinquished space for a small
RUNESTONE inset in the smooth rock face. The surface gleams with the sinuous red shape of the
Plague symbol.
In this scaled-down map, you can see that the fungal forest, which takes up most of the right side of the room, is just an array of dim colors (aside from the RUBY, which glows with a dull throbbing light) - this map focuses on the steppes on the right and the small city that has sprung up above them. Strangely, even in this map, the structures on the land itself are RUINS, with KITES riding the uneasy wind currents above them. The once massive river has been divided into several AQUEDUCTS that still ultimately all lead from the LAKE you're standing in front of to the distant CASCADES, the waterfalls depicted as bright spots of shimmering blues and greens in a few patches of GLIMMERING moss.
Strangely, the castle doesn't seem to be anywhere on this map.
Touching any of the bright spots on the map makes the lights around you shift and swirl, giving you the sensation as though you're temporarily standing somewhere else...
What would you like to do?
examine the RUINS
examine the KITES
examine the AQUEDUCTS
examine the CASCADES
examine the GLIMMERING patch
examine the RUBY
When you are through experiencing this area, you may continue through the
ARCHWAY or press the
RUNESTONE.
