Miasmora & Wisric's Grand Meridellian Misadventure

     They spiraled down until Miasmora's muscles ached. Though Wisric didn't voice any complaints behind her, his breathing became increasingly ragged as they descended. Down was usually the easy way, but these stairs were slick--a few of them were even covered in a sickly-looking green growth that made skipping over those steps seem safer--and with nothing to grab onto should they slip, each step down was laborious.

     "Good thing we didn't try the grate."

     Behind her, Wisric made a choking sound, and Miasmora imagined him imagining a terrible fall through this near-infinite darkness.

     "There is a bottom to this thing, right?" she asked.

     "Has to be," Wisric said.

     The sounds of water were getting louder, Miasmora realized. She focused her attention back on the descent, and a few grueling minutes later, a wet stone floor rose up out of the darkness beneath them. Both she and Wisric let out relieved breaths, and stepped gratefully onto the solid ground at the bottom of the stairs.

     "We have to climb back up that, don't we," Wisric said, raising his lantern to survey the stairs they'd just descended.

     "It won't be so bad. We know how long it is now, so it'll seem to go by faster. And besides, down's the dangerous way. You're much less likely to trip going up."

     The Spotted Ixi's face paled at the word trip.

     "Or there could be another way up. This might connect to that other staircase." The staircase beneath the trapdoor in one of the castle's towers that they'd explored the day before--when they'd been looking for a Ghost Neopet to translate the text on the Old Paper they'd found at the Rubbish Dump--at least had solid walls on both sides. There [i]might[/i] have been a very hungry, very Invisible Grarrl lurking in that part of the castle's underbelly, but an Invisible Grarrl was something they could fight. Endless darkness, on the other hand...

     "Where to now?" Miasmora asked, trying vainly to chase thoughts of infinite darkness and castle underbelly denizens out of her head.

     Wisric passed her the lantern and took the transliterated, decoded map annotations out of his belt pouch and studied them for a moment. "It says southeast. There should be an archway, and beyond that there's a sloped corridor. It's probably long--there's a break in the drawing, so I don't know how far we'll have to go. Keep an eye out for this marking on a door frame." He showed her a symbol that looked strangely like an eye.

     Miasmora shivered. She couldn't help recalling the feeling of being watched from the night before.

     Wisric tucked the paper away and took the lantern back. Miasmora took the lead again, one hand ready on the belt where her potions hung. She hoped she wouldn't need them, but she was familiar enough with adventure stories to know that, sooner or later, she would.

     Twice she nearly slipped on the cistern chamber's floor. Unlike the stairs, the slickest parts of this chamber were disguised, just a shade darker than the rest, nearly impossible to discern in the flickering lantern light. Before long, though, the lantern illuminated an archway that matched the one on the map, and the two passed through it to see what lay on the other side.

     Immediately, the sounds of water behind them faded.

     "That's weird," Wisric said. He paused and examined the archway. There was something carved into the stone all around, text or symbols of some sort, though not like anything Miasmora had ever seen. "I think-- I think this is some sort of spell, maybe?"

     "Oh great," Miasmora said. "It's enchanted."

     "Huh. I wonder if someone did manage to convince the king to put some kind of seal on this place." Suddenly, his face paled. He leapt back across the archway's threshold into the cistern chamber, slipped, and crashed into the floor. To Miasmora's surprise, the sound he made was one of relief. It took half a dozen tries for him to get his feet firmly beneath him--Miasmora swallowed the urge to laugh at the spectacle--but when he stood and brushed himself off, the color had returned to his cheeks. "Okay. Okay, it's fine. We can get back out."

     "This was a terrible idea," Miasmora said. If the color of Swamp Gas could have drained from her Skeith features as she realized what he'd been so afraid of, she was sure it would have.

     "Maybe," Wisric admitted. "But we're already here, so."

     They continued on. Just as the map suggested, the corridor sloped downward, gently at first, and then steeper. It turned a few times, and Miasmora was sure they were, once again, circling down into an earthen abyss. At least the floor wasn't quite so slick here.

     They passed dozens of rooms, some with doors, some with only the remnants of doors. Many of them were empty. Some contained boxes and crates, but whatever had once been in them had long ago rotted away into sludge. (Not that that stopped Miasmora from rooting through every single one of them, in case there was treasure to be found down here after all.) On a few door frames and walls they found spellwork like they'd found on the archway out of the cistern, but if those ancient enchantments still worked, neither of them could discern what kind of effect they were having. They certainly weren't helping with the wet-damp smell that permeated the corridor and its off-shoots.

     As they were leaving one of the larger rooms--entirely empty--Miasmora stopped. "Wait, it's here."

     The eye marking they were looking for was scratched--not carved, not engraved, definitely scratched into the inside of the room, just above the door's mantle.

     "That can't be right," Wisric said, taking another look around the room. It was a dead end.

     "That's definitely the symbol, and it hasn't been anywhere else. I'm sure," Miasmora said. "Maybe the way through is hidden?" She did know a lot of adventure stories.

     "Right. So I guess we should look more closely."

     The two began a slow circle of the chamber. Wisric held the lantern close to the walls, inspecting the stone for imperfections or seams or plates that might be concealed switches. Miasmora ran her hands over the stone, feeling for anything Wisric's keen eyes might have missed.

     They'd circled most of the room and were almost back to the doorway when Miasmora felt it: a spot of stone that was cooler than all the rest.

     She stood back and let Wisric examine the spot too.

     In addition to being cooler to the touch, it was paler and smoother than the rest of the stone. The patch extended from the floor to near the ceiling, though it was narrow--barely wide enough for a Neopet to pass through, and only if they squeezed. "Can you see a way to open it?"

     Wisric shook his head. He handed her the lantern again and pressed his hooves against the stone as hard as he could.

     When it didn't budge, he took the map from his pocket for a second look.

     Miasmora held the lantern steady for him. It wasn't long before the lantern's light revealed a growing confusion on Wisric's face.

     A moment later, he reached into his belt pouch again, took out every sheet of paper in there, and sat down on the floor, spreading them out around him.

     "What are you doing now?" she asked.

     "I'm not sure," he said. "Could you just hold that still?"

     Miasmora found herself tapping her foot impatiently on the floor while Wisric pored over the sheets. After a few minutes, her arm began to tire, and she settled herself on the floor opposite him, propping the lantern on her lap.

     Wisric looked from the original Old Paper to Isoldeia's transliteration to their decoded versions and back again, over and over. He muttered under his breath, too low for Miasmora to make out much more than an occasional "No, if that means--" or "Then this should be--" or "Wait, why aren't these--"

     He took a blank Old Paper and and ink pen from his pouch and began scribbling furiously, referencing the original Old Paper and one of their decoded copies, completely ignoring Isoldeia's work between them. Miasmora thought that was an incredibly curious thing to do--they'd needed Isoldeia's transliteration to make any sense at all of the text on the Old Paper--but when she tried to point that out, Wisric shushed her and continued working.

     Finally, after what seemed like a very long time to Miasmora, he looked up.

     "We went the wrong way."

     "What?"

     "We need to go back. There's a room a few turns back with this symbol over the door." He pointed to a shield he had drawn himself a moment before.

     "But we decoded--"

     "It's wrong." He showed her the original Old Paper, both halves back together now. "See here, and here? These are the same words on the original, but Isoldeia transliterated them differently. If I replace them with the words that are the same from the letter, the directions point to a room with that symbol over it, not this one," he said, indicating the eye.

     "So what does the eye on the map mean?"

     Wisric hesitated for a moment. "I'm not sure. The text definitely points to a room marked with a shield symbol like this one."

     Miasmora glanced at the space above the door where the eye symbol had been scratched into the stone. Then she followed the door frame down, to the floor beneath, where stone shavings floated in the dampness. Fresh stone shavings.

     "I think," Wisric said, gulping, "Isoldeia tried to mislead us."

     "That would explain her disappearing last--"

     Before Miasmora could fully form the thought, a deep rumble filled the room, the grating of stone on stone, and the concealed passageway next to them began to inch open.

     To be continued…