The air inside the grand temple of Sancturia was wrong before it was anything else.
It was dark — not the honest dark of a room with the lamps put out, but a thick, settled dark that seemed to have weight to it, the kind that pressed against the backs of the eyes and made a person aware of their own breathing. What little light there was came from nowhere Aim could name. It did not fall. It simply hung, grey and exhausted, over surfaces that had once been gold and were now the color of something left too long underwater. The high vaulted ceiling vanished into black long before the eye could find it. The pillars wore a fine pale fur of dust and rot. And underneath it all there was a smell — sweetish, faintly organic, the smell of a thing that had been dead long enough to stop being urgent about it.
And we're walking into this with people we can't trust.
Aim kept the thought behind his teeth and let his eyes move.
That one — the stupidly mysterious one who's never once said what he actually wants. And Miss Vine, who is clearly stronger than most officer in palace. Yet never appeared in a single record anyone can find, and who somehow wears the Rosier seal like it grew on her—
Think. Think!
There's no reason for this to be a trap meant for us. We're nobodies. Not worth the effort. Not a sacrifice — we aren't special enough to be worth offering to anything. Not slavers' bait, either; we're a hundred miles and more from Orenthel, who would haul three commoners all the way out—
"Hey.." Isolde murmured, leaning in close to his side, her voice dropping under the dark. "Corrupted ass animal corpses everywhere, and the corruption here — it looks unfinished.."
"It's like—" she started.
"Mm," Aim said.
Click.
Something cut the air, fast, low, a thin whistling that ended before the mind could catch it.
Isolde's breath caught.
"Aim!"
The young man hit the ground hard, all at once.
"Ah AH AHHH—!"
She dropped into a crouch beside him, hands already moving to check him over.
Two arrows lay against the stone where he'd fallen. Black-shafted, ugly things. Neither of them had so much as gone through the leather of his boot.
...huh?
"Honestly." Isolde let out a slow breath, the fear draining out of her face and leaving something dryer behind. "You. Do I really have to protect you from *this*?"
"It hurt, okay?! It didn't break the skin but a thing hitting you that fast still hurts—"
"sisisi!." A giggle come from the white hair man.
"Shut up!"
"Aim, Aim. What are we going to do with you?" Isolde facepalmed herself.
A sharp gaze settled on the two of them, cold as a draft from an open door.
They turned, slowly, together.
Lady Vine was looking at them — and the look alone was enough to still a room.
"Stop playing and keep up."
"...sorry," they said in unison.
Isolde got an arm under Aim and hauled him up — and halfway through the motion, as he came off the floor, his eye caught on something growing out of the seam where the wall met the ground.
Two camellias. One white, one pink, standing side by side.
They had pushed up through a hairline crack in the stone, in a thin scrape of black soil that should not have been able to feed anything — soil gone dry and dark as charcoal, the corruption sitting heavy in it the way oil sits on water. Everything around them had surrendered to the rot.
And yet the two flowers stood, small and stubborn.
Aim picked them, gently, before he straightened.
---
They went on, deeper, through halls that grew colder and quieter with every turn.
Then the Noble Lady stopped, and tossed something to Const without looking back.
"We split here. Go wherever you like. If you want to meet again for the way out, give me fifty minutes."
She strode away without waiting for an answer, and as she went she scattered a handful of glasses-shards along the floor behind her, glittering faintly in the grey light, like she was leaving herself a trail of doors.
---
"...so what now," Aim said, once she was gone.
"I don't feel ease, maybe we just leave—" Isolde started.
"Here." Const tossed the floor plan into Aim's chest.
"Wh — what's this?"
"The map Miss Vine gave us."
"And what am I supposed to do with it?"
"Obviously there must a treasure vault somewhere in here! Ancient temple, treasure vault — they come as a pair. You're telling me you don't want to go look?"
"...fine. We've come this far anyway," Aim said.
"I'm in too."
"Great. I'm off, then~"
Const lifted a hand in lazy farewell and started walking away.
"Oi — hey! Where are you going again!"
"Not telling~!"
Const was gone in the space of a blink, swallowed by the dark.
That damm of a human..
Aim dragged a palm down his own face.
Sigh.
"...shall we, Sol?"
"In and out. Quickly."
The two of them walked on through the black halls. The cold here had a damp edge to it, and the smell was stronger — that same sweetish rot, thicker now, with something mineral underneath it like wet rust. The corruption had worked deep into the bones of the place; the stone itself looked soft in patches, sagging where it should have held, and once a fine trickle of dust came hissing down from somewhere far overhead, as though the whole temple were a held breath that might, at any moment, decide to let go.
They reached a heavy door at the corridor's end.
Aim set both hands against it and shoved.
Barely move.
He shoved again, leaning his whole weight in. The door did not so much as shudder.
"A little help please..?"
"You're hopeless, you know that." Isolde set one hand flat against the wood and pushed, twice.
The door swung open.
"Just give up and work at maid cafe at this point, limpy boy~" Isolde spun back at him with a smirk.
"Fuck nah, and why don't you use that strength at that ambush months ago eh? Cocky Sol?"
"Those dude got Vanguard grade artifact, dummy."
Inside, in the grey hanging light, lay artifacts and gold — heaped and tumbled across the floor of a long low chamber, more wealth than either of them had seen in one place in their lives.
"Whoaaa — haha~" Aim's eyes lit up like a child's.
"Ahem."
"...right. Mm." Aim recomposed himself.
They began to pick through the hoard.
Most of it had gone the way of everything else in Sancturia — the corruption had crept into the artifacts too, leaving them dull and lifeless, their old power leached out into the black. But not all. Here and there, something still held a faint warmth, a flicker of the thing it had once been.
"Two of the strengthening type here," Aim said, holding up a pair of small, plain-looking crrystal. "
"You know how to use those?" She asked.
"Heard that if you just bond them to your Catalyst, they sort themselves out," Aim said.
"Split"
He tossed one to her and kept the other.
"Military engineering as supplement class does help eh?"
"Third best decision in life, Sol"
The artifact in his hand sank into his Catalyst, dissolving into it like ink into water.
"Huh — feels lighter already." Across from him, the band soaked cleanly into Isolde's Catalyst as well.
"You ready to go?"
"One sec..."
Aim kept digging.
There should be something. Something basic, at least.
He pushed his hands deeper into the pile, metal and crystal clinking under his fingers.
Anything that'd help me understand this workflow at least even a bit...
Something at the corner of his eye caught the light.
"Ah—!"
What's this...?
Glass? A pair of spectacles?
Aim pulled it free of the heap — a slim pair of eyeglasses, the lenses faintly violet — and slid them onto his face.
"How do I look?"
"...fine, I suppose—"
"AH—!"
The lenses flared, and a thin lance of light drove straight into his eyes.
"Are you all right!"
Isolde caught him as he doubled over, one arm bracing his shoulders.
"Easy — easy, breathe—"
"Aaagh—!"
"Can you still see? Aim. Can you see—"
Her hand moved in slow circles against his back.
Blink. Blink.
The cry that had been clawing its way out of him guttered and died.
"...what in the world."
It's like — faint lights, flickering, drifting off into the air?
But why does Isolde have so much more of it on her—
He shook his head.
"Jumpscare contact lenses, eh?" Isolde asked, dry.
"Maybe. But, uh." Aim blinked again, lifting one hand in front of his face and turning it over. "I'm seeing strange things now that I've got them on."
"Apparently — when I look at a person, or even just the air, I see these odd colored lights. People are brighter, though."
"Brightest at the head."
"Like — some kind of see-through vision?"
"Something like that, I guess..."
"Then we can go—"
A sound came down through the temple.
It was not loud the way thunder is loud. It was loud the way a mountain is loud when it begins to move — a vast, low, grinding concussion.
Something, somewhere in the dark of Sancturia, had begun to come toward them, and the whole dying building groaned around it as it came.
"What's going on, Sol—"
Isolde's hand clamped over his mouth and yanked, and in the same motion she swept the both of them down behind a heavy crate near the wall.
"Quiet!" she breathed.
Nod, nod—
A footfall.
Then another. And another.
The footsteps that had been coming closer were softening now.
Yet the fear had not stop plastering on Isolde's face. It had only settled there, gone still.
Aim's was no different.
A footfall, very close.
His whole body flinched, a single hard jolt he could not stop, the kind that happens before the mind has time to decide anything at all.
And then the thing tore through the wall of the storeroom — tore, ripping the stone aside the slowly.
"Quiet," Isolde mouthed, her hand pressing harder over his lips.
...
Aim eased his head out from behind the crate, slow, an inch at a time.
He looked.
His breath stopped in his chest — not a gasp, there was no air for a gasp, just a sudden total stillness, every part of him going rigid at once as though his body had understood something his mind had not yet been allowed to. He pulled his head back behind the crate.
Across from him, Isolde's face had gone tight with confusion. She made a small, sharp gesture with one hand — a question — and when he only stared back at her, she made it again, slower, brows drawing together, not understanding what he had seen.
That's language no normal human can understand, Sol..
Aim pressed the heel of his palm against his temple.
Another footfall, closer.
The cold of it crawled the length of both their spines, slow, and settled at the base of the skull, and would not leave.
He cast Catalyst up, wetting the tip of one glove with ink and worked it onto the wooden crate, he wrote:
WHAT. CREATURE. DON'T KNOW.
Isolde stared at the words, then made the same useless little gesture again, palms turning up, brows knit.
He wiped the leather and wrote:
BLACK. CORRUPTED. LIKE OMEN
The thing in the room went still.
What's it doing.
Aim narrowed his eyes behind the lenses and made himself look again — not at the shape of it, but at the lights, the strange drifting colors the lens had given him.
Why has its head suddenly gone so bright—
Then
The patch of color where its skull should be was guttering. Dimming. Whatever the lights meant, the brightest part of a living thing — *brightest at the head,* he'd said — was draining out of the creature in front of him, fast, like water leaving a cracked basin.
"That's it!"
Isolde grabbed a fistful of Aim's collar, ready to run—
But—
A breath stopped in two throats at once.
The face was already there, an arm's length from them, filling the space behind the crate where there had been nothing a heartbeat before.