PreCursive

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  PreCursive

  For one long moment, nothing happened, and I feared the worst. Was the door broken, after who knows how many centuries moldering in the shadow of the Wyrm? Had all of our efforts to reach this hidden door been for nothing? Had I dragged my friends and companions across the ocean and the treacherous surface of Goryuen for absolutely nothing?

  No, as it turned out.

  But something else just as arming happened instead.

  Back in Hollow Hill, when I had first encountered one of these bunkers, the door that Grey had spent so much time obsessing over had opened easily at my touch. From the point of contact, a rolling wave of pure, rainbow-colored Aether had rolled across the surface, illuminating my handprint. After that, the door had separated out into countless small segments and smoothly rolled back into the surrounding walls.

  That didn’t happen here. It almost did, I could tell.

  Instead, the door shuddered for a moment. Slowly, almost reluctantly, Aether came to outline my hand upon the surface of the ancient bunker. But this was the opposite of the comforting, cascading hue of natural Aether.

  This was a dark, nearly bck magenta. It oozed up from the precisely machined cracks of the door, and under my palm I could physically feel the sensation of the energy. That was…new. I had never touched raw energy before, and I didn’t appreciate this being the first example I was introduced to. It was oily to the touch and slick with a malicious, wicked intent as it rolled under my hand.

  I almost instinctively tried to recoil and yank my palm from the sensation of that depraved power, but to my dismay, I found that I couldn’t.

  My hand was stuck to the surface of the metal.

  I tensed as a low roar started to fill my ears.

  This was a trap of some kind. Set by who, I had no way of knowing.

  But I couldn’t escape.

  From the point of contact, tendrils of the corrupted Aether started to spike outward, until they reached the outer circle of the door. To my rising panic, the stone hands on the edges shuddered when the bckened Aether touched them and recoiled, retreating into the rock. Rapidly, a symbol came to be illuminated upon the surface of this ancient doorway.

  A five-pointed star, oriented downward and quite literally dripping with malevolence. My right, flesh hand rested in the center of that pentagon, and for that, I cursed myself. If I had only touched the surface with my left, I could have disengaged the prosthetic and abandoned it to hang there. But I didn’t, and for that, we were put into immediate crisis.

  All of us, it turned out.

  With my hand stuck to the surface, to my horror, something was happening at the point of contact in the center of that star. I felt it when, from the pool of murky, corrupted Aether surrounding my hand, something reached out.

  What felt like a single, feminine finger reached out and drew itself, almost teasingly, down the center of my palm.

  Goosebumps of sudden fear and horror exploded down my spine.

  This all happened in moments, and my companions were only starting to tense in arm at the unexpected sight. But none of us, not a one, were ready for what happened next. Instead of folding away neatly, the surface of the door abruptly exploded inward in jagged junks of disparate metal. The portal into the bygone fortification was ringed with those barbed fragments in a manner as if to evoke the sight of an enormous befanged mouth.

  My hand was released from the grip of the door, and of the finger I had felt, no evidence presented itself.

  On the other side was only darkness instead.

  Darkness and distant, deep, all-encompassing silence.

  The st time I had broken the seal on one of these tombs, air had suddenly rushed inward as if it was fighting to fill a vacuum. Later, I had realized that the entire structure had been entirely devoid of air, as it was being deliberately preserved in the absence of oxygen.

  Something simir happened here.

  Only…

  Much, much greater.

  As if the mouth we all stood before was one in reality, a vast inward pressure suddenly began to pull at all of us like an inward breath of air. Wind, dust, and rain pulled from the mouth of the nook we stood in rushed forward, drawn from the force of it. It was nearly akin to the reversal of gravity, where the center of Vereden had suddenly reversed, finding itself within the heart of this bunker.

  We were being sucked inward.

  With our strength and reflexes, all of us of course tried to resist the pull. From Venix, to Azarus, to Renauld, to Kazuma and myself, we tried everything we could to stop ourselves. We drove weapons into the stone floor of the outcropping, we activated all manner of Skills and Spells and Arts to try and anchor ourselves…

  But all it was for naught.

  The mouth would not be denied.

  We were all dragged from our feet and inexplicably fell downwards into darkness, the distant rattle of Tatsugan’s tail the only sound that reached us.

  Boom…boom…

  Boom.

  The darkness swallowed me, and I knew no more.

  …………………………………..

  I could not tell you how long I was buried in the bckness of unconsciousness. For the longest time, it was as if I had ceased to exist.

  No…

  It was as if the world had ceased to exist. I was everywhere and nowhere, all at once. Formed and formless in an unending void of a reality that no longer remained for purchase. And yet, in the depths of that deprivation, I could tell.

  Something was happening all around me.

  And I could only tell this because of my core ring.

  My outer was being smothered by the darkness. No thoughts ran through that outer ring, but thankfully, it fulfilled its purpose. The core of me was protected, and it could feel the shifting of the world around me.

  It was, in a way, nearly familiar to me. The rearrangement of the outside world felt simir to that strange dimension I had battled Rhazal within.

  The Concord, realm of Spirits.

  But it wasn’t that pce. Something intrinsic to my soul could tell that I was still within the domain of physicality, and not that of the spiritual. The malleability of the actuality I found myself within reminded me of that pce, however.

  And then, all at once…

  Sight returned to me, as if the lights to creation had been relit once more. My outer ring startled to life at the same time, and it was just as struck in confusion by where I now found myself.

  I was in what must be the bunker, only…

  It wasn’t like the other one I had explored at all.

  That tomb had looked to have been ransacked, in a way, as if a great invading force had stormed its depths and put all within to the sword. Great rents in the walls and fixtures of the bunker had dotted every surface, and even the ceiling had caved in at certain points. There had been a nearly imperceptible feeling of mencholy that filled that pce.

  Here…

  Here, what could only be one of the bunkers looked to have been defiled. The recognizably, normally pristine and precisely machined metals looked to have been corroded. Rust and corrosion were heavily present on every single surface I could see about me. Pitting within the walls was all about my sitting form, through which I could easily look through into an ominous pitch-bck void.

  I, however, was in a small room not much rger than a broom closet. There was barely enough space in here for me to y ft, and if I tried, I wouldn’t be able to stretch out my arms out fully. I couldn’t even really raise them. The space was so narrow that all I could do was wedge one hand up to rest on the wall next to me. There was nothing else in here but the door, of which was the only surface still fully intact. SAid door had a small square hole cut in it, filled with three bars at around eye height on an average man. The only light in the cell came from the opening, and that light was weak, and disturbingly, slightly reddish. Even the floor beneath me looked to have been weakened, with one corner sporting a visible hole into nothingness.

  The door was shut.

  And it didn’t have a handle.

  Carefully, suspecting what I would find, I stood up. I wasn’t able to stretch to my full height and had to remain stooped over. I had to stop, briefly, when the ground underneath me creaked and groaned beneath my feet ominously. I held my breath for several tense seconds to see if I was about to fall through it, but thankfully, nothing happened.

  I barely had to extend my arm at all in order to y one hand on the solid, rusty surface of the door. Exerting the slightest amount of effort, afraid I would shatter the floor from the pushback, I shoved against the entrance.

  Nothing. The door was shut tightly.

  Trapped.

  I was trapped in this small, rusted closet. Panic started to well up in me then and my eyes widened in their sockets. I started to breathe heavily, my shoulders tensing.

  Just the sight of this small, cramped little closet was dredging up old fears and even older memories. Things that I’d forgotten. Things that I thought I’d gotten past.

  When I was little, my parents had been friends with another couple who had a young son, someone who they wanted me to be friends with. That hadn’t really worked, however. The two of us had barely tolerated each other’s presence.

  Well, to be more accurate, he had despised me, and I was afraid of him most of the time. The kid had been a bit of a bully, and was much bigger than I was.

  One day, when I was maybe six years old, the bastard and his much rger friend group had ganged up and locked me in a closet and shoved a dresser in front of it. Thoughtlessly, the cackling little shit and his asshole friends had left me there, in the dark, for an entire day as our parents were out at some concert or something. There in the darkness of that closet, my young mind had thought it was going to tear itself apart from fear. It was only after the adults had returned and found me missing that a search was undertaken. When my mother found me there in that dark, covered in snot, tears, and truthfully my own urine, it had caused such a fight that we never associated with those people again.

  In the aftermath, I’d needed years of sessions with a child psychiatrist in order to combat the intense custrophobia that resulted from the experience. I’d never developed a fear of darkness from the trial.

  Just small, enclosed spaces.

  It was a fear that I thought I’d long since gotten past.

  It was such a childish thing…

  But now it was rearing its ancient head once more. I would ask why now, normally. I had encountered plenty of dark, small spots since I’d been dumped on Vereden. Plenty of them had been filled with actual monsters, too, and not just the demons of the mind.

  But I knew why my spine was starting to crawl now.

  It was because this was a closet.

  Or rather…a closet-like cell.

  It was my core ring that kept a grip itself, while my outer descended into fear and childlike dread. Where the hell was I? This had to be the bunker…right? I don’t remember a thing that had happened after-

  Oh God.

  I’d triggered some kind of trap left on the bunker, and all of us had gotten sucked inside of it. It…almost looked like I had been captured, somehow, and locked up in this…cell. But by who? And why the hell would captors like that leave me all my weaponry? Because I still had everything. I wasn’t missing a single piece of equipment, from my daggers to Terractus to my bow. Even my supply pouch was still on me. Hell, I even had my staff.

  And let me tell you, the long length of wood wasn’t helping me maneuver in these tight environs.

  Had there been inhabitants in the bunker? I couldn’t see how considering how old it must be. Nor did I hear anything from outside my cell.

  The only thing audible was the creaking of degraded metal.

  How…how had I gotten in here?

  The absurdity of the situation, combined with my core’s calm assessment of it, finally broke through the panic of my outer self. My adult mind finally triumphed over the fears of the deep past. I took a deep, shuddering breath, and started considering options.

  I couldn’t stay in here forever. I don’t care if I had been deliberately imprisoned by some force, or outright teleported in here.

  I had to get out. But how? I don’t think I was going to get through that door, not without breaking the weakened floor beneath me. I had to tamp down on a hysterical ugh, for a moment, because this was the second time today that I was being thwarted by a door of all things.

  God, my life was a tragedy sometimes.

  It didn’t have any visible hinges on it either, which was…not great. If it had those at the very least, I could have broken them and slipped out that way. It was thick, as well, so I don’t think the corrosive effect of Poisonthorn Shot-

  I stopped. There was an idea, a distant part of me whispered.

  If I couldn’t get through the door….

  I look over at the wall consideringly. That…could work. It might be the only way I could get through the wall, actually. I didn’t have enough room in here to draw and using any of my weapons or tools. Not even my daggers, really.

  But if I wedged one hand up against the wall, and used the Skill then…

  Maybe I could burrow a hole into the room next to me and try and get out that way.

  No time like the present, I guess.

  I slid one hand up to rest on the wall to my right in this cramped space and called for the Skill.

  Poisonthorn Shot.

  I felt the thunk as the thorn embedded itself in the wall, but more importantly than that, I felt the wall start to give. The sizzling of metal pierced the quiet of the cell, and chemical smoke drifted up to my nostrils. I grimaced at the smell but soldiered on.

  That couldn’t be good for me.

  It only took seconds for my skill to pierce through the surprisingly thin walls, causing my hand to slip through into open air. I didn’t feel anything on the other side, so I withdrew the arm and knelt down enough to look through the small hole. The floor creaked warningly at the movement, but I did my best to pay it no mind.

  On the other side of the wall was…

  Another cell, almost identical to the one I was in. I wasn’t able to see the door from this position, but judging by the slight illumination in there, it was shut closed as well.

  I let out a resigned, tense sigh. For a moment, I was tempted to try again on the other wall, but I think…

  I think there was only open space, on that side. There was a small pitting on that wall that let me look through, and on the other side, I saw a deep, foreboding darkness that represented only open air.

  Still.

  The hole I had made was progress, at the least. And the sight of it was lessening my old fears of tight spaces.

  Time to make it bigger.

  I got to work widening the hole with my corrosive hole, and when it was rge enough, I carefully slipped through.

  Closed door, like I thought.

  I tried again on the far wall.

  And again.

  And again.

  And again…