Unfought Wars [Time loop Action Fantasy]

The corridor vanishes into the darkness, emerging into view as we walk ahead. It feels even more like we aren't getting anywhere. I'm treading water, staying in place. Everyone seems relieved when we step into a brightly lit room. I find it hard to decide how long it took. Ten minutes, two hours? Time means nothing in here, in more ways than one.

I squint, shadowing my eyes against the bright light. I realize we haven't slept since leaving Jonun. Maybe we don't need to sleep, with so much mana frying our brains constantly. Now we have the ambronite, the hours or days we've wandered around this place are catching up to me. I yawn, stretching out both arms over my head.

"Stop it, you'll dislocate a jaw," Finna says, but yawns as well. She doesn't bother trying to hide it, instead letting out a long drawn-out groan.

"The moment we get somewhere bright, you start yawning?" Hearn says.

"A moment longer," Rworg says. "We are getting close. I feel it."

"I trust nothing less than your feelings," Finna says. "I'm the one who has had proper hunches in this place."

"Well, what do your hunches say, thief?"

"Dunno, don't have any now."

Rworg grunts as Finna chuckles. I leave them and walk to check out the room. There are lights on the ceiling, shining orbs of white, like the library room had. When I walk closer to them, they wink out and the room plunges into darkness.

"What!" Finna shouts. It's too dark to see anything, as the light already burned through my night vision. I see just the afterimage of the light orbs in the middle of my view, like bruises swimming on the black.

"The stone broke the lights," Rworg says from the darkness.

"Get away from them," Finna says.

I fumble my way back to where the voices are coming from, but the room stays dark.

"Ah, right," Hearn says, next to me. "Ambronite breaks magical items. I'm afraid we've lost the lights."

I pull my backpack off and open the strings to let the ambronite shine its blue light into the room.

Finna plunges her hand into the bag and lifts the stone out of it. The light makes her eyes and hair look pitch black. She rotates the stone, peering into its opaque blue. "Well, ok. It does look pretty interesting," she says after a moment.

"Told you," I say. I focus again on looking around the room, now that there's some light and the glare isn't blinding me. "What is this place?" I ask out loud.

The room looks like an antechamber, an entrance to somewhere else. The walls have stone jutting out of them on both sides of the room, forming what might be benches. Hearn walks up to the bench on the right and sits on it, making a relieved sound.

He cranes his head as he takes a look around and makes a hmm sound. "There's something here," he says, reaching a hand out and moving it along the wall.

I walk and lean close to the wall to take a look. There are grooves, swirls, symbols. "Decorations?" I ask.

"Perhaps," he says, brow furrowed, fingers running over the wall.

Finna nudges me aside as she pushes close to the wall as well. "Can't make out anything in this stupid blue light."

Rworg squeezes in from the other side, pushing me against Finna. "The vaults sometimes have decorations, but it is too dark to see properly."

Hearn makes a muffled sound. I look at him, but Finna is in the way, pushed between me and him. My eyes meet hers for a moment. Hearn makes a noise and Finna grunts, pushed even closer to me.

"You're doing this on purpose!" she shouts at my face. She wriggles, dropping out from between me and Hearn, sliding to the floor and pushing her hands on the bench to shoot herself out into the middle of the room.

Hearn chuckles and Rworg moves away, letting me breathe again. Rworg winks at Hearn over my head. Everything about the situation is going over my head.

Finna walks to the middle of the room and picks up the ambronite. "I'll take this to the other side of the room. Draw the warm rune, so we can see something, old!"

Hearn smiles and points a finger, wiggling it in the air.

Finna walks away to the other side. "Next time, you're getting stabbed," I hear her mutter. I hope she means Rworg or Hearn.

A light appears at the end of Hearn's finger as Finna reaches the other side of the room. "Ah," he says and starts drawing. The rune isn't that complicated. I could learn it as well, but I remember I shouldn't. Especially as I couldn't channel any mana into it, anyway.

Hearn's rune lights up, shining with warm, yellow light. It feels nice on my face, after all the drab corridors and their cold, dim light. The wall is filled with grooves and notches. I look further out and realize it's a plaque. The symbols are the same black stone as everything else, framed with more of the same black stone.

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"It looks like writing," Hearn says, running his hand over the symbols. "It's hard to make them out." He picks up something from the wall between his fingers and rolls it around in them, peering at it. "There's something left here. Maybe paint? This might have been easier to read back in the day."

I lean close to the wall and see it. Flecks of gray on top of the symbols, peeled and flaked off over the untold time the plaque has stood here.

"Some of the symbols are familiar," Rworg says. "More light, old."

Hearn chuckles, and draws a second rune. "I actually have to channel to keep them lit," he says. "The mana feels almost normal here."

"I want to try too," Finna says, poking her finger into the newer rune hanging in the air.

Rworg leans close to the wall, running his large hand over the symbols.

I do too. It's impossible not to touch them. Maybe because they are so hard to see, or because it's just interesting to feel letters pushed out of stone like that.

The light flares and spits, flowing wildly. I press my other eye shut as it feels like I might get a headache soon.

Rworg turns to look at Finna. "Let Hearn do it."

"No, no, I have it," she says. Finna lets out a breath and closes her eyes, holding her hand steady touching the rune. The light steadies itself, growing brighter and dimmer like a heart beating.

"Good enough," Rworg says, turning back to the letters. "The writing resembles ancient Kertharian, from what I can see."

"Can you read it?" I ask.

"No," he says. "But I will try, nonetheless."

I go through my arrows as I wait. I have shot my bow just twice after getting into the Monolith. And I regret the first time. The difference to my time in Kerthar is stark. There I was running out of arrows constantly, killing Kertharians by the dozen. It feels like it happened to someone else.

I wonder if any of this will feel real once I get home. Reliving the same day, igniting the skies, wandering endless black corridors. Fighting, even dying.

I spin the waterfowl arrow in my hand, completely useless for everything I have been or could be doing on this trip. Going back to shooting ducks sounds ridiculous. I could probably find new adventures to go on. Lille might object. She will have no idea what I've been through. How can I ever explain any of this to her, to any of the people in the village?

I hope so much that they are all fine.

Rworg steps away from the wall, crossing his arms over his chest. "I have what I am going to get."

"Finally!" Finna says. She lets her hand drop and the rune dims, starts fading out. "My arm was starting to go numb."

"I drew the rune too high, sorry," Hearn says, letting his hand fall as well.

We're left in dark blue haze, the ambronite shining, placed on the bench on the other side of the room.

Finna stretches her arm over her chest, pulling on her elbow with her other arm. "So, what did it say?"

I pick up the ambronite and take it closer to the others, so they don't have to talk in almost total darkness. I'm excited to hear what Rworg found out as well. We didn't look too closely at the books in the library. I wonder if he could have read those as well, but the mana was probably too thick down there for him to keep still long enough to try to read anything.

"I cannot say what it says, but I can infer a few things," he says. "There are words that resemble words like we still have, even if the letters are not similar: magic, blue, or sky. Stone."

"So?" Finna asks.

Rworg shrugs. "Hard to say. Ideas, Folke?"

"Hmm," I say, pinching the bridge of my nose. "It could be related to what this place is? Magic related to blue stone. We know that ambronite and magic are tied together. When the auroras started to pull mana out from here, the tremors started?"

"Not much to go on, is it?" Finna says.

"I think it sounds pretty plausible," Hearn says. "Maybe this was a place to study ambronite? Or to extract it from the ground?"

"Yeah, ok, but what do we do with that?" Finna asks.

Rworg tuts, pointing a finger at her. "It is interesting, thief. Knowledge can be its own reward."

"I'll reward you with a kick to the groin," Finna says.

They are both right. It isn't much to go on, and I'm not sure either how it will help us. Still, it is interesting. I go to sit on the bench on the other side of the room to be able to think. Rworg and Finna stay bickering with each other, but they are just having fun. Hearn watches them with a smile playing on his white lips.

So, maybe this place was some kind of facility. To research ambronite or time, or to use magic to do something to the ambronite. The Device and the stakes pulled on more mana than possibly anything had before. Could that have done something to the ambronite? Ambronite causes time to speed up. Mana was already flowing out, but time affects how fast that happens, causing the mana to pool and stagnate at the slow places, make it rush like a waterfall at others. Damn.

Add in that this place is such a knot, leagues of corridors tied and tangled inside a single black slab of stone, jutting out from the forest. We're not necessarily even in the forest anymore. The corridors could be connected to a vault somewhere under the sands of Kerthar, if I've understood how Rworg's tombs work. There's no way to know. No way to know anything.

"What are you groaning about?" Finna asks as I lower my head into my hands.

"This place makes my head hurt," I say.

"Believe me, I know," she says.

I snort. I guess she does. Once again, I hope Mandollel would be here. He could try to work all this out with me.

I'm not angry at him anymore. He was sick, and we got Finna back. It's weird that she doesn't even remember what happened. She doesn't need to forgive him, even if she was the one who got killed.

"Good think? What do we do?" Rworg shouts from the other side of the room.

I rub the back of my neck, as scratching at the beard seems to annoy Finna. "Well, I think we'll just have to stick with the original plan. Break the stream, stop the mana from flowing."

"Good," he says.

"That's it?" Finna asks. "Did we spend all the time here for nothing?"

"Look, I don't know!" I snap. "We know nothing! We're so far out of our depth that it's not even funny."

"We've been out of our depth since the beginning," she says, taking a step back.

"Finna, I'm sorry, it's just…" I can't find a way to finish the sentence. I wanted to go on an adventure, but I thought I'd have it all figured out. The stories never tell about the heroes being completely confused, utterly perplexed by everything that is going on.

She looks at me, waiting, face pale. I breathe out, coaxing a smile on my face. "I just don't want to mess anything up because I didn't bother checking. Because I got hasty."

"That's not a problem for some of us," she says, nudging her head at Rworg.

Rworg waves at me, a smile playing on his face.

My shoulders twitch as I'm not sure if I want to laugh or cry. I grab Finna into a hug. Despite everything, I think we're going to be fine. We're—

Finna elbows me in the chest. My ribs crunch and Finna's hair is pushed into the air as I gasp, my face next to her face.

My vision swims, Rworg howling with laughter in front of me. Hearn has both hands in front of his mouth, eyes wide in shock.

Finna squeezes my cheeks from both sides with her hand. "Once we're out, I said," she hisses. Her face lingers in front of me for a moment. She scoffs, and pecks a kiss on my pouted lips.