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Raziel spent many hours examining every crevice of that chamber with his memories tossing and turning.
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Even if I escape this place, this cathedral of the damned, then where can I hide? The material realm is forbidden to me, and the spectral realm is nothing but Sluagh and Shadows.
Perhaps this is my only escape. The Spectral Realm, for all eternity.
SOME escape indeed.
Then, it hit him.
When he first left the Sarafan Stronghold, an event which seemed like so long ago, the great lake beneath the balcony and the beautiful waterfalls housed some flooded monument. At the time, he had not seen any of the Ancients’ forges.
But he had now, and he recognised the structure beneath the lake. It was constructed, like the others, by The Ancients.
And everywhere on it, he recognised, was the Shift glyph, the symbol the Ancients used for the Spirit Realm.
Maybe… just maybe. The Ancients had planned for this contingency, and had prepared some shrine to… could they… a shrine to return to him the ability to shift.
It was his only hope. His one small hope.
That lake was near here, very near. Through… two doors if he remembered rightly.
With a new motivation, Raziel vaulted up the curved support struts of the chamber, to the balcony above. Door number one, sealed. Not completely though. Between the wall and the metal hinges…. A slight small gap. |
It wasn’t bars, but maybe he could...
Pushing his body into the tiny gap, slowly, very slowly, he phased through the door and stone, emerging at the other side.
Heading down this corridor and turning, the second doors were already open. The vista before him was of a cold icy lake. The waterfalls had prevented complete freezing though, only chunks of the surface were iced over.
Leaping into the lake, he saw it. A temple, a doorway downwards.
Time was an enigma in the Spectral Realm, he considered. Things didn’t change, but they did. An iced lake had ice, but in the future… it didn’t?
Here, this temple exists in the spectral depths of the lake. In the future, it was collapsed, gone, consumed by the river bed.
Such questions were unanswerable, and seemed not to matter. What mattered was getting whatever The Ancients had buried in here.
Raziel strolled down, into the open mouth of the Spirit Shrine.
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