I ducked into a maze of narrow streets, where the crimson light of that second sun barely penetrated the clouds of steam rising from the sewers. The book in my hands burned like a red-hot coal, and it whispered something in a language I didn't understand, but the words stuck into my brain like splinters.
"To the left. Down. Into the well."
I barely managed to turn away — blades were already ringing behind me, cutting through the air where my back had been a second ago.
The well turned out to be not a well, but a trap.
I fell into a black pit, falling longer than should have been possible, and landed not on a rock, but into something... It's soft.
Tina.
Thick, sticky, alive.
It enveloped me like a second skin, and I opened my mouth to scream, when suddenly —
Silence.
I didn't drown.
I was breathing.
Through the green haze, the outlines of a huge hall appeared in front of me.
—An underground temple,— the book whispered.
The walls here were covered with murals on which creatures with human bodies and heads were writhing... something else. Animals? Birds? Or things that don't have names?
And there was a Stone in the center of the hall.
Black, streaked with red, as if molten blood had been poured into it.
And there's a silhouette on it.
A man? No.
Wings.
Horns.
Eyes burning like coals in the dark.
—Ignis,— I said, and the stone shook.
Another old man came out of the shadows behind him.
The same one?
No.
But very similar.
"You shouldn't have come here, Sato," he said, and his voice was like the creak of rusty doors. — **They've already rewritten history. The guild has never died. They...
he didn't finish.
There was a crash above us.
They broke through the floor.
Silver masks were falling down like specular raindrops, and somewhere among them —
The lyre.
Her hands were tied, but her eyes...
Her eyes were burning.
"They know you're here, Sato!" "Stop it!" she screamed. — He will wake up if you touch the stone!
— Who?!
— The one who wrote your book!
I looked at the pages.
The text disappeared.
Instead, there's a mirror.
And in it...
I am.
But not the one that is now.
Another.
With horns.
With fire in his eyes.
With a blood-curdling smile.
—Run, Sato," my reflection said. — But where?
And then the stone cracked.
And the darkness spoke.