Chapter 37: Pictures - The Unforgettables: A ZeroYear litRPG

  Liora woke up as Silas finished assembling her parts, and she thanked him with just a glance as they exchanged thoughts along the rebuilt. The work was demanding, yet they lost no time and began repairing the ship, not even waiting for Petra and Frank to return from their winged reconnaissance of the region. Upon their return, the humans took a well-deserved bath in their cubes; both had emerged unscathed from the brutal combat that had just taken place, carrying only the sweet taste of rain on their faces. Despite the damage to the ship, spirits are particularly high, and time passes gently; this time, Frank is the last to leave the refreshing waters of the cube.

  “Weren’t those Hawaiian torches? They were everywhere in the 90s, right?” Laetilia slowly awoke from her sleep at the sound of Frank's voice. She lay on one of the giant armchairs on the ship’s lower deck with Kaskas still sleeping beside her, taking a moment just to observe. The ship was stationary and floating, but now without walls; Silas and Liora were flying back and forth, repairing the previous day’s damage.

  Petra held beside her a strange wooden pillar carved with a human-like face, its smiling exaggerated. She said, “It’s a tiki, but I don’t think it’s Hawaiian; my grandfather brought one of these back from the great war; New Zealand, I think.”

  “Ah, okay… Did you make that using your creation magic?” Frank asked, a bit lost but picking up on the mood.

  “Sort of. It’s a new spell from the School of Creation; I was eager to test it,” Petra replied, exchanging smiling glances with the pillar at her side.

  “Is there a specific spell here for making these things?” Frank was surprised.

  “Well, I don’t think that’s it. While studying the spells, my memory seemed to refresh itself, and my grandfather came to my mind. I remember the days of my childhood as clearly as if they were yesterday. It’s impressive, and this new spell created an almost perfect image of one of my memories,” Petra mused.

  “Cool, so this magic restored your memory?” Frank thought.

  “I don’t know about that, but I remember some things in detail. On my grandfather’s tiki, carved into the wood, was ‘Peakakariki December 24th 1942’; must have been some memory from Christmas Eve,” Petra replied, trying to capture the horizon through the open gaps where the ship’s walls once stood.

  “He never told you anything about it?” Frank inquired, crossing his arms and leaning against one of the ship’s beams, which now looked more like the metallic skeleton of a building under construction.

  “One day he told me the tiki was one of the first men, like Adam…” Petra’s eyes got lost in the darkness; she continued speaking with a shrug: “He clearly didn’t know what he was doing; odds are he looted a bar decoration during a night of carousing.”

  “Don’t be so hard on your memories, Petra. After all, they’re all we have left,” concluded Frank. After a long pause, he continued, “But what does this magic do? Couldn’t you already make a torch with the old magic?”

  “The Vabala says it’s quite different; this is like an improved Sun; just pour mana into it to turn it on. What’s more, it can stay this size or grow larger than a mountain,” Petra said, lifting the torch high, defying the fear of the night like the Lady of the Harbor.

  “That’s crazy! I think I picked the wrong magic school,” Frank lamented. “So, are we gonna light this thing up?”

  Laetilia, with a start, sat up in the huge chair, waking Kaskas in the process. She smiled and said, “Good morning, guys! Let’s see what this does!” Frank and Petra smiled back and nodded. Kaskas, curious, began grooming, keeping to herself the pride of having fixed the knight’s right hand so well that, so far, no one had noticed.

  Petra sent a mental message to everyone: “Guys, I created a torch with a new spell, and I’m going to test it; it should help light things up.”

  Silas, completely focused, replied without paying much attention: “Good, Petra, but we’d need something much stronger than a torch to replace a repair dock.”

  Liora added, “You’re the one who insisted on not going back to the dojo, Silas, but I’m already ‘magically’ lighting up everything around me…” Liora grumbled, positioning a part with the help of maintenance drones.

  Petra hung by one hand from one of the ship’s beams while holding the torch outside with the other, saying, “OK, shield your eyes, I’m turning it on max!”

  With a deep, heavy sound, like a contained explosion, the torch lit up with intense light. The magic didn’t just boost the light; it spread the source throughout the entire environment, as if radiating from various points in space around the ship, yet always producing concentric rays.

  “Holy cow!” Frank exclaimed. “Whoa, whoa, woooooa!” Laetilia gasped in unison.

  The light filled the entire region like a star being born, but the effects went far beyond illumination. The environment immediately warmed to a temperature much more pleasant than Gate’s perpetual ice. Everyone watched the ice crack and melt, reflecting a strangely yellowish hue; the remains of the deity that had exploded. The sky of Gate, once lit only by the Big Bang's light, gave way to a warm blue, almost white.

  In the moments that followed, Liora and Laetilia felt an intense sense of well-being they had never experienced before; the magic seemed to restore their energies. A similar effect was replicated in all the technological devices in the region: every battery used in combat that had been set aside lit up with a full charge indicator as if brand new, just as the ship’s life support and auto-repair systems had their energy completely restored, as if connected to a power plant.

  Silas and Liora exchanged glances, astonished. Liora was the first to speak mentally: “Impressive, but I can imagine a few ways to draw more attention.”

  Silas: “The ‘bright’ side is that, in a matter of minutes, we’ll be ready to leave!”

  Petra: “No worries, I can turn this on and off whenever I want.”

  Silas: “Nice, how long does it last?”

  Petra: “From what I understand, it can last forever until someone blows it up, but it’s pretty tough.”

  Liora: “That thing explodes? Let’s finish the ship, get the hell out of here, and leave that torch off!”

  Frank: “Hmmmm… Getting the hell out part sounds good, but what do you think about leaving it on?”

  Laetilia: “The idea doesn’t seem bad; drawing attention to a place with nothing in it, where we won’t be.”

  Petra: “Well, I can even control the light and dark cycles, but to change it later, I’d have to come back here.”

  Frank: “Do you have any teleport stones to spare?”

  Petra: “Yes, I have a few left.”

  Silas: “Look, I can set up a relay transmissor here; if this torch is permanent, energy doesn’t seem like it’ll be an issue.”

  Liora just pinched the bridge of her nose while shaking her head; Frank concluded, “I just remembered Ramirez, saying that the Vabala could change the game for entire cities.”

  While Silas and Liora hurried to finish the fuselage repairs, Petra realized it was hard to see anything next to the lit torch. She then created three pairs of magical sunglasses, put one on, and handed the others to Frank and Laetilia.

  Frank looked particularly good in sunglasses; he said, “Now we are talking, Petra!”

  Kaskas revolted, hidden behind the sofa: “Where are mine?”

  Petra, with a gesture, created tiny sunglasses and placed them on Kaskas, saying: “I thought cats didn’t like wearing anything… Look at that, so cutie!”

  Kaskas thanked her: “I’ll make an exception to the feline manual; it’s not every day a cat wakes up inside the Sun.”

  “Oh, right, Frank, could you go down and sink this torch somewhere high up? I’ll set it to 12-hour Earth cycles,” Petra asked.

  “Sure, hand me one of your little stones too,” Frank replied, while Petra handed him a reddish-pink pebble. Frank nodded and flew down to the ground with the torch, while his friends watched from above. Moments later, he returned.

  “OK, time to make this thing grow!” said Petra, gesturing with her hands until a beam of light shot out and hit the torch down below. It grew rapidly until it was larger than any peak in the region, becoming a colossal tower that retained the shape of a smiling, colorful figurehead.

  Liora grumbled as she watched the light and color show: “Right… The list is getting shorter and shorter.”

  Frank, jokingly: “Petra, do these torches need to stay on the ground?”

  Petra, innocently: “No, but when they grow, they get kind of heavy…”

  Frank figures: “Well, I think I can put some of these in orbit!” Laetilia pointed a finger at him, smiling.

  Liora, perplexed: “Okay, okay, I won’t say another word.”

  Frank replied, joining Silas and Liora: “I’m kidding; I’ll help you put these plates in place so we can get out of here!”

  Silas commented: “Look… Not here, nor in Metropolis, but I know of some places where a star appearing in the sky would solve a lot of problems.”

  Liora couldn’t resist: “Do you guys really think it’s a good idea to leave this stuff turned on here?”

  Silas thought: “Well, we are really far from anything mapped; Metropolis is not going to see it and must have its own problems.”

  Frank, putting a wall in place with his bare hands, said: “Drawing attention to this region? That′s for sure, but I found absolutely nothing.”

  “The combat affected the entire atmosphere, and across an area beyond the torchlight. Leaving a beacon on the way isn’t bad, I guess,” Silas conjectured.

  Liora shrugged while reattaching several plates at once. “Well, I’m remembering the Wyvern, but this time it seems we got lucky. All ready here, let’s go back inside!”

  Silas, gathering the devices and flying back: “This magic ended up fixing all the parts at once; we would have been here all day…”

  Frank, now with everyone regrouping to finish the repairs at the docks, said: “Well, yesterday the idea was to visit Cernutos, not kill a god.”

  Laetilia, who was with Petra watching the ice melt, replied: “And it still is; no knight seems to fully understand that place. I think Seneca passed through there on his way North.”

  “What for? Wasn’t it just a waypoint on this so-called Tempus route?” asked Petra, already updating her teleport stones, organizing them into an oddly satisfying case she had just created with magic.

  “Well, he was one of the scholarly interpreters of the monolith atop that tower; Beni passed through there several times and found nothing. He doesn’t like that place; he just told me something feels wrong, but I didn’t have time to sense any of that when I faced Adarian,” Laetilia reflected.

  “Speaking of that devil, there’s also Adarian’s ship with the far-range communicator, plus a warp drive,” Silas remembered.

  “And probably a direct line to the MBSI, we need to be careful,” Liora concluded, as she flew around the ship at super-speed to check the walls while Silas restarted the ship's devices.

  Petra stood motionless at the entrance, simply watching the many seas forming around her tower island, giving way to an astonishing landscape. She said, noticing Liora and Silas finishing up: “Whenever you want, I’ll open a portal.”

  “Well, we’re ready to leave. Just let us accelerate the ship North, and we can start our wayback visit,” Silas said, while Liora was already at the helm doing exactly that.

  Petra sent the Vabala to the dojo through the portal as time passed, while Memel came through to join Laetilia on her journey. The cats exchanged licks while they waited. Laetilia and Frank exchanged more serious, anxious glances.

  “More spiders?” Frank commented. After a collective silence, Laetilia nodded, and the group gathered next to Petra, with tech stuff filling every space in the aircar.

  “All set!” Silas confirmed, eyeing the pile of devices stacked in the aircar. “Hmm… I think I’ll start investing a bit more time in miniaturization technology.”

  Upon hearing Silas, Petra’s eyes widened as if remembering something; she opened her pebble case, took a pen-sized tiki, and tucked it into her bracelet. Liora noticed and asked, “Do you think we’ll need that, Petra?”

  “I hope not, but don’t worry: I can also control the light intensity. Just in case some spider decides to try and shut us down like last time,” she warned as she opened her portal. A pale, light-yellow disk formed before them; the cold wind was already invading the ship. Silas and Memel squeezed into the aircar while the others walked slowly alongside it.

  “Watch the first step!” Frank warned, opening his wings, remembering he had placed the teleport stone in the middle of a slope.

  The party passed through the portal with caution; everyone immediately realized the other side was dark, lit only by the cosmos, which cast the silhouette of the immense tower against the skyline.

  “Heads up, the area is full of threads, no warm welcome, like last time!” Petra warned, strumming the air, struggling to perceive the ethereal web and closing the portal behind.

  “We can’t see anything!” Liora said telepathically, amid distress.

  Petra shared her senses, and everyone could see some threads, with the same difficulty, and tried to position themselves so as not to touch any of them.

  The hairs on Petra’s arms stood up as she sensed approaching danger; she warned everyone immediately and took the vanguard position. Something was coming from the direction of the tower.

  After less than a minute of tension, three giant spiders leaped from the parallel veins that served as valleys and immediately pulled all the threads to slice their victims, thinking they would be unprepared. But to their surprise, their web-attack was blunted: Liora and Frank dodged all the threads with ease; Petra took another approach, wrapping the threads around her flexoclava like making cotton candy, but the aircar, Silas, and Laetilia were hit.

  However, before the spiders could finish their dance and drain the energy, Petra threw her tiki on the ground, saying, “Not today!” and made her magic torch grow and light up to the size of a building, trampling the threads around it as she had done with her flexoclava, causing the spiders to drain part of the torch’s energy instead of her friends.

  Liora wasted no time and, with a few precise shots, took two spiders out of combat, but they didn’t turn into eggs or giants like before; they simply vanished into thin air like ghosts. The third was dominated by Frank, who mounted its back and firmly held four of its legs.

  The trapped spider said nothing, just struggled desperately while Frank commented: “This one isn’t like the previous one; I don’t know, it doesn’t seem communicative at all…”

  The region was lit by Petra’s torch, partially sunken in the snow and somewhat crooked; the group waited for the spider to calm down while Silas checked the devices and began assembling the reconnaissance probes and drones. However, the creature proved untamable.

  “It’s going to kill itself if I keep this up. Now what?” Frank shouted from atop the spider, whose legs were almost being torn off by brute force.

  Liora pointed her weapon and said, “Let’s see. Let it go; if it attacks us again, I’ll shoot.”

  “I can’t feel anything; it’s as if this spider is part of the environment,” Laetilia said, trying to understand what was happening.

  Frank nodded to Liora and suddenly jumped, releasing the spider, which immediately lunged at the group. Liora fired three, four times at the ground, her weapon blasting small craters, driving the spider, already quite injured, away from everyone.

  After a moment, the spider leaped onto one of the valley slopes and turned to flee. Silas noticed and energized his probes with his beam, firing it against one of the creature’s legs, aiming with surgical precision at a wound opened during the struggle with Frank, thus planting a tracker on his opponent.

  Liora let the spyder go and scouted the entire region around the tower at super-speed, saying mentally, “Petra, see with my eyes if there are more threads.”

  “A little slower, Liora… That’s it, that’s it, perfect,” Petra said, adjusting her cognitive capabilities shared with Liora via Frank’s magic. “Done, there’s nothing else, except under Adarian’s ship. It seems the spiders were using the place as a nest, but these webs are quite different, thicker.”

  “Well, it didn’t go back there; somehow, the spider dug a hole and is already miles away, under the snow,” Silas warned, checking the data from his probe.

  “We’ll have to be very careful; if it’s quick to flee, it must be quick to return,” Liora said, ending her reconnaissance trip.

  “Without its web trap, I doubt it will show us its ugly face again, but you never know,” Frank said in a perplexed tone.

  “Well, the spider went even deeper, into the rock. It only stopped now inside some structure beneath the tower. The underground readings are disjointed; there’s rock under the snow, but it seems there are also monolithic structures,” Silas concluded.

  “I know the tower of Cernutos is just the tip of a horn on the head of a colossal statue directly connected to a monolithic vein. Seneca, in his studies, concluded that this tower is directly connected to the sixth level of the Underworld,” Laetilia said, remembering her time with Beni.

  After an interrogative silence, Laetilia added, “Don’t look at me like that. Whatever this means, if there is something else in this place, it is not trying to communicate with us, for sure. What I understood, I guess, is this: the tower and the spiders aren’t part of the same thing, unlike the demons and the meteor we just encountered.”

  “Maybe the spiders were here and got affected by the tower; I’ll assume they live for many years, as everything in this world. The previous one we met just spent more time living around here,” Frank conjectured, surprising Laetilia.

  “And where did you get that from?” Petra asked.

  “The first one, right before dying, said it was a messenger and that it had lost time; shortly after, it said it would be reborn. If Laetilia is right and they aren’t part of the tower, maybe, over time, they just start to understand better what goes on around here. If we can learn incredible things in Gate, why can’t these spiders do the same?” Frank suggested.

  “Because they aren’t intelligent, Frank. They attacked us like beasts; worse, they almost killed themselves in the face of danger. They don’t even react like the wildlife we know,” Petra concluded with some nervousness.

  “This isn’t Earth; maybe what we call intelligence doesn’t work the same way with them…” Frank ventured.

  Petra interrupted: “And how the hell can we be sure of that?”

  Frank looked at his hands, his voice faltering: “But, Petra, don’t we ourselves…” but he didn’t finish the sentence, sensing an ill-timed conflict. He corrected himself: “…we can’t stay here too long; this place is really weird.”

  “That’s for sure! Let’s go check the ship,” Petra said, cracking her shoulder and gathering her torch, which she carried lit, much smaller now and illuminating a restricted area.

  The party hurried along the valley leading to the tower. Upon arrival, they found the ship abandoned and slightly buried in snow. A spider nest spread across the lower part, blocking the only entrance and blending into the snow. There were some cocoons larger than a person amidst the tangle of threads.

  Silas and Petra operated the probes and were impressed by what they saw. “How strange, there’s technological material inside some of these cocoons. I think… Frank, can you open this one here?” Silas asked, pointing to the largest of them, blocking the entrance. Liora and Laetilia remained alert to their surroundings.

  Frank opened the cocoon with immense ease. He said, “Whoa, what is this doing here?”

  Laetilia noticed and said excitedly, “It’s my bike! It can’t be.”

  “It’s brand new…” Petra observed.

  “Yeah, it exploded in the crash; someone fixed it all up!” Laetilia approached to check. She picked up a pair of tiny knitted socks hanging from the bike’s handlebars and examined them closely with her glowing green eyes: “What the hell? I remember this being burned in the bike crash; how is this possible?”

  No one had an answer for that. Liora broke the silence: “What’s in the other cocoons?”

  Petra checked again while Silas said, “Looks like clothes, two cubes, survival gear, and local-range communicators…”

  Frank began opening the cocoons and found various items. The only thing they had in common was that they were brand new. He took them to Petra and Liora to try and figure something out while Silas activated the medium-range sensors. He said: “Well, inside the ship, nothing has changed; it’s exactly as we left it, only dirtier.”

  Liora marginally recognized one of the items. Shaking a kind of cloak-shaped backpack, she said, “In my records from when I was out, one of the visitors killed by Adarian was carrying a brown tactical backpack. Look, maybe this is it!” A gray triangle with rounded base angles stood out, and Laetilia mentally confirmed that it looked like one of the symbols of the Alpha hierarchy.

  “Frank, watch your step!” Petra warned, heading toward her friend. “To the side, move to the side, blockhead!” she said, pushing him against the wall. Now, everyone noticed something written on the ground in a grotesque script formed by thick scratches, crossed by one of Frank’s footprints at the entrance of the torn cocoon where the Alpha stuff was.

  Liora lit up her eye sensors and commented: “This isn’t an ancestral language; actually, it looks close to characters from a Mujo dialect, based on our natural language database.”

  “Mujo? Was that cloak from one of them, maybe?” Frank observed.

  Silas approached to collect samples from the ice around the carved letters, saying, “Let’s see who wrote this here…”

  Petra, searching the limited databases they had, concluded: “Guys, without access to any network, it’s going to be hard to be sure of anything, but the language models say this is a song to celebrate birthdays in a relatively recent Mujo dialect… whatever a Mujo is.”

  Liora, with a somewhat perplexed look: “Ramirez is technically a Mujo.”

  “Technically?” Frank asked.

  “Isn’t he a distant relative of King′s people? He’s always wrapped in illusion spells; apparently, he assumed human form to make us feel better,” Petra pondered.

  “Who knows? Mujo is a generic term that came into existence exclusively in Gate after technology enabled different species to have children. Ramirez may have human relatives, but N? too, from what I’ve noticed,” Liora commented.

  “No way!” Silas exclaimed, gesturing. “The one that wrote this in the snow was that giant spider, for sure. There are hairs from it everywhere, on the edges of the grooves, and they sink into the snow following the direction of the strokes; it wrote this with its leg tips, probably with great difficulty.”

  Petra grimaced and put her hand to her head.

  “Is everything okay with you, Petra? What’s the fuss with these spiders, anyway?” Frank asked.

  “It’s nothing! You were right: the problem is this place; it brings me unpleasant memories of Earth, that’s all,” she said, reticent and changing the subject. “That spider killed an Alpha and then celebrated its birthday. Bizarre.”

  “I don’t think these spiders learn to write a Metropolitan dialect after killing a victim, but I could be wrong; there’s something about all this that doesn’t add up… Any ideas, guys?” Silas commented, but received only silence and frowning faces in response.

  “Did the spiders eat their victims’ brains and suck out their memories?” Laetilia ventured. Liora just shook her head no.

  Silas received a beep from one of his probes. He commented, “According to the data, Adarian’s ship hasn’t registered any visitors since we left. These spiders, the bike, and this pile of stuff were brought here very recently; let us be careful.”

  “Careful with whom?” Petra grumbled.

  “Adarian’s security is crap; we can easily take the engine, the communicator, and everything else. However, in Metropolis, they’ll know someone was here because the channels are still open. I’m going to need a few hours to mask our presence, maybe more. That way, they’ll realize things are missing, but they won’t know who we are or where we took everything,” Silas calculated.

  “Well, there doesn’t seem to be any imminent danger; I’m going to take a look at the top of the tower, OK?” Laetilia suggested. Liora and Silas agreed silently as they dismantled the ship’s devices.

  Petra, already operating a probe, replied mentally: “I’ll keep an eye out down here; if there’s any trouble, I’ll show up.”

  Frank, spreading his wings: “I’ll go with you, Laetilia.”

  Atop the Tower of Cernutos, Frank and Laetilia removed all the ice from the area and found the sealed monolithic entrance, with a prominent relief resembling an attached tetrahedron, its faces inscribed with poetry in the ancestral language.

  Frank observed the monolithic door at the top of the tower and remembered: “Amanda had talked about this, and Chester asked me to check if this was still closed.”

  Laetilia read aloud, with some difficulty, then said: “Well, it seems Amanda’s version has an extra letter right in the first verse. It’s not a mistake since the interpretation would be similar, but it’s a Nailia versioning; the original here doesn’t have it, look!”

  Frank observed the letters and agreed. His study of magic helped him at least understand the phonemes. He asked: “Does this door open if we recite the poetry correctly? Is it some riddle?”

  Laetilia laughed and replied, “I don’t think that’s how it works; if that were the case, people would have entered here a long time ago.”

  “And no one has entered before?” Frank asked, still touching the stone, trying to see if there was any hidden mechanism or something.

  “A couple of times, knights of the First House who passed through here and found this door open, but I have no information other than that. Some think it’s a matter of dates and cycles or luck, but I don’t know,” Laetilia replied, placing her hand on the back of her neck, then shaking her sword, to check if Kalis had anything to say, but nothing.

  After a silence, Frank looked out over the entire region and commented, “Maybe luck is what keeps this thing shut. Aren’t you feeling kinda weird here?”

  “This whole place bugs me; up here on the tower, since we arrived, I’ve been experiencing a bizarre lag in my communication with Memel, who stayed down below; the message packets are taking ages, and neither Silas nor I can identify why; it must be this tower’s monolith,” Laetilia’s words were almost lost amidst the intense wind atop the tower, as they find out that the telepathy is also flawed.

  After some time, Laetilia and Frank returned to the ship to help the others. Things took longer than expected, and hours turned into days, giving way to a strange, almost numbing comfort. Silas activated his shelter cube while waiting for the protocols to finish; he had already removed the engine and sent it to their ship, and was now erasing their fingertips.

  Finally, after Silas removed the communicator from the carcass of Adarian’s ship, he informed everyone that they would soon be departing, leaving time only to double-check the cleanup of their tracks. Everyone was excited about finally leaving Cernutos.

  Laetilia turned her head toward the top of the tower and asked Frank mentally, “Any news up there?”

  “Up where?” Frank said, carrying devices back to the aircar.

  Laetilia checked her visual memory, and nothing came up. “I thought I saw your silhouette upon the tower, but I got confused. Let’s go check up there one last time.”

  Frank and Laetilia flew over the tower and confirmed there was nothing. Laetilia began activating the probes to be left in the top, and Frank returned to finish loading the aircar. As soon as he reached the ground, Memel came to speak with him.

  “Everything okay up there?” the cat asked.

  “Yeah, just setting up the stuff, and we’ll be leaving,” Frank replied calmly.

  “The latency is particularly horrible; I’m not receiving any packets,” Memel grumbled, finding a corner inside the aircar to settle in for departure.

  “Well, let’s go, Petra!” Silas warned, still coiling some wires along with Liora.

  “Laetilia, come down! Silas is done here; it’s time to leave,” Frank warned mentally.

  After a few seconds, Laetilia said mentally, “I’m connecting the probe to the relay and taking some photos, but the lag is terrible. When Silas finished up, let me know, OK?”

  “What? Laetilia, he’s already finished!” Frank said, now noticing Memel, the cat′s eyes bulging, pale, frozen in a corner of the aircar. Immediately feeling that something gone wrong, he flew to the top of the tower, warning the team by telepathy: “I’m going to see what the hell is going on!”

  Arriving at the top of the tower, Frank realized the monolithic stone that sealed the entrance had disappeared. A completely black corridor, formed of a material that looked like darkened bone, led to a gentle ramp spiraling into the Tower’s interior. As soon as he turned his head to call his friends again, he realized there was no one left at the foot of the tower, not even any sign of Adarian’s ship.

  Frank thought fast, “What the… Tempus route, load of crap. If I leave, I bet this door will close, dammit.” He ran to the entrance and stopped, hearing and seeing nothing inside. He shouted, “Laetilia! Laetilia!” But there was no answer, not even an echo, both his telepathy and communicator completely silent, he grumbled aloud, alone: “She′s not there! This is just perfect.”

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