Chương 33: Light at the end of the tunnel.

Lloyd ran his hand over the metal, rust-covered gate. The cold, rough metal sent a faint shiver beneath his fingers, as if something inside the gate had felt the touch of a stranger. The doors gave off a sharp smell of oxidized iron, mixed with something older and heavier — the scent of ancient stone that, it seemed, hadn't seen sunlight since the founding of the world. He looked the gate over once more from top to bottom, searching for any hint of a mechanism he could use.

"I don't see a place for a lock. Don't tell me they..." — the thought trailed off in his head, unfinished. He placed both hands on the doors and, putting every bit of strength he had into his arms, pulled toward himself. His muscles tensed, his feet braced against the uneven stone floor, and for a moment it seemed the gate wouldn't budge an inch.

Yet, as strange as it sounded, it gave way — and a second later an ominous creak rang out as the doors swung open, long and low, as if the mountain itself had groaned in pain. The sound spread in echoes through the unseen space beyond the gate, bouncing off walls Lloyd couldn't even see yet, and slowly fading somewhere in the unimaginable distance. Lloyd pushed the doors open just wide enough to squeeze through, and there he was, standing right in the middle of an enormous tunnel.

The air here was different — dense, damp, smelling of iron and centuries of dust that settled on his tongue with every breath. Somewhere high above, water dripped, steady and rhythmic, as if counting off the seconds of his presence here. He turned, studying the massive gate from the inside — now, seen from within the tunnel, it looked even more monstrous in scale.

"For something this massive, it gave way too easily. Well, lucky me" — he thought, though deep down that ease unsettled him more than it reassured him. Lloyd looked into the darkness of the corridor. In this colossal space the dark seemed alive, dense, almost tangible — so thick that for a moment it seemed to Lloyd it might shift at any second and swallow him whole, without leaving so much as an echo.

The tunnel's walls disappeared somewhere far above, and from up there came a draft of cold, as if some void hung overhead that had never once known light.

"What I should fear isn't the dark itself, but whatever's hiding in it" — he thought, and a chill ran down his spine at the idea, making him hunch his shoulders without meaning to.

"Do I actually want to do this?" — he asked himself, and the thought only made him more uneasy, something twisting in his stomach. He sighed, slowly letting the air out through his teeth, and the sound of that exhale seemed unnaturally loud in the surrounding silence.

"And when exactly did I become suicidal?" — he smirked to himself, though there wasn't a trace of humor in it, only the bitter weariness of a man long used to making bad decisions. He turned around one last time, looking at the gate now closed behind him, understanding there was no way back. And he set off forward, deeper into the tunnel, toward the place where the darkness seemed thickest and the air coldest.

The crystal overhead, set into the ceiling, flickered softly to life, responding to Lloyd's presence, and the tunnel was bathed in a dim green light — sickly, flickering, as if the rock itself grudgingly shared this light with the intruder. The light trembled across the walls, picking out jagged outcrops of stone and long cracks running along the ceiling like scars from some ancient wound.

This light was far weaker than what he'd seen before — maybe because the tunnels here were on a much grander scale, and there simply weren't enough crystals to cover so much space, or maybe because this place itself was older and more forgotten than all the others. Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences. Lloyd walked on, his hand resting near his belt, where a knife was hidden beneath the flap of his orange jacket.

The jacket had long since lost its original bright color — the sleeves and hem were smeared with green slime, the same stuff that seemed to coat nearly every wall in these cursed tunnels. In places the slime had dried into hard, dark patches; in others it remained sticky, chilling his skin unpleasantly through the fabric.

Lloyd couldn't remember which of the earlier corridors had left him this filthy, but the smell of the stuff — sour, sharp, somewhat like rotting seaweed — now seemed to follow him everywhere, soaked permanently into the fibers of the cloth. He still hadn't run into a single monster, not one sound, not one movement in the dark — and that frightened him more than anything else could have. The silence pressed on his ears, burrowed into his skull, making his fingers grip the knife's handle tighter with every step.

Every sound of his own boots against the stone floor bounced off the walls and came back distorted, as if someone unseen were echoing his footsteps a beat behind, like a shadow trailing him, just slightly out of step. After several minutes of walking through the straight, endless tunnel, he noticed some change up ahead.

The shapes of the walls became faintly distinguishable, the shadows thickened differently, and the air shifted slightly — grew cooler, carrying a hint of damp stone and something faintly rotten, as if something dead had been lying nearby for a long time. As he drew closer, the crystal lit up what lay before him. The massive tunnel came to an end, but what awaited him next was another passage entirely — a narrow dead end, and deep within it a round opening, just a bit taller than Lloyd himself.

The walls around the opening were coated in the same green slime, thin streaks of it trickling down and pooling in small puddles on the floor. Beside this round entrance loomed two more openings, set symmetrically, like three open mouths waiting in silence for prey. Lloyd looked at them with open contempt, making no effort to hide the irritation on his face.

"Seriously? Now I have to pick which one to go into?" — he thought bitterly, sweeping his eyes over all three tunnels in turn. He examined each opening carefully once more, searching for any clue — a symbol, a scratch, some difference, anything that might point him toward the right path. But there was nothing. All three looked equally uninviting, equally dark, equally indifferent to his fate.

Without dwelling on it too long, he headed into the central tunnel — the one that seemed just slightly wider than the others. But this tunnel was different from all the ones Lloyd had passed through before. There were no green crystals here lighting his way with their dim, flickering glow. He was met only by absolute, impenetrable darkness — so thick it felt like it clung to his skin, wrapped around it, seeped into his lungs with every breath.

"Just perfect, couldn't get any better than this" — he thought, stretching a hand out ahead of him to feel his way forward, and immediately his fingers found that same cold, damp, slimy mass coating the wall in an uneven layer. Still, Lloyd kept moving forward — he had no choice. Each step echoed dully in the darkness, and he counted them in his head, trying to keep his rising unease in check.

"How long have I been walking? Ten minutes? Twenty?" — his thoughts grew tangled, time seemed to dissolve in this lightless black, and it was starting to feel to Lloyd like he was walking in circles, like this tunnel had no beginning and no end. The tunnel's walls gradually narrowed, and now he could feel them on both sides — cold, damp stone, patched in places with the same green slime that covered his jacket, the same slime that covered the walls back at the round opening.

From somewhere deep ahead came a low, barely audible hum, like the breathing of the mountain itself, slow and heavy, as if something enormous slept nearby and dreamed restless dreams.

"Just let it stay asleep" — the thought flashed through his mind, and without meaning to, he quickened his pace, trying to step more quietly. And then, after several more minutes of stumbling through the impenetrable dark of the tunnel, he saw it... Light at the end of the tunnel.