“Welcome to Lochuir, my loves!” Eluned exclaimed with an oriole laugh as she led the two kids into the mystical township.

“Aren’t we going to the Elder’s Rest like the big guy said?” Elrhain asked absent-mindedly, his slit-blue eyes darting in every direction like magnets. Agwyn also kept tugging his sleeves to point out each new absurdity she saw while gasping Ooohs and Aaahs.

“Mother can’t take you there because of the rite. Someone will come and escort you.” Eluned said, and Elrhain could pick up some concern in her voice.

But he ignored it because there were more urgent things to ponder about.

Like, how were these town folks fastening a lump of dirt, gravel, and vines into open-walled pavilions with a few gestures of their hands?

Or why were those groups of Dhionne with gills and blue skin worshipping those horrendous sculptures made of fishbones lining up along the wharf?

Not to mention, what were these tiny and adorable little critters that flocked around the area where the fish were being processed? They fought each other to eat the black gunk like wastes left to the side, ignoring the scales and discarded meat. After which, they swelled up like cute fluffy balloons and popped! Scattering chunks of solid, shiny materials all over the place.

Elrhain felt he had a heart attack, and Agwyn started crying before they noticed something even more bizarre.

The original adorable critter was left behind in its original spot, confused and mewling, looking left and right as if to take in the situation, then went back to repeat the process pushing through its brethren for more black gunk.

Agwyn squealed and ran off like a puppy to hug one of them. But a band of muscular fishers with their tops exposed—servants by their sigils, blocked her path with grim determination and refused to budge.

Agwyn tried to tackle through while screeching war cries, but Eluned picked her up in a panic before hastily leaving that area.

Elrhain could sense the suspicious glares those men sent even as they walked away. It physically stung.

And so their exciting tour continued, with shrieks, yells, and laughter. There was the hustle and bustle here in Lochuir, but nothing like the cities on Earth.

It felt exhilarating; it felt invigorating.

Things were just about to get more fun for the two when another group of people blocked their path. This time, Elrhain recognized them.

They were a few servants headed by Elder Croneira, the nice if grumpy old lady that visited them often to check up on their health.

“Lady Siaglas, good that you could make it on time.” She said. The voice was hoarse, and there were dark bags under her eyes.

Eluned shifted in her place with a stiff smile.

“Don’t make this difficult, young lady.” Elder Croneira sighed, then spoke like some mafioso, “hand them over.”

“Um.” Eluned was about to argue, but the Elder held one of her palms up.

“Look, I know you are worried. But I thought we went over this a few days ago. The father leads the boy, and the mother leads the girl. You, weave the blood-tethered robes.” The Elder said with no small amount of frustration, “And please, for the love of our great lakes and the spirits, I haven’t slept in seven days! I would really rather have this up and over with.”

The young mother agonized for a few more breaths, and Elrhain felt her literally pry her hand away from his own.

“Your father and the chieftainess will be there.” Eluned said, kneeling to their eye level and hugging them tightly, “Listen to the Elder on the way down. And little Gwyn, don’t rush off, promise?”

“Pwomise!” The little girl replied while Elrhain wondered if they were actually being taken to some dangerous place where Agwyn’s shenanigans could brew actual harm.

---

They were not, at least in his opinion.

Yet, he could understand why his mother was so worried. Because for other typical toddlers their age, this underground world was most definitely dangerous.

The humidity, the deepwater pools, sharp rocks and slippery algae, the hundreds of meter drops, and so many interesting glowing things a hyper curious baby could run after to their doom if left unsupervised for even a second.

Right now, Elrhain and Agwyn were standing before two cryptic doors deep under the Loch Sagathan Temples. It took an hour and a half of careful Dungeon spelunking with the adults carrying them protectively to reach here.

Elder Croneira brought the two wide-eyed kids deep down the winding stairs carved into the walls, passed by soaking hallways covered in bio-luminescent moss and algae, which were also engraved with pictures telling tales of yore.

They walked on bridges with streams of all shapes below, the rumbling echo of water beating their ears like a ritual drum, and the damp air around them felt like salty sea wind on their skin.

They trod through caverns, with mazes of aqueducts crisscrossing amid the air, carrying untold volumes of shining blue water. The water would often splash down, and before Elrhain could take a closer look, the glow would vanish as if it wasn’t magical.

Littered around them were debris and pillars jutting out of the ground in odd angles. They were dressed in algae and moss, both of which illuminated the artworks inscribed.

Agwyn had an even harder time staying put than Elrhain.

For example, when they crossed a pristine temple complex submerged under crystal clear water, she had to bite her own hand to hold in the urge to dive in and explore for lost Atlantis treasures.

And at the end of their journey, behind the many waterfalls tumbling down from the cracks and broken aqueducts above, they stepped into one such Temple.

This one wasn’t submerged, but that was only true for the part Elrhain could see.

He turned towards Agwyn. The little girl was standing a few paces to the right, fidgeting about in either nervousness or impatience. Her eyes were glued to a small, jagged crystal on the door right in front of her, hesitating if she should touch it or not.

To Elrhain, the murky blue sheen made her small Elven features look even more like a dream.

Yet when he saw her eyes, that dream of fantasy broke. There was no anxiety there, just an insatiable thirst for adventure.

Elrhain looked behind him to a sleepy Elder Croneira and one other servant standing between them and the deep plunge below.

The passageway floor ended with a row of pillars in that direction, but there were no walls. They could see the dimly illuminated cavern hundreds of meters away from where they stood. As if they were on top of a mountain peak.

Elrhain had peaked down a few minutes earlier out of curiosity and immediately scuttled back. Elder Croneira had to pry Agwyn’s grip from the ledge of the corridor when she did the same.

Under this open-air corridor was a colossal statue of a dhionne hoisting up various weapons and items in its many hands.

The temple complex they had entered in the other cavern opened up inside a flower carved out of stone in this one, with corridors making up its stems and petals. This flower, was set upon one of the statue’s hands.

The water flowed where the Dhionne’s veins would be, and it cried rivers of tears, each no smaller than the underground streams they had seen before. But the sorrow of the statue didn’t give rise to empathy within him, just fear and awe.

‘It’s like the Water Temple from that popular video game with the time-travelling ocarina.’ Elrhain thought with nostalgia as he now ran his hands over the etchings on the door. The material felt cold like metal, yet grainy like wood.

‘I wonder what the locking mechanism is?’ There was a paragraph written in an unknown tongue carved on it. The inscriptions slid under his fingers seamlessly, as if the creators of this place had shaped the door around it, and not the other way around.

He looked up and found the writings snake towards the ceiling in neat yet twisting rows.

Elrhain couldn’t understand what they conveyed but was sure it wasn’t Uorian. These words even moved, which none of the scripts on the scrolls he had seen had done. With a jolt and a shake, they hid into the gaps of the walls as his eyes followed them before his tiny brain could even comprehend what happened.

*Creak*

‘Ah, wait, it was the door which moved.’

Elrhain stepped back as the giant panel started sliding left with the noise of rusty gears. A few seconds later, the door was gone with a clink and a clank.

Another tunnel lay behind the now open entrance; a gust of warm wind rushed out as if to greet them. It flew past the two standing in the corridor into the cavern outside to open walls, raising echoes of the gale in the vast space of the crying statue.

Elrhain peered at this tunnel’s walls. They looked flat, smooth even. They still had cracks here and there, but with a utilitarian industrial flavour as a whole.

He turned to Agwyn in askance, and she shot back the same look. There was a clump of moss she found somewhere in her hands, and she kept squeezing it like a plushie.

Elrhain felt a pat on his shoulder and saw it was Elder Croneira.

The old woman looked eerie in this dim lighting, but her tone was gentler than before. “Follow servant Thomos inside. But let him know immediately if you feel… unwell. Can you do that, boy?”

Elrhain nodded, swallowing in uncertainty as his eyes crossed with Agwyn’s once again.

“Good, good. Don’t worry about the heiress, though it warms my heart you do.” Elder Croneira said with a good-natured smile. Yet her crooked teeth and wrinkly skin sent goosebumps through his body.

The old woman muttered under her breath, “I will escort the princess myself. You two will always be within 10 meters of each other, even with this wall in the middle. It will be fine.”

‘What will be fine? Why would I feel unwell?’ Elrhain remembered all those stories about miners and cave explorers dropping like flies because of the stagnant air and carbon monoxide deep within the Earth.

He wanted to question her, but the old lady shushed him. Elder Croneira thought intently for a few more moments. Then gently but suddenly, she held Agwyn by the hand while stepping inside.

Agwyn didn’t want to go.

She cried out and stretched her hands towards Elrhain with a pleading look. But the sudden tug had taken her by surprise, and she was already inside the right tunnel.

Elrhain tried to rush in, but Thomos stopped him.

“Young master, don’t be hasty.” The servant said, trying to calm Elrhain down.

Thomos then gestured towards the tunnel and stuck his hand in. Elrhain’s eyes widened in shock as ripples appeared in space. An invisible barrier stopped Thomos’s hand from going in any further.

Elder Croneira stood on the other side of the ripples, sighing. Her expression looked both annoyed and humourous as if she was trying hard to hold in a smirk and bring out a scowl, “Aye, you two are making us look like villains.”

They both blushed, and the Elder laughed. “Children, there is no need to be so afraid. This is simply another part of the ritual for the heir and heiress’s engagement and inaugural ceremony. No man can enter the wife’s door, and no lady can enter the other.”

She stopped for a bit to look over their faces, and Elrhain felt his cheeks heat up even further. That smile on Elder Croneira’s face was mortifying.

“The two clan shamans inside will explain to you what to do, and I cannot tell you more. Since this is not even my jurisdiction. Greats spirits, what I do for the clan.”

With a few more promises, persuasions, and one last hug from Agwyn, who had come out of the tunnel later, they were finally willing to go in.

But the fear rising from deep within Elrhain’s chest didn’t abate as he watched the last visage of Elder Croneira and Agwyn’s silhouette vanish into the darkness.