It turned out, Issa had explored quite a few of the nearby tunnels while looking for the Yovashi’s lair. It had taken her the better part of a day to find her way, having to stop, pull the cloak up and freeze in a corner whenever she heard the Yovashi or some other sound. It had been harrowing, wondering all the while if she’d be discovered and killed. She’d stumbled upon the stairwell leading up just a short distance from where she’d ended up hiding and waiting for the Yovashi to leave its lair. She explained all this to Morgan while sorting through the equipment piles the creature had scavenged from its victims.

Of the weapons, Morgan ended up storing an extra spear, not nearly as nice as the one he was using, but it still had a sharp, steel blade. He also took a black metal mace and a broadsword that wasn’t rusted too badly. He still marveled at how all those items fit into his dimensional pouch along with all his other loot, and he could see that he’d only used about half its space. Sifting through the clothes and armor, Morgan found a pair of soft leather boots that fit him reasonably well. Most of the clothes were too small, too torn, or too filthy for him to wear, but he found a set of black, tattered robes that seemed relatively clean, and they fit him very well. The robe’s inner layer fit his body snuggly, while an outer cloak-like layer, tattered and stripped but largely whole, covered his shoulders and hung around him. He wore his girdle over the inner robe and smiled; it felt good not to be wandering around nearly naked for once.

Issa also found some grey trousers and a light blue blouse, with only one large stain on the back, near the neckline. Her cloak covered it up. While she stepped over behind the boulder to change into her new clothes, Morgan dug out a pair of small leather boots and threw them her way, saying, “See if these fit.” She stepped out a few moments later with her foot in one boot and smiling.

“They fit!”

“Great! Anything else you want? If not, let's get moving.” Issa nodded and moved through the nearby piles one more time, and Morgan saw her slip a couple more small items into her pouch.

“I don’t think anything else here is very valuable. I wish we could bury this place,” Issa said as she walked back.

“Yeah, this place is terrible. I’ve been meaning to ask, does the System make these places to put in the Crucible? Is it always the same?”

“No! No one has ever reported having the same Crucible experience unless they went in together or met up inside, like you and I have. My teachers think the System puts invisible portals in the stairwell rooms and connects many places around the world together in a design to challenge each person differently,” Issa explained.

“So your teachers didn’t really know, then?”

“Well, no. My village is pretty small and only has an improved Town Stone. That means we only have communication and trade through the System with other similarly leveled settlements.”

“So?”

“So, the people we communicate with regularly have a similar level of knowledge about the System, and none of us know exactly how things like the Crucible work,” Issa shrugged.

“Oh, so there aren’t more advanced towns or cities you could travel to physically? You only have access through this ‘Town Stone’?” Morgan scratched his head.

“Oh, good question! Yes, there are bigger towns and cities we could travel to, but not easily, and it’s rare. Our world is huge and dangerous. It’s much larger than it was before the System came here, at least that’s what my grandfather tells me.”

“Uh-huh,” Morgan said, taking it in. “Hmm, well, now that you mention it, when our ship arrived near your planet, we thought the sensors were broken because of the size of your planet.”

“Sensors? It sounds like your people are pretty advanced. I didn’t even know one could travel between planets and stars without the System.”

“Well, we had more advanced technology than lanterns and spears, that’s for sure, but we didn’t have any magic or magical items. Wait. Did you say the System allows travel between planets and stars?” Morgan asked.

“Yes! Town Stones can be upgraded to allow travel to other Town or City Stones, even on different worlds. It costs System Credits, though.” Issa frowned and continued, “You can trade treasures like the Energy beads for System Credits at a Town Stone.”

“All right, my head’s spinning. Let’s get walking while I mull these facts over,” Morgan chuckled, and they advanced, armed and clothed and feeling a lot better about their prospects, into the hallway and toward the stairs.

*****

This time the stairwell was a rickety mishmash of wooden planks. The steps were flat and sturdy, but they were cut in all sorts of different sizes, and the railing was of varying heights. The walls were boards and planks that were unevenly matched together, and the gaps in the panels seemed to lead into endless shadow. It was nerve-wracking climbing those steps, and they seemed to go on forever. Their lanterns made islands of light in the dark, creaking stairwell as they climbed. Morgan kept track of the time with his quest tracker. When they started the climb, he was on four out of seven days in his quest to help Issa stay alive.

As they climbed, Morgan and Issa spoke in quiet voices, telling each other about their lives before the Crucible. Issa told Morgan about her father and how she was an only child. She told him about losing her mother to raiders when she was a little girl and how her father had begged her not to enter the lottery to come to the Crucible. According to Issa, less than half the Hunters, the most common class of Energy cultivators among her people, that entered the Crucible ever came back. However, those who did usually returned with significant gains in both personal power and wealth. Issa wanted to be able to stand on her own, and she accepted that the world was dangerous. She wanted to face danger on her terms and not be a victim like her mother had been.

“I lost my parents when I was young, also,” Morgan quietly said after Issa had stopped talking for a while. Issa looked at him, inviting him to continue. “Things were pretty bad on my homeworld when I was young; lots of wars. Well, most of the media called them ‘conflicts,’ but they were wars. Water was a problem, which is crazy because our world was rich with water. I guess clean freshwater was the problem. We still had lots of water, but not enough was usable to sustain the megacities that had started to sprout up in the last century.”

Issa looked a little confused. “Megacities?”

“Yeah, that’s what they called them because they grew to the size of small countries or states. Like the New Detroit Megacity, where my parents were born, was thousands of square miles of concrete,” he saw Issa’s confusion again and clarified, “uh, concrete is a building material that looks like stone. Anyway, over a hundred million people were living in New Detroit when the Great Lakes conflict started. By the time it was over, everyone was dead or had fled, leaving just a couple hundred thousand scraping by in the rubble. My parents were on the run when some biological agent caught up to their caravan. It was carried on the wind, a kind of poison. This is according to my big sister, who was nine at the time. The caravan didn’t have enough gas masks for everyone, so they gave them to the children and a couple of lucky adults. I was only four, so I don’t remember it, but it really messed up my sister.”

“That sounds horrible, Morgan,” Issa said, reaching out a hand. Morgan took the offered hand in his, and they walked quietly for a while.

“Anyway, things were starting to get better on Earth when I left. I’d been a part of a few conflicts, but it was at the tail end of the global violence. Some breakthroughs in tech allowed us to start cleaning our atmosphere and terraforming some of the other planets and moons nearby. It gave us a purpose other than fighting with each other. That’s why I was on my way here; in fact, I was on a ship full of settlers, hoping to start a new human colony. We didn’t know other people were here already.”

“Is your sister here also?” Issa asked after they’d walked quietly for a while.

“Oh. No, she died a few years ago. Actually, it’s more than 200 years now, but it feels like a few years to me,” Morgan said with a sigh. He could see Issa had more questions, but she didn’t ask them, and he didn’t feel like saying any more.

When the tracker said five of seven, they stopped mid-climb and rested. Issa slept first, and Morgan was able to stay awake until she woke on her own. This time, when he slept, she didn’t doze off. Their precautions proved unnecessary, though; nothing happened while they were resting, and soon after they’d eaten some of their spartan rations, they began the climb again. By the time a small wooden door appeared around the paneled curve of the stairwell, Morgan was on day 6 of 7 in his quest.

As was becoming their usual practice, Issa fell in behind Morgan while he crept up to the door. He placed his ear to the wood and thought he heard the sound of the wind, but nothing else. Morgan studied the door for a crack or hole he could spy through, but it seemed to be too well made for that. He checked the handle and saw that there wasn’t a latch - it looked like the door would swing open if he just pulled it. He gently pulled on the handle, and it didn’t move. He applied more force, and it still didn’t move. “I’m going to have to pull hard. It might make some noise, so be ready,” he whispered. He gripped the wooden handle in two hands and pulled hard, slowly increasing the force. After straining for a few seconds, he felt the door budge just the smallest amount. He took a deep breath and jerked the door. It scraped along the jam about an inch but still wasn’t free. He yanked on it again, and it popped out of the frame, causing him to stumble backward.

Hot air flowed into the stairwell, and dim red light revealed a stone platform beyond the doorway. Morgan gathered himself and carefully crept through the opening. Once again, he found himself in a stone-walled, high ceilinged, natural-looking cavern. The floor was unnaturally flat, though, and just ahead, he could see carved stone steps leading down a slope. Looking down, along the steps, he saw the cavern opened into a larger space. The red glow was coming from that area. He motioned for Issa to follow and softly padded down the stone steps.

When Morgan reached the cavern opening with Issa close behind, he took in his breath at the sight that unfolded in front of him. The opening was about twenty feet across, and looking through it, Morgan could see another cavern that dwarfed any indoor space he had ever seen. The cavern ceiling had to be hundreds of feet in the air, and he could see all the way across to the other end, which must have been more than a kilometer. The entire, massive space was suffused with a red glow from a literal river of red-orange magma that flowed horizontally across the cavern. More steps led down to the bottom of the enormous cavern from where they stood. From there, a cobblestone road traversed the length of the cavern. It crossed the magma river via a stone bridge. It then continued to another set of steps leading up and out the other end of the cavern through an opening like Morgan and Issa were standing in.

“Incredible,” Issa whispered from just behind Morgan.

“Yeah, it is. Who made this road? Are we in some kind of underground kingdom, or did the System just put a piece of an old civilization here, or… Bah! There are a million possibilities. I wish the System would just answer my damn questions.” Morgan ground his teeth in frustration, studying the cavern carefully, trying to see if something moved. He could tell Issa was doing the same. After a few minutes of watching the sluggish flow of the magma and seeing nothing else moving, they decided to venture forth.

“This feels like a trap,” Morgan groaned as they set foot on the cobbled roadway. Issa nodded, gripping her rapier and looking around. There were lots of places for something to hide: boulders littered the cavern floor as well as hundreds, maybe thousands, of stalagmites, while long stalactites hung from the vaulted ceiling. “Well, we can’t go back.” Morgan shrugged, and they started walking down the road.

The roadway was similar in width to an old, two-lane road on Earth. The cobbles were irregular in size and rough, but Morgan could imagine that it was a pretty impressive feat of engineering, the way they were mortared together and flush with the stone of the cavern floor. After a few minutes of walking, they came in sight of the bridge that crossed the lava. The road narrowed and smoothly continued up onto the stone support arches. They stopped at the foot of the upward slope and took in the sight of the magma river flowing sluggishly through the cavern. The magma was in some sort of a natural channel or crevasse and was a good fifteen feet down from the edge, but even so, it gave off a very uncomfortable amount of heat. Morgan had been to the Sonoran desert a few times, and this billowing heat felt similar to how the dry wind would blow off the asphalt in those little desert towns. Issa gestured at the bridge, and Morgan nodded. He was ready to get over this lava and put some distance between him and that heat.

The stone bridge had a gentle arc and narrowed to about ten feet at the apex. It was constructed with rather graceful stone railings, and Morgan realized that concrete and stone were quite different. He wondered if he’d ever seen something actually built from stone before. He was musing about that when they heard the horn. It was a loud, brassy, BAAAAAROOOOO, and it seemed to come from off to their right. Morgan looked over the railing, trying to find the source, when he heard a loud clanking and crash from back the way they had come. An identical sound came from the direction of the other end of the cavern. Standing at the midpoint of the bridge, Morgan could just make out the cavern openings atop their respective sets of stone steps, and he saw that a broad, metal portcullis had somehow been erected in front of each. “Oh fuck.”