The sound of of the vial spinning through the air was tremendous. Only a barely audible whistling of a slender glass form through the dank tomb air. The sound of the vial crashing against the marked wall was monumental, it sent Flip and Dovhran reeling out of the door of the lab and into the small hallway beyond. The mixture within the vial seemed to adhere to the odd surface of the wall as the glass gave way, and it stuck there with a disconcerting splat.

As the glass shattered away, the substance clung to the odd texture of the wall. And as it sat there, like a putty, it began to sizzle and hiss. The noise was quiet at first, but quickly became nearly a roar like flames. And as the noise reached its apparent pitch, it became clear that it was wearing away at the wall like an acid. Just as soon as that became apparent, the effect of the substance changed as the second and middle layer of it began to soak into the wall. The second substance caught flame… in a fashion. It burned bright white and hissed loudly. It seemed to be scorching some exposed deeper layer of the wall that had been uncovered by the acidic reaction of the first compound.

“Rust and bruise, break and burn”—Selian counted off the lines from the riddle on her fingers—”blast…”

There was a split second when the second compound extinguished and Selian realized what was about to happen.

With a concussive force not unlike several ships cannons all firing at once, the third compound exploded. The wall, touched by decay and by searing flames, crumbled under the force; but just the portion that had been effected by both compound one and two. Selian had narrowly avoided the blast itself and the resultant shrapnel by diving under a workbench, though not without some bruising of limbs in the process. The blast also left her ears ringing, so when the door to the lab opened and Flip and Dovhran peered into the mess, Selian could not hear them. In fact, due to the loss of her hearing, she didn’t know they had even come back into the room until Flip tapped her with his boot to check if she was alive.

“I’m not dead!” Selian shouted. The volume of her speech was part triumph and part inability to gauge her volume.

“We can see that!” Flip shouted back enthusiastically, unsure of why she was shouting but eager to join in.

Dovhran buried his face in his palm. “She’s lost hearing, you idiot. She’ll need a minute to get her head back on right.”

“Right,” grumbled Flip.

“I think I might need a minute to get my hearing back!” Shouted Selian.

Dovhran offered a pained thumbs up, while Flip offered a much more enthusiastic one. Something about setting off an explosive had energized Flip. It wasn’t every day he was allowed to blow things us, he hardly ever even had the opportunity or permission to disintegrate things. But now he had been party to a full fledged explosion. And he didn’t have to strain his arcane stores to do so.

Brushing aside the rubble that was strewn across the ground, and righting two of the toppled workbenches in the lab, Dovhran made his way over to the wall. Specifically the wall that had been obliterated. It was not in the best of shape. There was now a rather large hole in the middle of it, approximately three feet off the floor. And the material around the hole was at first melted and then further back it looked as though it had been reduced to charcoal and then splintered apart with a hammer. Or in this case, a bomb. And what, Dovhran at least, found strange was that the material was still quite stable and sturdy after being melted and burned. It had legitimately required an explosive force to break. Had any of them been the type to wear armor, he might have thought to collect some of the larger chunks of debris to add to a set of mail. But they would be bulky to carry, and if they were to be collected at all it would be done best on the way out of the tomb.

“What’s on the other side?” Flip had crept up behind Dovhran and was peering over his shoulder. “Secret room?”

“Unfortunately… not exactly,” Dovhran said with a sigh. “It’s a secret staircase.”

The changeling leaned away from the hole in the wall to reveal an unlit passage. The light from the lab reveal the first three steps of a staircase that descended into complete darkness. With a flourish of his hand Flip produced a small globe of light and tossed it into the hole. The light tumbled down the steps and continued on and on—Dovhran counted thirty before it became too difficult for him to keep track. Far down the flight, the orb dropped down and vanished.

“Did that… did you throw that hard enough?” Dovhran cocked his head to the side as he looked for the glow of yellow light.

“What do you mean?” Flip lifted himself on his toes to get a better angle to look down. “It’s a descending flight of stairs, I don’t need to throw it. It’s like a slinky.”

Dovhran turned to Flip in confused. “First of all, what is a slinky? Second of all, I can’t see it anymore. Did it stop or did it disappear?”

“A slinky is a children’s toy made from a long loose spring that coils back and forth to preserve its elastic motion. And the spell, the globe of light is still active. It’s right there!” Flip pointed sharply down the stairs as he spoke. The wizard’s agitation was growing slowly and he was not entirely sure why, but it felt right.

“What?” Dovhran craned his neck forward and stuck his head through the hole. “Where? I don’t see it.”

“It’s right there! See!” Flip pointed harder, though nothing changed.

“Why are you shouting?!” Selian had gotten to her feet and was looking over the other two.

Started, Dovhran jumped to the side and in so doing cut the side of his face on a sharp spike of broken wall. “Wha… Wait. Have you always been taller than both of us?”

“Yes.”

“That didn’t really… that didn’t quite register… until just now.” Dovhran was starting to look a little pale from his exasperation. “Is there something funny in the room? Do you smell that?”

Flip flared his nostrils and took in a deep breath before muttering, “smells like… thin…”

“The wall may have had a secondary reaction…”

Selian muttered to herself as she stooped down and patted through the rubble, brushing away dust and soot and other small crumbs of what was once a very solid and stable substance. Mixed in among the dark debris was another substance, a small crumbling of pale yellow. It could have been very easily ignored if the elf didn’t know what she was looking for.

“It’s feather ash,”—Selian rubbed two gains of the pale yellow substance between her fingers and let them crumble into a fine powder—”not toxic itself but it can leach toxic fumes into the air. We should move on before we inhale any more.”

“I feel fine.” Flip shrugged. “But, very well, the stairs appear empty.”

Dovhran turned back to the hole in the wall and early topped through. “Very empty. Could fit a person.”

“Could fit you.” Selian chuckled as she put her foot to the changeling’s back and pushed him through the hole. “Just don’t slip.”

Dovhran stumbled forward and nearly began to tumbled down the stairs, but managed to stop short on the very small landing that preceded them. Selian then gestured for Flip to follow. And, with the subtle threat of her forceful kick fresh in his mind, the wizard crawled through the gap.

“I think he might be more sensitive than us.” The elf said with a chuckle as she stepped through the gap as well and over the nearly limp body of Dovhran. “He’ll sober up quick though. Air passes through the body faster than most things.”

As if that was his cue, the changeling stirred and sat upright on the first step and looked down to the darkness below. “Would you mind conjuring another light? And maybe don’t drop it down this time.”

Flip did as requested and held the globe of light high above his head. The glow radiated around the small tunnel down, showing it’s rougher state than what they were accustomed to in the tomb. Previous rooms had been deliberate, well made, and even beautiful. But this looked like a rough descent carved by an untrained hand, if any hand had been active in its formation at all. The smoothness of the lumpy sides of the tunnel spoke of flowing water, though none could be seen or heard. Flip recalled a spell which could conjure water and spray it out in a powerful jet, but to use such a force to carve out a tunnel so wide and long would have been absurd.

The stairs themselves, the steps the three tomb delvers strode down, were of finer make. Intentionally placed and level cobblestones kept them from tumbling into the abyss, but the descent was still precarious. No hand rail meant that one wrong move on the unusually short steps might spell disaster without hope of recovery. But the three carried on anyway, occasionally reaching out and catching a shoulder of a stumbling companion, sometimes leaning back to correct a bad footing before they stumbled forward.

After a descent of maybe fifty feet, one such stumble forward on Flip’s part led to Selian lunging forward and catching him by the elbow. But as the elf lunged forward, she lost balance for ever so slight a moment herself, and Dovhran—who had struggled to regain his wits—had to link arms with her and lean back to keep them all stable. When everyone was able to right themselves again, a discovery was made. A small glow could be seen ahead and down. Though, more own than ahead, as the initial light globe which had been thought lost was found before them… at the bottom of a very long drop.

Before the three, without any structural warning and nearly invisible due to the angle of descent, was an empty space. A negative column in the rock around them, nearly perfectly square and perhaps eighty feet deep. As Flip inspected the empty space, he had the forethought to look up and see that at the top of the empty column was a set of jagged stone spikes. The spikes were roughly thirty feet above the precarious opening into the drop and about five feet long. Skewered among the spikes and pressed up into the ceiling were the bodies and bones of dead rats and other cave dwelling vermin.

“I’d say that’s a trap,” Selian began, “but at this point it looks too obvious and that makes me nervous.”

Flip huffed. “Was it a trap that I almost fell to my death? Or did you mean the spikes that couldn’t possibly harm me unless I started falling up instead of down after I lost my footing?”

“Both?” Dovhran chimed in. “Or maybe the trap is overthinking it.”

The changeling’s words rang true in their minds. If anything had been straightforward about the tomb thus far, it was that it was not straightforward.