Sagar and the others lay on their backs panting too, looking up at the earthy ceiling in the distance high above them.

The earthy ceiling which they could see, Sagar realised, even though he had lost his torch and the pup wasn’t projecting fire any more.

On the ceiling were hundreds of what looked like small pieces of string, spaced at short intervals in the brown earth, but either embedded in it or stuck to it.

And they were glowing. They emitted a warm yellow glow, which lit up the room so they could see them.

“Well that’s pretty, ain’t it?” said the engineer-woman.

Sagar’s brow crinkled in puzzlement. As he inspected the bits of string on the ceiling more closely, he realised that they weren’t just glowing but moving.

He got to his feet, suspecting something.

“Sure enough,” the same glowing strings were embedded in the floor of this new level of the Shrine they had reached. They weren’t stuck to its surface, they were definitely embedded in it an inch or two down, but they glowed so brightly that their light shone through the earth. And these ones were moving too, wriggling around, some slowly, some more quickly than the others, so that the yellow light that came from them shimmered and shifted slightly.

They weren’t strings at all.

“They’re worms!” Sagar said out loud.

“Ewww,” said the princess, getting to her feet with the others and brushing herself down. “Yuk!”

“I think they’re kinda cute,” said Elrann.

“Ah yes,” said the monk, rubbing his legs. “These are Farrian glow-worms. They burrow in the earth and eat it, turning the energy they get from it into light. You will not need to use your tricks inside this chamber, fire-boy.”

“That’s a relief”, said the pup, still panting, taking longer to get his breath back than the others. “I think I used up a lot of my mana on that fireblast.”

“Here, let me give you some more,” said the Old Timer. He walked over and laid his hands on the pup’s arm again, muttering something or other, and the boy visibly relaxed a little, the colour coming back into his face, and stopped panting at last. “I’ve given you a bit more, but I need to keep some back for myself in case anyone else gets hurt. I’m starting to run low now, too.”

“That was too close a call,” said Ryn. “If you hadn’t held back those walls to buy us some time, Huld, we would have been goners”.

“You’re very strong,” the engineer-woman said to the monk, looking up at him.

“Yes, said the monk, “I have trained from birth.”

“I like that,” said Elrann.

As usual, the baldy smiled.

To his partial, but not entire, surprise, a stab of jealousy went through Sagar’s chest.

He spoke up. “Yeah, well it was my idea that got us out of there once badly bought us some time by holding the walls.”

“That is very true, Captain Sagar,” the princess said to him. “All credit to you.”

Sagar thought he saw the pup deflate a little at that. He wondered if the pup felt like he had when the engineer-woman had complimented the Farrian. That made him grin.

The pup looked like he was about to talk up his own involvement in their reaching this floor, but when he opened his mouth he said “Anyway, where do we go next?”

They looked around at the new room they had landed in properly for the first time.

They hadn’t noticed anything earlier because there wasn’t really anything to notice, apart from the wriggling glow-worms.

Where the ground floor of the Shrine had been dark and cramped with branching corridors, they now found themselves now in a massive, high-ceilinged, open, well-lit hall.

The only features of note apart from the glow-worms were the hole they had just blasted in the floor to get here, another opening in the floor about thirty paces away in the centre of the room and, in the far corner of the room, a set of earthen stairs that ran parallel to the wall and led up to what was clearly another set of double doors, though these ones were a dull, grey colour.

They went and inspected the opening in the middle of the floor first.

It turned out to be the top of another set of steps that led down to the floor they had just been on, the first few of them visible before they descended into darkness. There were no glow-worms inside these steps.

Cid said, “This must be the route we were supposed to use to get up here…”

“What do you mean ‘supposed to use’, old timer?” Sagar asked him.

“Well, clearly the ground floor was a kind of labyrinth. A maze. We were supposed to solve it and find our way up here by way of these steps. But instead we found our own...idiosyncratic way of getting up here. We should be careful--it may be that the Jewel wanted us to solve the maze in its own way and come up by this route. It might penalise us for having used an unconventional method…”

“Whatever, old timer,” said Sagar, irritation at the old man’s knowitallyness prickling at his chin, which he scratched. “That maze was a load of bollocks. We didn’t need to solve it, we just needed to get out of it. Which we did. Thanks to me. Now come on; this floor’s a bit more simple. All we need to do is climb those steps over there and open those doors to get up to the next one.”

Sagar strode over to the steps that led upwards. Even as he did so, a vague uncertainty gnawed at the back of his mind, but he ignored it and concentrated on climbing the steps.

When he got to the doors at the top, the uncertainty was still there, and had grown into a bubble of hesitation that held him back from doing anything else for a moment.

Eventually, he put his hands on the doors.

They were rough and cold to the touch.

A sinking feeling swallowed his stomach.

He paused another moment, and pushed.

They did not budge an inch.

“Princess,” he called down the stairs, “is there a Jewel for the element of ‘stone’?”

“No,” came the instant reply. Another know-it-all. “I mean, the Jewels themselves are mostly all different kinds of precious stones. But ‘stone’ itself would come under the element of ‘earth’.”

“Ah. Well, these doors are made of stone. They’re shut fast, and I don’t think pup’s fire trick is going to work on them.”