The light-pool led them down the corridor, left at a turn, around a bend, right at another turn. If they ran at full pelt, they were just able to keep up with it, sometimes even to run in the encirclement of its glow below their feet, though it was moving fast now, and they never kept this up for very long.

It was like they were making their way through another version of the ground floor they had gotten lost in before, only this time they had some more light to guide them and illuminate their path.

Though that didn’t turn out to be the only thing that was different about this floor.

Ahead of them, in this latest corridor that the light had led them into, Ryn, running at the front of the pack, could see that the floor dropped away for a few metres.

He stopped just in time, pulling up and halting his run, and the others crashed into the back of him, and would have knocked him forwards into the pit had he not braced himself for the impact.

“Oi!” said Sagar.

“Hey!” said Elrann. “What gives?”

Ryn recoiled from the edge of the pit even more when he saw, as the pool of light moved down the side of the pit and passed underneath them, a few metres below at the bottom of it, row upon row of sharpened, earthen spikes.

“Wow,” said Elrann for the others when they looked over and saw them too. “Alright, it’s a good thing you did stop.”

On the other side of the pit the pool of moving light came up and reached the floor of the corridor again, and carried on quickly moving away from them.

Their part of the corridor got darker.

“Quick!” Ryn said desperately. How are we going to get across this?

“We’ll have to jump again!” said Sagar. “I’ll boost us over with a gust. Come back, everyone, you’ll need a run up.”

They hurried back a few paces away from the pit. It was still getting darker as the light moved away from them--they could only just see where the pit started now.

“One…” said Sagar, “two... three... run! Jump! WIND!”

Ryn took his running leap over the lip of the pit with the others and felt Sagar’s wind blast rush into him from behind, pick him up and carry them through the air above the spikes.

He landed clumsily on the other side of the pit, lost his footing, put his arms out to break his fall, rolled, and came up again, then carried on dashing forwards to try to catch up with the rapidly receding pool of light.

The pool of light which reached the end of the corridor and turned left, deepening the darkness once again.

Ryn hit the end-wall and went left too. He pushed himself harder, making his lungs and legs burn, and began to gain on the pool of light.

“Ryn!” called Nuthea from behind. “Which way? We didn’t see!”

“Left!” Ryn shouted over his shoulder. “Hurry!” He must not lose the light.

When he had looked round briefly he had seen Sagar, Vish and Huld’s faces lit up in the worm-light behind him. Nuthea, Cid and Elrann must have had bumpier landings, but they couldn’t wait for them to catch up. They must keep pace with the light.

The light which he had nearly reached again, which was moving down the corridor, past a weird protrusion that stuck out from the side of the corridor-wall like a thin tube thin tubular protrusion that stuck out about a hand’s breadth into the middle of it, at about chest-height. That was weird. What’s that for? Ryn thought as he ran following the light towards it.

Hands grabbed hold of his shoulders.

“Get down, boy!” shouted Vish.

The hands forced him down with ferocious strength, but he kept his momentum so that he ended up diving to the floor and skidding along it for a few metres on his stomach. It was only a hard earth floor, but it knocked the air out of Ryn and grazed his belly.

Above him, a sound like someone rapidly chopping vegetables issued--thunkthunkthunk.

“Hey!” Ryn said to Vish, who had forced him down and ended up on the floor with him, his masked face only inches away from Ryn’s own. “What was that for?”

Then he saw. In the corridor-wall above where he lay, a couple of metres back, a number of feathered darts stuck out of the wall on the opposite side from the tubular protrusion.

Sagar reached the protrusion, but instead of diving under it as Vish had with Ryn, he made a wind-assisted jump over it, and three more darts shot out of the tube and thunked into the wall on the other side.

“Watch out, you lot!” Sagar called back the way he had come as he ran past Ryn and Vish on the floor. “There’s a tube about halfway down this one that shoots darts!”

Ryn scrambled to his feet even as Huld reached the tube and very carefully lowered himself to a crawl to go under it. He wasn’t about to let Sagar get ahead of him.

Run, Ryn, run, he thought, an old rhyme coming back to his mind as he hurtled after Sagar and the light. But he had to change the words now. Run, Ryn, run away, live to fight another day, live to train another way, live to find the Jewels and make the Emperor pay.

The pool of light reached the end of the corridor and turned right, deepening the darkness again. Sagar followed it.

Behind Ryn the others were calling and shouting and discussing something, but there wasn’t time to worry about them. He must keep pace with the light.

“Swinging axe!” yelled Sagar from somewhere up ahead.

Huh?

Ryn pulled up just in time, and a huge curved-bladed axe moved across his vision perpendicular to the direction of the corridor, inches away from his nose. It swung from the corridor ceiling, and as it reached one wall with the tip of its blade, it hung suspended in stillness for a moment, then swung back the other way.

Ryn took a deep breath and waited for his moment, hearing Vish and Huld arrive behind him.

“Swinging axe,” he informed them matter-of-factly.

Vish grunted his acknowledgement. Huld didn’t even bother to do that.

The axe reached the apex of its ascent again and paused.

“Now!” Ryn yelled, and the three of them shot past the axe, further down the corridor, after Sagar, after the light.

“Swinging axe!” Ryn called back one more time as he heard the others arriving in the corridor behind them.

“Slow down, would ya?!” Elrann called back. “Princess-girl took a poison dart to the arm, back there, pops had to heal her!”

Ryn felt a pang of concern between his lungs for Nuthea, but he was glad that Cid had been there to heal her. “Stay together!” he called back, still without looking. “We’ve got to keep up with this light or we’ll lose our way! We’ll keep telling you what the traps are up ahead as we reach them!”

It got darker again as the pool of light turned down yet another corridor, Sagar hot on its tail.

Ryn, Vish and Huld reached the corner and turned too.

This time they were greeted by Sagar running towards them in pursuit of the pool of light, which was now moving very quickly back along the corridor it had apparently just gone down. Behind him, something stirred and grumbled in the shadows.

“ROLLING BOULDER!” Sagar cried, even as the pool of light passed underneath Ryn’s feet and the pirate pushed past him in the opposite direction.

“Oh poodoo,” Ryn said as he saw the giant grey stone boulder that filled the entire width of the corridor, rolling rapidly towards them.

He turned with Vish and Huld and ran for his life.

They rounded the corner they had just turned down.

In the distance, beyond Sagar and the light-pool, Nuthea, Elrann and Cid were stood on the other side of the swinging axe, waiting for the right moment to dash past it.

“What’s going on?” said Nuthea when she saw the light moving towards her.

“At least now we can see again!” said Elrann.

“Turn around!” yelled Sagar. “It’s going back the other bloody way now! There’s a massive rolling boulder behind us!”

A tremendous crash came from behind them.

Ryn dared to hope that the boulder would stop in its tracks now that it had hit a wall, and looked round.

Nope. It was still rolling towards them down this corridor.

“Damned magic shrine-temple place!” Sagar cursed in exasperation.

They kept running, barely avoiding another swing of the axe-blade in their mad rush, following the light-pool as it shot back the way it had come, sweeping Nuthea, Elrann and Cid into their wake.

They were all near enough to the moving light-pool now, as they ran together, Ryn back at the head of the pack next to Sagar and Vish.

They turned a corner as they heard a sound of snapping metal. That must be the boulder smashing its way through the swinging axe-trap.

Back they went, back past the shooting dart trap, which they all ducked under or jumped over.

The boulder rolled after them.

Back they went, back over the spiked pit, which they flew over again with a quickly coordinated jump and wind-assistance from Sagar.

The boulder rolled after them.

Back they went, back to the first fork they had reached when they had got past the stone doors at the start of this floor.

The boulder rolled after them.

This time the light-pool moved straight on past the turning to the doors, in the other direction than which it had initially taken on their arrival on this floor.

“Stupid bloody glow worms!” Sagar cried. “It’s like they’re teasing us, leading us into all these traps!”

“We’ve got to keep following them!” yelled Ryn. “It’s our only option!”

“I know, pup! Don’t you think I don’t know that?”

“It’s not a tease,” yelled Cid, “it’s a test!”

“Shut up, old timer! I’m starting to get testy with you!”

Another turn at the other end of this corridor, then more corridors, more turns.

But no more traps, for now.

And yet still the boulder rolled after them. Never more than a corridor behind. If anything, it seemed to be getting faster.

Ryn began to pant and wheeze as he ran.

“Huld, do you have any idea how much further we have to go?” he gasped to the monk.

“I am sorry,” wheezed Huld as he ran, almost breathless too, “I do not. I have. Never. Been. Here. Before!”

“Hey, look!” Elrann called out.

The light-pool had stopped still. It had gotten a ways ahead of them in their exhaustion from sprinting so long, but about twenty paces away at the end of this corridor it had stopped still at last in front of a solid wall that seemed to be made out of something shiny which shimmered as it reflected its glow.

It was probably because Ryn was trying to work out what this wall was made of that he didn’t notice the new pit in front of him, into which he fell.

“Oomph! Ow!”

He pushed himself up and rubbed his arms where he had landed on them.

There was another thump.

“Stupid pup!” Sagar said next to him. He had fallen in too.

“What did I do?” Ryn said.

“You didn’t look where you were going!”

“Neither did you!”

Thank the One, there were no spikes at the bottom of this pit, just a cold, flat, earthen floor about ten feet down and a few feet long. There was, however, still a giant boulder in the corridor above, rolling towards them.

The others appeared at the lip of the pit above.

“Quickly!” said Nuthea. “Captain Sagar, we need you to boost us over this pit as well!”

She still manages to add the honorific to his name, even at a time like this…

Sagar wind-boosted himself and Ryn as they jumped back up to the corridor-floor above, on the side that they had fallen down from.

The boulder had nearly reached them.

“Hurry!” Nuthea cried.

“Windaaaaaaarragggaaaahh!” Sagar shouted, as he and everyone else were thrown by the great gust of wind that he summoned across the air above the pit.

This time there was no question of a smooth landing. They all crashed into each other in the corridor on the other side of the pit, banging limbs and heads and collapsing in a bug jumbled heap, then disentangling themselves from one another and standing up cursing and bickering.

A massive boom sounded.

Ryn got up to see that the boulder had fallen into the pit after them.

It rolled forwards a few paces in the pit, then sank down a little and came to a halt, pressing on some sort of mechanism that he and Sagar hadn’t noticed had been built into the floor of it when they had been down in it, which made a clicking sound.

A creaking noise followed, this time from behind Ryn.

He spun to see the iron doors at the end of the corridor, which apparently the glow worms were not able to eat through, opening.

Opening onto glorious blue sky and sunlight which lit up the corridor completely, dimming the glow from the worm-pool on the floor ahead.

A flood of warm air from the world outside filled the corridor, pleasantly caressing Ryn’s face.

They had made it to the top of the Shrine.