They made camp in the third room of a cave complex dug into the side of a hill. It was a huge, towering hill just a bit too short to be called a mountain, with a bare rock cliff that faced Farcall on one side, and a gentle slope facing the rolling grasslands and plains on the other side. Testament Hill, as they called it, was nowadays just a place of no importance in the middle of the kingdom. Edmund had no idea what the kingdom was even called, as everyone simply referred to it as the kingdom, but had never bothered to ask. As for the hill, Toora had mentioned some lore about it, but to be completely honest with himself Edmund didn’t really listen to it, engrossed as he was in saving his hide from the pursuing creatures.

It was dark, the light of the fire not reaching far enough for the team to see the walls or the ceiling. The room felt ominous, the encroaching claustrophobic walls ensnared a scent of mold and stuffy air. Even where the light hit the dark rock, there were places of dark. They were like pools of black smoke, windows into an unknown void where the shadows were so deep they almost looked solid. The light of the sun had no hopes of reaching this far into the cave system, and Edmund hoped that the small fire they lit against one of the walls of the cave wouldn’t attract all sorts of weird creatures.

He was confident enough that it wouldn’t be seen by the monsters outside. For some reason, the team had noticed that the monsters were reluctant to follow them into the cave, and by the second large room the enemies had all given up on chasing them. It didn’t necessarily mean that there was something bad going on here, but it sure felt like an ill omen to all three. They didn’t speak about it, everyone keeping their own, personal, rationalizations to themselves. Edmund liked to think that the monsters didn’t want to stray too far away from the forest that had generated them. He couldn’t see, despite his particularly accurate magic vision given by his Hume field, anything out of the ordinary about the hill or the cave that could have alerted the monsters on some instinctual level.

His mind went back to Farcall, and he thought about what could have been, but was not going to be anymore.

“You know, I was thinking about Maliketh. He seemed so strong… and yet. He too broke in the end. The pain was too much. I kind of wanted to save him, make him forget all his pain. But I couldn’t. I didn’t have enough Humes. Such a shame… he could have been nice to have around.” He mused.

Whatever. Plan A never works. Plan B is still on hold, for now. I guess we’ll do as I have always done, improvise. Praetor, please tell me the situation at the Pylon is stable.

“Yes, sir. No anomalies detected, and the portal is still 79% stable.”

Toora was resting, eyes closed against the cold stone wall. She had her staff, resting between her legs with the tip reflecting specks of light from the fire like a prism. She nodded to herself, but didn’t open her eyes, immersed as she was in her thoughts. Lisa was sitting next to her, holding the hammer that she used in the battle of Farcall. It was useless now, and not Marika’s hammer anymore, much to Edmund’s relief. I wonder why she still has it, though.

“We can’t go out, not anytime soon. Why don’t we rest, then see if these caves lead anywhere?”

They rested for a few hours. Toora gathered her mana, Edmund his Humes, and Lisa just rested her body after having pushed it to the extreme with the hammer. Ever since waking up she had been almost completely silent, sometimes eyeing Edmund when she thought he wasn’t looking, and barely acknowledging Toora’s commands.

“Okay, I think we have rested enough.”

Toora got up to her feet and tapped her staff on the ground lightly. The tip lit up with a soft, cerulean glow that reached farther than the light of the fire, despite being dimmer. It still didn’t manage to penetrate the shadows on the walls, which now looked like pools of black, true mirrors into another, darker place.

Edmund approached one of the dark circles.

“What on earth are these?” he said and tried to investigate the shadow as if it was a hole, keeping his head barely an inch away from the swirling black surface. However, he couldn’t see on the other side. “It’s not a shadow. It’s some sort of… material.”

He crouched and picked up a rock. “It reminds me of something, to be honest. Let’s see…” he tapped his chin, trying to jog his memory. The more he thought about it, the more it made sense. To the point that, just as he was about to move the rock, the realization hit him, and he wondered why he couldn’t think of it sooner. Maybe whatever had frozen him in time for three millennia, stripped him of all tech and augmentations had made him forget… worrying.

He gently poked the swirling surface with the tip of the rock. Immediately the material reacted, swirling harder, and a ripple went through it from where the rock had touched it. It was almost impossible to see the ripple because the material was completely black, but Edmund saw the surface waves at the edges of the vertical swirling pool of darkness where they hid the stone from his vision. He refocused on the stone, and saw that the black was crawling on it, spreading in a crisscrossing pattern across its surface. The stone was becoming heavier to keep there by the moment, but as he tried to pull it away, he noticed that it was stuck and let go. In a matter of seconds, the rock was completely black, and then it disappeared.

Toora looked from the side to see if there still was a dark bump where the rock was.

“Nothing. It’s like it absorbed it.”

Edmund smirked. “It did absorb it.” Then, he laughed. “I would never have thought I’d see them here. Well, long time no see, my dears.” He said, talking to the mass of black.

“What are they?” Toora’s voice was full of worry.

“Nanomachines. Nanites. Call them however you want. There would be a joke to be made here. To think,” the looked at the ceiling longingly, looking to the other two as if he was remembering times long past, “that this would really be a prime time to say nanomachines, son and look all smug. Anyway… these are microscopical pieces of autonomous, self-replicating technology. Very dangerous to touch.”

Toora ignored all the nonsense she couldn’t understand and focused on the important bits.

“What do they do?”

“Right now,” he said, “nothing. Which is strange. They did digest the rock completely when I touched them with it, probably to build more of themselves but beyond that… they aren’t doing anything at all.”

“So, are you saying that if we touch that liquid we will end up like the rock?”

He shrugged. “Probably, yeah. They never acted like this back in my time, so who knows? But I think they will probably indeed consume you if you touch them. If they have the energy to do that, of course. I wonder how much energy they still have.” He looked at the vertical pond of black. “They must be in some sort of low-power mode… Also…” he started to pace around the room, “If there’s nanites, then it means that there probably is some sort of construction from before the shattering of the world somewhere. Assuming it survived. And if there is, maybe there is also a controller console. Which I can use.”

Toora was at a loss for words. “That’s crazy.”

“Uh?” he looked at her. “Is it though? You reacted as if you had already seen something like this before.”

“There have been instances of something similar to this phenomenon that I’ve heard of. However, to think that this was possible even before magic was a thing…”

“Reality bending was a thing though,” Edmund pointed out.

“And yet I don’t feel any reality bending field coming from the pool.”

“Maybe it’s a small field?” Lisa said. “Edmund did say that your perception was worse than his own.”

Both Toora and Edmund looked at her. Toora paused. “Even if it was… the whole pool would still have a compound field large enough to be felt.” She turned to Edmund. “Right?”

He nodded. “Good guess. But yeah, they are purely technological, even after all these years immersed in magic. They were highly experimental, mind you, cutting edge technology that didn’t really see the light of day beyond some experimentation facilities here and there. Well, plus my personal stash of course. I wonder where that ended up.”

“What do we do with them?” Lisa asked.

For the first time, she was asking him a question, he noticed. Interesting, he thought, and blinked.

“Nothing. I definitely don’t wanna touch them.”

She nodded. “I see.”

“But if we find the control panel… then that would change the whole scenario.”

He started walking in the direction of one of the unexplored tunnels with renewed zeal. The team followed suit, with Toora casting some magic to light the way. The light didn’t reach him very well, however, so he wondered if he could do something about it with his own power without consuming too many Humes in the process.

“Casting a light like you have just specified would cost 1.33H per minute.”

Not bad. How many do I have? Do the math.

“At a rate of 18H per hour, you have accumulated 134H total.”

That’s not a lot.

“I can suggest some improvements to the light to make it cheaper. One of which could be to make it directional.”

Good, do it. Then make it so it requires me to keep my hand in a finger gun shape.

“Done. New cost would be 0.98H per minute.”

Lower the light by 10 lumens.

“0.92H per minute.”

Deal.

His finger lit up, illuminating the cave in a cone ahead of him. He looked around, satisfied at his work. Ahead of him, just around a corner, the cave system opened into a large final room with no exits. There were stalactites and stalagmites dotting the floors and ceilings, along with a deep pool of water at the center of the room, with other smaller pools dotting the floor all around. At a certain point the dirt and mud had given way to stone, making the wet floor slippery and smooth near the ponds.

“Looks like a dead end.” Edmund said.

“This doesn’t make any sense. These caves were dug by miners all the way through the hill. I know that this tunnel leads to the plains on the other side!”

Edmund hummed.

“Dug by miners you said?”

“Yeah, they were looking for minerals and ores. When they found nothing, they went away but then king Somaleon III ordered the tunnels to be dug again in secret so he would have a strategic passage across the hill and into the nearby kingdom.”

Lisa sat down on the floor next to a stalactite and closed her eyes to meditate.

“Aren’t we at the center of a kingdom, though?”

“King Somaleon III ruled three hundred years ago. The whole project was completed and used during the war, but then abandoned and forgotten when the other kingdom fell, and Auraxis I annexed it.”

“I see…” he said. “Cool that you know all this.”

She watched him knock on the wall a few times. “I did my research before coming here.” He moved a few paces and knocked again. “May I ask you what you’re doing?”

“Yeah, you may,” he nodded. He pointed at the central pond, where a huge pillar of what looked like molten white stone was jutting out of the ceiling and hung just inches above the water level. Small droplets dripped down and into the perfectly still pond, making circular waves in the crystalline water. “But let me ask you this first. If this cave was dug by miners, then why in the hell would it have stone formations that take millennia to form perfectly preserved in the middle of a room?”

“Maybe some magic or—”

“But the walls were dug stone up until somewhere in the tunnel we took.”

“Oh,” her eyes grew wide. She sprinted back towards the way they came but found that the opening of the tunnel was not there. In its stead was only solid rock. “Edmund! The exit’s gone.”

He lowered his stance and squinted his eyes as he looked at the walls and ceiling carefully.

“This is not a normal room at all.” He touched a wall again. “The walls. They’re fake!”

Suddenly, a rumble like an earthquake shook the whole room. Unimaginably loud sound exploded all around the trio, deafening them while the ground shifted and moved around them making their footing unstable. Lisa sprung to her feet and, in a jump, positioned herself at the head of the group shield at the ready. Despite the quake she was unbelievably stable on her feet, balancing herself with her shield, holding the ruined and useless Marika’s hammer in the other hand. The central stalactite broke and fell into the pond, dissolving in the water like a mirage.

“Shit.”