One by one, they walked into the arch, only to find themselves in a strange hallway, entirely made of giant stone slabs.
It reminded Niklaus of the dungeons he'd read about in his web novels.
Their collective footsteps echoed through this dingy hallway as they strode forward, sending a chill running up his spine. He looked around, only being able to do so thanks to the occasional burning torch that hung from one of the walls.
"Where is this place?" Aveline whispered.
But not one of the others responded, because none of the others knew the answer to that question.
The walls pressed close around them, making Niklaus's breath quicken as he started feeling claustrophobic the longer this corridor ran.
The giant slabs of stone were stacked together to form the walls, the ceiling and the floors with a precision too clean to be natural. He couldn't help but notice the fact that the stone slabs appeared brand new, with no chips or even the slightest bit of wear or tear. There was moss creeping along the lower edges where the torchlight didn't quite reach, but even that felt artificial – like it had been deliberately placed there.
There was something very wrong here…
Rhea led the group, her spear angled low as she walked forward. Her steps were silent and measured, despite the uneven ground.
Laena walked close behind her, the earlier excitement drained clean out of her voice, replaced by a watchfulness that didn't suit her at all. But still, the hint of the old whimsy and hunger for adventure was visible if one looked close enough.
Aveline's grip on Niklaus's hand hadn't loosened since the Arch. If anything, it had tightened, her thumb tracing small, anxious circles against his knuckles that he doubted she even noticed she was doing.
Niklaus kept half an eye on their backs, wary of any attacks, and the other half on the Black Notebook in his other hand. Its pages sat still and dark now that they weren't actively lost – no directions, no warnings, just dormant ink waiting for something to react to.
Great. Even the magic GPS doesn't know what's down here.
The torches kept up their irregular rhythm, burning strong in some brackets and barely a guttering ember in others, like whatever lit them had simply stopped caring somewhere along the way. Niklaus counted eleven before he lost track, his mind drifting toward less comforting questions.
Who lit them in the first place?
And who, or what, still came down here often enough to keep them from going dark completely?
He didn't like the answers his mind kept creating.
"Anyone else really over walking into places that clearly don't want us here?" Laena tried, the joke falling flat in the oppressive quiet.
None of them had it in them to laugh in this oppressive atmosphere.
They walked on without another word, the corridor stretching longer than it had any right to, bending now and then at angles that made no architectural sense, until it simply stopped being a corridor at all.
"Look there!" Laena cried out.
They all followed her gaze to spot a bright point of light in the far end of the corridor.
The realization struck them all at once.
An exit.
Niklaus and Rhea exchanged a glance before exploding into a run, with Niklaus practically dragging Aveline with him, through their linked hands.
"Hey! Wait for me too!" Laena yelped as she burst into a run to follow after the others.
OO OO OO
The narrow corridor spilled open without warning, opening into a vast, cavernous hall.
"Whoa," Laena breathed out as they walked forward into the hall.
Niklaus looked around, the sheer size of this hall stealing his breath. It was vast enough to accommodate entire buildings back in the outskirts, but sideways and in straight height. It had large stone pillars jutting out of the ground, several of them broken, but several of them rising so high they seemed to vanish in the darkness above. His eyes found the skies above, and he couldn't help but be mesmerized by the millions of twinkling stars up in the darkness, each a different colour.
There was probably a star for each colour that existed up there!
On either side of the hall were two enormous cloth banners, bordered with glimmering gold cloth, each depicting large murals as they stretched across the entire wall, their colours strangely vivid despite how aged this entire place looked.
Both walls led toward a gigantic pillar at the far end of the hall. It was several times wider than Niklaus was tall, and its surface was weathered and ancient. Even after ignoring everything else, just the pillar was enough to instill a strong sense of fear within him. It was like looking at a fossilized version of his mother.
A God.
As if on cue, the air above the pillar shimmered, and a stone statue of a majestic four-legged dragon appeared. It had a long, pointed snout and two curved horns on top of its head. A pair of majestic wings emerged from its shoulder blades. The wings were intricately carved, and he couldn't help but notice that there was a half-open eye in each feather of each wing.
Even without anyone saying it, Niklaus instinctively knew who the statue was about.
Mother.
Just as he thought it, an oddly familiar voice hit his ears.
"Mother."
Niklaus looked around in astonishment before the sound of singing hit his ears.
"♪ Wherever we wander, wherever we roam,
If there's trouble ahead, then we're calling it home! ♪ "
He glanced at Laena, the source of the singing. She was just looking around the Hall as she sang. Why the fuck is Laena singing at a time like this? He couldn't help but wonder.
A moment later, he heard the exact same question he'd just thought, be asked. "Why the fuck is Laena singing at a time like this?"
Laena whirled towards her cousin with a mixture of shock and astonishment on her face, both at the language and the accusation laid on her. But to be honest, it was more for the sheer… vulgarity of the language used by her usually prim and proper cousin.
"What is she talking about? I'm not singing?!"
"What is going on?"
He flinched as the voice suddenly echoed through the hallway, only to realize with a start that the voice had been his. Well, it was Cecilia's, but… whatever.
The important part was that he hadn't spoken.
Then he heard Rhea's voice echo through the hall. "This place, does it have the power to recreate our thoughts as sound and let everyone hear them? And even conjure what we imagine, like when I prayed to the goddess, the statue of her Mythical Creature Form appeared atop the pillar. It's the same statue from the main cathedral in Lumi City that I saw a few years back."
"Whatever I'm thinking, this hall articulates it!" She realized.
"Whoa, that's so cool!" Avy's voice echoed through the hall. Her eyes glinted like gems as she looked around in wonder and awe.
"Aw~ You think my eyes are like Gems," Avy gushed with a flattered expression on her face, and Niklaus realized with a start that even that thought had been echoed out loud by this Hall.
Niklaus's eyes widened as he realized what was going on, and the consequences of what…certain information getting out might cause.
He tried to cogitate and rein in his thoughts, trying not to let any stray thought appear in his mind.
At the same time, his voice echoed through the Hall. "…Rein in my thoughts, Rein in my thoughts."
"So that's how Cece's inner world is like," Laena's musing hit his ears, and he deepened his attempts at Cogitating. "That's so cute! She's like a child who's just started school, and is forcing herself to pay attention to matters. The image of her cogitation is also really cool – it's just layers of wavy sheets of light stacked on top of each other, like a sea of multicoloured water. It's so beautiful." Then her eyes widened. "Oh boy. No, no, I am not thinking of this, Cece; I'm serious."
Laena's true thoughts kept appearing as she thought rapidly in a frantic panic.
The mental snickers of Rhea and Aveline spread through the hall.
"This fucking Moron… no, why am I saying that? Be more polite, be more polite…" He tried to at least maintain a semblance of Cecilia's thought patterns. "Playing Truth or Dare here would be so interesting."He couldn't help but think.
"What game is that?" Aveline didn't need to open her mouth to ask.
"It's a little game I used to play back when – no! Cogitate, Cogitate," He almost blurted out, before trying to cogitate to control his thoughts.
He tried to use his spectator powers to suppress his thoughts, to prevent them from being sounded out in this hall, but it didn't work. He just didn't have enough experience with them.
He needed to do something drastic.
He drew on all his might as a Dreamwalker, and forced it inward, towards his mind island. With all his might and will behind it, he shattered the island in two, and with it, his thoughts.
A Gasp of pain escaped his lips, and the same thoughts echoed across this chamber as his thoughts split into two streams, one exterior and one interior. With the last few moments of consciousness allowed to him, he separated his memories, sealing everything belonging to Niklaus into the Interior thought stream, and leaving only Cecilia on the surface.
The very last action he managed to do was add a trigger to this, hoping with all his might that he just hadn't made the biggest mistake of his life.
OO OO OO
Cecilia looked around amidst the throbbing headache that suddenly struck her head, making it feel like someone was screwing a nail inside her head.
"Ugh… Damnation, it hurts!"
She groaned mentally before flinching as she had her thoughts immediately broadcast to the entire Hall.
What?
"Cecilia!"
Aveline's frightened voice reached her ears, and before she could properly gather her thoughts, the pink-haired girl was already at her side, gripping her shoulders with a worried expression.
"Cece? Are you okay? What happened? Does it hurt? Should I -"
"Oh Goddess, what happened to her? She was perfectly fine just a moment ago! Was it something in this place? Did someone attack her? But I didn't see anything! Maybe I should - "
"Avy."
" - ask Rhea if she knows any healing spells, or maybe I could - "
"Avy."
"What if it's something spiritual? Cece's a Beyonder, right? Could it be a side effect of this place? Oh no, what if - "
"Aveline!"
The pink-haired girl froze in the midst of her worried rant, and Cecilia immediately regretted raising her voice. Not because she had actually spoken particularly loudly, but because the Hall had apparently decided that shouting one's thoughts was an entirely acceptable thing to do.
She pressed a hand against her forehead.
"By mother, what is wrong with this place?" Her question echoed throughout the chamber. Who would make such a place like this?
And why?
How utterly troublesome.
Before her thoughts could leak out because of this accursed 'Hall of Truth', as she'd just named it, Cecilia used the spectator pathway's abilities to control her thoughts and emotions, gradually reining them in until they became too faint for the room's power to catch.
A moment later, they grew faint enough that the Hall could no longer articulate them.
Much better.
"Cecilia?"
Cecilia opened her eyes to see Avy looking at her with an expression that made her heart ache. "I'm alright, Avy," she reassured her, reaching up to gently squeeze the hand resting on her shoulder. "Just a headache."
"That didn't look like just a headache," Avy said, and her own thoughts of concern, care, and frantic worry echoed through the entire chamber.
"Well, a particularly unpleasant headache, then."
"Cece!"
Cecilia giggled softly, only to immediately regret it when another spike of pain shot through her skull.
Her smile faltered at the strange feeling.
It wasn't a normal headache, and it wasn't due to spiritual exhaustion – her mothers knew that she had more than enough experience to know that.
This was different, and it almost felt like something in her mind had been torn apart. But that couldn't be right. She carefully examined her mental condition, probing the familiar landscape of her mind island.
It didn't look like anything was wrong.
Her memories were intact. Her emotions were stable, and her spirituality, although somewhat disturbed, was well within acceptable limits.
But still… there was something strange. Like a silence that had suddenly settled in the depths of her consciousness.
It was strange, to say the least.
"You're doing it again," Aveline complained, snapping Cecilia from her introspection.
"Doing what?" the blonde asked.
"Thinking too hard!"
Cecilia blinked. A moment later, she smiled and intertwined their fingers. "Then perhaps you should distract me, my dear."
Aveline's face flushed red at the sudden attack, and the smile on Cecilia's face turned victorious – That's right, she knew how to attack as well. "Y-you can't just say things like that!" Avy said, but her reddened cheeks said otherwise.
"Why ever not? You're my girlfriend, aren't you?"
"Oh, get a room, you two." Laena snickered at them.
"We're in one," Cecilia replied without missing a beat.
"A different room!"
Even Rhea couldn't quite suppress the small smile that appeared on her face.
Cecilia allowed herself another soft giggle before turning her attention back towards their surroundings.
There would be time to examine her condition later, but for now, they needed to figure out where they were. Her gaze settled upon the enormous murals adorning the walls of the Hall of Truth, and almost immediately, her curiosity won out over the lingering discomfort.
She turned her gaze towards the mural on the right.
It began with what looked like several rivers of multiple colours swirling together in a lake, from which a man stepped forward, holding two gems, one bright yellow and one pitch-black, in one hand, with a third pale gem in his other, lower hand. It showed the man raising his hand, and the night was scared away by the daylight.
The mural then transitioned to the man fighting several monsters, taking their gems for himself.
It showed the man creating a servant and then giving the pitch-black gem to the servant. It showed the man raising and taking in angels under his wing. It showed the man creating two more servants and handing them 2 more gems, one of which was the pale one he had from the start, and the other a light blue one that the man had taken from the corpse of a dragon previously in the mural.
Then the man was betrayed and killed, and his corpse was consumed by three of his angels.
Cecilia's gaze moved further along.
The man appeared again in the next part, but something was wrong. His existence seemed like it had been divided by two – one half had become a living shadow that had descended into madness and what looked like loss of control. The other had the appearance of the servant that had been gifted the blue gem, but this time its face was cold and utterly devoid of any emotion.
She didn't know what exactly was going on, but she knew that it was involving matters relating to high sequences. Maybe even Gods, or her mother forbid – Higher.
The mural continued for some distance, but the way it had been arranged seemed to suggest that a lot of the history in between had been skipped.
Eventually, the two figures appeared together once more.
The cold-faced man approached the writhing shadow, and in the final depiction, he stepped directly into it. Their forms overlapped, gradually merging until neither could be distinguished from the other.
Where two beings had stood before, only one remained.
"Whoa…this is so cool!"
Cecilia turned around to see Laena staring at the other mural with starlit eyes.
She turned her gaze to it and saw that it was about a man emerging from a greyish-white fog, similar to what they had just crossed to find this Hall of Truth.
The man seemed to progress through the sequences, changing his appearance several times. Initially, he was depicted as a rather unassuming young gentleman, but further along, he had adopted an older appearance, complete with a beard and a rather peculiar hat.
The next transformation was considerably more striking. The man had become taller, his features sharper and more menacing, with a cold expression that made him look like an entirely different person.
It was then Cecilia realized what she was looking at, that this man in the mural was advancing through the Seer pathway. And judging by his ability to freely alter his appearance, he had reached Sequence 6: Faceless.
The next few sections of the mural depicted his adventures upon the high seas, where he appeared to encounter all manner of strange individuals and terrifying creatures. Some scenes portrayed battles aboard enormous ships, while others depicted events so utterly bizarre that Cecilia struggled to make sense of them.
Eventually, the man's appearance changed yet again, this time into that of a refined, kindly gentleman whose elegant bearing was really different compared to cold adventurer from before.
The mural continued, showing increasingly extraordinary events. One particularly elaborate scene seemed to portray the fall of a god, while another showed what Cecilia could only think of as the failed advancement of a different divine being.
Just who was this man?
Eventually, the man changed his appearance again.
Oh, by Mother, how many faces does this man have?!
She couldn't help but mentally complain
This time, he took the appearance of a wandering magician, travelling from place to place, performing seemingly miraculous tricks and granting the wishes of those he encountered. The mural showed all sorts of impossible occurrences, from the restoration of ruined structures to miracles that appeared to defy the very laws of reality.
She recognized the significance almost immediately.
Sequence 2: Miracle Invoker.
The man depicted in this mural had become an angel of the Seer pathway.
But these peaceful scenes didn't last, and the mural went violent. The next scene showed the man advancing to Sequence 1, surrounded by a town of corpses. A god with limpid golden eyes stared at him, while thunder crackled in the greyish-white fog-cloaked sky.
Even on just a cloth, the scene carried an unmistakable sense of danger.
The town soon turned into a towering mountain, with the lower half in the real world and the upper part in what looked like the Astral world. Cecilia continued down the murals, reading the story, before her eyes landed on a particular figure.
Her breath hitched.
"I know this one." Rhea's voice echoed through the hall as she stared at the same mural as Cecilia.
Cecilia didn't say anything, because so did she.
The Fool
The Lord of Mysteries her mother once served when she had been an angel herself, and acted as the Justice of the Tarot Club – which was led by the same god.
Of course, she knew of him; she had practically grown up on stories about him and his blessed – the Angel of Redemption Gehrman Sparrow.
Cecilia looked backwards at the mural, towards the man fighting in the sea.
"It must be him then," She allowed to leak out, the truth of the mural hitting her at once. That the Angel of Redemption was also the Fool that her mother once prayed to.
"That's Gehrman Sparrow."
The moment those words left her mouth, a low hum reverberated throughout the Hall.
Startled, Cecilia whirled around towards the sound, only to see the air before the gigantic pillar ripple, like someone had thrown a stone into a perfectly still lake. The ripples slowly expanded, taking the shape of an enormous pair of doors. They were magnificent, their surfaces covered in intricate carvings that Cecilia couldn't quite make out.
The doors were illusory and translucent – and Cecilia could see the pillar even through them.
What?
"Whoa! A secret door!" Laena exclaimed, immediately rushing forward.
"Laena, wait!" Rhea called as she reached out to grab the other girl, but was just a second too late.
Laena reached the enormous doors and, without an ounce of hesitation, placed both her hands against them. Or at least tried to, because her hands just passed through the doors without touching anything.
"Huh?"
She blinked before trying again. Her hands passed through the doors a second time, meeting nothing but empty air. Laena looked down at her hands, then back up at the doors. She stared at the illusory doors for a long moment. Then she said: "...Well, that's rude."
Cecilia approached the strange phenomenon at a measured pace, her hand clasped and fingers intertwined with Aveline's. Rhea remained a few steps back, examining the surroundings with a cautious expression.
"Don't touch anything else," she instructed, shooting a glare at Laena.
"But I didn't touch anything!"
"That's precisely the problem," Rhea thought, her delivery utterly dry and lacking any inflection.
Laena pouted.
Cecilia ignored their byplay and activated Spirit Vision to take a closer look at the door – and took a sharp breath.
The Hall of Truth was a beautiful thing when she saw it through her normal eyes, but it was just something else when Spirit Vision came into play. She could see streams of information flowing everywhere, connecting through the air like a giant spider web. This spider web had three anchor points, with one of them being the illusory Door in front of her.
The other two were the two murals on either side of the Hall of Truth.
"But why is there an illusion there in the first place?" Laena's thoughts were relayed out loud, and it was the clearest thought, and the only one that she could coherently make out. The rest of them were just random, fragmented and rapid, like they appeared and disappeared as fast as they came.
"It's not an illusion," Cecilia idly commented, peering deeper into the layers of reality with her spirit vision. The Door was different than anything else around them, and while everything was full of information and power, the door lacked it completely. It was like an empty chalice – a structural boundary that looked like a Door with normal eyes.
She suddenly turned her head to the side and flinched when her eyes saw another pair of green. Laena had somehow appeared next to her, and was staring at her with large eyes, her face close enough that she could feel her cousin's breath on her face. "What do you mean?" Laena asked.
Cecelia scrunched her face and stepped backwards, before shooting Laena an annoyed glare. "Don't do that!"
And in true Laena fashion, she waved it off. "Yeah, yeah. Now spill – what do you mean?"
"It's not an illusion. The door exists; it just isn't fully here," Cecilia said. On seeing the confused look on Laena's face, she elaborated. "Think of it this way: this door exists somewhere else, but through a beyonder power or an aspect ability, it has been made to appear here as well." She allowed certain thoughts to leak out, allowing the Hall of Truth to form an image in front of her.
The image was of a flat paper floating in mid-air horizontally.
"Take this paper, and think of it as reality, and this door is the one in front of us," Cecilia started, imagining a door with the same design as the large illusory one in front of her to appear on the paper. "This door has been basically pulled through space to partially appear in another location - this second location being this Hall of Truth."
She now imagined the paper to twist and turn, and one end crossing the other to form a weird geometrical shape. The door was now in the exact place it intersected.
"Something like this, the door is basically in two places at once, so it isn't fully in any one place. If we want to use the door and enter it, we have to discover a way to pull in to this side fully – only then will we be able to interact with it."
It definitely was a lot more complicated than that, but this explanation was simple enough for someone new to concepts like this to understand.
And as Cecilia continued explaining the nature of the Door to Laena and a curious Aveline, her thoughts went in some other direction – and to me more exactly, it went towards the make of the Door.
It reminded her of the Door pathway, or something a High Sequence Beyonder of the Visionary Pathway – like an Author would be able to do. But… she didn't know that her mother had separated a Sequence 1 Beyonder Characteristic to create an Author.
She knew of all the Visionary Pathway and all the three Mystery Pathway sequences and what authorities came with them – a perk of who her mother was, so naturally she knew which pathways could accomplish things like creation of a Door like this.
But in hindsight, it really wasn't guaranteed, as many pathways had ways to use abilities of other pathways – White Tower's Imitation, Door's Replication, and Hanged Man's Grazing being some of the more prominent examples that appeared in her mind.
Realizing that her thoughts were going into a self-circling tangent, she quickly shook her head and focused back on her cousin.
Cecilia finished her explanation.
Laena nodded sagely. "I see…I see…"
Then she tried to kick the door again, and her foot just went through it again.
"Whoa!"
Rhea reached out and caught the girl before she could fall, and held Laena up by the neck like a mangy cat. "Laena."
"What? I was testing Cece's theory!" The girl protested.
Rhea cocked an eyebrow. "With your foot?"
"It was the closest thing available!"
Cecilia then decided that it would be better for her own mental well-being if she just ignored the two of them. Instead, she directed her attention towards the door again. "Why did you appear?" she murmured under her breath.
They had been in this hall for several minutes before the Door had suddenly appeared.
So that meant… that one of them had done something to trigger the Door's appearance.
She retraced the sequence of events in her mind - They had entered the Hall of Truth, discovered its peculiar ability to broadcast their thoughts, and then started examining the murals.
After that, she had recognized the man depicted in the second mural.
And then…
"Gehrman Sparrow," Cecilia spoke out loud.
Her voice echoed through the entire chamber, and Rhea and Laena stopped bickering as the three girls turned towards her.
But nothing happened.
Cecilia frowned before trying again. "Gehrman Sparrow," She repeated.
"What are you doing?" Aveline asked.
The blonde girl ran a hand through her hair, a hint of frustration appearing on her face. "Trying something. I don't think I'm succeeding, though."
Rhea turned to Cecilia for a moment before realizing what the princess had been trying. "They appeared when you identified the man depicted in the mural, correct?"
Cecilia nodded. "Yes,"
"Then perhaps identifying the subject of the other mural will complete them." The red-haired woman hypothesized in her head.
That made sense. Cecilia nodded, then furrowed her forehead as the sound of something scratching on paper echoed in her ears. She gently pulled at her earlobe, resisting the urge to dig into her ears. That was not something a noble lady did, especially not when she wasn't alone.
"Oh! That's easy!" Laena exclaimed, turning towards the mural of the man that came out of the river of colors. "That's the Ancient Sun God!"
They all waited with bated breath, not knowing what was going to happen.
But nothing happened.
"Are you sure that's the Ancient Sun God?" Aveline asked, and at the same time, her inner thoughts were broadcast and echoed through the entire chamber. "Of course, Laena got it wrong – she hasn't stayed awake in a single history lecture for years now."
"Hey!" Laena turned an offended look at the pink-haired girl. "Just because I sleep in History class doesn't mean I don't last history!"
"Since when?" Avy shot back.
"She's right, though." Rhea suddenly chimed in.
Three heads snapped towards her as exclamations echoed through the chamber, two shocked and one elated and smug.
"What?!"
"How?"
"I am?!"
"She is," Rhea insisted. "I've read about the Ancient Sun God before, and that mural," she waved towards the large cloth depicting the life story of what seemed to be a god, "looks to be accurate to what little records of the Ancient Sun that have survived tell."
"So why didn't it work?"
"Maybe because the Ancient Sun God is a title, not an actual name." Cecilia said, before turning to Rhea, "Do you know what his name is?" Because Cecilia had no idea. She knew of the ancient Sun God mainly from what she had learned about him from history, but it was nothing extensive or impressive.
So hopefully Rhea would know, or they were stuck here.
Thankfully, the red-haired girl nodded. "I do, it's Grisha Adam." She said the name with a certain gravitas that made it sound even more impressive. You know, even more impressive than being the name of a god.
The name echoed throughout the enormous chamber, and all four girls immediately turned towards the doors.
One second passed.
Then another.
But nothing happened
"Seriously?!" Laena groaned. All of that anticipation, all for nothing! What a letdown.
Cecilia frowned. "Are you certain that's his name?"
"Quite certain," Rhea replied. "Although it isn't commonly mentioned in modern scripture."
"Then there's something more needed – more than just the name, y'know." Laena shrugged.
They spent the next several minutes examining the murals, searching for some hidden clue. Laena even suggested that they needed to touch both murals simultaneously, an idea that ended with her standing rather awkwardly against one wall while Rhea pressed her palm against the other.
Needless to say, nothing happened.
Eventually, Aveline spoke up. "Wait… Cece?"
"Hmm?"
"Why don't you try saying it?"
Cecilia turned towards her girlfriend, a confused frown on her face. "Saying what?"
"The name! Grisha Adam!"
The doors remained unchanged, and Aveline continued, "You were the one who said Gehrman Sparrow's name, right? And that's when the door appeared. Maybe you're supposed to say both names!"
Cecilia blinked for a moment before her eyes widened slightly as she considered that. That… actually made sense. "Avy, you're a genius!" She exclaimed, suddenly having to resist the urge to kiss the lights out of her girlfriend.
Aveline beamed. "I am?"
"Mhm!" Cecilia turned towards the mural and spoke clearly. "Grisha Adam."
Now this caused something to happen.
The very Halls of Truth trembled as a brilliant golden light suddenly erupted from the right half of the illusory doorway, while its left half began radiating a greyish-white mist. The intricate carvings upon their surfaces shifted, becoming increasingly distinct as the doors gradually lost their transparency.
A deep, resounding boom echoed throughout the chamber, and the doors suddenly became real.
"IT WORKED!" Laena cried.
But before she could rush forward, the enormous slabs of stone began moving.
Slowly, accompanied by the groaning of ancient mechanisms, the doors swung inward, revealing an opening where there had previously been nothing but the gigantic pillar.
Cecilia stared at the sight, her green eyes reflecting the golden radiance spilling from within.
"Well," she murmured, squeezing Aveline's hand. "That was easier than expected."
But why did it only work when I said it?