Chapter Text
The code is undecipherable.
..Or the coordinate — whatever it is, Avery has spent more hours thinking about incompressible strings of numbers than he does actually trying to solve it. Hell, he had sprinted straight to his makeshift base after reading the content inside the old book-he-did-not-write. And the rest of the night was filled with pacing around and scratching nonsense into empty pages.
And of course, that does nothing. It's not like Avery had memorized every method of cipher decoding the world can offer — hah! He has a million other things to do than sit around learning ciphers of all things.
But then that would've been a useful skill, especially for his current situation.
He sighed, closing the old book with a disappointed huff.
Then he stared for a good long while at the bland cover, old brown leather and string holding not-quite-yellow pages in a tight bound. Avery realises —
“The puzzle is incomplete.”
Each transcript written out using the very few methods he knew came out unintelligible, what was originally jumble of numbers became jumbles of words.
Unreadable, unsolvable, not when the puzzle itself isn't written in full.
Pfft. Did he just waste hours on something he can't even start to comprehend? Perhaps. This is a waste of time, he could've been sleeping instead of adding wrinkles to his shirt.
Avery had half a mind to just burn the damned thing. Throw it into the raging fireplace and watch as ember picks away any evidence of the book's fickle existence.
He might get cursed that way.
Old blood etched into thick scrawls — presumably written with a finger and not a quill — is enough to alarm anyone with a working, functioning brain. Add on the content of the writing itself, and it's like begging to be killed right then and there to tamper with the very item.
The repeating messages filled most pages of the book, ‘don't turn left’ scrawled all over like mantras — or perhaps.. a prayer. And the sentences aside from the mantra warns of something violent and sentient. The trembles in the spelling speaks of panic and desperation. Like the author of the book had written it out while being actively chased by unseen horrors — blood from injury used in a way to ward off anyone from falling into the same fate.
No. Not ward. From experiencing the worst brute of said fate. ‘You can't outsmart it’ like an unavoidable apocalypse instead of an incoming disaster.
Whatever it is, its.. coming — is what the author was trying to relay.
“Well, that's.. comforting to know.” Avery whispered, staring at the old book as it stared back at him.
The first ray of sunlight hit a corner of his base, fenced up windows carving harsh shadows and light. Dawn, it says. Morning had come and thus it was a new day. Avery had spent all night worrying, he hadn't a wink of proper rest.
Avery huffed, his bed creaking as he stood, “I still need to gear up.” Because the fiasco of the mine-he-did-not-set and the book-he-did-not-write has derailed him from his original plan on gathering irons. If what the book tells him holds any truth — then he better face it as best as he could.
Battles are what he's good at, after all.
Deciding that it's better that he hold onto the book, Avery hovers over a chest by the door. Day old bread and a dozen more torches should be enough for another trip down the caverns, Avery sets off.
———
The sun had risen high in the sky when he spotted an open ravine, far from the direction of his base and very, very much in the opposite direction of the mine-he-did–not-set. Nope, Avery isn't taking any chances, not when he's still stuck with a stone sword and a halfway worn axe.
The ravine was deep, but wide enough that sunlight hit the bottom. There weren't any ores that could be spotted on the surfaces, Avery ventures deeper.
The cavern on the right is dark, the overhang of dirt obscuring sunlight — he echoes within is less than desirable to the ear. The cavern on the left has a small water stream flowing down to it, an easy way down, it seems.
Avery went right anyway.
It wasn't long before he had to pull out a torch, one hand holding the flaming source of sight and the other his pickaxe. Yellowish orange hue painted the jagged stones of the cave, the ceiling and walls being the same grey only heightening the boxed in feeling that caves usually carry. The slow downturn led him deeper into the darkness, only to disappoint him when he reached a dead end.
Avery turned back, knowing its more worth to seek another cave than to set a strip-mine for irons, of all things.
———
He was met with another wall.
A wall.
“Okay, that's weird.”
Because he had been following a straight path, there weren't any turns to make; there weren't any crossroads to choose from.
So, yeah. Weird.
Avery isn't the most knowledgeable with his directional senses, but he knows he hadn't gone and gotten himself lost before. So why now?
“... talk about bad timing.”
But there isn't much to do, turning back for the second time meant going deeper and meeting the dead end from before. He sighed, bringing up his pickaxe and began digging away.
Strangely enough, as if yesterday wasn't enough of an introduction to some obscure horror show, Avery wasn't met with the midday sunlight. But the void darkness of yet another cave.
Okay.
Pretty weird. Yeah?
The steep drop brings him down to a somehow bigger cavern. The stone ceiling and stalactites now sit higher instead of the previously low wall that he could touch with a stretch and a jump.
Aside from those, all Avery could see himself doing is walk forward.
And that's exactly what he does.
Level floor, stone wall, darkness, and the occasional patches of moss. In other words: nothing. It felt like following a winding pathway of a hedgemaze, except there was no maze nor hedges and all Avery sees is the same grey and it's really disturbing to think about the longer this goes on.
Thankfully, it didn't go on for long.
As Avery walked, the shadows ebbed away with the presence of distant lights. And from where he stood, Avery could spot the telltale green of leaves and the rich brown of wood making up oak trees in the background. Sunlight streams in from the top, not as bright as before he went caving — but he wasn't so keen on keeping his hours, so it didn't matter.
As Avery neared the edge however, he unfortunately wasn't blessed by the raw heat of sunrays. The air hitting his face was as cold as the faint underground breeze. Realising this, Avery looked up —
And it was the same stone grey ceiling.
He looked back to the trees, where shadows on the grassland below sways long the — now impossible — breeze and faux sun. No torches nor any recognisable sources of light to be seen yet the cave is alight.
Avery felt like screaming, he decidedly didn't.
He drops down to the grass. Soft, and healthy, even with the absence of the sun. He finds himself missing it, and the way it would dry his skin whenever he spent too long exposed under it.
But no, his skin stayed moist and cold. The cave echoed back noise with each step he took, like the chamber it was. He gave a shaky laugh, “This is fine, totally. Fine. Yep.”
Avery hadn't even managed to reach the — what he assumed — center of this underground plains, when he noticed another sound other than his own and the green grass and leaves.
That distinct click of heels, and metal slipping against leather. The swish from where a sword is pulled from its hilt, and the pre-slash in the air where a blade is held high above the head.
Avery turned, his own sword parrying in defence.
He saw gold that was turned into armour, he saw ruby red cloth draped over leather, he saw the inky black dyed leather as another layer of protection.
Most of all, in the space where light slivers into the gaps of the golden helmet, when everything else is a pure void of shadows — he saw fear.