Leon crouched down besides Gaius, a sense of anxiety in his chest that he would never have guessed would be there even just a few months ago.  But anxious he was, for Gaius wasn’t moving, and the reason why was easy to guess: the bloody hole Leon had poked in his chest to help bait the shadow cat into appearing.

The plan worked, the shadow cat was dead, but Gaius was still unmoving.

“Are you all right?” Leon asked as he shook the nobleman, seeking any kind of response at all since it was clear enough that Gaius wasn’t all right—the nobleman was covered in his own blood, and while Leon’s lightning attack hadn’t been too powerful, relatively speaking, it had still burned some of Gaius’ extremities.

Gaius didn’t say anything, but he did quietly groan, showing himself to be alive.

Without hesitation, Leon procured one of his more powerful healing spells from his soul realm and pressed it against his ally, letting its healing light fill Gaius’ body and stitch his wounds back together.

After a couple of minutes, Gaius groaned once more and opened his eyes.

“What… what happened?” he asked as he immediately tried to sit up.

Leon, pushing him back down, said, “We got the shadow cat, but you seemed to have passed out.  How are you feeling?”

“Uggh, like I fought a bull and lost,” Gaius replied as he shifted around enough to pull his shirt up and see that the wound Leon had left on his abdomen had closed over with a freshly-healed skin.  “At least that’s taken care of.  Thank you, Leon.”

“Yeah, no problem,” Leon replied.  “If you were feeling this terribly, though, why didn’t you activate any of those healing spells I gave you?”

Gaius had the good graces to look a little bashful, and said, “I didn’t want to endanger the plan by doing something like that.  Maybe the shadow cat wouldn’t have come if I weren’t still blatantly injured.  I thought… I thought I could take the pain, but I suppose I couldn’t…”

Leon sighed as Gaius’ face fell in dejection.  He clapped the nobleman on the shoulder and said with a slight smile on his face, “You did just fine.  You played your part perfectly.  The cat’s dead, so now all we have to do is find our way out of this place, make Jormun a head shorter, and we’re golden.”

“Sounds like a good idea,” Gaius replied.

As they spoke, Leon noted the color rapidly returning to Gaius’ face as his fourth-tier magic power once more filled his body with energy.  Given how shaky his aura seemed to be, though, Leon knew that Gaius wasn’t quite in fighting condition yet, though he should be strong enough to walk.

“Are you good to go?” Leon asked just to be sure.

Gaius nodded with as much confidence as he could muster—which was actually quite a bit, Leon was surprised to see.

Leon stood back up, then bent at the waist and held out his hand for Gaius.  “Come on, we’re not going to get anywhere sleeping in this dark place.”

Gaius grasped Leon’s hand, and the latter hauled the former to his feet.  Gaius nearly immediately lost his balance, but Leon’s steadying hand on his shoulder kept him on his feet.

“Thanks,” Gaius repeated.

“No, thank you,” Leon responded.  Being bait wasn’t an easy thing to do, and he respected the hells out of Gaius for volunteering for it.

But their small party couldn’t stand there in the hallway constantly thanking each other and singing each other’s praises for long, and soon enough, Leon was leading them through the maze once more.  As was the strategy so far, Leon took every right that they encountered, but after several hours spent in the maze, they hadn’t so much as run into a dead end or been brought back around to someplace they’d been before.  It was like this maze was endless…

As he walked, Leon felt a subtle shift in the ambient magic of the place.  It was hardly something worth mentioning, but the maze was an effectively closed environment; the magical currents in the air were generally quite consistent.  This slight shift meant that an enchantment somewhere had just been activated, though given how nothing in the maze seemed to change, it couldn’t have been that powerf—

Leon entered another four-way intersection, but before he could lead the party down the right passage, he glanced ahead and then to the left, and when his eyes landed upon what was sitting on the ground to the left, he froze without warning, causing Gaius to run into him from behind.

“Huh?  Oh, sorry Leon!” Gaius immediately said.  “What is it?”

Leon stared silently at the small object on the ground only about thirty or forty feet away, sitting on the ground of the passage, his mind too consumed with wondering just how that had gotten there to respond to Gaius.

It was a feather, full and fine—obviously from a large and healthy bird—colored a rich, deep brown, and flecked with gold.

It looked like a smaller version of one of the Thunderbird’s feathers… or one of the feathers from her look-a-like that had led Leon and his people to this temple in the first place.

Leon stared at that feather, utterly bewildered as to how it got there, only to immediately check his mental defenses and flood his brain with silver-blue lightning as soon as he came to his senses.  He quickly hurried over, ignoring the puzzled questions from Gaius as he did, but stopped about five feet away from the feather.

This wasn’t a trap as far as he could tell, but he made sure to examine the area as closely as he could.  He’d sensed a change in the flow of ambient magic power within the maze, so he supposed that this was the result—’Some kind of illusion, maybe?’ Leon thought.  ‘Maybe something Jormun threw down here to fuck with our heads?  But does he know about that bird?  Are they working together?’

Leon took the final couple of steps and knelt to pick up the feather, his senses firing on all cylinders as he looked out for anything and everything that might indicate an imminent attack, ambush, or anything else of that nature.  It was dark, though, and with his attention elsewhere, he wasn’t ready for what he saw when he finally reached out for the feather.

His arm was covered in black scales that seemed to sparkle even in these low light conditions.  His fingers were elongated and clawed, and his forearm was much longer than it should be…

Leon let out a yelp of surprise and jerked himself back out of pure panicked instinct.  His brain decided that he needed to get away from whatever it was that had just caused these scales to appear, and as he fell on his ass, Leon saw that his arm was back to normal.

“Leon?  What’s going on?” Gaius inquired as he hurried over, but Leon didn’t hear him.

His arm was exactly as it should’ve been: human skin, lightly tanned from being outside most of the time these past few days, fingers the proper proportion, normal fingernails…

Leon stared at his arm, wondering just what in the hells he’d just seen.  It had seemed so real, as if his arm had really sprouted scales and he just hadn’t noticed.  It was, if he were honest, rather terrifying, but as he thought about it, it wasn’t really the first strange thing that had been happening these past few weeks—ever since he’d arrived in Serpentine Isles, he’d been experiencing strange instincts that were utterly foreign to his human experience of the world.  Spreading his wings, tearing into his enemies with claw, talon, fang, and beak.  It was as if something were drawing out some dormant instinct in his inherited blood.

Leon had no answers he could give himself.  As far as he was able to tell, his senses weren’t being manipulated in any way, but given everything that he’d seen on the second and third islands, his certainty in how definitively he could say something like that was starting to crack.  With access to spatial magic powerful enough to create entire worlds, golden golems, teleportation, pull the image of his father out of his head… Leon had no idea what exactly else this temple was capable of.

All he knew for certain was that he needed to speak with the Thunderbird as soon as he could.  She was frustratingly absent most of the time, but she usually showed up once per week at the very least to check in with his training.

But he pushed those thoughts out of his head for the time being.  There’d be a time for those questions, and so long as he was fully ambulatory and capable of fighting, he needed to focus on the problems immediately in front of him.  There’d be a time for other things later.

Leon pushed himself up to his feet, and only then became aware that Gaius was trying to get his attention, and that Maia was starting to get worried and was calling his name into his head.

“I’m fine, I’m fine!” he assured the two of them, but he barely even looked at them.  Instead, he turned his gaze back to the ground at his feet, where the bird’s feather had been.  It, like the scales on his arm, had vanished.

---

The trio continued to explore the maze for the next couple of hours.  They grew more and more irritable in their own ways as time continued to pass in silence.  Within the dark and seemingly endless maze, all desire to speak and socialize melted away, leaving three rather sullen and impatient people who were ready to see the end of this place as soon as they possibly could.  Given how much of the maze they’d explored and how many intersections they’d passed during Leon’s strategy of depth-first searching, every step they took increased exponentially how large the maze could possibly be—at least, it did in their minds, for while they all acknowledge the possibility, it was hard not to imagine every path they could take being of equal length.

The only real saving grace was a complete lack of defensive wards other than those that prevented Leon and Maia from looking ahead with their magic senses, or any of them from trying to break through the walls.  There were no active defenses trying to kill them, but that also led to boredom and mounting apathy.

Leon supposed, however, that there was actually one more saving grace: whatever Jormun was doing, it seemed as if he couldn’t speak with them in the maze.  He couldn’t imagine that with all this wandering that Jormun hadn’t gotten bored and would’ve tried speaking with them if he could.

‘Or maybe he just left after trapping us all in this maze…’ Leon thought with some anxiety.  ‘Maybe this is just a prison that he led us into before vanishing to finish up whatever work he has left…’

That thought echoed around in Leon’s head for a short while, but soon enough, his small party finally, finally came upon something different.

They turned right at an intersection, as they’d done so many times before, and instead of seeing a seemingly endless hall in front of them or a turn somewhere in the gloom, they saw the hall opening up into a chamber about three hundred feet or so in the distance.

Without a word, all three began to channel their magic in unison, and drew their weapons.  Maia conjured a water dragon and had it follow them, both readying herself to attack in the front while covering them from the rear.

The room, however, hardly seemed to warrant such measures—at least, at first.  It was relatively large; a circular chamber about fifty feet in diameter.  There were no decorations on the walls, no written instructions left anywhere, not even any more doors.  There were, however, seven large pools on the floor of the chamber arranged in a perfect half-circle around the center of the chamber.  Each pool was about six or seven feet in diameter, and so deep that Leon couldn’t see the bottom, even when he lit the room with a torch spell.

“What the hells is all this?” Gaius wondered aloud when it became clear that there was nothing in the chamber but bare black stone and these pools.

“Who the hells can say?” Leon replied.  “At least, this comforts me with the knowledge that this damn place has some dead ends.  Now we can finally start heading back and exploring other paths…”

“Yeah, it only…” Gaius began before catching himself.  Leon guessed he was going to point out that they’d been exploring for at least six hours and had only now found the end of their chosen path.  They’d passed dozens of other intersections on the way, meaning that even if this was proof that the maze wasn’t endless, it would still take days or even maybe a few weeks to explore the entire thing.  They could be down here for a long time, assuming that there even was an exit, and this wasn’t just some giant prison.

“Come on,” Leon said.  “Let’s get a move on.  We’re not going to find the end sitting around staring at empty—”

As if on cue, the water in the central pool began to shake and vibrate, spilling its water all around the floor of the chamber.  Maia’s water dragon surged in from where it was watching the hallway and interposed itself between the trio and the pools, while Leon and Gaius readied their weapons, Leon’s blade sparking with lightning magic as he readied himself for whatever was happening.

None of them had to wait long to see what was happening; only a few seconds after the water began to shake, the pool began to overflow almost to the point of seeming like it was trying to flood the chamber.  The chamber entrance, however, remained open and the water from the pool only surged out a few feet before being captured by the unmistakable use of water magic.

“Something’s coming up!” Leon shouted in warning.  The water wasn’t trying to flood the chamber, it was just being displaced by something very large making its way up from the bottom.

A moment later, an immense head emerged from the surface of the pool as the water it had captured rushed back down into the pool.  The head was reptilian, but instead of the smooth serpentine look that Leon might’ve expected, this head was almost draconic, with a pair of small ‘fins’ where its ears would be on a human face, a long snout filled with rows of gleaming white fangs, reptilian eyes burning green in their sockets, and a pair of huge horns extending from its brow and curling around the front of its face, like a pair of massive ivory hooks attached at its ridged forehead.  It was dark green in color, its scales sparkling like emeralds in the light of Leon’s torch spell, and its long serpentine neck stretched from its head back down into the water, where it vanished.

It was big.  Its head alone was longer than Leon was tall, and he could easily see it swallowing his entire body in one bite if it felt the desire.

Worse, it radiated a magical aura that was completely opaque to Leon; much like how it looked when he tried to read Maia’s aura, it was like trying to peer through a cloud of pitch-black smoke, utterly masking itself and whatever lay beyond.

This thing, whatever it was, was stronger than Leon, and from the way he felt Maia’s fear spike through their connection, was likely stronger than her, too.  And it was intelligent, or so it appeared as it coldly regarded Leon, Gaius, and Maia with its dispassionate, reptilian gaze.

Leon and his party were momentarily frozen in fear and shock, and it seemed that this monster wasn’t about to tolerate that silence.  Its mouth parted, and a long forked tongue began to dance around its teeth, making a series of high-pitch hissing sounds in what was an obvious attempt to communicate.  A moment later, a voice came emanating from the monster’s mouth, speaking an older version of the same common language spoken throughout Aeterna, the same language that was ubiquitously used throughout the Bull Kingdom—older, but still perfectly understandable.

“What isss thisss visssion before me?” the monster hissed.  “New pilgrimsss?  Long hasss it been sssinccce the Elder One sssent sssuplicantsss….”

Some of the other pools began roiling and churning, though most of them weren’t overflowing quite like the central pool had.  The one immediately to its right, however, was the exception, as it began bubbling and overflowing as the draconic-serpentine head finished speaking, and a moment later, another monstrous dragon-serpent head surfaced.

It was nearly identical to the first head in general shape, but not in anything else.  Instead of glimmering dark green scales, it was covered in scales of the deepest blue, it had no fins on the side of its face, and its pair of horns extended backward toward its neck rather than forward along its face.  Its facial structure, too, was much different, with a shorter, more snub snout, and softer, rounder edges giving it a more feminine look compared to the first serpentine thing.

When it spoke, it made almost identical hissing sounds as its forked tongue played across its many sharp teeth, though the more understandable voice that followed took on a more feminine tenor than the comparatively deep voice of the first.

“Are they food?” it asked aloud.  “Many sssunsss have risssen sssinccce lassst have offeringsss been reccceived…”

“Perhapsssss not,” the first droned, its speaking cadence almost unbearably slow as it drew out the first and last syllable of every sentence, as well as lingering on every hissing sound it made in the language that Leon could understand.  “Why did you three come hither?”

Leon’s heart was hammering in his chest, the most primitive parts of his brain screaming at him to turn tail and run as far from this chamber as he could.  The more rational parts of his brain, however, knew that, with the power he could sense from these things, he’d never get far.  If they wanted to, these creatures could likely utterly annihilate his entire party, Maia included, with little effort.

He’d have to be very careful with what he did and did not say to them, though he managed to find some comfort in the fact that he felt no killing intent from either of these monsters.  For all intents and purposes, they didn’t seem hostile, and they seemed more than intelligent and willing enough to converse rather than fight.

Right now, conversation was a far more preferable way to deal with this in Leon’s mind than anything else.  He quietly let the magic in his body subside just a little bit—enough to not seem threatening, but still maintaining enough flowing through his circulatory system to retaliate or run if need be.  He also lowered his blade and assumed a more neutral stance as he took a couple of steps forward.

“We were tra…”  Leon trailed off, having almost been a bit too honest.  He started again, “My name is Leon.  I’m here… hoping for the answers to questions I have…”

“Quesssstionsss?” the first head hissed.  “I have anssswersss to many quessstionsss…  Many quessstionsss, too, have I…”

Leon put on the best smile he could, which with how nervous he was right now, wasn’t that great, and said, “Maybe we could trade, then?  Answers for answers?”

“Anssswersss,” the second head whispered as it began leaning forward, its serpentine neck—or body, Leon couldn’t tell which—more than long enough to bring it uncomfortably close to Leon.

It nearly came into contact with Maia’s water dragon, and Leon asked Maia to just let this thing pass.  Maia acquiesced, but Leon could tell she wasn’t happy about it.

So, with this massive thing now so close, it locked its softly glowing green eyes upon Leon’s golden eyes in a manner that had Leon feeling rather unsettlingly like he was a rabbit before an anaconda, and said, “Anssswersss are pleasssing, yet few pilgrimsss anssswer well enough to satisfy…”

It pulled back, giving Leon some mental relief—and some physical relief, too, for its breath was beyond rank, and it had been more than close enough for Leon to become abundantly aware of that fact.

“A… proposssal, human,” the first head asked as the other pools began to churn and roil, much like the first two had, “indulge me, and indulge you, I ssshall…”

Five more heads, each of different colors emerged from the pools, each with identical auras to the first head.

Leon paled in response and took a few instinctive steps backward.  His breath became shallow and worried, and he silently asked Maia, [How strong are these things?  Can you tell?]

Maia’s reply was brutally short and sent shivers of terror running down Leon’s spine.

[No.]

Each of these heads were, at minimum, possessed of ninth-tier strength.

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