Zephyr watched the gate of The City Whose Wall Will Hold Up The Sky close silently. He was outside now. No longer within the confines of the wall, he needed to speak the language of those who lived out here.
The city he stood outside was named Pillar.
It was a place he'd lived in since he was born, 44 Summers ago.
Well, he'd inhabited it. It was barely beyond the 17th Summer of his life when he began magical education. Since then, he'd had nothing to do but listen to tutors and read books. There was no point in going outside to a closed space he'd seen every cranny of already.
So understandably, he was ecstatic about not only being outside the institute, but the city itself.
Looking around, the city was less like a pillar than the mountain range itself, peaks taller than the highest towers, standing high above the sea of white fog that danced turbulently below. Dark rock jutted out from the pure, clean snow, painting the mountains chaotic patterns of grey and white in the sunlight, as if they were of metal.
That must have been what the Iron Peaks, or as the Silver Ones had called them, the Blacksmith's Jagged Cloud-Breakers, had been named for; Zephyr realised.
The range opened up into a valley further down, a green crack worming through the spikes, but the way down was steep.
A conundrum, already.
At this point, one of his peers or tutors would have simply cast a flying magic to get there, or maybe beyond. It would have been a simple matter of using their magic, a task that wouldn't take even a second.
For Zephyr, it was out of the question. Flying magic took hours for him to perform, and it didn't even work anyway, since the spell needed to be recast constantly to change direction, or even keep them off the ground.
For Zephyr, a clear path was needed, or else he would have a lot of trouble getting anywhere.
But of course, it was a mountain range that he was standing in. More specifically, one chosen deliberately for the purpose of being nigh-impossible to traverse without magic on the level of the Silver Ones. Magic that he didn't have access to.
Invisible barriers were scattered left, right, and center; but his race, Zephyr knew, weren't idiots. If an anti-magic field was deployed in some kind of attack, there would be escape routes that didn't require the use of magic. There would be one somewhere, without a doubt.
He figured it best to start climbing.
The sun was already beginning to fall behind some of the peaks when Zephyr found a colossal gash in the mountainside.
Icicles crawled from the ceiling as if reaching out the light sheen of frost on the ground. The rock he was standing on was a few metres higher than the ground below it, but there was a slope up to a narrow path a few dozen paces from the base of it, twisting like a snake until it reached the mouth of a perfectly circular tunnel. Clearly, there was once water in a pool below it, but it had frozen into a flawless mirror of ice that could have been skated on if Zephyr had so wished. He had to make an active effort not to slip and fall as he crept across it apprehensively.
It was obvious at a glance that this place had gone unmaintained for centuries, possibly more, as the natural order had long since begun to take back its land. Frost and snow permeated every crevice and overflowed as icicles from the ceiling and floor alike. The cave itself seemed natural, as despite the mouth of the tunnel being present, there was another opening near the back, tall as the hills themselves. The place still seemed like it was outside in open air; the sunlight reflected off of the snow and flooded through the gaps in the rock, and the ceiling was high enough to accommodate the Institute itself.
Zephyr's breath still formed small clouds in front of his face, and the light winds that spiralled in the tunnel as he stepped in, making the ends of his scarf dance like a flag.
How old was this place? A thousand Cycles? Two? Ten? His mind leaped at all the possible circumstances that his path could have been created in.
Perhaps it was a matter of urgency, frantically carved in a desperate escape attempt by refugees or prisoners.
Perhaps every curve and every step had been carefully crafted by expert architects as a matter of preparation.
Or perhaps it had even been carved backwards, by the original pioneers who had explored these mountains, as full of anticipation and curiosity as he was for what lay on the other side. The explorers would certainly have never expected someone to be as excited about an unknown world on the opposite side that they had started on.
Of course, the world wasn't completely unknown to him. The books he had read had a very in-depth and intricate documentation of customs and language of the outside, but reading a book wasn't the real thing by a long shot, and he wouldn't know everything about it in the least.
The steps in the tunnel weren't steep or icy, so he hurried on.
The tunnel finally opened up into the verdant expanse he'd seen earlier from above. That tiny view hadn't prepared him in the least.
It was difficult to see much at night, but the light of the fireflies in a waltz around flower petals was enough to illuminate the emerald leaves sprouting from the soil, the rushing of water among the rocks beside it.
The only plants Zephyr had encountered in person before had been trees in farms and wood factories inside the city. He had never seen an area before in which even grass had spread so far untamed. A lone, wild tree that only could be described by him as overgrown past the threshold of chaos leaned over the narrow stream atop a small, grassy mound.
He had no end of questions about this new landscape. Why did the plants seem to lean towards the water? How did the insects glow? Why were they so obsessed with the flowers? Even the stars that he'd seen every day seemed brighter and foreign above him.
There wasn't enough time for that. He could find all he wanted later, but he had been walking in an alien wilderness all day. He wandered up to the tree, sitting down at the base of it. He held his hand out at the ground, his hair turning to white.
But while he didn't have time to light a fire the mundane way, the arcane method would simply take even longer. By the time he'd finished, it would doubtlessly be after dawn, and he wouldn't even need it anymore.
He simply curled up beneath the tree and shut his eyes, listening to the water.
Zephyr awoke the next morning with a great deal of effort.
His body was stiff from where he'd been sleeping on a combination of rocks and a few pieces of armour, and it hurt his joints to move.
Clearly, he needed to be better prepared to camp out in future.
The sunlight was beginning to crawl over the mountains now, and at the end of the valley, there looked like a cliff, overlooking a town of some sort. Seclusion was all well and good, but somebody somewhere was bound to find you eventually if you just stay in the same spot, he noted.
He began to make his way down a path, nearly tripping over a stone in the ground with a few letters marked in it, but it was still a great deal less painful than his climb the previous day. It wasn't too long before he reached the place. He loitered around the border for a little while, though, staring intently at what must have been a wooden signpost. There were an awful lot of signs pointing further into the place, one of which was marked as "I N N S".
He had had enough practice with reading the language of outsiders, but the wood was still marked nonetheless with simple, alien shapes, each of which had no meaning on their own. In the Silver Tongue, each letter was equivalent to a word, but here, each letter was naught but a sound.
Who was truly the outsider here, Zephyr wondered?
He made his way into the town, eventually finding one of these inns that the sign had mentioned. He had been conjured by his enchanting tutor, Evanescent, some currency which he could trade for goods such as food.
The concept of "buying" was also a foreign idea that he didn't think he'd come into contact with.
The ability to save up work and expend it elsewhere in exchange for something completely unrelated seemed odd. Surely the magicians of each town simply need to do nothing but conjure these things and give it to the population?
Nonetheless, he managed to hold a ten-odd minute discussion with a barkeep on how he could buy some food, before finally doing so, leaving a rather long line waiting in his wake and receiving the attention of everybody in the room as he sat down at a table, the waiter making it over to him in due time.
"I never imagined finding a Silver One stopping by here," he commented offhandedly. "What are you doing down from the mountains?"
Zephyr cleared his throat loudly with more than a touch of pride with his confidence with the language. He had, after all, gotten the general gist of the question.
"I am down from the mountain because I am here to look for the Endless Dungeon!" he declared. "Do you know about it?"
"...Well, yeah, everyone does," the man shrugged. "You talk like you don't know how to get there."
"Do you know how you get to it?" Zephyr asked.
"There's a field about a week's walk north from here. If you start now, you can get there by the time the entering begins."
"Oh," he blinked. "I didn't know that. Should I have a map?"
"Nah, just keep walking and you'll see it. It's impossible to miss."
"...Impossible means it is not possible, doesn't it?"
The waiter nodded bemusedly, prompting a chuckle from Zephyr as he puffed up with pride.
The field was odd once he arrived. It was lit magical runes, not unlike the fireflies around the plants he'd seen before. To the outsiders, he imagined, it would look fantastical and exotic, but he was very used to it by now.
There were also people of all kinds there, packed together like grains of sand in a desert.
Interestingly enough, more than one conversation was happening around him, complaining about a desert.
Eventually, someone else spoke up loudly, talking about everyone still standing up getting "executed". Whatever that meant. It certainly wasn't a word he was familiar with.
Not long after, a red orb soared up into the sky, light erupting from the ground.
Zephyr was unfamiliar with the common language, but he was, by no means, an idiot. He recognised the magic instantly: a dimensional distillation phenomenon, separating the crowd from the world and sending them into the Endless Dungeon.
Having experienced something similar before, he wasn't at all surprised when his senses stopped working.
There was a void.
Zephyr drifted gently through it. He didn't move his arms or legs. He didn't need to. His eyelids opened with what all the effort of standing up to see some kind of... something. With it came anticipation, excitement. Zephyr knew he was asleep, but...
Wait.
He knew he was asleep? That wasn't right. Zephyr didn't get dreams he was aware of. So it was magic.
He looked up at this thing that was more eldritch than the most ancient of the Silver Ones, feeling it root through his very being.
And then it spoke.
[glow=white]"O mortal who dares venture into mine fortress. Let me ask thou, what is it that thou desire?"[/glow]
[glow=white]
[/glow]
Venture into a fortress? The only place Zephyr was looking for was...
The Endless Dungeon. It was communicating with him. The Dungeon itself was sentient? Could such a thing have come about naturally? Then, of course he would tell it what he wanted. It would be rude not to, given that it itself made up the core of his desire.
"I want to know about what you are!" he called out excitedly. "You're the place in the world I want to know all about the most of all! Please, can you show me?"
There was only silence in reply as the empty sea of darkness faded away.
Necessary Survival Equipment (Food and Medical Aid)