Chapter 49: Chapter 49: Sara

Sara and the masked girl left the throne room together, took two flights of stairs down a dark hallway, and ended up deep in the castle’s bowels.

“Call me crazy,” said Sara.

“You are.”

“No, it’s a saying. It- Forget it. I just want to say I’m beginning to get the feeling we know each other.”

“Perhaps we do,” said the masked girl. “But it doesn’t matter.”

Sara’s sigh echoed along the widening hallways. There was no carpet here, so their footsteps clicked loudly. “You keep saying that. What does matter, then?”

As the air grew thick, the ground started to dip. They were headed underground.

“Closing the loop,” the masked girl answered. She stopped walking. They were facing a set of grand wooden doors crisscrossed with beams of iron, so tall they seemed to be made for giants. “That’s all I care about. Nothing else.”

A spiderweb of iron chains was nailed around the doorway, keeping whatever was behind them out, or anyone from getting in.

Sara took in the massive architecture. It looked completely different from the rest of the castle. There were no bronze accents and the quality of the wooden beams was several steps above the lighter, molded ones in the main halls.

The masked girl reached into her robes and took out the key. There was a single lock on the web of chains. With a click, the heavy iron fell to the floor like a dead snake. She stepped back. “I’ll be waiting here.”

“What about me?” Jack asked from Sara’s hip. “I would also like to stay outside the gate of ominous darkness, thank you.”

“Oh, you’re coming with me, mister,” Sara told him as she pushed against the doors. With a deep, groaning shudder, they swung inward. Black winds howled from the darkness, ruffling past Sara and making her shiver.

The masked girl held out an oil lantern. “You’ll need this.”

Sara took the lantern and held it up, revealing steep stone stairs descending into the void. She let out a breath and stepped in.

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As shadows parted in her wake, Sara noticed strange hieroglyphics painted all across the walls. Most seemed to be depicting creatures locked in battle, but there were humanoid figures mixed in.

She couldn’t make heads or tails of what she was seeing.

“They are travelers,” Jack explained when she voiced her confusion. “Starting from the olden days, Arcadia has been getting a steady stream of otherworldly visitors.”

“Prisoners, more like,” Sara said.

The walls grew further apart as the tunnels stretched on. Eventually, she reached the entryway to a crypt. There didn’t seem to be any other way through into the arena, so she went in, holding her lantern aloft.

Stone pillars stood in couples through the yawning darkness. Between each pair were statues of kings sitting on thrones of stone, each with long swords placed in their laps. Most of the blades had disintegrated away into nothing, smears of rust across stone palms the only hint they once existed.

“There were more kingdoms in the past,” Jack said. “But now, there are only three.”

“Can’t imagine why they’re dying out,” Sara said. "I mean, with those kind of rulers? Incomprehensible." She pressed on into the damp coldness. She wasn’t dressed anywhere near enough for this excursion, and she supposed it was only her high constitution levels that were keeping her from freezing.

The crypt ended in a final archway. Beyond it was darkness so thick Sara’s lantern could do little to break through. She spotted a shallow well carved into the wall, and remembering what the masked girl did in the library, she took out the lantern’s wick and stuck it in.

With a whoosh, fire spread along the walls, jets of orange and red coloring a grand coliseum. It was the size of a football field and caged in by stone walls that looked forty feet high.

Sara hopped down the small drop, dust fluttering as she landed on sand. Jack let out a grunt of annoyance as his skull clattered against her thigh.

“Must you do that?”

“Shh.”

Sara walked across the sand. The coliseum was wider than it looked from above, so much so that the light from the burning walls wasn’t enough to penetrate the middle of it.

Even so, she saw him.

In the epicenter of the gladiatorial arena knelt a steel statue of a knight. Covered in a fine layer of sand, the knight’s armor shone jet black underneath. A two-handed greatsword lay on the ground in front of him, and even from twenty yards away, Sara could feel the weapon’s keen edge.

She made her way closer, lantern held firmly out. As the light spilled across the knight, two bright orbs flickered to life inside his full-plated helm. He began to rise, serenaded by grinding gears and screeching metal.

Sara reached up and unbound the cloth around her chest, catching her sword as it slid down her back.

The knight unfolded to his full height. Towering over Sara, he said in a voice rough as sandpaper, “You are Bronzehaven’s new champion?”

“More like their mercenary,” said Sara. She took in the knight in his full stature, and tried to recall what form she took when her chaos peaked. “You’re a Berserker?”

“Yes,” said the knight. Dust rained from his shoulders, cascading down the length of his herculean form.

“How are you able to speak to me?” Sara asked.

“There is little I remember about my past self,” the knight answered. “But this I have retained during the hundred years I have been down here: My name. It is Shawn.”