Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4
The elevator descended through a massive open space, walls that only rose halfway to the ceiling thinning my exit to two short hallways. The one to my right ended in a closed door—scaled, as was everything in the previous shrine, as for giants—so instead I took the one before me, already showing the glyphs of ghosts past its end. As I approached, I noticed them standing in front of a huge statue of a man that stretched beyond the glow of Karah’s Lantern, the majority of the illumination of this room. At best, I could see up to its thighs. The ghosts were in pleasant conversation: “How’s the western monument coming along?” Looking around more, I found other, shorter statues; some of them had fallen.
Looking back from here, I could tell that the elevator platform was significantly skewed, as though it had a bad foundation. I had been lowered on chains, so it hadn’t made much of a difference, but it was now resting at least ten degrees from flat, the high side towards the closed door. Even a mechanical place such as this one was not free from wear over the ages. An open door frame to the left beckoned me within.
Boxes the size of myself were strewn about the edges of the hallway, with some replacement grates for the floor among them. Hourglass-shaped red lights provided a dim illumination as I descended a set of stairs to a still-burning furnace. What could still be burning after all this time?
The room to the left opened up again into an enormous shaft, unmoving sets of gears on the scale of those outside this place spanning the center. There did not seem to be any architecture supporting further ingress, but as I did not need to fear a fall, the gears could serve well enough instead. Further in, a set of spiral stairs wound around the square shaft, allowing my progress. I noted a few platforms on my way down, but all held halls and elevators blocked by closed doors. I found another pair of ghosts. “The dreams of the people are calm again. I hope this whole ordeal with the king is nothing more than an old man worrying about nothing.” Perhaps Koroku calmed down before the end of his reign.
I reached the room’s floor, but a huge hole had been opened into it destructively, clearly outside of the original designer’s plans. Grated platforms led within, and a huge pipe stood up from it along with chains embedded in the rocky debris strewn about. A blue fog effused the space within the hole, and ghosts stood nearby. “We’ve found a fortune! There are multiple pockets of AER below. Loads more than we had anticipated.” What does AER do?
At the top of the grated platform was another ghost holding his hand up to his head as he looked down into the hole. “The elevator isn’t working again. Who keeps turning off the main switch?” Ah! That explains the nonresponsive diamonds I found on the way down. At the bottom of the grated platforms was one diamond that did respond to the Lantern, so I used that. Nothing appeared to happen. Ahead of me stood a door that seemed to be locked by three stone diamonds upon its face, engravings of gears behind each, with the appearance of deadbolts behind each gear. Another hallway led to my right, so I went that way, and found another responsive diamond on the floor. Activating that one lit the bottom-most diamond upon the door with a yellow border.
I had nowhere else I could go within the fog, so I retreated upwards and found that one previously unresponsive diamond lock was now ready for the glow of a lantern key. Using it caused the gear behind the diamond on the door adjacent to rotate, then sink into the door just before it swung open towards me. Past it was another unresponsive diamond followed by one that operated a chain-lifted elevator. This elevator brought me all the way to the top floor: I could tell because behind me was the closed-but-mesh door that allowed a view of the skewed entry elevator beyond.
Proceeding forwards, I found a room with a door between two enormous vertical gears, only a quarter of each visible outside of the walls. I spied two ghosts by a far wall, one with his hand leaning up against a memory of a scroll five times as tall as himself.
“Is this the last one?”
“Yes, the other dreams are locked up in the storage.”
What a strange conversation. Dreams were mentioned earlier, but this made it sound like they could be recorded and taken somewhere else. I ascended the platform to my right and found a pair of lit pentagons, almost like arrows pointed at the giant gears. From this vantage point, I could tell that the gears were in line with four chains, two on each side of the door, and one on each side of each gear. Using Karah’s Lantern, I was able to press down on the post in the center of each pentagon, and the gears turned, each lowering a layer of the barred door between the gears. Layers? When I moved away from one pentagon, the layer started to move slowly back up. More hastily, I pushed down on each post—the one controlling the back layer first—then rushed to and over and through the door. A one-way door, I supposed. Hopefully everything ahead of me would still be functional enough that I could leave.
The crumbling room ahead of me was dimly lit, but the edge was still in one piece and led me around to a mural depicting what could only be a throne room. Banners hung between pillars, and a crowned old man stood with a sword in one hand, point to the floor as a cane, while giving a pointing gesture to the crowd. The crowd, for its part, consisted of armored spearmen closest to the king, while others garbed more as priests were standing further away, in a few poses that held at least one arm in the air for each. A caption below it read,
Feast in honor of the Only God Koroku, forever is his reign. King of Kings and soon the ruler of the known world.
I supposed his followers had indeed made their way inside here. I jumped down into the central pit and found two ghosts speaking by four more of those giant scrolls mounted on the wall. “Should we remove these old scrolls before we start up the drill?” Judging by their real, and not memory, presence, the answer was apparently “No.”
The hole in this room was the same as in the main: a huge pipe rose from blue fog, and the stonework around it was jagged and crumbling. Did these people simply drill through the foundations of this place? I ran along the top of the remarkably flat pipe to another diamond switch within and activated that one. Nothing seemed to happen. I was sensing a pattern for this place; I’d have to go elsewhere to see what it did. One more switch opened a gear-locked door, and I was back in the main room.
I descended once more and found that another switch on my path was available to open a door. Past that was a raised platform with a switch with a statue of a spirit monkey watching. Why was that there? The switch activated the nearby horizontal gear system, a large pipe (bigger than myself in width, but half as big as the one I’d just walked upon) lighting up in blue at every joint along its twisting length. Finally, some decent lighting in here. The rotating gears had been fractured, rendering their movement necessary to ferry me across the room, but they moved slowly enough that it was not any danger to myself so long as I did not lose my footing between them. I was careful to avoid that.
Another switch caused the gears to move more wildly—not faster, exactly, but they started to move up and down, as though meant to be lifts rather than functional as gears. This allowed passage to one further switch, the activation of which caused the most central pipe section to light up with… a massive blue diamond. That had to have done something below!
On my way back towards the triple-locked gate I had seen before, I noticed one of the giant scrolls had been rolled out for reading.
When the Creator made the humans, the Keeper of Dreams came forward and stood guard. He saw the link between the Great Dreamer and Eternity. Sometimes fear and nightmares were born into the world, and when snatched up by human thought, they turned into horrible realities. So he prepared powerful songs of time and peace, stories to lead the nightmares astray, and he trapped them in eternal scrolls and stored them away. Horrible stories never to come true, stored and forgotten in his halls of sleep.
Was that what this place was supposed to be? Oh… That explains wanting to keep out the men of Koroku. But they failed, and the men drilled into the foundations. And now I wonder if this had anything to do with the Great Divide.
The triple-locked door’s diamonds were now lit with colors of red, blue and yellow, top to bottom, and the diamond switch before it was lit and ready. With a deep breath, I lifted Karah’s Lantern and opened the door. Beyond it was a room with pipes and boxes, and beyond that was the room of endless sky that I expected.
As I drew near, a great mountain rose from below. Partially down the mountain, on its left, first, then its right, were structures that looked to hold torches, though no flame was apparent within them. And slightly above the second torch and continuing downwards was a great slit of light splitting the mountain with an effulgent glow, made even brighter by my time in the dimly lit halls behind. When I stood upon this room’s Key-depicting dais, the mountain spoke to me.
“So the time has come, finally. Then this marks the time for the Keeper of Dreams to wake from this daydream, and to resign. How could I protect your people from the nightmares that lurked within their dreams as you ceased to believe in me? I doubt you will be able to overcome the shadow that lurks in your world, little human; there is a shadow in every human as well. A shadow called emptiness, that can’t be filled with power nor possessions. Shallow minds led way for the Void to come into existence, eating everything away. The Creator had to sacrifice himself to lock away the ravenous Void. And the lands and skies were shattered in the Great Divide.
“Heed my word, little human. Will you be able to find the last fragment before The Void does? For myself I claim the deep sleep, and leave my concerns to you. I am free.”
The medallion fragment appeared as the one before, though unlike the with the previous one, the mountain’s light faded and the mountain fell before the power fragment even reached me. It seemed an even smaller portion than the previous; the “last” fragment spoken of must be nearly half of the circle. I rose into the air again as the power flowed into me, then all turned black.
The two sides of the glowing triangle appeared. It seemed nearer, this time. More aware of my presence. But otherwise, the vision was the same, and ended the same. When I returned, the rocks of the previous shrine were barricading me near a familiar pillar of light that I knew would take me outside.