The guilt was real as Dunwich finally teleported into her Wonder. As she always had before—several years ago, before Idrialite had purified into d’If and they had needed to spend some time laying low—she appeared on the highest cliff along the coastline. Standing at the foot of a great lighthouse, she could look out at an endless expanse of sea in one direction, or down at the scenic wharf and its surrounding town in the other. She frowned, regardless of where she looked.

Maybe it wasn’t fair to her own Wonder, but even the surrounding area made Dunwich’s heart (her real one, still beating in her chest, not the driftwood one she called a weapon) sink at the thought of the lighthouse. It certainly stood tall enough to cast an imposing shadow over everything……but as she stood beside the pedestal it rested on (considerably taller than Dunwich herself, even though her uniform gave her a very high set of heels), the sea stretched out before her, wild and open and free. More than its surface-level appearance, the Neptunian ocean teemed with things that vaguely she knew about but had never seen for herself: the ruins of vast underwater cities; several other Knights’ Wonders and the magic that sustained them, hidden below the waves; who even knew what else (certainly not Dunwich, that was who, because her Wonder rested entirely above the water, as far as she had seen).

Turning to take in the bird’s-eye view of the city, she sighed. A pang in her chest accompanied the wish that she could have ventured down there tonight, instead. On her previous visits here, Dunwich had often preferred going into the town, with its collection of little buildings that felt too quaint to be real (almost pointedly so, but only “almost,” as though someone had tried their best to avoid being too suspicious), its inexplicably winding cobblestone streets (with all the algae and strange grasses sprouting up between the cracks), its weird little alleys that veered off in unexpected directions and sometimes stopped too abruptly for it to feel entirely safe (but therein lay the excitement of the thing).… Obviously, given its existence as a material physical object, the town couldn’t run on any non-Euclidean geometry—but something about the way everything in the town all came together……

It didn’t feel quite right.

It felt like the town contained secrets that Dunwich needed to unlock.

It felt like one of the biggest things she’d missed while not coming here, with all of its mysteries and every corner that might have concealed potential danger……and yet, the shining golden trail—help sent down by the Code itself—only led toward the lighthouse.

Dunwich sighed as she stepped away, heading far enough down the path that, when she looked up, she could crane her neck and see the whole thing. Being fair, she supposed that she ought to have been impressed with the Wonder that fate had assigned her to guard. Aside from its height—which screamed “Do you think the architect was compensating for something?” even without accounting for the pedestal—the lighthouse had been fashioned out of black stone that seemed to drink in so much light, everything else around it looked duller by comparison. That was only a trick, of course, something that Dunwich’s eyes and brain must have made up in their desperate attempts at understanding exactly how the stone could be so dark and yet so vibrant, so inanimate and yet practically pulsing with life.

Or maybe that was just the fact that Dunwich’s Code Piece required her help.

Shaking out her candy-colored pastel hair, Dunwich climbed the gleaming steps up the pedestal. Her signet ring unlocked the door, and as she crossed the threshold, she fully expected that the golden trail would lead her up the several-storey, winding, narrow staircase. She’d never been to the top of the lighthouse before. Considering only the Knight of Dunwich could even unlock the lighthouse, keeping the Code Piece up there made sense to her.

And yet, the shimmering trail stopped in the middle of the floor.

Dead-center middle of the floor, in fact. Right at the decorative wrought iron insignia so dark, it nearly blended in with the black stone floor that surrounded it. Dunwich had seen the insignia before, every other time she’d come up here (at least, the times when she’d actually come into the lighthouse), but she’d never actually examined it that closely.

Kneeling on the floor, she wrinkled her nose at the design she found: a raised symbol of Neptune, surrounded by decorative bubbles that seemed to be made of glass, each containing their own symbol of Neptune. At one point, they might have had color. Whether thanks to time fading them out or the intensity of the black stone making them seem more anemic by comparison, though, the bubbles were fairly colorless. The one clear splash of color sat on the trident of the main Neptune symbol, just below the middle prong.

A little circle carved out of very dark jade, perfectly sized for Dunwich’s signet ring and with an indentation that matched the raised Neptune symbol. Taking a deep breath, she pressed the ring into the circle—and then gasped as some ancient mechanism creaked to life.

She scrambled to her feet, but without enough time to get off the insignia—which, she now realized, had actually been a platform this entire time. Slowly, accompanied by the churning of gears and chain, and the sharp sound of metal scraping against metal, the device lowered Dunwich down, down, down. As she descended into the dark, she held on to one of the chains beside her.

After a couple moments, the darkness lit up bright: gemstones driven into the wall, each carved with their own Neptune symbols and seemingly about the size of her signet ring. Hewn rock walls around Dunwich seemed close enough together that she didn’t need to fear falling off into the abyss, at least. This offered some comfort for her worried mind, but the fluttering in Dunwich’s chest didn’t stop until, finally, the platform landed back on solid ground.

The double-doors before her dragged along the rock floor as Dunwich shoved them open. Before her, the shimmering golden trail led onwards, down a path illuminated by more of the Neptune-branded gemstones, all placed at different strategic locations on the rough stone walls.

“……Oh,” came out of Dunwich’s mouth, and not entirely with full consent on her part. Looking around at where she’d found herself, the syllable flared up again: “……Oh.”

Well. She certainly had wished for her Wonder to prove more interesting than she’d thought before. Awed into silence, Dunwich strode forward, following the path that the Code had set.