The red sands, the glow of evening sun, the architecture of a civilization past: all gone as he pulled them away. Replaced in an instant by quite a bit of nothing. Some might find it a bit disorienting how quickly blackness completely swallowed up their vision. There was no Sun, no sky, no light as they landed in the deep caves of his wonder. The air was cool, damp, and still, tinged with the scent of mildew and almost deafening in its silence. Antisana knew what to expect on arrival, but he’d hardly given warning, besides that it was “dark and a little dull.”
The tunnels were narrow and winding, not even wide enough for a person to extend their arms to either side and not brush stone with their fingertips. They were tall enough that Antisana didn’t have to stoop when he walked, but it was a near thing. Someone keeping too close to one side might catch the top of their head against jagged rock.
After a beat of adjustment to the dark, maybe the sparse and glowing foliage would make itself apparent. The scattering of dim blue flecks mottled through their narrow field of vision did absolutely nothing to actually illuminate anything for anyone to see, but they were the only thing not swathed in complete darkness, and the luminescence they put off was meek at best, like they didn’t actually want to be noticed.
“Here we are,” Antisana rumbled softly, offering at least some acknowledgement that this was Correct and where they were supposed to be.
He always expected the people he brought with him would be disappointed. There were a few aspects here that no one would find in Destiny City, but it was hardly as extravagant as literally anywhere else Antisana had been invited across the cosmos. There were no beautiful plants or skies with strange-tinted atmospheres. There was no past civilization to admire, no history to study. It had only ever been one Knight, left to their own devices to do whatever was possible with just a single set of hands.
And Indra had come in and not accomplished very much at all. It was darker, colder, quieter with him as Antisana’s steward than it ever had been, as far as he could tell.
That was just the atmosphere he brought to the table, probably: dark, cold, quiet… solitary.
Except for this time. There were people with him now, and they could not stand around admiring the view. Antisana plucked open his space pocket and produced two button lights. A tap and the first illuminated. Angling the beam down the tunnel, he handed it to Maya. “There is not very much to see,” he admitted as he passed the second to Meninx. “But watch your head.”
There were a handful of spaces he’d outfitted to be more comfortable for himself, but this was not one of them. These particular tunnels he’d only seen once, when he’d moved the Code piece nearly a year ago. And given how low and narrow these walls were, he expected this was a path traveled only very infrequently. “It will not be a long walk,” Antisana promised as he set off.
Kyuseisha no Hikari
Shanyume
