SERVER: CARMINE
NAME: PetizaTiraPiedra
The Way Back
Petiza hated walking. Stone was honest; it stayed where it was put, unless you gave it a reason not to. Roads, on the other hand, were a waste of perfectly good legs.
She dropped her pack and searched for her Scroll of Escape. She trusted her axe, her earth-bending, and her own judgment. The first two had never betrayed her. The third was a matter of debate she preferred not to entertain.
She found the scroll beneath a coil of rope and began the incantation.
Halfway through, a voice surfaced in her memory.
Wait for me.
She clenched her teeth. Not now.
The ground shuddered. The words on the parchment seemed to shift beneath her eyes, though she couldn't tell whether the ink had changed or she'd lost her place. She tried to stop reading, but the final syllables escaped her mouth.
Then everything went dark.
She awoke in a narrow corridor, her pack beside her. The scroll was gone.
“Perfect,” she said. “A faulty spell, and no refunds.”
She pressed her palm against the wall and extended her senses through the rock. Her magic revealed an immense space on the other side, a chamber that couldn’t possibly exist there. She sensed pillars, arches, and something else: small irregularities in the floor, like bodies lying beneath a layer of stone.
She pulled her hand away.
She tried again. The chamber was still there.
With a sharp gesture, she ordered the rock to part. The wall cracked, but behind it she found nothing but more solid stone. No chamber, no pillars, no hollow space at all.
Then she heard three knocks.
A pause.
Three more.
Petiza froze. She knew that rhythm. She had heard it before, a long time ago, somewhere her memory insisted on keeping locked away.
She crouched and placed both hands on the floor. Her perception sank through the layers of rock until it found a hollow space. There were two figures down there. One lay motionless; the other had its arms stretched upward.
Petiza snatched her hands away so quickly that her knuckles struck the floor.
She remembered dust in her mouth. A thunderous crash. A tunnel ceiling collapsing while she held back tons of stone with trembling hands. Someone was screaming. Someone was telling her to leave.
She remembered escaping.
She remembered staying.
She couldn’t trust either memory.
“You promised,” a voice whispered.
“What did I promise?”
There was no answer.
Petiza got to her feet and ran. The corridor seemed to stretch with every step, though its walls never changed. She didn’t look back. When she finally found an exit, daylight blinded her.
She was in the city.
Her home was just as she had left it: dust on the furniture, tools beside the door, an abandoned cup on the table. Everything was in its place, and that should have reassured her.
Then she saw the scroll.
It lay open on the table, though she couldn’t remember taking it out of her bag. The incantation was perfectly legible. In the margin, a sentence written in her own handwriting read:
Don’t leave me here again.
Petiza stepped back.
Three knocks echoed beneath the floor.
She stood motionless. Then, slowly, she knelt and pressed her palms against the tiles.
Her magic sank into the stone, passed through the foundations, and descended into the darkness.
It found a hollow space beneath the house.
And something inside it.
She couldn’t make out a shape. She could only sense a hand pressed against the stone ceiling, directly beneath her own.
Petiza stopped breathing.
No. That’s impossible.
She withdrew one hand. The other remained pressed against the floor, fingers rigid, as her magic probed the stone for a crack, a tunnel, any explanation. There was nothing. Only solid, compact, unbroken rock.
Then the hand below moved.
One finger. Just one.
Petiza jerked both hands away and stumbled backward until she struck the wall. Her heart hammered against her ribs. She tried to convince herself she had misread the shape, that her magic had mistaken an irregularity in the rock for something that couldn’t possibly be there.
She slowly reached toward the floor again.
She never touched it.
Three knocks echoed beneath the tiles.
From the other side, something had recognized her.
Petiza didn’t touch the floor again, but something cold brushed the palm of her hand.
