The corridors stretch forward and back. Finna starts complaining about her head the moment we leave the area where the time ran faster. She winces and squints her eyes, throwing glances at the walls.

"What is it?" Rworg asks. He walks last, behind Finna, making sure nothing catches us from behind.

"I can feel the mana behind the wall. It's like a big river, held back by an eggshell. I can see..."

"What do you see?" I ask, turning around. I'm walking in front, bow in hand. If something comes at us from the front, there's no one standing before me and getting in the way.

"The stone around us is crumbling. It withers. How can rock wither?" Finna says, touching the wall with her fingers. Her eyes are glazed, staring through the stone in front of her.

"This happens to some people in the tombs," Rworg says. He grabs on to Finna's shoulder and shakes her roughly.

Finna's head flops from side to side before her eyes focus. She snarls and kicks at Rworg, snapping her leg straight up. Her heel only barely misses his chin as he pulls his head back.

"Nice kick," Rworg says.

"People see visions in the tombs?" I ask, hoping to get them to focus again.

Finna pouts but stops to listen. She again brings a hand to her face, rubbing her right eye with her palm. The headache is probably the real reason why he doesn't go after Rworg instead of being interested in the explanation.

"Not all tombs. Not all people. But sometimes there are visions," Rworg says quickly. He must have seen the opportunity to avoid a kicking and grasps it. "Visions of the past or the future. A companion old, dead, or young. Bones bleached by the sun, shining on them in the dark below the ground. I have seen none."

I sniff at the air. "I haven't seen anything either. The air is thick, and there's a pressure to it, but that's it. Lictor said we two are very bad with magic. That has to be the reason?"

The discussion dies down. Rworg makes a noncommittal sound, Finna presses her lips together so hard they are white.

We walk on the black stone, surrounded by black stone walls, a black stone ceiling hanging above us. Sometimes the corridor splits off into different paths. There's no way to tell them apart or guess where we are. We must have walked for hours inside the Monolith. Far enough that I wouldn't be surprised if we suddenly popped out in the middle of Rworg's desert in Kerthar. I stop for a step, as I realize it might actually be a possibility. Who knows what the tombs are doing with space and where the corridors lead?

At every intersection and new corridor splitting off, Finna picks the direction. She tilts this way and that, walking close to the walls, and leads us to where the mana is going. She says it thunders just beyond the wall. I don't know how it feels for her, but if she's putting it like that, it has to feel pretty intense.

We don't see any more whitelings. Rworg tells Finna more of what we did while she was dead. Is this what being an adventurer is like? Someone dies, then they get resurrected, and everyone keeps going like nothing happened? I note Rworg spends a lot more time describing how we killed a bear than him dragging Finna around on the ground, rope tied to her ankle. Finna doesn't sound nearly as impressed as she should about the bear, but she's from the city, so she doesn't understand. A bear!

Rworg tries to skip over the part where he used Finna as a sledgehammer to break the corridor wall, but Finna remembers and starts grilling him about it. I walk faster to avoid anything that might end up happening.

The corridor ends in another sharp intersection, splitting into two. I look in both directions, but there's nothing to see. Only more corridor. "This place is a maze. Are you sure we're getting nearer to something?" I ask.

Finna walks next to me and pushes a hand into her hair. Like her nails, it shines thick and lustrous, like the mane of some legendary animal. "How should I know? I just follow where the mana goes. It has to go somewhere, right?"

"All rivers flow to the sea," Rworg says, stepping to stand on my other side.

"Is that relevant, though?" I ask. "Wasn't the problem that the mana is being sucked out, not flowing in?"

Rworg slaps me on the shoulder. "You are the one with the plans, with the elf standing and scowling in Kerthar."

Great. But I guess it's true. I'd rather be the one making the plans than the one seeing what happens when Rworg charges into something he can't handle after all.

The smell of ozone is lighter here, the air a bit clearer. Finna stands a bit straighter and grimaces less. "Are you feeling better?" I ask.

"A bit, yeah. It's weird. I follow where the feeling leads, but the pressure is also becoming lighter, now that you mentioned it."

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Rworg thumps his fist into his palm. "When we get there, we will know what it means."

He really seems invested in avoiding any sort of unnecessary thinking. I search Rworg's face for something, I'm not sure what. He licks his lips, gazing hungrily into the direction that Finna points to. He taps the floor, hands opening and closing.

"Let's go," he says, marching off into the corridor.

Finna shrugs and follows. I sprint to catch up. I don't want them to push into some area of the corridor where time moves faster and disappearing into the distance, feet pitter-pattering on the floor, voices squeaking. There have been some areas where the lights faded and became stronger, but walking into them hasn't felt like anything. There's nothing to gauge how fast or slow time is moving, as there's nothing in here. No trees, or stars, or animals.

Finna grimaces, Rworg huffs, I listen.

We walk.

Another door closes our path. It's in even more disrepair than the one from earlier. The handle crumbles in my grip as I grip and try to move it. The rust stains my hand brown and red.

"My turn!" Rworg shouts, stepping his leg backward, bracing for a kick.

Finna spins around and slaps a hand on his face. Not hard, but enough to make him flinch and interrupt his kick. "No, it's not. What is wrong with you?"

"The handle broke," Rworg says, pointing a finger at the door.

I think. The handle was rusted through. Even more than the one before. The wood looks almost the same, but maybe wood ages differently. How long does it take for iron to rust and for wood to petrify? My thoughts return to Gran's lessons. She never discussed timeframes. Lille talked about preserving gear against rust. I can pull from what she told to estimate what might have happened. The door--

The hinges crack, and the door drops to the ground, falling from its position on the wall. Finna yelps, and jumps sideways. Rworg grabs my arm and yanks me back. The door slams onto the floor. The sound is exactly like dropping a slab of stone on stone.

"Pay attention, zone-out boy," Finna says.

I shake my head. "The door fell?" I ask. I realize seeing Finna tinker with the latch, sawing through it with some sort of thin serrated blade pushed through the crack between the wall and the door.

"Huh?" she says, pointing a hand at the door on the ground. "The hinges gave up when I nudged it."

"Imagine how far I could have kicked it," Rworg says.

"Never break a door behind you," Finna says. "Leave it so you can open or close it. Have you never broken into anywhere?"

I run my fingers over the door. The surface texture is exactly like stone, with grains like wood.

"Snap out of it," Finna says. "You wanted to find a control room. If there's a door, there's a room."

I nod. Let's hope she is right, so we can get out of here as soon as possible. She has a headache, and Rworg is acting rashly, running into things head first. He's already inside, looking around the room. He points to the ceiling, craning his head back. "The mana goes up."

I touch the door once more. It's coarse and gray, the wood grains visible and like they have been worn deeper by running water. Maybe this tomb has moisture, unlike the ones in the desert. This one is in the middle of the forest, so it would be logical.

"Whoa, so it does," Finna says. She's standing next to Rworg, looking up at the ceiling. A light falls on their upturned faces from above, flowing through colors. "It's being sucked up somewhere. My head hurts less."

That is pretty interesting. If all the mana flows here, how can there be less mana in the air? Maybe elsewhere it diffuses into the air--

"Oi! Come on! Leave the door and come help us figure this out," Finna shouts.

"I wasn't thinking about the door," I say. I was still kneeling beside it, though. Dusting my hands, I get to where Rworg and Finna are looking at the ceiling.

Rworg points up, squints into the light. "Is it brighter or the same as in the previous room?"

"Pretty much the same," I say, peering up as I get to where he is standing. Light blasts my face, warm and blindingly bright after the dim corridors. "It flows in from more directions, and the strands are thicker, but they flow slower, see?"

"No," Rworg says, squinting. "How can you tell?"

"It... just does?" I say. I can't really explain it better than that. It's obvious. Time is running faster here. Maybe it runs faster the further and further we get into the Monolith. The change must have been so gradual that I didn't spot the change in illumination, even if I was watching it for the whole time we walked. It would explain why the door was in such bad shape here, and if the time in this place runs faster than in the surrounding area, then the mana flowing in from the slower parts of the Monolith gets diluted or spread out when it flows into this faster moving area. Maybe I could have explained it better, but Rworg probably wouldn't have listened. Too hasty, especially lately.

"Ok, I'm taking over," Finna says.

"What?" Rworg says?

"Sorry, what?" I say. I'm not completely sure what she said or meant, as I was still thinking about what would be the right word to use to explain the effect of sped-up time on mana.

"You two are acting weird," Finna says, pointing a finger at Rworg. "You are acting dumb. It was fine and funny before, but now you're just being stupid." She moves the finger to point at me. "And you're zoning out, thinking who knows what. Get a grip, you both."

Rworg frowns. He scratches at his neck, craning his head to the side. "When the situation calls for decisive action, I will act."

"What, like a door calls to be kicked instantly when you see it?"

Rworg's frown turns from confused to worried. His finger stops. "Well. Perhaps not."

I think back on the situations that we have been in, tapping my nose as I think. Already outside, he challenged the bear directly, but that might still have been him still acting normal, making sure the bear attacked him instead of me. In the infinite corridor, he could have at least explained things to me properly before starting to bash the wall with her head, out of all things. In the large hall, I had to stop him from just marching directly into the middle of the whitelings, and he still did, a moment later. He even broke both the handles on the door, but those were pretty rusty, I have to admit. After that, it has gotten only worse.

Finna looks at me, with a look on her face. Her eyebrows are raised, and she's tilting her head to the side, arms crossed over her chest.

"What?" I ask, lowering my hand from my face.

Rworg has a similar look.

"Ah," I say. They must have been waiting for a while. "I see what you mean, ok."

"Finally," Finna says. "Now, was there supposed to be machinery? Where is it?"

"Maybe we are not yet at the control room?" Rworg says.

I look around the room. There's nothing in it. Another way out, with no door. The hole in the ceiling, and some scrap spread on the floor.

There hasn't been scrap anywhere else in the building.

Well, dang.

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