We settle down to wait. While napping, I have a dream about Lictor chasing me around in black stone corridors. He's telling me about all the teratomes that live in the Monolith, while I press my hands on my ears and try to run away from him. I wake up angry and feeling like an idiot.

Rworg maintains his sword, sharpening it and working out small scratches and nicks in its blade. He tests the hammer out, tapping it on the black stone of the room.

He looks like he itches to hit something harder with the hammer, so I tell him to stop before he collapses the rest of the Monolith, folding us into pancakes.

I go through my arrows, organizing them in the quiver and practicing so I can grab the one I want without looking. Broadhead arrows for larger things. Iron arrows with coarse, dark, and heavy tips to use against anything magical.

Rworg asks me about archery. I explain to him the basics. He listens, but I get the impression it's more out of courtesy and boredom than anything else.

He's just about to start telling me more stories from his life in the desert when Finna and Hearn burst out of the black square.

"--ards!" Finna finishes her shout.

She stuffs a handful of bread into her mouth, chewing as fast as she can so she can take a new gulp from my waterskin.

"You just had to have all the food in there, did you?" she asks, wiping her mouth.

Rworg offers her a handful of nuts. She grabs them and stuffs them into her mouth, chewing with her whole face.

Hearn rubs the back of his neck. "I'm sorry. This place has changed since I was here the last time. I haven't seen anyone react to that place as strongly as she did."

"Ready to tell us what happened to you?" I ask. She already ate half of what we got from Jonun. I move my backpack out of her reach.

She glares at me, still chewing. After she swallows, she burps and leans back to rest on her hands. "I waited for you until I got too hungry to wait more. It was really boring. But I had a lot of time to think about what I saw."

"What did you see?" Rworg asks.

Hearn looks up. "Oh, I have heard that can happen here."

I stop myself before I ask Hearn what can happen. I rotate my hand at Finna, urging her to continue.

She looks to be somewhere far away. Rworg glances to look behind his back, following her gaze, but there's nothing there.

"There were... dreams," she says. "I saw this place like it was before. There were people wearing weird stuff. They didn't look like anyone I have seen."

"That is vague. Tell it better," Rworg says.

I grimace, expecting Finna to kick him or lose her train of thought, but she doesn't. She keeps looking at a corner of the room, where the walls meet the ceiling.

"I saw more rooms. This place is not just all corridors, not for real. Some of the walls move. There are hidden rooms. They made the stone grow or rooms shrink into not being there." She shakes her head, blinks her eyes. "It looked a bit like what you told me about the accordion corridor sounded. Except intentional, and not two idiots just smashing places. With my goddamn head."

"It was just one of us," I say.

"You're both still idiots."

Hearn smiles and clears his throat. "People have disappeared in here. They could be just stuck in some place like that," he says, nudging his head at the black square. "But maybe they found one of these hidden rooms? We have seen no bodies."

Maybe. Or maybe they turned into the whitelings. Perhaps mana cooked their brains and made them feral.

"We should find one of these rooms," Rworg says. "The machines the wizards left have rotted. This room holds nothing for us."

I open my mouth, but a rumble interrupts what I'm going to say. The stone surrounding us wails, resonating with the rumbling. It sings and groans as the tremors continue. Whatever any of us says or shouts is drowned out. The sound is immense, like a landslide is happening just on the other side of the corridor. The black stone vibrates and strains, but it's like the earthquake is happening to someone else, and I'm mostly hearing its sound.

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I'm looking at Hearn, his eyes and mouth wide open, when the light flares. The rumbling ends in a crack, loud enough to sound like a mountain snapped in half. Half of the room turns painfully bright. The line runs at an angle across the floor, cutting most of the room behind a wall of light, engulfing the black cube into it.

I kick back away from the light, toward the entrance. My boots scrape on the stone as I push away. Finna is sitting with her back toward the light, but she sees our reactions and how the light must paint us white and her shadow pitch black. She reacts as fast as me, jumping to her feet in a heartbeat.

The echo of the crack spirals back, different echoes with different pitches, one sounding like a boom and the other like a zing. Rworg grabs on to Hearn and wrenches the man to his feet, pulling them both away from the light.

I push myself up, turn around. I take three steps before realizing the tremors and rumbling have stopped.

The final echo dies out.

It's quiet.

"So, we're in a hurry after all?" Finna says. One half of her face is in stark shadow, the other lit white by the glare coming from inside the room.

Hearn is covering his mouth with his hand, gaze lingering on the light. "The last tremor was decades ago," he mumbles.

"It's still going on," I say, pacing around the corridor. "The Monolith is pumping mana out, but down here it takes ages for things to happen. But how is mana related to the tremors?"

"All the tombs are a mystery. It is futile to guess at their purpose," Rworg says. "Yet this tomb is larger than any I have heard of."

"It better not be futile this time," Finna says. "Damn it, I wish the elf was here. He would be so annoying about it, but he's the one who knew something about this stuff."

"We all wish the elf was here," Rworg says, placing a hand on Finna's shoulder.

Finna pats his hand, moving her face away from the light. Hair falls to cover her face, shadowing her eyes.

I let them, us, have the moment. Hearn stays silent as well, picking up the mood.

I sigh, and start pacing again. "Finna is right, though. Mystery or not, we have to do something about it. The mana has to be linked to the tremors and the tremors are linked to the shifts in time. We just saw that." I'm explaining the things as much for myself as for the others. "Disturbing the mana so it stops running is one option, but we have no idea about how any of this works. Mandollel would warn us against doing anything hasty. The flow of mana suddenly cutting out might cause even larger disturbances."

"Mana doesn't affect time," Hearn says. He starts to pace as well, going around in the opposite direction as I am. "Ambronite does. And ambronite is stone, lodged deep underground."

We walk past each other at our respective circles and our eyes meet. "So, if the mana does something to the ambronite…" I say.

"...moves it inside the earth, that would cause explain both the tremors and time running slower or faster!" he finishes.

"Now we have two of them," Finna groans.

I stop and spin to face Hearn. "This Monolith uses mana to affect ambronite!"

He does the same to me, eyes wide. "It would make sense!"

Finna slaps the back of my head. "Except we have no idea if that is even remotely what is going on. Hold your horses."

Rworg chuckles. "Let them have their think. But the thief is correct that we should not do anything hasty."

All three of us turn to look at him. Rworg faces our gazes for a moment. He licks his lips, then starts to blush. "I mean not when we're in the tom—" he interrupts himself, frowns. "From now on," he finishes, bright red and gazing at the ceiling.

Hearn clears his throat. "Wise words. Anyway! Perhaps searching for one of the rooms Finna saw in her vision would be a good idea? I admit I'm curious to see something none of us have found over the decades we've haunted these corridors."

"Rworg suggested that as well," I say, deciding to have mercy on the big guy. "It's the best lead we have. Maybe we learn something about what the Monolith does. That would be something to tell when he…" I trail off. Even if Rworg would solve the mystery of the unfathomable tombs, it will be thirty years before he gets to go home and tell someone about it.

Finna sees my face as I think furiously how to continue. She jumps up to her feet. "Enough sitting around! Who knows when the next tremor hits."

Rworg blinks. I have no idea if he went through the same line of thought as I did, but he lifts the sledgehammer and uses it like a cane to stand. "Agreed," he says, sliding the hammer into a loop on his belt.

Hearn's eyes go from me to Rworg to Finna, but he says nothing. He smiles a sad smile and dusts off his pants as he stands. "Lead on, Finna."

Finna walks with her hand pressed on her temple. I'm not sure if her head hurts or if she's trying to dig out the memories of the vision she saw. She's steadily getting grimy again, her hair tangling. Would she let me comb it? I bite at my lip and grimace, imagining myself asking and her glaring at me like I've lost my mind completely.

"All the corridor's are the same," she says. "But…"

She walks on like she has a hunch, pulled by a feeling. At every intersection she pouts, scratches her hair, bites at a nail. Then nods and picks a direction, leading us further down a corridor or another. How are we going to get out of here once we've done what we came to do? I realize it might not matter that Hearn's people have scoured the place, as the corridors might be like the entrance, folded and tangled, wrapping back to where they started.

A cold shiver goes through my whole body. We could get lost for good. Wandering the identical black stone corridors until we run out of food and water, running in circles without even knowing it.

Yet, Finna leads us on. She frowns and squints and scoffs, but leads us on. I stop trying to track the route we are taking. Hearn walks beside me, looking more worried with each turn. He licks his white lips, eyes flicking between Finna and the corridor walls.

"Thief. Where are you taking us?" Rworg says.

We've been talking in silence for so long that both Hearn and I twitch, startled by the sudden words breaking the steady monotony of our footsteps.

"Right here," Finna says, touching a black wall like any other.

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