The Priesthood

The next day, right after their classes, they followed the uncertain clue that they had; it was just a straw that they were trying to grasp at this point. But they had nothing else to follow, so they went into the cellars.

The cellars were cold and kind of damp, and the air that they breathed in had this strange smell to it—the smell of old and the smell of a cellar. To get to the cellars, they had to enter a small stairway with steep steps going down; all this to find themselves in a maze of narrow corridors and cramped rooms.

Everywhere they went, it felt like the ceiling was going to collapse on them. To call it claustrophobic would be an understatement.

Sure, they had a direction, but to figure out where was north when taking turns in corridors, which felt like they just brought them to similar rooms that were either empty or filled with things of the past, books that had seen better days, their pages crumbling because of the damage caused by alternating temperatures and the dampness.

It was difficult to figure out if anyone had entered some parts of the cellars in years, perhaps in decades, so all they could do was see if they could find any less-than-obvious clues, like, was there less dust than here? Could that be a footprint?

Noticing such things might mean nothing, and after about an hour of aimless wandering in the narrow corridors, they were ready to give up. They found themselves in yet another small room; this one was filled with bookshelves. On the bookshelves, there were jars of different sizes; each of them had some strange substance inside.

Within, there could be jam, but that was just unlikely.

At the back of the room was an old chair in front of a fragile-looking table. Kanrel sat down on the chair and took out his notebook. "I think we ought to somehow map our way down here. I never could have expected it to be such a maze down here."

In the notebook, he wrote all the directions that he could remember that they had taken to reach this room.

In the meantime, Yirn seemed to investigate the many different jars on the shelves, saying, "I think they are potions gone bad. There are labels on some of them, like this one that reads, ‘Male Dysfunction'."

"I suppose these are from way before Forsvarn’s time." He chuckled to himself. He then picked up one of the jars to peer into it from different angles. The stuff inside was very murky, and it was difficult to say what it contained. He then went to put the jar back in its place, only to stop midway.

"Kanrel, you read a wide variety of different topics just for fun, right?" He asked while still looking at the jar in his hands.

"Sure, that is what I used to do; why?"

"Well, how often do you think they used to use eyes in potions back in the day?"

"Let me think... There are some cases with certain potions, like those dealing with eyesight. Why do you ask?"

Yirn set the jar on the table in front of Kanrel and asked, "How often do potions about ‘male dysfunction’ have eyes in them?"

Kanrel looked at the jar; at first, he didn’t see much of anything, but when Yirn gave it a little shake, soon enough, two eyes could be seen for but a moment in the strange mixture. He stood up from the chair and looked for any container he could use; a bucket, he soon found, would be just fine, so he went ahead and poured the contents of the jar into the bucket.

He separated the eyes from the rest of the liquid and, with magic, cleaned the eyes from it. Kanrel placed the "cleaned" eyes on top of the table.

The trio looked at the eyes for a while. "This could mean just about anything. We can’t even be sure whose eyes these are," Yviev said abruptly.

Yirn let out a long sigh. "It almost feels like the world is making fun of us." He went back to the shelves and took another jar to empty inside the bucket that they had found. There they found yet another pair of eyes.

"Well, that was a waste of finding then," Yirn concluded and threw the jar toward a wall, shattering it into millions of tiny pieces of glass. "Sorry about that."

Kanrel observed the two pairs of eyes that were on the table and said, "These are animal eyes, probably dog eyes." With magic, he lifted the two pairs of eyes and submerged them into the bucket, saying, "Let's continue."

He wasn’t just going to give up now that they were down there. They spent the rest of the day going back to the beginning of the cellar and mapping out their way from there to the room that had the jars in it.

Exploring the cellars wouldn’t be a mission done in just a day, so they would return the next day and for many days to come. It could take weeks, but as it was their only clue, they would continue until they had something or were certain that they would get nothing out of the cellars.

Late autumn ruled the world above, and not many leaves adorned the tall oak trees outside. The number of daily skinny dippers would soon reach zero, especially when the cold winter would sweep the land, burying most of it under a veil of snow.

The winters near the campus were fairly unforgiving, as they weren’t perhaps that high up north, but the nearby mountain ranges would often allow their cold winds to freeze the grounds around them.

Most would be outside, enjoying the last they’d have of the most depressing part of the year, but every day for a week now, they had spent mapping as much of the cellars as they could. Later, they could use their map and the approximate surface area to figure out which buildings were above them at all times.

At the tail end of one of their days in the narrow corridors of the cellars, they finally found something of use. Withered rose petals that covered one of the rooms were purposely placed on the ground to form a shape: a circle of petals with two opposite quarters of the circle filled.

It was unknown what this shape meant, but they all copied it into their notebooks. They would have to research what it meant later.

Yirn walked into the middle of the shape and looked around him, then he went ahead and kicked some of the petals out of his way so that he could see what was beneath. In the middle, where the two quarters met like an hourglass, were words engraved on the ground, which read as follows: "Verum Infra."

"The truth lies beneath..." Kanrel soon muttered; he formed a code to blow the petals out of their way. In almost an explosive manner, the hundreds of petals rose with the conjured wind from the ground and blew in a majestic wave to the sides of the room.

Under those petals seemed to be elaborate engravings, circular shapes, and lines that seemed to almost cut the floor in half. It was a door. But how to open it? They had no idea.

They could read no other carvings, not a single hint or a simple word that could help them figure out this puzzle. Just the carvings that were, the words, and the sixteen circular sockets that were empty.

They took notes and went ahead; they would have to return to the room to figure out what the solution to this puzzle was; perhaps the local library had some old books that might give answers to their many questions.

By far, the day had been their most productive day down in the cellars.

Kanrel took it upon himself to figure out how to open the door, so he first went through the library across the cafeteria to find any books about the history of the academy. He would have a long night ahead of him as he meticulously read as much as he could during the night. Only to find nothing and have to stay awake the entirety of the next day.

He pushed through the tiredness and headache that had formed by the end of the day, and they ended up skipping one day of exploring the cellars. Instead, they all went around the campus looking for any books that could help them with their quest.

Soon the lack of sleep got to Kanrel, and he fell asleep while reading. The next morning, he woke up feeling like shit and wanted to sleep even more, but he had to continue with his studies and with their investigation normally. Otherwise, he would miss information that would be useful to him in the future, not to mention information that could very well clear his reputation.

A couple of days went by with them mostly reading history until Yirn got a daft idea: what if they used the eyes that they had found in the jars? Why would the eyes be there otherwise? He had pointed it out. He had desperation in his eyes; their graduation was only a couple of months away, and if their names weren’t cleared by then, it was unlikely that they’d get to graduate normally.

There had to be some sort of conclusion to the murders. The three rich families involved would not be satisfied with just letting possible suspects live their lives as they usually did.

So they navigated their way into the room with the jars, and one by one they opened each jar, hoping that there’d be more eyes and not just the two pairs that they had found at first. After emptying the contents of the jars, they found eight pairs—no more, no less.

They carried the eyes in a container to the room with the carvings. And placed an eye on each socket, praying to the Angels that there might be something, anything, that would happen. The eyes seemed to fit perfectly, so there was hope yet.

As Kanrel placed the last eye in its respective socket, they all waited in silence for something to happen.

Yirn cursed out loud, "Verum Infra, my ass!" He yelled and soon lost his balance as the ground began to shake under them. The floor with its carvings slowly opened up, forming a stairway that would lead even further down.

Kanrel and Yviev both stared at Yirn, and she said, "I guess we needed a password for the door to open."

"And I am not quite sure if it was the first pair of words or the second one." Yviev chuckled and helped Yirn up from the floor.

The young man seemed genuinely embarrassed. "I shall refrain from cursing at doors from now on."

"No, no, keep at it; maybe you’ll open the next one for us as well!"

Kanrel ignored their banter and was already observing the new stairway that had opened up. It was a very complicated mechanism, with lots of magic involved in its creation. There was no other way that stones would just move around without the help of any physical mechanisms.

Maybe he could reverse-engineer it? Maybe not now, but far into the future, when he had the required skills and understanding of magic.

"Shall we descend?" Kanrel asked while peering into the darkness. He had this itch to explore—an itch to find out what was down there. It didn’t have to have anything to do with their investigation of the murders, but just the fact that the door might’ve been something that had not been opened for a very long time made him want to be the first to see what secrets could be found.

Yirn pushed him slightly forward and said, "You can do the honors."

"What if there are traps down there?" Yviev asked when Kanrel took the first step down; her words made him freeze.

"Which is exactly why he should go first!" With a wide grin on his face, he gave another push to Kanrel, who was then forced to take another step.

What was with the priests and stairs? Kanrel wondered. It hadn’t been the first time he had descended a stairway into the darkness. And for some reason, he was sure that it wouldn’t be the last time either.