The white-blossom forest was starting to grow dark.

A few hours of searching the forest hadn’t turned anything up, but that was mostly because of how thorough Balrim insisted they should be in the search. The Talsar was extremely vocal about not wanting to have to turn back around and comb the same area twice just because they half-assed it the first time, and the rest of the group was in agreement.

It meant they moved painfully slow and were incredibly thorough.

But they had nothing to show for it.

The problem was, they didn’t know at all what they were looking for. They split up to cover more ground, but Kaldalis had no idea if that was going to be effective. The Sunken Ruins had been literally underground. Was a slight indentation in the ground a sign of a buried passage? Was an immovably-large boulder covering the mouth of a tunnel? Was a wide section of tree roots a sign of an overgrown entrance?

They’d had some idea of where to start with the other searches. The underwater cave and impenetrable cliff were obvious sites for the exits, but the entrance to the previous dungeon would have been essentially invisible before the attack, and they had to acknowledge that they were looking at the same situation here.

And finding nothing wouldn’t mean that they’d missed it; it was possible that they were simply wrong about the exits.

“I can’t keep this up,” Martok said as it grew dark enough that Kaldalis could see the beginnings of the border of the globe of darkvision this game gave him. “I have too much else to uncover and catalog to be out here in the dark combing ground I’ve already documented.”

“We should probably call it as well,” Balrim called from off to Kaldalis’s left, obscured by trees. “I don’t want us to miss it in the dark.”

“We can keep searching for another hour or so,” Kaldalis called back, though he turned back to Martok and offered a handshake. “You don’t have to stick with us if you don’t want to. Giving us this starting point was all I expected.”

“I had to at least make an effort to see this through,” Martok said, grabbing Kaldalis by the forearm instead of the hand for a shake. Kaldalis returned it as best he could without expecting it. “Consider my maps at your disposal if your search is fruitless and you want to take another stab at it. As long as you don’t literally stab my maps.”

Kaldalis laughed. “Aww, I was really counting on that for a big dramatic moment.”

“You stab my maps, you get stabbed next,” Martok said, menacing Kaldalis with a dagger from his other hand and a sudden seriousness in his eyes. “Do not stab my maps.”

“I won’t,” Kaldalis promised, raising his hands in surrender with a chuckle. “I’d never disrespect someone’s work like that.”

“Good,” Martok said, giving a nod before heading back towards town.

Kaldalis waited until he was confident that the man was out of earshot. “Where the fuck did you find this guy?” he demanded, calling back towards where he’d heard Balrim’s voice earlier.

“He found us,” Balrim yelled back. “With all of our exploration, someone mentioned us to him in his donation stuff, so he came to us to help him fill out his maps.”

“We also needed a tank for when a certain someone was busy,” Myrin added from off to the right.

Kaldalis shrugged, not sure how to feel about that. Martok had seemed competent enough, even if he was a little eccentric.

“Well, keep looking,” Kaldalis said at last, “at least one more hour. I’m starting to feel a little hungry.”

With their agreement, they continued the hunt.

They were reaching the outer edges of the search area now, though Myrin had insisted that they should keep going out from this area in an expanding circle for at least another two hundred foot radius. It seemed a little much, but he wasn’t in a position to argue with someone he had to admit was smarter than he was.

He tried not to grimace at the memory of expecting her to need his help with simple math when they’d discussed theorycrafting earlier.

Continuing the search in the dark felt very spooky. After nightfall proper, he was reduced to his darkvision globe like usual, and while it didn’t affect his sightline that much - the limits of his vision were already relatively small due to the dense trees - it had a psychological effect on his perception of the surrounding forest.

It was distracting.

Every moment that passed, he expected a jumpscare. He was still technically within the white-blossom forest, so a treant was unlikely to attack him as long as he could clearly see the presence or absence of shed white petals on the ground. But that didn’t mean that the forest couldn’t hold other threats. The dark would be perfect camouflage for a daemonraptor. And there was no telling what might drop down out of the forest canopy above if it was lurking there.

He didn’t feel safe.

For a terrifying moment, he considered the idea that Ara - or something like her - could be dangling above him, tail coiled around a tree trunk, and eight arms clinging to branches, waiting for the moment to pounce and drive her face against his.

He found his attention directed upward, desperately scanning the pitch-black beyond his darkvision range for signs of movement that he had no way to detect.

Something caught his foot.

He told himself that the sound he made was a manly battle cry, or at least a gender-neutral yelp. Deep down he knew better, but acknowledging that would have been devastating to his ego. He didn’t have a clear recollection of whether or not he fully tripped and then hurled himself back to his feet, nor of when he got his spear out, but the next thing he knew, he found himself whirling in circles, menacing the forest with his weapon.

“Kal?” Myrin called from nearby. “Kal, what happened?”

Despite Myrin’s voice sounding close, Balrim burst into the circle of Kaldalis’s darkvision first, potion in claw with his arm cocked back to throw. Myrin emerged only a second later, greatsword raised to strike, and rushed to his side, standing where she could watch his back.

“Are you alright?” Balrim asked, lowering his arm, but still looking around cautiously.

“Something caught my foot,” Kaldalis said. He was still looking up at the darkness above, unable to dismiss the mental image of Ara waiting in the pitch darkness for her moment to dip down and yank him into the trees like the Predator. “I may have overreacted a little.”

Myrin lowered her sword with a sigh. “You about gave me a heart attack. I thought something had happened.”

Kaldalis looked down at the ground where his foot had stumbled. It looked like his foot had caught on the edge of a stone, rather than a snakelike coil catching his ankle. He’d hit it at such an angle that it had popped out of the ground, leaving a perfect little rectangular hole in the dirt.

Wait.

Kaldalis knelt down and picked up the displaced stone, turning it over in his hands. It was covered in mud, but as he handled it, it was unmistakably a sharp-edged rectangle.

“This isn’t a rock,” he murmured, reaching with his other hand for the hole in the ground it had left. Feeling at the rain-softened mud, he dug in and pushed to the side. The dirt moved out of the way but he felt another stone edge, and pulling gently, he peeled another perfectly rectangular stone out of the ground.

Not a stone.

“It’s a brick,” Myrin said, kneeling down next to him and taking the brick from his hand, brushing it off with her other hand.

“There’s something here,” Kaldalis said, looking down at the ground. “Something unnatural.”

“Maybe just more ruins?” Balrim offered, stepping up on Kaldalis’s other side, though he stayed standing. “I don’t want to get my hopes up.”

“That’s fine,” Myrin said, waving a hand vaguely in the air before she produced a shovel - presumably from the mining menu. “I’ll get my hopes up enough for everyone.”

Balrim joined Myrin in digging, and Kaldalis took just a moment more to join them, since he wasn’t as familiar with the mining menu to produce the tool. He joined Mirin digging in, uncovering more bricks, while Balrim scraped the mud off of what they’d already uncovered, giving them a more detailed view of what was beneath their feet.

Kaldalis had initially expected a staircase. What they uncovered, though, was a flat brick surface. Kaldalis wasn’t sure if it was the floor of whatever had stood here, or the roof of a building that had been buried entirely.

“So okay, we found something,” Kaldalis said after they’d uncovered about ten square feet of brick. “What do we do?”

“Well, it’s clear there is - or was - something here,” Balrim said, slamming the head of his shovel into the dirt and leaning on it. “But I feel a bit vindicated for my caution. This is probably just ruins, not a dungeon entrance.”

“What do you mean?” Myrin asked. “Listen.” She slapped her shovel against the bricks a couple of times. “Do you hear that?”

Balrim crossed his arms over his chest. “What, the sound of metal on brick?”

“Shush,” Myrin said, fixing him with a glare. “Really listen.”

Kaldalis held his breath as Myrin smashed down on the bricks again. Balrim sighed and shook his head immediately, but Kaldalis thought he heard something.

“Is that an echo?” Kaldalis asked.

“It’s wishful thinking,” Balrim said. “You’re hearing what you want to hear.”

Myrin scoffed angrily and wedged her shovel in between two bricks, popping one of them up, and then sliding it into the gap, pulling more bricks up and out of the ground. There was a second layer below, and Myrin peeled that layer away as well. The whole surface shifted slightly, and Kaldalis moved to hop back off of it as Myrin worked.

As he shifted his weight, though, the ground gave way.

Kaldalis and Myrin fell into darkness.