Cid walked through the doors ofthe Earth Shrine with the others, keeping to the back of the group.

He liked to be able to see all of them, not least of all to keep an eye on the Shadowfinger. He didn’t want to lose anyone on this quest.

No sooner had he passed over the threshold into the earthen corridors beyond than there was a slam behind him and they were plunged immediately into pitch darkness.

“Eep,” said Elrann.

“Fire,” said Ryn, and an orange glow appeared a little way ahead from a small flame that Ryn held up on his palm, illuminating everyone’s tight-lipped faces.

“Well that’s just going to slowly use up your mana,” said Cid. He noticed a shape on the wall next to them. “Here, look, there’s a torch here.” He removed the thin wooden torch from its holder on the wall and held it out to Ryn, who lit it with his flame. The tip of it, which seemed to be made from some sort of resin, burned bright and smokeless.

There were no more torches.

“Someone other than Ryn should carry it,” said his Granddaughter Nuthea. “He has access to fire anyway--it makes sense to spread it out among ourselves.”

“Thank you, but no thank you,” said Huld with a smile when Ryn offered him the torch.

“Why not?” Ryn asked.

The Farrian monklicked his lips as though he did not know how to respond. “In honesty…I do not trust your fire...”

“But the builders of this Shrine clearly put this torch here for people to use.”

“I see that. But I would prefer to keep my hands free, if it is all the same to you.”

“Alright—suit yourself.” Ryn gave it to Sagar instead. Cid judged the skypirate would be secretly grateful to have a means of defending himself against any more earth-creatures, given how ineffective his wind attacks had been on them, in any case.

At least now they could see a little further down the corridor as Sagar led the way and they continued down it. It stretched away for about twenty paces and then came to an abrupt stop. When they reached the end of it, they found two more corridors branching away from it in opposite directions.

“Which way?” said Ryn, looking at Huld.

“I am afraid I do not know, young master,” the monk said graciously. “Just to remind you, I have never been here before.”

“Cid?” asked Ryn.

“I’m not sure either,” Cid said. “We never managed to obtain the Earth Emerald before in my previous adventuring party. If in doubt though, always go with your nose. That’s a well established principle in life.” He tapped the side of his own nose.

Sagar sniffed theatrically. “Well, actually, now that you mention it, the air down this way does smell a bit...off.” He waved his torch in the direction of the right-hand path and the flames flickered, changing the shadows on the wall beside them for a moment. “Kind of...fishy. And eggy. But this way…” He gestured towards the left-hand corridor. “This way, the air smells cleaner, crisper.”

“Let’s go with that, then,” said Cid, trying to ignore the sweat forming on his palms. “In honesty, he had no idea which way to go, but he needed to appear as if he knew what he was doing. He didn’t want the group to lose confidence in him. And this was as good an approach as any other.”

They took the left-hand path together and trudged off down it, following Sagar at the front and his torch which he held high, keeping a halo of orange light visible as a beacon for them to steer by.

Another twenty paces, and they hit another wall, another fork in the path, just as they had done a few moments ago.

“Another choice!” said Sagar. “What do you say, Old Timer? Do we go with the nose approach again?”

Why is he deferring to me again? I am here to guide, not lead.

“What does your nose tell you?” Cid said.

Sagar sniffed. “My nose tells me to go right this time. But my heart tells me this is a load of bollocks.”

“Captain Sagar!” Nuthea chided him. “Do not be so rude!”

Cid stroked his beard. “I must confess,” he said carefully, “that I am somewhat out of my depth here. We do appear to have found ourselves in something of a maze.”

“Yeah, no cochobo-poodoo, detective,” said Sagar. Cid swallowed a little mouthful of irritation that he almost let out at the pirate.

“I say we carry on with the smell approach,” said Ryn. “It’s not like we have anything better to go by right now--one guess is as good as any other. And Sagar--you’re wind-aligned because of having touched the Wind Shell. Doesn’t that give you a feeling for the air? Wouldn’t that also give you an enhanced sense of smell?”

Clever, thought Cid. He’s making the skypirate feel like he’s in charge. I knew the boy was leader material.

“Fine, whatever,” Sagar said. “Right it is then.”

Right they went, traipsing down the corridor in the dark but for the little bit of light that came from Sagar’s torch.

This time after about twenty paces, the corridor continued on in the same direction, but there was also another corridor that joined it, leading off to the right again. They had reached another ‘T’ junction, only from a different angle this time, coming in from the top-left of the crossbar of the ‘T’.

“Do we go down here?” asked Elrann.

“No,” said Sagar. “Smells off again. We carry on straight.”

They continued like this for quite some time, arriving at junctions and then allowing Sagar to lead them down whichever path he chose. The party fell completely silent.

One God, lead me, Cid prayed inside his head. Lead us. Show us the way to go, I pray.

Eventually, they hit a dead end.

Sagar must have seen it coming first, because the progression of the torchlight at the front of their seven-strong line began to slow, and then it stopped completely. When Cid paused in his tracks with the others, he could see the skypirate’s withering scowl in the torchlight, and a wall of imposing brown earth blocking the way lit up behind him.

“So much for following ya nose,” said Elrann helpfully.

“We are lost,” pronounced Vish, ever the optimist. He always chose the most opportune moments to actually say something.

“We’re not lost,” Cid said. “We’re just...taking a while to find our way.”

“We are lost, Old Timer!” Sagar yelled. “Your ‘nose’ suggestion was total chocobo-poodoo! I’m pretty sure these are the doors that we came in through! My nose wasn’t leading me through this place, it was just leading me along the current of the cleanest air that leads back out of the Shrine!”

Now that he mentioned it, Cid could see a thin vertical line running down the middle of the wall behind Sagar.

Whoops.

“What do we do now, then?” said Ryn.

“We turn around and try again,” said Nuthea. “We keep going.”

“Are you crazy, princess?” Sagar said. The torch he was holding shook as he spoke. “We have no idea what we’re doing! We’re literally fumbling around in the dark! None of us have the first clue about which way we need to go to get to this earth jewel! Not even baldy here knows which way to go, and he basically lives here!”

“Master Pirate,” said Huld, “I would like to remind you again that I have not been inside this Shrine ever before. I do not live here. I know as much as any of you do.” The monk opened and closed his hands a few times, Cid noticed. Uh-oh, he thought. Even the Farrian is getting tetchy.

“Everyone just try to stay calm,” Ryn said, and Cid was glad he did, because he had been going to. “It’s no use us arguing, this won’t help anything. I’m sure if we think about it carefully we’ll be able to find a way through.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” said Elrann. “You’ve got your fire protection.”

“Yeah, pup,” Sagar joined in, “and it’s not just like we’re a bit off course. We have absolutely no clue whatsoever what we’re doing. I mean, we haven’t even gone up a single level of this damn Shrine!”

Cid was beginning to get the impression that the pirate didn’t like being cooped up inside, and that he much preferred navigating the open sky.

“It must be possible to get through though,” said Nuthea. “Someone must have built this originally. Someone must have come here to hide the Earth Emerald at some point.”

“That is right,” said Huld. “Before it was appropriated to house the Emerald, the Shrine was used as a regular place of worship. I know that much.”

A thought occurred to Cid. “Actually, I suppose that it could be that the Earth Emerald is reshaping the shrine around itself.”

“Oh, well that’s just fantastic!” said Sagar, throwing up his hands and nearly setting Elrann’s hair on fire with the torch. “We’re trying to find a magical jewel that doesn’t want to be found, we have no idea how to get to it, and it’s reshaping its environment around itself to make it even more difficult to find! Absolutely bloody fantastic!”

“There will be a way to get through to it,” Cid said firmly.

“How do you know?” Ryn asked him.

Cid sighed. “It’s like I said to you earlier. The Jewels are hard to find, but they are not impossible to find. Not with the One on our side. I know because I have found four of them before. I know because four of us are already Jewel-touched. Others have taken this path before. I know because the One wants us to find the Jewels. It is our destiny to retrieve all of the Jewels and to protect them from the Emperor. It is the Will of the One. To find our way through we need to know that it is possible to get to the end. And we know that it is because we know that others have gone this way before and because the One is with us. We need take only the road that our heart leads us on, under the guidance of the One. The One will lead us.”

A brief silence followed the end of his speech, which he was rather proud of, and for a moment Cid tricked himself into thinking he had persuaded all of them, and himself.

Then: “Oh, great,” said Sagar, “well, if the One wants us to find the Emerald, I’m sure we’ll be fine. If the One wants us to get through this ridiculous magical shapeshifting maze in the dark, I’m sure we’ll find our way. If the One is leading us through here, I’m sure we won’t all die cold, naked and alone in the dark. What a load of cochobo-poodoo.”

As if to add insult to injury, the walls started closing in.

The earth rumbled and the doors behind Sagar remained closed but just started to move towards him.

Cid’s bowels turned to water.

“Pirate-man!” Elrann shouted first to warn Sagar.

Sagar span. “What in the hells?!”

The moving doors pushed him back into Elrann and he almost set her on fire again. Elrann stumbled backwards, creating a domino effect that ended with Vish being shoved back into Cid.

The doors kept moving forward, both of them shut, coming flat along the corridor towards them, and began to pick up speed.

“Run, you fools!” Cid yelled.

He turned and fled back the way they had come, holding the hilt of his sword in his belt so it wouldn’t knock against his leg.

He was getting too old for this, and he wasn’t very fast, so at the first passageway junction the others caught up to him easily.

“Which way this time?” cried Ryn.

“Easy choice, pup!” Sagar yelled as he caught up to them, pointing down the path that they had originally taken at the first fork of the Shrine.

In front of them, in the direction he was pointing, another earthen wall was rapidly getting closer.

They pelted in the opposite direction.

No sooner had they done this than a wall at the other end of the corridor started to close in on them.

Behind them, the first wall was still approaching.

The whole corridor was shrinking in on them.

“We’re trapped!” cried Nuthea.