Adrian
After a day and a half of climbing the mountain, blindly going higher and higher with no idea what he was really heading towards, Adrian finally found what he had been looking for without knowing. A few yards ahead of him, the ground suddenly dropped away into a gaping chasm one or two meters in diameter and clearly far deeper. Adrian knew immediately that this wasn't natural. It was the entrance to the Underground.
He inched towards the edge and risked a look over the side. The sheer depth of the hole instantly gave him vertigo and he sat back on his haunches, trying to stop his head from spinning. Once he had composed himself with a few breaths he looked again. The bottom of the chamber had to be hundreds of feet below him, and in the small window of sunlight that reached down there, he saw the strangest thing: a patch of golden flowers that caught the light and seemed to glow.
Bushes rustled behind him and he scrambled frantically back from the edge, whipping around as he did so. "Who's there?" Adrian demanded. He glimpsed a human shape standing in the bush, visible in bits and pieces behind the plant growth. His pulse quickened. What was this person doing here? Were they following him?
The stranger hesitated for a few seconds before pushing out of the thicket into clear view. It was a girl who seemed to be about Adrian's age. She was pretty, with platinum-blond hair tied up in a ponytail and crystal-blue eyes.
Immediately upon locking eyes with her, a strange feeling came over Adrian. It was like nothing he'd ever felt before. Like some force is pulling me and that girl towards each other.
Nyssa
She felt it too.
When she came out of hiding and met eyes with the brown-haired boy, she felt it. Like a magnetic attraction. No, that wasn't exactly it. It was… a sense of connection. Like something inside her had been broken all her life and now it was becoming complete. Thinking back, she realized it was the same way she'd felt when she saw the person in the black robe in the first of her strange dreams.
Stranger.
Yet stranger.
A few seconds ticked by in which neither Nyssa nor the boy said anything–contemplating the feeling they gave each other, maybe, or sizing one another up. Then the questions poured out all at once.
"What do you want?"
"Who are you?"
"Why are you here?"
"Were you following me?"
"Where did you come from?"
"What's your name?"
"What's yours?"
At first they answered each other with hesitation that lessened with every question, but then the boy–Adrian, she knew now–asked her something that made her stiffen.
"I know this sounds like a weird question, but is it just me, or do you feel some sort of... pull?"
"No, that's not weird, actually, it's... it's pulling me towards you too. Though I wonder why I don't find it weird, at all."
"Yeah."
Another silence even more awkward than the last one hung in the air until Nyssa broke it. "So…" she gestured at the chasm. "We're both…?"
"Looking for the Underground? I don't know. I just got this feeling I had to come here. So I did. And I found this… and you."
"That's so strange."
"What?"
"I got the same feeling."
Xandre
Xandre's village was relatively far from Mount Ebott, so if he were to make the journey alone without being found, he would have to make some plans in advance. He finally had it all planned out: in three days, he would leave the village under the pretense of hunting. That would explain perfectly to the other villagers why he was leaving with a full set of weapons and large food supplies. True, they would know something was up once night fell and he didn't return from his "hunting trip", but hopefully by then he would be too far away to locate quickly.
He would have to be careful not to leave too many footprints, scraps, or any other signs that would make the villagers' job of tracking him down easier. That should be easy enough. He could hide from his prey; he'd just modify that technique.
Ironic, Xandre reflected, that I'm using the same skills the others taught me both to feed them and to escape from them.
Nyssa
"So what now? We've come this far."
Nyssa looked at Adrian. After a lengthy conversation, they had begun to trust each other. After all, the things that happened to them were too similar to be coincidental. What were the chances that both of them were born on the seventeenth day of the ninth month seventeen years ago, had the same dreams on their seventeenth birthdays, and ended up here just in time to meet one another?
No matter what it was, they both agreed, they had both been drawn to the entrance to the Underground. It was best to stick together, at least temporarily. As Adrian put it, "strength in numbers, especially if we're going into a cave system full of monsters that may or may not want to kill us."
"So we're both going… down there?" Nyssa pointed down the hole.
"I have a hunch we are... but... that hole is insanely deep and there's no way to climb down... it's suicide," Adrian sputtered.
Nyssa took a breath. "Something tells me it isn't."
"Something tells me that, too. One more thing we have in common. Are we hanging our lives on 'something'?"
"We'll have to. Well... do you want to find out what's behind all this, or not?"
It was time to take a leap of faith.
Without waiting for Adrian's reply or even to see if he would stay or leave, Nyssa jumped into the chasm.
Adrian
His heart froze in his chest.
Nyssa…!
Even though they were barely acquaintances, for some reason Adrian couldn't stand the thought of anything happening to her. He forced himself to look over the side, ignoring the lurch of his stomach. He was shocked to see Nyssa standing up, perfectly unharmed. "It's safe!" Nyssa yelled back up, her voice just barely audible. "The golden flowers stopped my fall. It's magic or something. I don't know. But I'm not dead."
Adrian hesitated, his heart pounding. Did he really want to do this? Jump down there into that dark cave, the stranger girl his only company? Something inside him urged him to go there. The Underground, it promised, holds answers.
So he swallowed his terror and hurled himself off solid ground.
