The Rainbow Ends Here

The melody seemed to gently float through the room, causing only small echoes that added a chilly notion. The mood lasted for about five seconds, then Knuckles stopped, and Sonic span round to look if it had worked.

Apparently, it did. From the shrine on, expanding in gentle spirals up to almost the ceiling, golden spinning rings had formed.

"Rings…" Knuckles' word broke the short moment of silence. "Now what are we supposed to do with these?" He scratched his head.

"They're rings!" Sonic snapped his fingers. "We collect'em!"

"Sonic, wait!" The hedgehog froze at Tails' shout, and the fox turned to Knuckles. "How did the puzzle continue again?"

"There was something about a 'trail of light'," the echidna mused.

Sonic shrugged. "Well, if this isn't it, I don't have an idea what else it could be. If there aren't any more complaints, I'll just do two things at once: collect the rings and follow the path they make."

"What do we others do? You're the only one capable of light dashing, plus once you did it the rings will be gone." Tails rubbed his chin in thought.

"Well, probably collecting them will make something else happen. We think about that later," Sonic decided. If he concentrated on it the hedgehog could use his chaos skills to be attracted by the spinning rings, an effect Tails had once called something akin to a reverse ring magnet. "Alright, guys, here goes nothin'!" Approaching the ring closest to the mystic shrine, Sonic spread his arms and let himself being sucked towards it.

The first ring absorbed into him with an audible pling and a brief surge of energy that ran through him. The blue hedgehog was lifted off his feet, weightlessly floating up to the next rings. Within a mere second he'd traveled almost the entire spiral, when Knuckles' voice rang through the dizzying waves of energy going through him, the for Sonic himself noisy plings that seemed to originate rather inside his head than outside, and the light daze these effects combined with the rapid and uncontrollable changes of direction had knocked the hedgehog into.

"Sonic, look out! You're gonna hit the wall!"

Sonic blinked, through blurred vision acknowledging the echidna's concern, but all he could do within the fragment of an instant left was hold his breath, squeeze his eyes shut and try bracing himself for a high-speed impact.

Instead of finding his face plastered into a stone wall however, the plings just kept coming, at least ten or maybe even twenty more, then they stopped and Sonic was handed back to gravity. It kicked in immediately, tearing the hedgehog's body out of his floating position and he dropped down. The reflexes that came naturally with being born with the gift of super speed let him land on hands and knees.

Blinking quickly to fight off the disturbance of ring dashing, Sonic shot a look around. He was in a small room, a single, big stone door situated a couple meters in front of him, lit by several small dots of light like the eyes of the snake statues in other places of the ruins. "Wow…"

"Sonic?! Are you alright?"

"Can you hear us?!" The voices of his friends sounded dull and echoed a little.

"Yeah, I'm good," Sonic replied into nowhere in particular. Standing up, he circled on the spot, taking in the chamber in more detail. "I'm in another room. Here's a door but it's locked and I clearly didn't come through it. I seriously have no idea how I got in here."

"You went through the wall somehow." Knuckles sounded utterly confused even through the stony echoes.

"Probably the rings allowed you to phases through matter," Tails speculated, and Sonic could colorfully imagine the look on Knuckles' face at this statement.

"I didn't feel like hitting anything," Sonic said. "Well, other than the floor in here." There was just silence from the others for several seconds. "Guys? You still there at –" He cut himself off at finding he had no idea where his friends were in relation to him. "-wherever I came from? It's just that I don't like being stuck in this weird room without a way out of here…"

"I think I just found it, Sonic," Tails called. "The wall… isn't a wall. At a spot next to the ceiling, just where you vanished, is a hole, I guess a little more than a meter high and half a meter wide."

"It perfectly looks like wall, but you can just move through it as if there was nothing," Knuckles added. "We're coming over now."

"Alright." Sonic's green eyes dashed around, trying to figure out where they could enter this room.

"Whoa, it's really dark in here," Tails noticed, sounding a little nervous, but less echo-y.

"Just feel with your hands carefully," Knuckles advised.

"Wherever you are at the moment, I went through in a flash without problems," Sonic said. "I don't think there is anything dangerous in that… whatever it is."

"It's a tunnel of some sort. We can walk through it, but there's no light," the echidna answered.

"Well, here is light, and from what you're sounding like you're coming closer to me," Sonic gave back, still looking out for any signs of the others.

"I think we – whaa!" Knuckles' reply was interrupted in mid-sentence by a yelp, and Sonic took a reflexive step backwards when a large, white-gloved hand ghostly moved out of the solid wall about two meters higher than the ground he stood on. It was followed by a foot, seeking floor but meeting thin air, causing its owner to lose his balance and stumble forwards with a yelp. Sonic jumped backwards another bit, and stared down on Knuckles having landed little gracefully flat on his belly. "Oww…"

"Hey, you okay?" Sonic couldn't stop himself from finding the situation slightly comical.

"I'm fine… I think…" Knuckles crawled back to his feet, briefly brushing over a skinned knee.

"Sonic? Knuckles? What happened?", Tails called, puzzled and worried.

"Knux fell out of the wall," Sonic remarked, fighting off a grin.

"Be careful where you stand on," the echidna warned, turning away from Sonic and looking up to the wall he had just emerged from. "The tunnel ends suddenly, you can't see it."

"Probably you should just fly," Sonic said. "We don't need the third of us crashing on this floor, do we?"

"Okay…" The well-known sound of Tails' spinning namesakes followed, then the fox' head and torso shifted out of what appeared to be a wall. Looking over his shoulders, Tails curiously regarded the stones he could move through without any resistance. "I wonder what that is. A hologram, maybe? It's certainly not stone. It looks like it, but there is nothing…"

"It's kinda cool… and kinda spooky," Sonic commented.

"Yeah…" Knuckles turned away, focusing on the door Sonic had found. "So what's this?"

"Another dead end," the hedgehog sighed.

Tails landed next to the others. "There must be a way to open it…"

Sonic looked at the door, at his friends, and back at the door. His ears flicked backwards a little. "Any ideas?"

Tapping a foot on the floor, creating a quick thudthudthud sound, Sonic watched his two friends inspecting the stone door. As far as he could tell, with limited success. "And? Anything turned out yet?"

"Well," Tails turned over his shoulder, "It has this strange thing that looks like a lock. See here?" He pointed, and Sonic walked closer.

Spiky head tilted, the hedgehog regarded the object Tails had called a lock. It was the only part of the big door that wasn't just plain rock. To Sonic, it looked more like it had been later installed on the door. Measuring about twenty-five by ten centimeters, the square piece of rock showed an elliptical carving inscribing it, with two small, conical holes at the foci, separated by a little more than ten centimeters.

Rubbing his nose, Sonic doubtfully glanced at Tails. "You sure?"

The fox shrugged his shoulders in a gesture of near helplessness. "Of course not. But the door has to open some way, and this is the only thing I can see."

"Point…" The blue hedgehog folded his arms. "Do you have any expert treasure hunting secrets you wanna fill us in on now, Knux?"

The addressed echidna knelt in front of the mysterious door-locking thing, the fingers of his right hand slowly tracing the structure. "I'm afraid not…" His thumb ran over the left of the small holes. "Maybe this needs a special key to open. You can't see anything, but it isn't really the best light in here. There might be a contact in these holes. Or they're just for decoration…"

"Did your ancestors already know abstract artwork?" Sonic frowned. "I thought this weird stuff is a new invention."

Tails giggled. "I always thought you like it?"

"Some is kinda cool, but much of it is just odd," the hedgehog grinned. "But I always thought it's more or less new."

"What we're looking at and what Eggman dug out before is maybe the youngest piece of my people's history I've ever encountered," Knuckles mused. "You know, finding something originating from a time after Pachacamac's defeat and Chaos' rampage is hard. I think the few survivors of the catastrophe had other worries than building large temples and pile up treasures or leave literature behind for the future to behold. Societies only do that in times of prosperity."

"How do you know it's younger than most of the other stuff?", Tails queried curiously.

"It's easy to tell from the language used. You know, I studied most of the relics I could find on my island when I was young; it was the only thing to do other than surviving and watching over the Master Emerald." Knuckles shrugged and stood up again, looking at his friends. "I don't remember how and when I learned reading the symbols left behind on Angel Island, or even speak the old language as well as the surface people's tongue. I just know these things. I read a lot while I was all alone. Everything I found. Chronicles, philosophical texts, writings about plants and animals, about medicine, methods of warfare, legends about the Chaos Emeralds and other things, poetry, texts on laws, whatever I came across really. I know all of it quite well. There are just few texts in the chronicles from newer dates, but I can tell Eggman's tablets were, too."

To Sonic, all of this sounded a little too vague, but Tails looked really interested. "So, what time do they come from?"

The echidna shook his head. "It could be anything from a few hundred years ago to around the time I was born. I don't remember ever seeing anyone of my kind, but I know puggles aren't able to survive alone. So at least one adult echidna had to be there to raise me to an age where I could take care of myself."

"Puggles?" Sonic grinned.

"That's what a baby echidna is called," Knuckles explained willingly.

"Puggle? Sounds kinda funny. But cute, too." The blue hedgehog's grin broadened.

Knuckles shot him a glare, but just kept talking. "After hatching, a puggle lives on the mother's milk and stays in her pouch for several months. Echidna's are about a year old until the child can eat solids."

"Pouch? You got a pouch?" Sonic struggled not to laugh and totally didn't succeed.

Looking annoyed, Knuckles rolled his eyes. "No, I don't. I'm male. The females do."

"If echidnas grow up at a rate similar to other Mobian species, even when they eat normal stuff the kids can't live without help," Tails noticed.

Deciding to try being serious again, Sonic nodded. "You're right. But you were only four when I found you and couldn't remember your parents either. So maybe Knux was about the same age."

"And then something happened that made all the others that were left die out." Knuckles sighed, but there wasn't much feeling behind it. He seemed to have accepted his fate of being the last, as good as you could accept something like that, Sonic thought. Still, the hedgehog understood well when Knuckles insisted they returned the topic to opening the door in front of them.

Studying the presumed lock again, Tails frowned, then looked at the echidna. "Don't be mad if I ask this now… Do all echidnas have spikes on their knuckles?"

Knuckles exchanged a look of surprise with Sonic, then stared at the fox. "What?!"

"I mean, is it a common thing? Or more like my double tails or Sonic's super speed?" Tails appeared rather serious about his question.

Knuckles' brow wrinkled. "I'm not entirely sure, but when Tikal made me have these visions of the past, I saw other echidnas, and they had the spikes, too."

Sonic's green eyes narrowed in concentration. "I saw them, too, but I don't remember what their hands looked like. I remember they were all pink… And Tikal doesn't have spiked knuckles, I think…"

Tails nodded to their both comments. "So, maybe some had and some didn't."

"Great, Tails," Sonic deadpanned. "Now what does that help us?"

The fox pointed at the small holes in the stone. "I think Knuckles' knuckle-spikes might fit in there."

For a moment the two others stared at each other, then at Tails and the door. "You think…?"

Tails nodded. "Worth a try, isn't it? There was something with hands in the puzzle…"

Knuckles still stared. "I think so…"

"Then what are you waiting for?" Sonic grinned, curious now what might happen. He watched Knuckles walk back close to the door, doubtfully look at his hand, but reach out for the stone. A hushed gasp ran through the trio when the small spikes on his hand slid into the holes without resistance, and a quiet clicking sound echoed through the chamber.

Staring at his hand, Knuckles shook his head in disbelief. "You were right, Tails."

"Isn't he always?" Sonic chuckled. "Now does it open?"

Pushing against the stone door, the echidna smirked a little. "Let's try it out…"

With the sounds of loud scraping, the large stone door slowly moved until it revealed the opening behind. The room was filled with thick darkness, the distant echoes of droplets falling onto wet stone, and a slightly mouldy smell billowed out.

"We need light," Knuckles noticed.

Green eyes dashing about, Sonic quickly found what they looked for. The wall next to the open door held a small protrusion hosting a pile of wooden torches. "Look there!"

Reaching for one of the torches, Knuckles nodded in appreciation. "The tips were dunked in pitch or oil or something like that. From what I can see, it looks still good."

"We just need something to light it up, then," Sonic noticed.

Pointing at the small storage platform, Tails indicated a little box. "What's this?"

Frowning, the blue hedgehog reached out for it. "Looks like a case for expensive pencils or something," he said, flipping it open. "There's some kind of wax in it." Now curious, he pulled it away, too, uncovering a few orderly lines of tiny pieces of wood. He blinked, staring down on the tiny box' content. "Knux? Did your ancestors know matches?"

When Sonic looked up, his friends seemed puzzled. "There are matches in there?", Tails asked, somewhat bewildered.

Sonic nodded. "Uh-hu. Now that's what I call a friendly welcome. They even left light behind so we can find their hidden treasure better… Does that make sense to you?"

Knuckles shrugged. "Well, judging from all the hints they left behind, whatever lies in here was supposed to be found one day. Treasures in graves for example are not to be found, but there are no instructions how to get there."

"Hmm." Doubtfully Sonic regarded his red friend. "So, you're saying they want us to get here all along? Then what are the traps for? What is it with collapsing tunnels and automatic arrows trying to kill us? Doesn't make that much sense to me…"

The echidna gave another vague shrug. "It might be we have to prove ourselves worthy of getting here."

"Ah, this is another odd moral thing…" Sonic trailed off when Knuckles glared at him. "Well then, why don't we put some light on things and see what we were considered worthy to have now?"

Soon, both Sonic and Knuckles held a lit torch, while Tails carried an armful of fresh ones in case the first burned down, and the box of matches. Excitedly the fox pointed into the darkness. "Now can we go?"

"Sounds good to me!" Sonic grinned and started to walk into the room.

Unlike the other chambers before, this one they were in now was clearly part of a natural cave. Stalagmites and stalactites grew out of floor and ceiling like giant sharp teeth. The flickering, orange torchlight threw long shadows, ghostly wandering across the bizarre rocks as the trio advanced deeper into the cave, resembling hundreds of creatures hidden in the shade behind the stones, watching and following them. Some of the stalactites dripped with water; the small, recurring sounds of droplets falling into small ponds of surprisingly clear water or just the hard floor adding to the atmosphere.

"It sure is creepy around here…", Tails noticed, keeping close to the others.

Smiling softly, Sonic looked at his little brother. "Nah, it's just an old cave. Isn't it kinda cool?"

Tails looked doubtful, but Knuckles spared him the trouble of answering when he pointed forwards. In midst of a slightly larger pond, a group of stalagmites surrounded a small chest.

"I think we found something," the echidna noticed.

"Yeah." Stopping at the edge of the pond, Sonic and Tails watched Knuckles hand his torch to the fox and then wade through the little more than ankle deep water.

Leaning down to lift the wooden chest, the echidna turned over his shoulder. "It stayed mostly dry, I think. The water is even shallower over here," he said, carrying their discovery over onto dry ground and placing to down.

Kneeling down and holding the torch over to put more light on the chest, Sonic studied it in curiosity. It was about the size of a regular shoe box he always got his sneakers in, made from a dark wood and decorated with elaborate scrimshaws. Sonic's ears twitched. "Is it just me or is it a little small for an almighty treasure thing?"

"That depends on the treasure. I think it's large enough to hold three Chaos Emeralds at least, and those would easily classify as great treasure, right?" Knuckles shrugged, examining the chest.

"Point." Sonic smirked.

"Guys?" Tails' index finger traced the wood. "Am I right saying it has no lock?"

Sonic and Knuckles exchanged a puzzled glance, neither of them had paid attention to that yet. But the fox was right, a simple, golden frame-joint held the cover closed.

"You're right, Tails." Knuckles smiled.

"Then what are we waiting for? Open it, Knux. You brought us here, so I think it's just fair you get to open it." Sonic grinned.

The echidna nodded, carefully flipping the hinge. It protested with an ear-piercing screech, but opened flawlessly. Taking a deep breath, Knuckles slowly pushed the cover open, all three of them leaning over the chest to catch a good look inside, but before Knuckles had fully opened it, a loud crashing noise behind them let all of them jump in shock and the cover fell close again.

Spinning around just in time to see it, Sonic stared at the laser cutting through one of the larger stalactites, causing it to come crumbling down with a noise copying the first as it fell to the floor, stone grown over thousands of years shattering into a million pieces within a few seconds.

"Not so fast!"

The hedgehog whirled back at the sound of the notorious voice. "Eggman!"