Location Unknown
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Kasumi Mizushima awoke slowly to the faint call of songbirds. The first thing she noticed was darkness, all around her, deep as pitch and equally opaque. She closed her eyes and opened them, slowly, but the dark persisted. The second thing she noticed was cold, not the surface cold of a winter day but the kind of deep cold that seeps into the muscle and bone and grabs hold, tenaciously, until spring. Her body ached from the cold, and what felt like long disuse, and she shivered. The third thing she noticed was the soft whisper of silk, and through it the unyielding touch of stone, carved to mirror smoothness.
Smooth stone for a bed and thin silk for a mattress; no wonder she ached. Sleeping in her armor would have been kinder; she had many times on her long campaigns, in the mite-infested morass of Maguuma, the stone stillness of the petrified Echovald, the snowcapped peaks of the far Shiverpeaks. Cold. Now the Shiverpeaks, there was cold. Her armor, though, where was it? And the rest of her gear, trophies from the lich and the betrayer and the servants of the maddened god, paid for in blood, some of it hers. She remembered...something, an echo of a dream, a shadow of a memory. She had been offered a choice. What choice? How had she chosen? The memory slipped away; no matter. When she cleared away the sleep-haze from her mind, surely the rest would come back to her.
She raised up a hand, carefully, to check for obstacles in the darkness; no need to add a concussion to the fog of her long sleep. How long? The darkness gave no token, and she tucked away the question for now. Immediate problems first, answers later. She sat up carefully, wincing at the complaints of muscles long disused. There it was again, long. She knew it had been a long sleep, but she did not know how she knew. "Why do you believe what you believe?" That was was Headmaster Quin had said, back at the monastery. It felt like ages ago, a past lifetime, but then the monastery had felt like another lifetime since before the destroyers in the depths, before the journey into torment, before the affliction on the mainland. No matter; this lifetime or another, she had no answer, and the darkness was less than forthcoming.
The darkness. This was a battle she could fight. She closed her eyes and focused her mind, pushing back the lingering mental fog, and concentrated on the spirit world. "Spirits of the ancestors," she murmured, "grant me sight beyond sight," and the darkness exploded into colour. Vibrant reds, brilliant greens, stunning blues - as the spirit world was the source of life, so too was everything it touched made brighter, or darker, according to its nature. As a child, she would gaze into the near spirit realm for hours; today, she had a purpose. Anyone with the right connection, the right training, or the right mental state could gaze into the spirit world, but looking back out was more difficult. It seemed fitting, since it mirrored the journey of the spirit itself, the miracle of birth and rebirth and the ease of return into death. The door of the spirit world could open both ways, for a price.
This trick she had learned from a sunspear archer in Istan, a natural ritualist who used his second sight to hit the bulls-eye on a target at fifty yards while blindfolded. By turning the spirit sight upon itself, a ritualist could see the real world reflected in the spirit realm, reflected clearly enough to loose an arrow or dodge a sword. So simple that almost any ritualist could duplicate the feat once he or she learned it could be done, and yet in fifteen hundred years of history no Canthan had discovered it. She supposed that said something profound.
She had shared a few ales with that archer, and a few bedrolls beside. He was captured at the debacle at Gandara, and fed to their pet demons. Not the first she had lost, or the last, but she had not forgotten.
The darkness was no barrier to her now, and the cold stone on which she had lain resolved itself into a marble bier, smooth-topped but elaborately carved, and masterfully so, not the work of a simple tradesman. Her silk garments were of similar make, and in an unfamiliar cut. The rest of the chamber was small, though not claustrophobic, and looked to be worked stone of lesser quality than the marble, though similar workmanship. The chamber looked old; cracks netted the walls, and water stains pooled into a corner festooned with moss. The once-smooth stone tiles of the floor were broken and uneven, and what looked like the root of some great tree had forced its way through near the far ceiling; it seemed that was the source of the water stains. A single stone door faced the bier, sealed shut.
A tomb. She had been laying in a tomb. Kasumi shivered, and whispered a prayer to Grenth, hoping that the tomb was not hers.
So. There was water, hopefully potable, and the faint zephyr of a breeze on her cheeks suggested that the air would not grow stale. If she could not escape this place, she would not die quickly. Or well. If it came to that, she had learned a great deal about the art of death. Perhaps it would be fitting that her final battle be against herself. Best not to dwell upon it, for now.
The door was the obvious exit. Kasumi stood, ignoring the screams of protest from her legs, and felt the cold stone floor against her bare feet. That could be a problem. Brother Mhenlo always said that walking around barefoot was good for the soul. Brother Mhenlo thought he was funny. He was also a monk, and could call upon the gods for healing if he cut open his heel. Bleeding to death from a broken flagstone in some mouldering crypt, wouldn't that would be a fitting end to the hero of three continents. She supposed they would probably leave that part out of the stories.
Still, if this was a tomb, and these were burial robes - there, at the foot of the bier, a pair of wooden slippers, still serviceable. She slipped them on gingerly. Not a perfect fit, but manageable. One more crisis averted.
The door. She approached it cautiously, the clack clack of her new wooden slippers startlingly loud in the stillness of the tomb. Some burial grounds had traps, magical triggers or cunning mechanical contrivances to deter grave robbers and worse. No one wanted their loved ones to become some rogue necromancer's experiment. The door and the threshold seemed clear of unpleasant surprises; unfortunately, they also seemed clear of latches, hand-holds, or other such tools of entry or egress. Of course. Otherwise it would have been too easy. To be thorough, she ran her fingers along the edges of the door. Solid stone, with nowhere to gain purchase even had she the strength to move the door by main force.
That was disappointing, but if this was how her story ends then she was going to personally kick the gods all the way from the underworld to the hall of heroes. Well, there was still the source of that faint breeze. A few minutes searching around in the not-dark narrowed the latter down to a narrow opening around the tree's root intruding into her prison, perhaps a hands-breadth across and a foot in length, opening out into emptiness and surrounded by a spiderweb of cracked masonry. Now that she examined it closely, the root looked withered; perhaps it had once grown large enough to fill that hole.
At any rate she knew of no spell that could shrink her down to the size of her hand. For a moment Kasumi considered calling out. The far side of the hole was as dark as her de facto cell, though, and judging by the general state of disrepair it seemed unlikely that visitors were a common occurrence. And given her luck, anyone or anything that came was unlikely to be the rescuing sort.
Besides, she wasn't some blushing maiden princess from the old Krytan bedtime stories, some damsel in distress waiting in a tower for her prince to come rescue her. For that matter, she'd rescued more than her share of princes. She remembered one, a scholar-prince from Vabbi with a quick wit and a clever tongue, and colored faintly at the memory before returning her mind to the task at hand.
The root had not been gentle, forcing its way through the masonry, and the cracks in the wall were fairly extensive. Looking closely, the ceiling where the root had entered was in little better shape. If she did enough damage at the right point, it might open the hole enough for her to squeeze through. That or bring the whole ceiling down on her head, but the gods watch over those touched by madness, and Kasumi figured that idea qualified.
If only she had one of those explosive kegs that fool dwarf Budger always carried around - but no, she was going to have to do this the old-fashioned way. It wasn't going to be easy. Unlike the power of the elements, the energy of the spirit world was best used for subtle effects and conjurations, and ill-suited to the sort of whiz-bang-boom that the elementalists always seemed so proud of.
On the other hand, as the saying went, if resorting to magic doesn't solve your problem, then you didn't resort to enough of it, and Kasumi had power to burn. She stepped back carefully to the far corner of the room, then thought better of it and slipped into the threshold of the sealed door. As a final precaution, she tore a long hem from her robe and wrapped it about her eyes, tying it securely behind her head in case the collapse was larger than expected and let in some sunlight. Using one's first and second sight together was confusing at best, and at worst a swift path to madness. She tore a second, wider swatch and tied it about her nose and mouth. Whether it worked or not, this plan was going to make a lot of dust.
Her preparations complete, Kasumi closed her eyes and focused her mind once more, drawing the energy of the spirit realm through her chakras and into her hands, building like the closing movement of a symphony. As the power reached its crescendo she called out, "Spirits of the ancestors, let your arrows strike my foes!" and loosed the gathered energy as a flurry of ghostly bolts, erupting from her fingertips to strike the weakened stone with the force of a charging bull minotaur.
With a dull roar and an earsplitting crash, the tormented stone gave way in bulk, filling the far third of the room with rubble and the rest with a clattering hail of stone fragments and a sea of dust. Kasumi hissed as a flying shard glanced off her cheekbone, and gazed up at her handiwork, the dust no more a hindrance to her second sight than the darkness. It looked like fully a third of the ceiling had given way, opening not to a main chamber as she had hoped but what looked to be a cross passageway of some sort. Still, it was better than sitting in her tomb and waiting to starve.
Besides, the aforementioned listeners, were there any to hear, could hardly have missed her little remodeling project. With that happy thought in mind, she clambered up the pile of rubble and into the ruins.