Lost and alone, disheartened by failure and wanting only to go home, Thomas Gown and his companions face the darkest hour of their lives when they stumble across a remnant of the once mighty Agglemonian Empire. There they make a stunning discovery t...
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“Any luck?” asked Matthew hopefully.
Lirenna stood up after yet another careful examination of the door and shook her head dejectedly. The young soldier slumped back against the wall in disappointment, but he hadn’t really expected anything else, any more than any of the others had. If there had been some minute button or lever that would open the door, her sharp half shayen eyes would have spotted it the first time she’d looked, several hours before. Still, hope springs eternal, and there’d always been the chance that she’d missed something, no matter how unlikely, and before long she’d probably try again. There was nothing else to do.
They’d been trapped in the room ever since being teleported into it following their narrow escape from the blue skinned kimmats in the Underworld. It was about the size of a small crofters cottage and made entirely from polished metal, walls, floor and ceiling; completely flawless and unblemished despite having to be at least five hundred years old, having been made by the Agglemonians, a long vanished people whose relics could still be found all over the world. Its seamless surface was broken in only three places; two massive steel doors in opposite walls, one of which they'd come in by, and a metal plaque next to the other door which, being made from a different metal from the rest of the room, was corroded to almost complete illegibility.
Thomas’s first thought, when they’d found themselves in the room, had been that the mechanism for opening the door lay on its other side, another precaution against the inhabitants of the Underworld using the teleportation chamber to escape into the World Above, and he’d sent his invisible servant through to find it, as it had with the first door. This time, though, it hadn’t worked and the spell had expired a few minutes later without having accomplished anything. Undaunted, they’d reasoned that there had to be some way of opening the door, if only they could find it, and had therefore applied themselves to a minute examination of the entire room from floor to ceiling, looking for pressure plates, touch sensitive surfaces and magical proximity activators.
They'd had no success, though, and they were now faced with the frightening prospect that whatever mechanism had originally opened the door had failed with age, leaving them with no way out. The only hope they had left was that the corroded plaque contained some clue as to a means of escape, and Thomas had been struggling to scrub away the powdery green encrustation that covered it. Whatever message had once been etched into its surface had been irrevocably destroyed, though, leaving just the odd word and fragment of a phrase here and there. What does ‘decompression’ mean? wondered the wizard, racking his brains. Compression meant to squeeze things up, so decompression presumably meant to release them, to let them become unsqueezed, but what was it that was squeezed up? It didn't make any sense! The only word that offered even a grain of hope was ‘patience’. It seemed to suggest that something would happen if only they waited long enough, but they’d been waiting for hours already and nothing had happened yet.
“How long do you think we’ve got until the air runs out?” asked Jerry, even the usually cheerful nome being morose at their present predicament.
