Siblings of Sol: Destruction of a Planet

Chapter 19

Adam enters the front door to the small house and looks around to see much the same furnishings as Jarl's home. A bed to the right is made neatly, while a small table and comfortable high-backed chairs sit in front of a small fireplace on a round rug to cover the rough wooden floorboards. Cupboards line the wall to the right of the door over top of a low counter where a small metal bowl sits with a pitcher of water beside it.

The interior has a homey lived in feeling to it, and he can imagine the fire going as Tar would sit in the high-backed chair, staring at the flames contently. Right now, though, he is more concerned with finding the entrance to the tunnels that Jarl said all the villages have under the valley floor.

He concentrates his search on the two corner walls that are right up against the barrier, thinking that Tar's entrance might be the same as Jarl's. He runs his hands over the corner to see if he can feel any draft coming through from a cooler opening behind it. Although he can't seem to find anything that would indicate a doorway. The wooden planks all overlap each other, not showing a square of any size to indicate a doorway.

He steps back to take in the whole wall at once, when he hears a duller thud under his heal as he stops. He looks down, and thumps his foot in several places, soon finding what sounds like a void close to the corner. Then, upon further inspection, he can tell that the wooden planks are not set down parallel to the walls, but at a forty-five-degree angle. They are all laid down in squares, almost as if each section of floor was built somewhere else and then just fitted together and attached to the support's underneath.

The void he hears under his feet takes up one of the squares close to the corner of the room. He kneels down to look for a way to lift the section up and comes across what looks like a gap between the middle plank and the next section, as if the plank was not long enough but was so close that the builders used it anyway.

Now, of course the only question is how to lift it up. The crack is too small to get his fingers into, and the floorboards must be quite heavy. "There has to be something here that he used to easily lift up the floor," he thinks, as he looks around the neat almost barren room. Then, on the table beside the chair, he notices a long metal poker for the fireplace, with the end pointing suspiciously towards the corner of the room where he is crouching. It is not sitting with the rest of the utensils for the fireplace and he smiles at the curious curve on the very end that just happens to be the same width as the planks on the floor. It could easily be taken for a means of pulling or pushing wood around on the hot coals of the fire, but he suspects that it has other uses. The fact that it is sitting on the table for him to easily see from his crouched position, gives away its alternate use.

He grabs the poker like tool and slips it into the crack and pries back on the handle. The section lifts effortlessly, obviously counter balanced with something underneath it to make it easy to rise.

The section lifts towards the corner of the room and reveals a set of steps that go down into the ground towards the corner. He steps down them and can see the cable attached to a metal bar that slides down beside the steps, and off to a pulley and a weight that rises, up and down.

Adam smiles at the ingenuity of the arrangement and continues down to a room cut from the ground just like the one at Jarl's village. A glow bulb comes to life as he enters to reveal a table and chairs sitting in the middle of the rectangular room. He walks around the table and can tell that it has been used recently by the fact that it is so clean, and the chairs show the wear of being sat in numerous times.

There is just one single entrance to a tunnel at the far side of the room, and he quickly heads towards it. There are glow bulbs stretched out down its length with long dark sections in-between them, but with enough light coming from the next one to give you a direction to head for. "Their supply of lights must be limited," he thinks.