“Okay, Bartholomew,” I whispered, my voice sounding unnaturally loud in the improving acoustics. “I’m officially upgrading my emotional state from ‘impending doom’ to ‘cautiously optimistic.’ The air no longer smells like a forgotten gym sock.”
“A most astute observation, Mistress Paige,” he intoned from his perch on my shoulder, his claws digging in just enough to remind me he was there. “Whilst I share your relief at the cessation of the subterranean dampness, I must caution against unbridled optimism. Hope, as they say, is the first step on the road to disappointment.”
“Wow, okay, Mr. Bummer-cat. Remind me not to invite you to my next birthday party.” I rolled my eyes, but his familiar pessimism was, in a weird way, comforting. It was a constant in a world of terrifying variables.
The tunnel widened dramatically, and the wavering light ahead solidified. It wasn’t the warm, friendly glow of a torch or a campfire. This was a cool, blue-white light, pulsing with a slow, steady rhythm, like a mechanical heartbeat. The scraping sound was now deafeningly close, a colossal grinding of metal on stone that set my teeth on edge. We rounded a final bend, and my sarcastic retort died on my lips. My jaw went slack.
We were standing on a wide ledge overlooking a cavern so vast it felt like we’d stepped into the hollowed-out heart of a mountain. The ceiling was lost in shadows far above, but the floor… the floor was dominated by the source of the light and noise.
It was a machine. A contraption wasn’t a strong enough word. This was a symphony of engineering and magic, a gargantuan orrery of brass, copper, and some strange, obsidian-like metal that seemed to drink the light. Immense, concentric rings, etched with runes that pulsed with that same blue energy, rotated slowly around a central sphere. The sphere itself was a flawless crystal, the size of a Smart car, and it was the source of the pulsing light, casting shifting, complex shadows across the cavern walls. Dozens of smaller spheres and celestial bodies, crafted from polished gemstones and gleaming metals, orbited the central crystal on impossibly intricate arms, moving in a silent, cosmic ballet. The scraping sound was the largest of the outer rings, its massive metal edge grinding against a carved stone track on the cavern floor.
“Holy shit…” I breathed, the words hanging in the vast space. “It’s like a planetarium had a baby with an escape room and it was raised by wizards.”
“It is a Celestial Cartograph,” Bartholomew said, his voice stripped of its usual sarcasm and filled with a rare, genuine awe. “A relic of the First Age. I had presumed them all to be myths, or dust.”
“A what-now-ograph?” I took a tentative step forward, my eyes tracing the glowing lines of power that ran like veins through the metal rings. “You mean this thing is a map?”
“A map of the heavens, Mistress Paige. And, if the legends hold true, a map of the flows of magic that bind them. It does not merely show the stars; it reflects their power, their alignment, and their influence upon Eldoria.” He hopped down from my shoulder, landing with a soft thud on the stone ledge, his tail twitching as he surveyed the grand mechanism. “An instrument of profound and terrible power. We should not be here.”
“Not be here?” I scoffed, already starting to make my way down a set of stairs carved into the rock face. “Are you kidding me? This is the coolest thing I’ve seen since I got zapped into this neck-beard’s wet dream of a dimension! This beats the Woods by a freakin’ mile.”
The sheer scale of it was dizzying. As I reached the floor of the cavern, I had to crane my neck to see the top of the central crystal. The air hummed with latent energy, making the hairs on my arms stand up. I reached out a hand, my fingers hovering just inches from one of the slowly rotating brass rings. It was cool to the touch, and the carved runes felt like a living language under my fingertips.
“Prudence, Mistress Paige! Do not allow your insatiable curiosity to be the architect of our demise!” Bartholomew warned from the bottom of the stairs, his voice a low hiss.
“Relax, fur-ball. I’m just looking.” But he was right. I am, and have always been, a button-pusher. The kind of person who sees a sign that says ‘Wet Paint’ and immediately has to check if it’s true. And in a panel near the bottom of the stairs was the biggest, shiniest ‘do not touch’ button I’d ever seen.
It pulsed with a gentle, hypnotic light, and a low thrumming sound seemed to emanate directly from it, a siren song for my bad judgment. I circled the base of the machine to the panel, my leather boots silent on the polished stone floor. There were no levers, no displays that I could recognize. Just the silent, relentless turning of the cosmos in miniature and a single crystal set into a column of polished stone.
“How does it even work?” I wondered aloud.
“It is not for us to know,” Bartholomew stated flatly. “It is a remnant of a time when the world was woven with magic far more potent than the Shadow Lord’s crude corruptions. It is a tool of creation, of understanding. To meddle with it would be the height of imprudent folly.”
“Yeah, yeah, Folly, my middle name,” I muttered, my gaze fixed on the crystal. I could see faint shapes swirling within its depths, like nascent galaxies being born and dying in the space of a heartbeat. It was beautiful. And it was the only thing in this whole cursed world that felt like an answer. An escape. A way forward.
My training as a Medieval Times ‘serving wench’ had prepared me for exactly zero of the situations I’d found myself in, but it had taught me one thing: when the show’s not going your way, you have to improvise.
My hand shot out before I could second-guess myself. My palm flattened against the smooth, cool surface of the giant crystal.
For a second, nothing happened.
Then, all hell broke loose.
The low hum erupted into a thundering roar. The blue light of the crystal flared, washing the cavern in an incandescent blaze that forced me to throw an arm over my eyes. The scrape of the great ring ceased, and the entire orrery shuddered to a halt. Then, with a deafening series of clicks and whirs, it began to move again, faster this time, the rings spinning and re-aligning with impossible speed.
“PAIGE!” Bartholomew yowled, his voice a mixture of terror and pure, unadulterated ‘I told you so.’
I snatched my hand back as if burned, stumbling away from the crystal. The light softened, and the roar subsided back to a powerful hum. But the machine was different now. The spheres and planets had rearranged themselves into a new configuration. And then, the central crystal projected a beam of light straight up into the darkness of the cavern ceiling.
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
The light hit the unseen rock and exploded outwards, creating a perfect, shimmering star map across the dome of the cavern. It was breathtaking. Constellations I’d never seen, shimmering nebulae of violet and gold, and tiny, pinprick stars by the million. It was a perfect, impossible night sky.
“By the Nine Realms…” Bartholomew whispered, his feline awe overriding his anger.
But my eyes were drawn to two points on the celestial map. One, far to the east, was a star that shone with a brilliant, silver-white light, pure and steady. The other, westward, directly over the region the Whispering Woods were in, was a festering blot of darkness. It wasn’t just a lack of light; it was an active, malevolent shadow, a void that seemed to writhe and pulse, greedily swallowing the stars around it.
The Shadow Lord’s domain.
The silver star, then… that had to be the opposite. A place of safety. A place of power. A destination.
The Celestial Cartograph hadn’t just shown us the heavens. It had shown us a path. It had given us a goal. Not that world-saving had been on my schedule.
A soft, metallic click echoed from the far side of the cavern, a sound distinct from the workings of the great machine. It was followed by the groan of ancient stone sliding against stone. A section of the cavern wall, previously seamless, was grinding open, revealing a new tunnel, this one illuminated by the same soft, silver light as the stars on the map above.
Hope, that fragile butterfly, wasn’t just fluttering anymore. It was doing acrobatics in my chest. I looked from the new opening back to Bartholomew, a wide, triumphant grin spreading across my face.
“See? Told you I’m good with buttons. Looks like our little adventure just got a next-level upgrade.”
Bartholomew, who had been observing the grinding stone with the detached air of a critic at a poorly staged play, turned his flat, furry face to me. His whiskers twitched.
“A ‘next-level upgrade’? My dear Paige, your vernacular is as baffling as your methods. You simply pressed a luminous protuberance you happened to fancy. Let us not conflate blind luck with strategic genius.”
“Hey, in my world, that’s called ‘user-friendly interface design,’” I shot back, already striding toward the new opening. “And my strategic genius got us a secret passage instead of another ten years of staring at your asshole in the dark.” I gestured dramatically into the tunnel. “After you, my liege.”
He let out a sigh that was pure, condensed exasperation, a sound I was becoming intimately familiar with. With a flick of his tail that conveyed immense suffering, he trotted past me into the silvery glow. I followed, the heavy stone door grinding shut behind us with a final, tomb-like thud. The sound sealed us in, but instead of panic, I felt a jolt of exhilaration. This was it. This was the quest part of the quest. My dinner theater training had prepared me for a lot of things—how to serve a dragon-sized turkey leg without spilling grease on a knight, how to shout ‘Huzzah!’ with genuine enthusiasm, how to spot a tourist trying to steal a pewter goblet—but this was the real deal.
The tunnel was unlike anything I’d ever seen. It wasn’t rough-hewn rock, but stone that had been polished to a near-mirror finish, swirling with veins of a material that seemed to drink and then exhale the silver light. It was like walking through the inside of a geode. The air was cool and still, carrying a strange, clean scent, like the air after a thunderstorm but without the dampness—the scent of petrichor and starlight. Our footsteps made no echo, absorbed by the strange acoustics of the place.
We walked in silence for a few minutes, the only sound the soft padding of Bartholomew’s paws on the smooth floor. The initial giddiness was beginning to fade, replaced by the familiar buzz of a thousand questions. My communications degree might be the butt of every family joke, but it taught me one thing: how to read a room, and how to tell when someone isn’t giving you the whole story. And, as absurd as it sounded in my head, my cat—my cranky, fluffy, ridiculously eloquent cat—was a walking, talking, fur-covered library of untold stories.
“Okay,” I said, breaking the silence. My voice sounded small in the vast, quiet corridor. “We need to talk.”Bartholomew didn’t break his stride.
“An astute observation. We have been engaged in that very activity since our unfortunate arrival in this benighted realm.”
“No, not talk-talk. I mean, talk. Spill. Unload the exposition dump. You know what I mean.” I stopped, forcing him to halt and look back at me. His green eyes shimmered in the ambient light. “You knew about the Orrery. You called it by name. You knew it was a map, you knew it was broken, and you knew fixing it was important. You’re a cat, Bartholomew, a cat from the suburban wastelands of the DelMarVa. The most exotic thing you knew about before this was the specific chemical composition of Fancy Feast’s gravy. So how?”
He sat, wrapping his tail primly around his paws.
“One does not require an arcane pedigree to recognize celestial cartography when one sees it. It was a simple matter of logical deduction.”I crossed my arms, leaning against the glowing wall. It was cool to the touch.
“Logical deduction? Bart, you looked at a giant, magical snow globe and diagnosed its function like you were a certified celestial mechanic. You’re holding out on me.”
“My origins and the sum of my knowledge are of little consequence,” he said, his tone becoming infuriatingly placid. “Our focus should remain on navigating this passage and ascertaining the purpose of the Orrery’s so-called ‘upgrade.’”
“See, that’s where you’re wrong. It’s of major consequence,” I pressed, kneeling down to his level. “I got zapped from my life, from my job serving overpriced beer to tourists and nerds, and thrown into a world with a ‘Shadow Lord.’ The only constant, the only thing that came with me, is you. My sarcastic, absurdly eloquent, furry sidekick. But it turns out my sidekick knows more than he’s letting on. That makes it my business. Are you some kind of wizard in disguise? An enchanted prince? A demigod in desperate need of a shave?”
His ears flattened slightly, the only outward sign of his irritation.
“Your penchant for melodrama is truly astounding. I am Bartholomew. A feline of discerning taste and superior intellect. That has always been the case. The fact that my intellect extends beyond the rudimentary puzzles of locating a sunbeam or demanding sustenance should not be cause for such an inquisition.”
“Superior intellect is one thing. Knowing the ancient Elvish name for a star-machine is another.” I poked a finger gently at the top of his head. “You’re my cat. I’ve watched you chase a laser pointer for twenty minutes straight until you fell off the couch. I’ve seen you get scared by a cucumber. Don’t try and sell me the ‘superior intellect’ line. I’m not buying it.”He stood up, shaking his head as if to dislodge my accusation.
“The laser pointer is a hypnotic predator sigil, and the sudden appearance of a cucumber behind oneself is universally startling. These facts do not preclude a deeper understanding of the cosmos.”
He was good. He was really, really good at talking in circles. It was like arguing with a furry, four-legged thesaurus. But I wasn’t letting it go. Not this time.
“So you were just born knowing about Eldoria? Did it come with the kitten starter pack? Food, water, litter box, and a comprehensive guide to a magical dimension you’d never end up in?”Bartholomew turned and began walking again, his pace a little quicker this time.
“The universe is woven from threads of knowledge, Paige. Some of us are simply more… sensitive to the weave.”
“More wizard shit is not an answer! That’s a line from a fortune cookie!” I scrambled to my feet and followed him. “Are you even from my world? Were you just pretending to be a normal cat this whole time? Was the obsessive grooming just a cover?”
“A gentleman’s fastidiousness requires no justification,” he sniffed over his shoulder.
We rounded a gentle curve in the tunnel, and the silvery light intensified. Ahead of us, the corridor opened into a small, circular chamber. In the center of the room, floating about a foot off the floor, was a single, perfect sphere of crystal. It hummed with a low, resonant energy, and the silver light seemed to originate from within its depths. Carved into the floor around it was a circle of intricate runes, the same script I’d seen on the Orrery.
Bartholomew stopped at the edge of the circle, his tail held low. He stared at the floating crystal, and for the first time since we’d arrived in Eldoria, his whole demeanor changed. The weariness, the sarcasm, the over-it-all attitude seemed to melt away, replaced by something I couldn’t quite name. It was a mix of reverence and a deep, profound sadness.
“The Heartstone,” he murmured, his voice barely a whisper. It lacked all of its usual pomposity. It was just… quiet.
“The what?” I asked, my own voice hushed. The questions about his past suddenly felt trivial in the face of the raw emotion radiating from him.
He didn’t look at me. His gaze was fixed on the glowing sphere.
“It is a vessel. A repository. It holds the light of the First Star, the memory of Eldoria before the shadows fell. The Orrery does not just map the stars, Paige. It draws power from them. This… this is what it was channeling its power into. You have not upgraded a map. You have reawakened a battery.”
He finally turned to look at me, and his green eyes were ancient. In that moment, he wasn’t my housecat from Silver Spring. He was something else entirely. Something old and powerful and tired.
“And to answer your earlier, impertinent question,” he said, his voice soft but clear as a bell in the silent chamber. “I know of this place because it is my charge to know. I am a Warden. Or… I was. Long before I was a cat who found himself startled by vegetables in your primitive kitchen.”Before I could react, a melodic ding sounded and a new notification appeared.
[New Quest!][The Realm of Shadow][Find a way to enter the Realm of Shadow][Warning: You must be level 16 to begin this quest.][Quest cannot be denied or abandoned]