>>6173158You draw your group inside, and such a great leader you are. The friend who is counting the most on your, disappeared. You must recover her. She must be worried sick, or… or worse.
Sun-Birther, let it not be worse.
The room shows you no further hints, but as you open your eyes again and crouch to check on the pavement, you notice a series of scrapes on the floor.
Right. The Temple’s inner pavement is made of ordinary marble and granite, here away from Ansàrra’s fury, it wasn’t destroyed and reformed into that glassy sheen.
You pass your armoured fingers over the scrapes. Some of them show a faint grass-green colour. What can scrape stone and leave green in its wake?
You frown, running a hand through your silver hair.
What kind of—
No, wait. Think.
The glow is golden, it’s not like the white sunlight outside, thus this grass green would actually be more of a blueish hue.
Just like—
“… <span class="mu-i">verderame</span>.”
The patina left on copper by time and corrosion.
You cross the room, following a faint sound. And as you raise your rod, you pass into a narrow hallway, which descends at a steady pace towards the centre of the pyramid, closer to the nether rooms where the flame used to burn back when this place used to be in use.
The noise get stronger — it’s distorted but it sounds like someone is struggling, a female’s voice… it’s Willow’s.
Your heart picks up pace again. Dawn be blessed.
Perhaps you can stop fearing the worst.
Then something scrapes your shoulder. You stumble, and turning back you see something sticking out of the tessellated wall: a piece of copper, shiny under the light of the rod. Its deformed shape seems to loom back at you, with two large holes and a third one beneath, its edges covered in <span class="mu-i">verderame</span>.
It looks a bit too much like a screaming face.
A shiver runs through your spine even as the copper was unable to damage the tetracerarmide armour.
You proceed, and with every step more copper follows, its fragments and pieces all seemingly reaching out to you, hindering your progress. You have to push through a few slabs, left there as if half-molten, having scraped the pavement and the wall just like you saw in the other room.
“—hnnhffme! Fuck you!”
Ah, at least Willow seems lively.
[cont.]
this is peak autism on my part, but I did not want to use 'verdigris', as its origin is both from French, and it means 'Green of Greece', which would make no sense used here, so I decided for the Italian term which would be in Argia's vocabulary. 