"Well. This place seems to be quite the hole." Marika said in a grumbling tone as she poked at her and Cinder's fire. Kimisa had trudged off somewhere, saying she smelled something off. Marika had long given up on understanding that little shadowless woman. She was a puzzle inside of a puzzle put back together in all the wrong, jammed ways.
"Seems so." Cinder remarked as she sighed, leaning against a bone they were using as a couch. "We will find a way out, though."
"Sound quite sure of that." She retorted, voice more sour than she had intended it to be.
"I am used to escaping cages." She flicked a finger, and the fire grew thicker again. Marika looked at the woman with a quiet respect as her own past came back for a second.
"We both are, I am afraid." Marika answered. It was softer this time without the irritation it had been laced with prior.
"Funny that. Men and their cages."
"... Yes. They do quite love them."
"Only the bad ones."
"What decides good and bad?"
"Your heart."
Marika looked at the strange and demonic woman a little more closely. "You know inside what's really right and wrong. Sure. If you lack a piece of the puzzle, try and learn it all first. Contrary to popular belief, though, people are good. They are at their core, Marika." She turned to the queen of gold. "You are, too."
"I wasn't always." She answered after a few moments, rather quiet and sheepish.
"You thought you were, and you were scared."
"Scared?"
"Scared of the cage again. Scared of someone taking control away, again. That fear will haunt you for millenia." She turned back to the fire. "I know that fear all too well." She whispered shakily, holding onto an old talisman she kept on her person. It resembled an icy flower shaped like a howling wolf.
"Who..?"
"My wife... the only person who understood..." She croaked quietly. "Now she's gone... and there isn't anything I can do, but... trudge on. Live... for her sake." She leaned her head back against the log, arm laying over her eyes.
"Did she leave?" Marika asked quietly.
"No... She was taken by a monster I could never fight... a monster in their mind..." Cinder breathed a little raggedly. "And it was all my fault... Cause I let go for just a moment... I let my own pain become a new cage. A new fear of losing her so badly... That I..."
Marika rested a gentle hand on the woman's shoulder and said nothing more. She let Cinder for a few moments enjoy the cloudless rain in silence.
...
Kimisa was many, many things. A cookie connoisseur. A tech wiz. An eater of bad people. She was not, however, very patient.
So when she came across a door guarding a smell of hers that was sealed up tighter than a fortress, she put a crack in the base of the door and then laid about fourteen dozen firepots down beside it. The resulting thump likely could be heard on the surface, but damn if the door had not, in fact, been opened.
She stepped through, hoping to find a passage out. The light gleaming down from the cavern in the distance along with the drippings of water made her suspect she may have gotten somewhere. It was a large open cavern that hummed heavily with a blue light. She stepped through and noticed a small grace, the little golden sigils that floated around these lands. Marika could use that to get them back to the surface.
There was just one large issue. The collosal skeletal deer spirit that was staring at her, rather angrily. She didn't think it wanted to exactly let her pass without a fight. "Joy." She murmured as she walked forward.
The beast softly trudged a hoof across the icy wet floor of the cavern, stone beneath its hard and cracked black hoof. Its body was extremely dried and tight to its bones, but it still had the dry hint of flesh around the limbs. Its massive antlers were decorated with flowery vines that glistened with a blue, frozen magic.
"This will at least be enjoyable." She mused as the creature charged towards her, head laid low in a gouging attack. It got caught instantly on the black wall of inky like shadows and teeth that formed in front of the small woman, pushing back against it. "Hm. Maybe -"
The beast disappeared in a sparkle of blue dust before its hooves stomped against Kimisa's back. She flew, pain bursting out of her as she rolled across the wet floor. She dragged herself up and spat out a bit of blood as the beast was already firing a great wave of frost from its boney jaw. "Two can play the missed me game." She simply stepped back and melted into the wall like a shade as the ice blasted and froze the spot she had stood.
For a second, the beast assumed it had won. The sudden spearing across its one ankle by a lash of biting shadows reassured it that victory had not come. It began to rear back against the vine, just as another gripped its other hoof. Then another, and another. It started to try and dematerialize, but the biting kept destroying any focus on magic with a constant flood of gnawing agony.
Then, the ground beneath the beast began to turn black. It didn't even glance down, so when a massive pair of jaws like a dragon snapped shut around its whole, it didn't even have a moment to consider its death before whatever undeath it had was gone.
"Hate having to do that." The girl muttered as the shadowy masses vanished. She stepped out of the center before it vanished as she picked a bit of dried flesh with a new boney toothpick. "Least it was tasty." She burped up a bundle of antlers as she turned to find the other two. She was getting a little tired of the stuffy air down here.