Erisa sighed as they watched Ran take off after looking around like he'd seen a ghost.
"Where is he off to now?" Kigana asked, making Erisa shrug.
She turned towards Haru. "Can you reach him mentally?"
The Acolyte stared at the figure of his friend until he was out of sight then closed his eyes. "No," he said, a few heartbeats later. "It's like the connection is dead, or null. I don't know how to explain it."
Erisa decided that there was nothing any of them could do. "We will just have to go after him then."
Sharing a glance, the three of them started moving. They started as a run but soon had to slow down to a jog in order to conserve strength.
Erisa could not help noticing that the environment was quiet, too quiet. And staring ahead, seeing nothing but darkness and hills, she just had a terrible feeling —the type of feeling one got from staring into a ditch at night.
"Wait a moment," she said, coming to a halt.
The others came to a stop with her. Haru's situational awareness was really good because as soon as he stopped the Acolyte was back to back with her, pulling Kigana close to join them.
"W…what is it?" The older girl asked before Haru politely hushed her.
Erisa enshrouded her senses in her kin then focused her sight, hearing and sense of smell. Taking a quick sniff she noticed she could smell something wet, sort of leathery. And there was sulfur, so much sulfur. Probably from the dragon wraiths of the Abyss.
But there was more to what she could smell than just sulfur, but her kin enhanced nostrils were not good enough for picking it up so she instead focused on what she could hear.
The winds around them whispered. They curved and flowed around something to the left, something still, something silent. But the environment around it was not silent.
Erisa looked left and focused on her sight. Several dozen yards away she could just make out a shadowy figure when it began to move.
It leaped across an incredible height and she opened her mouth to call out a warning to the others. But this being moved faster than thought, much less words.
Her eyes could only widen, her heart thundering, as she saw it fall towards them.
The last thing she saw was dark wings unfurling before there was a bright flash of light that stunned her into unconsciousness.
When she woke up next Erisa found that she was completely disoriented and in so much pain. Her head ached so much that even thinking made her wince and her muscles were totally cramped.
Blinking her eyes open, all she could see was darkness. From her nose drops fell to her lips leaving the taste of iron in her mouth—blood.
'Where is this? Why is everywhere so dark? Why does my head ache so much?'
She was just completely confused. Her eyes and head were gripped by a sensation of whirling and loss of balance. She gingerly sat up, upright and tried to swivel around to see if any one was nearby.
When that did not work, she called out. "Soran Haru?"
Her voice echoed around, alerting her to the fact that she was in a vast, round, and empty room.
Silence responded to her with nothing after the echoes of her call faded away.
"Nika Kigana?"
Just as before, there was no response. Worried about what could have happened to her friends and kinhood mates, she gently rose to her feet, fighting against the dizziness that almost swept her off back to the ground.
From what she could remember, something, or someone, had attacked them. It had been a winged figure. And a bright flash of light from it had knocked them out.
It had been fast, too fast, almost unimaginably so. But whoever attacked them was nowhere to be seen, and neither were her friends. She was certain of that as her senses were still kin enhanced and she could not perceive any presence in the room with her.
Deciding to throw away caution for the moment. She spread her kin out to the only source of light in a darkness like this, her soul, and borrowed some of its glow to light up the room.
Normally, she'd have done this with either sunlight, fire, or any source of light around her. But here there was none, so she had to use the brightness of her half Fey soul. This method would tire her out quickly, but it could not be helped right now.
A ball of brilliant star light appeared in her hand, making her quickly close her eyes as the room became incredibly bright too quickly.
Carefully squinting and slowly opening her eyes, she saw that it was no ordinary room, but an oubliette. And there was no ladder to the trap door above.
That was not a problem for her. Embracing nature, she tapped into the air of the environment and floated up. The trap door was quite strange and looked more like a creature than a door. All she could see was tentacles, hundreds of them, folded together to form a blockage.
There was no way she could open this naturally. It was so confusing, and once again she found herself wondering where the hell she was.
Tapping into the nature of the stone walls around her, which looked quite strong with no visible cracks in them, she let her kin borrow their strength then punched hard at the strange door creature.
Her fist went through it like it was wet paper. Quickly she began to shred it with successive blows until there was a large enough gap that would fit her.
Quickly, she floated out not wanting to wait and see if the damn thing could regenerate quickly as most creatures in Naraku could.
She was right. As she floated out, she looked down and saw new tentacles already sprouting out of the mangled remains of the creature to form a new trap door.
Looking around she saw that she was in a hall so bright that there was no use for her star light anymore. Thankfully, she let the star light go and immediately noticed that even though the hall was bright, there was nothing she could point to and say it was what was producing said brightness.
She looked around in wonder, wondering what enchantment had been used to build this place.
She found something to wonder even more about when she glanced up and caught sight of the clouds above.
Floating there, she just gaped and watched the slowly drifting dark clouds.
She didn't need to wonder anymore. She knew only of one place that this could possibly be. A place as storied as the person it held.
As the tales of old said, buried in darkness, chained and soulless, out of the sight of the universe…
"Here lies Lucifer upon his Dragons' hearth."
She turned around at the sound of the most beautiful voice she had ever heard.
Standing at the very end of the hall, cloaked in radiance, was a being who could very much be mistaken for an angel.
She was not fooled though, she knew where she was now—she knew just who he was.
"Lucifer."