A crossroad, it seemed. Anubis paused, nose tilting towards the ground as he searched for Bacchus's scent. He could barely see the pawprints, but his nose needed no light. Bacchus had gond forward, straight through the tunnel, probably straight in the direction of the garden. He was interested, sure, but at the moment, this was time to find his own discoveries. He looked right and left, considering, before turning right.

Before he left the crossroads, he let a number of extra mushrooms in the direction that he had come from, so that if he came back this way multiple times, there would be no confusion which direction would lead him to the light.

He continued down the corridor, ever leaving a sparse path of glowing mushrooms in his wake.

The right-side corridor was cooler than the rest, a faint breeze blowing through it from top right to bottom left. Thin gaps and cracks farther on let in slivers of silver light, faint but enough to see by in and around the tiny pools they cast. Dust motes drifted in these pale beams, the emptiness eerie.

Now and then there was a soft shuffle sound. It was impossible to tell its source, or its cause; it might have been Lessers living farther down, given that this side headed back toward Cassiopeia proper. Maybe there were other gaps in the rock. Or maybe it was just dust sifting down, the cracks slowly, inevitably giving way over many, many years.

A few huge stone blocks had crashed down and into the tunnel, forming half-blockages. A much larger Gembound would have been unable to pass, but for the jackal it would be easy enough: a scramble here, a crawl there, and--was that spiderweb? A little clung to one side of the tunnel. Spiderweb, or cobweb.

To either side along the entire corridor were more cells. Simple, square rooms hewed from dark stone, void of light or real features. Some had a very plain almost-bed stone shape that rose from the rock at one side of the room but in others this had worn away.

The corridor stretched on for quite some time before, if Anubis followed it to its end, coming to a halt in a smaller, circular room. A deliberate hole in the ceiling here let in light, a cone that plunged straight down to a gemstone grate sunken into the floor. This was likely to avoid the rusting of metal, as the dark stains all around it suggested that blood, or perhaps other wastes (or merely water) had been dumped down frequently enough that mere steel would have been ruined in just a few cycles. The holes were large enough to keep a jackal from falling in, but only barely; the cistern into which the hole plummetted was impossible to gauge in terms of depth.

@Anubis

The cracks of light filtering into the corridor had Anubis pausing, standing just within the beam and looking up and through. A smirk twisted its way through his features as he thought of Bacchus and how he'd thought that he'd be starving his children of light, holding them in that Voidlit garden as their only respite from the unending dark. Clearly, he had not taken any time to explore the prison. The fool.

They would come here and drink from this well without the need of that garden. He could see them scrabbling to reach for the tiny cracks so that even just an eye could peer out towards the light just beyond. Bacchus was not going to have any control over them, unless he planned, unless he learned.

Anubis would have control. Over him, over his studies, over this entire plan of his.

He turned and continued, not hesitating to scrabble over the rocks, squeezing through what space he could find until he reached the end of that corridor, the cistern that reached far, far above. He almost laughed. Another source of light to satiate their starving souls.

He drew that arcane power in himself again and reached into the ether, pulling more visions of the past. Not of a chrysalis or an old mummified fragment, but merely the room he stood in, to get a glimpse of its purpose.

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gore

A sound, from behind Anubis. A shuffle, not unlike those he'd heard, though this one was growing louder.

A dragging.

Another of those non-distinct, hulking shapes was coming down the long, dark corridor; the rubble was no longer there. This one had too many teeth, ripped in a cheshire grin from ear to ear and then again from forehead to chin. These four jaws split and moved idly as it walked, multiple limbs latched with hook-claws into another shape that it dragged, motionless, across the floor.

It would, Anubis might reflect, as the creature hauled the body to drop at the cistern's gemstone grate, have made more logistical sense to eat this one. This creature, with frozen grin and six empty eye sockets. Perhaps there was a reason they did not. Perhaps there was a reason the Valkhound began to methodically rip it limb from limb, as retches and whimpers sounded farther down the corridor. Perhaps there was a reason he fed the pieces down the grate, dropping them to spin away into darkness. Viscera, meat, bone, hair, torn away and discarded to the shadows.

Before long there was nothing left but thick, congealing streaks of blood on the stone. The beast stood, turned--and vanished.

@Anubis

The vision Anubis saw this time wasn't one surprising in the least. He figured this was some kind of garbage chute for those that died in the prison. Although he wondered why the grate was needed, instead of a simple chute. Perhaps so the jailers did not follow the deceased into the depths below?

Speaking of the depths below, Anubis marveled at the depth of it - he could not see that far down, but there was very much a way he could test it.

He quickly tapped the floor next to him and, when his paw lifted, a large glowing mushroom appeared, which he carefully ripped from the ground. Leaning over the grate, careful not to step on it just in case he would fall through, he released the mushroom, watching as it fell, to perhaps gauge the depth, if it was anything reasonable.

Down it tumbled: to the side, striking the wall and bouncing away. Down again, its dim light barely visible against the black mouth below.

It thudded to a halt some fifteen or twenty feet down, and then... began to slide downward in the direction Anubis had come from. It vanished out of sight beneath his feet.

@Anubis

Anubis watched until the faint, eerie glow of the mushroom slid out of sight. He noted for later a test he would have to run. To acquire a lesser - a rat or a bat of some sort, something that could fly or be nimble, and have it explore the tunnel in his place. He would have crawled in himself, but he knew there was a very very large possibility that there was no exit and he would never crawl out of that hole again. If it were a lesser, well, it could crawl in for him and fly out or, if it bore no wings, he could simply sever the connection if there was no exit. Lessers were in plentiful supply, after all.

For now, however, he was satisfied. He knew the cistern's location, he knew what, most likely, this "pit" was that he'd heard tell of in his visions. He turned and began making his way out and back to the crossroads, following the trail of glowing fungus on the way, although it was a relief to know that it was a straight way back. Another hitch in Bacchus's great plan, he noted with amusement. It would be ever so easy for his children to simply walk right out, wouldn't it?

Once he made it back to the converging corridors, he immediately set off along the left path, once again bringing up his magic to leave behind a trail of glowing fungus like a lifeline back to the surface.

Back past the room with the black slab table on his left, and forward...

A little bit of rubble was visible in the tunnel ahead. Nothing, at first, like what he'd seen at the cistern, but it gave the place a dangerous, claustrophobic sort of feel, like anything could be lurking just beyond. An opening to a new cell was worn away on his left, and another just beyond--but on the right side of this corridor, opposite the entrance to the third left-hand cell, was another hallway stretching away to his right. To the north. This one was narrower, like the one that had led to the cistern; but without exploration it was hard to see what might be down there.

Anubis could turn right, heading up that tunnel; or he could go forward, exploring what lay ahead.

@Anubis

The claustrophobia of this prison was...intense. His brain ever going, he wondered if, perhaps, they find a way to block off the way to the cistern and keep the children on this side, away from those peeks of light and the potential to escape. Still, there was a lot more to explore. A lot more to find, he thought. It seemed to stretch on forever.

He glanced in the direction of the narrow corrider and paused, thinking for a moment, before turning that way. Not before, of course, stopping to leave a slightly more condensed patch of his fungus behind, to lead the way back towards the entrance. The more branching tunnels, the more potential to be lost.

But the magic didn't work this time, so he simply shrugged and continued. It was one path - he would fix this later.

At first, there were only smooth walls left and right. Undoubtedly, the space behind them held the cells whose openings he had passed, or had yet to pass, on the east-west corridor. Then came four, to either side. One on the left had half-collapsed, a large pile of rubble filling it. And ahead, the hallway plunged into total darkness, without the benefit of the dim fungal light.

This place smelled of dust and stone. There was no sign Bacchus had come this way, no disturbance of the damaged stone underfoot. And ahead was a now-familiar smell, a sort of dank dampness and fresher air. No light, but... another cistern?

@Anubis