The mosquitoes weren’t monstrous, not in the way of system-spawned horrors or the thumb-sized mutant bloodsuckers Marco had sometimes teased Elisa about, but each insect was nearly double the size of what they were used to. Once it started, their droning hum never ceased, and no matter how many they slapped, more replaced them. Elisa cursed, Riv swore, and Aethe merely gritted her teeth and kept walking.

“They’re not dangerous,” Elisa confirmed after squashing one flat on her arm, “just obnoxious. I don't even know how they are getting through our skin.”

“Me neither, but it's something that bypasses body stats.” Riv swiped at his neck. “If they keep this up, I’ll be drained dry.”

The group trudged on with their morale dipping but not entirely broken. In an odd way, the annoyance of the mosquitoes had provided variety to their suffering, which almost made it better.

Occasionally they found a patch where the undergrowth thinned, and they made better time for a while before plunging back into dense growth again. The rhythm of slapping mosquitoes became as constant as the rhythm of their steps, filling the air with a weird, annoyed music until they were finally out of the wet region and back to less muddy, mosquito-free climates.

As the sun began to lower and Marco had just about given up on finding anything that day, Riv came out of yet another thump with his club and ground to an immediate halt. He tapped the ground with his club once, twice, three times. Then he frowned.

“What is it?” Marco asked.

Riv tapped again, more firmly. “It feels odd. Different somehow.”

Elisa knelt, pressing her hand to the soil, but shook her head. “Feels like dirt to me.”

Aethe stomped a few times. "Me too."

“I can’t explain it.” Riv scowled. “It’s not like it's hollow. It's not stone or anything. It's just… look. Aethe. Come here.“

Aethe raised an eyebrow but said nothing as she walked to his side.

"Stomp a few times. Get used to how it feels. I've been doing it for days, so I already am."

She did. Little squelching thumps rang out through the forest as she trod down hard on the dirt.

"Great. Now go back there." Riv pointed the way they had come. "Twenty or thirty feet. Then do the same thing."

Aethe raised her eyebrows but obeyed. She was only on the second stomp when she stopped all of a sudden.

"It's not the same," she said. "It's a different kind of soil."

"Magic?"

"Completely normal. Just different. Drier or wetter, I don't know. But not the same kind of dirt as over here."

"I'm going to find the edges of it. Aethe, could you work going the other direction?"

It took all of the rest of their sunlight to mark out the space, an almost perfectly circular area of different-sounding dirt that was about an eighth of a mile from the center to any part of the edge.

"It's something, right? We have to check this out. It has to be something." Riv slumped. "Though I don't know what."

Marco clapped Riv on the shoulder. “All right. We’ll mark it. We don’t have to solve it today. It’s been a long march, and we aren't going to figure it out in the dark. Let’s make camp and think it over with clear heads in the morning.”

They picked a spot about a half-mile away, just in case Riv's discovery came with unpleasant surprises. The mosquitoes kept their distance, and the smoke drove most other kinds of insects away, leaving them mostly unbothered. Dinner was plain leftover pheasant meat and the mushrooms Elisa had saved, but it filled their stomachs enough to let them drift off to sleep. Marco was the last one awake, keeping watch over the campfire until the embers died down to almost nothing.

As the fire cracked and shadows lengthened, Marco thought again about Riv’s discovery. He didn’t know what it meant, but he had learned to trust Riv’s instincts when it came to the solidity of various materials. If he said the earth was strange, then something was strange indeed.

Tomorrow, they would test it.

—

"This should be the center," Riv said. "The dead center. It should be here, right?"

"I mean, it should," Marco said. "That makes sense."

"We'll check it out," Elisa said. "Slowly and carefully. Every tree. Every stone."

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

The four of them spread out across the clearing, moving slowly. None of them pushed too quickly, for fear of missing something small but significant that could break open the mystery. Aethe moved to the tree line and then inwards in a slow spiral, brushing her hand across the trunks, pausing to study the bark. She scratched a bit free with the edge of a knife and sniffed at it, then frowned and shook her head.

Riv bent low, still focusing on the ground, club still in hand. He pressed his palm into the soil, then scooped some up, letting it run through his thick fingers.

“Feels like dirt,” he muttered.

He took a deep breath, as if the smell of the place might tell him more than his eyes could. He tried again in another spot, then another, each time with the same level of non-success. He still found nothing.

Elisa paced with her journal open, jotting observations as she went. She tapped a rock with the butt of her pen, then crouched to peer closer at the lichen clinging to it. She turned the rock over, brushed off soil, and even held it to her ear as if it might whisper something useful.

“Normal stone,” she announced eventually, disappointed. "It's normal soil under it, too. Nothing special.

Marco drifted between them, trying out each of their tasks with them for a time before moving on to the next. He crouched near a patch of thin grass and tugged it free, hoping it would open up a tunnel like a secret switch. The grass just acted like grass.

An hour passed that way, with each of them cycling between trees, rocks, soil, and anything else that might hold a clue. Riv eventually slammed his hammer down on a flat stone, hard enough to crack it in half. They all peered at the splintered inside, but it was like everything else here. Just a rock.

Aethe climbed partway up a tree to peer into its higher branches, then slid back down with a shrug. Elisa sketched a crude map of their checks and wrote a single frustrating All ordinary note beneath the whole thing.

Marco finally called them back together at the center of the clearing. If there had been any progress at all, he would have let it go on longer. Like this, he felt like they were all acting insane.

“Nothing weird,” he said, rubbing the dirt from his hands. “Not in the soil, not in the stone, not in the trees. I don't see how we can keep going like this.”

“Which,” Elisa said, closing her journal with a snap, “is its own kind of strange. If Riv says something’s off and it's just a feeling, fine. But there really is some kind of serious change here. I just don't know what we can do about it. Sometimes something weird is just something weird, and there's nothing you can do about it.”

Riv’s jaw tightened, but he didn’t argue. Aethe looked around once more, scanning the shadows like she might still catch them misbehaving. At length, she sighed. “For now, the place is empty. We’ll have to dig harder tomorrow.”

Marco nodded, though something still tugged at him. The clearing remained stubbornly normal, and that in itself felt wrong.

"Wait. I have an idea."

Marco had only used this ability once, and only in desperation. Right now, in this place, it seemed like it might have another use. That depended a lot on what psychological effects really were and encompassed, but he couldn't say it wasn't at least worth a shot.

He opened his mouth, and inspiration flowed forth in the form of a yell. His magic drained down to the dregs as he and everyone in his party got stronger and braver. In some situations, that would have been the main event. In this one, something else took center stage.

"This is…" Riv ran over and hugged Marco. "Captain. My captain. Thank you so much."

In front of them, on every bit of ground Riv had flagged as odd, was a flat, bare, stone platform. Every tree, rock, and bit of soil they had seen and examined there was gone as if it had never existed. In its place were square stone bricks fitted together tightly to form a completely level surface. In the center, yawning open big enough to admit all four of them shoulder to shoulder, was a staircase.

"Wow," Elisa said. "I guess we really should have thought of that. If it's the temple that granted Quill illusion powers, then all this makes sense."

"Kind of," Aethe said. "But then how did he find it in the first place?"

"Who knows? Maybe he has an affinity for this kind of thing. Maybe he got lucky. Maybe he found a map or something that changed the rules. All I know is we are going down there," Riv said. "Now."

"Not now," Marco said. "It's been more than thirty seconds and the illusion isn't coming back. I think we are immune to it now. That doesn't mean we are immune to everything inside there. I'm not moving until the cooldown on Captain's Cry is finished."

They spent the time eating a quick lunch, then hiding their non-essential cargo between some big forest rocks. They'd be going in light, just carrying water and a bit of emergency food.

When the cooldown finally flipped, they were all at the top of the stairs, ready.

"Be careful." Marco said. "Everyone stay close. Don't believe anything you've seen. Whatever this place is, I don't think we can expect it to be normal."

"Fair," Riv said. "Let's go."

The stairs stretched downward much further than Marco would have thought possible. There were a hundred of them at least, and they took them far below the level of the forest. Either through illusion or some more substantial kind of magic, the space was completely clean. There wasn't so much as a cobweb or speck of dirt on the path from the opening of the tunnel all the way down to the base of the floor.

"Aren't we due for something?" Riv was standing on the landing of the staircase looking down what appeared to be an endless tunnel that stretched for miles and miles ahead. "An attack. An illusion. Something? This is pretty boring so far."

"Don't look a gift horse in the mouth, they say." Marco wasn't sure they weren't in an illusion right now, but if they were, it was a relatively calm one. He wasn't going to waste his limited illusion-dispelling powers on it. "Although I bet we do find something if we press in just a bit further."