Dissonant

“A-are you sure it's safe down here?” 

“‘Course it's not safe, Matty,” my brother replied, the lit torch in his hand illuminating his slightly dirty face as he spun around towards me. “I don’t think anyone's been here since… I don’t know, since before Grandpa was alive, or somethin’.” 

He lifted the torch up, looking around at the worn rocky walls as the orange glow of the fire settled on them. 

“Why should somethin’ like that have to stop us?” The scabbard on his belt swung around as he turned back towards the door, the metallic ornament near the top dimly catching the light of the torch. “I don’t want to spend my whole life cooped up in that village. At least we get to leave for the hunts, but what’s the point if all the animals are easy takedowns? I could hunt for the whole village's food supplies myself, if I wanted to!” 

His booming laugh echoed around the solid walls of the cavern, as he slowly strolled through the passageway dug out of the rock. He didn't have to drag me along on his adventures, though! I grumbled a little as I followed him, trying to keep close to the torch so that I wouldn't be left in the dark. 

“You need to get out more, too!” he suddenly started up again. “Only reason I brought ya along was so you’d take your nose out of those books. Why’d you even ask for empty ones?” 

I recoiled for a moment. He knew about that?! I thought I had hidden that from everyone… Did he see me talking to the merchant? “I…” 

“I know you told Dad you were buyin’ books for readin’, but how are you supposed to read an empty book? Or are you doing weird stuff with that ink set you bought?” 

“Y-you know about that too?” I stammered, almost bumping into his back as he stopped walking. 

“Do I know about it?” he exclaimed, his laugh almost painfully loud in the enclosed space of the tunnel we had entered. “You keep ‘em all next to your bed like they’re the most important thing in your whole life!” 

My brother bent down, reaching out with his free hand to ruffle my hair. 

“I mean, I don’t mind it,” he said, his grin faintly visible under the light of the torch. “Dad’s always goin’ on about how we’re a huntin’ family, but between me and him, we can get all the huntin’ done that we’d ever need, and have enough to spare for the whole village, too! You can just leave it all to old Alvin here.” 

He turned around again, continuing on down the dark passageway in the cave.

“If it makes you happy, you can keep doin’ whatever it is you’re doin’ with those empty books you’ve got. I’ll help throw Dad off the scent.”

“Th-thanks,” I timidly replied, stumbling along in the dark behind him.

*     *     *     *     *

The passageway continued to wind down deep into the earth, completely empty for what felt like hours. The walls all started to look the same to me, as if we had entered some sort of maze and were just going in circles. Bending down for a moment, I picked up a loose rock off the path, hurrying to catch up with my brother.

“Y’know, I don’t think we’re goin’ to get out of here for quite a while,” Alvin started, pausing for a moment to glance around the corridor we were inside. “I mean, I'm all for an adventure, but we're here for the long haul.” 

“Just… as long as there’s no fighting,” I mumbled. I could handle exploring, searching new places was amazingly fun. It’s just… 

“There’s nothin’ even to hunt down here.” Alvin fiddled with the handle of his sword, swinging the lantern around in his other hand. “And we don't get monsters like you hear about from the other villages.” 

That was one good thing about our village… no monsters. Even if it was because we lived in the middle of nowhere, too far away to even visit the other towns. 

“If we did, though… you’d probably have to fight,” he added. “...Even though I know you hate it.” 

It was a very good thing we didn't have monsters here. I silently thanked my dad for raising me in this particular village… as much as his parenting style wasn't pleasant. The forests were pretty, the mountains in the distance were spectacular… and I didn’t have to train myself to fight and defend the village. The idea of being as big and… bulky as Alvin, or my dad… 

I shuddered at the thought. Something about the possibility of me bulking up like that made my stomach crawl, though I couldn't figure out why. All I knew was that if it’d make me end up like those two, all big and muscular and angled… I never wanted to learn to fight. 

“Actually, I’ve been meanin’ to ask you about that.” Alvin suddenly stopped, turning around to face me. “You weren’t there when that mercenary group showed up, were you?”

“No, I wasn’t.” I thought back to the time he was referring to.

A few years ago, a small band of mercenaries had visited the village, looking for members to add to their monster-hunting group. While Alvin was very enthusiastic about the thought, I was… much less so, thanks to overhearing my father talking about hiring one of the mercenaries to help me train and build muscle.

“One of the girls in the group made an absolute fool of me,” he continued, running his hand through his hair out of embarrassment. “She wasn’t even that strong, she was just fast. Stayed out of range, waited until I made an openin’ and then… that was it. I was finished.”

He placed a strong, bulky hand on my shoulder, looking down at me with a brotherly smile.

“I reckon… if you do end up havin’ to learn to fight, somethin’ like her style might be good for you,” he said. “We’re lucky out here that we don’t get any monsters, but if they suddenly arrive… you might have to.”

“I-I guess,” I mumbled. Maybe… if it meant I didn’t have to bulk up, like my father wanted me to.

“Besides… you can already fight. You fought Dad off a lot when you were little, every time he tried to cut your hair.”

“Wait, really?” I stared wide-eyed at Alvin. Thinking back, I could remember a point where my father tried to cut my hair, but my memories were too fuzzy to recall the specifics.

“Yup!” he loudly exclaimed. “You were vicious back then! The moment Dad even brought the scissors near you, you’d scratch and bite and kick and everything! It was so fun to watch.”

I nervously fidgeted with the ponytail dangling from the back of my head as my brother continued to blather on.

“Honestly, I’m surprised Dad gave up on cuttin’ your hair, and just let you maintain it instead. With how much you fought him, I’d have thought he’d keep trying, just to train you to fight so you could hunt with the rest of us.”

Hunting… I recoiled a little, thinking back to when I was younger. My room was on the second story of our house, and I had set up my desk so that I could peer out of the window at the nearby forest. The trees always looked so pretty… 

But one time when I was small, I saw the hunting group return with what looked like a deer. They laid it out in the middle of the plaza, sliced it open to prepare it, and… needless to say, after watching them rummage around the inside of a deer, I learned to close my window around hunting time. 

“Eh, whatever… this should shut him up for a while,” my brother said. “If he knew where we were, he’d flip out at us for goin’ here without an adult.”

“Which just means he’ll get mad at us when we come back,” I retorted, already shivering at the prospect of my father dragging me out the back of the house for more… training.

“Yeah, but what do you think will happen if I say that I dragged you out here? He’ll get mad at me for goin’ out here without the group… never mind the fact that I’m already an adult anyway, but he should be ecstatic that you’ve gone out of the house.”

“I-I guess…” I idly scraped the rock in my hand against the wall as Alvin went on.

“Besides, I’m pretty sure I’m stronger than Dad now.” He stopped walking for a moment, making a few punching motions into the empty space beside him. “I could easily fight him and win. He’s gettin’ old.”

“That’s reassuring… I guess…”

*     *     *     *     *

My worries about my father’s potential reaction to our outing soon faded, as the rock surroundings of the tunnel gave way to simple stone walls. Alvin lifted the torch up higher, bathing the corridor in a soft orange glow. The previous jaggedness of the rocks had completely disappeared, giving way to features such as a few rusted metal loops jutted out of the walls, similar to the loops we used at home to hold flaming torches. 

“I knew it,” Alvin said under his breath, though his voice resonated down the corridor.

“You knew something was down here?”

“Yeah. Or, well… I was pretty sure we’d find something…” His voice trailed off as the corridor reached an end, and we were faced with a large, metallic door.

To the side of the door, within a small inset circle of metal, was what was left of the handle. Red, rusted, and mostly disintegrated, the only remaining part of it was a smudge of dust on the lower part of the circle, and a small pipe sticking out of the top.

As Alvin reached out for it, the rest of the handle crumbled away into nothingness. 

“...Now what?” Alvin let out a loud sigh, leaning against the closed door. “We’ve come so far already, so–” His voice cut out as a loud creaking noise emerged from behind the closed door, and he stumbled back upright, jumping back from the door as it slowly fell to the ground.

“I guess the hinges were as rusted as the handle,” I said, using my hand to shield my eyes from the large cloud of dust that had been kicked up by the falling door.

“Sweet.” The dust settled to reveal a huge grin on Alvin’s face, and he confidently strode through the now open passageway, stepping over the fallen door. “C’mon, Matty, let’s go.”

*     *     *     *     *

Aside from the dust that caked almost every surface inside the structure, it seemed abnormally clean, compared to the rest of the cave. Alvin and I weaved through mazes of empty metal shelves and heavy wooden boxes until we arrived at a small, open room.

“What even is this place?” I asked, my voice echoing a little down the open corridors. “It doesn’t look like anything I’ve seen before.”

Alvin rummaged around in the cupboards towards the back of the room, flinching as one of the half-rotted wooden doors crumbled under his grip. “Haven’t got a clue. What a discovery, though! An underground crypt… we’ll have to keep it secret from Dad, right? Somethin’ this cool…”

Leaving him to ramble to himself as he looked through the cupboards, I looked over the small desk sitting on the opposite side of the room. Sitting on top of it, though buried under a layer of dust, was a thin book. Next to it sat an intricate glass flask, containing some kind of black liquid. Was it ink?

Lifting up the journal, I brushed off the dust, revealing an elaborate gold spiral pattern decorating the spine. Though it was old and had dulled somewhat, it still shined under the light coming off of Alvin’s torch. Neither that, nor either cover had any kind of words written on them.

The first few pages of the book were blank, aside from a few black splotches and swirls. Further in, the random splotches began to give way to complicated pictures and geometric patterns, with labels written at each end of some of them. 

These diagrams continued until the tenth page, where a journal entry had been written. I carried the book over towards Alvin, shifting until the torch lit up the pages enough for me to read.

Day 57, Season 2, Year 1328

I’ve finally found a source! This region was far away from the epicenter, so it’s been difficult to make a stockpile of Materia for my experiments. I’ve had to feed the mechanism myself, just to have enough to conduct my experiments. But now, I have a monster! One unlucky creature happened to be wandering around the forest, and I managed to capture it. With this, I’ll finally be able to proceed!

Monsters? I quickly glanced around the room, listening for any kind of movement. If there was a monster in here with us… no, Alvin was capable of fighting it off. The only sound down here was the crashing of him casually ripping the doors off of the cupboards with his brute strength.

Day 60, Season 2, Year 1328

The monster has been a wonderful source of Materia. Do they constantly produce the raw elements needed for it? One of my colleagues was studying that, but without any contact with him, there’s no way I’d be able to find out. If the monster stops producing it, my guess is that it’ll either become benign until it refills, or it’ll return to its previous form. If that happens, I can just let it go, since it won’t hurt anyone.

“Hey, what’s that?” Alvin asked, peering down at the book in my hands. “A book?”

“Y-yeah, some kind of journal.”

“Ahh…” he mumbled, seemingly losing interest almost immediately as he made for something that had caught his eye at the edge of the room. I followed him, trying to keep the book under the light of the torch so that I could keep reading.

Day 65, Season 2, Year 1328

Finally, a breakthrough! I haven’t left the lab since I caught the monster, and my stockpiles of food are starting to run low. Now that I’ve discovered this property of Materia, I can get to work distilling it into a mixture that enhances it. Once I do that, as long as I can source a mirror, I’ll be able to prove my hypothesis! If this goes well, I– 

I flinched as something dripped onto my neck. Was something leaking? We were so far underground, though… My skin tingled slightly as the drip ran down my neck, and I absentmindedly wiped the spot where it had landed, stepping back and looking up at the ceiling. 

In contrast to the solid, almost featureless walls, the top of the room was filled with metal tubes, all weaving around and over one another. Though cobwebs and splotches of rust dotted many of the pipes, the majority of them seemed to be still intact, forming a maze that weaved around a large, open central pipe.

Just underneath where I had been standing was a single pipe, curving slightly away from the rest of the pack. A large section of it had rusted, and the pipe hung slightly lower off the ceiling. The small metal straps that were used to secure the pipes along the ceiling had also partially rusted, the one attached to the drooping pipe hanging by one screw.

“Hey, Matty,” Alvin said, gesturing for me to come over towards him. “Check this out.”

Partway up the wall just in front of him, set in a small indent, was a tall mirror. The surface was abnormally clean, compared to the amount of dust that caked the tops of the framing that surrounded it. By the light of the torch, I could just barely see a strange liquid, slowly coating the inside of it.

“I just flipped this lever–” Alvin gestured to a small switch attached to the wall next to him– “and this mirror started goin’ weird.”

Our reflection started to distort as the inside of the mirror seemed to fill with the mysterious liquid. The room seemed to gradually light up with a soft blue glow as the mirror began to sparkle, small twinkling stars appearing on the surface as the liquid settled at the bottom. The reflections slowly cleared, only what was being shown in the mirror was… different.

An unfamiliar face stared back at me. Rather than my slightly stubbly cheeks, which I had spent so long trying to deal with, the reflection of me had smooth, clear skin. Instead of my grey, almost black eyes, sharp green ones caught the light of the torch, glowing with an orange hue from the flames.

The shape of my reflection’s face looked quite different, too. Gone was the sharpness of my jaw that was beginning to develop, and instead my face seemed rounder, and softer. My hair was longer, with clumps of it framing the sides of my face, the rest tied back in my usual ponytail. And on top of my reflection’s head were two tall, fluffy, bright orange fox ears.

“Alvin, are you…” I glanced up towards him, only to see him looking around in the other direction in wonderment at how the mirror was illuminating the room.

“That’s so cool! I can…” He quickly rushed over to one of the unopened cabinets on the other side of the room. “How is it lightin’ everythin’ up like this? I can see so well!”

Leaving him to his hyperactive exploration, I turned back towards the mirror. Why was my reflection… The moment I looked at it, the strange liquid on the inside began to drain out, and my reflection distorted again. 

Softly touching the side of my face, I felt the familiar stubble that I seemed to be stuck with, as much as I disliked it. If there was a way for me to deal with it forever, or something I could do that would stop it from coming back… I didn’t want to end up with a full beard like my father, or the strange mess of facial hair that Alvin had. 

As my reflection in the mirror began to clear, I reached up to the top of my head, where the strange furry ears that I had seen were. There was nothing… both on my head, and where the ears had been in my reflection. Now that the mirror had finished clearing, it looked no different than what I was used to. Same stubbly cheeks, same sharp jaw… same old me. 

The soft blue glow in the room began to settle, and the room gradually grew darker, the sparkles completely disappearing from the mirror as the rest of the strange liquid drained out. 

I slowly wandered over to Alvin, who was hunched over the remains of a cupboard, digging through the crumbled wooden panels. 

“Find anything?” I asked, looking over his shoulder at the mess he had created. 

“Nope,” he replied, glancing up at me for a moment. “Nothin’. A few of these cupboards had some little glass things in them, but other than that, I've found nothin’ at all.” 

Pressing down on his knees, he lifted himself upright, leaving the small pile of wooden pieces in the corner of the room as he looked around. 

“There’s more to explore, but are you up to keepin’ on goin’?” Alvin asked, gently placing his hand on my head and ruffling my hair. “I know I dragged you out here and all, but…” 

I looked up at him, his face bathed in the orange glow of the torch in his hand. His concerned expression was barely visible under the dim light, and I could tell from his voice that he was worried. Even if he did things like this sometimes, he was still a good brother. 

“I think I'll be fine,” I responded. “I’m a little tired, since we went out so late, but…” 

I stopped talking as a chaotic rumbling sound began to emerge from the door behind Alvin, leading further into the structure. It echoed around the solid walls, slowly growing louder and louder. 

“What's up?” Alvin asked, seemingly not hearing the noise. “Is everythin’ okay?” 

The strange tingling I had felt when the drip hit me had returned, getting more intense as whatever was making the rumbling noise crept closer and closer. Chills ran down my spine, and the hair on my arms stood on end as I recoiled, my gaze locked on the door behind Alvin. Was it a cave-in? Or… was something down here with us? 

Alvin stepped to the side, following my line of sight towards the door as he stepped back. The rumbling kept growing louder, a few crashing sounds interspersed in its approach. And then, the door was pushed to the ground with the loudest crash yet.

Standing there was the most terrifying creature I had ever seen. 

It stood on four thin, wiry legs, taking up the entire space of the doorframe. Its body looked warped, vaguely resembling that of any other four-legged creature such as a bear or deer, only with thick black clumps covering all over its skin, making it unrecognisable. Some kind of fluid dripped down its legs, pooling on the floor underneath it as it shakily stepped into the room. 

It lowered its long neck down towards us, letting out a growl that grated on my ears like a blade. Alvin and I slowly backed up as it approached, rearing up to its full height with its head almost brushing against the ceiling. The trail of fluid it left in its wake slowly sparkled like the mirror, illuminating the room a small amount. 

Every muscle in my body tensed, as the tingling I had felt before spread through my arms and legs. They almost felt like they were burning as my heart raced, and I glanced towards Alvin, who had one hand gripping the handle of the sword attached to his belt. 

Neither of us were ready to come face to face with a monster.