[Feint]

Lya Pointa. Though its name had changed, the great cathedral remained the same. Saru thought of this quietly as he pressed his roughened palms to the stone door and eased it open. In the time that had passed, he himself had changed--he had grown older, tougher, and more mature (though it was only a marginal improvement). As he slipped between the two massive doors, he noticed that he felt a little guilty, as though his changes had betrayed the building somehow. His large eyes scanned all that he could see in the darkness, hungry for some slight difference that he could blame for his not returning for so many years. Yet it was not to be--despite all that had happened to the rengosett in the last few years, despite all of the stress he had been through, pain he had suffered, lies he had told, and lack of stability he had been forced to adapt to, the abandoned cathedral had not changed a bit. Saru half-shut the door behind him and slowly and silently made his way down the long entrance hall, carefully avoiding bits of rubble from the crumbling upper floors. He paused mid-hall and sat up on his haunches to examine the remains of a mirror still attached to the wall. His own solemn face gazed back at him. No, the cathedral had not changed. Even after he had left it, not once looking back, it had not changed at all from the way he remembered it. After all these years, it had preserved itself for him, waited patiently for him to come back for the sense of consistency it sheltered, and that he had begun to bitterly crave. As if it knew. That made Saru feel all the more guilty, and so he moved on. He passed a broken vase that he himself had shattered, and a rotting stool that he himself had thrown. More and more memories flooded him with each and every step, and he let himself sink into their welcoming embraces. He paused in the center of the hall and sat again, letting the memories take him over completely. He had been startled by his first friend there--what was her name, Constance?--and been very rude to her. Off and on he felt badly for treating her in such a way, but at the moment he felt no sympathy. He was a rude person, and he knew it. There were just certain people in the world that were not a breed of friendly, and he was one of them. He let his gaze wander to a dark spot, and then an adjacent hallway that he remembered led to a staircase. He started for it, remembering how he had uncovered a lucain and corbine hidden in those shadows once, and was tempted to lift his fiery tail to it and see if anything new was hidden there. But he did not want new--he wanted old, old things, old places, old memories. He wanted his old life back. So he pressed on, and let the darkness keep its secrets for a little while longer.

[Feint]

Saru padded slowly down the remainder of the hallway and around the corner, almost in a tentative fashion. He was afraid of finding something new there--yet the feeling was confusing, for it almost felt as though he was hungering for change, and the fear he was feeling was merely his emotional reaction to facing the unknown. Saru squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head forcefully.

"Shut up, Saru. Stop thinking like that," he muttered to himself grumpily, and strode towards the staircase whose existence he had once doubted. He carefully ascended the steps, feeling the old wood under each paw as he went. They had been so sturdy once--back before he had been there, he supposed, back when the cathedral was first built and in use. Back then, their users did not fear falling two stories to the ground. Not from those steps. Now was not much different. Each step was rotting on the inside and outside, yet Saru strode from one to the next without fear. They had been rotting when he had first used them, and they were no less rotted now. They had not dropped him then. Why start? Incredibly, even with Saru's horrid luck, the stairs held his weight easily, and in five minutes Saru found himself staring into a darkened room on the second floor. The melted statuette was still standing in the corner, though with a new cobweb and new layer of dust. The shattered remains of a longsword lay scattered on the ground, just as he had left them. He was tempted to take one with him, but they were too sharp and rusted for him to want to take a chance. Pity--he had been so proud of breaking the weapon. His gaze was stolen by the messy remains of a wall in the center of the giant room he was standing in, and he trotted over and past them to gaze down a once-hidden hallway and its line of doors. Two stood open--the two he and Constance had used. One was a rigged broom closet, he knew, but apparently the fool door that had locked him within had slid back into the floor, as it was closed no longer. Saru was tempted to see what else had changed there, but decided to approach the closest open door instead. To his memory, there had been many massive bookshelves there--and as he walked in, he discovered that not much had changed. Despite all that had not changed, the cathedral was still very much a place of supernatural happenings, and Saru chuckled to himself when he observed that every one of the giant bookshelves had been re-locked and turned ninety degrees of their own accord. Strangely, it didn't bother him. He sat down to ponder this, and his tail-fire cast shadows about the quiet room. He watched them flicker as he thought, and decided that the one most stable, predictable thing the cathedral could offer was, in fact, its wild unpredictability. Each room was a mystery in that one would never know if it remained the same or had changed in some manner. It was interesting that his heart had picked such a fluid place to be its source of stability, as the great cathedral was anything BUT stable, especially in its current crumbling state. Feeling cured of his depression, Saru approached one of the bookshelves on his own to see if he could break it open again. Odd that the cathedral would be so protective of its books.

[Feint]

Saru quickly withdrew his bleeding finger and sucked on it morosely. The enchanted lock had bitten him hard--an upgrade to the setup Saru had so easily defied during his last visit. He watched it rattle its chains ad bare its pointy little teeth threateningly. How did he miss such a spectacle? He glanced around the room, hoping to find that it had only jumped to life after he had touched it, but to his dismay, he was wrong. Every lock he could see was wriggling and twitching this way and that, with movements that were very much not subtle. He shook his head in self-disgust and disbelief, and bent over the lock that had bitten him--without touching it--to see if it had any visible weaknesses. With the dim light and its constant movements, it was hard to tell, but Saru thought he saw a second keyhole, much smaller than the central, tooth-lined one, along the side of the thick lock. It was too small for his dexterous fingers, so he cautiously left the room (would it change before he got back?) and trotted back to the shattered longsword to find a splinter he could use.

A soft mechanical sound came from the hall behind him, but he chose to ignore it--mostly out of fear. The last time he had heard such a sound, he had been thrown two stories to the floor.