by Feint » 11/24/2010 8:50 PM
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.