The surface of the walkway was surprisingly solid.
It stretched out ahead in a straight path, the pathway had lustre like a light aquatic blue, with the visible texture of a water balloon or slime.
When Julius stepped down, through the wide gap between the halved lake, he noticed how his heel could comfortably glide across the path.
Thurid peered down from the shore, her expression twisting hesitantly before leaping off the edge, expecting to sink when she landed.
Only for her to land heels first, with a loud thud as if meeting against solid rock.
"Huh?" Thurid questioned to herself in a small breath, tilting her head aside in confusion at the unexpected solidity of the surface.
The flat glowing blue surface was like a fusion of illuminated blue colours, floating around like blobs of ink.
With faint globs of subtly darker blue, obscuring anything beneath the surface hiding in the depths.
Thurid's momentary confusion was immediately replaced, her head tilting back up as she watched the boy descend the steps ahead of her.
Suddenly she was hit with the incoming realisation that Julius was leaving her behind.
"Hey! Where are you going off to?!" She immediately barked harmlessly, before marching in stampede-like steps toward the stairs to follow behind, swinging her arms heavily to pace up to Julius.
The stair way, made from the same discoloured glowing ground, descend into a hole at the end of the glowing riverbed.
The walls leading down beside the stairs were made from the same bright sickly glow as the stairs, and the path that came before it.
The two descend the steps together, with Thurid following heavy footed just a tad behind Julius.
"So... How can we be in Helheim? I've heard stories before...But I know it can't be in Midguard." Thurid wondered aloud, her voice dull with contemplation.
Juliius exhaled a slow breath through his nose, his unchanging expression slightly dimming at his eyes.
"Third dimension..." Julius muttered nonchalantly, as if the single sentence was somehow enough to answer Thurid's query.
"What?" Thurid asked with a soft chuckle, reacting as if she had seen an old man babble something under his breath.
"We live in the third dimension. That's what your father would call 'Midguard', or rather 'Earth'." Julius explained in an exasperated breath, as if he was teaching a middle-aged man how to breathe.
Julius was very much like this, excelling much further than his peers and growing bored long ago of having to repeat the same explanation to who he considered "simpletons."
There was of course naturally one thing that Julius didn't excel in.
Though he made up for it in other ways, like right now, with his impressive knowledge.
"But what lies in the fourth dimension? The fifth?" Julius asked purposefully sharper, provoking Thurid's own trail of thought.
"These are the 'realms' your people speak of. They are merely planes of existence weaved together. With a tool, sometimes specific to each culture, used to maintain and traverse these dimensions." Julius finished, his voice bored again, as they reached the end of the steps.
"Tools?" Thurid wandered as she trailed behind Julius, to the bottom of the watery glowing staircase.
"It's different in cultures, though your people would know one as the world tree 'Yggdrasil'." Julius added, his voice quiet as he displaced his observing attention to the room.
The bottom of the steps gave way to a blue middle-sized room, enough to fit four horses in each corner.
This room was like a box, with each surface featuring the same complex illusory glowing colour.
It was as if this box had been placed deep within the heart of a magical ocean, the walls acting as glass of an unfathomable aquarium, showing the view of this radiant sea.
Thurid stepped beside Julius, her thunderous steps halting immediately as she drank in the appearance of the room.
For a long moment the two were silent.
One was naturally silent, comfortable and indifferent as he gazed into the watery abyss.
The other was blazed with levels of incomprehensible astonishment, her earthy hazel eyes wide with amazement.
Thurid fell into deep contemplation, stunned by the sight of topics she'd only heard of in stories told to her as a youngling.
Her thoughts in this moment weren't lines of words, but rather a silent process of understanding, slowly registering this dream like environment.
Her long comprehensive contemplation was cut off abruptly short, as Julius stepped into the room.
His gaze swept observantly over the sparkling floor; with each step he took.
"...How do you know so much?" Thurid suddenly breathed, her voice uncharacteristically soft.
Julius paused, it wasn't as if he hadn't been asked something like that before, he just wasn't ever sure how to answer it.
"I'm not like you." He breathed quietly, after a moment of contemplation, his gaze traveling distantly into the floor.
Then he continued onward toward the centre of the room.
"That guy said...-" Julius murmured in thought to himself.
He stopped as he said that, raising his hand outward to hover over the floor.
"Akashic records vault." He demanded toward the magical water, his voice loud and carrying ripples across the surface of the floor, trickling in waves up the walls and reverberating around the ceiling.
Suddenly the waters responded, the ripples retravelled back down as if it spoke in a silent voice of its own.
The waves gathered back together in the centre of the room, Infront of Julius, right beneath where his hand hovered.
BANG!
The flat body of water erupted into furious bubbles, foaming at the mouth of the surface, spewing white softness.
The bubbling grew more violent, as if the water was regurgitating something.
Something dark with a square silhouette, began to drift up from the depths.
Its appearance was obscured by the glowing waters, acting as a blurry veil of sorts.
Finally the item floated high enough to meet with the surface, the bubbles pulling the item through the glowing aperture.
The light from the water reflected of the surface of the item beautifully, revealing the item to be a cube.
Its sides were flat and coloured a metallic chrome, with each corner made from thick golden trim that continued thinner across each edge.
The surface itself was flat, with a metallic shine.
On each side was this strange clockwork pattern made from a dark engraved metal, missing only clock hands, though one side stood out in particular.
This side featured the same clockwork pattern, though had a dark round circle engraved into the surface.
Within the parameters of the circle, even smaller than the dark circle, was one glowing purple oval.
This oval was made up of two ovals, a smaller oval fitting inside the first like a ring, resembling an ominous glowing eye.
"I-Is that...-" Thurid began, nervous all of a sudden in the presence of this item.
"-The vault, yes." Julius interrupted, answering her flatly, taking the cube into his hand.
Meanwhile, the swelling of the foaming aperture continued.
This made Julius's eyelids narrow curiously into horizontal slits, his gaze vigilant, as the bubbles continued to spit out from the water.
The water dribbled out another item.
This item was the pink, the size of a hand and a complicated spiral shape.
It was solid, with a smooth texture like quarts, with long darker shade of stripes over the surface.
One side was rounded, spiralling out, whilst the other end opened up like an irregular umbrella fixed into place.
This was no doubt, a seashell.
Thurid looked confused, whilst Julius seemed indifferent, Julius raising the shell to his ear.
Immediately, he heard a familiar laughing sound jolt his right ear.
"Hehe, see? I can be quite useful sometimes." The voice teased in an exaggerated lilt.
Julius didn't respond, staying silent as he listened to the voice projecting from the shell.
"I hope you find what we're looking for." The voice giggled with dramatic warmth.
Thurid peered over, subconsciously learning forward from where she stood by the doorway, trying to hear whatever Julius was listening to.
The next thing the voice said was dark, spoke in an entirely different voice.
"Otherwise..." A pause, the voice switching its tone into something dangerously monotonous.
"We may have to talk about...that...mountain." The voice breathed in a murky tone, speaking with an emphasised mix of disdain and reluctance in the pause.
Then just as instantly, the voice tilted into its joyful laughter all over again.
"Well anyways! You're welcome! Don't forget to bring back a trinket for me!" The voice finished in a giggle, the sound of his overly joyful chuckle cutting off abruptly.
Julius froze for a moment, his gaze fixing intensely into the luminous floor before rising to his feet with a huff.
He flicked his other wrist, tossing the seashell to the ocean bed as he turned to Thurid.
"You ready?" Julius mumbled with dead eyes, the water behind him bursting into bubbles as they began swallowing the seashell.
"Ready for what?" Thurid blurt, leaning back as her dark eyes flew open with confusion.
Julius turned away, facing aside of Thurid.
Julius held the vault in his left hand; the other hand embedded into his pocket.
His left thumb rubbed over the surface of the flat cube, finding the side with the ominous purple glow.
At once the cube purred, vibrating gently in Julius's hand.
Then he spun the cube over in his hand, so that the purple oval faced away from himself.
The cube continued to hum, purring in Julius's hand like an active engine, the eye fizzing with overly glowing energy.
Suddenly the light zapped out from the oval in a twisting beam of purple, the purple energy shooting straight out, before suddenly looping mid-air to gather into an oval shape.
PZZZT!
The oval filled with a murky blend of ominous purple and sinister violet.
The two colours swirled around together, until the shape pulsed sapphire, sporadically clearing into a hollow blue oval trim.
This hollow oval was a dark magical blue, with two continuously spinning sparks moving around the oval frame.
The inside of the oval wasn't empty, but rather contained an entirely different view like a window.
"What the-" Thurid blurted with further confusion, though the amount of things she had already seen at this point made it easier for her to digest the portal in front of her.
Through the portal, the two could see a grand red carpet spilling endlessly ahead in between stacks of glossy brown bookshelves.
Julius didn't wait a moment longer, already raising his leg and swiping it over the bottom of the oval outline to step through the portal.
Thurid seemed worried to be left behind at first, though soon smiled with crescive glee at the excitement of the situation.
She hastily marched ahead, dragging her thunderous steps through the portal to follow behind Julius.
The two entered through the blue gateway, the circling immediately swirling closed behind them and dissipating into nothingness.
The two found themselves in a library of sorts, the air was old with the smell of oak and something expensive.
They stood at a circular red rug, that split off at the edges into four diverging red paths, trailing off into a four-way junction.
Each path trailed down endlessly between aisles, made by tall oak bookshelves on either side of each red path.
"Ahem." From the side of the two, an old female voice sickly coughed to garner attention.
Julius traced his chin across his surroundings, leading his gaze to the librarian sitting behind a wooden half-wall past one corner of the red rug.
The half-wall was a rich shade of brown, made from polished wood with neatly engraved patterns.
The top corners jutting out, with increasingly large layers of square wooden tiles, stacked on top of each other.
On the edge of the half-wall sat a misplaced book, laying balanced over the edge.
The book had a brown cover, with a golden trimmed spine, the rest of the book wasn't visible from where the two stood.
Behind this half-wall sat a thick slug-like creature half-curled on a leather armchair pulled into a desk.
Her body was like a thick lump, rolled into a green sausage.
The outer shade of her skin was composed of a forest green, whilst the front of side of her skin was like a painted thin pale green.
Surprisingly, she wore a maroon cardigan drooped around her shoulders, with only two of her multiple arms threading through her long sleeves.
The cardigan was frizzy and dark, pulled over where her arms tucked in, her many hands gently protruding from the edges of the open cardigan.
Her grey hair was rolled into a slimy bun, sitting like a shaggy dog, on the top of her head.
"Woah! Cool!" Thurid blurted as she looked over at the librarian, her eyes wide with shock as she digested the appearance of the creature in front of her.
The two approached the front desk, Thurid leaping forward with energy whilst Julius carried himself with the same mysterious grace.
"Hi there! Can I know where-" Thurid began to call out in a loud cheer, only for Julius's dead bore to somehow overpower her booming voice.
"Where is Prophecy 'A' forty-two??" Julius asked, his voice like fog if fog was capable sleep.
The librarian cleared her sickly throat one more time, her age ridden face creasing as she settled in her chair with thought.
Her face was puffy, sagging, much like a frog's face.
"Down the left, aisle number two-hundred and thirty four." She snarled in a raspy and raucous voice.
Thurid snapped her head aside, her eyes widening as she examined that the aisle closest to them began at aisle number one.
Julius's eyes narrowed with irritation, turning away abruptly to start gliding down one of the red carpets in illusory graceful steps.
Thurid's chin followed where Julius turned, internally screeching in rage.
"Ugh, he's already leaving me behind!" She thought to herself, refusing to whine aloud, not wanting to sound childish.
With an agitated huff through her nose Thurid slammed her hands onto the edge of the half-wall, her demi-god strength sending hairline fractures through the wood, knocking the book off of the half-wall.
"O-Oops! Thurid stammered with a bright face, instantly dropping down to pick up the fallen book.
The librarian made a complicated sound, not exactly a sigh but more like a revolting purr, it sounded like she was trying to clear her throat.
The librarian rolled her eyes as Thurid shot back up, the book held between both Thurid's surprisingly feminine hands.
Thurid's eyes wobbled nervously as she extended both arms to pass the book over the half wall, only for her eyes to suddenly widen in intrigue at the visible cover of the book.
Now that Thurid had a better look at the book, she could clearly see
the black painted oil lantern symbol, enscribed on the leather cover of the book.
"Huh? What is this book about?" Thurid questioned curiously, her brow raising slightly.
The librarian growled in slimy voice as she reached out with one maroon sleeved arm to take the book.
"The one that came a while before you, this was the book they came here for." The slug-lady explained.
Then suddenly, she leaned close with an ominous grin as her fat face stretched apart to accommodate for the crease in her lips.
"It was a dark elf..." The librarian whispered in a conspiratorial whisper that come out more like a sticky rasp.
Thurid's eyes flew open.
A dark elf was unheard of, they were incredibly rare.
"How do you-" Thurid began to ask, only for the librarian to cut her off.
"They had dark skin as black as coal, as smooth as hot sand, and ashen hair...It doesn't get more dark elf then that." She answered, pausing to clear the mucus in her throat.
Thurid gulped, thinking curiously to herself "A dark elf? What were they doing here?"
Her eyes tracked the book leaving her hands and entering the slug-lady's.
"Why was a dark elf reading about an oil lantern?" Thurid accidently thought out aloud.
"Heh...Not just any oil lantern." The Librarian responded, pulling the book open suddenly as she flattened it against her desk.
"The story goes there was once a dwarf, called Silheimerr." She paused as she pointed a finger along the words whilst she traced them.
"Silheimerr was a fantastic craftsmen. Known for his impressive ability to craft powerful tools with magic imbued into them, these tool's soon became known as artifacts. He made famous artifacts, such as the rift severing blade."
"One day, A god called Odin sought after Silheimerr, impressed by what he heard about him. When he found Silheimmer, he asked the dwarf to make him an artifact that could grant his every wish."
"The dwarf was conflicted, he knew that refusing the god would lead to his own suffering by Odin's hand. Though on the other hand, if he was successful in making such an artifact, he would be giving away unimaginable power."
Thurid was attentive to the slimy words she heard, the story wooing her intrigue as she softly breathed. "So what did Silheimerr do?"
The Librarian's face did a complicated thing, her lips creasing into another grotesque collection of folds as she smiled. "He built an oil lantern, then made it's flame seal away a Djinn, granting whoever lit the lantern three wishes."
Thurid's eyes widened at the absurdity in the Librarian's story.
How was she supposed to believe that such an artifact could exist?
"How can someone capture a Djinn? Can such an artifact really exist? How can a Djinn even be capable of granting wishes?" Thurid questioned to herself internally.
"When Odin was presented with the lantern, he was delighted with greed. Silheimerr saw this, taking the lantern and running away. He hid the lantern in a storeroom, in a place where he thought it would be the most safe. Where the oil lantern would never be found again..." The librarian finished, slapping the book shut, before bending down to stash the book under the desk.
Before Thurid could ask anymore, an unfathomable roar snapped with an echo in the background of the seemingly endless library.
CLAP!
end of chapter 9