He awoke with a sharp intake and coming out of the fog of his sleep Quartes saw the haze of dust that hovered about him shift as his eyes opened.  For a moment he marveled at the swirling pattern, the way the particles scattered the light of the room.  Panic however rose in his breast and his eyes narrowed as he reclaimed his feet, sword coming out in a whisper of steel.

Old habits had him turned towards the passage way, but he was forced to look away.  The brightness too much.

There was light in the room, and not the blue wavering light of his torch.  Shading his gaze, Quartes ducked to the left of the entryway, hiding his pale eyes from the direct source of the lights.  The stars of the after image hung before his eyes as he rubbed at them, glancing to make sure the Shards remained in place to defend him in his blindness.

Waiting for his eyes to adjust, Quartes got to completing his morning tasks.  He gathered water once more into the pot, slid the Shard into it, and added the grains from bag stored in his pack.  As the Shard hissed in the water, and his back still towards the passage, he took in the small room about him.  There was not much to see beyond what the torch had revealed the night before.

And yet it was so different.

The steady light revealed the floating dust, stirred up simply by his presence.  Easily could he see now his boot falls in that dust.  Similarly could he see that there was no other trail that disturbed the dust.  The light, illuminating the room in a more familiar glow, also laid bare just how plain everything was.  He knew that long centuries had passed since the fall of the line of Falden, since any peoples had resided here.  Yet the light made it plain.  While a few remnants of the counter top, and a few objects on the shelves, remained they were but dried husks.  The years had sterilized the room.  The walls were expertly carved but plane.  Whatever curtains, tapestries, or furniture that had brought them warmth, had shown that they had life, had long been destroyed.  All that remained was a shell, an echo that hinted at a story of a past.

Quartes took a heavy breath, his isolation and loneliness beyond just the mountain weighing on him.

He finally prepared himself and turned.  The source of the light dazzled him still for a moment but his pale eyes adjusted.  A beam shone on down from the roof of the room.  He knew of these, that the Faldenians had cut away rock up through the mountain to let in light, that some even had crystals which would gather the light at all hours and bring it down so that the Landians that had lived here under the mountain could still bask in the sun.  In past trips he had seen that a few of those had survived the downfall of the Clan of Falden, but many had been destroyed or blocked in the violence that left the Halls empty of his kin.  When he had passed through this waystation in his past trips it had always been dark.  Quartes walked towards the beam.  Perhaps whatever had caused the collapse in the tunnel ahead had cleared what had once blocked the shaft.

He reached out a hand.  The warmth of the light elicited a shiver from the cold the rest of him endured.  He flexed his hand, extending and curling his fingers, taking in the play of light across his skin.  The way the light highlighted the white scars, the warped skin of his right hand.  With a step up onto the stone table that took up the center of the room, Quartes stepped into the light.  Eyes shut, face upturned, he basked in this fragment of the greater world.

He was the Heir of Lehn after all, a warrior of woods and plains.  The great feats of the Faldenians he would not dispute, but nor would he understand the wishes that brought them under the mountains.  Yet under the mountains he would remain for a time yet.

Lost under the mountains perhaps.

Quartes hung his head.  Both to quiet the thought and in relief of shoulders bound by too much wariness and hard ground.  Taking a breath he opened his eyes.  There was the dazzling for a moment again, the sparkling swirl of the dust he had kicked up, but there was something else.  He dropped off the table.  Looking for a moment at the prints of his boots and what laid revealed by them, lines and carvings.  Turning, he retrieved his blanket and returned.  Swiping, fanning, inducing a few sneezes he stifled from echoing in the halls, he uncovered the table.

A shadow of a smile pulled at the corners of his mouth.  Etched in the stone were things familiar to him.  The long winding line of the Falden Road as it passed from hall to hall, making way through the Great Hall of Falden itself at the heart of the mountain and eventually to the Hall of Larathon where he would find his way out to the lands east of the Hendarks.  However, the map showed the side paths.  The halls that had not been deemed worthy of being connected to the great road.  It marked where he was and from there was one of the crossroads he had pass earlier.  That road led to a hall called Serijo.  A hall that had its own road taking it to the Great Hall.

A way possibly around the collapsed path.

A way forward on his trek.