Dib07: Lol sorry for the looong update. Been busy! ^_^

Meowtastix: Hiya! Hope you still be reading this and hope you don't need to recap too much! Lol! Anyway, thanks so much for your comments always!

Chapter 13: No Intermission

'Waking or asleep,

Thou of death must dream

Things more true and deep

Than we mortals dream.'

Ode to the Skylark - Percy Bysshe Shelley

Shaking from fatigue, Shadow linked the pictures up with each corresponding element they had solved through their current collection of five chaos emeralds. Once it was clicked in, the dial glowed a pale yellow and the stone door swung open from the inside.

Sonic proceeded with Shadow in front, feeling the gold ring on his wrist for spiritual support and good luck. They entered a wide, spacious passage. Its walls were stretched out so wide that a mammoth could easily stand facing the centre. The ceiling was unreachable. And here the walls glowed like the corridor they had come through, lighting the way ahead. The only way ahead was straight forward through an open block of old stone, leeched with green fungus and dust. On the floor, metres from the little doorway they came through, out in the middle of the stone passage was some eight large generic crocodiles on the floor. Dead. They all lay inert close to each other as if some mass hysteria had led them down here, only to die all at once.

"What the -?" Sonic stepped lightly up to the sprawled bodies of the crocs, paying close attention to any sudden movements. He poked one with the tip of his sneaker and got no response. "Looks like they've been gassed. What else could have done this?"

Shadow spat at the floor and walked carelessly through them, unafraid of one of Mobius' greatest predators when they were once in their prime before the mutations. He even stepped on a few of them in his way. "Nobody could have. They're too fresh. They couldn't have been down here more than an hour."

"So what - gives?" Sonic said, minding them as he hurried to keep up with a bruised and battered Shadow.

It felt like they were deep underground. Moving down all the way slowly so that you barely even noticed it. The stale air was dry and rotten. Water trickled from the damp ceilings as if they were passing deep beneath a water source. The stone walls, ceiling and floor were all precariously smooth. No cracks or unkempt crevices. "Somebody must have worked on this for a long time."

"Forerunners must have built it." Shadow implored from further ahead, his soft, strong voice ending flatly in the dank atmosphere. "Either way the emerald is right at the very end. It's a straight walk there and a straight walk back."

Sonic grinned and stretched his back that was still tingling from the effect of all that overzealous electricity. He was recovering better from it now - which proved that it had been chaos energy - too much of it, like a lethal serum of an addictive drug. "This will be easy then. With that crystal tower we just got chucked in - this will be like drinking a cup of tea."

Shadow snorted darkly, maybe in assent or rebuking his childish mannerisms.

After a good few minutes of trawling on, they came to a sizable gap in the old stone floor. Sonic noticed Shadow breach to a standstill in one of the middle of his strides. Catching up to him, he peered down at the chasm Shadow had discovered. The hole in itself looked purposely made. With everything else so keenly polished and in place, the gap looked cut clean away, opening a nasty space of one hundred feet across. There were small ledges to go around it, but that would take time. And the ledges didn't particularly look stable.

Sonic whistled and tried to look down it. All that faced him was an open maw of infinite blackness that not even a vanguard's pelt could challenge.

Shadow sniffed at it. "No drafts. No air. It must go a long way down."

So they side stepped along the ledges bordering the massive hole, pinning themselves against the walls and shifting along it inch by inch. When they reached the safety of the other side, they looked back at it in mild accomplishment.

"We'll have to face that on the way back." Sonic muttered.

Shadow looked on in cold approval. "Whoever made these traps, is a genius."

Soon however they came to another obstacle. This one too was out of place and purposely built like the chasm. Three separate walls lining the width of the passage were thick, wooden bars. Like prison bars. Sonic, being so thin, passed straight through them without even feeling the press of wood against his fur. Shadow tried to do the same and got stuck halfway. He tried to squeeze his way out, grunting with the strain. Sonic grabbed his hand and hauled him all the way through, combing their way slowly through the three layers of bars, Shadow cursing at every stage. When they had ended up on the other side, Shadow gave them a vengeful glare. "What was the purpose of that?"

"Think about it, forerunners would be too large and fat to fit through those bars. And they'd take a while to give under force. So that rules the gawks out, who would be too large and clumsy to take to the ledges on that hole too."

"It's like it's meant - for us." Shadow kneaded his temples. "We have taken each test and passed. Maybe it's just coincidence."

"But you said that this world is Mobius' past! Everything is old, isn't it?"

"Yes but Mobius could never have been this lifeless? Could it? Where are your dragons, Sonic? Where are the apes and generic beasts that bred and lived before the mutations? This world doesn't hold the ecosystem to have the foundations to gain such a bountiful, complex pool of life that comes in the future. If it does at all. And if the vanguard are possibly as real as you and me - which I sorely doubt - then they'd gobble up anything that has a chance at life. This planet we're on DOESN'T MAKE SENSE!"

Sonic's face darkened into a pained grimace. "Then I'm right. This is hell. Nothing makes sense in hell. Why would it need to? Chaos control killed us, and now we're stuck here - forever."

"Why would we go to hell? I've never done anything wrong!" Shadow groped at the air with his fingers, then he hung limp on the spot, peering endlessly up at the glowing walls for an unreachable answer.

"Then what does it mean?"

"I - I don't know. Maybe there is no heaven then. Maybe all of religion is a lie and none of it is true. That just leaves a blank void - a place of limbo. Neither hell or heaven. And no afterlife either."

Sonic shook his head and touched the face of a glowing wall. It sent shivers of warmth through his fingers.

"But Shades - we're together. That's weird. And we need to eat and drink. Rest too. And we get hurt. Does that still make us dead?"

Shadow growled and a solemn passion strengthened his otherwise confused features. "No. The answers will lie in the last emerald. We must carry on."

Just two more to go.

They came across a series of spikes. Long, smooth cone shaped spikes that had been made from the same material as the wooden beams of the wall bars they had passed earlier. These ones were also strange and different. They all pointed diagonally upward at the way ahead, like swords poised half way from the ground.

Shadow liked keeping to a fixed, slow walk, which slowly and surely annoyed the cobalt hero. Wasn't it better to race up to the end, snatch the emerald and come hurtling back down again? Wasn't it easier to ignore what traps and fears didn't exist and go with instincts? To leap without looking?

Sonic opened his mouth to voice his opinion when they came across another odd bit of flooring that wound up as they travelled slowly upward and came to a block of long, colored squares that stretched out beyond their sight. There were only four different colors in a repetitive fashion. Red squares, yellow, blue and lastly green. Shadow approached the green one and ran his finger along it. No ink or paint mark came off. As if the stone itself had been marbled by the chosen color.

Shadow rose and looked stonily up at the floor littered with these tightly splayed colors. "Remember those small colored panels back at the booby trapped house with the interchanging stone walls?"

Sonic nodded. "How could I forget that?"

"Well, I think these are like that. Different colors mean different traps. I could be wrong, but why else would they be here?"

"We have to cross them, all the same."

"Yes. I touched the green one. So I am assuming that green is safe." As further proof to this equation, Shadow bodily stepped out onto the green panel, tensing for anything to happen. The passage remained deafly silent. Nothing moved except for Sonic who stepped onto the green tile beside him. It was barely large enough to hold two hedgehogs, but they squeezed together side by side until Shadow hopped over onto another green one that was separated by a yellow and a red. The jumps were easy. Another green to lead them further was never too far away. There was one leap that proved a little more challenging. Right at the end of the long tile charade was a single green one surrounded by blue tiles. Sonic was tempted to try standing on another color at this point. It was foolish he knew, but what if Shadow was wrong?

'Well, I think these are like that. Different colors mean different traps. I could be wrong, but why else you they be here?'

And why did it just so happen that the only tile Shadow originally touched was the green 'safe' one?

It couldn't have been pure luck alone? Could it?

Sonic strayed on the second from last green tile after Shadow had managed the last jump and made it neatly to the other side like a grumpy champion. What if Shadow had caused chaos control on purpose? And had led them here to recollect the emeralds in a world he had designed?

"But why would he do that?" Sonic found himself asking. "What if I am dreaming?"

Shadow turned round and threw him an imputative glare. "Sonic? What's wrong? Take the last jump."

Sonic did, with a half mind to land purposely on one of the blue ones circling the green. But he landed true and met the other end of safety. Back on normal stone.

Was it ever normal to begin with?

"Shades, what if we're just being played with?"

Shadow remained stolid and firm as he walked on, quicker now, homing in on the emerald's closing beacon like a bee to honey. "Does it matter? We're being played with enough as it is. But look around you, blue hedgehog. Is there anyone really watching?"

Is there?

The passage stretched massively on like a roadway to either a heaven or a hell. Shadow sublimely kept on, regardless. Sonic found his hard, cold demeanor more and more difficult to tolerant. Before long Sonic knew he'd be ripping his fur out and shaking Shadow senseless, hoping to see some creature still alive and breathing behind those bitter eyes of his. His exterior was just so frigid and spiritless. Yet at the same time, perhaps Shadow was taking up this affront to keep them both going. To keep them both pressing on without rest or giving into emotions like fear, anxiety and worry.

He could only hope.

Still the passage leapt on along the gleaming walls, smothered with the sense of eternity.

"Shades, let's run the last bit. Come on, we must nearly be there by now!"

Shadow huffed and didn't turn to glare at him. "If we run we could activate a trap. Unless you want that to happen."

His tone held that horrible patronizing quality that Sonic detested beyond comprehension. But he held his tongue. He'd bring it up once they were out of here, stark naked with fear or not, depending on what could happen in this dead place.

Misshapen and foully formed like looming lumps of termite mounds, tall rocks sat like columns of something perversely ancient by the walls. Some even touched the ceiling with their heads, towering over the two animals completely. Their smooth, polished sides looked impossible to climb. And again their presence here seemed utterly, persistently - pointless.

"Maybe they were deities for someone?" Sonic asked. "Normal rocks can't form down here. I - I don't get it."

Shadow walked straight on through some of the ten oddly shaped towering pillars of rock that felt natural - but looked far from it. There was no key - no element or clue of what could have made such a place. A passage that consisted of numerous different things that didn't fit in with one another - the riddles - the evil vanguard. The gawks and the perfectly inlaid traps suffusing each emerald.

"Shades, do you think we are merely dreaming?"

Shadow showed a few of his teeth, "perhaps."

Then, utter and divine, as pure as Aztec gold, stood the emerald. It shone with seraphic hues of white. The silvery white emerald. Deemed sixth of the seventh. And like the trapped others before it, the emerald sat mounted on a pedestal low enough for a little hedgehog to reach. Shadow stared suspiciously at it and noticed something different.

"Sonic - wait -"

They stood before it, mounting with anticipation to grab it and be done with it. Sonic sent his elder a deep, questioning look. "Wait for what? This is what we came for. And I want out of this place. It gives me the creeps. At least the mirror tower held some task - some purpose. But this place is -"

"No, the emerald. It's not covered by a vial. It's open to take. Isn't that - odd?"

Sonic stared. So it was.

"Maybe they forgot to cover it?"

Shadow stepped up to it and read the new riddle enlisted below the shining emerald.

'It shines bright and fair. Enfolding everything in its lustrous glare.'

"Ah, easy."

Sonic's ears prowled forward, his eyes scanning the riddle for himself. "It's light. The answer is light."

"But there is nothing to make light with." Shadow seemed right. Though the walls glowed, it was only a faint gleam. An unproud, almost artificial moonshine that paled in comparison to real daylight. There was no fire this time. No torches from which to burn from. And certainly nothing else usable, even throughout the long haul through the passage.

"Let's just take the emerald." Sonic suggested.

"No. We need the code and the words. Each answer of a riddle comes with that."

Sonic shrank back. "We can go back and fetch - some fire?"

Shadow bit his lip, ears swerving back in puzzlement. "Light -" Light - the founder of everything living. The maker. The dreamer. The giver. Nothing could make that. Nothing artificial.

Why make a riddle we can't solve? Even if we knew the answer?

He gazed idly at Sonic who was peering back down the gaping throat of the passage they had journeyed slowly through - and now seemed like an unwelcome and pointless trip back. Back to the waiting vanguard at the other end.

The golden ring, possibly the last in all the cosmos, hung limply from Sonic's wrist like an expensive, gaudy bangle.

Golden ring -

The light -

At once he had it. "Sonic! Your ring! Take it off!"

In surprise and shock, Sonic looked round, gaping in confusion. "Ring? What? Why?"

"Its light, you dolt! This is it! The key!"

Sonic took it off and handed it over, looking displeased despite Shadow's apparent stroke of genius. "I was saving that for a tight situation."

"Isn't this situation tight enough?"

Shadow squeezed his grip on its smooth, thin metal. Sonic, ears bent back, hovered close, perplexed and bewildered at what Shadow intended to do.

With the strength of willpower, the ring activated, sending a whoosh of supreme energy and light around them, annihilating any dark corners, destroying shadows and causing the hedgehogs to flinch under its brilliance. The light swooned like a gentle cocoon over the emerald and its riddle, changing the words into a code and a new set of letters.

The ring died out, becoming gelid, dull gold. Shadow dropped it as if it were common rubbish and noted the code and the letters with barely even a glance. Uuidndtu 48.

Sonic stared absently at the ring lying still and dead on the floor where seconds ago it had been brimming with limitless life and energy. It made him feel the same. Brimming with life once - before it all started draining out of him. Now he felt close to being like that ring. Spent and tired.

Shadow caught his far-off look and nudged him dispassionately. "We have an emerald to pick up. Come on, I can't have you daydreaming on me. Not here."

The white emerald glowed appreciatively, intoxicatingly.

Sonic took the emerald, rather sore at expecting another shock. Nothing harmed him. The emerald he gripped tight but then the walls turned into a fiery red glow, losing their senescent peel of light gold and turning into something nightmarish.

The ceiling shook - if it could, and sent loose rock spilling from it like hail. Shadow grabbed Sonic's hand and pulled him forward. "Sonic! We have to go!"

Everything was convulsing. The walls throbbed and twisted into shadows of stone and hate. The massive pillars - the upright turds of rock - flooded towards them, shattering the floor in a domino effect. Sonic wrestled free from Shadow's grip and missed a boulder that thrashed down to the floor close behind his flank. Another rocked and tumbled just before him, almost crushing his head. Shadow jumped over a fallen column of giant rock and sprinted down the passage as if the vanguard were chasing him.

Sonic looked behind him. And wish he hadn't looked at all.

Everything coiled into a bad dream of slow motion. Shadow was shouting at him. But Sonic couldn't make out the words.

The pedestal was gone. The back wall - marking the end of the passage - was gone. All that existed was true darkness eating at the walls, ceiling and floor in hungry doses. All the bricks, tireless stones and debris fell away into this macabre void, never to appear again.

Impossible! Impossible!

'Whoever made these traps, is a genius.'

"SONIC!" Shadow clenched his arm again and yanked him free from his paralysis of shock that had rendered his senses in a cold stupor. "Don't look at it! It's just another trap! Another obstacle!"

"It's - it's like a blackhole!"

Able to run on his own now they galloped fiercely down the passage, assessing their true speeds, except for Sonic who had to nail down his limit so that he wouldn't leave Shadow behind. He was about to grab his hand to reel him forwards like a fish to make a faster escape when they dashed recklessly across the colored tiles - touching every single color as they torpedoed through it.

As soon as a red one was touched, a dock of arrows jabbed from tiny holes in the walls and shot at them point blank. Another color was touched, releasing hundreds of spitting, rancid snakes before them.

Shadow ducked to avoid the arrows and skidded across a green tile as a snake got caught on his foot and then proceeded to bite him with uncouth aggression. Sonic jumped lithely over a bunch of wriggling, menacingly snakes, only to turn and watch them fall into the angry darkness that was racing towards them like a bat with open wings. Walls and chunks of stone disappeared in its touch. It was getting closer - its speed was frightening.

The spikes. Their purpose, their odd reason for being put there for no reason at all made perfect sense now. The passage was now their exit, a downward slope instead of an upward one. And now they were running straight towards the lances of stone that looked fresh, sharp and as irate as the gobbling darkness behind them.

Shadow slipped and fell across the floor towards the spikes. An emerald - the green one - tumbled out of his bag that was slung around his shoulder and was thrown into the jumble of pillared spikes. Sonic lashed out to grab it. He slipped under one spike and narrowly avoided having his left ear sliced off.

Shadow balanced himself upside down on his hands and somersaulted over the spikes, covering them completely like a ballerina, landing superbly on his feet.

Sonic grappled with the emerald that had sunk down the fat base of the spike, knowing that his time was running short.

He clutched at the emerald. The floor beneath him started to crawl with twisting thuds and quakes. He rose and jumped neatly over each spike that promised pain and mutilation. But they acted like a wall, prinking him and throwing him back. Shadow reached out from behind the throng of sharp stone and reached out a hand for him.

Sonic took it and was propelled safely through.

Just in time.

The long stone spikes were taken like a sacrifice into the absolute blackness that had no intention of stopping. It consumed them utterly as easily as it had done the floors and walls.

The hedgehogs floored it, tearing down the sloping corridor for their very lives. The walls far ahead of them were cracking and being pulled in by the very consuming blackness breathing down their necks.

Next came the three, thick rounded bars of wood. This time it did not slow them. On instinct the two of them curled up into a ball and slammed into the wood, spinning and cutting. They sliced through and leapt back to their feet, belting towards the exit.

The gap in the stone floor rallied up to their greetings once more like an old friend. When they had passed it the first time they had used the ledges to scuttle round it, the jump being simply too far to risk. Shadow had even tried to peer down its length, seeing no bottom to behold.

The darkness slobbering at their heels bayed no time to slink around ledges. This time they had no choice but to leap or die.

At once, with silent consent, they leapt up high. In the suspension, flying through the air, Sonic looked at the awaiting stone ground on the other side and heard the rumble and crunch behind him from the blackness lapping up anything that light touched. Three quarters of the passage had already been swallowed up. Gone. Like the corridor housing an emerald had been nothing more than lunch.

Legs still stretching out across a bleak gap in a reflexive run, Shadow landed on the other side and hit the floor - hard, and was carried on by his own momentum, scuffling across the floor on his front like a seal. Sonic landed and tripped up, rolling down the slope most painfully. He fell right into the crocodile pile of cadavers. But the dead bodies rose up and snapped their powerful jaws at the surprised hog, closing their teeth around his arms. Shadow jetted out chaos energy and snapped them back. One was so harshly catapulted that its lower jaw was ripped off and its body smacked against the red gloating wall.

The cobalt hedgehog squirmed free but slipped down again, forcing Shadow to pull him to his feet and pull him towards their exit. The door. But it was now closed. When they had left it, it was open.

The sneering crocodiles began pacing towards them, actually rather fast and nimble on their squatty little legs when they were capering for a meal. Dead or not. And their eyes birthed pure red, like the demon vanguards of this world.

As Sonic kicked and spiked them back with the ripping blackness racing to conquer them all, Shadow could not get the door open. It was wedged shut. Only a keyhole resided in its centre - like some sick, twisted joke.

"Sonic! The door! I can't get it open!"

The blackness was rolling up. They'd all die.

The walls shunted out their last goodbyes. The crocs were sucked in, their red eyes feasibly plummeting into a cold, hellish abyss.

"The key! The silver key!" Sonic dived into the bag and pulled out the tiny silver cut of metal. He braced it into the lock and turned it. The door opened and they tumbled through it just as the darkness lunged at the last inch of passageway, smiting any last patch of stone.

Panting, and heavy with sweat, they turned on the floor and stared at the solemn blackness gaping in the doorway. Beneath their hands and feet was ordinary stone. It was not chasing them here. Whatever had lunged after them remained in the original trap passageway as if some invisible force was holding it all in. And it was not escaping. Not wrinkling out like the monster in the crystal tower.

It looked - contained - even though it had swiped the passage utterly clean into its gluttonous dark belly.

Sonic numbly - slowly and with difficulty - rose and stood by the doorway, clasping a sweaty hand to the stone frame, peering out.

Blackness. True and formidable. Nothing else existed. And that was all he saw - in there. No crocodiles. No rumpled stone walls. No light of any kind. It was like having your eyes shut.

Nothingness.

Sonic stepped away and collapsed back on the floor beside a shuddering Shadow. A pool of sweat had bled out around him. "You were saying this would be easy as drinking a cup to tea?"