I've hit a snag, diary. Something I didn't expected but probably shoulda, considering where I live: this place has traps. Enough traps that it took me almost two days to find something other than rock tunnels.
Shortly after I wrote in you yesterday, diary, I descended into the tunnel, and I came to a massive chasm with a bridge crossing it. I'm naturally wary of bridges, and I hope you know why by now, but this one looked pretty normal. So I tapped the first board of it with my foot.
The board fell right through the bottom of the bridge. Wasn't rotten, either - it just wasn't nailed down. And when I tossed a rock into the middle, most of the bridge just collapsed. Eep.
Fortunately, my rat had the answer: the rock railings. One on either side, and the strip of stone all the boards had been laid on WAS solid. The rat, being a tiny little bastard, just started walking across one, as though it were a city street. I, uh, didn't have much choice, so I followed its lead, shimmying across, not looking down, thinking of little Eve back home. I probably sweat away most of my body weight in fear and urine.
After that I came to another passage that continued downward, and I followed that for a while - only to, eventually, notice some weird, unnatural holes in the walls. A lot of 'em. I grabbed another rock - rocks are GREAT in these ruins, diary - and when I chucked it past, a crapload of arrows soared out of the holes! Every one of 'em! Eesh.
There was no space at all for getting BY the arrows, and if I'd tried I woulda been skewered in an instant, so I just kept fetching rocks and tossing 'em until the trap stopped going off. Musta been a thousand arrows laying in that little hallway. What a waste. No good to me, though, just like every bloody weapon.
Kept going. Next I ran into a swinging boulder trap, and it took me an hour of pondering to figure out that there were switches in the wall. Then after that there was a poison gas trap, and I ran BACKWARD to get away from it… and then, after… well, I think you're starting to get the point, diary…
By the time I got to the puzzle trap I was pretty tired. And hungry. I ate some of the bread I filched from June's hut, and drank some of the water - I didn't mention it before 'cause I didn't know if she was reading you, diary, and I didn't want her to fry me with her witchy powers or something - and investigated the pizzle: a bunch of rounded stones set in the floor. Looked like any floor in the castle. No OTHER floor in here had been paved, though, so I was suspicious.
Once I was done eating I figured out the trap pretty easy by tapping one of the stones. It fell through almost immediately, plunging into a pit with no bottom I could see. Tried it again with another right in the middle of this section, though, and it was nice and sturdy. So I had to walk a pattern across this stone thing, and not screw up.
So what'd I do? I chucked rocks at the stones, of course. What else?
Eventually I managed to pick out a safe route across the floor, and I veeeeeery carefully crawled my way across. And once I was on the other side, I was so proud of myself that I stomped one of the stones I wasn't sure about… and, uh, all the unsafe ones just fell out of their spots. Whoops. Guess I coulda done that in the first place.
Doing that DID help me out, though, 'cause it revealed a pattern in the floor: two circles, meeting at a central cone thing and stretching to a bulkier half-circle. It looked like something Philip would draw, so it must have been dirty. Why must even ancients be perverse?
I'm tired. Gonna sleep right here, on the other end of the stones. Seems safe. Enough traps for one day.
Sincerely,
Dragomir the Adventurer
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