The Butterfly Girl: A Star is Born

#113 The Light of Truth

[Sophia]

We continued to trudge through the darkness, a couple of rocky downwards slopes leading us deeper. And almost to the point of falling over each other because there were a lot of unsteady rocks to climb over. As I followed the Twins further, I realized that the upward climb back to the surface would be a lot more exhausting and I began to dread the thought of it. When we made it to the flatter path, I pushed that thought out of my mind.
"Woah, wait a second." the Twins suddenly stopped me and I pointed my flashlight forward. A pile of heavy stones blocked the entire tunnel.
"Is this it? Is this the end of the tunnel?" I asked.
"No. This... this wasn't here before." the Twins stepped forward, touching the stones in confusion.
"There was another wall over here somewhere." Fleetfoot said.
"Maybe that... 'earthquake' from before shook it all up and made the tunnel collapse."
I stepped forward, shifting some of the smaller rocks to see if I could see through the other side. I shoved the flashlight as far as it could go through some of the cracks, but it didn't look like it went any further. I heard the Twins sigh in defeat and stepped away.
"There's another tunnel we can take to get back up. There might be something up here. If we can't get past this, then maybe there's something else we can try looking for."
"Hmmm..." I kept shining my light around and testing other rocks to see if they would budge until I finally gave up and took a step back. I flashed my light around one last time, not spotting anything that could get us through. I looked back down at my feet until I noticed some sort of light coming from my bag. It looked like it was... glowing. I opened it up and shuffled around until I pulled out my gem. It regularly glows in the dark, but this time it was shining a lot brighter than normal. I lowered the flashlight to my feet and held up the gem towards my face. I didn't understand what was going on with it to make it react this way. It suddenly flew from my hand and into a hole in the boulders, the light starting to fade as I herd it clinking against the rocks.
"Hey! No!" I shoved my arm through the hole, trying to reach for the gem, but it could only go so far. And I didn't want to get it stuck.
"Sophie, what happened?" the Twins rushed up to me.
"My gem... it just flew out of my hand... it's stuck in the rocks."
"I think I see it."
We started shoving away loose rocks and pulling out heavier ones, hoping we could make a hole big enough to reach into to grab the crystal. The blue glow starting to get further in. There was no way I could loose this again.
"Sophie... these rocks won't move." Fleetfoot grunted.
"They're too heavy. They're stuck on top of each other." Flyboy huffed.
"Argh... come on. I can't..." I trailed off as the glow suddenly became brighter. We all stopped digging, watching the light growing and shimmering through each crack and boulder. I took a few steps back to compensate for the brightness and continued to watch as it started doing... something. Suddenly, some of the rocks began to shift and fall to the ground.
"Sophie, get back." the Twins pulled me aside and we all took a couple of steps back as the entire wall of rocks came crashing down, making way for the bright light that temporarily blinded us. The rocks also kicking up dust and dirt and obscuring our vision even more. When I finally controlled my breathing and opened my eyes, I was in awe at was glowing before me.

Another mural was carved into the back wall, the crystal set just below the center, lighting up the entire wall like a blue neon sign.
"Sophie... what is that?" the Twins asked quietly, staring up at the wall.
There was a symbol in the center above the crystal that I noticed looked very similar to the symbol on the cover of the Ruined Book. Surrounding that was another border of accents and lines, but surrounding the enlarged symbol were more of the unidentifiable letters that was just one big wall of text that I had no idea how to decipher. I quickly snagged my phone out of my bag and started snapping as many pictures as I could get. But once again, my phone was having even more issues trying to focus on it. Probably because of all the light that was somehow blinding it from catching all the lines and details. I told myself again I could probably fix it by editing them a little bit.
"Do you know what this means?" the Twins asked me.
"Nope. But I got a couple pictures. We can show them to Apollo and Teri and see if they can help us."
I stepped through the unsteady rocks and reached out toward the crystal, carefully plucking it out of the indent and the mural suddenly went dark. The lines and details all disappearing in an instant. I quickly raised my flashlight and pointed it upwards.
"Is that it? Are we gonna head back now?"
"Yeah, I think we should get going. It's gonna be a long climb." I sighed.
"Oh, we don't need to climb all the way back up. It's too steep. There's another tunnel we can take that goes back up. It's a little tight, but we can make it."
"Oh cool." I sighed in relief, "Let's go then."
I pointed my flashlight to the path behind us and followed them back the way we came, hoping our ascent wouldn't take too long as it did to get down here. The gem in my other palm went back to glowing peacefully without blinding me and I shoved it back in the satchel. The whole time, I was wondering how it was able to do that, I've never seen it do anything like that before, I wasn't really sure how to feel about it right now.