They spread out to look for something, but Greg told Hilda to stay put and rest. The meadow was bigger than it looked at first.

It was at least a hundred yards wide in all directions. Greg ran his hands along the edges where the grass met the hazy lines, looking for any seams or bumps that might show where a secret passage was.

There's nothing.

Elwen tried to use her plant magic to see if there were any unnatural things in the area, but everything was so fake that she couldn't tell what was useful from the background noise. Lylia examined the scattered trees, searching for hollow trunks or hidden mechanisms.

And yet again, nothing at all.

Greg said, "This is pointless," after what felt like an hour of searching with no luck.

"He could be anywhere! He could have left this area completely while we were on those islands! We may have lost our only chance!"

He sat down hard on the grass next to Hilda. He was angry and tired, and his chest felt tight.

They had come so far and been through so much, but for what? To get stuck in a fake meadow in a pocket dimension while the Calamity destroyed Meridian?

Lylia said, "We'll find him," but she didn't sound very sure.

Hammy chirped sadly and curled up into a little ball. It looked like even the slime had given up as well.

Greg looked at Hammy and saw that the compass inside its body was still spinning and glowing. "Hold on a sec..."

The compass wasn't just spinning around. It was beating in a regular pattern, getting brighter and dimmer. And even though it was spinning, the direction it was pointing kept going back to the same place.

Greg stood up suddenly and said, "The compass! Elwen, come here and bring Hammy."

Elwen followed Greg's instructions, and Greg knelt down to get a better view of the compass through Hammy's clear body. There was definitely a pattern.

The needle would spin and then snap back to point in a certain direction. It would pulse three times, spin again, and then snap back to the same direction and pulse three more times.

Greg said, "It's trying to tell us something."

"Look, three beats. Then it turns that way." He pointed out where the compass kept going back to. "It was toward one of the little hills in the distance, the one with just one tree on top."

"Three pulses," Lylia said again as she moved to stand next to him. "What does 'three' mean?"

"Maybe it's not the number," Elwen said. "Maybe it's what the number stands for, like three things? Three steps? Three signs? Three..."

"Elite Royal Knights," Hilda said out of the blue from where she was sitting.

Everyone looked at her. She pointed to the three trees that could be seen in the field. "Rosalina, Christoft, and Tunner."

"Three elite knights... and those are three trees."

Greg thought it was dumb that he didn't see it right away because it was so obvious. "Right! The trees... we have to do something with the trees."

They ran to the nearest tree, which was a tall oak with branches that spread out. Lylia looked at it closely, running her hands over the bark and looking for anything strange on the branches.

"Here," she said, pointing to a small symbol carved into the trunk at eye level.

It was a circle with three lines coming out of it, similar to the symbol they had seen on the compass. "This has to be it."

Greg put his hand on the symbol, and it glowed a little, but nothing else happened. "Maybe all three trees need to be turned on at the same time?"

Elwen said, "We don't have enough people."

"There are four of us, and one of us can hardly walk."

Hilda weakly said, "I can walk," but she didn't try to get up.

Greg took a moment to think. "Hammy, can you push one of the symbols?"

He stared at the slime. "You brought us here. It looks like you know what we need to do better than we do."

Hammy chirped and bounced with excitement, as if it had been waiting for Greg to ask. Greg took the oak tree, Lylia took the willow tree by the small pond that had appeared in the meadow, and Hammy bounced toward the ash tree on the hill in the distance.

"On three," Greg yelled. "One. Two. Three!"

He put his hand on the symbol. He could see Lylia do the same thing in the distance, and Hammy jumped at the third tree with surprising force, slamming its whole gelatinous body against the symbol.

At the same time, all three symbols lit up with a golden light. The ground shook under Greg's feet, and he heard a deep rumbling sound coming from the middle of the meadow. The ground was splitting apart, and there were stone stairs leading down where there had only been grass before.

"That's our door," Lylia said as she ran toward it.

Standing at the entrance, they gazed down into the darkness, only illuminated by a faint glow emanating from below. The stairs were steep and narrow, and they went down much deeper than they should have been able to in such a small space.

Greg let out a long breath. "Last chance to turn back," he said, but he knew none of them would.

"After all we've been through to get here?" Lylia said. "Not a chance."

Elwen said, "Hammy's already going down," pointing at the slime that had bounced onto the stairs and was going down too quickly. "We should hurry before we lose it again."

They went down the stairs, and with each step, the fake sunlight in the meadow got weaker. The light from below got brighter, and it became clear that the stairs led to a small room with walls made of the same dark stone as the islands outside.

There was a man in that room, sitting cross-legged in the middle of a circle of glowing runes. He was tall even when he was sitting down, and his broad shoulders and strong build showed that he had been training for years.

His hair was long and dark, and he wore it in a simple ponytail. His face looked old, but it was more because of experience than age. He was wearing simple training clothes and no armor. His eyes were closed in meditation.

Greg was most interested in the sword that was lying across the man's lap. It was simple and beautiful, with a straight blade and no extra decorations. It gave off a powerful energy that made Greg's hair stand on end.

The man's eyes opened, and his irises were so dark that they looked almost black. He looked at each of them one by one, his face unreadable, until he finally settled on Lylia.

His voice was deep and resonant, like someone who hadn't spoken out loud in a long time.

"Lylia Goldenwind..."

"I didn't know that I could meet an old friend in this seclusion..."

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