- Excerpt from “My Talks with Glis’Merinda, Daughter of Exeter”
Written by Dak of Kell
The shifting of the earth reminds me of the sound of fire, a light crackling as stones bounce and settle, then pebbles bouncing and settling, finally followed by a sprinkle of dust. The dark grows silent, the two of us breathing the only sound. The hot puff of Jor’Mari’s breath brushes my face, growing softer and more relaxed with my own until we almost breathe together.
“Are you okay?” he asks from the dark.
“Just a little cramped,” I say, trying not to gasp for breath. “Give me a second.”
Light blossoms around us. A sphere of black sand no larger than my fingernail sparks with an orange color. Jor’Mari looms above me, his left hand pressed flat against the stone floor next to my head, his right down closer to my waist, both arms shuddering with the weight of stone settling on top of him. There is something savage about his body when he is like this, a dangerous gleam in his eyes. It isn’t wholly a bad thing.
“You’re hurt,” he says.
Dirt falls away as I lift my hand to my head, feeling the stickiness of blood mixing in my hair. “Not that hurt,” I say.
“You should wear something to protect your head. That crown is pretty and all, but a proper helmet might do you some good.”
“You’re one to talk,” I say, tapping his bare chest. “You don’t seem to have any equipment at all.”
Jor smirks down at me. “You try finding armor that will change size with you.”
“So, going around half-naked in a fight is better?”
“Certainly more comfortable,” he says.
“Speaking of comfortable.” I try to shift, but there is not much room in the crevice beneath the weight of stone above us. “Is that your leg pinning mine to the ground?”
“Probably a rock,” he says.
“Well, that rock hurts a lot. Do you think you can get us out of here?”
“I could use some help.”
Black sand falls out of the air around us, gliding over itself to erect growing pillars on either side of me, the stones above rumbling as the sand slowly pushes it away. Jor’Mari strains as well as the weight of stone above him lightens the slightest amount. With a sudden grunt of effort, his foot slams down just next to me with bone-shattering strength, the earth bouncing beneath me as he adjusts. The stone continues to groan as it is pushed away. When I begin to hear rocks shifting and falling somewhere past the pile we are beneath, I rush more sand into the work.
With a final yell, Jor’Mari lifts the stone above him clear, hurling the three-hundred pound slab away from himself and inviting in a clean burst of air. A moment later, we are free, alone in a dark abyss deep beneath the earth.
“Can you sense anything?” Jor asks, taking a protective position in front of me.
I don’t answer, spreading out my soul presence in all directions, trying to figure out what had happened. The chamber we stand in now is massive, filled with stones evenly spaced around us. The ceiling rises far away, so far that I almost can’t find the tunnel we were in before. A network of switching tunnels run down to this chamber, different paths branching and leading far away to places I can’t follow. It was only by chance that we fell this way.
Dovik and Jess fell some other way. We need to find them.
“We are far deeper now than we were,” I tell Jor after turning my attention back. “You collapsed the tunnel above pretty well.”
“So, we are blaming me?” he asks, unserious.
I ignore him, focusing on keeping the headache down that is pounding away at my head. My mageblade comes to my hand with a gesture, and I pull out the reserves of mana I have stored inside. The pain in my head lessens somewhat, the exhaustion of mana pushed aside for the moment.
With my ability to concentrate returned, the black sand sitting in loose pillars on the ground floats into the air, becoming burning orbs of light that illuminate most of the chamber. My eyes widen, taken aback by what the light reveals.
“Are those eggs?” Jor’Mari asks, looking out at the sea of white eggs spread throughout the chamber. There must be thousands of them in the chamber that I can see before the light grows too dim to see by. Eggs as large as barrels spread away from us, each sticky with white fluid and glistening in the light of the dragonfire.
“That should be impossible,” I say. “I thought monsters were born from magic. They can’t make more of themselves, can they?”
Jor’Mari shakes his head. “I’ve never heard of anything like this. There are enough down here to overrun the duchy if they all hatch.”
His words make my thoughts run away. Throughout this whole operation, even with most of the 4th army working together, we have never faced a monster horde with more than four hundred monsters in it. Down here, in this cavern a mile beneath the surface, more than ten thousand of these creatures wait to be born.
“We have to destroy them,” I say.
“How?”
It is a good question. If Jor’Mari went on a rampage through this chamber, he probably wouldn’t be able to destroy more than a corner of the room before we alerted something that would get us killed. For the entirety of this operation, my fire has proven almost entirely useless as dealing with these insects.
“I don’t know,” I say, eventually.
“This is the kind of thing I would expect you to handle,” Jor’Mari says. “The three of us are more duelists. You are the one that brings the wide-spread destruction.”
“I can try.”
Feeling defeated before even beginning, I walk down the slight depression of stone we have been set at the top of, kneeling next to the closest egg. Dragonfire wreaths my hand, and in its glow, I can see a shadow of something resting inside the white egg in front of me. It doesn’t shift as the light nears.
I press my burning hand to the surface of the shell. The membrane of liquid evaporates as the fire drawls closer, turning the air bitter with its acrid bite, but the shell of the egg does not look to care at all about the fire. After a few seconds passing without the slightest hint of damage on the surface of the egg, I stand and back away, sighing as I put the fire out on my hand.
“These are just like all of the other monsters in this place,” I tell Jor. “My fire doesn’t seem to do much of anything to it.
“Tits and Honey,” he swears. “If we find the others, then maybe…” His head snaps around, his eyes shifting inky black as he stares off into the dark on the edge of the light. “Kill the light.”
I waste no time, the light of my orbs snuffing out in an instant. The dark surrounds me, pressing down on me like a sheet. My aura returns to me, but for some reason, things are fuzzy and dim in its perception. It must be this stone around us. I was convinced these eggs were rocks until I saw them with my own eyes.
“Something is moving in the dark,” Jor’Mari whispers, his hot breath next to my ear. “It’s big.”
“How big?”
“I can’t tell from here.” His hand slips over mine, leading me away. Jor takes me off toward a pillar of earth holding up the ceiling high above us. “You stay here. I am going to go check out the room.”
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I clutch his arm before he can turn and leave. “You are going to leave me by myself down here?” In the granted to me by my aura, I see his body return to its normal size as Jor pulls his robe over his shoulders.
“I’m not leaving you,” he says. “I will take a look around and try to find us an exit from here. You can’t guess how huge this cavern is.”
“And you have to abandon me to do that?”
Jor squeezes my hand. “You can’t see in the dark, which is why I have to find a path first. Stay here, you will be safe. Nothing is close to us right now.”
“Right now.”
“I’ll be back. Promise.”
He settles me against the stone pillar before slipping off into the dark. Somehow, I lose track of him when he gets more than sixty feet away from me, the impression that I get from my soul presence growing far too vague. There is something primal in the fear that comes from sitting alone in the dark, listening for monsters.
Ten minutes pass as I slowly grow calmer, the tension of the last fight gradually leaving me. My attention splits as I turn my vision inward, focusing on the mana pathways running through my body, trying to cycle the streams faster with nothing more than my will.
The pathways running through my body especially stand out just now, though I can’t say why. I imagine the energy rushing through the network like water, streams of blue pumping through me in the same way my heart pushes blood through my veins.
Something clicks at that thought. Yes, there is a cluster of the channels in my chest, a knot of pathways clumped together. They form a sphere to the right side of where my heart should be, the place where the soul cage resides inside of me. The realization forces a split in my attention. A part of my mind is pulled away toward the inky blackness where I have stared at the slow revolution of my multi-faceted soul before, while another part of my attention lingers on the network of mana running through my body. The two inner visions cross over one another, condensing into a singular perspective.
I stare into the dark, the moving geometry of my soul made into a spinning heart of an outline of my mana network. My body, made of a wire-frame of pulsing blue pathways, floats in the darkness before me, my soul a metaphysical heart pumping power into me. The picture is so clear, and as it coalesces in my mind, I feel the mana running through my pathways speed up, the depth of the pathways themselves seeming to expand with the understanding, growing deeper and more real.
My body towers before my inner eye like a titan, as tall and grand as the Wall of Grim, one eye made of white light while the other sizzles with burning opalescent fire incapable of settling on a single color. The path of this sudden epiphany draws my attention onward, settling on the shape of my soul. Vaguely, I am aware of the fire that I call to burn on my hands as I stare at the concentric geometries.
Two of the runes etched into the faces of the soul shapes light up as I look on. This is not the first time that I have stared at the shape of my soul, trying to puzzle out its meanings, but inspiration is with me for now, and I give myself up to its flow. My soul has hundreds of faces to the shapes, the largest shape bearing more than a hundred on its surface, the next smallest inside of it holding just a few less. The shapes grow more and more simple as they descend toward the middle.
For all the time I have spent looking before, the reason for the multiple shapes has always eluded me. Corinth commented on it to me once, telling me that it is unusual, and since then, I have looked for the answer. Watching now, I feel a tickle at the back of my mind, telling me the answer is close at hand.
One of the runes spinning on the twelve-sided shape in my soul burns a deep red, the rune emblazoned upon it bearing the meaning of fire. Higher up, on the shape with twenty-nine sides, a green rune lights up, its symbol meaning corrosion. On and on the shapes inside my soul spin, the two runes spiraling erratically.
Then, as if by chance, there is an alignment in the runes, a sudden providence that has them facing the same direction. I realize at once that it is more than a simple alignment; the two runes line up several times in a handful of seconds, but this instant of correlation comes differently.
The symbol on the highest plane, corrosion on the twenty-nine-sided object, is separated from the one carrying the symbol for fire. Immediately inside the twenty-nine-sided object is one with twenty blank sides, and inside of that is one with sixteen blank sides. It is only inside the sixteen-sided shape that the twelve-sided one bearing the symbol of fire resides. For the briefest instant, the fire and corrosion come into alignment, the two intervening shapes arranged to have a vertice in line with the two symbols. The alignment lasts for less than a thousandth of a second, but in that brief window, a connection like sand-colored lightning flashes through my soul. The phantom of a different mana is struck onto one of the inner shapes, the one with only six sides.
I only have an instant to see the rune emblazoned there before it begins to vanish. The symbol is entirely alien to me, but one thing can’t be doubted. It was different than anything I have seen before, a different mana. For that flash of a moment, I had created the brown flames.
“Are you alright?”
I scream.
The shrill sound of my yelp rings off of the stone wall around us as Jor’Mari presses me to the stone. His hand sits snugly over my lips, my scream having been cut off almost as soon as it came. We wait in the dark for a moment as the echo passes through the chamber, dying away into the quietude, bringing nothing.
“And you wanted to come sneak around with me,” Jor’Mari says.
“You scared the shit out of me!” I whisper as harshly as I can.
“Would it have been better if I threw a pebble to get your attention?” I slap his arm as he pulls away from me. “This chamber is huge. There are a few good paths leading upward, but I didn’t explore any of them. It looks like we are at the bottom of the hive now.”
“I’m taking it that you didn’t see Jess or Dovik.”
“We waved to each other,” he says.
“Whatever.” I retrieve my staff and a dagger Jess made for me once. “I think I can locate them with my staff.”
“Keep it dark, we don’t want to attract attention down here. That big monster I told you about is walking around down here, and I don’t think we can take it down alone.”
“You sure know how to make a girl feel safe,” I say. It takes a moment after activating the mana-tracking spell in my staff before the dagger feeds enough ambient mana to allow the spell to work. A line appears in my vision, racing off into the infinite darkness. “I have it. You will have to be my eyes.”
“I will be whatever piece of anatomy you want me to,” he says, taking my arm as I start to walk into the dark.
I keep my aura suppressed to no more than ten feet away from myself. The vagueness that it offers this far into the hive is a hindrance past that. Three times, I nearly jump out of my skin as something loomed into the vision of my soul, only to find that those sudden new shapes were actually rocks. My fright gives Jor’Mari no end of entertainment, but after the third time, I refuse to be tricked again.
Jor’Mari was right, I had no idea how massive the egg chamber was. We walk for more than an hour, making a slow circuit around the edge of the room as I try to follow the magical trail as well as possible. Once, Jor’Mari makes me stop, telling me that the big monster in the room is too close by to move. I hear it then, just barely, a delicate tapping of claws on the stone. He makes us wait for more than ten minutes after the sound of movement dies away. The worst thing is, he refuses to describe the creature when I ask.
Finally, we come to a wall of stone, the trail of magic leading straight into the rock.
“There isn’t a path there,” Jor’Mari says, helpfully.
“They have to be somewhere.”
Jor’Mari leaves me for a moment, walking to the wall and putting his ear to the stone as he taps on it. “Hollow.” He turns back to me with a smirk. “We have already proved that I can break this stone.”
“It took you a while to do before,” I say, ushing him to move aside. “I have something that might work perfectly for this.”
“Oh?” Jor’Mari stands away, crossing his arms as he looks on. “I will be interested to see this.”
“Just tell me when we are alone enough that I won’t draw any attention.” I make a fist with my right hand, pointing the ring on my middle finger at the far wall, aiming directly for the spot where the magic line runs into the stone.
Ring of the Ram(Very Rare)[Rank 2]:
A stone ring bearing the insignia of a ram’s head, this item was fashioned to augment the offensive arsenal of the wearer. Activating this ring will call upon the power locked inside, projecting a powerful ram’s head to inflict incredible force.
Enhancement: +25 Strength, +40 Defense
Power: Ramming Blow
“We are fine now,” Jor’Mari says after looking around the chamber a bit.
Power flows into the ring, and a sudden light spreads out into the air as an ethereal ram’s head fires from my ring. The expulsion of magic threatens to knock me over, but I set my feet before firing. I learned my lesson from the demonstration in the store where I bought the ring.
The ram’s head drives into the wall of stone with unfathomable force. Splintering rocks scatter everywhere, turned into dangerous shrapnel for a second before clattering to the ground. A hole big enough to drive a wagon through stands in front of me a second later, the line of magic connecting to the other side and leading onward.
“Easy,” I tell him, stepping through the hole and lighting a ball of dragonfire for light.
Orange light fills the smaller chamber on the other side of the wall, a space no more than fifteen feet across. Two people lay in the chamber, their heads turns up at the sudden intrusion. Jess lays atop Dovik, a few of the straps of her armor undone and lying on the stone around her. Dovik’s shirt lays open, the buttons undone.
“Is it time for recreation already, team leader?” Jor’Mari asks, entering the small alcove next to me.
Jess giggles at the jest, sliding off of Dovik and reapplying her straps. The man stares up from the ground, his face slack and frozen for a moment before he suddenly looks down at himself. He reaches down to start digging through his pant pockets.
“I didn’t think we were that kind of team,” I say.
“Oh, hush.” Dovik pulls free a small stone emblazoned with lines of powers, the same stone that he has been using to coordinate with the other parties in the hive. The stone pulses with green light in his hand. “Someone found the main chamber. The wall must have been keeping the device from receiving the message.”
“Sorry to spoil that for you,” Jor’Mari says.
Dovik ignores him, climbing to his feet and moving the stone around, tracking the way the pulse of color speeds up and slows down. “It looks like it is above us,” he says.
“We found ways up,” I tell him. Jess embraces me when she makes her way over, still doing up her multitude of belts. “The only issue is that there is a monster so horrible outside that Jor’Mari won’t tell me what it is.”
Dovik squints at us. “That sounds bad.”
“It isn’t paying much attention,” Jor’Mari says. “We can scoot around it.”
He nods, pocketing the stone once more and turning his attention to putting his shirt back on right. “Lead on then. We won’t want to miss all of the fun in the main chamber.”
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