Cynthia wanted to crumple. So she’d wasted more than twenty-four hours on an impossible quest? Wonderful. Not that it mattered, really, because the legal angle was her only option given her relationship with the family. And it wasn’t like she could’ve gone in to work with Owen’s life quite literally in jeopardy.
She pulled out her phone. “I suppose I have some appointments to cancel,” she said. “Thanks for your honesty.”
“There’s one more thing,” the lawyer said. “And I hope you’ll forgive me for what might seem like an intrusion into your private life.”
She snapped her gaze to his and raised her hands defensively, a reflex she’d thought buried after years in the city where—at the very least—the racial and class-based attacks against her were now subtle and back-biting rather than physically threatening.
He dropped his eyes to show he wasn’t a threat. “One facet of the automated legal system is that people like me—those who have passed the bar—may peruse the queue of online petitions at our discretion. There were just five power of attorney requests filed in the last week, and it wasn’t hard to figure out which matched your situation.”
She blinked, stomach sinking. If the case was so cut-and-dry, and the petition had already been filed, she’d lost Owen hours ago. Days ago, really. It made her last few appointments seem even more useless.
“Judging by this office”—Frank Galavis gestured at his humble surroundings—“you might imagine that my case history is less than impressive. But I wasn’t always a cut-rate attorney. In fact, there was a time when I moved in political circles that included a man who would one day become the governor of Georgia. The things I saw…the way those people worked…it was appalling, and eventually I got out. Afterward, some of my former peers made it their mission to ruin me.”
Cynthia perked up, sudden hope flaring. Did he know something?
He cleared his throat. “But you don’t need to hear my riches to rags story. I only hope that you’ll trust me when I say that Governor Calhoun has many weaknesses, and chief among them is vanity. He would rather sacrifice his own son than lose his campaign—or worse, be made to look ignorant or foolish.”
Cynthia nodded slowly. That made sense. It didn’t help, but it made sense.
“I can see that…”
“Then find a way to use it. It’s your best hope.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
THE MORPHKIN QUEEN raised her hands higher as the light began to flow from the pillar, stream across the ground, and sink into her form. Her flesh gave off such a glare Devon could scarcely look, and the brightest glow of all came from deep in her eyes.
Abruptly, much like she’d felt in Ishildar when she sensed new awareness in the architecture, Devon simply knew that something had changed. The Queen Capybara was now a level 37 highly intelligent being with ten thousand servants at her command.
The morphkin threw her head back as magic rushed out from her, a breaking wave that drowned the scene.
Time seemed to slow as, in almost perfect unison, the muskrat horde stiffened and halted their frenzy of nibbling attacks. Devon grimaced as a swarm detached away from a nearby woman. The woman—at least, Devon thought the mangled heap was a woman—was bleeding from a thousand divots chewed by muskrat teeth.
The next damage-over-time landed, and each of those tiny wounds inflicted bleeding damage to the player. The woman screamed, then whimpered, then died. She left behind an item that looked suspiciously like a ham sandwich when her body dissolved.
A heartbeat later, the queen snapped her finger. Like toy soldiers, the muskrattons stiffened again, furry flesh rippling as they transformed into one-foot tall pygmies, each with a wicked shiv. Their eyes began to glow, and the crackle of awakening filled them.
“Each one of you will die,” the Queen said with a sneer. “You, who entered our home and slaughtered our kin simply to stop us from achieving this final step. But once we’ve massacred your number, we won’t be satisfied. We will only rest when we’ve done to your den and your kin what you’ve done to ours.”
The queen threw her head back again, and the chamber filled with thousands of shrill war cries. Players fell beneath thousands of gray-skinned carvers, the muskratton so desperate for the kill that they sometimes stabbed their own in the jostle.
Devon ran for the stone and nearly collided with Dorden as he growled and rushed the boss, warhammer raised. With a wave of her hand, the queen conjured a whip of energy and snapped it around the dwarf. Casually, as if dismissing him as unworthy, she flicked the whip and sent Dorden sailing into the horde at the edge of the chamber. His anguished cry echoed in Devon’s ears, unmistakable even in the chaos. Moments later, he was gone, vanished from her interface.
“Daddy fly!” Bravlon squealed.
Devon felt sick. She should have forbidden the child to come, even if it meant overriding his parents’ wishes. But at least she would do her best to finish this.
Jeremy was still on his hands and knees. As Devon marched past him to the stone, determined not to give up, she spotted Hailey delivering a kick to the troubadour’s rear end.
“Stop being such a wuss,” the seeker said.
Devon might have smiled if she hadn’t just seen one of her dearest friends die. Sure, she could resurrect him later. But when was later? After her visit to the demonic plane? What if she never returned?
She laid a hand on the fine-grained granite of the pillar, feeling the carvings chiseled by some long-ago Ishildar mages beneath her palm.
Cleanse the stone. How? With her mind, she quested for some sense of its energy, groping for something she didn’t quite understand. This was a game. She wasn’t supposed to get all metaphysical. But despite the humiliation of being so easily beaten by Torald in the duel, his ability to cut her off from her mana had proved that there was some sort of spiritual component created by immersion tech. She had a source of life energy, and for her class at least, her connection to it lay in her mana pool.
It had to be something similar with the pillar.
Behind her, Torald began chanting. His heavy footsteps rang out in the hubbub, and moments later, an armored hand rested beside hers on the pillar.
She looked to him and shouted over the screams. “We have to cleanse it. It’s the only way.”
Nodding, the paladin bowed his head. He started muttering, and once again, light began to surround him in a pearly halo.
Devon tried focusing on it, mostly because she was out of ideas. The cleansing of corruption was a cleric sort of thing; failing that, it was a paladin’s job.
“Come on, you idiots,” she heard Greel shout. “Can’t you see Devon and Torald are our only hope here. Guard their backs.”
I…” Heldi tried to respond, but her voice broke.
Devon’s heart ached. It wasn’t just the dwarf’s son who’d seen his demise. His wife had watched him fall, and it wasn’t under a wave of hundreds of giggling teddy bears.
Devon had to finish the quest. She had to stop this army before everyone here was dead and the force marched on Stonehaven. A chill entered her belly at the thought. If Stonehaven fell, there may not even be a Shrine to Veia where the dwarf could be resurrected.
Torald’s aura spread to surround her as well, filling her mind with an unexpected sort of clarity. Abruptly, Devon felt Veia. Not the sarcastic text the game used—possibly to motivate her—but the true, game-world-spanning intelligence that lay behind the creations.
“Holy shit,” she muttered. “Do you… Are you getting this, Torald?”
A faint smile touched the corners of his lips. “Makes it easy to see how religions get started, doesn’t it?”
Devon shook her head. This was… She didn’t really want to get into the implications right now. Time to get back to the practical matter at hand.
“Okay, Veia,” she said. “I’m not going to spout off some flowery prayer because that’s not my style, but I’ve got shit to take
care of concerning your arch-nemesis, and I can’t move onto that while the area near Ishildar has a rodent problem. So if you’ve got any guidance on fixing this stone.…”
Unfortunately, the sense of chill light that filled her remained unchanged. She laid hands on the pillar and searched through her abilities tab. There was nothing that seemed to apply. Beside her, Torald continued chanting some sort of mantra.
And suddenly she sensed it. Not a way to cleanse the energy, because the magi who’d created the awakening stones were so far beyond her in skill that it would be like trying to improve one of Shakespeare’s plays with a couple passes through thesaurus.com. There was a crack, a weakness in the stone. She scanned with her eyes and spotted the hairline fracture, the physical break matching the gap in the flow of energy.
“Here,” she said, pointing.
Torald peered and seemed to grasp it at once. Whirling, he grabbed the dagger from Greel’s hand. The lawyer spluttered and turned an outraged glare on the paladin.
“I’ll get you another,” Devon said quickly, as she helped Torald line up the tip of the dagger with the fracture. With an enormous shout, Torald smashed his mace into the butt end of the knife, driving the blade into the crack.
The pillar shuddered but remained standing.
More players died.
“Here,” Devon said, pulling out her Wicked Bone Dagger, one of her few magic items. Torald raised an eyebrow, but she nodded. The paladin took the weapon with a somber expression and pressed it into the crack above the dagger. Another solid whack of his mace sent her blade into the heart of the pillar.
She felt it bite deep, piercing the energy and sending a vibration through the air. Around the chamber, pygmy figures staggered. The queen went down on a knee and shrieked.
But the pillar still stood.
With an outraged shout, Heldi sprinted toward the edge of the chamber, then returned with her husband’s massive two-handed warhammer raised high overhead. Bellowing at the top of her lungs, she smashed the side of the hammer’s head into both daggers, and with a loud crack, the pillar broke in two. The halves toppled like trees under a woodsman’s axe.
The chamber went abruptly still. All blue glow faded, the light returning to the dim filtering of sunlight.
With a feral cry, the Queen fell onto her side and began to transform.
A moment later, a furry mammal the size of a small house looked back at them with soft animal eyes.
“Kitty kitty!” Bravlon shrieked as he ran forward.
The enormous capybara looked at the child, then whimpered, and a sort of possessiveness entered her eyes. She started licking the child.
“Oh no ye don’t, ye menace,” Heldi said, marching forward to pull Bravlon away.
All at once, the capybara growled. With a snarl that bared blunt, rodent-like teeth, she gave a strange howl at Heldi, then grabbed Bravlon by the armor on the back of his neck and, like a cat carrying a kitten, thundered away.
The capybara lowered her head and used it as a battering ram to carry her and the delightedly shrieking Bravlon out into the sunlight.
“Me boy!” Heldi screamed.
Bob swirled down from the ceiling and whizzed in front of Devon’s face. “In case you were wondering, that’s a capybara. A gentle, water-loving rodent native to the savanna.”
“Not now,” Devon said, patting the wisp away.
“Hey, you asked,” the wisp said.
“We must go after them,” Heldi said.
Devon nodded, already starting to run. She hadn’t considered any other course.
At the edges of the chamber, the pygmies had once again assumed their animal form, only now they snuffed at the floor and squeaked, apparently at a loss for what to do. Devon ignored them as she wove around piles of sticks toward the circle of bright light.
And then the ceiling began to fall.
Muskrattons squealed and disappeared through holes in the latticework walls, evacuating as massive logs fell from the roof and smashed into the chamber below. In the sudden light, Devon saw another few players crushed by falling debris, their bodies quickly fading as the respawn process whisked them back to their bind points.
Her eyes teared up in the sudden glare, and the dust raised when debris pulverized dried mud clogged her nose. Staggering forward, Devon peered through the new exit to the den, searching the slope of the mound and the lake beyond for sign of the queen.
“Me boy. Tis the only way a parent can lose a child,” Heldi shouted as she sprinted past Devon. As her sturdy legs propelled her over the tangle of fallen debris and stunned bodies, a massive stump the size of an autocab shook free and began what—to Devon—looked like a slow-motion tumble straight for the panicked dwarf mother.
Devon could see it all happen as if she peered into the future. In a half-second, Heldi would be crushed. The odds for the rest of the raid, including Devon, didn’t look much better. With no one to chase after the Queen Capybara, their only hope would be to send trackers after her and Bravlon.
Devon couldn’t leave the boy’s fate to hope.
Without hesitation, she slapped her hand onto her opposite forearm and activated the ability on her Bracers of Smoke.
The Vanish spell exploded from her in a ring, yanking every member of the raid out of contact with the physical plane. Stumps and logs and other debris smashed through translucent bodies, their manifestations only visible because she had also been pulled out of phase.
For an instant, anyway.
You are 100% Shadowed.
For once, there is nothing to say. No sarcastic comment. No backhanded insult. Only, “Goodbye.” And good luck. You are strong. Remember yourself.
The popup flashed, then faded.
A roar rose unbidden from Devon’s throat as something inside her body reached forward and canceled the Vanish effect. The sudden and very real sensation of the physical realm slammed home. But it was unlike how she had ever felt it before.
The world was disgustingly alive. Every stick had a vibration. The air hummed against her skin, and she could feel the heartbeats of the thousands of muskrats as they fled down the slopes of their former den. Logs fell around her, stirring the motes of life energy that filled the air, a soup of the goddess’s creation.
And she hated it. She hated them. She wanted to crush every drop of vitality in this foul place. She yelled, a guttural, yet still pathetically human cry.
Devon. Heldi made it. Some internal force grabbed hold of her awareness and yanked it toward the far side of the collapsing chamber. Through the chaos of falling wood, she spotted a shimmering form, the hint of a figure clambering through the mouth of the cavern and into the light. Soon, more wavering forms followed. A half-dozen at least. The urge to tear them apart warred with a presence deep in her being, the voice which spoke in her mind. That being recognized the shapes as friends.
Devon’s flesh burned. Once again, her fingertips tingled as claws erupted from the nail beds. Then her flesh seared. As if blackened and cracked in a fire, her skin split and curled and turned leathery. Tender flesh pulsed and ached where the splits exposed it. She screamed as her skin seemed to stretch tight over her shoulder blades. Unbearably tight. Black spots blossomed in the corners of her vision when the pain rose to excruciating.
With a tearing sound, the skin of her back ruptured. Devon’s scream changed to a discordant wail as she threw back her head and stretched out her wings. She flapped them once, twice, to dry the ichor that coated the wing membranes. It felt so good to once again spread herself wide.
Bones cracked in her legs as her proportions changed, her ankles rising high off the ground so that her legs were like a goat’s, long and slender above a small hoof. Her teeth lengthened and grew pointy, the upper row like little daggers jabbing into her lower gums and drawing blood—human blood from the creature she’d recently been. She shrieked again, tasting that which gave her power in this realm.
Bodies
of slain animals and strange humanlike beings were strewn around the crumbling chamber. As Devon flapped her wings and lifted her weight from the chamber floor, she activated Blood Mist. Red fog swirled from the bodies, churning through the air as it streamed toward her. As the mist flowed up and into her, Devon’s power grew. A tumbling branch clipped her on the shoulder, but the flashing pain disappeared in a split-second as the healing power of the blood of the dead surged and mended her flesh.
She activated Demonic Frenzy, adding haste to her limbs. The small, warm-blooded creatures fleeing in waves down the slopes of the mound would be little challenge for her power, but it had been so long since her hunger for flesh had been sated. Thousands of lives waited to be extinguished.
/Worm./
She shuddered as her god’s voice penetrated her mind. Cringing, she wobbled in the air. A falling chunk of mud slammed into her thigh, sending her skating toward the disintegrating wall of the chamber.
Devon landed and hunched as if to guard her vulnerable middle from Zaa’s disdain.
“Master.”
Zaa is not your master, Devon. You are stronger than this. The irritating presence inside her mind pushed hard against her thoughts. For a moment, Devon chased after her awareness of the being. She remembered something, the notion of a woman inside a demon, the demon inside a woman.
A section of the wall fell inward nearby, heavy pieces of stone that had been cemented in the matrix crashing through the packed mud floor.
Citadel of Smoke: A LitRPG and GameLit Adventure (Stonehaven League Book 4) Page 22
