Lydia smirked. No, she didn’t think she was ever going to be proud about shooting a man in the head. But at least she hadn’t killed him—not for keeps, apparently. That was some peace of mind. “So, you take people to…what, refresh the gene pool? Bad choice of words, if you can’t reproduce, I guess.”
“Your sentiment is correct. Replenishment notwithstanding, to grow—to change—we must take,” he explained. “If we are to progress and evolve, we must collect from your world when we are able.”
“So, you take us, and then turn us into things like you?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“A ceremony. It is painless, I assure you.”
“But what, exactly, happens?”
“I will wait to answer that until we are seated, if you do not mind.”
Lydia knew he meant that to be comforting, but it didn’t work. Not in the slightest. But since he was answering her questions, she could at the very least let the man—vampire, she reminded herself—make her some damn tea. “Sure.”
“Thank you.”
They crossed in front of another corridor, and it went on for a few feet before being consumed in darkness. No candles were burning down that way, and it left the hall an empty, eerie void of impenetrable darkness.
Turning, she realized the candles behind them were extinguishing a few moments after they passed them. The lights seemed to be following them, illuminating what was needed and leaving the rest of the massive building cast in complete shadow.
“Is this whole place always this spooky?” she asked.
“Yes.”
Lydia laughed at his deadpan answer and looked up at him. He had no expression on his face, save the doleful one he always wore, and did not seem to understand why she thought that was funny. “So where am I?” she asked.
“We are in the Cathedral of the Ancients, in the city of Yej near the Ronde d’el Lin, and overlooking the great Red River.” Lyon cast a glance at her again, at her bewildered expression, and the look on his face was almost glinting with the barest amusement. “The name of the world in which you find yourself is Under.”
Lydia tried not to glare at him and instead just sighed. All right. If she was on board this crazy train, she might as well play along. “Under. So where is this place in relation to Earth?”
“Think of Under and Earth as two planets which orbit each other. Following this analogy—and it is a metaphor, nothing more—the orbit of your world and ours is an eccentric one. Our worlds do not pass by one another so much as our worlds pass through the other.”
“What happens when our worlds pass through each other?” she asked.
“Those who know how to move between them may do so freely,” Lyon answered.
“I…” The next question never had a chance to come out of her mouth. Lydia paused in front of a long hallway, becoming distracted from their conversation. Something in the darkness didn’t look quite the same. The blackness seemed textured, for lack of a better word.
There was a sound coming from the hallway, like sticks, scraping on stone.
The darkness moved. Lydia took one step back away from it, as something in the shadows shifted. It looked like a pile of branches, a giant tangled mess of thin twigs that wove in and out of each other. But they were moving. Toward her and around themselves, like a tumbleweed.
Each of the sticks was an arm. Or a leg. Or maybe they served the same purpose. At the end of each rod was a single talon, opposed on the other side by a matching, smaller thumb of a claw. They were grasping and grabbing on to the other legs and arms. By pivoting its wrists and elbows, it could move the whole in one direction or another.
With a slow, creeping horror, Lydia realized the creature’s arms began at a claw, ran to a wrist, to an elbow, back to a wrist, and another talon…with nothing in between. Hand, wrist, elbow, wrist, hand. It was a tangled mass of double-sided arms. No single body lived at its center.
A beige shape appeared within it, pushing out from the stick-like limbs. It was the upper portion of a skull that didn’t look like it had ever belonged to a person or any animal she recognized. It only had one nostril that bisected its upper jaw, and it had no teeth. The holes for the eyes were large and vacant, almost comically oversized for the skull.
The hands were holding onto the faded and yellowed skull, passing it from claw to claw as it pushed itself toward the end of the hallway and into the light.
“H-holy…Holy fuck.” Lydia backed into the wall on the other side as the creature crawled out from the darkness. It was also huge, taking up the whole of the width of the hallway. It shrank and expanded as it moved, pulling itself along the corridor by grabbing the trim of the doorjamb. It walked on its claws like a sea urchin, alternating using them as feet before pulling them up into its mass of tangled sticks for another purpose.
“It means you no harm,” Lyon said gently from nearby. She wanted to glance over, but she couldn’t take her eyes off the thing that was moving closer to her. The skull it held in the center of its body was now being held out further from its center and toward her, as if it were trying to look at her.
Grabbing one of its stick-like arms and using it to extend its reach, it slowly stretched out a single claw toward her. When Lydia made a small, startled cry and jolted in fear, it shrank back at her unexpected movement.
It was acting timid and afraid like an animal, trying to inspect something unusual and new. Every time Lydia moved, it would shy away, compressing its size, and then reach back out. She had a cat once when she was a kid, and it did the same thing the day it met a lizard for the first time.
“It is called a graspling,” Lyon said. “They are not overly aggressive.”
“I hope you realize that’s not helping,” she muttered, still wide-eyed and staring at the creature in front of her, who seemed hell-bent on…well, poking her. Oh, god, it had so many hands. Each of its longer opposable talons was five or six inches long.
“They do not stalk their prey. Grasplings lie in the darkness and wait for the foolish to step within them.”
He had a funny opinion of what aggressive meant. “So…so they eat people, though?”
“Everything here does.”
“Ooh, still not helping…” She whimpered and pulled back tighter against the wall. It was reaching out toward her again, a single claw grasping at the empty air. Graspling. Right. The name made sense. It almost looked like the hand of a chameleon, the way its digits moved.
It went to touch her face, and she let out a small cry and shifted to the side. Reaching up her hand to protect her face, it gently grabbed hold of her hand. The claw was sharp, but it wasn’t squeezing down to hurt her.
The creature seemed content with just squeezing and releasing her hand, then tried working its way up to her wrist. It was investigating her, trying to figure her out. A second talon stretched out and poked her in the shoulder.
It was standing close to her now, almost caging her against the wall. It was a beaver dam of tangled arms, bending and twisting to create its shape. It had a musty, decrepit smell, as if it had spent a great deal of time in a basement somewhere. The smell of dust almost made her want to sneeze as it crept nearer in its fascination.
“Please. That’s close enough,” Lydia said, trying to sound firm but failing miserably. But damn it, she tried. “I’m…I’m having a rough day already,” she admitted quietly, for what good it might do. Lydia spoke to everything. Animals, plants, dead bodies, her computer. So she talked to the graspling now.
Remarkably, it seemed to understand her and inched backward. It stopped its advance but didn’t stop poking at her. It was now holding the edge of her coat and, like a blind person trying to visualize a face, was intent on poking and prodding at her.
After a few more moments, the creature’s curiosity seemed sated—thank god—and it backed away. Like an animal having enough of being petted, it just turned around and moved back into the darkness of the hallway from which it had eme
rged.
It left her finally aware her heart was pounding in her ears, her breath was short and fast, and she was trembling. She had always said “panic later” as her mantra, and, well…now that the immediate threat was past, her body had decided that now was a perfect time for later.
The world threatened to drop her down a tunnel; she was going to pass out. Breathe, you idiot! Breathe in, breathe out.
A hand on her shoulder made her jump, and she whipped her head up to see Lyon standing next to her. He almost looked sympathetic, the slightest overlay of emotion on his alabaster features.
Pressing her palms into the cold stone of the wall behind her helped calm the swirling in her head. She kept breathing slowly, in and out. When she felt like she could move without hitting the floor, Lydia nodded to him that she was now hopefully out of the woods.
He removed his hand and took a step back. When Lydia pushed herself off the wall, she took another deep breath in and let it out in a sigh, even if it did waver embarrassingly. “How many more creatures like that live in Under?”
Lyon let out a single laugh through his nose. He shook his head as if amused by a question only a child would ask. “Let me make you that tea.”
They resumed walking down the hallway, and Lydia felt the panic in her replaced by a slow, pervasive dread. His non-answer was enough of a hint. Whatever Under was, whatever its purpose might be…it was a world of monsters.
Chapter Eight
Edu had no patience.
That was an inarguable and intractable fact, one Edu never contested. It was not a trait he had any care to learn or practice, and now was no different.
He stood in the center of the great hall, looking up at the massive and tangled orrery overhead. It was a beautiful sculpture and would have been an awe-inspiring masterpiece alone, without the added use of its function. The purpose it served was vital to this world.
Shame he never had the resolve to understand it.
Yet he had others who filled that role. Since there were those who served him who could understand its movements, it was rendered moot that he could not comprehend the twisting tracks of brass and copper in their gyroscopic and nonsensical orbits about the center.
Perhaps if it had been a traditional orrery with predictable motions and movements on a single axis of rotation, he would have had the patience to learn. Edu was not a fool—he was not the idiot that many would paint him. He did not care to ply his time to such uses that others could far more readily fulfill.
Not a single track of the dozen or more shapes of glass and stone could be considered traditional. Each was oblong, warped, or twisted. And the movements were not steady. They could speed up or slow down, twist on an axis and whirl wildly about the center. Some days, the structure hardly resembled its appearance from the day prior. Other times, it could go for years with barely any adjustments at all. In truth, it did not even have a center around which the items pathed. It could tilt and swing one direction or the other, as the balance did the same.
The massive, hanging piece—easily twenty feet in diameter, suspended far overhead—displayed far more than the simple rotation of planets. The orrery exhibited the shifts of power in Under and all the hidden workings in their world, not merely whether Under and Earth were in phase. The alignment of Earth and his world was a moment of diversion for him and carried no dread.
It was the movement of another piece upon the track that he eyed warily.
It was the track of one dark glass orb, impenetrable in its darkness and without any other tone or shade of color. All other representatives upon the structure were marbled with color tones. Green, blue, purple, and white orbs were present, though they had not moved in centuries. His own familiar red swirled about the center, glistening in the amber light of the chamber.
The black orb had shifted unexpectedly. Now, it was quickly ticking steadily closer toward the center. Edu needed no assistance in divining what that fact might portend. He had seen it happen frequently enough now that even he could discern its meaning.
Edu’s hands clenched to fists at his sides.
Aon would soon wake.
***
Lydia kind of hated tea. But she didn’t have the heart to tell the man who had brewed a cup the way it used to be done, by putting the leaves directly into the pot and straining it out into a glass for her.
So she thanked him and lifted it to her lips. It had an earthy and tart smell to it. The taste wasn’t too bad, she had to admit. Just a little bitter, offset with an herbal fullness. It wasn’t too cloying or flowery, which was what she generally disliked in tea. Lyon had put out a small tray of odd-looking fruit, and she had picked a few of the things closest in resemblance to grapes and munched on them. They tasted unusual but fine.
Besides, the act of making her a pot of tea and trying to make her comfortable seemed to please the vampire, or whatever he was. Lyon had a contented look on his face for the first time—although the man had the range of emotions of a rock. They were so subtle, they were barely there.
Lyon had taken her to a kitchen that looked like it saw decent use. He had apologized for the state of the room, and she had almost laughed at how polite he was being. The man had exceedingly practiced manners, something that betrayed that he probably was as old as he said he was.
He had left her to sit on a stool at a large, wood-topped counter in the center of the room while he brewed the tea. Sections of it were worn to different heights, so well-used was the thick wood surface.
“We do not usually take guests into the kitchen,” he had said.
“I’m a prisoner, not a guest,” she’d reminded him. That had sent Lyon to silence, and she almost felt bad at hurting his feelings.
Watching him brew the tea let her sit for a few minutes and gather her thoughts. The kitchen looked like it belonged in a castle, like everything else here. An enormous hearth dominated one wall, the unevenly made bricks blackened from use. Wrought iron swing arms sat in heavy brackets, supporting a collection of massive pots and cauldrons with ease.
The room smelled of smoke and cooked food like a campfire. When Lyon had gone to boil the water, he had placed a pot over a more traditional stove and clicked it on, the ranging making a familiar click-click-click as the pilot light ignited the gas.
“This place is a hodge-podge,” she observed. A blender sat next to an old-fashioned wooden mortar and pestle. Each looked as used as the other. A gas range any chef would love to own, next to a massive, medieval hearth.
“That is an apt observation,” Lyon answered. He sat across from Lydia at the counter and fixed his cup of tea. “And serves true for more than just this kitchen. We collect from Earth that which interests us. But as we do not age and die as you do, we tend to keep a fondness for the antiquated.” He gestured to the place around them. “Much as you observed, this room is a collection of times and influences of others, so is our world as a whole. We progress and evolve in our own right, but we also collect from your world when we are able.”
In some weird and twisted way, that was all starting to make sense. How all the prisoners seemed precious and exciting to them. Why they were very concerned about the injury on her arm becoming infected, or why that graspling creature had wanted to see what she was.
If nothing new ever happened here and nobody here ever aged or died, it must be like being trapped in purgatory. Wait. “Am I…is this…” she stammered and clasped the tea in her hands a little harder. “Is this hell?”
Lyon laughed at that, a low but mirthful sound, and shook his head. His laugh was pleasant and felt like a warm fire in a small room. When his laughter stilled, he had a genuine smile on his face. He may be a monster, but it was hard to be afraid of him. “No, my dear,” he said. “This place far predates that name. While those you meet here have inspired many of the myths and legends your people tell of a dark place that lives below, fear not. You are not in some burning afterlife.”
Lydia let out a breath and sipped her tea
again. It was helping her feel better, honestly. It took some of the shaking out of her hands. And she hadn’t eaten since…well, she didn’t know.
“Every culture of yours has tales of demons, of monsters and outlandish creatures. When your world and Under touch, we may pass in between them. While the stories may not match the truth, the inspiration comes from us,” Lyon added.
They sat in silence for a long moment as she processed everything he had said. She wouldn’t believe him if it weren’t for the fact that she had seen proof to the contrary with her own eyes. The monster in the hallway, the fact she had blown out Edu’s brains and he was still up and about. The gaping black hole in space. A vampiric corpse. The freak haunting her dreams. All of it was real. And because of that, she had no reason to doubt him, even if it would be a lot easier to live in denial.
“And you’re positive Nick is okay?”
“I promise you,” Lyon replied with a gentle bare smile in her direction. He seemed to find her worry over her friend far more endearing than Maverick, at least.
“What happens to us now? We’re going to ‘join’ you, fine, but how, exactly?” Lydia asked.
“We will take you to the Pool of the Ancients.”
“The Ancients?”
“The original creatures who ruled this world, the source of all that we are. Our primordial gods, for lack of a better word,” Lyon answered.
“Then what happens?”
“The Ceremony of the Fall, where you will be shown what path you may take. Think of it as induction into our world. A homecoming. While its outcome may take many forms, it is not to be feared. You will emerge reborn and anew.” Lyon smiled at her gently.
The Fall. The man in Lydia’s nightmare—Aon—had used that word. Fall. He had said she had not yet Fallen.
Lydia felt the color drain out of her face as she looked at Lyon, wide-eyed. Aon had claimed to be real. But she had written it off as a particularly self-aware dream. But there was no way in hell she could have invented the Fall.
King Of Flames (The Masks of Under Book 1) Page 10
