Halcyon Rising_Shadow of Life

by Stone Thomas

  “It looks… smaller,” I said.

  “Once the mucker-mites got their claws on the city, Kāya couldn’t blast off with it again,” Reyna said. “Soon they’ll drag every building beneath the mud.”

  “We need to open a new rift and get everyone out of here,” I said.

  “That’s impossible,” Reyna said. “My mother barely has the power to close the rifts we have, she can’t open a new one without taking a head priest and feasting on souls to rebuild her power. For now, the price of passage is death. If you want to force open a rift home, someone has to die.”

  As we walked, a rift opened in the sky, high above us. It was a star-speckled streak of midnight blue, a window into the world of vibrant light’s late-night sky.

  “What about that one?” Mamba asked.

  “Hmm,” Reyna said. She spun into the air, peering through the rift as it pulled closed. “It opens into the ocean. Someone must have died on a boat and left a rift behind. That’s the tricky thing about a rift, the location of death determines its location in your world.”

  We talked and walked, approaching Valleyvale from its rear. The temple stood tall, with several long mucker-mite arms attached to it. With a chunk of the city’s defensive wall missing we could walk right into the city’s southern district, a short walk to the temple’s doors.

  A storm swirled above the city, shooting bolts of lightning at the city’s center with unnatural frequency.

  Our conversation almost turned into something normal and pleasant as we traversed the netherworld, until Savange interrupted.

  “Hush your gossip,” she said. “You’ll drown out the sound of last hope.”

  I paused. Thunder cracked, but otherwise hell was quiet. It was the land of folding stillness, where the only sounds were the slurping of wandering varkinds and the scratching sound of mucker-mite claws on stone.

  Yet, there was something else too. A muffled struggling. A whimper. I scanned the ground for any trace of its source.

  “Vee!” I yelled. She was almost impossible to spot, a black-clad woman sunken into black mud. I summoned the negasus with a single yell. The horse-headed creature in the distance raced toward us, galloping on two front legs while its rear faded into a foggy cloud behind it. I leapt on its back and we charged ahead.

  In the two minutes it took to cross the distance toward Vee, boney claws had pulled one of her arms under the mud entirely. She was up to her neck in the dense, gloppy ground, fighting off mucker-mites with only one arm.

  I leapt off my mount and sprinted, sliding to the ground when I got close. With my fingers curled around the cold hard pincer of one pale ugly bug, I pulled. The boney arm didn’t break, it just bent backward as I yanked it out of the ground.

  Four feet of bone emerged from the muck, thin at the tip but growing into a thick, dense arm as it reached its base. With another forceful tug, the entire insect burst from the ground.

  Its body was the size of my head, and it had only that one bone appendage sticking out from what seemed to be its face. It shrieked from a mouth unseen and whipped that arm at me. I kicked it away, watched it scuttle backward, then dig itself back into the muck.

  “Hold on, Vee,” I said. I grabbed another long bone, twisting as I pulled back. Something popped, possibly the bone leaving its face-socket, and the bug retracted itself into the mud.

  “Arden?” Vee asked. “I can’t see you.”

  “I have your glasses,” I said. “We just have to get you up.” I stuck my Vile Lance into the ground handle-first and grabbed Vee by the arm.

  We both groaned as I pulled, sinking my own boots into the mud as I dug in for support. It was no use. No matter how hard I forced my legs to move, the thick paste of hell’s ground had too firm a hold on her. She was still sinking, inch by inch — and now I was too.

  “Let me help,” Reyna said as she touched down next to me. Mamba and Isilya still ran on foot further behind. She grabbed Vee and tried flapping her wings, but she couldn’t lift off with enough power to counteract Vee’s gradual plunge into oblivion.

  I gripped my spear with one hand. “Vee, hold on.” She clenched her fingers around my ankle. Her breath came in short spurts as the mud enveloped her, constricting her lungs and sucking her into the bowels of whatever sat below the underworld.

  I Vaulted. My feet lifted off the ground a few inches and a sickening glug erupted under us. I did it again, lifting Vee a few inches. She twisted against the muck until her shoulder came free.

  Reyna helped pry her other arm loose, and Vee grabbed both of my ankles now. I Vaulted again, lifting her torso higher. Now we had her. With Reyna and me pulling Vee up, we freed her from the ground. A mucker-mite had the audacity to poke its boney finger toward us, but I stomped on it and handed Vee her glasses.

  “Arden!” she yelled. “Mamba! Other gypsy lady! Succubus! Thank you all for saving me.”

  “For the last time…” Reyna said.

  Vee looked around. “The last thing I remember, Gorinor was leading me to a secret spot in the woods where we could be alone. Then he took my glasses, kicked me into something icy cold, and I ended up here. What in hell is this place?”

  “Exactly,” I said. “And we need to get into the city, fast.”

  “Let Larry help with that,” Mamba said. She swung her hips and waved her arms, flicking her wrists as her abdominal muscles rippled in impossible waves. Then she stopped. “He’s not coming. He only rides in our world.”

  “Then we’ll walk,” I said, leading the negasus alongside us. “It’s not far now.” My arms prickled against the cold breezeless air. “Isilya, you don’t just have a turtleneck I could borrow, right?” My kobold-blood-red vest was pretty awesome, but sometimes a guy just wants some sleeves. She shook her head. “Yeah, I didn’t think so.”

  What had started as a midnight meeting in the Chal tent became a long sticky walk through the quasi-solid fields of hell. Occasional rifts cracked open, all displaying brief windows to the night sky before sealing over again.

  After an hour-long trudge, we stood at the city’s rear wall. It was cracked and broken, with large chunks entirely absent. What portions remained, and the houses and shops ahead of them, had the narrow segmented finger-claws of mucker-mites extending up their sides. Some were thin, spindly appendages no wider than my own fingers, while others were as thick as tree trunks and reached higher, grabbing houses by their roofs and pulling them into the abyss.

  “Everyone’s at the top of the temple,” Reyna said.

  “It looks destroyed,” Mamba said.

  “Kāya’s anibombs blew the belfry to bits,” I said. The stone dome was half gone, leaving only an arching stone awning behind. A small crowd had gathered around the remains of Kāya’s half-dedicated shrine, the energem mortar still glowing faintly purple several stories above us.

  “Vee!” I said. “Is what’s left of that dome shaped enough like an arch for you to open a portal under it?”

  “With what idol?” she asked. “I used the one you gave me on the Barren Moon portal.”

  “Right,” I said. I stepped past the outer wall and into the city itself when Savange spoke into my ear. “One doesn’t charge into a snake’s nest. Look carefully. I’d hate to imagine you getting yourself hurt. Here, at least.”

  I held out an arm and took a cautious half-step forward. No sooner did I peek around a corner than a massive serpentine head poked through an alley between two buildings. It was the rex fulmin, and it was on a wild race through the streets of Valleyvale. It careened past our group with a body wider than a horse’s, and hundreds of feet long, glowing with a faint white sheen.

  It wasn’t just a snake, it was a river of scales that slithered along the ground, up the walls of sinking buildings, and back down again on a never-ending quest to fulfill the focus of its curse: to kill Valona. Standing still as we were, it didn’t seem to notice us.

  “Mamba,” I asked, “can you tame it?”

  Her body launched into mo
tion, a jerky, arrhythmic dance that was less graceful ballet and more poorly choreographed convulsion. “Not yet,” she said. “I’m not strong enough to charm this snake with only a passing glance. We’ll need a heart to heart.”

  “First let’s find out if everyone’s alright,” I said. We stalked through the back alleys of Valleyvale, a city half-steeped in black mud. Occasional lumentors wafted past us, spheres of dim light trapped in their own minds. Most had Reyna’s signature mark, three red lines that ran in parallel and anchored those rotten souls to this plane.

  Some of the buildings we passed were submerged all the way to their roofs, others sank in a lopsided way, tilting one wall up while the opposite side plunged below. We passed the Grippersnout without a second thought, then onward past Hinnabee’s.

  It’s the wrong Hinnabee’s, I reminded myself. I need it to be.

  The rex fulmin stalked across the roofs of Valleyvale’s abandoned homes, keeping its head turned toward the city’s center.

  I paused at an alleyway with a clear view of the rex fulmin’s obsession. In the space Kāya’s metal spire had once stood was a black dome of magic. A constant stream of lightning struck at that barrier, singeing its dark surface with light and scattering sparks on the ground.

  “My mother is inside that magic shell,” Reyna said. “I doubt she even knows the city appeared around her.”

  Small bursts of white energy flew slowly through the air, homing in on the rex fulmin as they traveled. When they struck it, the white sheen that engulfed the snake beast’s body brightened. I followed the source of those magic blasts to a few glowing creatures standing on other roofs.

  “What are those?” I asked. The massive creatures had smooth white skin and heads like a praying mantis, with crackling orbs of golden energy where their eyes should be. Their torsos were like women wearing plate armor, but their arms were just sword blades from the elbow down.

  “The Great Mother’s mantid gladiators,” Reyna said. “They keep the curse going.”

  “You never told me how they got here,” I said. “Was it the varkind?”

  “Valona opened a rift back when the Great Mother came for her emperor’s second reckoning. They’ve been here ever since. I expected the Great Mother to come one day, but she never did. Only Duul has been to visit Valona, and only once.”

  “When was that?” I asked. The mantid gladiators thrust their arms out and sent a wave of white magic forward, washing the rex fulmin in their curse and forcing the animal’s sheen to brighten.

  “A few weeks back,” Reyna said. “He came right through a rift, powerful enough to ignore the Great Mother’s law. He offered Valona women to feed on, but when they refused to pledge fealty he just laughed and tried cursing them.”

  “His curse only enrages men,” I said. “I don’t know why he’d even try it on women.”

  “We’ve seen cretins and generals curse, but never Duul,” Mamba said. “Children don’t learn all their parents’ tricks.”

  She was right. He could have tried anything on those poor women. We pushed forward, closing the distance between us and the temple.

  The rex fulmin bounded up the side of one building and stared at us. Its tongue extended from its mouth toward the sky and a dozen bolts of lightning struck at once. Some hit Valona’s protective shell, while others smacked against the ground on what seemed to be a direct line toward me. The negasus took off in a panic.

  “Guys,” I said. “I think we’ve gotten its attention.”

  +50

  “Run!” I yelled. Another bright light pulsed in the sky, sending a series of bolts all over the city, including a few toward our group.

  Running from lightning. That’s a great plan, unless you’re me. About six seconds in, I got struck by it.

  A crack of thunder erupted, but the thing about thunder was, it trailed behind lightning. It wasn’t a warning of things to come, it was more like a storm saying “haha!” to whoever’s brain it had just fried.

  In this case, that brain was mine. I was already on the ground by the time the thunder cracked. My hand stung with pain, my whole body spasmed.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t carry this,” Reyna said, taking the Vile Lance and laying it against a nearby building. “You know, it being made of metal. And the sky being full of electricity.”

  “I’m not leaving my only weapon behind,” I said. Actually, what I said was, “Iwa ma onah we be.” I couldn’t make my lips or my tongue form words through all of the twitching going on.

  I brought up my skillmeister menu while Mamba and Isilya continued toward the temple. Two thirds of my HP were gone from a single lightning bolt. Improving Call to Arms to level two improved my spear-summoning range to 15 feet, but improving it again would require spending too many XP to meet the attribute requirements.

  I could, however, unlock Upsurge. The AP cost would add up, but if I stacked the skills together I could double my Call to Arms radius to 30 feet. It was worth a shot. I stumbled along on unsteady legs after that, activating skills every dozen paces.

  Upsurge caused my whole body to glow with faint white light, then I used Call to Arms. My weapon zoomed to my hand and I threw it like a javelin toward the temple. It got struck by lightning a few times, but I didn’t. I walked well past the weapon, then did it again. Upsurge. Call to Arms. It flew to my grip, then I hurled it ahead once more.

  Before long I made it to the temple, but the building’s first floor had vanished into the muck below. I climbed through what used to be a second-story window instead. From there, we followed the spiral stairs up to a narrow window that looked out above the rest of the city.

  Outside, the two mantid gladiators waved their bladed arms and shot a perpetual stream of curses at the rex fulmin. Each had a crowd of bubbled lumentors swirling around it. Those spherical souls were all Encapsoulated and Hell Bent, but they lusted after the energy that radiated from those gleaming familiars.

  “You’ve been busy,” I said to Reyna. “That’s a lot of bubbled souls.”

  “Keeping up with those glowy bastards is a full time job,” she said. “When they get close to those familiars, they get agitated and fight against their casing, but it’s not hard for me to maintain them. Not anymore.”

  The tower’s dome took a strong bolt of lightning, shaking the building and forcing another chunk of stone to break away. It crashed to the ground as I raced up the last set of stairs.

  There, in the half-exposed peak of the temple’s tower, almost thirty people huddled in the dark.

  “No,” I said. “There have to be more survivors than this.”

  An older man was the first to speak. “A lot of people fled the city when it first jumped into the elf lands. Others fled after the second jump, or the third. I hung onto the hope that Valleyvale would go home one day, but I feel like a fool now.”

  “We’ll get everyone home,” I said. “I just need time to think of how. Wait, I don’t see Gorinor.”

  “The gypsy musician,” the man said. “He’s around. We turned him away from the temple, but he’s not far.”

  Mamba had her arms around three women who sat huddled against the wall. A few other women in clothing styles I recognized from the bassador sat with them.

  “Does anyone have skills that will help us out of this?” I asked. No one answered. “I’m happy to skill you all up and find out.”

  “Start with my mommas,” Mamba said. “It’s been a long time for them, so they’ll have a lot of XP on hand.”

  I got to work. The first woman was a disciplinarian specializing in Quell Tantrum and Inflict Guilt. The second was a culinarian whose highest level skills were Conjure Milk and Conjure Cookies. Not a bad combo, but I had to wonder what kind of cookies they were. And what kind of milk.

  The last momma was a tailor who could make children’s clothing that grew as quickly as the person wearing it. Helpful for growing boys and men alike! Just not suited to escaping a sinking hellscape.

  Everyone tensed as
footfalls carried up the stone steps. I bent my knees and aimed my spear, but no one emerged from the stairwell. Then, someone called out behind me.

  “Head Priest Arden!”

  As if materializing from thin air, Greggin the blue elf was sitting on the floor pulling off his socks with one hand and clutching two books the size of his torso with the other. “Sorry, I thought it best to stay incognito among humans. You see why.”

  The humans in the room all jumped back. “I think they’re just surprised,” I said. “I know I always am.”

  “Elves don’t get the best reception in human cities,” he said, “but you and me, we’re cool. Right?”

  “We go way back,” I said. “Last I saw you, Akrin was blasting you with a timeline spell.”

  “And it was right back to the library with me,” he said. “Earlier in the day I had explored the Mayor’s private study thanks to my sneak socks.”

  “And you stole books!” I said. “What are they? Magical tomes that control monsters? Animals? More undead?”

  “Oh,” he said. “No. I just took a few pulpy fiction books to pass the time.”

  I took them from him, inspecting their covers. “Timathy’s Intriguing Time Travel Yearbook? Vicarious Adventures with Gorgeous Insatiable Naked Adult Ladies?” The text inside was written in the same odd looping language as the ghost book Klimog had taken. “How can you read these?”

  “Don’t judge me,” he said. “My standards for recreational reading are much lower than they are for academic books.”

  “No, I mean the actual writing. I saw a book like this that controls the dead, but I couldn’t read it. This is some arcane, dead language.”

  “This?” Greggin asked. “This is just cursive. Oh my gods, you don’t know cursive?”

  “Nobody reads cursive these days,” I said.

  “I do,” Mamba said.

  “Me too,” said Vee.

  The other people all huddling in the temple’s tower nodded.

  “It’s not like it’s calligraphy!” Greggin said. “Which I also happen to know. I could teach it to you.”