Erolina studied her tracker carefully, watching its needle flick about as it tried to find their quarry. “Basic warcraft, you feign weakness when strong, you feign inertia when mobile. All combat is based on deception. When the time is right, you release your inner restraints and remove your mental locks.”
“What does that even mean?”
“Isn’t it obvious?”
Agaprei rolled her eyes. “You don’t have to be cryptic, just explain it to me simply, as if I were an idiot.”
Erolina stared at her.
“Well?” Agaprei pressed.
Erolina blinked. “I’m sorry, I just can't see how that would be any different from the way I normally talk to you.”
“Oh, shut up!”
Erolina grinned, pleased with herself as the needle locked in and she smashed the wall to pieces.
“I’m not so sure this will actually work,” Storgen warned as he looked around suspiciously.
Beyond there was a circular shaft, dropping down starkly, the entire structure slowly spinning. As soon as Erolina stepped inside, however, the gimbal changed directions, now pointing starkly west.
“Huh, that’s strange,” she said, giving it a shake. She turned and punched through the spinning rock, revealing a lavishly decorated corridor filled with finely painted portraits and statues. But as soon as she stepped through, the gimbal changed direction yet again, now pointing straight down.
“This place just gets weirder and weirder.”
Erolina powered them through the maze, breaking through the floor, then through a large decorative mural, then up through the floor into a dusty ballroom, then smashing through a fireplace into a dark tunnel beyond. Each time the gimbal changed directions, seemingly at random.
“I’m telling you, I don’t think this is working,” Storgen pressed, worried at how desperately lost they were. They passed a mirror, the surface warping their reflections, leaving each of them a twisted image without a face.
Erolina punched the wall the gimbal pointed her towards, cracking the solid stone. “Hey, we tried it your way. Now it’s my turn.”
“I feel like I'm arguing with a goldfish.”
Erolina punched again, and the solid rock split, gouts of pressurized water spraying at them from within.
“Uh, oh.”
The stone exploded, hitting them with a wall of water. The world became a tumble of bubbles and motion, rock floors and walls spinning around them, all noise muffled by the liquid, thrashing limbs, burning lungs, clouded vision.
Storgen managed to get his head above water for just a moment, the world becoming three times as loud for just a heartbeat as he gulped for breath, people screaming, a tidal rush of violent rapids as they were swept down the hall, then he was underwater again, tumbling and colliding with the walls, the floors, with pieces of furniture caught up in the current, and with other people.
Forced through the maze-like expanse, they slipped around corners and walls, then were forced upwards, sucked through a hole where part of the ceiling had collapsed. Erolina managed to grab hold of the edge of the opening, but when the others collided with her, her grip slipped free.
They were dragged through a narrow tunnel, their bodies screaming out for breath, and then they dropped, falling with the water down a vertical shaft, plunging into a pool at the base of a new waterfall.
Coughing and hacking, they instinctively pulled themselves up to the edge of the pool, spitting up foul water and retching uncontrollably.
“Scythe, you muscle-bound moron!” Agaprei wheezed, rolling onto her back and trying to catch her breath.
Storgen slopped up to dry ground and fell on his side, gripping painfully at his midsection.
“You all right?”
“Just a couple of ribs,” he grimaced. “No big deal.”
Agaprei scooted over to him worriedly and gently touched his side. His body flinched in pain.
“Your sixth and seventh ribs are broken,” she cautioned. “We need to get them taped before you puncture a lung.”
Philiastra looked up at the solid flow of water coming down from the shaft above. “Oh, well this is just great! This is perfect! Now we can’t even backtrack if we wanted to!”
“Well, you can’t blame me,” Erolina coughed. “How was I supposed to know there was a river on the other side? I mean, who puts a river inside a tower, anyway?”
Storgen winced as Agaprei pressed the tape against his side.
Philiastra threw up her hands. “That’s why you don’t just go smashing through walls. You could have brought this whole place down on top of us.”
Erolina inspected her smashed gimbal and tossed it aside. “Oh, like you were being so helpful with your adorable little bow and arrow. Shouldn’t you just be able to ask the trees around here where we should go?”
“I already tried that. All the plants around here, their life forces are all…fuzzy. I can’t explain it.”
“Well, then, maybe try explaining it to us as if we were idiots,” Agaprei snapped.
Erolina and Philiastra looked at her harshly. “You stay out of this!”
“Guys, stop fighting,” Storgen plead, a deep bruise forming across his face.
Agaprei stood up and pointed an accusatory finger. “You should have listed to Storgen, he was supposed to be our guide!”
Erolina glowered. “You don’t get to sit there and do nothing but criticize those who are doing something. Besides, I don’t think I like your tone!”
“Like I care!”
Philiastra stomped her foot. “The problem is, we let the pah-toma get way too far ahead of us.”
“Ptóma.”
“Don’t correct me! I hate it when you guys correct me. We would have never lost the trail if little missy here hadn’t made us stop.”
“I had to use the bathroom. It is a biological necessity.”
“Well, your flawed biology almost got us killed.”
“Oh, go dig in the dirt.”
“How dare you!”
“Blithering sow!”
“Diseased turnip!”
“Homewrecking temptress!”
“Guys, I said STOP!”
All three girls went silent and turned to Storgen. He propped himself up and looked out into the cavern beyond, his bruised eye turning red. “Can’t you feel it? The black breath. It’s so strong here.”
That’s when they realized the jagged crags of rock around them were not rock at all, but piles and heaps of cages. Stacked cages, reaching up for hundreds of feet around them. Cages of every size and description. Mangled skeletal arms reaching out, as is still pleading for water, even in death. Air like foul breath, the stench of corpse worms and the chittering of lung beetles everywhere.
Here suffering had a smell, an actual smell so pervasive one could actually detect it in the air.
“I know where we are.”
Storgen walked silently, his skin pale as he looked at bloodied operating tables, shackled racks, and rows upon rows of rusted surgical instruments. His body visibly shook as he held his side, looking down at the stained floor, the gurgling drains, the sagging nets. He knew every detail of this room, every imperfection in the stone, every resinous secretion on the wall, every place where repellent water collected.
Storgen stopped, his body completely still, his heart unable to beat inside his chest. The girls fanned out to get a better look. It was a small cage, barely even waist high, with worn bars and a warped roof. A series of locks ran along its door, each more complicated than the last. The final one was the most complicated lock any of them had ever seen. The floor was scratched with fingernail marks, the bars potted with the imprints of teeth. It stank of squalid despair.
Without thinking, Philiastra reached out to the rusted nameplate and wiped away the dried blood, revealing a number.
“XVII,” she read. “This is where they kept you.”
Agaprei turned around and saw a small faded mounting on the wall opposite the cage. “T
his is where they hung the picture you drew,” she whispered, reaching out to touch it. “The picture of me…”
Even Erolina was visibly disturbed by what she saw. “Storgen…how did you end up in this place? How did you family allow it?”
Storgen opened his mouth, a tear rolling down his cheek. “I…I never knew my parents. They never even gave me a name. When I was born there were…complications of some sort.”
“The healers probably realized you were cut off from magic when they tried to treat you,” Agaprei surmised.
Storgen nodded slowly. “My parents were horrified. A child cut off from beauty, a child barred from love. They must have thought I was some sort of demon, or a curse brought upon their house. Skotádi said they thought to get rid of me, but realized it might be better to make some quick cash first, so they sold me to the tower as a novelty.”
Agaprei covered her mouth, looking like she might cry.
“I was their property. Legally bought and sold. A test subject with a number instead of a name.”
“You never had a chance,” Agaprei realized. “You never even had a chance at a normal life.”
Storgen turned away. “Now you all know my crime. Now you all know why I am hunted. It is because I am a thief. I stole this body from the people who owned it, I took these hands, these legs, these eyes, and ran off with them.”
He held up his fist and looked at it. “I stole everything that I have.”
Erolina and Philiastra could not take their eyes off the cage, looking on even after Storgen had moved on.
“I can’t imagine what it must have been like for him,” Philiastra whispered. “The sorrow he must have felt. The hopelessness.”
Erolina’s eyes became moist. “He deserved better.”
“Yes, he did.”
“And he deserves better.”
“Yes, he does.”
Erolina wiped her eyes. “And he’s not going to get it.”
Storgen shuffled over to a large alchemic door, red veins pulsing through it. Rather than grabbing the release lever, he picked up a small pebble and tossed it. The wall around the lever chomped down, becoming a jagged toothed maw, biting and chewing. Storgen tapped his foot with practiced precision, waiting for the right moment. In between the third and the fourth chomps, he snuck in his hand and pulled the lever, and the doors opened, revealing a vast room of light and glass beyond.
“We’re here.”
Chapter Thirty One
All despair begins with hope. To hope, is to put oneself on a path that leads to despair.
-Midnight Prayer from the Holy Scrolls of Soeck, First Binding, Third Stanza
This was a place of light, a spotlessly clean place in defiance of the rest of the tower, yet they found no comfort there as they walked inside.
It was called the Kyvernítis, a vast spherical room, every feature formed from thousands and thousands of tiny glass tubes, braiding around one another in an endless maze, threading together into larger ropes that formed load-bearing columns. Light moved through some, darkness moved through others, still others contained water, oils, and gases of every color and texture. But the most disturbing were the empty tubes, for they contained traces of their former contents, residues of blood.
They all flowed out into the center of the room, forming a kind of platform high above the floor far below. Philiastra watched as the hateful rules flickered along the glass surfaces of the tubes. “I get it, these are miniaturized versions of the mass driver we saw earlier. It breaks down materials into their spiritual components, then takes the spiritual matter with opposing resonances, and collides them there in the center.”
“What would that do?”
“I’m not sure. Normally, when you merge wavelengths you get interference, but if you do it just right, waves inverted from one another will completely cancel each other out. It works with sound, light, water…but it shouldn’t be possible to achieve destructive interference with magic. Magical energies cannot be nullified, only redirected. This place…is attempting to violate the first law of mage dynamics.”
“I can’t tell where the light is coming from,” Storgen noted, looking down and realizing they cast no shadows. He moved his hand through the air, and it slipped around his fingers as if it were thick. Light seemed to just kind of exist here, rather than come from any single source.
Philiastra pulled her arms in close, feeling inexplicably cold. “Something’s wrong here, I…I can’t hear anything.”
“This place is creeping me out,” Agaprei mentioned, her voice echoing strangely off the threaded glass walls, her voice coming back warped and ethereal.
“No, something’s definitely not right,” Erolina gasped, fighting to catch her breath. “It’s getting stronger the closer we get.”
Storgen and Agaprei walked up to the base of the platform and looked around, but could not detect anything odd.
“What do you mean?”
Philiastra screamed, dropping to her knees and clutching her chest. “It hurts! It hurts so bad!”
Erolina struggled to stay on her feet, grabbing the sides of her head as if it might explode. “It’s gone…there’s nothing here…nothing!”
Storgen and Agaprei ran back to help them. “What is wrong? What hurts?”
“Ahhhhhhhh!”
They both began writhing in agony, thick drops of sweat forming on their skin.
“What’s wrong with them?” Storgen asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Let’s get em out.”
Storgen hooked his hands underneath Erolina’s arms and dragged her back towards the door. Agaprei did the same with Philiastra. As they drragged them farther away, their pangs lessened, and they began to regain control.
“You all right? What the crap was that?”
“It’s…it’s all right now,” Philiastra coughed. “I can hear it again. We’ve moved past the range of its effect. I felt like I was going to lose my mind.”
“Hear what?”
“Magic,” Erolina said, breathing painfully. “There’s no magic in there, I’ve never felt such a cold void before. It felt like my soul was freezing inside my body.”
Agaprei looked back. Far up at the top of the platform was a glass pedestal, on which sat an oval gemstone giving off a dark, crimson light. “They did it. Skotádi and Master Kynigó, those maniacs actually did it. They created a stone that cancels out magic around it. But why weren’t Storgen and I affected?”
“I bet it’s because it’s made from my blood,” Storgen guessed. “I remember hearing Skotádi refer to this place as his distillery. That’s what he must have meant. It’s basically the same curse I have inside of me, just far more powerful.”
Philiastra coughed and put her hand on her aching chest. “Is that what it feels like, Storge? Is that what you feel every day? How can you bear it?”
Agaprei and Storgen looked sad. “It’s all we’ve ever known.”
Erolina forced herself to sit up. “Normally, I can feel the flow of different magical energies. They run like rivers through everything. But, in there, there was just…nothing. It was maddening. Like crushing deep waters. I felt like I couldn’t breathe.”
From somewhere nearby, a heavy metal door creaked as it swung open. All four of them froze in silence, listening as heavy footsteps drew near.
Agaprei licked her dry lips. “Whatever happens, I want all of you to know that I hold all of you in the highest regard.”
Storgen felt his blood run cold. “Oh, come on, you act like something bad is about to happen.”
The heavy footsteps drew closer, and the injured ptóma rounded a corner between two mountains of cages, trailing green ooze behind him.
They all breathed a sigh of relief.
With a gurgle and a spark, the ptóma collapsed, revealing a demigod standing behind him with platter- shaped eyes like a goat’s and skin of grey fog.
Storgen’s eyes went wide. “Master Kynigó!”
“It wo
uld seem I have some thieves that have broken into my home.”
Erolina flipped up her hood and wrapped her cloak around herself and vanished.
Agaprei turned in shock. “Did…did she just abandon us?”
Philiastra drew an arrow and fired, but Master Kynigó simply became vapor, allowing the shot to pass through harmlessly, thudding into the mud off in the distance.
“Do you know what happens to those who trespass into the Kyvernítis?!” he asked, becoming solid again.
Master Kynigó’s eyes moved separately, a beam of fire coming from his right red eye, and a beam of ice from his left blue eye.
Agaprei rolled away from the ice beam, iron cages freezing and shattering from the cold. Philiastra leapt high into the air, the beam of fire melting cages down to a molten slag. She fired off another shot, but the sharp arrowhead simply bounced off of his skin.
Suddenly Erolina reappeared behind him, screaming a mighty battle cry in her native tongue as she stabbed him through the ribs with her dagger.
He hollered in pain and spun around, nearly taking her head off as he smashed a cage to pieces. He staggered back, looking in shock at the dripping wound. “How? No mortal has the strength to pierce divine skin.”
“I’m stronger than any Amazon has ever been.”
She leapt up and landed a wicked uppercut, hitting him so hard it lifted him clean off of his feet and into the air. She landed on her hands and kicked upwards as he came back down, striking the hilt of her dagger and driving it even further into his ribcage.
Master Kynigó roared and released blades of energy in all directions, a sphere of death slicing apart cages and support pillars, cutting through doors and tables, and shredding hanging chains.
Philiastra and Agaprei had to jump behind heavy metal tables and rocks to shield themselves, but Erolina stood her ground, rolling to her feet and side-stepping the torrent of blades, letting them effortlessly slip beneath, above, and before her as if she were dodging rain.
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