Chains of Gaia

by James Fahy

  “You understand nothing,” Peryl said, turning away, running her hands through her long hair. “Eris won’t show mercy. She isn’t like me. You should have stayed in your stupid cage in the forest. She’s going to destroy you.”

  “Peryl, I’m sorry,” Robin said, reaching out behind him, fingers searching the table, brushing past the fallen mirror.

  The Grimm turned to face him, confusion clouding her stricken face. “Sorry? For what?” she snapped.

  Robin’s hands found what he was looking for and closed around it. With a great swing of his arm, he brought the lantern capsule containing the Earth Shard up in a swift wide arc, cracking it against hard against the side of her head.

  The capsule shattered, the force of the blow knocking the Grimm to the floor. Peryl fell in a crumpled heap, splayed and motionless on the yellow tiled floor.

  “For that,” he said hoarsely.

  With a shrieking hiss, the two swarm-creatures swooped furiously back in through the doorway, spears raised in retaliation, but the air around them was suddenly filled with loud crack and pops and flashes of light. Their wings fluttered in panic, battering the walls and the doorway. Their bodies colliding in confusion as they crashed into one another, disoriented by the blinding fireworks exploding in front of their lens-eyes.

  Robin dropped the shattered lantern case to the floor, dimly aware that the Shard of the Arcania had rolled, clattering like a glass paperweight, across the floor to land at the feet of the Princess Ashe.

  Robin flung out both hands, casting twin Galestrikes, swift and deadly. They hit each of the dazzled guards full force, sending the swarm creatures spinning out through the doorway into the great void, tumbling over the slender bridge. Their wings twisted and beating uselessly as they fell, far out of sight below.

  With a popping hiss, the shadowy gags which had muffled his friends disappeared, the dark mana which had held them in place clearly gone with Peryl unconscious.

  “Bloody hell, Robin!” Henry gasped loudly, eyes wide. He stared at Peryl, lying motionless on the floor, her face covered by her hair. “Did you kill her?”

  “Grimms don’t die from blows to the head,” Karya said urgently, getting to her feet. “She’s out for the count though. Well done, Scion.”

  “Thanks for the light show, Woad,” Robin said, stepping hurriedly over the fallen Grimm and untying the faun's metal bindings, freeing his friend's outstretched hands.

  The faun was grinning. He flipped his opal mana stone in the air and caught it again as soon as his hands were free. “Figured you could do with a little help,” he said, slipping his stone back around his neck. Together they quickly freed the others, the princess leaping up and helping them untie Hawthorn, Henry and Karya.

  “Someone should wake the pile of soft pudding,” Hawthorn said, prodding the unconscious form of Ffoulkes with his toe. “Or I can just carry him.”

  Karya stared from Robin to Peryl to the doorway urgently, slipping her mana stone bracelet over her wrist. “Right. We have to get the hell out of here, and now, right now,” she said briskly. “I can flip us to the human world, but not here. We’re at the top of a very tall pyramid. If we appear in the human world at this height above the ground, it’s going to be a long drop and a sudden stop. Plus, I need wood or earth to tear through. There isn’t either here. We have to get to ground level first.”

  “We’re not running,” Robin said firmly. The girl stared at him, dumbfounded.

  “What are you talking about?” she gasped. “We have the Shard, we have the princess, and in case you weren’t paying attention, Eris is coming.” She stared at him wildly. “Eris!” she repeated for emphasis.

  “I know!” Robin argued. “But we can’t leave them all. How many could you flip? All the dryads here?” He glared at her, knowing full well she couldn't. “Can you imagine Eris’ fury? If she arrives here and we’re gone with the Shard?”

  “I’d quite like to imagine her fury,” Woad said, raising his hand. “If we’re taking a vote. Imagine it from a great distance rather than, you know, being here when it’s happening.”

  Robin was adamant. “No. She’ll kill every dryad here.” He looked to the princess. “All of your people. We can’t just leave them all here to die.”

  “Such is sometimes the price of war, Master Robin,” Hawthorn counselled grimly. “You are more important to the cause. You and the Shard. Our priority has to be to get you away.”

  “I cannot leave my people here to die,” Ashe argued desperately. “I won’t!”

  “They’re not going to die!” Robin raised his hands, trying to stop everyone from arguing. He stared at Hawthorn. “I’m not more important. The cause? What cause? What are we trying to even save if we run and leave these people behind?”

  Hawthorn glared at him. “You can’t save everyone, Robin Fellows.”

  “I can bloody well try!” Robin argued hotly, his green eyes flashing. “Save the Netherworlde from Eris, right? The Scion’s duty? These people are the Netherworlde. I’m not leaving them behind.”

  “Robin, I can’t flip that many people over,” Karya said. “And we can’t free them all. The swarm is filling this place. There isn’t time. Eris is coming, right now. She’ll be through the Janus station any minute.”

  “I don’t mean to leave anyone behind in the Hive,” Robin said firmly. “Because there isn’t going to be a Hive.”

  They all stared at him.

  “Whatever you’re going to do,” Henry said desperately. “You need to do it quick, before sleeping-crazy there wakes up or metal-muzzle comes back.”

  QUICKENING

  Robin crossed swiftly to the princess. He knew they only had seconds to spare. The two guards he had sent tumbling through the void would surely not have gone unnoticed. He could already hear the low rumble of a thousand angry buzzing creature, rising like a tide from beneath them.

  “Ashe, I need the Shard,” he said. She had picked it up in the confusion, and it shone and flickered, cradled in her pale green hands. She looked at him, seeing him as the Puck for the first time.

  “It wants to come to you,” she said. “It doesn’t want me. I can feel it. It remembers you I think, from earlier. You took it from the drake, didn’t you? Strigoi told me it killed my father. But you took it. It’s already yours as far as its concerned.”

  Robin held out his hands, nodding, and she placed the Shard in his cupped palms. It was hot, and Robin felt its great power flowing into him.

  A warm, flooding sensation. Sunlight on forests, the rippling of cool grass between shadowy trunks. The endless furling and unfurling of leaves, more than a galaxy of them, rolling through the endless forest of the Elderhart, more numerous than the stars in the heavens.

  The Shard shone in his hands, flickering from a glimmer to blaze with light, and he closed his eyes, letting it take him, feeling it flow over and through, filling him with the knowledge of the Tower of Earth. With the deep and dark secret majesty of nature. Robin's veins felt golden, flowing with the sap of a thousand trees. His breath was the wind in leaves. Between his tousled white hair, he felt the shining white spikes of his horns, tall and solid, the proud antlers of the strongest stag.

  When his eyes opened, his companions were all watching him closely.

  “So,” said Henry carefully. “Who are we looking at now, then? Are you Robin right now? Or are you the Puck?”

  Robin smiled. “There’s no difference,” he said. “Not anymore.”

  “How are you planning on using Earth magic?” Karya asked. “There’s nothing natural here to manipulate. Everything’s made from this disgusting waxy swarm-stuff.” She kicked at some of the broken boards of the collapsed bookcase Robin had earlier thrown onto Peryl. “Even this isn’t really wood. It’s just glamoured to look that way. Peryl is so strange.”

  Robin looked to the princess. “A leaf from your dress?” he asked, holding out his hand.

  Confused, Ashe nodded. She tore one of the silver leaves fro
m her long dress and handed it to him.

  Robin closed his cupped hands around it, dropping into a crouch close to the floor.

  “What was it you told me back in Rowandeepling, your Highness?” he asked, his tall white horns bowed low as he put his mouth to his cupped hands, as though about to blow into a conch shell. “Even the mightiest oak owes its power to the memory of the smallest acorn?”

  He put his lips to his fingers holding the leaf between them. “Time to wake up,” he whispered to the small dead thing, and he pressed it flat against the yellow waxy floor. His hands, he noticed for the first time, were tinted slightly green by the power of the Earth Shard.

  Beneath his splayed palm there was a rumble, and the floor shook. The noise intensified, making the walls buckle and tremble. Robin looked up at everyone.

  “Get ready to hold on tight,” he told them. Hawthorn had picked up the unconscious body of Ffoulkes, heaving him onto his bony shoulders in a fireman's lift. He nodded, regarding the Scion with a curious expression.

  “Tight to what?” Henry asked, struggling to keep his balance as the room shuddered around them as though in an earthquake.

  Cracks appeared in the ground at Robin's feet, spiderwebbing in every direction through the cracking tiles. As the roaring, creaking rumble intensified, the floor suddenly erupted, great shoots and vines bursting forth from the soft yellow wax. They spilled into the room, spreading everywhere at a tremendous pace, thickening and growing ever larger as they flashed out around the chamber. Leaves were already unfurling along their length as the powerful, thickening tendrils crashed into the walls, splintering them. They roared upwards, still growing, as thick as trees now, as Robin and the others backed away. They pushed woody roots down through the floor which splintered and began to fall away in great chunks, revealing the dizzying void of the Hive beneath. The great, shaking vines and creepers burst through the ceiling, smashing through the yellow surface with ease, breaking it apart like smashed sugar. It rained down on them in pattering chunks, as the great and unstoppable creepers continued their relentless growth, thrashing around the disintegrating room.

  “Grab onto the plant!” Karya yelled above the deafening cacophony. “The room is coming to pieces!”

  They all leapt onto the thick creepers as they shot here and there, twirling and growing, thrusting out, powerful battering rams. Robin leapt onto one great green offshoot, his arms wrapped tightly around its stem, feeling absurdly like Jack clambering the beanstalk. In the confusion of the twisting jungle, growing larger and denser by the second, a writhing mass of lush vegetation in constant motion, he glimpsed the others. Karya and Henry were wrapped around a similar huge vine, clinging on for dear life as it shot upwards through the ceiling of the crumbling room, out into the void of the central Hive, questing for space to grow and taking them with it. He saw Hawthorn and Ffoulkes, wrapped in an embrace of twining leaves and creepers, hoisted into the air at great speed, and Woad, clinging tenuously to a great leaf, still in the process of unfurling, which was as big as he was. The faun was a blue smear as the tendril crashed outwards through the crumbling walls.

  Between the thrusting, thrashing shoots, the Princess Ashe darted on her swift dragonfly wings, a pale shape, dwarfed by the expanding vegetation.

  As Robin's creeper thrust upwards, rocketing him out of Peryl's chamber as the last of its crumbling walls and destroyed floor fell away into darkness, he looked down in time to see the Grimm’s limp body rolled into a great leaf, curling and growing around her unconscious form, bringing her along for the ride. Her books, scrolls and broken furniture tumbled down into the great dark void of the pyramid beneath them. Heaps of detritus, crashing down and bouncing off the latticework of criss-crossing walkways below. Robin glimpsed the bright golden mirror tumbling away, over and over, as it fell, flashing as it caught the light before falling into darkness and mist far below.

  The swarm was everywhere in the immense cavern of the pyramid's interior, hundreds of their yellow armoured bodies filling the pallid air. An angry wasp's nest that had just been kicked. They flitted around in panic as the power of the Earth Shard swelled, and the great, unstoppable plant expanded, sending out great green tentacles like some immense sea beast, thrashing in every direction. Its immense arms and branches wrapped around the yellow paths, covering the brittle maze of bridges, squeezing the walkways with questing vegetable strength until they began to shatter, one by one, under the relentless pressure. Robin's creation was tearing the Hive apart from within. Amidst the roar of growth and the musical explosion of walkway after walkway, it twisted and branched, spreading like wildfire, crisscrossing the monumental space with an ever growing net of green life and newborn vitality. Road after road fell to its tangled mass, bridge after bridge torn apart by weaving fingers. Everywhere, it knocked the swarm out of the air with whips of fury.

  Robin heard Woad whooping somewhere in the confusing maelstrom like a maniac. He held on for dear life. He was still Robin, he could feel his arms wrapped tightly around the tuber and his knees gripping it as it shot through the dark space, but he was also the vine. He could feel every questing root as though they were his own toes, thundering downwards, shooting into the deep mist at the bottom of the darkness, questing for ground, for soil. He could feel the countless climbers and ivy-covered creepers lashing against the outer walls, dressing them in a knotted skin of vegetation, piling up layer upon layer of tangled, living tissue, fibrous shoots and vital tuber, the weight and the insistence of his living creation straining and groaning against the strong outer walls. The power of the Tower of Earth filled this cloying place, flushing dizzying oxygen into its nauseating stale air, and through it all, Robin and his friends swooped and dived, riding the twisting plant like long green dragons, threading acrobatically through the fog.

  “Are you doing this?!” Henry’s voice came, bellowing across the space as his vine swept past Robin's own swiftly-moving perch, the two like funhouse rollercoasters thundering in the dark.

  Robin wasn’t entirely sure. He felt at one with it all, but not remotely in control. He didn’t think anyone could ever really be in control of something this. It was too primal, too fierce. The stuff of life itself, it grew, and expanded. It filled the great pyramid, and it pushed against the walls, yearning to be free, wanting the open air.

  All over the Hive, now more a green maze than an empty space, there came an endless chorus beneath the constant rumble of growth. The ceaseless musical tinkling as countless slender whips of greenery smashed the bars of the cells, freeing dryads everywhere. Cell after cell was broken, popping and shattering in the sea of churning forest.

  Soon, the air was filled with dryads, swooping free, furious at their imprisonment and, led by the Princess Ashe, fighting with the swarm. A great and furious buzzing was everywhere.

  The swarm were at a disadvantage. They were used to the darkness, the silence. This green and vibrant confusion was anathema to them. The dryads however, were in their element.

  Quite literally, Robin thought.

  The branch on which he rode appeared to have stopped moving. It had wedged firmly against the outer wall of the pyramid. Finding itself unable to go any further, it was now sending out further vines and shoots, covering the inner surface of the great wall in a thick carpet of tangled ivy. It was beginning to flower here and there, the wall of the pyramid no longer visible at all. The woody stem with Robin on, however, was still growing, thickening all along its length. In moments, it was wide enough to stand on, a natural horizontal bridge in the leafy maelstrom.

  Robin searched the great hissing and rustling forest, trying to make sense of what was going on. There were dryads everywhere, sweeping and diving between the giant leaves and through the enormous knots of vines. They soared with ease and precision like fighter planes, chasing desperate and disoriented swarm-guards, half hidden by the giant leaves still unfurling everywhere.

  After a moment he saw, to his relief, Karya, Woad and Henry, picking
their way toward him, jumping from root to shoot and clambering over leaves.

  “This is just like one of those jungle gyms!” Henry shouted. “Or, you know, those forest activity places, where you get to zipwire through the treetops. Except we don’t have any safety harnesses on, and there’s a billion foot drop to certain death everywhere.” He sounded full of adrenalin and more than a little hysterical.

  Karya on the other hand, seemed practically elated. Earth was her Tower and she was loving every minute of it. The destruction of the Hive, the ever moving nest of giant green blades. He saw her bracelet flash time and time again as she and the others moved towards him. She was directing pathways, making connections, bending the huge mass to her will to forge them a clear path.

  “Now this is the kind of showboating I can completely get on board with,” she yelled, as they finally made their way onto Robin's wide and barky bridge. They ran along it towards him. “Eris is still coming though,” she cried urgently. “I think I passed the Janus station chamber a moment ago. It was kind of hard to tell, as there were about eight thousand leaves slapping me in the face at the time, but I swear I saw the circle of stones and mist. Someone was coming through it, and I doubt very much it was your Father Christmas. We have to get out of here now.”

  “We’re still halfway up the pyramid," Robin said. “Nowhere near the ground. You can’t tear us through to the human world from here.”

  “We should bust out of here then!” Woad suggested.

  “The wall is too thick,” Robin replied. “I can feel it, through the vines. It’s bending, but our little new Eden isn’t strong enough yet.”

  From above them, sliding down a long tube of passing greenery as though it were a waterslide, Hawthorn appeared, landing at their feet and still carrying Ffoulkes. Robin noticed that the Fire Panthea appeared to have woken up from his faint, but he was still clinging to the wiry old Fae for dear life, staring around wild-eyed at the primal jungle.