by Demi Harper
Though a part of me still shouted that this whole thing had been a terrible, terrible idea, it was easier to listen to Melakor’s reasoning. It always was. He was a god, after all. Of course he knew best. And so I allowed myself to be comforted by the weight of his conviction; allowed it to envelop me like a thick blanket, protecting me from uncomfortable feelings and unwanted thoughts.
But even as I lay there on the altar, the stone cold against my back, something niggled at me.
I sat bolt upright. A flash of annoyance emanated from Melakor’s gem as it tumbled from my chest and into my lap. I had the sudden urge to fling it as far away from me as possible.
“Wait!” I looked over at the high priest’s body, blood still dripping slowly from the wound in his neck and pooling thickly on the ground underneath.
But speaking aloud seemed difficult all of a sudden, as though my throat were filled with treacle, so I asked Melakor silently: You said we needed blood for the ritual, but the priest is dead, and the ritual hasn’t begun. We don’t have a sacrifice.
Oh, but we do.
Icy fingers seized my heart. What?
Melakor’s voice was smug as he replied, The priest’s sacrifice gave me the push I needed to Ascend; to regain the final ability I require for our little ritual.
His smugness was making me want to punch him in the face. Then I remembered he didn’t have a face. Yet.
What ability? I asked, no longer even pretending to be devout. And why Rylviari?
The high priest was a worthy sacrifice; a font of knowledge and experience. The man was a precious trinket belonging to my ancient enemy, and one which I delighted in taking the opportunity to smash.
I made to ask him again about his new ‘ability’, but he interrupted me. Enough words. Let us proceed.
His heavy, oily presence in my mind intensified, but far from soothing me, I found it suffocating. Melakor’s next words were as final as the grave.
Kill him.
Shock jolted through me, though I realized that somewhere, deep down, I’d known all along that this was coming.
To my horror, I found I could no longer move; no longer speak, nor even breathe freely.
His voice slipped inside me like a necrotic eel. I knew you would be too cowardly to proceed with the ritual once you knew the truth of what it entailed. My new ability is called ‘Dominate.’ Do you like it?
I tried again to move, but I was trapped in my own body, locked in as surely as I’d been locked into Melakor’s vault all those months ago. I cursed the day I’d found him—Khazla was right all along, I thought bitterly—and prayed my disciples would realize what was going on in time to save me from the God Core’s arcane tyranny.
Kill him, he said again, and I knew they all heard him. This is the final stage of the ritual, the treacherous Core added smoothly, and around me, the cowled figures relaxed.
All but two of them.
When Draykon looked at me, uncertain, I widened my eyes—the only part of me I seemed able to control—in an attempt to communicate that something was very, very wrong. Instead, my horror turned to despair as that heavy blanket of Melakor’s presence slid up my spine and forced my neck to bend in a nod of affirmation.
Draykon nodded in response, his expression clearing. As his own spine straightened with conviction and he raised his hands, the dagger they clutched a coldly gleaming curve above me, any hope I’d held of being saved finally fled. All I could do was watch the knife descend.
Distantly, I saw Khazla lunge toward Draykon, and felt a strange pang of joy at her unexpected gesture, futile though it was. She was tackled and restrained by the other disciples before Draykon was even aware she’d moved, and so, that curved black-metal blade slid between my ribs with no resistance.
Cold. It was so cold. It was like being impaled with a stalagmite from the bottom of the deepest ice-lakes in the Netherdark. Straight through my heart the dagger plunged, and with it came Melakor.
If the blade had been like ice, the god was liquid flame, flowing gleefully into my chest and out through my arteries like molten steel. His presence burned me from the inside out, but not for long; for as Melakor insinuated his way into my body, I myself was pushed out. And though I struggled, I was pulled apart, fragment by fragment, and drawn inexorably into the cool facets of the purple Core.
Fifty-Five
The Only Way is Up
Corey
I fell for what felt like forever, burning, burning. My mind whirled as I tried to roll away from the agonizing displacement, but my body was unresponsive. Some sort of paralysis, perhaps? Where was I?
By the time I regained my wits enough to look around, vague memories started to return to me. A gem. An altar. A knife in the dark. Already they were receding, pushed back by what I knew to be more recent recollections. A wriggling eel. A tiny girl riding a badger. A fluffy owl sitting atop a large furry spider.
Then I heard the voice.
Like a light against the crushing darkness, it pushed through the fog, a tendril of hope reaching for me, reaching.
“Corey…”
I followed it, clinging to all it offered—light, memory, life—until the faintest hint of a spark appeared. Hope surged inside me. I focused on the spark, willing myself to be pulled toward it, anchoring myself to it with all my remaining strength lest the void around me suck everything away again.
“Corey…”
The voice was closer. The light was brighter. With one final pull, I left the draining void behind and emerged into the light.
A tiny winged figure flitted anxiously from side to side.
“Ket?”
“Corey!” Pink and white sparks rained down from the figure as it turned a somersault in the air, clapping with delight. “You’re back!”
Everything came flooding back: the Grotto, the forest, the Marsh Zolom, the mountain, the disastrous river crossing.
Something large moved behind Ket, and I breathed a sigh of relief when I recognized Ris’kin. My avatar was alive and well, though she was focused on some task and barely spared me a glance.
With Ket sending warmth and encouragement through our bond, I managed to muster my energy, focusing it through the remains of the ark beneath me and assuming my god’s-eye form. I rose into the air.
We were crowded upon a shelf of rock in some kind of flooded cave. Though ‘cave’ was a generous word; the wet, mossy ceiling was barely high enough for my avatar to stand upright. She was crouched over my gem, which I now saw had been placed amongst the sad remains of the ark. Ris’kin was attempting to reassemble it as best she could, but she was no carpenter, and the wooden box was damaged seemingly beyond repair. It was a miracle it still functioned.
Sitting nearby was Longshank. He’d finally managed to pry the fangfin’s jaws from his peg leg, but they’d bitten deep, and there was a wide crack running up the length of the wood. The hunter had unwound the bindings that attached the leg to his stump to better assess the damage. He was squinting, as though struggling to see, and I realized the area wasn’t as bright as I’d first believed it to be, lit only by the faint light of a single illumishroom—one of the small hand-held ones carried by the scouts.
There were no other gnomes in sight.
“We got separated,” I realized. “Does that mean… we failed?”
No; the sight of numbers winking in the corner of my vision left me weak with relief. The timer was still counting. That meant Exodus hadn’t failed.
Yet.
Time remaining for Exodus: 5 hours, 9 minutes
“That can’t be right.” Fear iced through me as I stared at the timer.
“You were out for a while,” said Ket. “But there’s still time!”
“Do you think the others are all right?”
“Most were safely on the far bank when the water hit,” she replied. “Coll knows the way to the summit. And if anyone can lead the gnomes the rest of the way, it’s Gneil.”
She was right. In particular, th
e incident with the dire badgers—where Gneil had somehow received the warning I’d intended for Ket, and prepared the tribe to defend against an attack—gave me hope that my high cleric would rise to the task again, this time to lead them home. Coll would have made sure their path was clear, and I trusted that he and Benin would remain with the tribe and help with the ascent.
Assuming the mage was still alive.
The last I’d seen of him, the pyromancer had lost control of his magic. I hoped he’d survived; I owed him more than a few strong words about his reckless actions during the river crossing. His initial refusal to enter the water had cost the life of one of my carpenters, and though his use of the portals had allowed Gneil and the rest to finally cross safely, Benin’s loss of control was what had put us in our present situation, and may ultimately have cost us the exodus.
He was a volatile ally for sure, though I had to admit he’d grown more useful—not to mention more personable—since he’d been hanging out with Bekkit. Speaking of whom…
“He got pulled underneath the water when your Sphere was carried away,” said Ket quietly when I asked about the sprite. “I think he used Terrestrial Body to escape.”
I hope he used it to escape, the uncertainty in her tone implied. Despite her lingering animosity toward her friend-turned-betrayer, she still couldn’t bring herself to wish him dead.
A quick check of my Augmentary map confirmed Bekkit was nowhere within my Sphere, which meant either he had managed to activate Terrestrial Body before drowning, or…
“You’re probably right. I’m sure he’s fine,” I said. “And at least the tribe has the badgers. And…”
And Binky, I’d been about to say. Until I caught sight of the row of boxes at the top of my Augmentary. Every one of them was grayed out; empty.
Binky had taken up just one Creation slot, and been able to somewhat resist the pull of my Sphere thanks to his near-complete transition to a fully terrestrial being. It was possible that he’d completed that transition without me realizing, which would explain the empty Creation slots. But my pantheon—the record of species I currently had in existence, up to a maximum of five different kinds—was empty as well.
I closed the Augmentary and then opened it again, but the slots remained empty. I felt bereft. For the first time ever since the day I’d gained the Creation ability, there was no familiar spider symbol gazing reassuringly back at me.
“He was on the verge of reaching terrestrial,” Ket said, though she sounded uncertain. “He’s probably fine. I’m sure.”
Or maybe he got dragged through the water by my Sphere and drowned.
The only person I could have asked about whether terrestrial creatures still showed in the pantheon was Bekkit, and he was gone too, perhaps the same way as Binky.
I tried to focus on the positives, though they were few and far between. “At least we’ve still got Ris’kin. And Longshank,” I added as an afterthought.
The hunter had tossed the wooden leg to one side. Drawing a knife from his boot, he turned his attention upon the dead fangfin instead. From the viciousness with which he began to butcher the sharp-toothed fish, I deduced that the prognosis for the limb it had damaged was probably not good.
He stabbed his blade into the fish’s flank, but grunted when it met resistance. When he pulled his knife back out, impaled on the pointed tip was a seed. It was winged like a sycamore, making it look vaguely like a fish’s tail. Its wrinkled surface was matte-black, though hints of red glistened in the grooves like blood caught in the fuller of a sword.
The hunter plucked it from the blade, turning it over and over between his fingers. Frowning, he sheathed his knife and then reached into one of his many pockets with his free hand. After some rummaging, he found what he was looking for.
It was another seed. This one was roughly rounded in shape; it looked like a walnut, and was just as wrinkled, though its surface was pinkish-white rather than brown. I saw my avatar glance over curiously. Touching minds with her, I gleaned that she recognized the object as having been cut from the mole-rat queen we’d fought, months ago now.
Longshank held it out in his palm, comparing it with the fangfin “seed” in his other hand.
I activated Insight. Nothing happened. No matter how hard I stared at the seeds, the Augmentary remained a blank.
I recalled the scouts had harvested a similar item from the dire badger queen in the forest. I’d caught a glimpse of it before it was handed to the botanists. It had been of a similar wrinkled texture; silver-white in color with black grooves, it had been a perfect match of the fur of the creature from which it had been taken. A creature which had also been a “dire queen”.
Since Insight only worked on living things, there was no way to be sure, but I was willing to bet the butchered fangfin—which was larger than the others that had attacked us—was also indeed a queen.
“But what does it all mean?” asked Ket when I told her.
I didn’t know. I felt there was a connection here, but I was missing some vital component that would help me put everything together. It didn’t help that my mind was still reeling from the flashbacks to my past. After so long with barely a hint of recollection of my former life, to have experienced so much of it, so vividly, was like drowning in memory, and I still hadn’t properly caught my breath.
“Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Just a bit disoriented,” I lied.
The words tasted sour. Withholding the truth from Ket—my only companion for so long—felt wrong, but I’d never quite been able to shake the memory of her reaction upon first learning I’d been a dark elf. Given that these new memories confirmed what I’d long suspected—that I most certainly had not been a shining beacon of benevolence among my otherwise maligned race—I decided to hold on to them for the time being. I’d process them later.
Besides, I had a task to complete before I could afford the luxury of wallowing in my past.
“I’m going to try something,” I told Ket.
Activating Double Sight took me a moment longer than usual. My concentration was still somewhat scattered, and it was hard to focus, but soon I was looking out through Ris’kin’s eye. Her blind right side felt even emptier without the presence of Sir Fura; I recalled seeing the squirrel safe on the bank and hoped it had remained that way. My avatar was saddened by his absence.
Ris’kin felt significantly weaker than usual—no doubt a consequence of fighting for her life under a crushing weight of water—but that didn’t make me revel any less in the sensation of having access to working limbs and all five senses.
I reached down and closed black-furred fingers around my gem. I braced myself, then lifted the gem from the ark.
Nothing happened.
Blackness did not descend as I expected. It seemed that so long as I was using Double Sight when my gem was removed from its anchor—in this case, the holy box—my consciousness would remain tethered to my avatar rather than being sucked away into the void.
It had its limitations—I could no longer slip back into my god’s-eye form—but as a temporary solution, it was good enough. A quick test reassured me that I remained within Ris’kin even when she was no longer in physical contact with the gem. I relaxed a little and finally took proper stock of our surroundings.
With Ris’kin’s darkvision, the illumishroom’s faint light made the area beyond its greenish aurora even darker. There was no sound beyond the running current and the gnome’s breathing, both echoing in the narrow confines in counter-rhythm to the beat of Ris’kin’s own heart. The weight of the mountain pressed on the ceiling above us, and I felt the brief touch of an alien sensation: claustrophobia. I found myself longing for fresh air and clear sky, for sunshine and rain and the scents of grass and earth. I couldn’t tell how much of it was Ris’kin’s and how much was mine. Clearly the past few weeks spent out in the open had affected me more than I’d thought.
Well, it’s a good thing we’re heading back up to th
e summit anyway. One way or another.
Before us lay two options. The first was to ascend the mountain from within via a rough passage Ket had discovered in the corner of the stone ceiling. We had no idea where it led, if anywhere—I attempted to scout it via god’s-eye, but the vertical shaft continued to climb beyond the upper limits of my Sphere. The handholds carved into its sides looked precarious at best.
Our second option was to risk the river again and then climb the mountain from the outside. But the river flowed west and curved around the mountain. That meant we’d been carried around to the same side Ris’kin and I had scouted previously—the side where we’d encountered the mountain bear.
The Augmentary had said the bears were known for using their keen sense of smell to track prey for miles. If it caught even the slightest whiff of squirrel-fox…
I tried to picture us managing the same daring escape as before, except this time with Longshank and my gem. No, the swim and the subsequent climb were both too risky. Besides, the journey had taken Ris’kin almost five hours. We no longer had that kind of time. Our only hope was to follow this passage up through the inside of the mountain and pray it brought us to the summit before the timer ran out.
We’d also have to pray Gneil and the others had made it up there as well. From what Bekkit had said, the ritual for officially concluding the exodus had to be conducted by my high cleric. Since the Augmentary offered no options for me to end it at the moment, I had to assume that was true.
“That’s a lot of ‘ifs’,” whispered Ket when I ran through our options. She seemed distracted again, and was gazing up through the hole as if she could see all the way up to the top if she looked hard enough. “I think you’re right though. This is our only chance.”
She started to drift up toward the hole.
I peered up into the darkness, considering the climb. Ris’kin could definitely manage it, though carrying my gem would make things a little trickier than usual. However, Longshank would definitely struggle somewhat. Perhaps if the hunter hung on to my avatar’s back, she could probably get us both up there, though carrying the gem might mean making two journeys.
