Into the Dark

by M J W Harrington

  “Gods above Dav, a little warning!” she yelped, and The Architect turned around with an irritated expression on his little face.

  “Do you mind? I’m doing some important data analysis here!” he snapped, before his eyes locked on Clara and he let out a small gasp of his own. “I mean, hello there dangerous one, I apologise for my rudeness, please do not kill me?” I sniggered to myself, he’d clearly taken my joke earlier to heart.

  “Sorry, what?” Clara just stared at the small man and looked confused. Then I realised the issue, unlike me she couldn’t speak fluent… whatever it was I was speaking (I know it, but saying its name is still hard). “Is that Jeff?”

  “Uh no. This is The Architect - capital A, capital The, I think he was in charge here at one point until they overthrew him and locked him in stasis, long story, lots of revelations about how his people have been dead for tens of thousands of years.” I caught Clara up quickly as The Architect cocked his head and listened to us babble in the trade tongue.

  “That must have been hard for him,” Clara sympathised, “I’m having enough trouble with my squad, with Bron, let alone-”

  She was interrupted as abruptly all the lights in the room snapped off, plunging us into darkness. “What’s going on?” she immediately asked instead.

  The Architect slapped at his panels in frustration. “We appear to have lost power, but that’s impossible, the first thing I did when I got here was hook up a generator relic and ensure it charged backup power sources, even if that failed - which is impossible - we should have hours of power left. Unless-” He froze for a second. “When you came here, did you go exploring anywhere?” He asked in a quiet voice.

  “We may have visited one of the storage facilities.” I replied softly.

  “And did you find anything interesting in there?” he asked in a voice with an edge so sharp I felt like my ears would be cut off just hearing it.

  “A power source.” I’d immediately followed his train of thought, and I didn’t like where it was going.

  “And where is that power source now?” The Architect asked, everyone in the room fully aware of the answer.

  “In her bag.” I said, with a defeated note of finality.

  -Oh dear.- rumbled my inner beast amusedly.

  We immediately sprang into motion, The Architect fumbling his way across the room. I ran over to Clara and pointed her in the direction of the door, putting my light maker in her hand.

  “We have to go, now!” I whispered hoarsely in her ear, and she nodded, holding the light away from me, which I appreciated as she ran off to collect her gear.

  “The other host will not remain at bay for long with the power down, and as you quite succinctly put it, there’s nobody out there to help us. We must be gone. Grab my bag, I can’t see it.” The Architect gestured off into the room. I’d been studying it while sitting in my cage for a while, the lavishly appointed interior was filled with all manner of clutter, presumably gathered from the rest of the facility. I’d not seen a bag, but I started moving various piles of assorted paraphernalia out of the way searching for it. Eventually I found it, a small-handled bag made of some strange leathery material that my memories dimly told me was made from some chemical mixture that I really didn’t care about on account of the screaming roar of the beast that could be dimly heard through the complex.

  After The Architect had found himself a light from his bag and scooped up a number of strange implements even my fragments of memories couldn’t identify, we ran into the other room to find Clara, weapon drawn and facing the only door out of the long, narrow hallway we found ourselves in, her light illuminating the frame as it shook and cracked from the booming impact of something (although no prizes for guessing what) smashing into it from the other side.

  -Let it in, embrace it, feast upon it, make us whole.- The voice inside began to rant, but I squashed it on account of really not wanting to die. I was getting sick of it, first it wanted me to escape, then it wanted me to fight; if it was going to be driving me insane it could at least be consistent.

  “This way!” called the Architect, pushing at a seemingly smooth section of wall. As he did so, it swung smoothly and silently open to reveal a passage. The door finally shattered, allowing the creature through to see us retreating. We ran, the narrow halls giving us an edge as the beast struggled to squeeze through and use its many disturbing limbs to propel itself along the smooth hallways. We turned corner after corner, and many times it felt like we’d doubled back on ourselves, but The Architect ran tirelessly, as did I. I don’t know how long we ran, it felt like either a few seconds of an eternity, but even Clara began to flag. I helped her along as best I could and called out to our diminuitive guide as we ran, struggling to make myself heard as the agonising roar of the beast echoed from not far behind us.

  “We can’t keep this up much longer!” I yelled.

  “Keep running, we’re nearly there!” came the reply. I didn’t wait for further explanation, I just grabbed Clara and hauled her along, enduring the pain of being near her light in favour of just gaining enough speed to keep up. How was someone with such tiny legs so damn fast anyway? Abruptly The Architect stopped, slapping the stone to reveal a door I’d not even noticed previously - how many times had I missed out on rooms like this as I’d delved? They apparently didn’t even need power to function, given the fact we still had no light. Not the time for theorising or regret however, so we ran into the room after him. We found ourselves in a surprisingly large chamber, big enough that the lights of my companions barely reached the walls.

  “The power source! Do you have it?” The Architect yelled at Clara. With a start we realised he was speaking the trade tongue. The old guy was a quick study. After a moment of shock, Clara swung her pack around and plucked out the power source she’d removed previously and threw it at The Architect. Absolute fear and panic filled his eyes as the small cylinder tumbled through the air towards him and he scrabbled to catch it, diving towards the ground after missing it on the first try.

  “YOURFEMALESAREINSANEHOWDOYOUSURVIVEASASPECIES” he screamed in a semi-incoherent babble as Clara winced. We all ran across the room as far from the door as possible. As we ran it became clear - there were no other doors out of this room, but that wasn’t uncommon throughout our flight, I assumed that once he calmed down (the little man was still ranting) The Architect would pop open another door. I was wrong.

  As we reached the far side of the room, I saw what the Architect was running for, a set of panels not dissimilar to those in his quarters, but also accompanied by a large pedestal with what looked like knobs and buttons set into the top. As we reached it, The Architect stopped and the now familiar roar filled the room as the beast joined us. We locked eyes in the darkness and I felt a connection between us, laden with hatred. I ached to draw my weapon and rush the thing, and my inner darkness agreed wholeheartedly, to the point where I even took a step towards it. Fortunately, I also have an even stronger self-preservation instinct, so I quickly took two back again. The Architect had inserted the power source in a compartment and was tinkering and tapping at the panels and buttons frantically as our hunter stalked across the room towards us. Clara stood frozen, the same primordial fear that had struck us before rooting her to the spot as she got a good look at the beast. It was one thing to be afraid and running, it was another to behold the full mind-shattering horror that was the beast. It ignored the pain of our light as I feared, the light makers not proving strong enough to hold it at bay. I grabbed at Clara’s pack and dug out another light orb, but it didn’t make much difference. The pain filled me with increasing intensity and I let out a yelp of pain, but the creature simply growled louder and stalked ever closer towards us. Soon it was only a short distance away, and it suddenly dashed forwards with a roar. The Architect let out a cry of success mixed with abject terror and a dome of bright green light appeared around the creature. It roared with agony as the light burned into it.

  “Containme
nt field, modified to direct light inwards,” he gasped, finally out of breath. “Like yours, but brighter.” I realised he was right, and the only discomfort I was feeling was from the light orb from Clara’s pack, which sizzled my flesh as I reached to shut it off, and backed away from the others to slump in the blessed dark away from the pain.

  “Will it die?” Clara shouted, as the screeching, screaming roars of the beast echoed all around us, causing us all to clutch at our ears.

  “Unlikely,” The Architect replied loudly, still speaking our language. “But it should buy us some time.” I pulled myself together and stood up, still as much out of their light as I could be.

  “Can we please leave now?” I yelled over to them, and they nodded, jogging out of the room, not as fast as before, they were feeling the burn even if my body remained strangely energised from the burning light, but the threat of death is a strong motivator. As we ran, the cacophony behind us steadily grew quiet, and we burst through an otherwise unassuming door directly into the street, somehow a short distance away from the plaza we first entered by. To my immense relief, the everpresent viridescent glow was in its ‘night’ cycle, instead of burning my skin.

  “What? How-” I began to ask, as my companions bent over breathlessly, finally succumbing to the run, Clara eventually just giving up and sliding down against the wall next to the door.

  “Tunnels… relics…” The Architect waved a hand dismissively, not looking up until he caught his breath, once again surprisingly quickly for a little guy, “you never know when you’re going to have to evacuate the relic testing area in a hurry.” I shrugged, anything that got us away from the beast got my approval.

  “So where to next?” I asked. Clara piped up from her slump on the ground, where she’d dug out one of the water producing rods and was dousing herself liberally.

  “We came in from a hole in the cavern wall, somewhere west of the tower” she gestured up and down the street, “long walk though, and I’m not sure where.” I nodded, thoughtfully.

  “I came in through what looked like the main entrance to the city, up there.” I pointed up, in the distance I could just about make out the plateau plaza, but nobody followed my gesture. “Oh, right. The darkness thing.” Clara nodded tiredly, but didn’t respond. “It’s way up on the rim of the cavern, a long way from here. I think we should look for your entrance, Clara - it’s much closer and I want to get out of here.”

  “Agreed.” The Architect nodded and turned to Clara, “Do you recall what was around you when you entered the city?”

  “A fountain, a small archway leading to what I think was a marketplace. The floor had pictures of fruit on it.” The Architect stood, thinking about her words for a moment before clicking his freakishly long bony fingers.

  “I know the place! Let us go.” He strode off, covering far more ground than should be possible for someone with such tiny legs. I’d have to ask him about that, but shook my head and set off in pursuit. A few seconds later I stopped, Clara hadn’t moved.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, dashing back to her, “We need to move, he won’t stay in there forever and I’d rather leave before the lights come back on.”

  Clara looked up at me, her eyes tired and haunted. “Right. Sorry.” she pushed herself up the wall and I pulled easily her to her feet. She looked down at my hand with a strange look in her eye, looking at the skin cracking and blackening in the light and I yanked it back away from her. Right, of course. I was a monster now. Mustn’t forget that. I turned away from her, she called my name but I ignored it and ran ahead, trying to catch up with The Architect and outrun the pity in her gaze.

  We moved rapidly through the city, The Architect guiding us easily, darting through sidestreets and alleys until we came across a large courtyard, not dissimilar to the one I found Clara and her company in, but this time with an intricate mosaic covering the floor, just as she’d described. It was breathtaking, I couldn’t even identify any of the fruit, some of them bearing passing resemblance to others I’d seen, but clearly not your typical apples. I shook my head as a vision from my new memories suddenly snapped into focus, showing me a bustling marketplace, full of both builders and their tall friends. I’d ask the Architect about them later, there was plenty of time for research later. Snapping back to reality I called back to Clara, just now reaching us.

  “Is this the place?” I asked her, moving aside away from the light as she took in our surroundings.

  “Yes, I think so,” she replied, “the breach should be that way”. She pointed off through an arch on the far side of the courtyard, and we made our way across and through a large yet surprisingly delicate archway on the far side. We moved at a steady trot, not quite running, but not a run. Clara and I both knew we weren’t out of the caves yet, and we’d need whatever dregs of energy we could muster to get through the untamed darkness alive.

  It didn’t take us long to find the collapse that had given Clara and her band their entrance, it seemed at some point in the city’s history, a series of columns had collapsed, crashing a building into the cavern wall and breaking through into the tunnel beyond. The everpresent painful light of the devices held by my companions lit a short distance beyond the collapse revealed rough stone and stalagmites, a far cry from the curiously smooth and well-preserved stone of the buildings. The Architect took one last look back at his city and sighed, and Clara laid a hand on his shoulder. He jumped momentarily, but relaxed when he confirmed that she wasn’t going to kill him. Just then our heads all snapped back as we made out an all too familiar screaming roar echoing through the buildings, far in the distance but still loud enough to be heard. By an unspoken agreement the time for hesitation and sentimentality had long passed, if it had ever existed, and we jogged towards the collapse.

  I quickly moved into the tunnel ahead of my light-bearing new friends to take a look around. The rough stone was almost worryingly boring, and with my new sight, I could see more of the features of the immense cave network we typically just called ‘the dark’ than I had ever before. I momentarily considered whether I actually wanted to see more, as nothing I’d ever found down there outside of a ruin was anything I’d consider good or wholesome, but eventually I landed on the side of preferring to see whatever killed us coming. Coming up behind me, Clara began moving off to our left. I frowned, the tunnel sloped up to the right, which normally was a good bet that eventually you’d find an exit, but she’d been through that way before so what did I know?

  Interlude 1: The Beast

  Pain. Light. The sound of flesh, the beating of feet. The bond. The creature known only as the beast snarled out of some of its mouths as others ate at the stone itself, breaking their teeth, bleeding, reforming, digging, driving its body down, ever down, away from the pain of the light. Worse than the day cycle, the prey and the brother had caged it in the light. The beast hated the light, hated the prey, hated the brother. It burned, it screamed. They ran. It dug. The burning claimed flesh that immediately began to regenerate, constantly burning, constantly dying and being reborn. Somewhere deep within a small voice asked if they could finally stop, finally die, but the darkness enveloped everything, even while the light drove it away. Time passed, but in the millennia of pain and light, time had long lost meaning. The pain though, the pain had not. No matter how many times the beast attempted to endure the day cycle, the light burned too much all the same. Sometimes prey wandered in, and the beast found moments of joy and satisfaction in pulling their flesh apart, feeding on their fear and torment, but it was never enough. Nor could the beast leave, pulled inexorably back to its other half.

  The madness came, or perhaps it had never left, the prey came, but hid away, behind the light, behind the day, never stopping to be consumed. Then more prey, delicious, weak. Then the brother came, met the prey. The prey lived, the brother lived, the brother claimed its other half and then the brother ran. Did it not feel the call to become whole? To consume as it was consumed? Did it claim the prey for it
s own? How could the brother not share, not become whole? The beast’s many maws roared with frustration and continued digging as the floor slowly but steadily gave way to it. The more the beast dug, the less the light burned. The brother was further away now, the pain immeasurable. It would see. It would feel. Time had no meaning. Only the hunger and the darkness mattered. Eventually the brother would see. It continued to dig, inch by inch..

  Chapter 8

  It turns out, I know a decent amount about the dark. A solid hour of walking later after our exodus, Clara stopped in a small cavern and let out a curse.

  “Pardon me, but this appears to be the same place we just left. Are you positive you know our route?” The Architect piped up, and I winced. Bad idea. Clara whirled on him and he took a step back, but she unclenched her fists and took a deep breath when she saw his confused, panicked state. I doubt I would’ve been so lucky, but I guess the guy got a free pass on tact for being the only remaining survivor of a completely foreign species. Let’s just call it what it is, Clara’s clearly just blatantly racist towards horribly cursed humans.

  “I thought I did, but…” Clara trailed off helplessly, gesturing at the cave. It was cosy in its own way, a small pool trickled out of the rock to one side, which inspired the growth of some unappetising-looking fungus, and stalactite met stalagmite in a few places, creating an almost artificial feeling of being in a small hall fancy lobby with pillars. It was nothing like the smooth perfection of the builders obviously, but still deceptively constructed-feeling, despite its natural formation. I piped up, seeing her distress, she may be a racist but I felt bad for her, getting lost in the dark is as easy as breathing. Easier, if you get lost in the wrong place.