A tone, a long note obviously made by something artificial, pulses through the room, leaving silence behind it. All eye turn toward the chalked outline of a wide door, almost like a barn’s, etched on the pink stone at the end of the room. In the space left by the long note, the lights flickering on the chandelier dull, turning a shade of yellow that seems to make everything in the room the same color.
“Get up.” It is hard to stop myself from yelling the words, not that I need to, everyone is moving quickly. Armor, left loose, is looked to, strapped tight in teams in short order, weapons are grabbed and slung over shoulders or tied to hips. Lucky for me, it only take a moment of concentrated effort to have my armor appear in place over my most-worn but still complete set of clothes. I manage to have the Lamplighter’s Charge fall into its new favored spot on my back, a braid of pale string landing on my shoulder and wrapping around my waist to hold it on, but my newest weapon, the Staff of Luminous Insight, clatters to the stone floor. A discord of my home-made talismans clatter as they appear around my neck, thoroughly tangled.
As I snatch my staff from the floor, another long, harsh note passes through the room, rattling the dishware and glass table. The light from the chandelier turns again, becoming an orange so intense that even Clarice’s black hair looks stained with the color.
“How many more colors do you imagine this might take?” Jor’Mari asks, leaning against the wall near the soon-to-be door, turning a ring about his finger idly, non-anxious prick.
“Not too many,” I say, striding to the door. Behind me, Jess and Samielle are speaking in low tones. Jasper stands near Jor’Mari, frowning around, eyes darting between the lights overhead and the wall. Clarice stands near me, perfectly poised except for a thumb that runs madly over a button on her cuff.
“Which way?” she asks, though we both know that she knows the answer.
“To the right,” I say. I let go a long breath, almost bouncing on the balls of my feet as I wait. When the sound shakes the room once again, it feels almost like the world slows down as it fades ever so slowly. The world changes to red. Jor’Mari kicks himself off the wall, he is more effected than anyone by the new color, a man made of red from his hair to his pupils. His form begins to shift, become lean and athletic, horns pushing up from his forehead.
A loud crack just in front of my face makes me flinch. Everything inside the outline on the wall vanishes all of a sudden, leaving haunting red light spilling out into a dark room. A massive, barren round stands in front of me. Three wedges of stone, more than twenty strides across at the width, descended at a slant from the wall. Five spots of harsh red light beam toward the open center of the room cutting the vague shadows. High, high overhead, a pure white light shines over a circular platform of gray stone that eclipses it.
“Go.” Somewhere between a yell and a whisper.
We sprint into the room, hugging the wall as we run to the right. To our luck, the ramps rise into the air in such a way that we can simply run straight onto the nearest one without having to crawl around to the front. Unluckily, a hesitant group of people are between us and it. A man, one of the huge ones wearing silk robes, steps from the red light, spectacled eyes peering about, one hand held up to halt anyone from following him out just yet.
Jor’Mari, just ahead of me in our group, hits him like a bolt of lightning. His fist slams into the man’s stomach with a wet thump that lifts him partway off his feet, leaving him falling to his knees and crumpling to the floor. A violent wave of purple light pools off of Jor’Mari, striking into and through the open door shedding red light. Some woman inside the room shrieks so loud it echoes through the chamber. I know he is just scaring that group a little, literally, that is what his soul presence does apparently. We cannot afford to pull any punches here at the final stretch.
I slap Jor’Mari on the back as I pass and reach the base of the ramp leading upward before anyone on another team even understands what is going on. I unsling Lamplighter’s Charge, grabbing it in my right hand, while I hold my newest weapon in my left, power pooling in the ends of each. Clarice is the first to make it past me, followed closely by Jess. Each are overtaken in less than a second by Jor’Mari as he sprints up the ramp, Samielle taking a more direct route through the air. The moment Jasper is past, cheeks puffing, hands chopping the air, I begin.
Both staves fall to the ground at the edge of the ramp. Without thought for conservation, plumes of orange and white flame sprout from the heads of the weapons, washing over the stone like a liquid as I backpedal up the slope, lingering and churning on the barren stone. It is all I can do to not trip over my own feet as I run backward up the slope for fifty full paces, lavishing the ramp with a carpet of boiling fire all the way. It won’t do to have people following us up the slope.
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Names, some familiar but most not, begin to pepper the gloom, labels standing around on the ground floor, hesitantly moving from the red rooms out into the central chamber. I see Macille’s name among them, but I can’t spare any time. We race for the top; I will see him up there.
Less than a minute has passed and already people are moving in groups toward the ramps, no one here is so slow on the pickup as to not recognize the nature of the challenge. The groups left need to squabble over the remaining two, and already blazes of light and the clash of arms echo in the dim light. Hopefully we can keep our lead all the way up.
I turn away from my fire, sprinting up the incline toward where my group races ahead. A body lying on the slope appears out of the dark, sending a shudder of fear down my spine that turns to confusion as I notice its clearly non-person shaped appearance. Monsters waiting for us on the ramps, that had not been in the information I received on this final challenge. I tap the body with the head of my old staff as I run past, and it erupts in a pink mist that chases after me. No time to slow.
They are just ahead. As I finally make to catch up, a cloud of darkness explodes on the slope, myriad stars slowly twinkling into being throughout. My shoulder knocks into someone, Jasper judging by the squawk of surprise, and I feel the head of my newer staff knock into a boney knee. A light in the shape of a short blade flashes through the dark, cutting ribbons out of the odd starscape, and a moment later the world begins to filter back to normal.
Clarice stands on the ramp, bent and pulling Jess back to her feet, the corpse of a monster made of wriggling green fingers dead at her feet. Our eyes meet for a moment, and she nods further up the ramp. “He continued ahead, said that we could handle this.”
“It appears he was right,” I say, squeezing Jasper’s arm as I step around him. Impatience burns in me, and I gather myself to run ahead.
A grunt stops me after only two strides. Samielle collides with the side of the ramp, a slight string of smoke snaking up from his back as he scrambled with fingers and nail to grab ahold of the side. I beat Jess to him, clamping my arm around his wrist; gods, the man is like an anvil. I strain, legs burning, back burning, and Samielle only makes it harder by uselessly scratching at the stone, twisting this way and that. He comes up an inch, just one, and grunts as the stone digs into his over-muscled stomach. I’m pulling him up.
That is when I notice that Jess has me around the waist and is hauling backward, the woman almost lifting me from my own feet with her effort. Samielle comes sliding across the stone, twisting his wrist out of my hand and patting at the seat of his pants, smothering the burgeoning fire. Jess nimbly turns me to the side, and sets me down, moving to kneel over him.
“Some damned thing hit me,” Samielle says, trying to stand, but finding his legs too wobbly. “Was trying to see what the top looked like and then something jumped up and hit me in the ass.”
“Are you alright?” Jess asks.
“Think so, just tingly is all.” I can see the effort on his face as he plants a boot, but he needs to lean on Jess in order to put any weight on it. “Can’t really feel my legs.”
Jess looks at me. “Is his spine alright?” she asks.
“What?” Samielle, sudden worry in his voice.
I move around, finding nothing at all wrong with the big man’s back, but there is a hole burnt into his trousers, exposing a red spot on his ass. “Looks like something hit him.”
“That’s what I said isn’t it?”
Close to the side again, I take a tentative look over. The drop is less than I feared it would be, maybe only thirty feet. I’ve had worse. What does catch me up is the sight of numerous names moving in the gloom of the room, dozens racing in spirals against the far walls.
“We need to move,” I say.
“Go ahead,” Samielle says, gesturing ahead. “Don’t let me slow you down.”
“Right,” I say, turning to sprint up the ramp. “Follow as fast as you can,” I call back over my shoulder.
Clarice is already running before I reach her, and I can hear Jasper’s labored breathing behind, falling further and further behind actually. I want to race at my top speed, burn my way up the ramp to catch Jor’Mari as quickly as possible, but leaving Clarice behind, making my entire team a spaced out line along this twisting ramp, is likely a very bad idea.
A good measure up and I spy a change in the structure of the ramp. A line of stone walkway, a bridge, juts off from the side of the ramp, shooting out over open air to join with the ramp ahead of us. The information we received said nothing about the ramps being connected to one another. We pass a corpse, something like a burly cat with its head missing, as we run up the spiral. I barely have the presence of mind to tap it with my staff as we pass.
A bridge comes out of the gloom from behind us, becoming an easy turn and horizontal platform that lets out onto our own ramp from the one behind. I look out, trying to see anyone through the stone on the ramp behind us, not even certain if Galea might be capable of doing that sort of thing. More names continue to race up through the chamber, dashing, clumping together at times and breaking apart. I don’t stop to read, all my concentration on putting one foot in front of the other.