“Really Syndra? Spying on the crew? Monitoring their mental states? Can you imagine the disaster that would be if they found out? What were you thinking!?” the delvemaster fumed.
Arrick Torval paced angrily around the command wagon, almost smouldering. His lover sat impassively on her stool, legs crossed and dark robes immaculate. The only part of her face that expressed her disdain was her sharp blue eyes, glaring out at the man like razors. The chronicler sipped slowly at her tea before retorting.
“I was thinking that maybe we should have some warning of the mutiny that is almost certainly brewing in our ranks, to start. Secondly, seeing as you stubbornly refuse to share the purpose of our expedition, I thought it wise to ensure other means of motivation. If you had just told them all outright, we wouldn’t be in this mess,” she snapped.
Arrick stopped his pacing with his back turned to his lover.
“If they find out that we’ve had a psion rooting around in their heads…” he muttered.
The chronicler tsked.
“And how, exactly do you think they would find out?”
Arrick threw up his hands in exasperation, still facing away from her.
“I don’t know! But you can’t tell me the outcome would be good!”
Syndra Calisto set her teacup back down with a quiet clink and a low sigh. The chronicler made her way over to her lover, her partner, and wrapped her arms around his chest.
“You shouldn’t have kept the truth from them. From a purely pragmatic perspective, telling them is the better move. Instead, you’ve divided the officers and forced the crew into the threat of annihilation for what seems to be nothing other than your greed. I know you’re looking out for them, but think of how it must appear to them,” she murmured into his back, drawing her hands in circles over his pectorals.
The delvemaster, usually so stoic and coolheaded, broke. His shoulders hunched forward, and his head drooped.
“It would break them,” he croaked.
Syndra nodded her head against his back.
“It would. The beastkin would have a crisis of faith, the greener recruits would falter. Some of the more mercenary elements would get ideas that we’d have to quash.”
She paused, allowing his mind to run over the possibilities.
“But it would unite them. Give them purpose. Drive. We carry the burden of civilization’s downfall on our shoulders. Some of us will break. Inevitably. But more will rise to the challenge. You just have to give them a chance to.”
The delvemaster’s body shook with a repressed sob. Syndra maneuvered him so that he was facing her and pulled his head down into the crook of her neck. Her hands swept in soothing patterns up and down his back.
They stood like that for a while, silent tears trickling down her neck and soaking into the fabric of Syndra’s robes.
Finally, they separated.
Arrick took a deep breath and righted himself, rekindling the fire in his eyes.
The two sat across from each other at the map table, as they had done for the many years they had worked together before their love had bloomed.
Syndra poured them both tea.
“You’ve trusted them—us— this far. Some of them for years. They deserve to know what they’re fighting for. What they’re dying for,” she said.
Arrick nodded, pulling his cup to himself and staring down into it. As if it held the answers to his fears. Syndra let him ponder, content that she’d made her point. Her lover took out his delvemaster’s log, penning out careful lines of immaculate script into the book.
Her work. Her insistence that his records be legible and concise. Useful for a future generation of delvers and thinkers.
Arrick snapped the book shut and slid it back into its place. He looked at her with conviction in his hazel orbs.
“We reach the fork in the tunnel in a day. I think given the events of the past few weeks, that we should take our chances with the Chasm. The Ways are only going to get more…populous,” he said.
Syndra inclined her head slowly but otherwise remained silent.
“We can convene with the officers, and I’ll tell them. Then we can announce it to the crew. I’ll have Feyan and Osra put up walls for us. It’ll allow us to talk freely.”
Syndra interjected.
“We should consider carefully how to frame the revelation. Otherwise, good intentions might backfire on us.”
Arrick nodded.
“You’re right. I was thinking…”
The two stayed up later than they probably should have, discussing the potential repercussions of what they were about to do.
Either way, it had been decided. Come the morrow, the expedition would have a singular goal, and either unite to face it, or crumble in the face of it.
----------------------------------------
Out of the many things going through Talia’s mind, one stuck out: the Chasm of the Lost deserved its name. It was, for all intents and purposes, a larger, deadlier sibling to the Maw. The wound in the Under was large and wide enough that she couldn’t see the far end, the bottom, or even the other side. It was like walking on the edge of a depthless abyss, with a wall on one side and a gaping emptiness on the other. If Calisto was to be believed, the pit had once been the site of Karzinkol.
If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
Talia wasn’t sure if the pit that had swallowed the city up even deserved to be called a ruin. Of Karzinkol, nothing remained.
Apparently, the Chasm had a reputation. When Torval had announced the detour, the crew had almost unanimously balked. Their trek through the Ways thus far had been nerve-wracking to be sure, and the fear had only ratcheted up a notch once the signs and sounds of beasts had appeared.
Piles of carrion swarmed with insects.
Deep gouges carved with claws into rock.
The rumble of wyrms tunnelling through stone.
The echoes of deep dwellers fighting and dying behind them.
Not to mention the few fights they’d had since the encounter with the mirage lynxes.
It all paled in comparison to the tumult caused by the mere thought of going through the Chasm. Talia had slammed her senselocks shut as the collected delvers recoiled in concert. They had claimed the pit was cursed, that it was a gate into the darkest hells. That none of them would return alive, that it would take their souls, and a host of other unpleasant things.
Talia had been sure that mutiny was budding right before her eyes.
Then Torval had dropped the second shoe on them and told them that Karzgorad was dying. That the Chasm was their only viable option to save it.
The silence had been abrupt and all-consuming. For a lonely instant, the crew had slipped into catatonia. Stupefied, to a one.
Before the crowd could regain their wits, the delvemaster had seized the moment, asking them all if they understood why they had to brave the Migration, the Chasm, and any challenges thereafter. Not for glory or greed, but for duty; to save their city, their homes, and their families, the expedition would have to overcome the odds. A trek through the Chasm of the Lost was but the first step, one that, united, they would overcome.
To Talia’s amazement, Torval’s rhetoric had worked. The crew had come out of their shock afraid, yes, but determined. The addition of true purpose to their mission had swayed those lost in dejection and fatalism back to vitality, or at least a semblance of it.
To be sure, there was much to discuss. The beastkin especially had seemed hesitant in their resolve. Talia didn’t know much about the spirituality of the insular race, but given Darkclaw’s…negative reaction to the news, she was sure that once the burst of motivation from Torval’s well-crafted speech wore off, there would be issues to deal with.
The young psion kept a careful eye on her mindsense, wary of any delver sinking too close to despair.
Whatever the result, the expedition now pushed through the wide, rocky ledges of the Chasm, and silence had fallen once more over the Deep.
A clicker call from wagon one suddenly went out, signalling the crew to either get inside the wagons or put on their gas masks.
They’d encountered the first hazard of the Chasm of the Lost. Up ahead, Talia could just make out the viridescent colours of bioluminescent fungi, and the accompanying haze of spores creeping slowly toward them.
----------------------------------------
If I never see another mushroom again, it’ll be too soon.
It had started out innocently enough. Speckles of round caps, creeping mycelium coating the right wall of the ledge. White when it wasn’t glowing in neon colours. The off-white spore cloud began as a thin cloud that mostly lingered about the caravan’s ankles. Calisto had called the fungus a long-winded technical name. Muttering from the crew named the mushroom brilliant ghostcaps.
An apt description, if a little dramatic.
Brilliant ghostcaps were beautiful, a splash of colour in an otherwise drab and muted world.
As they pressed further on, however, the cloud rose up to their knees and their chests, before engulfing them entirely. Thankfully, whatever god had pushed them onto their current path had seen fit to give them a straight road. Otherwise, visibility would have been a dire problem.
Mycelial strands had turned into thick ropes and then been engulfed with huge, luminescing growths the size of a human that jutted out of the chasm wall like the grasping fingers of fungal giants.
In some places, it was bad enough that the whole wagon train had to stop and cut into the toxic growth, clearing a path and letting out huge gouts of spores in the process.
Days passed into a week until it felt like the jungle would never end. Whispers of worry threaded their way into the minds of the group, a toxin more insidious than the spores themselves. Or so Talia thought.
She focused on exuding an aura of calm perseverance through her psionic link, forgoing practicing her kinetic affinity in order to stabilize the group’s mental state with little nudges. Anything to stave off the oppressive haze of the mushrooms.
Eventually, inevitably, the first delver snapped.
Whether it was a clogged filter, an improper seal, or a mistake, the beastkin found herself exposed to the mass of spores.
And began to hallucinate.
It was slow at first, so slow Talia never noticed the change amidst the other minds she was keeping track of.
Then a random assortment of clicks began to ring through everyone’s clickers. A jumble of incoherent noise that stumbled over established codes only ever by accident.
Before the source of the sound could be pinpointed, the beastkin woman ripped off her gas mask and spat out her clicker, clawing desperately at her face. Deep furrows weeping glowing blood came away with clumps of dark fur in the beastkin’s claws.
The woman’s mind in Talia’s sense felt like a pool of dyes swirled around in a tub. It vacillated dangerously between mania and rage, like a pendulum about to swing out of its mooring.
It took those around the manic delver far too long to realize what had happened.
To act.
It happened too fast.
Before most even got time to comprehend what had happened, the beastkin was screaming. A haunting sound that Talia knew she would never be able to forget. Recognition bloomed in her mind as she remembered a dance shared on the night she’d manifested her telepathy.
The delver, whom Talia had drunkenly twirled about first haven with, just a few weeks ago, screeched so loud that the young mage swore that she could hear her vocal cords snap.
The beastkin began frantically tearing at her armour, snapping claws against buckles and snaps.
The woman’s mind felt like it was tearing itself in two. The sympathetic agony alone was enough for Talia to freeze in her seat. She stared transfixed, as the beastkin woman ran, smashing herself into wagons and walls bouncing off of ghostcaps, alternating between screams and jabbered drivel.
Talia remained petrified as the maddened delver dodged her sluggishly reacting comrades and approached the edge, uncaring or unaware of the danger.
The next moments unfolded in the mage’s mind with stark clarity. She dropped her psionic web and spun up her core, drawing out a lattice, a net of force that she tossed out over the side of the ledge.
To catch the beastkin as she flung herself off.
Please please please please please—
The net broke apart in her mental grasp, sending Talia reeling from the backlash.
The beastkin screamed the whole way down.
Fuuuck—
The sound never quite stopped, echoing off the walls of the Chasm of the Lost like the voice of a vengeful wraith.
For a moment, Talia thought that the caravan would come to a stop. To mourn. Do something. Anything.
Then she remembered why they used clickers in the first place.
Sound of any kind was anathema to life in the Deep. Sound drew predators and scavengers alike.
‘All ahead; full speed’ came the clicker call.
The caravan pressed on, fueled by a new sense of terror and urgency. Anyone still braving the spore cloud tightened the straps of their gas masks worriedly. Talia did the same, her stomach roiling at the suddenness of the woman’s death. Tears pooled around her chin under the leather. She didn’t know what was worse, her horror at the senseless death, or the seething anger of failing to prevent it.
They moved forward at a clip, muzzled tunnel drakes ordered to a near run. The crew grabbed onto wagons as they passed, combat readiness coming second to avoiding discovery in the first place.
Behind them, the echoing scream overlapped with the leathery sound of wings.