Amelia awoke feeling like one of the hull boards. Stiff and rotten, structurally unsound and yet still somehow attenuative. A team of microscopic ants had taken to excavating in the back of her skull.
Having her first sight be a spectral cutlass aimed at her throat and the first waking sound being a low gravelly voice snarling at her to “get up” had lit a fresh fire under their … whatever the anatomically correct term for insectoid buttocks was.
Neither of these phenomena was new to her. She had already spent what she guessed had to be at least several days in this horrid simulacrum of a ship.
The nigh comatose state of misery and terror she’d been in at the start of the trip had worn off fairly quickly, only to be replaced by an engorging sense of insignificance.
At first she’d tried patching over this nihilistic wellspring with anger. She’d recounted every last infraction and slight the universe and anyone in it had ever imparted on her, however minute and petty. But this had been like trying to dry out a marsh with a piece of match cord.
Conversing with the animated husks of the crew had been like talking to the walls, so she had consoled herself by talking to the inert planks as they disturbed her slightly less. At least their degradation was normal and comprehensible.
At no point had she been the slightest bit tempted by the oddly colored bits of food and pot of stale water one of the phantom servitors had left for her. No matter how much her belly churned or how often her lips cracked and bled.
She instead numbed her body by opening her perpetual coat seal Willingly submitting her naked skin to the fractious chill.
And she numbed her mind by wholly ceding it to the visions and voices her delirious imagination conjured to fill the hole left by the hours of near total sensory deprivation.
So absolute was her confinement that she was almost relieved to have a weapon being hung in her face, as long as it meant that there was something resembling a sentient beast attached to the other end.
Almost.
She rose stiffly. But she felt nothing. The ghost offered her a hand which she didn’t think twice about accepting. Only blearily coming to recognize after she’d gotten her footing the oddity of the thing, if that was even the correct term for it, in her grasp.
She regarded the murky, translucent form of a beast in the same disillusioned way she had come to regard the Petrie water cup. Somewhere in the dim blankness of her hollowed mental cavity it registered that this was the same beast who had put her down here. Only now his voice sounded more like a flooded ditch than a shallow grave.
He seized her arm with strength rivaling that of a blacksmith’s power hammer and forced it behind her back. He pressed her face into the wall and leaned in so close she could feel the cold drafts simulating breath wafting from him.
Directly into her ear he hissed in what just barely exceeded the minimum threshold between a voice and a breeze, “the Captain wants you.”
Not for any particular fault of her own the subtle arc of a hint in his voice was lost on Amelia. She answered his words directly in the only way that made sense to her at that moment. She bared her teeth and growled like a fur-clogged Kitten.
She would never know whether the sound he made after was a sigh of a poor attempt at laughter. But either way its meaning rang all too clear.
By digging his surprisingly dense icy digits into her neck he cut off her last remaining strands of defiance.
“Listen to me carefully young one,” he hissed. “I don’t have much time and your life may very well depend on what I’m about to tell you.”
He pressed closer. His lips coddling the rims of Amelia’s auditory nodes. His voice was little more than synchronistic air. “I know what Saedel wants. And believe me, you don’t want any part of it.”
Before she could so much as take stock of this new information, he took from his pocket what sounded like a bag of cracked walnut shells. But it turned out to be a fragment of scroll that at first appeared to be of papyrus make, but that a closer inspection revealed was actually a piece of dilapidated canvas.
Such a thing had not been in common circulation for going on three thousand years.
He pressed it into her numb hand.
“You'll be thanking me for that very soon,” he said, easing his grip on her neck just enough to allow her freedom for speech.
When he read nothing in her body language of gratitude, but rather mute inquiry, he explained in the verbal equivalent of a shrug.
“Think of it as a map.” He jammed her chambered witticism in the breech. “I know what it looks like. But it guides you from point A to B, ergo it’s a map. Technically.”
When he let go a counter-insurgent rush of of brain-melting panic and cosmic rage surged through her. Her blood went ice cold and her vision turning red.
She didn’t remember asking “why should I trust you?” or him replying gruffly “because you don’t have much choice,” or “I'll explain later if you live that long.”
The only part of the next few minutes’ internship she would retain was the wholly irrational single urge to ‘kill him. Kill Him. KILL HIM! KIILL HIIMM!!’
Consequently, at no point during said exchange would it enter into her pan of speculation to wonder about his sudden upward bent in sophistication. posture, accent and grammar.
“For the time being,” he continued in a hoarse whisper, “all you need to know is they’re throwing you to the …”
He never got to elaborate further.
A voice like the grinding side of a rasp came down from on high. “Silver!” Chased shortly thereafter by the specter of a lean, sinister, glowering Rat with a fanged tooth and a left eye that seemed to have lost its heading somewhere between the casket and the underworld.
“What’s takin’ so harin’ long? Cap’n’s getting’ impatient!”
The Frog ghost, apparently named Silver, snapped his sword back up to Amelia's windpipe faster than any living tendon could have managed.
“Whas it to you Rat,” Silver answered in a hastily reverted drawl. His jarring degradation in intellectual caliber striking Amelia with the tune of an overcorrection in error.
The Rat, whose parents had either been the laziest or cruelest beasts on the planet, squinted through his working eye and said, “been sent to collect er. An’ you. ‘E says getyer ass up top ‘fore he has us all flayed.”
Silver straightened and sneered. “Jus’ havin’ a bit of sport’s all ‘fore the boss puts her through the ringer.”
The lazy eyed ghost looked unconvinced. He squinted at Silver through his good eye and said, “well knock it off!” Amelia could see ripples of a wicked thought course under his tram car brow. “Cap’n wants her alive an’ incorp … uh … inca … uh …”
His mind cast off through his eyes and seemed to circumnavigate the globe before reentering his body through the back of his skull.
“Intact. He’s got some special plans fer her.”
His prominent incisors glinted like daggers as he aimed his own sword’s point at Amelia. Then he started waving the pale blue blade back and forth as if casting a ward.
When Silver made no move to either hand Amelia over or to take her above boards, Rat’s malfeasant grin morphed into an almost sarcastically evil sneer.
Amelia’s eyes and brain twisted as he sauntered over. Or rather … floated?
No … Fluctuated was the only verb that properly fit. Though Amelia was in no state of either mind or learning at present to make such an esoteric connection.
Had Tim been present he might have recognized this pretense at perspective tunneling for what it was. The square peg of a fifth dimensional topographical animus matrix trying, and only partly succeeding, to conform to the round hole that was three dimensional geometry.
These specters, these lingering abstract aspects of a prior world frame, didn’t as much move as loiter across spatial instances.
Exposure to this counter rational phenomenon Sir Francis himself had coined “inverse negative action”, essentially the desynchronization of a subject’s movement through space and time, would be unfairly taxing on any regular corporeal mind. But on one which had all but gone the way of a dehydrated grape it had the nauseating effect of a tumor being forcibly excised with a spoon.
She pressed her body into the wall so hard that the dilapidated boards creaked. With every fiber of will she had left at her disposal she silently prayed to every god, daemon and faire she could name that she might somehow phase through the solid wood.
For the span of a single butterfly’s wingbeat the hard planking behind her fingertips felt like it might be liquifying. Perhaps with just a bit more pressure …
But Rat was on her before she could force her way through to tumble into the unending blackness of the cavern depths beyond. He knocked Silver away with a very real, and very painful sounding, crack upside the temple with his cutlass’s basketed hilt.
Rat seized Amelia by the collar with his free hand and dragged her up top as though she were a blocky bedroll.
He pushed her up onto the quarterdeck and shoved her hard onto their knees in front of Saedel, brandishing his sword as though he intended to stab her with it. He looked up at his master and said proudly, “here she is Cap’n. Still alive an' undamaged. Just like you ordered.”
Saedel glanced down at them with the same contemptuous glare one might give a pestering pet.
“Where is Silver,” he said in a voice that would make the harshest Erandic blizzard seem like a cozy hearth fire.
“Right ‘ere Cap’n,” Silver said, limping doggedly along to stand beside Amelia.
The image of a beast who was already dead quaking in his boot should have defanged a fair fraction of childhood night terrors. And indeed this would have been true were it not for that the superior monster had her in its clutches as well.
“He says he was interrogatin’ the prisoner on your orders,” Rat said without any effort to conceal his smug delight, “but I ain't never heard you give such an order. I brought ‘em to you so you could … ACK!”
In a blur, faster than the thought itself could have traveled through organic neural fibers, Saedel seized the gloating rodent by the throat and hurled the strangely solid specter into the main mast, leaving a shivered crater in the dense wood and cracking the three foot trunk so that it skewed aft a full two degrees.
If Rat was still conscious after that Amelia felt sure he was thanking his immortal maker for his lack of bones.
“Never presume my intent fool,” Saedel boomed in a voice like a burly gale force. “I shall do as I will. And you shall do as I command!”
When he turned his wrathful attention back to Silver, the poor beast had bent nearly fully in half. His crutch stuck out behind him like a wooden tail and his neck seemed to stretch out like a convicted traitor waiting for the axe as Saedel declared rather than asked, “you spoke to the prisoner.”
Silver said nothing. He stood trembling, or rather rippling, staring at his boot like a plucked instrument string. A realization whose gravity was compounded by the fact that this beast had, inexplicably, shown her compassion, despite having every obvious reason to do otherwise.
Her heart cracked when she saw in her would-be helper a dismaying reflection of how she herself must have looked upon her arrival at the FPA.
“Is that how Drake saw me?” she thought. Then, for all of a single beat, her molten heart hardened into diamond glass. “Pathetic.”
She looked up to Saedel. Nowhere in that façade did she detect a trace, a whisper of fear, mercy or doubt. Just power. Raw, unencumbered, unbeholden strength.
Her pulse spiked.
Saedel held out a hand and Silver flew towards his waiting palm. The towering monsters claws closed around the dead Frog’s throat and into his face that seemed to have gone several shades lighter and more transparent the behemoth growled, “give me one good reason why I shouldn't cast you straight back to oblivion.”
Silver could barely stutter, “C-Captain … I … uh … I, I know the path through the Labyrinth. I-I have been there before … as you well know. I-I-I … I could guide the girl to the Entrance.”
He paused as though trying to gauge Saedel’s implacable mood through the faceplate. After a frigid moment of unsuccess he added weakly, “… if it would please you that is.”
Apparently it did. When Saedel again spoke, the whole of the known universe felt to be in attendance. “John Silver, you will escort this child through to the Sanctum. Once there she will retrieve what is mine and you shall become its indentured sentinel for all time. This I COMMAND!”
Amelia’s chest became home to a nest of slithering serpents. Their icy fangs tore at her lungs and heart with wicked zeal.
They infected her blood with their dread poisons and constricted her lungs, so her breath came packed with sharp needles of prickling frost.
Silver's shuddering instantly ceased. His entire countenance sank below despair and into what Amelia could only understand as grim acceptance.
She wished so direly to hold the Dawn Sliver of Ancalagon so as to summon the Black Dragon just as the righteous knight, Sir Gillian, had done in that old story.
She wanted the power to crush these wretched creatures and their infernal master in her clenched palm.
The venomous snakes that had been coiling in her belly had metamorphized into as many feral dragons. Their black venom turned to seething Magnolsis fire in her veins.
It took a tremendous act of will for her to not actually attempt to leap up and seize this monstrosity by his jugular.
This had the unintended effect of encapsulating her rage so that it multiplied and congealed to fill her every gland, crevice and pour like the vital gel of a Textar CANDY mine.
Only unlike the patented cream, which was renowned both for its mechanical plasticity and chemical stability, without an ignition source or viable outlet, her hot emotional bile sought to excavate its own egress through any means.
She wanted to scream. She wanted to cry. She wanted to tear into the very deck boards with her bare fingers.
A curtain of baneful fire drew across her mind and heart like the Allfather’s vengeful horde with Saedel as its target beacon.
She couldn’t have said, not that she would ever dare to think, what might have happened were both her hands and feet not at that same time being bound in what looked and felt like iron ropes by Rat who had, by this time, hobbled submissively back to his master. Physically unaffected, though thoroughly chastened by his ordeal and, for lack of a better term, broken.
At some point Saedel must have released Silver, for the next thing Amelia knew was Rat binding his arms and crutch behind his back.
He then hauled them both over to and knelt them by the main mast facing what, in the ship’s previous life, had been the port gangway.
From here the cesarean crack in the mast was plainly visible.
The twinkling star lights she had seen on the way in were now nowhere to be found. Only the pale lanterns that were her ethereal compliment stood out against the umbral pale.
As a consequence Amelia could see nothing beyond the ship’s rails. How she could even see this far, or why the very matter of the ship seemed to pulsate with harmonic diffusions of pondwater colors, and why a persistent chime like tiny bells seemed to strum the bones in the backs of her ears eluded her.
The only thought, the only feeling, was that of the pervasive, perpetual, antipathical nothingness.
“Where are we going?” Amelia asked.
“The Labyrinth,” was his monotonal answer. “Or the Necropolis depending on who you talk to.”
“What do they want with me?”
“They want you to find something in the Sanctum.”
“But why me?” she asked again.
Silver shrugged, “apparently, it can only be used by a mortal. Or so I've been told.”
Amelia scowled into nothing. “What is it?”
Silver shrugged again. “Couldn't tell you. I never made it past the Sanctum door. I died before I …”
He suddenly jolted as if he’d taken a dagger to the spine. “Oh, uh, by the way,” he said in a pensive whisper, “I realize it's hardly my place to ask, but I wonder if you might find it in you to do an old, dead Pyrate a favor?”
‘Pyrate’ Amelia’s individual brain cells repeated in tandem. ‘Is that with a good aye or a bad I?’
After finding nothing to do with this information, she returned to the question itself.
Much to her surprise, despite her logical neural crews scrambling to hit everything that even vaguely resembled an ABORT or MAYDAY switch, she couldn’t find it anywhere in herself to refuse.
Maybe it was the impending threat of her own demise that made her so amiable to the spirit’s needs.
Maybe it was the lack of food, water and sleep causing her brain to run on an archaic circuit to conserve energy.
Maybe it was all of the above.
Or perhaps this was all one of her grand, elaborate nocturnal operas that she would at any moment wake up from having never left her bed in Amurza.
That was definitely her imagination talking.
Regardless of the why, she suddenly felt like she’d known Silver for far longer than three days. She heard her mouth say, “name it.”
She then heard a voice in the back of her mind that may or may not have been hers say ‘what? Why?’
Her ear couldn’t tell whether the sound Silver made in return was a snort or a sneeze, though her mind preemptively assumed the former.
After a trepid pause he said under a dense intonation canvas of nostalgia, “you are so very much like your mother.”
Her reaction was as reflexive as it was stupid.
She shot to her feet, only to be instantly felled by Rat’s all too tangible raining cannonball of a fist as though he’d been waiting eagerly for exactly this occasion.
She collapsed in a dull heap. Her mind forcibly reclused to a murky realm of spinning dust and celestial helixes.
The last thing she heard was a thunderous roar and something like a city-sized island disintegrating.
****
When, however many hours later, Amelia regained consciousness an unbound John Silver was squatting over her like a mother Bird over her newborn brood.
She tried to push him away, but her arms behaved as wet rags. This, however, was evidently proof enough of life for Silver. For he backed off immediately and took to harrying away two other ghosts who had wandered dumbly near.
As Amelia crept slowly to her feet, it dawned on her that she could see again. She wondered where the light was coming from, but she couldn’t identify a likely source anywhere.
Her eyes eventually found their way over to the mast pole where she and Silver had been sitting. There she saw something that her brain initially struggled to compartmentalize. But when it did, the realization struck her like a loaded cargo tram.
At the foot of the mast was a pair of pistols. Next to which a single strait saber morosely lofted its hilt .
Next to the crater left by the hurled Rat, the mast now sported a jet-black scorch mark, the kind made when a candle’s fire meets the edge of old or dry parchment.
Amelia gulped and then choked on her own dry gullet when she remembered Rat’s fist hitting her skull. The pieces of the grim puzzle finally fell into place.
Silver caught her up by the elbow mid-swoon and led her hastily toward the lowered gangplank.
Amelia hazarded one last glance back at Rat’s final resting location and was suddenly, inexplicably, and violently sick all over the deck.
When she’d recovered a wave of warm revitalization swept through her.
Whether this was catharsis or the start of hypothalamic shock was a matter she was in no mood or mind to ponder.
For lack of a useful covering to offer her, Silver draped his arm over her shoulders and led her silently down the plank. Which still had the opposite of the intended effect. The equivalent of drying someone off with a wet sponge.
But she appreciated the gesture nonetheless and so let it rest despite its raiment chill.
Marching with purpose, their heads held high and their shoulders back perhaps a bit too stiffly the thought, “if I die, I’ll die with my head up” passed through Amelia’s cerebrum.
She wasn’t sure why, but she felt like she’d expected that to be of some greater comfort than it was.
Beyond the plank bridge they saw the ghostly crew and Saedel prowling restlessly about the cliff. The infernal captain pacing about like a hungry predator.
Had Amelia’s thinking regions been a bit more solvent than a pudding dish right then she might have contemplated the oddity of how the ghosts seemed to emit faint traces of light but Saedel’s fiery crown did not.
But she wasn’t, so she didn’t.
What even she couldn’t fail to notice was the gaping monster of a cave that loomed at the back fringe of their Halloween glow.
No sooner had her boots touched the rock then Saedel, with no more than a wave of his scepter, rallied and herded them all through the oblivion portal.
Less than three yards in they hit a dead end.
Even by the diffuse light of the undead throng, the back wall struck Amelia as being somehow unnatural. Though exactly how was impossible to ascertain beyond an intuitive guess given the near zero visibility.
All the same, it was not of as much immediate concern under the circumstances as it might otherwise be. Given how far removed the preponderance of things around here stood from normal reality already, her threshold for abnormal she felt was gaining by the second. In fact, she’d hardly have batted an eyelash if Lord Nightwish or the Hogfather decided to just pop in here for a chat at some point.
Not that she wouldn’t still have questions, of course.
When Saedel ignited the green plasmatic torch stone on the head of his scepter, the exact form of the structure ahead was revealed. A wall of white marble about twenty by twenty paces divvied into six equilateral sections imbedded into the natural rock.
Each slice sported an intricately carved sigil personifying one of the six cardinal elements of alchemy. Though that wasn’t something Amelia was privy to.
At the convergent point of all was set a hexagrammid plate upon which were carved hieroglyphic versions of the same icons. Only some were misaligned as if the lead sculptor had suffered a stroke midway through construction.
Upon closer inspection, Amelia also discovered that the points and angles of the set were askew. Together they formed a mini hexagonal opening roughly the size of her head.
Silver leaned in to her and said, “that’s the entrance.”
Amelia nodded. She’d already figured as much, but confirmation was never to be shunned.
It did nothing to ease her disquiet that all of the ghost crew were nervously flitting around like plump roasts about to be slaughtered, cooked and carved up for dinner.
Saedel approached the bone white obstacle with intent.
The fact that he cast no shadow evaded Amelia’s grasp for her utter, enrapturing fascination with his conjuring to his hand from thin air a six-sided silver bar etched in detailed rectangular glyphs that seemed to correspond to the symbols on the marble sections.
Like an overused, underappreciated feather duster, her brain only slowly began absorbing further details of the object after Silver inadvertently wrung her out by saying, “Dolsenec”.
She blinked, looked at Silver, who seemed lost in his own elusive world, then returned to the bizarre ritual.
From one end of the bar there protruded a hexagrammid alignment of hooked barbs which looked to be of solid brass construction, but were in fact a carefully cultivated alloy of titanium.
From the opposite end grew a bewitchingly ornate lapis dragon whose golden talons clutched an obsidian sphere and whose golden-veined serpentine tail coiled solicitously around the shaft.
Its three sets of piercing ruby eyes flickered as though the twin suns resided therein. Their light played off and through its forest of horns and combed spines, throwing black images of crooked fiends dancing by an infernal bonfire across the walls and over the mist-born onlookers.
Saedel inserted the barbed end into the hexagonal hole in the wall and gave the dragon a hard pull by its purposely roundly crooked neck. The key and plate came out from the door about half an inch. At which point he spun the whole apparatus clockwise until the symbols aligned. Then he pushed it back in up to the base of the dragon’s pointy tail.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
The mammoth barrier responded by retracting its six triangular slabs noiselessly into the parent walls, ceiling and floor like as many daggers sheathing themselves.
This perfectly orchestrated, elegant dance of sophisticated machinations granted the inanimate components a profound aura of sentience that Amelia would have found eerie were it not for her real present company.
The very instant the machinery had concluded its work, Saedel handed Silver the key, who then tucked it dutifully into his coat. An act which, had he or his garments been corporeal, Amelia might have questioned the geometric logistics of.
But them being as they were not, strictly speaking, bound by the conventional laws of physics or standard universal energy dynamics, she saw no reason why such comparatively menial concepts like physical displacement or object permanence should matter either.
His slavish demeanor lent even more credence to her initial suspicion that these instances of the paranormal were not the sort which lurked under the beds, in the closets and atop the pillows of broodlings or whose tales were swapped by sailors, soldiers, adventurers and nomads around hearth, camp and cook fires.
What of all this her face betrayed Amelia would never know or think to wonder. But she knew some fragment of her thoughts had leaked out because when Saedel turned his back Silver winked and whispered in what was surely meant as a warm, comforting tone, “trust me.”
When the last of the ghostly party had entered the revealed cave system, the ancient entrance behind them resealed, leaving them in a state of utter oblivion. Even the forms of the ghosts cast no visible presence here.
Fortunately for her, Amelia had learned the hard way the dangers of being unprepared and so she had taken to carrying a two knife set and multiple P.A.O.I.S.Ts, or Pocket Aluminum Oxide Integral Striker Torches, with her at all times for just this sort of occasion.
After several minutes of floundering in her pockets and a few embarrassing failures to find and pull the match cord she at last managed to summon the chemically bound flame.
Being essentially an elongated flare, she knew the effulgent light wouldn’t last more than thirty or forty minutes. But since having the ability to see her own feet was a dramatic improvement she wasn’t about to tarry over details.
Besides, that’s why she carried five spares.
Saedel evidently had zero problems seeing in the dark as he was already a few hundred feet ahead of them.
Not that she minded.
Ghosts she was finding she could handle. At one point they had been regular flesh-and-blood beasts like her. So they had at least that much common ground to work from.
But the further she got away from that … thing the better.
No sooner had Amelia thought herself ready to take the lead then Silver tapped her on her shoulder.
“You should probably let me go ahead,” he said, opening a hand to take the torch.
To answer her silent question he flicked an ear Saedel’s direction and said, “if I get on his nerves he can’t exactly kill me twice.”
‘Yes he bloody can!’
The thought sailed into Amelia’s head like an assassin’s arrow. Its piercing razor head was the image of Rat’s Nigredo remains. The one which followed after was the poisonous lace.
‘And who knows how much worse?’
But having no reliable way of articulating these points that didn’t make her sound needy or paranoid, she let out her feelings in a snorted sigh before handing over the light.
Silver gave back a consolatory tip of his indelible hat, then proceeded to lead their posse along the long dark and narrowing way.
Even in the dim light of her pocket torch, the gold and silver ornaments embedded in the sandy-yellow colored stone walls glinted like many twinkling celestial points.
The geometric slabs that made up the entire structure were so perfectly formed and fitted that a razor’s biting edge couldn’t have intruded more than a hair’s width.
The floor and the arched ceiling were carved with intricately erratic patterns and painted in exotic colors that seemed to dance and twirl to the rhythm of the pocket torch's flickering golden flame.
Her circumstances notwithstanding, Amelia marveled at the neat mathematical artistry around her. Apart from its geometric harmony, every part and particle of this place seemed practically marinated in auric honey and glaze.
Granted, it would be disingenuous to say that a large part of the aesthetic didn’t owe to the walls and arched ceiling being made of a desert-gold cement.
Every so often Amelia would catch Silver eyeing Saedel with the patient, feral intensity of a caged circus wyntyrdyr waiting for a chance to gore its tyrannical captor.
A more charitable, or at least slightly more fortunate, beast than Amelia might have actually felt sorry for these poor devils. But, being in more or less the same boat dampened her sympathetic gene sufficiently to make the feeling fractally symmetrical to trying to run a mainline cargo hauler off a bank of potatoes.
It was an irony of a sort that would forever elude her that this would be the moment that her brain chose to reintroduce to her awareness Silver's earlier comment about her mother.
Seeing that she didn’t have a sword, gun barrel, fist or boot near her head at that moment, she decided that now was as good a time as any to try and get some real answers out of him.
She doubled her pace to pull up alongside him.
She was almost starting to see some appeal in disembodiment.
Almost.
Silver didn’t seem to notice her approach. Not knowing how quite to phrase her question, or even exactly what she wanted to ask in the first place, the words that came out of her mouth could have been torn right off a page of some tweeny romance novel written by a dyslectic Chameleon.
“So … if you don’t mind my asking … how did you and my mother meet … exactly?”
Never before in her thirteen years of life had Amelia wished so desperately to have been born a Tortoise.
It didn’t help that Silver’s response was to throw his head back and laugh.
Amelia glanced back. None of the trailing ghosts seemed at all interested in the commotion. Though that did nothing to assuage her embarrassment.
Silver’s lacking physical lungs or diaphragm meant that when the expenditure of humor was over it ceased as if some beast had hacked his nonexistent windpipe in two.
He then straightened as much as his dependency on the wooden pole that seemed a few inches too short for him would allow.
“Your mother and I shared a … we shared a … a dream,” he said as though trying to force the complex memories into a simplistic mold they didn’t fit in.
He stared off into the darkness ahead and his milky mist eyes turned to inky glass.
A solitary moment of mourning later he shook himself back to here. He indicated the hole in his chest. “But you see, the problem with dreams is that you have to wake up at some point.”
Forced levity strained the ends of his sentence as though the whole weight of a lifetime were suspended from them by chains.
Amelia wanted to press the point. But something raw and familiar like a nostalgic scent tugged at her most soluble heartstring. Spinning her back through the decades to before she had even been conceived.
A peaceful time. A time before Pyrates, before swords. Back before monsters and ghosts and evil necromancers. A time when the world was all of one thing. A time when nothing died. When nothing haunted. When nothing scarred or tarnished. A time when everything could simply be as it was and no more.
She honored its memory with deep silence.
Then she inhaled deeply the dry, dead air of this forsaken catacomb and lifted her eyes to study Silver’s face again. When next their gazes crossed she did not falter.
Emboldened by a newfound assurance from she knew not where, she stayed strong and held him fast.
She studied the ghost’s grim face for a belying hint of magickal foolery or any telltale sign of good old-fashioned deceit. But all she found in his tired features were the gentle warmth of a father’s kindness and ... was that sorrow or pity?
Maybe it was both.
“I wish I’d told her … quite a few things come to think,” Silver said. A low whistle served his unreal airways for a sigh. “But you've got your father's grit.”
His eyes glazed over again as he sailed back to that obscure place between thoughtfulness and delirium. “For your own sake I hope you’ll prove wiser than he,” he said as though from inside a barrel.
This dropped a block of ice right through to Amelia’s center of mass.
This haggard, lingering, locomotive figment of a beast seemed to be better informed about her family’s internal business than she was.
However, circumstances being what they were, she didn’t have time to dwell on this before she was jolted back to the present.
For no immediately discernable reason Silver came to an abrupt halt. His head twitched about in the way of Felines and Canines tracking a strange or distant sound.
Then, in one impossibly swift motion Silver snuffed out the torch, which itself should have been impossible, spun around and easily caught Amelia up and pressed her against the wall.
Plunged back into absolute blackness without warning, her natural impulse was to ask what the saard was happening. But Silver's hand being clamped over her mouth put that idea on ice.
She could breathe through his hand, which was odd, but on reflection, not unexpected. The air she took in was made thick and heavy like watery syrup, which made talking through it all but impossible.
A few seconds went by during which very little of anything unusual or noteworthy happened.
Amelia considered trying to free herself from Silver’s grasp, but even had she the levels of supernatural strength needed to rival his undead bones, muscles and sinews she wouldn’t have gotten the chance to try.
Her eyes tilted in the direction of an unnatural rolling moan wafting up from the deepest bowels of the cavern.
She could discern nothing apart from the pitch void but the demure seafoam shimmer of the hand that thankfully held her own voice down.
As the sound drew closer, guttural snarls and curdling hisses sporadically grew out of its reverberant pitch.
In a few more seconds there evolved alongside the angry ensemble a train of fast metronomic ticks which Amelia’s oldest intuition recognized as the sritchscratching of claws against hard stone.
She didn’t need to see Silver’s wide eyes or bulging jaw areas to know he was in a similar state. Just the extra tinge of pallidity in his exoteric shell was proof enough that whatever was coming scared him. Which in turn further fed into and hardened Amelia’s paralyzing dread.
Whatever could scare a ghost must be at least quintuply bad news for a still flesh bound mortal.
The howls of racing death expounded with each racing thud of Amelia’s heart. Ripping into the secluded space like glaives through a thick curtain.
She scanned vainly in the black for a real image to substitute for the hellish creations her mind was augmenting the din with.
Soon, there came the unmistakable slurping of a wet tongue lapping against bared teeth. Then a loud swoosh of air went rippling past her, followed by the sounds of what could be best likened to rocks grinding metal into flaky shards.
Amelia was suddenly glad for Silver's hand restricting her ability to scream. She doubted she could have managed it on her own.
Even through the filter of Silver's spectral appendage, the rancid odors of rotting flesh and singed fur were still potent enough to make Amelia want to stuff hot coals up her nose.
But the horrid sounds and smells of the creature itself paled in comparison to the demented wails that shortly proceeded its passing.
Amelia’s blood flash-froze. Her veins were streams of frozen mud. She couldn’t have moved or screamed even if she'd wanted to.
In the terrible silent aftermath, Silver cautiously reclaimed his muting hand.
A tidal foam of exclamations, some portion of which took the form of questions, crested the back of Amelia’s tongue.
Luckily for them both, at some point in the chaos her throat had been involuntarily rinsed with stomach acid and so the only sounds that came out was incoherent squawking.
The second after he let her go entirely she dropped, nay, plummeted to her knees and shook more violently than if she had been naked in the midst of the polar deserts.
Upon following Silver's breathily whispered instructions, and with his gentle coaching, she took several slow, deep, calming breaths ... each time expecting the cool underground air to be a welcome relief.
Unfortunately, her next lesson that day was that incorporeal flesh, when ripped apart by preternatural claws and fangs, produced an even more appalling smell than real torn rotted meat.
When at last she had regained what only loosely resembled her sanity, Amelia noted that, contrary to only seconds ago, she could now clearly make out Silver’s spectral aura perfectly against the abyssal backdrop.
Something niggled at the back of her mind as she observed him. Something deviant … out of place … wrong. A thing that took her a fair minute to compute, but that hit her like a Barahman Pachyderm charge.
Her being able to see him sat as proof that he emitted some sort of emissarial radiance. However, there appeared no corresponding radiance on any adjacent surface. He was like a vampire casting no shadow.
She had to smile at the unusual sight of a grown Anuran fumbling with her torch like an infant first learning to hold a spoon.
Did the process of dying and partial reintegration with the mortal coil alter one’s procedural memory? Or had he just been dead for so long that he’d simply forgotten the normal way how to use his fingers?
Before she could offer to help he’d managed, with no small sample of frustration, to strike the lower reserve primer. When he beckoned her into the chemical candle’s glow she acquiesced with zero hesitation.
She could have carried her sum knowledge about magicks and their spawn in a bottle the size of her little finger, but some primordial instinct her told her that in this necrotic temple fire would be to survival what eyesight was to vision.
After she was certain the most imminent danger was a fair distance behind them she cupped her hands around her mouth and whispered, “what was that thing?”
After taking a quick survey back to ensure their continued safety, Silver replied, “tis a Naarfynder lass.”
A dreadful shiver wracked her bones. Silver interpreted her silence. Which he promptly did.
“Absolutely wicked creature that. Makes a bull wyntyrdyr during mating season look sophisticated. No living beast has ever seen one that up close before far as I know.”
Amelia’s mind curled a snare spelled like so: ‘A curious turn of phrase that.’ around a particular idea spring and waited for a particular thought to exit.
For bait her logical precepts rewound the past minutes. Spreading their deduced vulgarity over the well top.
Less than a second later, her imagination had its prize. And from its dense entrails, fractal images were ripped forth. Graphic depictions of what carnal fates had befallen the rest of their landed party rolled and crackled over her mental plains like infernal hooves. Tamping their memories’ bones into the soil, from which then sprouted new pictures of events that had yet to be. What would befall them, her and Silver, when that creature had finished defiling the stalk and turned its lidless eyes towards the bud and the leaf?
Her immediate surroundings offered no help or comfort either. In fact the only light in this dismal tunnel they shared was …
“Enough!" her exhausted brain silently cried.
Alright, if she couldn't escape into her mind, she would have to resort to the unorthodox. She turned back to Silver.
The irony of evading her imagined daemons by striking up a conversation with a ghost was not lost on her. But she was at the end of her rope and lacked any better solutions.
“What's it doing here?” she asked. “I thought they lived in the Gnarled Wood on …”
A dozen switches flipped on in rapid succession which, frankly, should have done some while ago.
Silver's next utterance may have been intended as a belligerent snort, but it came out more like a steel grate being hacked apart by primitives who had yet to comprehend the power of modern metallurgy.
“It’s likely some form of barbaric security system.”
He jabbed a thumb back over his shoulder. “Saedel lets him out every so often, so he can feed on the new batch of goons he sends down here as “backup”.
Amelia didn’t need look at his face to know what she would find there. “That's …” she said, wanting to fill the void at the end with every synonym for awful known to her in Adamic. But feeling the fractal frost crystals inside take a fresh leap and bite temporarily cost her the ability to cohesively weave thoughts into phrases.
Thankfully, Silver picked up rather swiftly on her drift. “That's our host for you,” he stated flatly. “Only a living hand can pierce the heart of the Labyrinth. Or so he says. But only a ghost’s flesh can satisfy a Naarfynder.”
“There’s more than one …?” Amelia croaked. This day just kept getting worse.
Silver spread his one free arm wide. “Where do you suppose this island gets its name?”
Amelia choked again this time on her own uvula.
Silver made a noise. It might have been a cough if he'd still possessed a solid trachea. Amelia suspected this was more a sympathetic gesture than an actual expression of thirst, but one which she appreciated regardless. It could also have been an obtusely subtle means of changing the subject. One that she was only too happy to take him up on.
Amelia croaked dryly, “you wouldn’t happen to have a water skin on you?”
A morose shake of Silver’s head made the little dust devil in Amelia’s throat spin a happy little dance.
“Fraid not. Not much use for it in my condition.” He then bobbed his nose forward down the passage. “But there's a water font about forty yards ahead. Or at least there was last time.”
Amelia tried to speak, but what came out resembled the sound of a sputtering candle. She just nodded and let him lead. Not that he needed to, as there was only one conceivable way for them to go if they didn’t fancy becoming ectoplasmic flambe.
They walked in parallel silence. Amelia wrestling with the strange disassociation of her senses, seeing Silver’s feet walk but hearing only her own feet’s refrain. Silver aiming his apparitional senses back intently for the slightest hint of anything that might signify the monster’s return.
Thankfully, they detected no such sign. For now the creature seemed too fully invested in its feast to be in a hurry to chase down a few loose scraps.
Not a hundred paces on Amelia perceived the babbling tunes of flowing water plucking the restless vacuum.
Amelia took off at a run. She did not think. Didn’t even feel. A force as basic and as powerful as the nucleic bonding soul of the materium brought her the sound like mass producing life by aligning stagnant energy.
When she’d found her horizon event she plunged neck deep into the refreshing spring.
If she’d had her wits about her she might have pondered the power of primordial instinct. So effortlessly eclipsing one’s perceptions and rationality so completely. She hadn't realized until that moment just how empty she’d been.
With her belly now exclusively full of fresh spring drink, an intense, painful knowledge of the power of hunger came upon her like a feral beast.
She couldn’t even remember the last time she’d had a proper meal. Time, she reasoned correctly, is a slippery thing when trapped in the waking stasis of an exoteric hull.
Having drunk her fill, she lowered herself back onto the inexplicably soft floor, closed her eyes and reveled in this practically prairie respite while she waited for Silver to catch up.
This would have been the point when, had her genius been a separate entity with its own eyes and mind, would have reminded her that the minimum speed for figments of the ether was that of conscious thought.
When Silver deigned it appropriate to make his presence known he came and knelt by her side at the fountain’s edge.
He wished he’d had something more nourishing than a banished father’s hand to offer her. But his having long since forgotten the need for chemical sustenance meant that the hand he placed on her scrawny shoulder had to spin both her emotional and metabolic axels. A task which would have been called Sisyphean by any arcanist whose knowledge of his craft wasn’t solely derived from nebulous fairytale depictions of magick.
Oblivious to her companion’s secret conflict, Amelia steadily came back to herself and as she did started to take stock of their new surroundings.
The first and most forceful thing that struck her was the lighting.
Rather than the harshly pulsating ambiance of the torch fire, which she would shortly note was under the water, there exuded a soft blue aura fringed with pale gold which only partially seemed to stem from the buds and strange bulbs that lined the fountain’s poolside and inhabited much of the semi-paved floor.
Speaking of which, she realized her knees rested on the single point of deliberate architecture left below knee height. An oscillating patterned ring of tetrahydric stones arranged in a perfect semi-circle around the pool of crystalline water. Itself continually incubated from a tiny spigot carved in abstract homage to a helmeted and plumed Equestrian a few hands up the wall.
The rest, in stark contrast to the expert masonry they had seen thus far, was a lopsided recipe of roughly one part scattered flat stones, six parts bare dirt, and three parts assorted alien floral and fungal species including, but by no means limited to, crocheted vines, ranks of albino mushrooms, fluorescent algae and a diverse pallet of flowers, spore shoots and seed pods.
The vaulted ceiling, which now hung not more than half and again her own standing height overhead, was buttressed by bone-white scaffolds that gave her a sickening insight into many a rodent, and likely many of her own relatives and ancestors’ final life minutes. Forcibly caged and locked behind the ribs of a massive serpent.
She retreated her gaze away. Gently stroking one of the nearby flower heads with a finger.
At her touch, a swarm of luminescent insects materialized from the very roots and soil. Some had been posing as the very mineral grains.
They unfolded themselves and floated up on wings patterned like the frozen helical matrices of volcanic glass. Only richer and more vibrant.
Silver sat agape and said with airy wonderment, “this … is new.”
The logical incongruency of this took Amelia only a single extra heartbeat to comprehend.
“I thought you said you’d been here before,” she said in a cloudy voice.
Silver bobbed in a shrug. “I've … studied the lore and maps of this place,” he replied. Seeming to draw his words straight out of the fountain head. “I’d thought I was ready for anything.”
The amending clause ‘but I was gravely mistaken’ hung around him like a blood-stained medallion.
Amelia needed to schedule an intercranial meeting. Thinking she was going to inquire down this ready road she’d given her mouth liberty to form words. However, there appeared to be a mistake in translation somewhere between her brain and her tongue, as what actually came out of her was, “where’d Saedel go? I mean, wasn’t he leading us somewhere?”
She heard that. She processed it. It made sense, objectively speaking. But why did she suddenly care about their supposed ‘mission’?
“Not that I’m complaining mind you,” she added, more to square her own oblong reasoning than anything else.
Without diverting his eyes from the “Necropolis Menagerie”, as some of the old scrolls had referred to this place, he said, “if I were to guess, I’d say he's probably back on the ship.”
An image pattern of thoughts and questions not wholly dissimilar to that of the twinkling life cloud around her lit up Amelia’s prefrontal cortex.
“He comes down here, releases the Naarfynder,” Silver continued in a lecturer’s drawl that reminded Amelia strongly of Talia, “knowing it’ll go straight for the largest bunch of necro plasm it smells and then he leaves. Don't ask me how. If I knew I’d … well, I’d at least have something better to do than float around and go uueeerrrhh all day.”
For what felt like the first time in her whole life Amelia felt the niggling froth of a laugh creeping up into her chest. But a chain of bellicose roars and scratching like the tearing of avalanche rocks from a mountainside shoved any sampling of humor straight back into its prison and fed the key to Drachyn.
Silver sounded Amelia’s first cogent thought back to her in one urgent word.
“Run!”
She did. Silver raced a steady number of paces ahead, his candle aura flaring in lieu of her guiding torch.
When the Naarfynder’s cries had safely diminished, and when Amelia was physically incapable of exertion, they halted at a three-way junction so that she could catch her breath.
The architectural sophistication of what modern society collectively called the Labyrinth, but which a more literate few knew as the Necropolis, had, by this point, been totally abandoned for the bare rock aesthetic of a natural cavern, complete with forests of jagged stalactites and stalagmites.
However, if their six geometric sides slopes weren’t proof enough of their unnatural origin, the strategic cropping of the latter to form a worming corridor of rough stepping stone stumps would have done the job just as neatly.
The deliberately uneven gaps between the artificially grown plates were mortared with fine, rusty orange gravel and what looked and undulated like thick tar but smelled suspiciously of rice wine.
Whatever it was it smoldered under the thick oily gloom like a latent match cord.
“Why’s he … feeding it … anyway?” Amelia panted when the normal tunnel resumed and they finally came to a stop. Clamping one hand on her aching side and leaning the other one against the wall.
She wasn’t in bad shape by ordinary standards. But keeping pace with a creature who could outrun heat and who was literally incapable of fatigue over a hundred yard dead sprint with nothing but water and pure adrenaline in her system was hardly a standard schoolyard fitness exercise.
“It’s a guardian,” Silver said, checking back behind them for the millionth time. “It’s here to eviscerate any intruder body and soul.”
“Oh … great,” Amelia groaned, straightening. Then her brain caught up with the rest of her sensory organs and she snapped upright so fast that something in the middle of her spine popped.
“Wait … Iradyl? I thought Sir Francis …”
‘Drake.’ The word fell from her mind onto her tongue like a salt brick.
Silver snorted. “The weight of any printed word is measured in units of gold on a scale of praise.”
Amelia looked up at him as though he’d just sprouted a third arm.
Was he quoting Benjamin Lutein? The anarchist? It was appropriate given Silver’s apparent piratical proclivities.
She knew the meaning of those words too. They had been one of her father’s many favorite sayings. And they’d always rung as true to her as the tune of the dinner bell.
But since when had this cowardly bone-rattler become a scholarly sage?
“Think about it lass,” he said, apparently reading her thoughts again. “I knew old Black Spot. Here was a beast with brains like the stretching sky, but whose arcane skill could be held in his baby’s hand. Now, take that beast and read him a few books and POOF, he’s suddenly able to pull a whole bloody landmass out of his butt like it’s as easy as getting out of bed? I’m sorry, but if you believe that then I’ve got a magick island to sell you.”
Amelia thought on this. Assuming it was true the reasoning held fast.
“But why would it matter if a ghost managed to get … ?”
Her voice swallowed itself. Midway through her thought Saedel's last minute curse on Silver materialized and cancelled it out. Drenching them both in a verbose quantum sea of emotional silence.
Forced to wander alone in the dark forever was tortuous enough a punishment to her fledgling mind, but to also be rent to constituent threads and consumed repeatedly until there was nothing left but a shambling, miasmic shade totally bereft of mind or spirit. Stripped of all hope and desire. Robbed of any hope or purpose but to wait for an eternal end they would never reach.
This was to be the fate of any unfortunate spirits who didn't manage to gain passage into the blissful realm of the dead the old Amurzan Sagas called the Crystal Pond.
Amelia had always hated those stories. That the filing down of a multifaceted spirit into a monocrystalline parody of life was completely irreconcilable with her inordinately mature idea of happily ever after.
Lightning spears of empathic dread ripped across her heart.
Something familiarly tender bridged the temporal and spatial gaps in their experience, compelling her to throw her arms around him and squeeze as though she could excise the evil magicks through sheer physical might.
When her emotional haze parted she would recall this as one of the strangest sensations she’d ever sensed. It was like taking a misty shower while clutching a swaddled fern.
She had only just started to wonder if there wasn’t a far simpler, if less intuitively friendly, explanation for their seeming extrasensory connection, now she’d come upon the fear that neither of them would live long enough to find out.
At the tickling chill carried by Silver’s consoling hand embracing the back of her head and neck a pressure release valve in her composure popped open, releasing a brief but therapeutic atonal flute solo of a laugh.
After a minute, Silver ditched his crippled pantomime long enough to pry her back with both hands and hold her fast at arm’s length by the shoulders.
He then raised her chin with a once-calloused forefinger, looked into her watery eyes and said with a bravado that might have been more encouraging were he of a larger stature, “don't worry about me lass. Death and I are old bedfellows.”
He flicked a finger down the precursing tunnel. “That mongrel won’t enjoy this meal.”
Amelia tried to smile, but that only made her tears come faster and less controllably. She turned away so he wouldn’t see her cry.
Far from the scolding response she had anticipated, Silver wafted back and forth, pried away her hands away from her face, and gently swabbed her cheeks with his technically nonexistent sleeve.
Physically this had the proportional effect of a butterfly’s wing in floating a castle. As he’d halfheartedly expected.
Psychologically it had the effect of a bellows’ breath on a coughing furnace pit. As was his exact design.
Once his little psychodrama had done its devious work, taking on the role of stoic parent he’d never gotten to play, Silver adopted an appraising posture and said the one thing Amelia had least expected to hear from him.
“I can’t and won’t say I’m glad you’re here Daisha. But I am proud … and I know your mother and sister would be too.”
Amelia didn’t know how to answer. Her mind, heart and tongue each had swelled too large for their respective cavities and were diced a thousand different ways.
So what sound came out to grace the eternal record was the throaty belch of a congenitally deaf toad.
Once again Silver seemed to intuit the private turmoil incubating in her skull. This time, his awkward, misinterpretive attempt to smother it beneath forced bravado only deepened its suffocating roots.
“I swear on … well, on my own bloody grave I won’t let you to end up a picked pile of bones.”
She sniffed and tried to conjure a smile.
He straightened, laid an oddly warm hand on Amelia’s head and took her, still quivering like a lost kitten, under his arm.
‘You’ve got a long, hard path ahead of you Daisha,’ Silver thought to himself as he led them down the narrower of the two branching forward paths, ‘and Avlon … there’s more than a few reasons why that beast never had children.’
What may have been several hours or maybe just one passed as the intrepid duo traversed many countless parayards of coiling tunnels and paths through stalagmite maws.
Many sprawling intersections, many dead ends, many fallbacks and curling winds and so many branching paths that Amelia started to wonder if this wasn’t something akin to the pocket portal sack pioneered by the ancient Trisphraestus sorcerer, Dehdi.
When they finally came to what seemed to be a plain, perfectly ordinary white marble wall, their initial reactions were paradoxical.
But in the eternal dual spirit of the hunt, the moment’s jubilation was followed by a triplex of perplexion, anxiety and disappointment. Before Amelia could offer comment to either effect, however, Silver walked over and practically stuck his nose into its glassy surface.
Even on an island that shouldn’t exist, inhabited by the living dead and by magickal monsters, this wall had an unnatural quality about it. It was perfectly smooth, unlike the ones before.
It had no markings, carvings, not so much as a dent, pit or scratch visible anywhere on its surface.
Nevertheless, Silver examined it with the practical and reverent air of a shaman checking over a newborn.
Finally, he found what he was looking for. At which time he produced the Dragon Key from the lining of his coat. Which, Amelia reasoned, still counted as thin air in some abstract philosophical sense.
He stuck its unornamented tail end straight into the solid stone and twisted it clockwise ninety degrees so that the eyes stared at the ceiling.
Just as Saedel had done, he withdrew it. And just like the last time a loud clang sounded within the great stone barrier.
“I guess that’s why Saedel's afraid of ghosts,” Amelia quipped.
Silver had his mouth open but whatever words had marshaled in his throat died to the piercing roar storming from behind.
If Amelia had had mammalian blood she would have turned as pale as the granite. Which, as if on cue of a twisted cosmic comedian, at that same instant chose to part and hide in the sanctity of the base cavern rock.
Silver didn’t miss a beat. Putting his unnatural speed and strength to work, he pulled Amelia over to the opening and veritably flung her over the threshold as one would toss a delinquent sock into the wash pile.
Faster than the thought to turn and face him had run the parayard from her brain to her feet he spun her around by the shoulder and thrust the draconic key into her hands.
“What…?” she started to ask. Stopping on account of an heirloom prejudice against making unnecessary mouth noises.
Silver answered her anyway. “I can’t go any further.” Sensing her expletive-riddled “why not?” in the works, he bowed low his head and said more to his own foot than to her, “you heard what Saedel said. I can’t…”
Amelia didn't budge. “I don't care what that bastard said!” she cried. “You don’t … ! You can’t … !”
Again, words failed her and she resorted to primal expression.
The Naarfynder bellowed again. It was closing on them faster than the fastest storm winds. “I won’t leave you to that … that thing!”
The fact that Silver couldn't or wouldn't look at her pressed blades hotter than any blacksmith’s forge through her heart.
“I'm afraid neither of us has a choice.”
He showed Amelia his wrist. An amethyst symbol Amelia couldn't identify branded his spectral flesh. The lines pulsed and writhed with yellow sparks as though infused with tiny electric serpents.
“I've been branded by the Nizarrat Autumn. Roughly translated from Equestrian, it means the perfect pact.”
He made a crestfallen gesture. “It's a magickal seal, as you can probably guess. A binding rune. I believe the official term is Totemfide. Though that may or may not be how you pronounce it. Every ghost on the Giant has one.”
Silver threw another wayward glance backwards. More out of habit by this point than actual expectation. “It’s why I must obey him,” he said ruefully. “So long as it’s here I can’t not.”
Amelia's insides ached. Her stomach collapsed into a crushing microcosmic vacuum pit. In whose transmutational core was fused impotent wrath and fear into a white hot nugget of phosphorescent rage.
“That saarding ... AARRH!” she roared into the earless void.
Silver flashed her a Pyratic grin. And like the proud father he'd once dreamed of being, he heartily declared, “that's the spirit Daisha.”
He positioned himself at her eye level. “If you truly want to avenge us then you've come to the right place.”
He pointed to the blackness beyond the opened wall. “You see down that hole there? At the far end, you'll find an open cave. Get through it, and you'll find something that even Saedel is afraid of. If the legends are worth their weight it can grant the power to destroy that monster and this whole saarding island.”
She took a step towards him. He shoved her three steps further back into the waiting womb of peerless black.
“Go. Hurry. Don’t look back.”
She turned back to see him square down the charging howls draw his spectral sword and pistol.
For the briefest instant Amelia considered that they might fight off that creature together. Sadly, her dreams were cut short when the portal began to reseal itself behind her. She had one last look at Silver as the apathetic stone began to close.
He shouted to her one last time over the encroaching wails of the Naarfynder. “Give your mother and sisters my best! Good luck, Daisha!”
The last thing she heard was Silver’s afterlife imitation of a traditional Amurzan battle cry as the animus granite slabs slid silently between them. Sealing both of their fates.
Alone again. This time with only the cold metal of the artifact and what her four remaining pocket torches for company.
Amelia sank to her knees. Her vital heat leaking into the dissolute stone like water through a valve. Her thoughts didn’t as much swim as pulse in nucleic clouds such that she couldn’t tell the leading edge from the contrail of another. Could she go on alone? Did she even want to? After all, what was the point?
‘We don’t have a choice.’
Somewhere near the motor chords in her spine a minor capillary captured a spark and with a small marathon of effort brought it to her heart where it was enriched by her life breath and ignited by her dormant will.
Its liquid flame of passion spread through her body like amaterial wings. Setting her blood and tissues ablaze with catalytic courage.
Thus it was that under the bearing hood of the nocturn pit she stood up tall and straight. A beacon to her kind in the absolute night.
She drew the next torch and brought its zygote pyre to life.
With her proverbial spear in hand, her shield at her back and her literal and metaphorical lantern at her fore she declared through bared teeth, “so be it Saedel. You’ll get your wish. But I’ll be damned if I don’t get mine first.”
With her war banner thus lofted, the lonely young Pyrate strode off into the black ether. Whether towards an epic destiny or a fool’s death the gods’ secret to keep and her fate alone to set.