Amelia had spent many an hour alone in the dark contemplating odd and interesting topics. Granted, the overwhelming majority of those had been lying awake on her bed back home, but aside from the general comfort level the difference between then and now was entirely aesthetic.
She didn’t know how long she had been here. At some point during that span she had reached an irrevocable conclusion, which she had then proceeded to periodically mull over and quash down, but that now blazed in the forecastle of her mind and stared her down with the white hot intensity of a newborn star.
That was that she was, in fact, completely, perfectly, and in the true spirit of the Labyrinth, hopelessly, lost.
Though she'd known this for at least a good hour or so by this point, she was only now allowing herself to admit to it. The only reason she knew how much time had passed was because she had burned through three of her four pocket torches since she’d been down here. Now the last torch was less than ten minutes from dying out.
The big problem with caves, she decided as she trudged uneasily onward, was that every square inch of them looked exactly like every other square inch.
If it weren’t for gravity's inexorable influence, she could have just as easily been walking on the ceiling for all the difference it would have made. She had contemplated trying to find her way back to the door and going in after Silver. But that idea evaporated when she realized she didn't even know forward from backward anymore.
She was as utterly and pointlessly lost as a beast could be.
This wasn't a narrow avenue of stalagmites like she'd been following before. It was a cold, dark, unevenly-floored cave, with large, sharp, angular protrusions jutting out in every conceivable direction. More than once she had felt a hot swell of gratitude for the bespoke rhicor-scale boots her mother had bought her as a going away present.
Were it not for these she would have had a few large holes in her feet by now and little or no skin left below her knees.
“As vicious as a wyntyrdyr and tough as diamond,” the old cobbler had told Mrs. Roberts.
And he had been right.
Designed by evolution’s exacting hands to deflect hunting spears and adolescent wyntyrdyrs’ curved belly tusks, the armored hide of the rhicor fish wore the sheen of oiled pack ice in its depths. Which turned the creature into just another random spurt of sunlight in a river’s rapids when not seen from just the right angle.
Being about as long as Amelia was tall, it would seem only logical that the miraculous plates would be heavily prized, nigh deified, amongst Amurzan warriors. And indeed they were. Which was precisely the reason why only chieftains, warlords, authorized military staff, economic elites and esteemed political figures were permitted to wear more than supplementary bands of the stuff outside of ceremonial rituals or propagandistic pageants.
The six expertly shaped bands guarding Amelia’s calves and shins were just thick enough to be proof against small arms, and thus technically qualified under the thoroughly nebulous ‘Castle Privilege Act’. But once again, being the offspring of a famous, famously ruthless and, most poignantly, famously wealthy, “Private Military Officer”, as the Amurzan senate referred to pirates who paid all their racket dues, had its privileges.
It was amazing, Amelia thought, how fast a body and spirit dried out and toughened after just about a week spent absent a mother’s tender warmth and stove.
Like many privileged youths she had taken her above average living conditions for granted. Living under the roof of one of the most successful pirates of his, or any other living, generation had literally afforded her and her sisters the best their semi-aquatic region of the world had to offer.
Whether it be food, medicine, clothes, education or any of life’s myriad trims, trifles and fittings, the Roberts family had wanted for very little until their patron had been ripped from the world.
Each of the following three years had been distended trials in and of themselves.
The first had seen the disappearance of Amelia’s older sister, Talia.
The second the systematic seizure and foreclosure of most of Captain Roberts’s tenant lands, side enterprises and capital assets by greedy ex partners, predatory bankers, corrupt tax officials and good old fashioned burglars. All of which Amurza sprouted in as abundant supply and variety as vegetation.
The third and final year had seen Amelia, the middle and for all any beast knew sole surviving heir of the desecrated Roberts estate, make known her wish to follow in her late sire’s legacy footsteps.
Here, now, sitting blind and pitiful and alone with the bitter fruits of that dream come true, Amelia pondered on many of life’s most ponderous conundrums in the way one ponders on a nonsensical dream.
Thoughts like whether or not her famous father now being famously dead had anything to do with her mother letting her now only daughter, and indeed only family period, go with so little fuss, clubbed her fumbling faculties in the way tormenting mobs often did the weakling runt after knocking her to the ground and stomping on her favorite book while she watched in helpless agony.
She stubbornly fought off the urge to cry by repeating one of her father’s favorite expressions.
“Tears won’t get you anywhere. They just blur your vision.”
She and her father had, admittedly, not seen eye to eye on many an issue, not the least of which was their core ideal principles. Black Bart had earned his wealth and infamy through ruthless materialistic calculations and pragmatism.
Whereas Amelia had always been drawn by the lure of the imaginative realm and was fascinated by the arts, both mystical and material.
Her father had described both of these pursuits as “pointless window gazing and wishing on stars”, with only subtle variations thereon.
However, for all their many differences, of all the words Amelia could think of to describe her father, unwise or ignorant would not be among them. After all, he hadn't become the richest and most statured pirate since Flint by having salt for wits.
It was then that a ray of hope flashed into her mind as she remembered the parchment Silver had slipped into her hand.
It was a slim hope she knew. But she had no other ideas. The irony that this was to be her first, and in all probability last, real leap into the realm of managing her own destiny was brought to her mind on a gleaming silver platter with a hefty side of sedative and melancholic sauce.
It didn’t escape her that one or both of those ingredients may just have been the early markers of dehydration or hypoglycemia masquerading as real emotions.
But of course, she then thought, if any or all of the above were still happening inside her own head then what difference did it really make?
Either way, what remained true was that if she didn’t read the note now she’d probably never get the chance, seeing as her last torch had less than ten minutes of light left in it.
So then, with the last vestige of hope steadily consuming itself, she fished the tattered scrap out of her coat pocket. Ironically, it had been squished underneath all of her extra pocket torches.
By the dimming light of her last torch Amelia began to read aloud. Albeit at a more ponderous gait than she was used to. Her eyes having considerable difficulty parsing Silver's deselecting script.
His disalivened state had clearly mangled his writing style, if he’d ever had any to begin with.
However, there being now no material barrier between his brain and his body enabled him to transmute thought directly, as it were, to parchment.
This did not make the task of reading any easier. What with the letters being so incredibly fine and small she might have believed it if she’d been told they’d been typed in a butterfly’s footprints.
But as necessity is the mother of invention and a sinking lifeboat is the father of necessity, Amelia strapped her dwindling cranial resources to the task and after a few ponderous minutes of metaphorically scratching at the proverbial paint to reach the figurative bricks she at last came away with a serviceable transliteration of meaning, if not so much actual wording.
A string of words passed over and through her mental eye. Raw meaning trickled into and around her very cells. This was the start of a dream, Amelia felt.
She did not so much know as intuit also that it was the first stage of the dying process as well. The first gate between mortality and immaterial space, where the line between reality and fantasy becomes more of a fossil strata.
But all of that was irrelevant. The optional paths before her were exactly twofold. Give up and die, or act and possibly live. This being the only action possible besides dying, there was no real choice at all.
It cost her the first fourth of her light source’s remaining lifespan, but she managed to extract the general arc, mill and cadence of Silver’s penned paragraphs with gaps filled in by elementary deduction.
The gist of what she deciphered went as follows:
Alright lass, I’ve not got the ink and methinks you’ve not got the time for me to mince words. So I’ll get straight to it. If you're reading this you've realized Saedel isn't keeping you alive out of the kindness of his black heart.
He has something wicked planned for you. For us all.
I don’t know how to put this nicely so I’ll just be direct. Saedel thinks he’s found the Sanctum of the White Wand. Yes, THAT White Wand. I don’t know how he found it or what he thinks he can do with it. But I doubt very much it involves sugar treats and unicorns.
Don’t panic! I’ve researched more about Iradyl’s Sanctum than Professor Shanter.
I've written a brief description of each of the Seven Trials on the following page. It’s not much, but I'm afraid it’s the best I can do in my current state.
One last thing, and you may discard this if you wish but you deserve to know. However this plays out, you’re everything your mother and I had hoped for and then some. And I’m sure she’s every bit as proud of you as I am.
Fare well Daisha.
-Silver
P.S. Sorry about any bruising from before. I had to make the whole ‘loyal servant’ thing look real. You know how it is.
Amelia wiped her eyes on her sleeve.
She hadn't registered the presence of tears until the drop marks on the parchment gave them away.
Splinters of ice shived and cracked the shriveled edges of her hollow chest. Pangs of guilt and rage shot through the cracks like rounds of thunder chasing lightning.
The image of Silver lying shredded and being leisurely chewed on by a Naarfynder came unbidden to her mind. She pushed it away but couldn’t help wondering why he couldn't just escape through the walls.
Maybe that was part of the Totemfide. But she couldn’t be certain.
Her actual knowledge of the arcane was limited to and by the handful of hand-me-down scraps she’d bought off the Amurzan caravan haulers and tramp peddlers.
Sadly, these were about as much use to her as a hammer for a lockpick. The study of anything deemed by the ruling powers as “dark” or “bloodless” magick was broadly banned on her home Continent.
“That means any magick the rulers can’t see,” the Sire Roberts had explained to his girls. “They like faith because it keeps people calm and tame. It’s a blanket. Magick’s a sword. To a tyrant, any sword arm that’s not his or under his ministerial eye is a threat. So guard yours with care lest they be cut from your shoulders.”
Amelia would later find that Black Bart had been even more right than he’d let on. As he was about most things pertaining to the big bad world.
Most typically, “rogue” or “aberrant magick” use was punishable by immediate execution. But some poor “deviants” had been known to get off with an “indefinite indenture” sentence if the relevant official had any outstanding debts or else an arrangement with the Black Sky.
What few tidbits of actual hard lore her father’s fiscal favor had bought past the censors had sadly told her nothing that her deductive reason couldn’t have uncovered.
‘Focus,’ Amelia’s second thoughts prodded her fractal higher nodes. ‘Time and light’s running out. Fast.’
She flipped the parchment over and found a maze of the most incredibly small and finely penned handwriting she’d ever seen. It was so small she wouldn’t have even known it for writing.
But by the time her beleaguered brain had gotten around to thinking about how to go about making anything of it the last vespers of her last torch sputtered and spat.
The sparks hissed a dying curse to the air for its foul betrayal before succumbing to their own inborne incubus. Leaving Amelia stunned and blind. Marooned and effectively as dead as her torch in the tenebrous belly of Naarfynder.
A few heart pulses proceeded a rising hum from inside the walls. A few more in a steeply faster tempo carried images of a nefarious burrowing swarm writhing through her gray matter. Some ravenous monster hive like the hex-jawed Draconian Carver Worms, the saw-fanged Amurzan freshwater Piranha or the bioelectric Lekvolo eels of Lexa. Their multifarious maws held at bay by the threat of umbrielic fire, now emboldened in their native element to rush forth and collect their meaty prize.
Not that she had much meat on her to offer. Though she doubted this factor would calculate.
She shut her eyes and prayed to whatever powers her hopes may concern that death would take her swiftly.
It must be true, she thought, the stories she’d heard about death’s impossibly sharp reaping tool. That its edge was so fine it could cut light from shadow, sever a soul from its incumbent flesh.
She’d heard old sailors talk of swords made by foreign master smiths so sharp they could cut your legs off and you wouldn’t realize it until you tried to walk.
Of course those same heady talers could have talked the legs off a millipede, no extra blade work required.
Amelia did an internal diagnostic check. ‘I don’t feel dead’ she concluded. She then did a peripheral sensory check. Tuning in first to her ears, nose and exposed nerve ends. Even going so far as to stick her tongue out and sample the air like a snake.
And for her strange efforts the only clue she found of anything whatsoever having changed about her circumstance was a slim, dusky halo creeping onto the brim of her retinal scope.
As she watched, a pair of pinhole fire spots emerged at her pupil focal centers. These grew out to meet the dawning rim fire. Both blooming along their journeys from the somber tint of aged wine to the deep burgundy of fresh blood.
A solid minute or so turned the hot brand spots into ripe tropical fruits, and still their glow climbed upward. Through the longer wavelengths of the visible spectrum to become a fiery yellow nebula that enclosed the whole of her closed sight. Through whose amber miasma a fleet of vital purplish grey tributaries snaked along their propense course.
Amelia had never had many units of thought to spare for theology, or higher spirituality of any kind for that matter, but here, now, trapped in the bowels of an island that shouldn’t exist at the hands of a monster straight out of a storybook, she found her innate curiosity crushed in the oppressive, black gravitational fist of existential terror.
Sensing nothing approach but feeling the warmth like a candle, she pried her self-made paddock gates open a hair. Then a sliver. Then an inch.
Then a seismic cacophony of activity overloaded her neural dendritic cables, causing her muscular control centers to momentarily invert. Resulting in her eyes and mouth respectively springing and falling open.
If she didn’t know better she’d have sworn some unhumorous deity had injected the island’s vascular network with a stream of silvery gold coins. But then she remembered the gods had no senses of humor. And even if they did, this was the caliber of nonequatorial gag that would get a jester booed out of a butter churning convention.
When her neural fibers had worked out which was back and front, and her optical signals had stopped trying to traverse them via cartwheel, she recollected her jaw and blinked as if preparing her orbiculari for a daring new career as automatic gun springs.
To any beast whose proverbial book was considerably smaller and in a sizably larger print than Amelia’s these creatures would have been simply marked down as some as yet undiscovered species of moth or butterfly.
But upon the sort of closer inspection upon which all the best and worst philosophical foundations were predicated, a list of irregularities that would, in an aspherical sort of way, constitute a mathematical proof of paranormal fingers in the proverbial pie cropped into Amelia’s secondary vision.
As a particularly rich example, each individual creature seemed to be simultaneously transposed with each other beside it. It was as though they were performing a quantum-physical dance, wherein they and their nearest dozen partners would swap places at speeds unfathomable to any rational particle.
Accordingly, their concert action was that of a phosphorescent flare. Their light and form fading, trickling in and out of existence in a vaporous wave and reemerging at the other end of some luminal tunnel. Only in the moths’ case the tunnel seemed to be figurative and its exit destination chosen at random by a roulette wheel with an ever variant, and ultimately indeterminate, number of slots.
And in keeping with that vein of borderline mania, what bodies they had in between Heinzen steps did not, in so far as Amelia’s eyes and amateur understanding of insectoid physiology could tell, conform to any known structures of biology. Instead their forms better resembled a composition of gossamer circuitry than flesh, with delicate brass, or maybe gold, filaments for bones and intricate crystalline dynamos for organs.
In the wake of all that, to say she reeled at the observation that they also exuded some fair amount of heat would have been to suggest that Old Iron Hide would be done in by a Llaman shepherd’s stray hacking dart.
Indeed, she only registered it when a rogue squadron of the baffling bugs broke away from the greater body and for no readily apparent reason started flying in surgically precise, gyrating helical patterns about her hands and forelimbs.
Her impulsive effort to shoo them off her only served to rally further and greater swathes to their fluttering cause.
In ascending quantities they flew in hypnotically kaleidoscopic arrays. Forming dynamic bioluminescent sigils in the air and organic circlets around her limbs and collar.
Whatever the intended consequence of this display was she evidently failed to deliver.
After a mesmerized moment of inactivity on her part, a dissolute section started dragging on her fur-lined cuffs with force that struck her keen intuition as proportionately incompatible.
Not that this came as any great revelation. Frankly, at this point had she sampled the wall and found it was made of gummy licorice she would have just shrugged and kept on chewing.
A useful feature of the “karmic apathy” espoused by Chandralaic sage, Elkwielden Foalstest, was the beautifully elegant way it streamlined reason by conjoining subjective meaning innately to objective things. In the Stag Prince’s own phrasing, “if what we see means what we say it does, then our sight is what gives it meaning. Therefore, if nothing outside our sight means anything, everything we see means whatever we say.”
There was, of course, more than a single reason why theirs was the first civilization to die during the 4th Divide. Their refusal to adopt aeraulic travel and trade practices because “what’s the point? We’ll all either die here or die over there anyway no matter what.” had meant that when their land masses were violently shattered by the indolent tides of Aevon’s draconic substrata they’d had nowhere to turn and run. Left instead to the fatalistic whims of their burning slice of the cosmic stage.
Finding herself in an eerily similar place, Amelia reached what some philosophers would have derided and others championed as a ‘neutral’, ‘gray’, ‘nuanced’ or ‘compromised’ conclusion, depending on their personal points of reference.
The material result of her lateral figuring was that where an ordinary beast might have reasonably allowed space for reservations about taking directions from a swarm of mysterious biosynthetic creatures, Amelia decided that if she could forgo enough of her common sense to willingly follow in the footsteps of the living dead then this was the logical equivalent of practicing her harmonic scales or multiplication tables.
Besides, it wasn’t like she had any real choice in the matter. After all, even walking straight ass-backwards or off a proverbial cliff was preferable to lying still and slowly rotting wasn’t it?
As she consigned herself to their charge, she consoled herself with the thought that at least they weren’t armed or carnivorous.
They led her quite some distance, through long, narrow stretches of tunnels and winding caverns. Many times they turned left and as many times right. In all but a few rare cases she had to duck and weave through purposefully rough-sculpted fields of jagged mineral teeth.
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She might have almost gotten the impression that these transcendental jesters were secretly part Arachnid. That this whole tug and tie marathon was just them spinning her up into a pseudo material web for whatever exterior motives a gang of fourth-dimensional glitter bugs could possibly have.
Maybe, thought her hypothetical alternate self, it was all an elaborate parliamentary trick meant to hide from her the real fact that she had trekked through more parayards of tunnels, both with them and with Silver, than should have been structurally feasible to fit inside this island.
Whatever the truth, in this reality it didn’t matter.
Even if she’d had the head for such things it was so full of other esoteric wonders at the moment that there was scarcely enough room left for such mundane tasks as walking, let alone complex, abstract concepts like spatial orientation, directional mapping, mathematical relations or the mechanical and material principles of architecture.
In the last week she'd met a magickal talking skull, been beguiled and kidnapped by ghosts, and been held hostage by some fiend right out of an old fairy tale.
And now here she was walking almost literally arm in arm with a transluminal drone swarm through an underground maze to procure a legendary artifact to topple a nightmare king.
‘If I didn’t know better …’ her inner monologue started. But she cut that hanging thread off at its root for they had just arrived at what she could only assume was their destination.
The irony of her simply assuming a dead end signified anything but the universe having a laugh at her expense was not totally lost on Amelia. But her karmic erosion kept her eyes and head steady enough to assess the scene before her.
Another moon-shaded facade. This one considerably smaller and more austere, though also more lustrous than the two before. Which itself was counterintuitively odd, which she was starting to accept as the new normal, at least around here. Its gritty, bonemeal texture shouldn’t, by any intuitive reckoning, have lent itself to the polished veneer that scattered shards of particulate radiance in the same way the moths divided their local corporeality.
She had half a mind to walk up and touch the barrier just to make sure it was real. But she didn’t
About three paces from the ending barrier at about her own eye level her sole respite from madness stood like the proud grand sire of the great stalactile army at her back.
A hexagonal obsidian obelisk atop which rested a shallow silver crescent basin.
From here the ornamental dish looked to her like one of the manicured bits of fine tinsel decorum she’d seen flaunted in the mansions of many Amurzan elites than a piece of actual functional tableware. Its metallic skin gleamed and glittered like the white stone, except owing to a semi-organic pattern of embossed pictographic tile runes rather than an intrinsic quirk of the material itself.
At the foot of the lordly pedestal a detail distinct in its disorderly presence caught Amelia’s eye.
A faded message, hastily scrawled in dappled deep red pigment. It read simply:
Don't turn around.
She turned around, and then she screamed so loud that it set her crowning wraith mist of moths to panicked flight.
Their quantum tangle gathered momentum as each bug seemingly tried to flee in every direction at once. Though, one of the rules of their strange matter state apparently being ‘thou shalt not run away from yourself’, the result was an exciting energy field that filled her view entirely with an impenetrable screen of jungle blues and greens.
For the first time she could remember, Amelia would have preferred to stay in the dark.
Lying roughly ten paces from the pedestal and basin were the dry and dusty remains of an old Frog. A pirate, judging by his garb. Dead at least a few years by the state of his bones.
Even if its moth-eaten brown coat, one-legged trousers and single boot had not given away its identity, Amelia would have to have had the brainpower of a strand of mucus if it took her more than a single thud of her heart to fit this macabre puzzle together.
His left leg was missing, wooden substitute and all, but that same hand still held his crutch. The other clutched what looked to be a blunted quill daubed in the same coagulated shade of pigment as his final message.
Two and two always made four.
Unless … She dared a closer look. Since when did quills have purple feathers?
Something blinked at her from where the original John Silver’s liver ought to have been. Something gray and wickedly jagged.
A branch of questions and answers ricocheted through her mind like an impossibly fast sling stone.
She thrust a hand into her pocket, seized upon Silver’s final letters, crushed them in a fist and cursed them and then flung them away as though they’d shot and dismembered a deep, personal conviction.
In a sense, it might be argued, they had done just that. Albeit not intentionally.
She felt sick. Then she was sick. Or tried to be, at any rate.
She knew Silver was dead. She’d even figured that he’d been killed somewhere down here in the Labyrinth. But knowing was one thing. Actually seeing was another.
She had no idea what to feel.
She ran that thought over her tongue. She had no idea what to feel.
Her emotions came and went without her. A transmutational maelstrom raged beneath her feel, but nothing stuck. Nothing felt right. She thought she ought to be feeling something.
Instead they kept dividing and subdividing into every form, element and permutation of disgust, hope and terror before invariably clashing and eventually folding back into an impotent crucible.
But even this was useless. Having nowhere to go, nothing to burn, her molten fire simply froze over. The leaden underbelly melted into black, solvent grief that stuck to and slowly infested ever cell, fiber and pore of her insides like primordial grease.
‘Despair’ a voice that may or may not have been hers told her.
Numb shock forced her body backwards until it reached a solid object. At which point her legs gave out and she sank into a quiet heap against the cold obelisk opposite her lone friend’s remains.
She didn’t move. Didn’t think. Her chest rose and fell on standing orders from a spinal authority alone.
She hoped beyond reason to simply open her eyes and be back home.
She closed her eyes, mostly to stifle her tears, and in the quiet sanctity of her mind she prayed for a sign. Or if not that, then at least a distraction until death came for her.
Much to her … consternation, she got both.
When she opened her eyes her first thought was that she was dead. Her second was that she was hallucinating. Or perhaps dreaming. None of these would have surprised her at this point.
A radiant apparition had materialized between the wall and the basin. Its aural fire dancing in the contours of both. Spraying silken diamond threads about like radial rain.
The figure was female, or at least feminine. Her form the paradoxical compilation of the complex interference pattern of her own refracted rays.
Had Drake or Tim been present, they would have recognized this clever trick instantly for what it was. But, stunted in her judicial reason by deprivation, exhaustion and inexperience, Amelia stood in starstruck awe of the ‘Matron Primus’, Aerion’s, matrimonial twin aspect.
In a word, she was gorgeous. And every bit as haunting as any ghost or monster Amelia had yet seen.
She was about as tall as Saedel, but that was as far as the similarities went.
Her piercing eyes were mini galactic vortices. Her glassy skin was pale like the night sky viewed through a daytime fog sheet. Her long pointed ears were wreathed in a delicate ethereal garland crown woven of pure gold and silver which wove around her brow, over the back of her head to lay all the way down her back to brush her bare heels.
Amidst all this otherworldly splendor, the most distinctive characteristic to Amelia was her avatar lacking any discernable facial features apart from the twin white orbs.
“Amelia,” the being chanted like the vocal sector of a wind ensemble. Its saccharine chords penetrated her disaffected heart where they sat humming and chiming like a tiny choir of chimes, bells, harps and lyres to soothe the raging tempest that writhed beneath Amelia’s exterior.
“How do you know …?” Amelia started to ask. Only to have her question answered as soon as her own mind caught up with her mouth.
Iradyl laughed in minstrel chords. Her eyes twinkled as what normal eyes do in the formation of a heartfelt smile.
The Mother Goddess, for it was apparent that She could be none other, extended a glinting hand. “Rise my child. And stand tall.”
Amelia’s body moved through mindless obeisance. Her mind racing a thousand leagues ahead at relativistic speeds.
Could this all be some fanciful dream? It wouldn’t be the first unconscious storybook adventure she’d been on. But though every rational part of her tugged and gnawed and pleaded for her to see that something was amiss, that this puzzle had a massive, gaping hole right in the center, a part far older, far stronger and far less discerning that wished, oh so desperately wished for it to be real turned her third eye’s retinal lens into flash cotton.
A shower of ancient evil flames spewed forth upon first contact with the prospect of being the first beast in over nine millennia to lay eye, finger, claw or talon on the White Wand. To be the next bearer of the ‘First Gift’. The heiress to the ‘Second Sun’, Aerion’s, first and only mundane work.
“The False God craves my sacred dowry,” Iradyl said. Her miasmic treacle tone laced with crude contrails of cinnamon and vinegar. “But only true living flesh may pass through my Sanctum.”
She motioned to the rapturous plane behind Her. “You will find it beyond the Hall of Trials.”
A mercurial glint of what, on a lesser being, would be labeled mischief crept into the solar matron’s veneer. Naturally, Amelia took no notice.
“Complete this quest and all the power you’ll need to save your world and your friends will be at your command.”
The chemical fire in Amelia’s head waned slightly. Her frontal lobe seized upon this chance to launch a foray into the Cerebrum Primus.
In stark deviation with statistics and tradition, it won. Partially.
The words ‘your friends’ were thrust through the gates of her conscious world before their backing reason was swiftly routed and turned back. Leaving them floating there in abstract, with nowhere to direct their neural energy. The resulting feedback loop caused a cascade of shorts and failures in Amelia’s otherwise pious neural banks.
Iradyl, as if in answer to a question not even yet formed, waved a knowing hand and said, “you think too little of yourself dear one.”
Before Amelia had a chance to probe deeper into this, the avatar produced a palm-sized celestial orb from out of her own noncorporeal drape and cast it lightly into the air like she was prompting a butterfly to take wing.
The orb drifted around for a moment, then settled directly over the basin.
Amelia, sensing the words ‘look closely’ clinging onto the edges of this display, leaned in close. But she saw nothing but the familiar fleet of solar and galactic fires.
The words ‘see what’s not really there, but is’ crept around the aft sectors of her consciousness, searching for a staging point to charge through.
They found one. Albeit in the next kingdom over. Though, ironically, and more to the point, paradoxically, ultimately in the right castle.
Amelia’s eyes started playing visual games with the swirling constellations of mini stellar points. Her mind arranged them in orders no god would have thought to.
Just as a painter would never dream of incorporating real straw or dung into an idyllic depiction of a rural homestead, so too would no deity ever imagine featuring a spoon or a ship or a sword so prominently across the heavens.
As she continued to gaze into the abyss of tithes, in its heart was birthed and grown a spark of bright azure into an amorphous alien pallet.
Then, as Amelia watched, thoroughly bewitched, its insides started to swirl and dance, as if trying to break free of their crystalline confines.
Much to her own confusion, she felt herself starting to empathize with the blob of trapped pigment.
Perhaps indicatively, perhaps coincidentally, this feeling persisted exactly up until the colors in the beguiling bile began to shift. Then it was back on order.
The colors, those of the tropics, ultra-neon blues, greens, yellows and oranges, started to blend, warp and mutate. Forming and conforming themselves to one another as if drawn through an invisible mold press.
At first, all there was to see was a fuzzy line of gray below a fuzzier line of slightly darker gray.
But in the time it took her to think this, the darker shadow deepened until it was as black as flint. Then it stretched tall and thin like the mast of a ship, until its end eclipsed the horizon of its crystalline prison.
Meanwhile the bottom of the ebony spire funneled out and sprouted ridges and what looked like hair. These further solidified into abscess faunal strata and tangled masses of landscapes.
During the same tenth of a second the lighter shade ballooned into a broad expanse of swampy murk which consumed the entire lower half of the globe.
All in all it was a rather bleak and drab show in Amelia’s view. This dark, perverse shadow of wonderland. One which langured in corrosive muck and lavished to the point of morbidity upon the mind the cruel contusions, inversions and hideous renditions of hallowed scenes.
Or maybe it was simply that her eyes had yet to fully adjust to, or her mind yet to properly adjudicate, the new contrast.
Once armed with this new attack angle, it took only a second for her formidable imagination to do its work.
In a blink, where had been an abstruse hellscape stood the clear and unambiguous shadow of an island. Namely, a wordless, toneless voice from nowhere helpfully informed her, the selfsame abominable landmass whose randomly logical innards she presently had the displeasure of exploring.
The nascent inkling of a budding spark of a question pertaining to the exact point of this had only just breached her head’s photo-linguistic barrier when the image in the center of the crystal began to stretch, causing the rim to fold and cram in on and over and into itself. Quickly becoming opaque, then burning orange, yellow, blue and purple, then eventually glowing white like the leftover corpse particles of a gutted star spilled over the cannibalistic lips of a black hole.
What was left was the perfect rendition of a small axe-headed ledge on the Zen-Aphelward edge of the claret coppice. Over the base of which was anchored a sleek black dagger tri-mast. And on whose ledge perched a gallant squad of fools, heroes or miscreants depending on the observer.
When Amelia tried to voice her opinion, her entangled matrix of thoughts translated into a series of noises more like a sloshing bucket than harmonic speech.
She shut her eyes, swallowed and began again. This time with the intent to ask if that had been a revelation or a premonition.
What she heard come out of her mouth instead was, “why?”
It took her head a moment to comprehend that her body was attempting to communicate with a hologram that may or may not be a figment of her dying imagination.
The Mother Goddess crushed the orb in a star-beaded fist, then said in tones like the wafting ruffles of a silk ribbon, “your captain is a brave and noble spirit. His crew all love him dearly for it, and would throw themselves into fire at his command.”
The Goddess’s eyes flashed hints of scarlet. “You ask why they would risk their lives coming here? It is because he has asked it of them.”
Amelia felt her lips form a smile. Drake had brought them all the way here looking for her. But how …?
“How they are here is irrelevant,” the goddess said sternly. “What matters now is what you are going to do to protect them.”
Amelia was dumbfounded. “Protect them? They're better fighters than I could ever be. If I can survive here, they can too.”
Iradyl shook her head. “You are here because your captor wished it so,” she said. “He has kept you alive and safe thus far because he needed you so. But your friends are here by their own accord.”
Amelia understood. Rationally, she knew it made sense. Though, predictably, her heart tried to stage a revolt. Screaming that it was Silver who’d seen her safely through the Labyrinth.
But she knew that wasn’t the case. Yes, he had protected her from the Naarfynder. Yes, he had written her directions. Yes, he had walked her through the first portion of the maze and written her directions for the Sanctum. But it wasn’t he who’d summoned the moths, without whom she’d still be in the dark and who still ornamented her head and arms like pristine costume jewelry. And it hadn’t been entirely by his own choice that he’d been there with her in the first place.
And so her head, on countermand authority from some lower straight that hadn’t caught up with the mood yet, drifted up and down as though moved by one of those expectorating radiometric spurts known by those who made travel over the Abyss their life’s mission as ‘Guile Fonts’.
‘How … appropriate’ ruminated her animus stimulant pallia.
Its rationale being that these “Sun Mines”, as they were also known, were the product of extruded ionized particles stretched across intersecting magnetic fields whose poles suddenly, and with no perceptible warning above the surface, radically reorient or dispel completely.
In the interest of clarity, such phenomena were nigh perpetual. But occasionally enough built on top of one another that their excreted energy didn’t have the time or space necessary to harmlessly dissipate.
The result being a dense concentration of charged particles directly below the Abyss’s already tempestuous surface. The coronal shell would inflate like a bellows sack, sometimes growing to the size of a small island, before internal pressure would hit a critical point and the bloating bubble would pop. Its angry matter tearing itself free. Setting fire to anything remotely flammable within a dozen parayards and sending shock tremors that could be sensed, and often heard, around the world as the celestial cocktail blasted into the stratosphere.
Many an ancient account described these apocalyptic spectacles as a flaming fan-tailed bird, and that many again depicted a birthing dragon or the ascension of some new god or another.
These would often beguile early Era sailors by appearing as new land on the horizon. Even going so far as to fool their less qualified instruments. Only upon closer inspection did the doomed crews often realize their fatal miscalculation.
Amelia remained obstinate. “You know, he shot out a grenade fuse from a hundred yards. I mean … if any beast can put Saedel down it’s him.”
Iradyl chuckled. “Your faith in your new entourage is admirable young one. But your lack of experience will be your greatest weakness.”
Amelia paused. She knew the truth in Iradyl’s words. But that didn’t make hearing it sting any less.
Iradyl placed a hand on the marble wall behind her. “My Sanctum is both a home and a prison. It is a bulwark against the foolish, the craven and the evil. My treasure will only yield to one whose living flesh can withstand its torments.”
Something inside Amelia dropped and landed like an anchor weight.
The Mother Goddess reached out to pluck a smooth, rounded stone from the cavern wall and pressed it easily between her thumb and forefingers, producing a convex lens that, had she not been directly privy to its origin, Amelia would have thought was forged of crystalline light.
Before Amelia could process this far enough to question it, Iradyl produced a long-stemmed, thornless, pink rose presumably from the same quarter of nowhere she herself had stepped from. As if Amelia needed proof this was no classical garden bloom, Iradyl then bent, twisted and tied the stem around the glass circle like a wire.
She offered the botanic monocle to Amelia, who accepted it graciously but with the question, “what’s this for?”
Iradyl pointed to the where Amelia had hurled the parchment. “To see what your eyes cannot.”
She rose until her head nearly brushed the ceiling and started to fade away.
“The challenges before you are many and time is short,” she said, her voice fading into fractious echoes. “Remember this always; beware the False God.”
A dozen thoughts battled for control of Amelia’s tongue. But by the time any had formally staked a claim the last traces of the Mother Goddess were gone. As suddenly as she had appeared she had been replaced by disparaging antlers of shadow ranged in the moths’ pulsating amber light.
Amelia was stone for what felt like a year and yet less than a second.
She’d heard much of religious experiences, growing up in the backlands of Amurza. Beasts laid out prostrate in a Shaman’s hut portending the future while on the cusp of death. Or beasts high off ecstasy or rendered dumb from extreme deprivation or exposure receiving help or guidance from on high.
Most, if not all, courtesy of their favored Deus ex opium, or so her father had always led her to believe. And in the decade or so she’d known him, rarely had she been given cause to question his worldly insights.
Even so, having been in many a death hut, she’d always expected a true visit from the divine to be a bit more … enlightening. Or at least comforting.
But, as usual, she was left to stir a cold pot of whatever the intellectual equivalent of gravel soup was.
Had they really come all this way for her? Did she dare hope?
In truth, her choice was outside the question, for it wasn’t truly her choice to make. A tiny chip of ice fell away from her heart’s wall, and through its Nexi hole there seeped a dribble of the warm spring nectar known as hope.
It gradually plied its work along her circulatory route. Purging neglected pipes and unseizing valves that had been jammed shut with infernal ice.
Then another thought crashed through her glacial miosis like a spray of dragon’s fire.
If her herd really was here on Naarfynder and Saedel was still out there somewhere waiting with an army of ghosts, then they were …
‘No!’ Amelia cried. Whether out loud or internally she had no idea. Not that it mattered. She would NOT allow them to die for nothing. She would get free and she would help them.
Amelia retrieved Silver’s crumpled ball of notes, reaching for the bloody parchment as if it were a hissing Cobra’s egg.
She opened the newest one gingerly as though it too might turn out to have fangs, and moved Iradyl’s hand-made magnifier over the tiny script.
She kept her back to the boney heap of Silver and tried not to think about the blood-sopped “pen” it still held as she read by moth light.
I don't know if any beast will ever read this. But if you are and you’re still sane then take this advice. GET THE SAARD OUT OF HERE!!!
Oh who am I kidding? If you've come to this gods-forsaken place of your own accord, then you probably don’t have that much sense.
Listen up mate! I am going to paint you a picture of what you're about to face.
First a warning. Take your piety or dignity and shove em! They’ll be the death of you where you're headed. Though I suppose you can't be that pure hearted considering you've just desecrated a corpse.
Amelia pinched her mouth and nose in the crook of her elbow and squeezed her eyes as she fought back what struggled to get out.
When she was certain her body had settled itself, she kept reading.
All right. Now that you're suitably humbled, you'd best say your prayers or mystic chants or whatever it is you usually do before throwing yourself into the jaws of death. Because I guarantee this will be your last opportunity.
Amelia cocked her head unconsciously. Why would Silver be expecting a beast of the cloth to come down here? The only Order she could think of who’d be interested in the White Wand were in the Imperial Ministry. And if they got ahold of the “Ring Finger of Aerion” there was no telling what irreparable damage might be done.
Silver hadn’t struck her as the quickest match in the set, but he couldn’t be that stupid … Could he?
Take Dolsenec. That’s the block with the dragon on it. If it’s not with this note then the False God’s probably already made off with it. If that be the case, then you might as well go right back to your monastery. Otherwise take the silver basin off the pedestal, put the key end into the hole and turn it the usual way.
Amelia went over to the pedestal and gave it a slight tug. She found it was not attached. It was deceptively light for its size. She lifted it free with the slightest effort and laid it on the ground.
Upon inspecting its former resting spot, she saw an indentation. There were odd lines carved at the very center of the depression. Around these lines were carved strange alien letters.
They were in a language she had never seen, whose characters’ meanings she couldn’t even begin to guess at.
Some instinct deep inside her told her they were important. Reasoning that her instincts hadn’t steered her wrong yet, she took from her pocket a wooden wax tablet notebook and a brass stylus with a serendipitous butterfly carved into the ivory hand grip.
By the light of her wraith moth bracelets and circlet she transcribed the carving for later study.
Then she produced the Dragon Key and held it near the pedestal’s revealed indentation. The only problem was there was nothing there even vaguely resembling a keyhole.
At a loss, she tilted the alien artifact so as to examine its facets more closely by moth light. Upon reaching the supposed key end, she realized that the intricate draconic bas-relief thereon was the perfect mirror of the picture carved into the black stone indent.
“Conjoined twins,” she thought for some reason.
She pushed the key into the space and, sure enough, found it fit like a bespoke glove.
That being as it may, convincing the cumbersome mechanism to yield to her as the ones before had for Saedel and Silver drew on nearly every quantizable grain of power her body had left in it to give.
When a few rotations produced no results, she tried half a circuit the other direction.
Still nothing.
Stumped, Amelia had just formed the question what to do when a tiny jerk on her sleeves caused her to momentarily forget what she was doing and so relinquish hold over the key.
At which point, as though awaiting this precise cue, the pedestal began to sink noiselessly into the floor, taking the key with it and causing the white wall to split into six receding daggers.
In the space they revealed Amelia saw another dark empty expanse. She discerned the same motif in the architecture and general layout of the two adjoining areas.
She swore on Silver’s grave that, even if she had to wander the Abyss for eight centuries like the 4th Era Centaur, Promeus, she would find a way to travel back in time, find the genius who designed this place and smack him so hard in the face that every beast on Aevon who looked like him would need dentures.
It would be a lie to say she hadn’t at all been expecting, and dreading, this.
More of the same. Long black tunnels.
Except … one thing was different. A faint orange bulb burned at the far end.
She knew what it meant. But for some reason it took her brain a second to land on the right term.
Light. That was it. A literal light had just appeared at the end of the tunnel.
This cracked open her hope faucet a few degrees. Against her logical sense, she tentatively placed one foot over the boundary between captive safety and perilous freedom and wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or even more worried when nothing at all happened.
But something outside of her established cairn stopped her from completely crossing the threshold. An intuitive spike that brought the lens and parchment back out to the lamp light for a detailed inspection.
Sure enough, revealed at the bottom of the last paragraph were four tiny words just barely squeezed onto the page.
Don't forget the bowl.
She leapt back away from the Sanctum entrance and found the silver basin lying on the floor, right where she'd left it. She picked it up and examined it in the light of the haloing moths. It bore the same style of foreign symbols as the pedestal and Dolsenec.
Since her inability to read a dead language had not drastically diminished over the last couple of minutes, she cradled it under her arm and looked towards the faint orange glow down the dark corridor.
Just as she was standing up to go through the opening, she heard a soft “chink” from the unmarked space where she was fairly certain had been a stack of black stone just a minute ago.
She looked to discover that the Dragon Key had been quietly regurgitated by whatever force or mechanism had claimed the pedestal.
After reclaiming it she reasoned that free hands would be far more useful than ones burdened with a bunch of stylized metal and stone, she turned a heartsick eye back to what was left of Silver's first incarnation.
Blinking back threatening tears she stripped the bones of the brown leather coat and trousers, suspenders and sword belt. Leaving him only his black tricorn for dignity. And also because she had no use for it.
She knew that being alive meant that her need naturally outranked his. But she also knew that he wasn’t dead. She knew it …
She set herself to the task of fashioning a crude but sturdy backpack, into which she packed and bound tightly both artifacts and the used notes.
‘It’s a shame you didn’t have your sword or gun on you when you died,’ she thought, catching the skeleton’s eye then turning away, repulsed by her own callousness.
She hadn’t really known Silver all that well though …
‘Stop it!’ she commanded, smacking her temple. Much to the displeasure of her flittering escorts.
Thus readied, she stood and strapped on her motley creation. After a few quick bounds and jumps to test the weight and the straps, she turned to the Sanctum portal and on the end of a breath that could have intoned half a ballad she set her course for the lantern heart of the latest unknown.
If her many escapades into the nether realms of fiction had taught her anything it was that a foray into the unknown depths was bound to be either extremely short, unpleasant or both.
But if she thought she’d already experienced the worst Naarfynder could offer then Iradyl had been all too right in calling her naïve.