Trial 7: Trial of Spirit: Some sources write it as the “Trial of Soul”. Personally, I don’t really see the difference. Also, if you’ve made it this far Daisha, you’re tenfold the Pyrate your father was.
Perhaps, Amelia thought, a more accurate title would be the “Trial of Vision”. For that seemed far more to be what was being put to the test here.
She’d read and reread every jot and parcel of Silver’s brief notation regarding the final Trial more times than she had teeth.
At last, on the final reading she’d been forced to confront the possibility that she’d supped on the last drop of wisdom her guide had left to give.
She was on her own now. Officially. Completely.
Through no want of trying, she could find neither hide nor hair of anything even the most confused imaginations could have construed as a spyglass.
However, between Silver’s advisory of its irrelevance and this being by far and away the smallest Trial chamber to date she didn’t feel particularly deprived.
Nor did she terribly mind that the most perilous thing in this chamber was her own reflection.
In her defense, several days of intermediately wandering, fighting and generally getting tossed around in decrepit ships, ancient ruins and catacombs without eating, drinking or bathing, she reasoned justly, was bound to create a less-than-flattering subject for any mirror, magickal, divine or otherwise.
The problem was this one seemed to fit into the otherwise category. A silver face framed by wavy black iron locks, as tall and as broad as the FPA’s castlelike gate. The ill effects of her journey stages were exemplified, and indeed in places far amplified, by this unnaturally perfect chromatic touchstone.
By now she’d come to more or less trust Silver like she did the bar of steel tucked in her waist strap. But that did nothing to curb the assailing fact that she hadn’t the faintest semblance of a clue of what she was actually meant to be doing.
It also hadn’t escaped her contemplative comprehension that if the spyglass was meant to be here and wasn’t, the odds were then higher than she was comfortable calculating that the White Wand had been whisked off to the same mysterious patch of beyond. Which meant she was in a whole other world of trouble.
She refused to yield any of her mental ground to this idea, however. Not solely because if that were true it meant that she was trapped in this cave with no hope of escape, that she would die here, doomed to slowly wither away and rot. But such thoughts also trafficked in with them a far darker notion that such an end was not only appropriate, but deserved. A fitting end for the bastard Runt of the Roberts fleet.
An even worse prospect began to magnify her mounting despair. Even if she did manage to get out of this hole without the White Wand, she didn’t stand a chance against Saedel and his crew.
Amelia fought these trojan thoughts off too.
In the immortalized words of Alastair Machiovolo, “abstract constructs can do no ill. But nor can they do any proper good. Until ‘what if’ becomes ‘and now’ it’s a diversion. Treat it as an academic exercise. Or a game if that’s more to your liking. View it as an appendix to events. Categorize, catalogue or delete as appropriate, then pivot your efforts to more prescient, gainful matters until such time as their leverage can be best affected.”
Her number of more gainful prospects being somewhere around the degree of the typical Erandian winter, she reached out a hand and laid its palm flat against the mirror’s silver finish.
She had no idea what she’d expected to happen. But though whatever did was most certainly magickal, she had to admit it was a far less impressive display than she’d come to expect from the inner sanctum of a major deity.
Her image diffused into gray smoke only to reassemble itself a blink later into an idealized rendition of her older sister. Extraintelligently altered to be as many years older since the last time Amelia had seen her.
Tall, lean and fit. As striking in her looks as in her mind. As formidable as she was admirable. Her entire being radiated such easy strength and natural beauty that she had once been described by a precipitately poetic suitor as “a pristine natural wonder given anthro form”.
Amelia let loose a pensive breath. While seeing her allegedly dead sister at her living age was a tad disconcerting, it was far from the most daunting exercise of this adventure.
‘Hardest Trial yet huh? I guess Silver’s not the only beast who needs to check a dictionary.’
The image in the glass clouded once more. This time, when it regained a familiar shape, it was distinctly the likeness of her father.
He stood on the Royal Rover’s castle deck, looking much younger than she remembered him. He cut a handsome figure in his lofty seaman's hat and long, dark admiral’s jacket with brass trim and buttons. His right hand resting proudly on the shoulder of his youngest scion. Her own lighter purple doublet flapping in the imaginary wind.
This was no great surprise or revelation to Amelia. Evie had always been their father's favorite, even if he’d never have said so under torture this fact had never gone unnoticed by either of Evie’s older siblings.
Perhaps it was simply one of the perks that came with being the youngest. Or perhaps it was her privilege of being the only true blood prodigy of both Matilda and Bartholomew Roberts.
In any event, like their father, Evie had seemingly been betrothed to the Abyss since the day she’d hatched. She had been right there at his side on all but a select few of his many rigorous adventures.
Consequently, she had known everything he did about keeping and running a good ship by the time she’d learned to read and had every tidiest scrap of Roberts’ bravery, determination and wit. Thusly, the crew had taken to and adored her every bit as much as their Commander.
When, on her tenth birthday, she’d been given the position of Quartermaster, they had given her the honorific “Nashook”. An old shamanic title which meant “she who walks on clouds”.
As in all stories worth telling, however, for every great fortune earned in the Roberts family there came an equal and opposite dark streak of doom. The most prescient one being in the form an odious stretch of sky at the Nadirmost corner of the map referred to by canny sailors as “Daggerpoint's Folly”.
To cunning shamans and soldiers it was called “the Final Depth”.
By wise and superstitious landvarcs alike, “Drachyn’s Quarter”.
And to all competent leaders, and consequently most official maps, it was marked simply as the “Forbidden Zone”.
This area was rightly forbidden to any decent folk by most of the major governments on Aevon, due to the presence of a band of infamous, ravaging cutthroats known to all Adamic speaking civilizations.
The Black Death.
The Enemy.
The Terror of the Nine.
Eviscean Raiders.
Their origins were unknown. Their motivations: unknown. How many were there? Unknown. Where did they come from? Unknown. What did they do with the treasures they stole? Unknown.
As many rumors abounded about their being an undead war fleet cursed to scour the Abyss for all eternity.
Notorious for their phantasmic blitzkrieg attacks and a pension for not even leaving bodies behind and rightly feared for committing entire merchant convoys and even military flotillas to Drachyn’s posthumous realm.
Precisely where the alternately Commander, Lord Sir, Admiral, So’O, Boss, Commissaire, Chief or Captain Roberts depending on the hour and company, along with his youngest offspring and his entire acclimated war posse had met their untimely fates.
Even the Armada knew better than to extend its tentacles that far abroad.
On those rare, dire, excursional occasions when fleets ventured down under they always went with the utmost extremes in caution and abundant concentration of force. And even then only sometimes returned intact, let alone with whatever prize or bounty they’d been sent there to collect.
The Eviscean fleet was said to be a force of ships so numerous, that their sails would darken the sky and the high density exhaust particles their alternate praetor-alchemic fuel created would violently react with and consequently ignite the coronal Abyss vapors.
This effect, learned of and quickly dubbed “the Vale” by the wider Abyss-faring populace left as its calling card a wake of writhing, smokeless fire that slathered the clouds above and below with streaks, dapples and arcs of irradiant lumens like a kaleidoscopic furnace that could mark a crime scene for hours or even days afterward.
Such places were often branded Necropoli, or “Dead Regions”
Destroying one Raider ship would instantly summon a dozen more ethereal ships from the very desolate heart of the Abyss itself to claim their souls as penance.
Though the stories varied as much in height and wit as the tellers, owing to their being comprised exclusively of compiled presumptions, relayed assumptions and wildly variable interpretations of whatever weeks-old evidentiary carrion scraps the Wild Hunt left adrift.
Like many tragic heroes both before and since, Black Bart had made a fatal error when he had sailed his whole twenty eight strong force into the forbidden skies off the Zenaphelern tip of Daggerpoint in a foolhardy errand to bring the fight to and stomp out the abominable Scourge that had plagued the civilized world for at least as long as anyone had records.
What, or whom, had compelled him to take on such a mythically preposterous task would forever be his and the eternal keeper’s personally kept secret.
After all was said and done, of all the ships and warriors that had followed their Commissaire’s fatally misguided lead that day, naught but a single drifting longboat remained for future discovery.
Itself wearing many scars of a losing struggle and empty save for a few bloody scraps and a single pair of soiled leather boots.
But, as the Fifteenth Pyrate Rule concisely put it, “scientists and historians have always made for the worst storytellers.”
By the time any word of the tragedy had even reached the rest of the Roberts family, port tavern, barroom and brothel frequenting tongues across the lands already told grand stories of a long and epically ferocious battle in which Captain Roberts singlehandedly slew four dozen Raiders before falling to the bladed hand of their allegedly unkillable leader, Admiral Scythe.
Known in some arterial sectors of the Depths as “Molkoth, Satyamna or Ndjar’ Tyr”. All of which meant essentially the same thing. “Dark One.”
Nashook, they said, had fared similarly. Dying before the Rover’s mizen with sword and gun in hands and the words “rashataan o’ie laluuk!” or “the old spirits (ancestors) are with me!” on her lips.
Amelia had found several glaring logical loopholes in these accounts. Mostly centered around their basis in the number of cutlass nicks and blood stains on the aforementioned sole surviving bit of salvage.
However, at the time that guttural phrase had been the subject many a horrific nightmare.
But what had shaken her far more was her elder sister’s reaction to the news of their kinds’ fates.
Talia hadn’t said a word. Indeed, she hadn’t seemed to hear at all. Through her own tears, Amelia had watched her sister just stare off at aethereal nothing as if being called by something near enough to hold and yet also infinitely distant.
When their mother had tried to call her eldest back down to Aevon, she had snatched her arm away as though the other’s pleading touch were a slashing nettle branch.
That night she disappeared into the Amurzan Backlands, never to be seen or heard from again.
This literal overnight shattering of Amelia’s entire world had been the primary catalyst for her enrolling at the FPA. The cruel and callous dispatching of her family by marauders had served to harden Amelia's resolve to never again be a victim to incalculable chaos.
Eventually coming to the conclusion that if she couldn’t stop the inevitable storm from striking, then she would become the immovable rock at its center.
To that end, her every waking hour preceding her coming of age to enroll herself in the FPA was spent carousing with and nursing her nascent inner fire.
For three long years that felt to her like so many days she had honed her body and mind as best she could on her own.
However, being robbed of her father’s personal guidance and with the plurality of Amurzan trainers being, for a variety of sociopolitical reasons, disinclined to teach the ways of battle to a female, she was left with little choice but to defer to the archival tributes of old dead combat masters.
Thankfully, what with her home region being famed for its skilled warriors and her father being a prodigious master of the killing arts, that knowledge wasn’t hard to come by.
Thus she had dedicated her daylight hours to hardening her body through rigorous jungle excursions and had haunted her father’s library during the long blink of the moons.
Delving deeper into concrete subjects like math and science than her once fluttery attention span would have allocated the patience or energy for.
Devouring dozens of lengthy treatises on any practical subject she could name. From lockpicking to metallurgy. Doctrines of advanced carpentry to masonry and blacksmithing like as many candy fruits.
Scrolls on medicinal herbs and poisons, fighting manuscripts the size of temple stones and books on all the great and minor aspects of warfare in her father’s personal library.
When she’d exhausted all nonfiction sources at her disposal she’d then gone so far as to plumb the fiction section for any loose scraps of historical or practical wisdom that might lay buried in the layers of dramatic and poetic licenses.
But it was never enough to satiate.
“You can never appease a wildfire. Feed it a twig and it will take a branch. Give it a stone, it will take your hand and arm before you can blink.”
Was that Martvel Summons who’d said that? Or was it Perci?
Within two years she had completely exhausted her father’s personal archival mass. And so she had turned her pet inferno’s eye towards physical exercise.
So consumed was she by her mission she’d hardly noticed the passing of time until her thirteenth birthday. That momentous occasion had seen her consumptive heart raise her ahead of the Cresting sun and carry her down to the harbor to purchase her Academy Wayfare Token.
And from there events, as the saying went, were history.
A sour boa tendril writhed to foul life in Amelia’s guts. The hungry venom of grief soiling its mass as it stretched out from her sallow depths to wrap around and constrict her aflame heart. Choking her lungs and stomach of their shares of vital plasma. Squeezing the fertile stream instead into her eyes and throat so that they swelled and burned..
How cruel the cosmos’ sense of irony was. That she should only think of her mother, alone and without anyone to console or comfort her and yet still fully supportive of her now only child’s errand, while sitting at the bottom of what may very well be her own self-dug grave.
There was a pull, a nudge, a friendly little jolt given by the inflexible stone which had become her resting place. It was a simple promise, one of everlasting peace and stillness. But it was one she felt sure the universe would actually deliver on.
And just like that, she was home again.
Of course, there was still the technical problem of actually physically getting out of this abysmal proving ground. But that was by far the more easily solvable issue, at least from where she stood at just this particular moment.
She took stock. She was alive for the time being and still, as far as she could tell, lucid. She decided it would suffice.
Her by then lukewarm blood had turned to sand before the Trial’s mesospheric kaleidoscope had even fully retracted.
When it did, her faux strength fled along with it, blowing out her pilot heart flame in its exit wake.
Mirrors and soul searches were common enough devices in the plethora of old tales she’d scoured through. Their one common element was that the hero was not allowed to turn away lest he forfeit the test.
She stood fast as a mooring post. And just as stiff.
The figure of her mother knelt tending a familiar hearth fire. She turned and gazed out at Amelia through the glass with familiar eyes and spoke in familiar tones.
“How could you leave me? You’re all I have. I supported you, gave you everything you have, and you just cast me away like a saarding weed.”
That voice was soft and wholesome. Like a cup of warm broth for the ear. But the beast Amelia knew as her mother had never used stones as punctuation marks or shaped her syntaxes of fresh forged caltrops and garrot wire. And she’d certainly never swore or wielded guilt as a cudgel.
“You left me here. Alone. A wealthy widow in a land filled with craven bastards, vermin and scavengers.”
Just as her father had often done, both intentionally and not, this voice sliced Amelia's hitherto unwavering resolve to ribbons.
“How could you?” the vision repeated. A grain of dejection mixing with the corrosive ire to form a conjunctive toxin that put Amelia’s natural defensive line to shame.
“I didn't,” Amelia choked through clenched teeth. She dared not blink. Her vision became clouded by mists of unshed tears.
“I left so I could …”
‘So you could what?’ a voice that wasn’t really a voice snarled in tones that weren’t really tones. ‘What exactly was your plan?’
No answer came to her that didn’t sound like an excuse.
Avenge Evie and father? Find Talia? Save mother? Save the world? Father had already tried and died for that hopeless cause. As had legions before him. What had possessed her to think she would fare any better?
The same thing that possesses all adventurous youths, naturally. That fledgling sense of invulnerability owing to an as yet unblemished record of success backed up by ignorance and inexperience.
Of course, as the Equestrian Cardinal Fernandez Holtz observed when challenged to a martial rite by the Archduke Dé’ Sirgulleion, “every beast is a master who has only faced phantom opponents. For they are always supremely skilled and yet always easily defeated.”
‘What would you do you little fool? Fight the whole saarding universe? You couldn’t even figure your way out of this bloody dungeon without some dead Samaritan to literally spell out the way for you.’
Like an archer sensing the critical instant in which to loose her deadly shot, her mother’s eyes narrowed into grim shutter slits. Their abnormally radiant irises changing from radial forests to compact sun disks literally in a blink.
“You left home because you are selfish,” the heartless image spat. Her voice had gone bitter and icy, but the words seared like hot nails.
“Too weak to save your family and too weak to accept that they would have died with or without you.”
Her mother’s ghastly image turned as if to walk back into whatever parallel arc it had slithered hence from. But its aspect stayed rigid. Its posture hard and regal. Just enough of her real matron shone through to wrench Amelia’s heart valve a few painful degrees.
“To think that you could ever measure up to your father. The nerve. You’re not a tenth the pirate or the beast he was. And you never will be.”
There was venom in her words now. They stung like acid. Amelia became conscious that her face was stained by long wet streaks. Her heart wanted to erupt right out of her chest, but she knew she must hold strong.
“I'm here to avenge father!” she bleated in evident panic. “And Evie!”
She knew this was a bold lie. But she was compelled to speak, even if not quite enough to give voice to the real truth.
Her mother’s predatory visage whirled on her.
“You pathetic child!” she roared. “How dare you speak of their lives as though they are mere pawns! I know why you’re really here. I see into your black heart. You left because you wanted power. You’re just as feeble and depraved as all the other festering cowards who run Amurza. But you lie. You lie to yourself and to your own mother!”
Inspirational fury consumed Amelia. In its resurgent fire all her bleating wretchedness charred and blew away on incendiary winds.
A reinforcement surge of primeval strength brought her upright. Her breath was fuel. Her will was raw Magnolsis bursting with auto nucleic voracity, plying every avenue in its reach for an exploitable flight vector.
She gave it one.
Locking eyes with the phantasmal distortion she said with the voice of a nascent storm’s rumbling yawn, “you are NOT my mother”.
The insolent effigy balked. Its mouth moved in approximal gestures of words but no sounds dared commit themselves to the affront.
Amelia took that chaotic moment to rally.
Martialing her own will to this new fulgent banner, Amelia continued, “I may not be a Pyrate yet, but I am my father’s daughter. I have his blood to thank for my strength and I have his wisdom for guidance.”
She rattled Silver’s blood-stained parchments before the glass.
These weren’t her words. Not entirely. But they had the desired effect so she didn’t pry too deeply into their origin.
“How dare you,” was the shade’s toothless retort.
Amelia snarled back. She’d had enough stupid games for one lifetime. Her heart stirred itself to a wicked froth. No longer was she the weak, scared child who needed her ego nursed. She had faced and conquered warlike goliaths, murderous behemoths and deadly traps. She would not be bested now by her own uppity reflection.
Stronger than she’d ever been, she raised herself to her full height. Pride tempered steel flashed in her eyes when they fell on the offending dementor. Its very presence now offended her. She would take this fight to her enemy’s house and she would drive this lowly imposter back to the despotic abyss that had expectorated it.
This thing, this displaced doppelganger, was nothing but an abhorrent simulacrum made to test her will and resolve. In her mind she refused to suffer the continued indignity of its existence. In her heart she accepted it, and thus her body made it so.
“My father taught me strength,” she said. “He showed me the light and now I’ve taken his torch.”
A moment’s pause. A buffer of hesitation. A time key no longer than the faintest twitch of a buffeted flame whisker. Though she agreed with what she’d just heard her mouth say, she hadn’t the faintest idea where the thoughts had come from.
Still, again they worked. So again she belayed her inner quest for the time being.
The shade’s imposing shadows softened. A glistening caste of honey swarmed over its now suddenly erudite porcelain features. Basting it in succulent warmth as a look of almost carnal satisfaction crawled onto its face.
Which, with said masque still bearing all the essential markers of her semblant biological parent, gave Amelia shivers of a kind normally reserved for nontoxic organisms. Or at least ones not hardened against such reflexes by the corrosive plethora of the jungle.
“Good,” it cooed. “Very good.”
“I …” Amelia stammered, her will beginning to flicker.
“He ... I ... that is … I …”
The reflection frowned, then folded her arms and drew out a fluty sigh. “So you merely suspect then,” she aired. “Very well. It shall have to suffice.”
“Wh …?” Amelia tried and failed to ask.
Her mouth remained open as though she intended to speak again, but her thoughts refused to organize themselves into anything more coherent than the odd grumble or grunt. So she remained stupidly quiet.
“Congratulations my child.”
How was it that the word child out of any mouth besides her real mother’s sounded like a passive aggressive slur?
Maybe because neither of her parents had ever called their own children that.
In any case, her mother’s lips and tongue formed around the words, but there was only one being Amelia could imagine having a voice so densely layered, so richly resonant.
The avatar curtseyed. “You’ve completed my Trials. As promised, what you seek now lies directly ahead of you. But still always remember, beware the False God.”
It was a surreal experience, watching her mother's image dissolve into her own reflection. Akin to watching glass melt into water.
An instinct module so far removed from her rational being it could have stabbed it from behind reached around and planted thought bubbles under her breast that sprang out of her throat in the form of an indolent cry.
“Wait! Mother! I … !”
The likeness Amelia’s deepest and most sporadically intelligent subsidiary lobes had tagged as her mother had dissipated before her higher functions caught onto and snuffed out the gag.
In its place was left the ghostly visage of a girl garbed in the surprisingly durable remnants of a life that seemed now to have belonged to somebody else.
A crude three point sling sack cobbled and lashed together from raiment scraps stolen off the bone-bare carcass of her posthumous paternal patron hung off her bony shoulder and was moored around her narrow waist.
Her floral headdress was in pitiful ruins. Its bone anchors and purity silver chains ironically stained the colors of a dead fire pit.
That said, in her book, the simple fact that it was still in its place and as recognizably intact as it was spoke more forcefully to the enduring quality of the craftwork than any antiquary or artisan’s professional critique.
Her face and hands were stained with the mineral recipes of half a dozen epochs, and blood.
Was it red or purple? She couldn’t tell. It was all just shades of black to her in this light.
A callous wave of thought brushed over her amygdala. ‘Probably the knight’s.’
Echoes of the words daubed their encoded meanings onto her temporal and hippocampal officiaries as she tried to wipe her sable-streaked face with her blackened sleeve. Which succeeded only in trading one fashion set of stains for another.
The mirror slid silently aside, revealing yet another open portal. Through which Amelia stepped blithely into a silo chamber about the same volume as Tim’s lab. Though it felt far larger on account of being substantially less inhibitively packed.
Like its forebretheren, this one was spartan save for its set of unique furnishings. In this case a pair of square white marble plinths about as wide, broad and about two thirds as tall as their visitor comprised the sum total.
Affixed atop the lefthand station was a black lantern cage. In which was locked what looked to be a polished bone clarinet.
Upon closer inspection, however, the idiosyncrasies of this alien device made quick and decisive work of any doubts
That it was carved from a single bent rib was apparent enough. Though from what sort of creature the bone had been stolen Amelia couldn’t pretend to guess at.
Hypnotic floral patterns and sharp, thorny runes spiraled along its broader forehand section. Etched into the white at the fipple end and inlaid with golden lava rivers, they wove a concordant visual poem down the truncated instrument, driving pronouncedly through a black tarry carapace at its fore end.
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On the underside of which was slung a small brass cuboid device of some sort and pearly orb. Over them hung a black clamshell saucer, from whose basal nose protruded an elliptical cage of blood-tinged treacle vines.
What sort of strange function any of these things served, if any, was to her about as clear as how a goddess could have congealed such a topsy contraption.
‘Well … I’m not sure what I was expecting, but that’s not it.’
With well learned caution she approached the display box. Thinking blankly that unidimensional tone of her internal monologue seemed at displacing odds with both the momentous objective and emotional gravity of the moment.
Later on she would give this also over to the effects of severe deprivation.
For right now she hadn’t the time or energy to spare on tangential inquisitions. She still had this secret eighth test to complete and an epic battle to wage and win soon thereafter.
As carefully as she would inspect the trigger mechanism of a medieval trap she examined the entire setup before trying to remove its treasure.
If something jumped out at her in here she wouldn’t have space to maneuver. She would have to rely on her memory of hypo dimensional swordplay to defend herself. Not a play she was very eager to wager her one life token on.
But after exhausting both her supplies of ingenuity and frustration and having made somewhere on the low end between one and zero units of progress, she decided she might as well put her dragon fire to proper use.
She unsheathed her captured blade and was readying to test its metal against the guardian pen when she remembered the silver basin. Whose heft and balance had by now become as familiar as that of her own limbs.
She traded her steel for silver.
Upon examining the second pillar, she found that the expertly carved workings on its top perfectly matched the fittings on the bottom of the basin. She set the basin neatly onto its intended seat, and it snapped consummately into place.
She couldn’t remove it now even if she wanted to.
The lack of a subsequent click or any sound was in itself enough to prod her towards concern. She didn't need her eyes to tell her that the Wand’s adamantine house was still tightly fastened, with its contents still held agonizingly just out of her reach.
What had she done wrong? She'd come this far. She'd passed all the Trials. Or at least she’d been allowed to pass. Hadn’t Iradyl’s avatar not just said a minute ago that the Wand was rightfully hers now?
Why couldn't she reach the saarding thing?
‘What you seek lies directly ahead.’
“The cruelest gift the gods could give to any mortal is hope.”
Amelia poured over every solitary parcel of Silver's notes, but they offered no useful instructions. She took out the Dragon Key and studied it all over with her magnifier. When this too proved fruitless, she turned her magnified eye to the silver basin, only to be met with yet another dead end.
With her options this time truly depleted, Amelia plopped to the floor in defeat and leaned back against the cool stone pillar. What wasn't she seeing?
A small, cruel black flame started sniffing around the peripheral firewalls of her heart. Searching, listening, feeling for the tiniest loophole or crack to steal in through.
Amelia’s hands coiled into claws that then hardened into rage-hardened fists. She would not surrender. She would not be beaten now. She had come too far, endured too much to quit when her prize was all but literally within her reach.
And she couldn’t go back.
She hoisted herself up and began methodically scrutinizing the room from top to bottom. Meticulously searching every square inch of stone with her magnifier. Looking for any hint of a whisper of a sign of a clue as to how to proceed.
Nothing. Dead silence on all fronts.
After her third pass over the same span of inscrutable stone and having discovered nothing except the anticipated bare rock and dust, Amelia was forced to confront the possibility that her predicament really was entirely hopeless.
She pressed her head against the wall and allowed her welling emotions to spill out onto the material world in the form of molten tears.
Her mother’s shade was right. She was no Pyrate. Soon she would be nothing at all. Just dry bones and lost memories like her father.
The more she dwelt on it, the more she was convinced she was going to die in this saarding pit. Alone and unremembered. Her time and efforts left in ashen waste. Her woe bitten ambition and potential squandered on some pointless, thoughtless quest.
Just like her father.
So resigned was she to this fate that the voice had to call her by name three times to break her of the despairing assumption that it was just a hallucination.
Thankfully, whether by the fickle grace of the Mother Goddess or by sheer good fortune, this phantom turned out to be as real as she was and persistent.
“Have I come at a bad time miss?” it asked.
She looked up. And when her heart leapt it carried the rest of her along across the room to the source of that beloved voice.
She grabbed him around the middle and squeezed hard enough to make him grateful for the fact that he no longer had or needed lungs.
The ‘how’ of the situation was overshadowed by the paralyzing ‘what’. How she could hug a being that could walk through twenty yards of solid rock was of little value compared with the sheer fact that he was here and in about as good a shape as a being of his corporeal state could be.
The specter indulged her for far longer than any corporeal being could have. Patiently riding out her adolescent emotional tide.
When her mind had reconnoitered the neural roads between her brain and her mouth, after several embarrassing false starts, she managed to squeak out the words, “Silver. You’re …”
She stopped herself short of saying “alive”. But Silver knew what she meant, and in his paternal way reciprocated his adoptive cherub’s delirious affections.
They passed through one of the infinite moments commonly experienced by dislocated families before Silver took it to mind to ask as though they were old friends reminiscing over a pint, “so what kind of mischief have you been getting into while I’ve been gone?”
His inflexion said I’m genuinely curious.
However, his tone said I already know, but I’m going to respect your integrity and intelligence by asking anyway.
Amelia looked into Silver's hard face and soft eyes and could only smile.
To a beast who did not know, or did not care enough to look, he would seem as stern and stoic as the cavern walls that held them captive.
But behind his shimmering spectral eyes burned the kind of pure hearth light that not even the darkest or most depraved magicks could rob a hearty spirit of.
She relaxed her grasp just far enough to allow him the freedom to answer her next shaky question. “How long have you been …? How much did you hear?”
She saw his sapient spark flicker. A phenomenon that, in living eye, a momentary retreat into circumspective thought.
Any beast not paying the strictest attention wouldn’t have noticed, let alone recognized it for what it was. But Amelia had scant else to focus her attention on at that moment.
Silver’s next words, “enough to lift some major weight,” carried sufficient force to give Amelia profound empathy for boards struck by cannon fire.
“Now,” Silver continued in an oddly chipper tone, “what do you say we pop open that there stubborn trophy case and get you on your way?”
Her own crushing weight, momentarily forgotten with the arrival of Silver, was once more upon her neck like a giant’s axe. The black flame had her heart’s castle surrounded. Its insidious spies offered dubious bribes to the guards. Over which many tyrannical bids were cast and many a fearsome battle was waged over the right to rule within.
For one dreadful moment, in changing part of her soul for fragments of trespassing power, one nefarious faction won over temporary control of her motor and speech diodes. And therein implanted the device which shook her head and sent the phrase, “I've tried. It won't budge” to her mouth.
Silver smiled. “Well, let's see if we can't iron out that little wrinkle, shall we?” the old sailor quipped.
In that moment, an unnaturally pure logical bolt shot and ricocheted through the depleted scaffolds of Amelia’s deepest mental substrata.
The construct it raised threatened to cast indelible light on her circumstances were she but to pry off its seals.
It has been said in not so few words by many a scholar and high thinker throughout the ages that knowledge and happiness are inversely correlated.
From the Mentan Hydrymyl; “moderately wise should each mind be. Too much is to ply one’s own heart with needless chains and to ply one’s spirit with spears and axes.” To the Shilvanah Igba of Horntooth, “wisdom is the fruit of the tree of knowledge, which must be kept in prudent attendance. For if any branch should grow too heavy, its bounty will sink to the soil and be soured by despair.”
And then there was the unofficial, inbred credo of all despots and tyrants, be they king or emperor or managerial clerk, “happiest is he who doesn’t know a great many things.”
“Ignorance is bliss, yes. But a blithe spirit is scarcely living. And while a pirate knows none for his master, the mind is no safe haven. For though it can make a brimstone pit seem a bountiful brook, in all truth it is nothing more than another simple toy for the great cosmic tyrants.”
That had been Flint paraphrasing the collected works of Spetz Nera, Leovoy Talen and Neochev Stallenkya. Three of the greatest minds the craggy lands named for the signature carnivoran weapons had ever produced.
In that moment, all Amelia’s reason and sense of caution was abandoned in favor of unmasking a truth that may otherwise forever remain disfigured, disguised and obscured by the long shadows of memory.
“Silver …?”
“Yes.”
She knew the line of questioning she was about to embark on could end in only one of two uncomfortable revelations, neither of which she fancied grappling with under present circumstances.
“Did … did you know my father? Or my mother?”
A tantalizing pause as Silver’s eyes went milky again. When he came back to himself, either the impending answer was no or he was an exceptional actor.
As though he were reading from a menu he said, “better than they may wish or admit.”
Ranks of electric cavalry shot up Amelia’s spinal column to drive white hot lances into her brain.
“What's that supposed to mean?!” she spat with considerably more violence than intended.
Silver waved it off. “It's not important,” he said. “Just some old wounds never properly healed. Nothing you need to worry about.”
He’d said that. She’d heard that. But she knew he might as well have said you don’t need to know, so don’t bother asking.
If he thought she would be that easily dissuaded he had as much emotional or social sense as Prokvert.
A wicked fire had been stoked, a slim shard of midnight implanted, of a kind that only the highest of scholarly magi or most despotic overlords could embody.
She had tapped into an extraplanar artery, however unwittingly, and though she couldn’t say with any certain degree how, she knew this as surely as she knew that she had two hands.
Somehow, somewhere here at her fingertips lay a codicil conduit of cosmic nectar she’d never been meant to uncover. And as the Sixteenth Pyrate Axion saith, “wheresoever lieth gold will also invariably be found to harbor dragons.”
“But you did know them,” she pressed.
Silver heaved a covering sigh. A melancholic smile bled along the edges of his voice as he said, “you are just like him.”
Amelia genuinely couldn't tell whether this was a compliment or a roundabout insult. But it also didn’t matter as she sensed his defenses faltering.
If you really want answers, push him. Now. You won’t get another chance. After everything you’ve come through, least of all you deserve to have this.
The notes hit her brain with the twinkling intonation of tiny bells, but with the tempestuous ferocity of a fully articulated brass ensemble.
So mighty was their chorus that she didn’t hear her own rational mental chamber counter with, ‘answers to what?’
And so the erroneous orders were sent. The insidious banners on her tongue were raised, the indelible trumpet sounded.
“Who was he?”
That was her voice. But it was not her question. At least not as far as she could tell. But then, what good were a mere mortal’s perceptions in the heart of a goddess’s personal trove?
Still, what could have possessed her to ask something so ridiculous? She knew who her father was.
And more to the point, what exactly was she aiming for here? What did she expect this little game of hers would accomplish?
Something in here stank of magickal trickery.
Regardless, for a moment her puxatonic shadow-puppet-fake-out strategy seemed to be getting results. Albeit not the sort liable to be noticed by someone not actively attuned to the nether side of psychological mechanics. Which Amelia was, but only vicariously through Silver.
The ghost looked her over as though judging her weight in coins. Then he answered in a more severe tone than she had ever heard from him, and which she doubted his organic voice box would have been capable of producing.
“You don't know.”
He’d phrased it as a question, but everything else about it said, ‘and I’d rather you’d stop asking’.
Amelia opened her mouth only to have its control tower raise the intruder alarm and hurriedly slam the gates back down.
What was this? Another Trial? A duel of wits?
Was Silver about to pull a Prince Xaraxin on her? Was he about to peel back his face, reveal himself to have been a clandestine sphinx all along?
As interesting and poetic as such a turnabout would undoubtedly be, Okuma’s Razor made her release it from her cervicale service on sheer academic principle.
She needed solid, stable information. Not storybook concoctions and childish fantasies.
Until she could definitively prove otherwise, she had to work under the warming assumption that this was and had always been her John Silver. The beast she’d come to know and admire in that strange way that leaves seem to idolize the ground even ahead of the very tree from whence they grew.
Was he lying about knowing her parents?
Well alright, he hadn’t actually said that he did in those exact terms. But if insinuation were poison they’d both have been drowned in a sea of black venom.
Was she just inventing stories in her head again? Or was he actually just one of Saedel’s pawns?
No! She couldn’t think that. She wouldn’t. Real or not, plant or not she owed the old ghost her life.
Or did she? After all, her life wouldn’t even have been in danger at all were it not for …
‘Stop! It!’
She answered his question with a glum shake of her head. Silver looked back at the basin but said nothing.
“Why don't you tell me?” Amelia prodded with mounting urgency.
“Because,” Silver said slowly, as though explaining a matter of adult complexity and import to a slow child, “I swore to your mother on my life that I wouldn't tell a soul.”
For a single horrible moment Amelia’s patience and tact left her. Through their retreating door a part of the dark, surreal wilds entered. And in its passing there spilled a stain of havoc.
“Well you don't have a life anymore do you?!”
The words burst out of her before she could think to stop them. As many parts stunned as abashed, she stared dumbly at her stoic companion, desperately wishing she could reach into his mind and take away his memory of them.
Lacking such absolute powers, she waited for his answer like a convict at a firing range.
Silver lowered his head and turned away.
For a string of moments that felt like as many cuts from a cold dagger he stood as still and quiet as the grave, staring off into the unfathomable beyond. Leaving Amelia behind to stew in the inflammatory juices of self-pity and regret.
By a stretch of the imagination too far to have been entirely of her own making, Amelia recognized something subtly inspiring in his ethereal shimmer that momentarily chased off her dark infiltrators.
It was only for a moment. A flicker of a candle’s pantomime shadow. But it was enough.
Drawing on veteran nerves she knew she couldn’t spare, she compelled her flailing heart and spirit to rally.
Then, calling those faculty garrisons least bloodied on the days’ emotional or physical battlegrounds to the front, she quickly assembled a defiant home front stratagem that would see every insidious, invasive and predatory notion she’d had about herself and Silver put to the sword.
Silver wasn’t sulking. He was meditating. Nay, he was strategizing. Scouring his mental recesses for any tidbit of literary wisdom, be it folkloric or academic, that might help them mint a key to this proprietary riddle.
A wave of hope lashed Amelia’s heart. One that brought in a dark crusading fleet that she knew she ought to turn away.
However, after vetting her other ideas as carefully as a sorcerer chooses an apprentice and finding them all, in their unique ways wanting, she banefully accepted the promises of the infernal horde.
“Truth is to a Pyrate what blood is to a hunter.”
There was something buried here. A secret stolen away from view, just begging to be unsealed. But for all her certainty, she needed proof.
Infusing her mental forge with the rich tapetal ingredients of the ancient sanctum air, she set an instinctive imitation of Bon Bon’s neotenous petite trim upon her voice.
“I'm sorry,” she said. And to her mediocre credit, she meant it. “It’s just that I’ve started to think there’s something you’re … that everyone isn’t telling me. About you. About our family.”
Unbeknownst to her, the emphasis she heard herself place on the word our was in fact strategic and, from what she could tell, effective. In the same way a nexii would be against a Holocene bunker wall.
Given enough time and patience they might open up a breach, but Silver’s castlelike fortitude was formidable. Under less contentious circumstances she might have even called it admirable.
Feeling the threads of her mercenary resolve beginning to fray, she threw her whole reinforcement brigade of malfactory incubi into the fray.
“Silver … please. I need to know.”
It sounded pathetic. She felt dirty, nay despicable, waging psychic war on the beast who had done nothing but try to help her. All at extreme, nigh unthinkable, risk to himself.
She hated herself for resorting to such miserable methods, but she would not relent. Not when she was already at the gates.
But when her first operation yielded no results, her pride. Planting herself firmly in the ghost’s line of sight, in the most piteous tone she could muster she repeated, “please …”
Silver stared longingly at the floor, then at the ceiling. His demeanor that of a caged Wyntyrdyr. Its soul starved for the smallest taste of freedom but its mind and body powerless to enable its craving.
At last, he turned back to his ward, a forced smile signifying surrender stapled on his lips, when an ear-splitting explosion rocked the citadel stone layers above. Raining several significant chunks down on the spot where Amelia would have been standing were it not for Silver’s preternatural speed and reflexes.
A nanosecond later another blast scattered whatever thoughts the pair had allied on the first. Followed by a third. And then a fourth.
Amelia’s inexperience in the kinetic aspects of warfare notwithstanding, it didn’t require nearly her amount of mental dexterity to figure the bombastic rhetoric for an angry cannon fire debate.
From the imperative frequency of the shots, any listener could have been forgiven for concluding that some beast had started, and was fast losing, a battle with a sapient storm cloud.
“Sounds like your friends are hitting it off with the locals,” Silver answered her unspoken question.
Amelia cocked an eyebrow. “Locals?”
Silver raised his own eyebrow. “You've met them. Well, one I should say.”
He was trying his best to look and sound academically passive. But the discernible core spark that gave him the facsimile of life betrayed his apprehension more than any words or actions could have.
He jerked a thumb back towards the mirror entrance. “Black eyes, big ears, pink skin, creepy smile. I never could understand what the old knacker saw in them. But then I suppose that’s why I never really wanted children either.”
A more resilient mind, or at least a better nourished one, would have captured that informative renegade and tortured every last morsel of meaning from it.
As it was, a flash of harsh, unbidden memory threw itself across Amelia’s interior vision. Blinding her to all but a familiar spur of anguish.
It couldn't have been more than a few hours since she'd killed that slavish creature in the jousting chamber. But her thoughts were so scrambled she had trouble perceiving it as part of her own lifetime, much less the same day.
Then a delinquent thought in the form of a singular word, ‘how’, popped into her head like a directed mortar bomb.
She whirled on Silver and asked in an indignant key signature, “how did you get out of the Labyrinth?”
The old ghost had an answer ready.
“Turns out that old faker up there isn't quite as clever as he thinks,” Silver explained. His words sharpened by the unabashed slit of a smirk they shone through.
“He thought he'd bound me to his service ‘until the end of time’”.
His exaggerated air quotes which had the intended effect of coaxing half a smile from his audience.
“He didn’t know that Naarfynders don't just consume the dead. They drain magickal essences. Which, yes, in most cases just means the souls of the recently axed. Luckily for me that mongrel had already lapped up a good quarter of our brig bunch. He chewed off my bonding sigil and just tossed the rest of me to the side for a later snack.”
Amelia’s guts convulsed at the thought. “And you knew this would happen?” she asked.
Silver nodded cagily. “Naarfynders aren’t the sharpest blades on the rack,” he admitted. “That seal was the only thing keeping me from running through the walls. So, I suppose you could say I made a calculated gamble.”
He flashed her an apologetic wink. “It took a fair bit of wandering to find you. I guess Iradyl should have left the architectural work to her husband.”
He laughed heartily at his own cynical wit.
Amelia tried to force a lighthearted chuckle, but it came off as an infant’s first attempt at multisyllabic speech.
“Never thought I'd see the day I’d be happy to nearly have my insides turned outwards. But like Barty always said, ‘if life wasn’t a stupid catastrophe it’d be miserable’.”
He should have kept his mouth shut. Amelia visibly choked on an insurgent rush of sick.
And it was at this moment that Silver presented himself with a second critical ultimatum. A symmetric opponent of the one he’d unwittingly pressed himself onto in life.
This time he was determined to take the honorable course, even if it cost him everything.
But as any modestly clever sage knows but would only ever extremely delicately and cautiously confer to their disciples, no singular act of moral duty or ruling of pious judgement, however significant, can truly overcome decades of antithetical instinct.
And so, in his piratical understanding of the term ‘help’ he changed the subject to something about as near to the problematic site as could practically be construed as far from.
“It occurs to me …” he started off in the manner of the arrogant scholar turned thirdhand brigand. Then he cleared his throat of nonexistent phlegm and started over.
“Come on Daisha,” he urged in the quiet, almost pasturing lull of the scared father.
“Let's open that crate and get the saard out of here, shall we?” he finished in the tone of the reticent pirate. Habitually underscored with a layer of brash confidence.
Amelia looked up at him, smiled with what could pass for sympathy on a face so young, and nodded. Then she gasped when he brandished a crackling silver blade from out of the endemic folds of the Ethereum.
“What's that for?”
Silver handled the weapon like a religious icon. In the somber frequency of the reluctant pirate beset by the burdens of life, death and the experiences there entangled, without looking her in the eye, Silver explained, “remember how I said that only a living hand can take the Wand?”
Amelia nodded.
“Well, that’s why.” He pointed to the basin. “The final ritual requires a sacrifice. I’ve heard it called the Trial of Gifts. I’m sure you’ve heard the story of the First Gift. How the Mother Goddess supposedly carved the Wand from the severed arm bone of Aerion.”
Amelia nodded again.
“Well then I’m sure you’ll also know that no gift truly comes without a price tag. Not even a mother’s love.”
Amelia looked down at her boots and mumbled something Silver shouldn’t have heard, and in the terrestrial sense had not, but was still nonetheless privy to on account of his superphysical ears being essentially a cross sectional nodule of all acoustic information in his proximity. Just as his eyes parlayed any and all visual information which entered his amorphous Schwarz-Nihil field.
And just as he didn’t need to physically see or hear her to know her words, he also didn’t need a mortal’s spotty sense of the abstract to clue him in on her feelings.
“We must offer something of equal worth. Something that, presumably, only a mortal beast would have to lose.”
He said that as though he didn’t quite believe it. Which couldn’t help but cast a less than compelling shade over his offered hand.
Not unwise to these things, in the way of the trusted confidante comforting his frustrated and imbittered oldest mate and mentor, Silver said, “trust me Daisha, this will only hurt for a moment.”
Had any other beast said those words to her in that voice, Amelia would have gone from immobile statue to warlike Guardian.
But Silver had a way with conversation that was not unlike a harpsicord. Whispering into her head without using so many words that he hadn’t misled her yet. That trusting him was, for her, by now, should be as easy and natural as nutrient-rich soil following a root back to its parent tree.
And so it was that with the blind allegiance of a windborne seed she surrendered her pax fidem to the wily.
Silver took it as delicately as a fresh flower petal and held it open to expose the palm to the silver receptacle.
“When I tell you,” he said in the tone of a parent teaching his child why she should fear the jungle floor. “Clench your fist as tight as you can. Even if it feels like your skin might boil away. Otherwise you will bleed to death and I won’t be able to stop it. Do you understand?”
Amelia nodded. Every muscle as tight as guitar strings, making speech all but impossible. They also ground her teeth together as though attempting to sharpen them.
Silver was not unsympathetic. Although his method of showing support was unusual, even by the day’s standards. “These Trials are meant to cull the chaff and weaken the crop. Only those who can endure sacrifice can be permitted to possess the …”
“Just saarding do it already!” Amelia snapped. Her whole body ached from the forces of physical tension. The last thing she needed right now was a lecture.
Now was Silver's chance to turn to stone. He steadied his weapon against her flesh with the kind of surgical grace only a supernal decoupling of brain from body could imbue.
For a snuffling moment the words this won’t hurt a bit danced and spluttered out in the air like welding sparks. He studied her hardened expression with a form of pride befitting an aged artist or sage capping off his life’s work.
She would never know exactly what he saw there. Only that she would recognize something in him then that she had only ever seen before in grand portrait figures and in a dream she’d had on the night that her father was murdered.
Steeling himself for his task, Silver asked, “ready?”
In what only a being caste into the same dungeon mold could recognize as an answer, Amelia clamped her eyes shut and unconsciously sucked in a breath.
She recorded only slivers of fragments of the moments immediately following her flesh’s bifurcation at the end of the cursed quantum-flower blade.
What fragments she retained, visions of dazzling star fields crackling in and out of existence, was hued in a microcosmic order of what was playing out over their heads.
Were it that she had her normal mental agility at that moment she may have likened the experience to having an alchemical brew of molten iron oxide, sulfur and sodium distilled into a boiling acid broth poured into her veins.
She might then have gone on to say its untidy path was punctuated by piercing cortical flashes which then self-propagated along incendiary plasma trains ripping through her skull and stabbing into her brain with the voracity of a thousand biting Hornets.
As she stood, too numbed to think, too tired to feel, her world persisted in the form of two ethereal shades. One of soft misty blue, the other of cold, watered gray.
From somewhere as far as the edge of the sky and yet as near as her own thoughts the word “now!” flew down her conscious canals.
This was proceeded by the innate knowledge of muscle tugging sinew, reshaping bone and a wholly novel sensation of the sky and the ground suddenly and passionately convulsing, merging and then consummating.
In truth, her existential motor operation dammed the flow of her essential fluid only in so far as to keep her spirit from being forcibly expunged in tandem.
Another titanic explosion rocked the cavern.
“Hurry!” Silver prodded, inwardly struggling against his age-old habit of punctuating orders with some vulgar or graphic insult.
Were there a cannier witness present, the outward effect would have been like watching a dual-amputee Primate artisan try to relearn his lifelong craft with his toes.
On this occasion, however, any measure of subjectivity outside of her own cranial corona remained utterly lost on Amelia.
She felt an ephemeral wind roughly shaped like a pair of frigid hands and a Heisenscopic body softly urge her along like an ancient Abyssal trifan.
She didn’t need a mirror to tell her that she was perhaps a garrison’s worth of heartbeats away from looking like Silver. And judging from her companion’s chimeric expression, she’d yet again only missed the last step into his quasi-immortal carriage by the space of a Beetle’s breath.
There came to her attention a sentence composed of sharp mechanical slides and clicks.
She spun on the spot just far enough to see that the Wand’s lantern cage had flung open its sides like a flower spanning its petals, exposing its nectar heart to the suns before gravity waged a surprise coupe against her brain, successfully annexing her legs and she sank to the floor.
Silver was quick to snatch the artifact from its cradle, and he danced around with it on the air like a drunken fool on a bar table.
“We did it!” he shouted, bouncing and blinking around like a raindrop in a stone tumbler. Shaking the Wand at the abandoned sky like a sword. “We saarding did it! Ha ha! I never thought I’d live to see it! But I’ve got it in my saarding hand! HA! Eat that you saarding devil! I hope it rots your saarding guts!”
Amelia did not observe any of this. Even if she could, it’s doubtful she would have cared.
She tried to tear a scrap from her satchel to bandage her wound. But her strength was so thoroughly diminished that she could barely muster the neural forces to compel her arms to move.
As any aspirant sorcerer knows, like the day succumbing to the imperious planetary axis motor, the mind rises and falls with the body.
And just as the twin celestials comport each other’s momenta throughout the day, the spirit waxes and wanes in complex accordance with the mind.
Amelia’s head reeled from the surge of infernal desert fire. Her heart fought to send reinforcements to her body’s palatial Zenith. But no aspect of her experience or intellect could replicate her body’s razed capital defenses.
An impious ruin held her in its grip. Its dark messiah held her diminutive king fire at sword point atop the bated ledge of eternal oblivion.
Her abject will was not strong enough to repel the encroaching tide of dark entropy.
She would need a miracle to recapture her cardinal throne.
Luckily for her, a stone-shaking bang from above snapped Silver out of his Midian jubilee and one more rallying moment brought him blinking to his young ward’s side.
He fashioned a long thin bandage out of the remnants of his old clothes and wrapped it tightly around her hand. Then he hefted her to her feet with superlative ease.
Upon getting tangible proof that she could walk without assistance he led her, vague and aloof, through the unveiled exit.
Before she’d taken her tenth step, however, a whispered auto mechanical phrase alerted her to the basin’s locking mechanism releasing its claim.
What force compelled her to double back and recollect the artifact would likely sit right between the location of the “Black Knight”, Dom Dynian’s, phylactery and the riddle of the alchemical Animus on the scale of the great cosmic mysteries.
But whatever its cause, she lingered just long enough to stuff the rich bowl, fluid and all, back into her satchel before bolting off to make up Silver’s nearly forty yard lead.
After a relatively short journey compared with those between previous Trial chambers, during which the neuromuscular revolt in her legs raged from a smoldering fire log into a runaway Magnolsis depot meltdown, it occurred to her she they must be near the surface.
Like so many over-wound clock springs, her body’s levers could only so much pressure before they snapped. It was just a matter of whether her body or her synapses broke first.
Just when it seemed like her legs would be the first to blink, Silver snapped abruptly to a halt a few yards in front of her. He pored over the stone like a mortician bent on determining its moment and cause of death
Amelia skidded to a standstill beside him and, pushing the mechanical limits of her wind equipment, asked, “what’s wrong?!”
“Door's jammed!” Silver barked back. Apparently having forgotten that mortal ears could drown just as easily as mortal lungs.
“What!?” she yelled. Forgetting that supernatural ears could recognize the patter of every individual dropped hydroxide molecule in a rainstorm.
“I said the bloody door's jammed!” he shouted, proving that, when it came to preternatural physiology, what was true of the eye and arm was absolutely as true for the throat. “It was supposed to open by magick when we got close.”
He grunted a curse under a non-breath that she may or may not have been meant to hear. “One of those saarding goblins must have blocked it off.”
Amelia opened her mouth to ask, but then swallowed the thought, telling herself there would be a better time and place for that sort of thinking. Deciding that a far more prudent question for this moment would be, “what now?”
“Follow me!” he answered. Then popped straight through the solid wall.
Even in her beleaguered state, Amelia could still spare enough blood mojo to be irritated.
‘Great idea’, She fumed, more frustrated with her own mundane material state than with Silver. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve got a drill stowed somewhere up your … ?!’
She didn't have to wait long for her answer. It came in the form of a yard-wide section of the wall, about twenty feet back down the tunnel, spontaneously crumbling into dust.
A smiling blue head poked out through the resulting hole. “I found a Skalgag tunnel,” Silver explained.
“A what tunnel?” Amelia asked, relieved to have a vacation way that didn’t involve running.
“Skalgags. That’s what the little gremlins call themselves.”
Amelia noted distantly the incessant roar from outside seemed to grow fainter and more diffuse the further up they went.
“They've got loads of these tunnels leading all over the island. It's how they get around the Sanctum without pilgrims seeing them. They helped little Franky build this place.”
Franky? Did he mean Sir Francis? Just how vast was this beast’s friendship net?
Granted, if he’d said he’d bunked with Captain Flint himself it would hardly surprise her at this point.
This prompted another long overdue revelation to unexpectedly spring to her mind.
Was there really a chance that the calm, compassionate beast she’d met at the Academy possibly be the Dark One’s scion?
It made sense logically, now that she put some thought into it. But the implications gave her such sickening anxiety to contemplate them, not helped in the least by her intolerable state of weakened health, so she dropped the subject.
“Did they show you how to get through the Labyrinth?” she asked instead.
Silver nodded. “They dug about eight tenths of it. Took me a while to convince them I wasn't one of the ‘bad ones’.”
Amelia frowned, and without thinking said, “but you were still on Saedel’s crew.”
Then, after a moment of thought, she amended, “weren’t you?”
Silver didn't reply. Not out loud. Except to change the subject in a way that implicitly rendered a guilty verdict.
“Here,” he said out the side of his head. “This is, I think, rightfully yours now.”
He tossed her the Wand as casually he would have flicked a lighter to his mate.
At the instrument’s touch, a fresh fleet of vital ships rolled through her necrose flesh. Their golden sails flush with indomitable winds. Their hulls brimming with stellar legions, celestial cavalry and archon dragoons.
Angcess Trialfa. Lapis Luminal. The Golden Tide. The Mother’s Bounty. The Anguileic Requiem.
The force which secured Amelia’s tired arteries, fortified her ravaged neural infrastructure and routed the infectious forces of entropy from the muscular planes to the stomach’s stygian coils had as many names as its aerator.
She studied the chimeran instrument for what was, in truth, the first time but felt like the millionth.
It was heavier than it looked, and felt as though it somehow belonged in her hand. Nay, belonged to her hand. As though it had always been there. As though it wanted to be there.
Silver smiled a proud-fatherly smile. “Congratulations Daisha.”
Like a soldier caught dozing off on watch Amelia snapped to attention, finally remembering where she knew the word from. It had been one of her earliest memories.
“Thanks,” was the only suitable response she could come up with. Then she added, “what are they like?”
Silver snorted. “If you fancy chatting with a broken keyboard they’re quite charming.”
Amelia grinned and quipped, “I see you have some common ground.”
This elicited a mocking frown from her elder. “Meaning what?”
Amelia had words ready to answer, but they were subsumed in a wash of irrepressible laughter.
Silver rolled his eyes over an abashed smile.
This, the old sailor knew, was more likely the result of the Wand’s incipit Casuist Field than of her own lackluster humor.
Nevertheless, the effect, in the way of such things, was contagious.
The odd pair meandered through the dark alien hive, talking and laughing like fools at the slightest provocation for a solid twenty minutes before either remembered what they were on about. And then their quest seemed a shade less grim than it had even just a few turns back.
While this all held its share of truth, it omitted the heart of the matter. The simple fact that Amelia again had a companion with whom she could comfortably laugh, his and their combined circumstances notwithstanding, was a light in the pervasive shades of darkness of Naarfynder.
One only slightly dimmed by their coming to another fatal terminus in their way that Silver insisted was actually a perfectly disguised exit.
Even if she could not hear the thunderous shouts of war being waged beyond, Amelia would not have had the resources to question him.
Most of her viking thoughts had landed on a distant shore. One that held the monstrous realization that she had absolutely no idea how to use the device she had spent so much time and will and blood to acquire.
She didn’t get much time to dwell on this. When Silver turned back to face her again with a look that made her stomach and voice box trade places.
“Just so you know …” he said with what started off sounding like confidence but which bled copious momentum on the grated edge of every syllable until it was a lowly dapple of the pounding parental river.
Though her first digestive organ were still waged in a deadly civil conflict between her tonsils and uvula, Amelia assembled a force of will just mighty enough to punch a single word through.
“What?”
Silver's face knotted up to form the basest iteration of a scowl.
“Whatever happens … I need you to know that your father would …” Again, his words fought a brave revolution only to die a traitor’s death.
A desperate Eciton swarm shrieking a longing battle cry charged her extraneous quadrant. She wanted to wrap him in her arms and say, “I know.” But just this once the gatehouse defenses on her tongue held firm. Cinching the deviant abstract in its wriggling throws.
Some of Amelia’s evaporated tension, however, lingered.
The undead pirate looked down at his boot then back up at her. He did this several more times before finally settling on the words, “would be very proud to call you his daughter.”
Amelia smiled a contented smile and nodded. Silver then heaved the heavy rock slab aside as though it were but a piece of crumpled parchment, revealing the battle beyond.
In the heart of the abyssal spire a solar storm unfurled. Lances of particulate death sliced through a sheet of immaculately splayed anarchy. In which starlight shards flew, puncturing reems of bright shades and crystal white fountains spewed negentropic refuse into the cataclysmic aether upon their contact.
If either beast or aberration had been asked in that instant to describe the “Dinozelos”, alternately related as the “Terrible War”, the “Great War” or the “War in Heaven” depending on both the speaker and the audience, they would have just pointed up and said, “see for yourself”.
The onlooking pair shared between them a soulful feast of voiceless words before taking the first irrevocable steps into chaos.