“The past is a worthy guide, for the wonders our forebears created are beyond us our understanding even today. The past is an unworthy guide, for the horrors our forebears created plague us even today. To understand is wisdom.”
—The General Principles of Gens Nethress
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Acerbian Labyrinth
Tumbling Seeding 20, 1885 CE
“Hrega!” Tvorh bellowed, inwardly cursing the narrowness of the tunnel as he struggled to squeeze his shoulders through the gap. Tvorh wasn’t a large teenager, but even so this was a tight squeeze. He could hear Hrega far ahead, pattering through puddles and scraping along the dark walls; he could tell that she was getting farther and farther away. With a grunt, Tvorh gave himself a final shove and emerged on the other side. After the tiny pipe, the tunnel seemed almost generously wide.
Hrega knew there were Chimeras in the unexplored segments of the Labyrinth. She knew how dangerous it was. She knew they were here to scavenge food, that they were supposed to keep to the safe tunnels.
Why had she run away?
He paused for a moment to commit the path he had followed so far to memory, then strained his hearing for a hint of Hrega. No sound met his ears but the steady drip-drip-drip of water. “Hrega!” he yelled again. Nothing. His heart sank. Had he lost her?
Had Tvorh lost his little sister?
Tvorh began to hum a wordless tune as he broke into a jog. The gentle vibration and the slow, steady release of air soothed him just barely enough to keep him from panic. There were tunnels coming up ahead, forming a T-split in the black stone warrens; something — the sound of Hrega, too faint for him to recognize? Simple intuition? — told him to turn right.
The twins were the last remnant of their mother. He couldn’t lose Hrega. “Hrega, you need to come back!”
Far ahead, his sister’s voice answered him. It was too faint for him to make out the words. He broke into a sprint, passing by defunct venous pipes and thick bundles of black nerve exposed to the stagnant air. They were probably the remnants of some long-lost Tool beneath Acerbia.
No, that didn’t make sense; they would have decayed long ago. Could those nerves still be alive? Tvorh slowed momentarily, bent over, and peered at a ring of bundling that had broken free from the stone walls.
A low vibration like the growl of some enormous beast drew his attention away from the mystery of the nerves. Were there chimeras down here? Whatever it was, he didn’t like it. “Hrega!” he called, and burst back into a run.
Left, memorize, straight at the T, memorize, bear right down the Y-split, memorize; Hrega’s voice was becoming clearer and clearer with every step. He hummed louder, harder, as he sprinted down the hallways.
“—ing for mother,” he understood at last.
“Mother isn’t here,” Tvorh called back between rapid breaths. “Come on. We have to get home to Bilr. She’s probably wondering where we are now, and she’s hungry. It’s going to take us hours to get home, and since I’ll need to go to the mycoprotein vats —”
“But I want to find mother.” Hrega’s voice was very clear. Not far now. Tvorh slowed to a walk.
What was this newfound obsession with their mother? It wasn’t like Hrega at all. “Hrega, mother’s not coming back,” Tvorh repeated, hopping onto a large boulder and squeezing between the space it had left between the floor and the ceiling of the dank tunnel. “You know that. We need to get back up. Bilr can’t afford to have us running around down here like this. She needs her strength.”
Hrega’s voice came back. Willful petulance tinged the edges of her words. “I want. To see mother.”
“Hrega,” Tvorh said, turning a corner, “I’m sorry, but—”
The tunnel opened up into a wide, tall highway. At the end of it there stood a large door, the pink quartz of its panels visibly offsetting the blackness of the surrounding rock even in this gloom. Tvorh’s pale-skinned sister likewise provided a stark contrast to the stone; she stood before the portal, crossing her arms and furrowing her brow, in a position she’d obviously been holding while she waited for Tvorh to arrive.
Hrega lifted her chin boldly. “Mother’s back there.”
Tvorh opened his mouth to protest, then stopped himself. She was crazy for talking about their mother like this, but he couldn’t deny that he wanted to know what it this enormous crystalline door was hiding.
What was he thinking? It was obviously an automatic door, which meant it was almost certainly nonfunctional after all these millennia. “Hrega, I don’t think the door is going to work,” he said, hoping inwardly that he was wrong.
Hrega scowled, turned, and slapped a button on the console on the wall. There was a shudder, a creaking sound, and the partitions of the door began to slide open.
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“Blood of my fathers,” Tvorh gasped, stepping forward next to his sister in order to get a better look at what lay beyond. The portal had opened onto a ramp far above a massive concourse. Arches of crystalline quartz rose against walls of gold and steel — not forgebone, but unalloyed metals.
The arches swept up the sides of the passage, arcing to their zeniths against a curved ceiling far above the heads of the lad and the little girl. The floor of the concourse far below was so pure and transparent that Tvorh had to look twice in order to determine where it started; only thanks to the aid of thin white shapes dotting the ground was he able to build a mental structure of its geometry.
Passageways, smaller than the main hall but still far larger than the cracks and crevices of the warrens, swept off from the concourse at regular intervals. Tvorh couldn’t read the flickering displays above the hallways from here, despite the presence of still-functional lumins hanging from the arches and the ceiling and inset into the transparent flooring.
The ramp they were standing on was stone, and it hugged the right wall of the concourse as it descended for a short distance ahead of them before terminating abruptly at a point still far above the floor.
“How far does it go?” Hrega asked.
This was overwhelming. It had been years since Tvorh had seen so much unbroken space; the concourse seemed to go on forever. He began humming to himself again, and suddenly noticed that far down the passage opened up yet further, widening to accommodate a circle notched into the floor before narrowing and continuing onward.
“Let’s go down,” Hrega said.
“Yeah,” Tvorh agreed. “Let’s go down. I mean, maybe there’s some food down there and we can bring it back to Bilr.” The idea was stupid and he knew it; as far as he could tell, nothing living had touched this place for centuries. Millennia, even. At this moment, however, rational thought couldn’t displace his curiosity. “Let’s go.”
But then Tvorh glanced down the stone ramp and realized it wouldn’t do. The walkway was crumbling, and halfway to the floor it had fallen away entirely; if the builders had plated it with metal like the rest of the room, it probably wouldn’t have been an issue. It was fairly obvious, though, that this entrance, and the path to it, had been either a temporary portal or in construction when the place had been abandoned.
“We can’t go that way,” Tvorh observed.
Hrega leaned over the edge of the ramp and peered down. “We should climb down the side.”
Tvorh joined her at the cliff. She was right; the walls of the ramp were flat stone that extended straight up out of the floor. They could descend its sides. There was only one problem. “It’s smooth,” Tvorh said. “We can’t climb that. But maybe… Come on.”
Tvorh grabbed Hrega’s hand and pulled her down the path to the ragged end of the ramp, passing quartz archway after quartz archway as they went. When they reached the broken end of the ramp, Tvorh glanced down. The floor far below was covered in stone rubble where the ramp had fallen apart. “Yup. It’s rough here. See those outcroppings in the side? I think I can climb it. Here. Grab onto my neck, and hold on tight.”
“I want to do it myself,” Hrega whined.
Tvorh stopped himself from saying, No, because you don’t have my father’s genes, and there’s no way you’ll make it down. That would only make Hrega mad. “When you’re older, I promise you’ll be able to climb whatever you want. But I’m bigger and I can move faster, so hold on to my neck, Reggy, all right?”
Hrega nodded, and in a moment Tvorh was descending the side of the wall, feeling beneath him with his feet for hold after after hold and humming madly. He quickly got into the rhythm of the climb, and as his muscles warmed up he increased his speed.
Another low rumble, like the one he had heard in the warrens but louder and streaked throughout with a menacing growl, assaulted his ears. Pebbles shook loose from the ramp, and Hrega gasped, gripping Tvorh’s throat so tightly that he couldn’t breathe. “It’s okay, Hrega,” he wheezed. “Not so tight.”
She loosened her grip fractionally.
“I can’t breathe, Hrega,” he whispered.
“I’m scared, Tvorh,” she said.
“I know, Hrega. It’s all right. Just a little bit looser—”
Another roar burst through the chambers, and its source was plainly both massive and angry. Hrega screeched and flailed, managing to cover Tvorh’s eyes with one hand and yank his grip off the wall with the other. Pebbles tracked his hand as he began to fall backward.
Instinctively, Tvorh flexed his feet as he flung his arms above his head to catch Hrega before she tumbled from his body. Miracle of miracles, his prehensile toes caught a grip on a sharp outcropping. Pain lanced through his feet; he sucked it down as he brought Hrega forward to his belly. An instant later, his back smashed into the wall.
Don’t let go. Hold on. Tvorh willed the pain away, holding Hrega tightly against his body as he swayed, upside down, over the rubble. Frightened sobs wracked the girl’s body. “Hrega,” he said as calmly as he could, trying not to let the pain enter his voice, “It’s okay.”
“Help me!” Hrega begged.
“I’m going to help you. I’m here, Reggy. I’m here. But there’s something I need you to do.”
“Help me, Tvorh!”
“Reggy, I need you to grab that rock over there and hang on very tight.”
“I’m scared!”
“I know, Reggy. Don’t be scared. Just grab the rock and hold on. All right?”
“I don’t want to fall.”
“I swear to you, Reggy, I will never let you fall. Never. Do you hear me? Never. Now can you do this for me?” Blood was slicking Tvorh’s feet and trickling between his tightly-clenched toes. He wouldn’t be able to keep his hold on the sharp rock for much longer. “Can you do this for me?”
The terror was clear in the way her body was trembling, but Hrega nodded. Tvorh took a deep breath and then pushed Hrega out toward the outcropping next to them. It was small, but the grip would be good for her. He just needed to —
Pain lanced up Tvorh’s leg. “I will never let you fall,” he whispered.
Then Hrega’s weight was gone. “I have it,” she whimpered.
Tvorh grabbed for the wall, fighting off a final pulse of agony as his feet protested the additional strain, and then his fingers had a grip again. He righted himself and then slipped beneath Hrega. “Okay, Reggy. Use your legs. You’re going to ride my shoulders.” Her weight settled in as another roar shook the hall.
“Go, Tvorh!” Hrega screamed, and Tvorh complied, racing to the bottom. He barely noticed the shift in his weight when his bleeding feet touched the rocky rubble below; he had picked his way down to the transparent flooring before he’d even realized he was off the wall, and by that point he had already lit off down the concourse as the howls chased him.
Tvorh ran and ran down the hallway, leaving blood-spattered footprints on the pristine floor as he ran. He kicked something hard, and the reptile brain inside him recognized that the thin white shapes that he’d seen from far up above were human bones.
This place hadn’t been abandoned. It had died.