Chapter Fifty-Eight
Chase
Nichole’s mind warped in and out of consciousness.
Lights blared in unfocused rays and dark shapes lingered in her vision as the roar of the surrounding chaos clogged her eardrums.
Nichole felt a thick, long rag pulled around her closed eyes and tightened with a sharp wrench of stone hands. The same was done to her hands and feet, and soon after, she felt her body lifted easily from the floor.
Her mind faded again and she woke up once more in the darkness, blind and unable to move, aching through every muscle with a newly pounding headache, courtesy, she assumed, of being thrown into the room like a sack of potatoes.
The pain of her Arcancy, her capture and her restrains was such a violent concoction that the moment she sat herself up, Nichole rolled over sideways and vomited onto the floor.
The darkness was a swirling vortex of pain-flourished colours and before she had the chance to relax into unconsciousness again, the young woman grated her head against the stone floor and wriggled free of the blindfold.
Acclimatised to the dark for some time, she could see they’d been thrown into a small cell, little more than four walls of black rock with a single iron door. Michael lay on the ground a few feet away from him and she nearly wept with relief.
She gave Michael a gentle nudge with her foot, unable to move anything else. “Michael?” she croaked.
He didn’t flinch.
Nichole squirmed over to the young man and nudged him with her head, pulling against the binds around her knotted wrists.
The boy looked small. His eyes flickered behind their lids, somewhere deep in a forgotten dream. His skin was pale and his breaths were ragged and uneven.
Nichole spoke his name over and over until she was all but shouting it, and still the boy didn’t rouse. She leant onto his chest and nausea swamped her mind again as her shouts brought on another wave of aching. When it passed, Nichole spent the length of a breath picturing Aroha’s face.
No, she thought angrily, shutting away the inevitable path of thought.
Nichole slowly tucked in her legs and brought her bound wrists beneath her feet and up in front of her. She began tearing away at the dark fabric with her teeth.
In the darkness of the room, she had no concept of how long it took her, but with every passing moment of Michael’s unconsciousness her fear deepened. The binds finally fell loose and she spat out a mouthful of grainy thread, sparing only a second to see how raw her wrists had been grated against the restraints.
With little preamble she then pulled Michael’s blindfold off, brushed a hair out of the comatosed boy’s face and said, “Sorry about this, my dear, but I need you to wake up,” and slapped him hard across the jaw.
He didn’t stir.
Nichole took a deep, shaking breath and shook her head. “Don’t you ignore me you ginger dumbass,” and slapped him again, harder. “Wake up! Wait, oh you’re kind’a brunet...”
This time his head titled almost imperceptibly and Nichole went still with shock. She sat up on her knees and raised her hand high.
Michael’s eyes twitched open right as her palm came swinging and he reeled from the hit, croaking, “Fuck, Nicky, Sweet Rii!”
At his mumbled curses, Nichole scooped him up in tearful relief and hugged him tight, muttering, “Thanks the gods, you’re not in Dead-Rest!”
“Don’t rule it out just yet,” he touched his face tentatively, glancing weakly to the surrounding cell. “Why are we alive?”
Nichole helped him sit up and they both grimaced from the effort. “Probably planning to torture us for information. Here, let me get your binds off.”
“How long have you been awake?” Michael asked, wringing his bruised wrists after she freed them.
Nichole shrugged and began untying the cloth manacles around her ankles. “Not sure. Can’t have been too long, I can still feel the effects of my Arcancy wear-down. Maybe an hour or two?”
“No sign of the others?” he asked, realising that along with his bow, arrows and travel-pack, they’d taken his cloak, Kosadi and Archie’s amulet.
Nichole shook her head softly. “We’ll find them.” Her voice was grim with certainty.
Nichole slowly made her way to her feet as Michael began working on his own foot-binds and she investigated the metal door. It was cold to the touch with no discernible grip or hand hold. It had no creases or indents, no runes or keyholes.
Michael rubbed his temples as he fought his way to his feet, practically dry heaving from the pain which coursed through him. “I meant to ask, by the way...”
“What’s that?” Nichole said, still running her hands across the cold metal.
“Instinct...” He nearly fainted from the pain of standing up straight. “You guys really sprung that on me both times. Care to explain?”
“You’ve done it more than twice,” Nichole said, pressing her ear up against the door. “Any time you catch the eyes of another Legacy when you’re both engaged in Arcancy, you share the thoughts you’re having in that instant. It usually goes unnoticed because the connection isn’t focused and severs immediately, but it's why Legacies fight so well in battle together. That’s why we call it Instinct, because it usually feels natural and happens in a flash. It's...” Nichole noticed a red flicker of light beneath the door and shadows cross in front of it. “Someone’s coming!”
Two harsh voices rattled in the Obthraie tongue and stone footsteps fell sharply outside.
Nichole put her back flat to the wall with the door at her right.
“Use your Arcancy!” Michael whispered as the door jittered and a handle could be heard twisting.
“I’d just pass out!” she cried under her breath.
Michael ran to her side of the room. He knew she was right because he felt paper-thin and that was with her doing the heavy lifting up until that point.
The door creaked as Nichole wrapped one end of her broken fabric bind around her right fist, and the other end around her left, stretching the dark cloth out tight between them.
Michael watched her act and in the same moment ripped his shirt off over his head. It was so cold already that the shirt wasn’t really better than nothing.
An Obthraie warrior with bright purple eyes came trudging mutely into the room. They immediately spotted the empty floor and turned to call out in alarm when Nichole came screaming out from the side, leapt and wrapped her tight binds around their neck and choke-slammed them to the ground.
A second Soiltorn came sprinting in to assist them, four of its six hands armed with short stone daggers.
Moments before they had the chance to impale Nichole, Michael leapt on their back and ripped his shirt over their face, causing the soldier to buck blindly backward through the doorway before they crashed to the ground.
Michael rolled to his feet before the Obthraie could catch him with a wild swing and found himself in a great circular room, lined with other cells doors, bathed in red light from a magical light suspended in the centre of the room.
The Soiltorn warrior rose silently and turned on Michael, not so much as flourishing their daggers with cockiness or grimacing from the pain of the fall.
Michael looked past his adversary and saw Nichole still clinging to her own Soiltorn with the binds around their neck. It would only take one bad swing to catch her side and that would be it.
Michael felt like he was back in his house. A dark creature stalked toward him. He couldn’t run. He couldn’t fight. There was only one true difference.
This time he didn’t even have a shirt on.
The Obthraie broke into a sprint toward him and Michael couldn’t drive himself to leave Nichole. His body froze as the soldier raised all four armed-hands and then exploded into dust, like it had the most violent brain aneurysm in the world only two feet away from him.
Michael blinked, staring at the creature’s remains, unable to even offer up words of bewilderment when Oliver appeared out of thin air with Iron Tooth levelled out in front of him.
Oliver didn’t stop to talk and leapt toward the cell only to find Nichole repeatedly smashing the helpless Obthraie’s head into the stone floor, to very little effect.
Oliver dashed to her side and drove the blade though its spine as she fell back, panting, “Fuckin stone...doesn’t break,” she glanced up at Oliver. “Hey.”
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Oliver hoisted her up and helped her out of the dark room. “Even unarmed you guys know how to put up a fight.”
Michael’s shock had finally left him as he grabbed his friend and kissed him hard on the forehead. “You’re okay!” Michael then quickly wiped the bulk of the dust off of himself.
Oliver blushed a touch before his gaze turned pale at the sight of them. “Dear gods... are you two okay?
Michael and Nichole shared a shrug and she said, “We’ve been better. Where are the others, Oliver?”
Oliver sheathed his blade and combed back his sweat-soaked hair. “I assume in one of these cells,” he said, waving to one of eight other rooms.
Oliver walked over to the next cell-door and out from the dark slinked Raeken, the slender Storm Drakonian, looking uninterestedly over the scene as the swordsman yelled, “Where were you? You make me hide you with my own Arcancy and then hang me out to dry when the fighting starts?”
Raeken merely stared at Oliver with his yellow, paralysing eyes and Oliver added awkwardly, “And... I forgive you, let’s just open this door.”
The dragon ambled toward the cell-door as Nichole asked tiredly, “You managed to hide the both of you without your Arcancy failing?”
“Gods no. We got separated by the first wave of Obthraie, then me and Raeken got forced to hide in a small checkpoint chamber to avoid being taken. They didn’t come in one so I didn’t need to use mine. Once the rest of the army had marched past, we tried to track the others but found a whole platoon waiting in here. They left about two minutes before you two came out swinging.”
The Drakonian retched and sprayed a wave of acid onto the dark door and it began eating into the metal like termites. The entire entryway began to corrode and warp inward.
Oliver and Raeken stepped back from the door as it toppled toward them and from the dark cell James and Rose leapt out yelling, fists balled and teeth bared.
Michael threw his hands up and yelled, “Guys! It’s us!” pulling his ripped shirt back over his head.
James and Rose both stopped and doubled over in calming breaths as the sorceress muttered, “Good, I was not looking forward to goin’ bare-fist against an Obthraie.”
Nichole rubbed her own skinned knuckles. “Trust that instinct.”
Oliver gave them both quick hugs but it was clear his mind was elsewhere. “Where’s the rest of the team?”
Rose shrugged helplessly and James ran his hands through his messy curls whilst Michael fretted over his many bruises. James said, “We all got separated and the others weren’t done fighting by the time the Soiltorn cornered us. They ran as fast as they could, deeper into the dark.”
In amongst the circle of cells, there were two greater entryways, one heading the way they came, and the other going further into the unknown.
“They just... left?” asked Nichole, looking into the oncoming depths.
James shook his head. He had a dark bruise colouring his jawline and the rim of his left eye from where he’d been struck or thrown. “They got forced down the hall by two Mountain Wolves.”
Nichole and Rose shared a horrified look and the ranger counted on her fingers, “Four Legacies against two Yiraa... They could manage.”
Rose tied up her mass of blonde curls and yelled, “Maybe if they hadn’t just been fighting for hours on end! We need to go after them, now!”
“We’re unarmed!” Michael said desperately.
“No, we’re not!” Oliver yelled, sprinting to the only open cell in the circle of rooms. After a moment of awkward noises and heavy, grating sounds echoing from within the chamber, Oliver dragged an enormous crate from the room and the Legacies practically wept for joy when he kicked open its lid to reveal their confiscated items.
Only as they re-armed and Michael was still looking for his amulet did he properly notice the glinting red light hovering above them.
It was a great brazier, unencumbered by a torch or any base of any kind, simply floating a foot from the ceiling of the cavern. It was red as rose petals and dancing with the drifting wind from the far-lying mouth of the tunnel.
“I don’t suppose that’s the Immortal Flame, right?”
James examined the dark blade of his axe as the red light painted his face and shook his head. “I’d grant wild sexual favours to Khasm for the rest of time if it were, but I’m pretty sure that’s just torchlight magic.”
A mix of revolted hilarity ensued and Michael could do nothing but sigh. “How are you still being you?”
“Denial.”
Rose’s eyeline was suddenly drawn behind James as her face went paler than normal. “We gotta go!”
Everyone turned to see the Shanii essence behind them as well as inside the cell beginning to clump back together, slowly rising from the ground.
“Good idea.” James slung his great battleaxe onto his back and tore off into the darkness with the others hot on his heels.
*****
Deeper within the cavern, Carter dripped with sweat as his veins retreated back into his hands while Aroha, Magnus, and Sarah were sitting up against a wall of silver spines that had been summoned from the cave floor to act as a makeshift barricade.
On the other side of the magic-made wall, two elephant-sized hounds made from moss-covered stone mauled angrily at the metal, keeping them only inches from their prey.
“I don’t believe it,” Sarah panted, fighting to her feet just to glare at the flat wall ahead of them, a dead end.
It was the same path they’d been on for days and suddenly it ended in a smooth, boring wall, about as interesting as everything else along the way to it. Nikereus had gotten into the cave somehow, but however they’d done so it was with no sense for the dramatic, it seemed.
Aroha pitched a bent arrow to the floor and yelled, “Who cares about this wall? The others have been taken! We have to go back!”
Magnus, the only one of them still sitting calmly, idly ran his fingers on the edge of his great scythe. “They’re probably already dead,” he said sincerely.
Aroha turned and drew a new arrow sharply up to her jawline, sighting the space between Magnus’ eyes. “Speak again. I fucking dare you.”
Carter pushed himself to his feet and moved between the two of them, wiping blood from his mouth as Magnus squinted at Aroha.
“We can’t do this right now,” Carter pleaded.
“I’m sick of it. He wants to make jokes, well he can make them in the Dark Lands.” She adjusted her aim over Carter’s shoulder.
Carter moved back in front of her, raising his hands gently. “Please. It’s me. I’m begging. Please, Ari.”
Aroha’s eyes trembled with rage as a tear trickled down one cheek and she looked hard at Carter. “My Nicky is back there, nobleman.”
Carter nodded softly and stepped toward her, lowering his hands. “So, are my brothers. So is Sarah’s companion. You and I both know that they’re worth more alive than dead. More likely they’re hostages than anything else,” he partially spat at Magnus, then returning to Aroha, “But, the more hostages Nikereus has, the less valubale they are. We can’t get caught.”
Aroha yelled out of frustration and shot wildly at the wall to the left before pitching her bow across the room with a thunderous clatter. Meanwhile Sarah wondered if Carter was referring to Raeken or Oliver when he said “companion”.
Carter let out his calm breath and when Aroha turned away, he stepped over to Magnus, who hadn’t so much as deigned to stand. “Another word and I swear to Khasm I’ll do it. I don’t care what Jack said. I’ll paint this wall with the inside of your skull.”
Magnus sighed and pushed himself to his feet, standing face-to-face with the Carter. “Don’t kid yourself,” he said, shoving past the Ahuran boy.
The dark-skinned nobleman didn’t turn, simply stating, “You know, Magnus, I’m not a surgeon. I don’t know what metal has to do with blood, but there’s somethin’ about it which I can just feel. It calls to me. So, you might be a devil, but you keep this up and I’ll answer that urge without a moment of hesitation or one fucking ounce of regret.”
The sentence gave Magnus pause as Sarah knelt down beside Aroha and held out her hand. “I need you in this.”
Aroha sat quietly. She looked to the kind-faced swordswoman and pursed her lips to keep more tears from growing in her eyes. “I want to go home, Sarah.”
Sarah helped Aroha to her feet and wrapped her in a soft hug. “Me too. Let’s find a way, huh?”
Aroha sniffled and cleared her throat before nodding to her friend and stepping over to the dead-end wall. She ran her fingers across the cold stone and felt several bumps and lines. Her hand froze in place.
This cavern was only spells old. It wasn’t forged by time, it was summoned and shaped. Every element of it pointed to that very fact, from the impossibly smooth bends of every archway to the lack of pickaxe etchings anywhere along the way.
“Andevār. Starfire.”
Magnus sighed.
Before he had the chance to reply, Aroha said, “Either you use your Arcancy, or I’ll set you on fire. Your call.”
The reaper boy rolled his eyes and summoned a soft light, showering the wall in yellow rays to reveal that its face was covered in long, artful patterns.
Carter lit up. “It’s a rune!”
Magnus made a slightly impressed sound and muttered, “Too right.”
Aroha turned to reply viciously only to realise he’d actually said nothing smug at all. “These must be displacement runes. Nikereus must’ve transported their army through it like a portal so they wouldn’t have to march across the entirety of Olympium.”
“But why the cave? Why all this extra work when they could just appear on the damn hillside?” Carter asked.
Sarah shook her head, “Darkness. Light is punishing for most Shanii. Besides, I suspect Nikereus enjoyed making an entrance.”
A bellowing roar rattled from the other side of the wall before one of the Mountain Wolves reared and slammed its head into it the metal, sending the entire sheet of silver quivering.
Carter sprinted to the others who had already drawn their weapons. “We need to turn that on, now.”
Magnus glared at him. “We don’t even know where it will take us!”
“We know it won’t be here!” Aroha bit back.
Carter spun and ran his hands across the runic lines but they stayed dim and inactivate. “Why is it not working?”
Both Mountain Wolves threw their bodies at the metal in unison, sending a hideous dent into the wall, bending much of the silver barricade away from the ceiling.
Magnus gripped his scythe with both hands as he saw one of the hounds begin to try drag itself through the opening as it snapped its barrel-sized jaw at them. “We need to do something!”
“I don’t know why it’s not working!” Carter slammed his fist against the dull lines. “Come on!’
Aroha strung an arrow and ripped it into the face of the Yiraa, sending it back through the bent gap of metal with snarls and whimpers. She turned and rapidly scanned the over-arching pattern, unable to see any discerning clues. “This is nothing like I’ve ever seen at Fort Guardian!”
Magnus barked, “It’s Creation-Casting! Same basic magic, different people!”
“Then why isn’t it working?”
A Mountain Wolf backed up about thirty paces and barrelled toward the opening.
Magnus spun and looked at the swirling pattern. “Think! Obthraie made this, so what would make it different?”
“I don’t know!” yelled Carter, whipping a knife into the Mountain Wolf to slow it down, bitterly knowing he’d never get it back.
“Six hands! It needs six hands!” Sarah shouted, sheathing her sword and sprinting to their side.
Magnus cast his scythe to the floor, placing both of his palms flat against the stone as Aroha and Sarah did the same. The moment their fingers glanced its surface, the rune burst with red flames, ripping across the lines like wildfire.
Carter turned and sprinted toward them as the Mountain Wolf threw itself through the metal sheet, ripping the entire wall open like a piece of wet parchment, landing in a stagger on the other side.
Those with their hands on the wall yelled, “Guys, come on!” as the stone shifted and glowed bright red, perfectly flat like a crimson waterfall.
Magnus swept up his scythe and leapt into the portal, vanishing to the other side as Aroha and Sarah grabbed Carter and threw themselves in together.