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Chapter 36: A Way into Abeline's.

I made it to the alcove. Climbing to it was no easy task, with the rock being smoothened by years of water dripping down them, but one manages, one always manages! I ate some brains before coming here. I can barely hold them down, but it’s better than an empty stomach. I think so much vomiting these past days has earned me a gastritis, but, whatever. If I am alive by this time tomorrow, someone call the Vatican, because it would be a series of miracles worth of beatification.

If the Vatican still exists, that is. I can’t imagine it falling, but thirty years change many things.

I have the diary and I have Jillsenbane. I will block the path behind me with explosive glyphs to delay the dragons once I am past the sphincter. I hope I don’t make the whole place collapse, but getting caught is a risk I cannot take. I will dispatch the dragonlings swiftly, decapitate them if possible, not to lose time getting the sword stuck in a ribcage.

Or, as an alternative, there are still several hours until the dragons go to sleep, though. It’s ample time to explore the narrow tunnel in the end this alcove. I am debating if I should play it safe, by taking the known path, or risk getting caught across treacherous stone walls in this narrow passage the cave has opened. Abeline’s chamber is gigantic, her form stands taller than the dragons would in their hind legs. It’s not far-fetched to think of the possibility that, yes, the chamber has multiple entrances. And the opening of this passage seems to be recent, there is still some debris on the floor of the alcove. Cave systems, being dynamical formations in constant, albeit slow, reshaping due to the action of water —mainly, but, as the defunct mad-me would put it, hic sunt dracones— have plenty of non-cognoscible variants that remain so even if you are a dragon, I want to believe.

In other words, and please don’t start singing certain song about the fucking moon —or do, I shall be a bit too dead to care by the time anyone reads this— the cave may be a tad too convolute by caprice of nature and the forces that govern it, plus the disturbances caused by the heavy lizards lumbering around carelessly. In yet another set of words that I am not sure serves to clarify my idea, secret passages may be found in bounds and heaps, were one willing to inspect every perilous nook and cranny.

I could get lost, but like Hansel and Gretel I will leave my trail of breadcrumbs back. This plan, of course, kept afloat by the rather reasonable hope that cave dwelling animals don’t have a sweet tooth for magical symbols carved with holy light. Scarreladai and Gadorprims cannot enter here, they are too big and bulky, and if I stash the diary around some of my leather rags, it should remain in a readable state despite the rough terrain.

I could come to a dead end and see all my effort go to waste. In don’t believe so, there is ample room for water to flow into before reaching the second sphincter, the one of Abeline’s chamber. If I go up there, the wager would be to find a tributary big enough to have bored a pawn-shaped hole into the flooded caverns that would provide me a route, an alternative access either between the seals or straight into Abeline’s chamber.

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If that were not the case, the only thing that remains is waiting here. I don’t want to wait. To wait is to think, to think is to question, to question is dangerous. Because I suspect my obsession with saving Abeline is just the weakest of moral inertia. I have already fallen into the temptation of the illusions. I am happy there, with the Abeline that is not, the animatronic controlled by a dragon. The one Abeline I can have, the one that offers me counterfeit love.

Furthermore: I don’t want to die. Or I may want to, but on my own terms. If the only thing they have not taken is my life, I cannot give it away just like so. Once I perish, my soul and body, together or apart, will be forever in the service of Lady Scarlet. If she has not released sweet Abeline yet, if she considers my crime much worse than hers —and I am sure she does—, what awaits me in my upcoming days, years, millennia? To be a marionette for her? For my intestines to dance around my body while a whelp chews on my still conscious remains?

I must not think of the aftermath. My duty is to save her, consequences be damned. If hell of hells befalls me, I am more deserving of it with each second of inaction, of indulging in the alternate reality of the palace.

No, it cannot befall me, because this is already hell. Drugged with lie and abuse, granted relief from truth and hunger only if I reduce myself to something worse than a dog. My back aches if I walk straight for a while, god damn it all. The bones must have grown misshapen, the articulations rusted.

But how I can do this to them? I have come to consider the dragons dear. Gadorprims a cunt of a brother, and Scarreladai a stern, but loving mother. I remember when she healed my broken arm, just like Gadorprim’s eye. Those events, and the silliness she lets shine makes me thing that Lady Scarlet is not a complete lie, a confection, that the persona and the dragon are separated by naught but blurry lines.

They killed babies to make a visual pun, for the love of god, Francisco. Sixteen babies just to torture me and make me snap. They play with an eyeglass under the scorching sun and I, the stupid ant, thank them for the calefaction?

My mind is a mess, broken, irregular, stitched together from many ill-fitting fragments of sanity. A Frankenstein monster made from justifications one would call rational. I am delusional, and the delusion is that there was a Doctor Jekyll buried somewhere inside this old rascal. There’s no such man. There’s the Abeline-obssesed, insecure, downtrodden, woebegone, failed hero, and there was the loyal, if silly, butler that works for a lady dressed in red and framed in blue curtains, all out of his own weird volition.

I will search for that alternative route. Past that calcareous throat I am about to get into, there seems to be some sort of clarity. Maybe it leads outside, and if it does, the ceiling of Abeline’s chamber, I believe, has a hole. I doubt Scarreladai would have been careful enough to plan the beam of sunlight that illuminated her in the illusion. So if this leads to the proximity of that other entrance, all the better.

Here I go, despite being too old for this.