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Night of Endless Portals
Chapter 27 - Become a Mindless Thing

Chapter 27 - Become a Mindless Thing

Fire erupted around us as Jarahn and Yierie let loose with pyroclastic fury. The tunnels lurched in several directions as the black sphere fell down around us. Yierie poured crimson fire out from her hands in a cone down the hall while Jarahn emitted blueish-white flames in a circle around us.

The swampy tendrils cooked to ash in moments, leaving behind four mound-like figures wrapped in the same. As the Revenants had before them, they raised their hands, their faces cleared of tentacles and they screamed at us. Eight pulses of energy smacked into my shield, making it flicker in the process.

Jarahn shouted as the blue-white fires around us ebbed and he sprang forward. At the same time, the gouts of red fire from Yierie stopped and she darted under my outstretched hands. I didn’t know how long I would be able to keep the barrier up, if it would survive another barrage, but that didn’t matter in the moment.

Twin streaks of tightly held limbs shot forward, one slightly ahead of the other and struck down the quartet of Revenants in turn. Crescents arced out from the twin streaks and split their targets in half. Tendrils wormed out from the falling figures and the screams rose to a fevered pitch as the lights flashed out of both faces.

Sharla shouted at me and I strode forward after Jarahn and Yierie. The transition from flashing motion to stillness in the two warriors had locked my feet in place. Without the training from Garaghan, I would not have been able to track them with my eyes. As it was, I knew I would have been in the exact same amount of danger from the two even if I’d been free to move.

With her hand locked on my own, Sharla pulled me forward to match up with Yierie and Jarahn’s pace.

Yierie turned to me and exposed a red burning ember in her eyes. “We’re moving on! To the left!” she motioned with the sword in her hand, which glowed with a blue light and shifted along with Jarahn.

Sharla moved her hand to my back as Jarahn wove his fingers into a complex pattern and burst out with a ring of flames. An entire mass of tendrils, growing toward us with impossible speed, flared into ash.

Behind me, Sharla chanted and called out as if she were summoning some ancient monster. She finished chanting and a quartet of flying blue sparrows shot forward. The birds swirled around the four of us and drove themselves into the oncoming tentacles. Meeting with the tendrils, the birds popped and a blue fluid covered the tendrils, dissolving them down to the base.

Ahead of us, the tunnels writhed with nascent tendrils, as if the Bedrock Wyrm’s inner defenses could not quite manage to anticipate our movements. There were only two directions we could move though, so the defenders were mustering from both sides.

Yierie stopped ahead of me and put her arms behind her. “Up on my back,” her head twitched as I stared at her. “Do it now!”

Without another command, I hopped up on her and wrapped my arms around the base of her neck. At the same time, Roo pulled itself around Yierie and tied me too her. The moment she had me on her back, Yierie increased her speed as did the other elves. I was holding them back, so I poured my own restive energy into Yierie and helped keep her stamina up.

Sharla and Jarahn focused on clearing our path as much as they were able. The tunnel widened up ahead and the quality of the dimness shifted toward white. We did not quite see light up ahead, more like the tunnels surfaces turned pale and slightly reflective as we jumped into them. Red and blue flickered from Yierie’s eyes and the faint light cast from the few remaining blue sparrows Sharla had summoned. Moisture covered the walls around us as if the wyrm exuded some kind of mucus from its skin.

The power I pumped into Yeirie changed in quality as steam began to rise from her feet. I realized the mucus was dissolving her skin then, which meant I was also healing Yierie. Her steps never faltered, which also meant I was healing her faster than the acids of the Bedrock Wyrm could damage her.

“I’m sorry about this.” I whispered into Yierie’s ear and squeezed her.

As an answer, she whooped and pressed herself forward, growling in time with the tread of her feet as she ran. Light burst and twisted down tendrils as we passed. A greater mass of tendrils twisted themselves into the mouth of the tunnel before us. Jarahn and Yierie skipped together and unleashed a spiral of fiery purgation into the tendrils. They flared away, like the ends of candles before a flame thrower.

Behind that wall stood a six broad line of Revenants. Yierie’s steps faltered as all six of the shrouded victims of the tendrils fired off pulses of magical energy toward us. Trusting my balance to Roo I raised my hands before Yierie and screamed a word out in Tibetan. My barrier rose before Jarahn and Yierie and a dozen white-hot missiles struck.

I felt each one across the surface of my skin, burning and pocking where they struck. For the first time in days I felt certain I’d exhausted my stores of magical force. Consciousness tried to escape me, but I clung to it as fiercely as I clung to Yierie. All but one of the projectiles melted into my shield. The two that survived careened into the walls of the tunnel and blasted holes into the surface, exposing a mass of writhing flesh beneath.

Yierie and Jarahn shouted pair of words in Elven I had never heard before. Around me the reflections on the slick walls blurred as if we’d made the jump to hyperspace. If not for Roo, I would have tumbled off of Yierie ’s back onto the wet, acidic floor.

Wind rolled back as if in protest at the speed Yierie and Jarahn drew their blades. Flashing arcs or blue and red cut down all but two of the Revenants, at the very edge of the line. Sharla shouted at the others as the remanning Revenants turned and screamed. Power built along their arms and flashed toward Jarahn and Yierie.

I raised my hands in defiance, Roo mirroring me in the process. Both bolts tore into the feeble barriers I’d thrown up at the last minute. The power diverted into my arms and blood erupted from my mouth and nose as voices drilled themselves into my mind. I screamed with the same inchoate sound as the Revenants had made, but then my own ephemeral twin appeared before me.

Next to her stood the white flame woman from the night before. Yeshe Tsogyal raised her hand into the air and motioned to me. The white flame woman neared and tried to interpose herself between Yeshe and me. I screamed in my defiance and strands of Roo and power raced around the woman in the void. I knew I still moved in the real world, but in the void we hung suspended around each other.

Yeshe moved toward me, pulled by strands of magic and the power coursing through Roo. At first, the white flame woman grinned as if pleased by these events. She hovered toward me and slammed against a white barrier than sprang up around my body like a personal force field. Sparks and tiny flames danced over the field between us and the white flame woman tried to turn away.

But now Yeshe caught her with her hands, and with the white cloth arrayed over Yeshe’s shoulders like my own shawl. When the white flame woman jumped, Yeshe pulled her back down. When she turned to strike at Yeshe, a silver field the reflection of my own appeared between them and seared at the white flame woman, who shook and writhed between us. Her form appeared to jump between spastic, anguished positions. Each time I blinked my inner eyes, the woman jumped from one place to another, leaving a tracer behind in the void.

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Yeshe began to chant to the woman, the word she repeated over and over was sGrol, a Tibetan word that meant something like subdual or death. Each repetition sent the woman into a rictus. After several minutes of sustained chanting, the white flame woman bounced off of the fields between Yeshe and me like a spark between dynamos. She moved faster and faster as Yeshe and I neared each other.

At the very last minute of contact, Yeshe raised her hands to catch the white flame woman’s cheeks between them. As if my hands had been strung up by a marionette’s line, I raised my own hand to the white flame woman’s cheeks.

Syllables, foreign and chirping rolled through my mind through my mind with the accent of Scandinavian or German, neither of which I spoke. The words came faster and faster into my mind, without ever once repeating themselves, until the white flame woman exploded. Afterimages burst over my retinas and the white flame woman vanished.

In her place hung a serpent with stone-like hide, akin to a rattle snake, which writhed and hissed at Yeshe and at me. It had two heads, one of which snapped at us while the other bit at the beast’s own tail.

I glanced down and could not see the looping turn of the snake through the void, as if it were simply that long. Its open mouth snapped until Yeshe adjusted her grip, jamming her fingers in between the serpent’s jaws.

Now I understood what Yeshe said, “Speak wyrm. You have lost this day and you shall claim no new victims for your belly. Speak or face your end and become a mindless thing.” The anger in Yeshe’s voice terrified me. I could not remember her sounding so furious before then. Remaining silent, the wyrm strained against Yeshe’s arms, trying to pull its head away from her or toward me. “I will not ask a second time, Wyrm. You will not claim us this day. Either live and hunt again or die now. Your choice.”

Again, the word she used, sGrol meant die as in “be liberated,” rather than die bloody.

After a second’s hesitation, the Wyrm went limp in Yeshe’s arm. It spoke despite her fingers wrapped in its jaws. “We feed, we hunger…”

“You will not feed from us, Wyrm. Choose again.”

“Power, we need the magic to protect ourselves.” It drew out its sibilants and let them linger in the air.

Yeshe looked at me and noted the way I balked at the Wyrm’s words. “No. Choose again, Wyrm.”

“Life, I wish to live, I wish to procreate, I choose life.”

Yeshe’s hands dropped and she nodded. “That we can agree to.” The Wyrm hung its head and shook as Yeshe continued. “Swear upon the Boundary of all things that you will not feed upon the living, that you will no longer take life, but give it. Swear against violence except in self-defense and to uphold these values in all things. Swear it or in the name of Padmasambhava I will banish you and all your ilk to the world beyond the boundary.”

The Wyrm nodded, power coalescing as it did. “I so swear.”

“Return the power you have taken from my tulku.” Yeshe rotated around the Wyrm as if it were an axis. She stood beside me and said, “This is the last of my demands.”

The Wyrm eyed me, for the first time I could see its pupils and irises. Both eyes were milky white, as if covered over with cataracts. It looked into my eyes despite its blindness and magical power flooded into my eyes. I could taste fresh blood upon my lips and for the first time since being struck by the Revenants’ magic, the void released me.

From the thrumming beat of Yierie and Jarahn’s feet to the pain of having my innards burned away, I could feel from the Bedrock Wyrm’s perspective. I knew of the foreign intrusion into my body, I felt the hunger in my bones as I tried to digest them with the fluids of my flesh and the special feeding tubes I’d named tendrils as Harriet. At the same time, I could feel my own body restored to sensation by the end of the void’s grasp.

“Stop! Stop!” I shouted into Yierie’s ear. Only after I spoke and she slowed, did I notice Sharla running alongside us with her hands on my back. “Stop, please!”

Yierie slowed and the fires clearing our path ebbed. “What’s going on back there?”

Sharla said, “her eyes are normal again, they have pupil and sclera.”

“Oh thank the Ancestors.” As the fires ended before us, I noted how the tendrils had ceased to fall down to block our bath. In fact, they had receded now, despite the end of the fires blazing them away.

Jarahn eyed the room we stood in, still the larger chamber with its acidic floors. “We can’t stay here, the tendrils will return.”

“They won’t.” I tried to extricate myself from Yierie’s back, but Roo clung tight. Satisfied with hanging there, I turned to him. “It won’t hurt us further if we leave it alone.”

“How can you possibly know that…”

Jarahn’s voice trailed off as the white flame woman appeared behind me. She opened her arms to her sides and bowed into a full kowtow, her head touching the floor.

“Your emanation speaks the truth.” She kept her head pressed to the acid ground and the fires around her subsided to reveal a tall elven woman. “As long as you bring me no harm, I will hold back my defenses.”

“Nonsense.” Jarahn gripped his sword tight in his arm. “Why would you do that?”

The woman didn’t so much as twitch. “I am foresworn.”

“Bull…”

Yierie put her hand on Jarahn’s arm and said, “Hear her out.” At the same time, she rotated her finger and pointed it upward. The tendrils had stopped coming out of the ceiling and walls. They waited like eager tadpoles with not but their noses sticking out of the ceiling and upper walls. “They’ve stopped.”

It was true and it saved us. From the mere proximity, I could feel how drained Jarahn and Yierie were now. Roo had been filling Yierie with power since I woke up and her feet had resumed healing from the acidic burns.

“As I said, do not harm me and I will not harm you.” The white flame woman remained with her head on the floor.

“Who the hell is that anyway?”

Sharla answered Jarahn’s question before I could. “I might be wrong, but that’s the Bedrock Wyrm’s spirit.”

“Fuck that, if we kill that thing, the whole Wrym dies, right?” Jarahn gave his sword a miniature hop and brandished it angrily. “Let’s stop her now!”

Sharla and Yierie moved to put themselves between Jarahn and the bowing woman. Yeirie shifted her gentle touch to a firm grip on his arm. “And if you fail?”

Jarahn snorted at Yierie’s question and I could see him brace himself for a second point. But Sharla grabbed his other arm and hissed. “And if you did kill it, what’s to keep us safe, idiot?”

“But it killed…”

Yierie snarled, “we fucking know, Jarahn. Do not name them until we’ve put their spirits to rest.”

Jarahn scoffed with a petulant sound, but turned away from the Wyrm’s spirit. “Fine. It lives.” I could almost hear him mutter, “for now.”

Yierie and Sharla released him and Yierie nodded to Sharla, who said, “So spirit. How do we escape?”

With her head still on the ground she said, “proceed forward and leave through the opened mouth. If you find a tail, do not attempt to go that direction. The left mouth cannot release the tail, not until the end of all things.”

Sharla bowed in return to the spirit. “Thank you for letting us go free, spirit.”

It did not speak further as we turned and walked away. Our pace was slower than it had been, though I could feel urgency in Yierie’s step, the acid clearly hurt her bare feet. I wish I could do something aside from constantly healing her. In a way, I imagined that I made this worse.

When the body narrowed, the slickness on the walls and floor dissipated and the burning of Yeirie’s feet did as well. These new walls lacked the bones of the previous ones.

Jarahn started with a shout as a pair of Revenants flowed into the hallway ahead of us. With his hand on his sword, he stopped and watched the two figures. They didn’t move or raise their hands toward us as we advanced. Jarahn watched them as the rest of us moved until he finally managed to relax and walk ahead. He kept his hand on his blade and his eyes on the left Revenant until we neared a fleshy floor. Large teeth rose up and dripped down from the walls around us. The left Revenant had been blocking a passage with her body, as if to ensure we did not go the wrong way.

Parts of the mouth took on a soft aspect, all of the hard surfaces gave way to moist tissues. We crossed over the creature’s tongue and out the front of its mouth as the jaw separated.

Outside we found Garaghan, Alaric, Tia and the three maidens waiting for us. Roo finally freed me from Yierie’s back as we stepped onto hard stone. I ran for my little sister and scooped her up into a twirling joyful hug.

Garaghan pointed to her and said, “she told us to stop attacking the beast…”

I nodded to Garaghan and turned in time to see Jarahn swear and bring his lightning quick blade out in a single strike. I shouted, “No…” but was too late to stop him. His sword scored a deep hit across the Bedrock Wyrm’s nose which made it roar in fury.

With Tia hanging off of me, I grabbed Yierie and pulled her into the three maidens. At the same time, Garaghan responded in kind, bringing himself a few steps closer to Yierie and me.

In an eye blink, the serpent swept its head across the tunnel, bashing its head into Jarahn, lifting him and dashing him into the nearby cave wall. Sharla faded beneath the serpent’s head, reduced to so much gore as she died under the Wyrm’s mass.

Jarahn hung agains the wall for a moment and then fell to the ground as if the suction force had finally given up its hold on the stone surface.

Tia screamed in time with me as Yierie rushed toward her fallen companions, what little remained of them.