Bel moved to the side as Manipule tugged on her sleeve. She muttered a quiet thanks as she avoided a collision with a thorny bush, but she barely glanced up from her book.
Not that she could really concentrate on its contents, but even rereading the same passage for the third time was better than facing the fraying mood that ran through their group. Things had been tense ever since their disagreement over how they should come to a consensus, and Bel didn’t know what to do about it.
The collapsed section of Pillar that they were navigating now only made things worse, with the gorgons forced to rely upon the scrattes to navigate through the nearly impassible sections of rubble that overflowed with water, choking roots, and small, bloodsucking parasites.
“You should really look where you’re going, Bel,” Cress chided her. “If you fall into the water you’ll ruin your book.” The gorgon put on a bright smile, clearly trying to strike up a friendly conversation.
Bel replied with a noncommittal grunt as she pulled her book protectively closer. Out of the corner of her eye she could see Cress frown. Bel almost apologized, but the tension in Manipule’s fingers tugged gently on Bel’s sleeve and stopped her from following her instincts. Ignoring Cress was just ignoring a bigger issue, but Bel had never been good at solving social problems. She was hoping that Manipule solved this one herself, but Bel couldn’t help but feel it wasn’t possible.
She sighed slightly and glanced up at their progress. Most of the gorgons had put their essence gains towards growing wings, but their new abilities were worthless in the crowded passageways. Instead, they worked with the scrattes to hack through the heavy growth.
That left Bel, Escalope, and Cress to escort the vulnerable egg-mothers and Craupadine, who was still recovering from her injuries. There was no real threat though, not in the cramped passageways that the scrattes had already picked clean. Anything edible had long since been killed and eaten before they passed through.
Orseis was with them too, and for once she was’t grumbling about her empty stomach. Instead, she was sulking. After the gorgons told her that she couldn’t vote for consensus because she wasn’t an adult, she had thrown a mighty fit and refused to do anything useful.
Now, slightly calmer, she was posing in front of different plants, exercising her color and texture shifting abilities. Manipule nodded along with approval as the two of them pointedly ignored Cress’ attempts at friendly discourse.
“Pretending to ignore me is really petty,” Cress said with exasperation. “I know you disagree with our consensus, but you said yourself that an outsider couldn’t understand our feelings.”
Bel’s lip twitched and she opened her mouth to reply, but Manipule beat her to it.
“Our feelings?” Manipule said sharply, her red and yellow snakes whipping around with anger. “For someone with a reputation for pushing change, you sure seem happy to embrace tradition when it’s convenient.”
Cress shrank back like she’d been bitten. “I’m just trying to keep us focused.”
She ran her hand over her snakes, soothing their agitated rattles. “Look, Manipule, I personally think that what you and Fortuit have to say is important, but everyone is at their worst right now. I know from experience that some things need to change slowly to be accepted.”
Orseis harumphed loudly, but Cress ignored her and continued. “Once we get to the surface things will be better, and we will bring this up again, I promise. For now though, can’t we just focus on getting through the Pillar and reaching the surface?”
From years of experience dealing with Beth and James, Bel could sense the sparks that were about to ignite into a heated argument. “Stop,” she commanded.
Bel swiftly shut her book and flipped open her carrying case, carefully putting the precious volume away before she became distracted and damaged it. “Before you two go at it, let me say something. I’m not great at dealing with groups, but I think I know some Old World knowledge that applies here.”
She made sure that she had both gorgon’s attention before she continued. “A good compromise means nobody is happy,” she declared.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
Bel’s snakes flicked their tongues towards the rest of the gorgons. “You may have been compromising your ideals for the good of the group, Cress, but Sotil and the other gorgons didn’t compromise anything. I’m not saying that I could have convinced them to give something up, and maybe you couldn’t have either, but we didn’t compromise on anything. If you want to be a good leader and negotiate with the other races then you’re going to have to learn to deal with unfair compromises.”
Manipule’s smug look fell when Bel turned to her and frowned. “And you need to stop blaming Cress. She’s doing her best, and being leader is hard. She’s not perfect, but who is?”
Manipule stiffened her lip, but then her resistance broke with a heavy sigh. She turned to Cress and lowered her head. “Sorry Crecerelle. I am taking out on you the frustrations I feel from the others.”
Cress smiled with relief. “It’s my fault, Manipule. If I were a better leader things wouldn’t have gotten so heated.”
“And people wouldn’t be treating me like a child either, right?” Orseis interjected. “Do I get an apology, too?”
Cress’ snakes rattled their tails as she look at the cuttle-girl. “But you are a child.”
“Jerk.”
Orseis flicked a small stick at Cress, which bounced harmlessly off of her armor.
Cress scowled. “We’re still in a dangerous place, Ori. Do not mess around.”
Orseis waved her tentacles around her head, impersonating a gorgon’s as she sarcastically repeated Cress’ words. Bel was impressed with the rapid change in color of the girl’s tentacles – at the end of each limb she even managed a pair of dots for eyes.
Fortuit stepped forward, coincidentally stepping in between Cress and Orseis as she pointed towards the path ahead of them. “Look. It seems that there is a change of scenery ahead of us.”
Bel followed Fortuit’s pointing and saw a brightly illuminated end to the current passageway. The contrast with their dim surroundings cleared some of the clouds from her mind, and Bel sped up her pace, running away from the gloom and the argument. She grabbed Orseis by the tentacle as she passed, providing a distraction to give the girl’s emotions a chance to settle.
Orseis sulked and dragged her feet, but once they emerged into a large, bright chamber her eyes opened wide with wonder. They were standing on a broken landing in front of a large opening. The canopy spread out below them, most of the trees forming a thick carpet of green below the glowing ceiling of the fourth layer. Some trees defied the rest, their crowns pushing past the constraints of canopy to rise up to and above Bel’s current line of sight. Flowering vines trailed from their branches, waving like banners in the warm breeze. Bel smiled at the peaceful sight.
“We’re about halfway home,” she declared. “Isn’t that great?”
Orseis nodded enthusiastically, and she barely reacted when Cress joined them.
“I wonder what took a bite out of the Pillar, though?”
Cress gestured to the edges of the chamber, where a ragged line marked the destruction of the former wall. “It looks as though some impossible beast has taken a bite out of the tower’s side. I thought that the Pillar’s material was impossible to destroy.”
Bel glanced guiltily at her gleaming nails.
“Well, mostly impossible,” Cress corrected.
“It was probably Technis,” Bel declared.
“You can’t just blame him for everything,” Orseis complained.
“I think it was, though,” Bel insisted. “Ripping the Pillar apart is definitely frowned upon by the pantheon, so you have to be pretty bold to do it. It would also take immense power.”
“This damage looks very old,” Cress noted skeptically. “See how multiple layers of roots have grown and twisted over the rubble?”
She pointed at a mound made from a stack of the Pillar’s metal. It poked up from the center of a pile of bones. Some of them were so old that they’d bleached white and looked to be turning into dust.
“I think that used to be a shelter of some kind too, but even without weather in here it has collapsed over time. It looks like it has been used as a nest since then, judging by all the bones scattered around it. If humans used this, it would have been hundreds – or maybe thousands – of years ago.”
Bel shrugged. “That still fits, since Technis was a vizier in the Third Dynasty. Their king funded lots of expeditions through the Labyrinthos and into the depths, and they set up plenty of teleportation temples along the way. We actually followed some of their old routes on our way down, I think.”
Bel gestured to the gaping hole. “The Third Dynasty grew downwards to avoid conflict with their neighbors until they’d amassed overwhelming strength. Wouldn’t a bunch of magic mystery metal be perfect if you were preparing for war?”
Orseis shrugged her tentacles. “Technis wasn’t everywhere though.”
Bel shook her head. “With his king’s teleportation technology, he kind of was everywhere.”
She knocked on her books’ wooden carrying case. “The writers are pretty sure that he picked up remote puppetry some time early, to make it safer to explore down here. That’s what started him along the path of body stitching and reanimation.”
Bel looked into the limitless forest below her and imagined Technis sitting safely in the tower, directing his bodies below, like a fat spider sitting in the center of a deadly web.
The shifting sound of metal brought Bel back to reality. She glanced around to see that Escalope had drawn her sword. The armored warrior stared silently at the edge of the hole, waiting for something to arrive.
Bel directed her senses outwards and detected a large group of hearts rapidly converging on their location, moving up the vine-covered exterior of the Pillar. She handed her books to Manipule and pointed the gorgon back towards the safety of the armored warrior.
“I guess talking time is over,” she sighed, “and now it’s fighting time again.”