Felun

After several minutes passed without sounds of pursuit, he slowed and panted for breath, swearing between inhales. He was hardly in a state to unravel a vault. There was a stitch in his side and he had a dry ache at the base of his skull. His back felt both stinging and bruised. He lifted the mask and wiped the crust of dried blood off his face.

The compass hand still pointed straight ahead. The items on the shelves—made of stone now, not mere birchwood—were protected by presumably-enchanted glass sheets, important-looking envelopes and peculiar sealed boxes under lock and key. He placed his hand onto the stone of the shelves once more. It was smooth and cool under the flat of his palm and this time, he could feel the definitive coils of enchantment within. Getting closer.

Something clattered behind him and he whirled around, rune book at the ready. The tracker-mark on his hand blazed with pain and then the burning sensation and the mark itself fizzled into nonexistence.

Her.

“Hello, breaker-boy,” Suria grinned. Clear faery-blood leaked from a cut on her cheek and she was missing the very tips of a couple of forehead-spines. “I had a wonderful time without you. You look rather half-killed. What is taking so long?”

He slid the Magician’s mask back down over his blood-smudged face. “I ran into some trouble.”

She snatched the compass from his hand and peered at it, before making a whirring, clucking sort of faery-sound. “You are not very efficient. Doubtless it had to come to this.”

She opened her mouth—he glimpsed sharp teeth, a barbed tongue—put the compass inside, and swallowed it whole.

There was a sound—a soft, cherry-coal-glowing sort of sound that crackled into being as her wings started to burn with lights. They looked as if they were laced with cinders. She hooked her arms under his and rose into the air, humming with power, shedding red-gold spell-light in sheets. And then she flew.

Fucking hell, she flew.

Suria, from what Felun had seen of her, could fly fairly fast—at least as fast as he could sprint—and she could keep it up for a fair while. But now she punched through the air on sizzling wings, hurtling them forwards faster than a mage-chariot.

The sudden wind buffeted his body and made his eyes water. His pulse hammered. If she dropped him, he would splatter into a red smear on the labyrinth floor. But her grip was sure and she needed his unraveling. He, or rather, his family, had come to an understanding. So. Surely she wouldn’t murder him in cold blood. He glanced up. The look on her face made it seem as if she might want to, though.

They flew further into the depths of the library. Felun clenched his jaw and tried to orient himself as they streaked past dark silhouettes on shelves and vitrines alike. He spotted bolted chests and jars of eyes. There were alien-looking seed-pods the size of his head and things that writhed in their bindings. The library shelves stopped being proper shelves and started becoming chunky rolling units. The deeper they went, the more there were. Armoured, rolling shelves chugged along on league-long rails that stretched into a foggy distance.

But why, he wondered, and couldn’t come to a satisfactory answer. What was the point? The faery archives had a point, from what Iolite had told him. The Library did make sense, up to a certain threshold. But why would a kingdom need this place of hulking mechanical monstrosities, moving parts and crushing gears? Perhaps Shadowsong had quietly gone insane centuries ago, and no one had ever noticed or cared.

Suria twisted and turned at a particular corner. Magic streamed off her in waves, the colour of polished weaponry and eye-burning flowers. She bore him down a grand staircase that hadn’t existed a moment ago. The ceiling dipped, then opened up once more, so far over their heads that he had to squint to see that it was papered with texts and maps and squares of blank parchment besides.

The realm of rolling stacks had disappeared and now they were surrounded by walls—ancient labyrinth walls dotted with doorways of all kinds. Some were set against the ground far below, but others were sunk into alcoves far above them, only accessible via flight or the occasional rolling ladder propped against the wall. Doors and doors and doors, embedded into the labyrinth walls. Wood and metal and stone and clay, some plain and others intricately-patterned, some awash with exquisite artworks and others coated in fuzzy mould, some smaller than his hand and others that extended up to the vaulted paper ceiling. Suria flew past them all with barely a glance.

Felun felt the thrum of ancient enchantments in the very air itself like a mounting headache, a growing dryness in his mouth. His senses were being stretched by a seeming demand for attention, for observation, acknowledgment. Which was stupid and ridiculous, because magic by itself couldn’t think. He felt the spiked carapace of Suria’s arm brush against his cheek and the whisper of braided magic within. A fleeting thought, not an unfamiliar one, went through his head: he could unravel that. Followed quickly by—yeah, sure, he could try, if he had a death wish.

Something cold and clear dripped onto his shoulder. He glanced up. Suria’s face was set in a snarl. She was bleeding; streams of her strange, clear blood spilled forth from her eyes like tears.

They sped past an enormous set of double doors, painted with a golden mural of crowns and thrones. Oddly-shaped windows were starting to appear in the walls; circles and arches and octagons of frosted glass set into the stone of the labyrinth. Shadows moved behind the blurry glass, faceless, featureless silhouettes. Some humanlike, some not. One outstandingly horrible window-panel, stretching several metres along the wall and in direct view from where Suria dangled him, had the shapes of hands and faces pressing from the other side. Desperate, clawing hands and obscene, bleeding tongues slithering against the lumpy glass. He bit back an exclamation of disgust as it finally faded from view.

The door-window-vault-labyrinth felt like a vast, inhuman palace. Something that had been twisted inside-out and wrung out to dry. The insanity of having a monstrous thing like this nestled in the heart of one’s castle, with all those riches and curses laying in wait, behind thousands of unlockable doors. What was to stop someone from walking in and unleashing a full legion of ancient mage-crafted horrors?

Once or twice, he was fairly sure that they flew over a desiccated corpse—tangles of fabric around what might have been a flash of ribcage and a scattered femur bone, an unmoving shape hunched over in the shadow of a book as tall as a house.

There are fail-safes, he reminded himself for his own sanity. There must be, for no one could have made it this far without knowing where to go, without Suria’s faery powers and the help of a compass that was not truly a compass. And there weren’t many other Breakers out there. The old generation were all surely half-insane by now, or at the very least, strictly retired. There were fail-safes. There must be.

Suria’s flight slowed. She dropped him none-too-gently in front of a nondescript door, about as big as the entrance to a kitchen cupboard. The surface was dull, dark, and metallic. Uneven-looking too, pitted and scarred. He sensed magic within, old and masked. No telling its true measure, though of course it would have heft, in a place like this. Just how much heft, now that worried him. There was no keyhole, not on the surface. He had expected that. It would have been more suspicious, otherwise.

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“This one,” she said. She stepped back to lean against the opposite wall, tail swaying to and fro like a pendulum.

The part he dreaded. It was time to work, to really work. He dug into his bag for a snack and a stick of chalk. Using his free hand, he sketched a wide half-circle on the stone at the base of the iron door as he gulped at a can of sour prune juice. Keep it together, man. Father’ll kill you if you don’t.

He felt like shit; head pounding, arm tremors settling in, a salty, metallic taste at the back of his throat that wasn’t washed away by the tart, refreshing drink. Most sane dungeonrunners would refuse to work in such conditions. But most dungeonrunners didn’t hail from families who sold their disgraced firstsons into the service of faeries.

He rubbed healing ointment on his physical wounds before he retrieved an adjustable folding stool from his bag and set it down within the chalk, checking and changing it such that he would be able to reach the door comfortably while seated. He lifted runes from his book to stick into the ground, heavy signs for general shielding and reduction of force. He twined more around his fingers, past his wrists and up his elbows, a hundred and one lines of anti-cutting and anti-corrosion sinking into his skin like glowing lacework gauntlets. He hoped that it would be enough.

“Don’t step past the chalk,” he told Suria. He fished around in his bag and pulled out a wooden cane, hooked at one end. “If I collapse, use this to fish me out.”

“So try not to collapse,” was all she said, lip curling in displeasure. She took the cane nonetheless. She held her other hand to the corner of one eye, trying to stem the trickle of faery blood there. It almost looked like water, but her grimace said otherwise.

“Could you cast a silence? I’ll need to concentrate.” And if it got to the point where he started screaming, it wasn’t like she wouldn’t be able to tell that something had gone horribly, horribly wrong in other ways.

She clicked her fingers and a silence-field formed, settling in over his head like a rain-soaked cloud.

Felun walked over past the chalk and sat down. His head was still pulsing, heavy blood glugging along inside his skull and hammering at his temples. He rolled up his sleeves and placed his hands onto the rough, unyielding surface. No reaction, but for a slight stirring in the enchantment within, like a snake uncoiling to taste the air with the very tip of its forked tongue.

He took a deep breath. This place was old. Older than any dungeon he’d ever worked by far. Ask him to break a hole in the wall? Not a chance. But the door was another thing entirely. It was certainly not new, still pushing the limit of his experience, but he felt that it was newer, a later addition to the primeval contours of the labyrinth. He tried not to think of whatever half-sane mage who had added it, of the how or the why. All that mattered now was that it was something that could be unlocked.

The enchantment gleamed wetly just beneath the surface; he dived.

The spell guarding the door wasn’t so much a braid as a knot so thick that it was almost spherical in shape. It reminded him of the puzzle ball from his childhood; concentric spheres and hollowness, the enticing gleam of ivory that had started it all. He would never have looked at the damn thing, if he had known that this is where it would send him.

He reached for the enchantment. Hundreds of lengths of twine rose to meet him, the outermost layer reminiscent of writhing cotton and fine grey silk. He picked delicately at the closest section and when the threads parted a little too easily, he moved to another spot. He pinched and pulled and evaded little snapping teeth; the silk-cotton shell sloughed off in one piece like a layer of dead skin. The next layer felt glutinous and sticky, bubbling glaucous greens and pearly greys interspersed with the smell of wet loam and plastics of a bygone era. He lost focus and bumped a trigger there, felt a dark fire ghost against his hand as the protective rune-gloves flared to life, some of the symbols sputtering out in sacrifice.

The layer below started to show its true colours; handfuls of long, pale human hair that grew increasingly blood-soaked as he unraveled more of it. He tasted the dulled edge of a love song to the dead princess of a dead empire. Poor thing. Dense nodules of pus-filled, flyblown flesh started poking through; a few of them popped despite his best efforts. His head hurt too much to do this cleanly. He was vaguely aware of several spiked, toothy tendrils lunging out of the wall and towards his physical body. The floor-runes flashed and took care of them.

A relatively straightforward mesh of thinly-woven bone next—to lull him into a false sense of security, oldest trick in the book—and then he was digging through a thick soup of soft, fatty brain matter that spat loose teeth and bloodied coins at him every step of the way. The runes around his prone body flared into a wall of white fire as the scarred metal door undulated, thrust out long, thin spikes that aimed for the hands and heart and throat and lungs. It became a war of attrition, one that he was used to. He, with his circle of runes, digging further into the meat of the enchantment. The enchantment, that un-alive thing with its layers upon layers of knotted jute cord and fresh viscera, a new tripwire at every turn.

Blue bone marrow. The texture of dead fish scales. A memory of his old crew, a sound of jeering, of disgust.

He breached the final layer, a tangle of golden vines that sprayed corrosive liquids at both his virtual and physical bodies. More protective runes sacrificed themselves. His virtual-hand closed on the handle of a cold, dark key, already wedged into the mouth of the lock.

He turned, and the door clicked open as the enchantment fell apart like a desiccated fruit.

The door opened to a rough-cut recess in the wall. It contained a vase-like object. Nothing special-looking: unglazed, plain brown in colour, and a little taller than his forearm in height. There was a small chip in the rim. Disappointing after all that trouble, not that anything could have really been worth it.

It was done.

Felun lurched back to full consciousness, palms fever-hot, raw and bleeding. Little blisters already lurked beneath the skin’s surface, bubbles in a tapioca pudding. He wanted to scream, but settled for resting his aching head against the backs of his wrists as he tried not to vomit.

They would all, of course, consider this a small price to pay. Bust open the vault to a deep artefact in exchange for weeks of cracked, bleeding hands that sprouted hundreds of itching, watery blisters which would torment him day and night and get worse if he touched them. Sure, when you put it like that, it sounded like a great deal. He didn’t have to die in order to procure objects of esoteric and questionable power. He just had to live through the aftermath, which was, he thought, possibly worse.

He craved rice noodle rolls and wisteria-filled days. Steamed pork and salted duck eggs. He was always hungry after a big unraveling; hunger came naturally when he felt so weak and hollow. Not sago soup, though. The mere thought made his fingers itch in protest.

Suria dispelled the silence-field with a pop and hovered over to the perimeter of his circle.

“Are you quite finished?”

“Y-yeah, almost.” His throat felt dry. “Pass me the cane. Please—” He broke off, coughing. “…thanks.”

He winced and shifted the hooked part of the cane in his grip so that he avoided touching it against the ragged parts of his skin. He poked its tip into the crevice, tapping along the inner walls and around the amphora. When nothing went off, he scanned once more for residual enchantment, found none, and nodded hesitantly.

“Okay, you can take the vase out.”

“It is an amphora,” she sniffed.

Vase, amphora, whatever. His hands stung, already bristling with phantom itches. He stumbled to his feet and dragged his chair out of the way as Suria pushed past him. He splashed blister salve onto his palms before wrapping them in bandages, not that it would help much. He got his book and returned the few surviving runes to the safety of their pages. The rest of his equipment was dumped back into the bag. He winced as he hefted it back onto his shoulder; the satchel was portable, yes, but only slightly less heavy than its contents and exhausted as he was, he was starting to feel it.

Suria was turning the amphora round in her hands, admiring it.

“Excellent,” she hummed. “Let’s get out of here.”

“How are you going to carry me and that thing at the same time?”

For a moment, he thought that she would say something like ‘actually, you’ve served your purpose so I’m leaving you here to die’.

She scowled and made a twirling motion with her hand. “This is how.”

Glittering filaments sprung into existence and wrapped themselves around the amphora. She floated closer and pushed the vessel against his chest; the magical twine bound it to his front. Its ceramic surface was surprisingly lukewarm. It almost felt as if it were pulsing through the fabric of his shirt, and well, wasn’t that fucking creepy. He was surprised that he was even surprised, considering where they were, where they’d found it, what he’d had to go through.

“You need to learn how to fly on your own with those little magic symbols of yours after this,” Suria snarled, seizing him in a painfully tight grip. The points of her fingers prickled uncomfortably through his shirt. “The shape of this blasted labyrinth was taxing enough without lugging your weight around.”

She took flight; the wind stung at his face. His fingers ached. The amphora pulsed against his chest like a withered clay heart.

He was so damn tired.