Twinty led the party inside the city, through twists and turns, out of the shallow pools of light where the batteries Gwen had made now powered ancient technology in huge, blinding white halls littered with the scuff marks of modern ratlings.
A few times they passed out of a building and into an open space, wide open as though they walked beneath pure black, a sad sky without stars. Here was where they began to see the bodies. Tossed about, piled up like dolls thrown aside.
“What happened here?”
Alouella asked. She shivered as a skull skittered away from her foot, breaking to dust as it rolled.
“We'll bring a cleric next time and we can ask.”
Wade tried to laugh but it wasn't funny to him either. The city was a tomb.
“Just a little further. Clarke you want another sip of potion?”
He nodded and drank it down, stopping in place to grimace and hiss swears under his breath. The impact absorption potion had withered away a few times so far, never meant for surviving long and he splashed another one inside his guts to explode out in a grotesque bandage.
“Feeling better all the time...might make it.”
No one knew what to say to the grim reminder that Clarke was heading downhill fast. He kept turning to look at corners, eyes twitching and muttering at things that he thought blocked his path.
“We're here.”
Twinty said.
It was a short tunnel from where they stood and they heard a deep hum from deep inside, a steady vibration that traveled up their legs, the closer they got the stronger it became until each of their steps was unsteady.
A door here was wedged open with a metal rod, bones spilling out that they kicked aside as they entered.
This room was round and wide, a number of booths laid into the ground, their doors wide open and each containing a pile of ashes sitting inside a one skintight suit. In the center, plugged into the central tower was Whilaway, or what remained. His mana drained and used to power the room, the devices. Not a master but a slave.
“This, is where we worked.”
Aggatha said. She stood from where she'd been adjusting something inside one of the booths.
Her fist came around and belted Alouella out of the air, the speed of her Lightning Jump turning the punch of an old woman in a blow that rung her head like a bell.
“I could see that. I can see everything.”
She said as Alouella fell through the air and hit the ground, the air knocked from her lungs.
“That's what they used us for. We were 'Readers'.”
Gwen rushed forward only to fall into a hole and hit the ground right where she had been. A small pad of loose pages hung at his mothers hip and she tossed one aside.
“And we were 'Writers'. Tools of the Ancients that they used to change things how they liked. One of the first things I noticed when I started looking into it. Everyone on this planet speaks Common. We have one language. See, when the Ancients came they wanted to ease in without any trouble so they made everyone speak the same way. Using one of us. They destroyed a vital part of an entire culture for 'ease'.”
Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.
Clarke looked at his team, at Twinty and shook his head.
He wobbled forward.
“So what do you want to do?”
His mother sighed and hopped down into the pod, pulling it behind her with one last farewell.
“We were never meant to be here. So we never will have been.”
The pod closed and they ran to it. Sealed closed, a metal helmet around her head. Alouella could feel a surge of mana, both good and bad, pulling in on them to power the script spell as Aggatha wrote on air, magical symbols appearing before her. Gwen rained hammer blow after hammer blow on the pod to rip her out of there but each blow barely registered, the thick non-glass taking each one and bending inward to pop out.
“I can't get in!”
She yelled.
Alouella tried to concentrate her mana but it pulled away from her, slipping out of her fingers as it was all sucked into the machine, like trying to hold water.
“I can't teleport in!”
Clarke looked at his mother...or what once was. He wondered when she'd lost herself. Was the time in The Roots the last time she'd really talked to him? Or had that been the last ghost?
He snapped out of his daze. His mind was slipping, harder to keep concentration on anything. He didn't even know if he was thinking or acting as the world went fuzzy around him, thoughts were no longer words. He forced himself out of the bog of his mind until words meant something again, where thoughts existed.
He had nothing. No potions, no magic, no-
He pulled the only thing he did have out of his pocket.
A hole.
He watched as his friends desperately tried to get at Aggatha but nothing would break through her prison. Clarke could feel something big coming, the world shifting as larger and larger mandalas wrote. Every spell Alouella tried to cast sucked from her grasp as though by a might wind.
Script powers can't affect anything in a hole.
“Twinty, your cape!”
He grabbed for it and the old rat yelled back over the hum of machinery.
“What? What good is that gonna do, we can't put the whole world- oh, we could make it her whole world!”
He whipped it off and tossed it over the pod, everyone grabbing a side as they tried to wrap her inside it, to put her into her own world.
The cape began to balloon out.
“We can't close it! She's still pulling in everything from this side!”
Someone yelled. It began to balloon out, trying to contain the land's worth of mana as it powered something far beyond what Clarke could even see. Beams of light, constructs of magic and energy grew around him like a house being built instantaneously, mandala as large as buildings.
They couldn't contain it if they couldn't wrap it around her and even then it seemed fit to burst.
Was the time in The Roots the last time she'd really talked to him? Or had that been the last ghost?
His mind couldn't keep a straight thought, always slipping away as demons howled around him.
He snapped out of his daze. His mind was slipping, harder to keep concentration on anything.
He hopped into the pod next to hers and put the helmet over his head as she had done. It was the only guide he had.
“Clarke? Clarke, what are you doing, don't you have some explosives or-”
He ignored Wade as he spoke, ignored the girls who now saw him jumping into one of the other open pods and pulling the lid after him. Ignored Twinty reaching for him just too late.
The cape whipped off of the pod beside him, power too strong to be contained in such a small world.
The seat felt comfy and he settled back, a bright white opening in front of him as he slipped it fully over his face. He reached out, his fingers drawing lines in the air that became solid, real things. He was afraid. Fear gripped his heart as it hammered in his chest.
(I'm going to die.)
What wish would you like to make today?
The machine wrote in front of him. It sounded so kind, he was almost sure it didn't actually say that, like some friendly delusion conjured by his addled brain. He couldn't make anything too big, it had to be less than what she was casting, quicker to create before she could destroy. Like he couldn't affect her and she couldn't affect him, she couldn't do anything to something he touched and that was all they had.
Change is scary but we need it. Make it how they see it. Fun. Scary. Sad. Happy. But always with a bright future. That's what we need. Make a world that they have always seen.
He felt like he was falling asleep, everything slipping away as he wrote and whatever was in his brain that made this happen began to break.
That's what they showed me for just a little while. Make sure they always get to see it.
He could feel the change as the mana raced to gather, stole from the huge wish beside him, constructed faster. He thought he could hear the faint pounding just outside the glass.
The spell raced around the globe, a wash of magic and power pushed by ancient machines that remade a world that already was.