Supplying mana to keep a flying slab of stone and metal gliding through the air at high speed was easier than it sounded.

It was dangerously easy in fact.

My conveyance came equipped with some manner of magical windbreak, and the tunnels were pitch black save for the dim glimmer of the controls, so all as the minutes stretched into hours and my mind wandered I started to forget that keeping my hands pressed to the control panel was the only thing keeping me from crashing to the floor of the tunnel.

A few hours into my flight I absent-mindedly took a hand from the panel to scratch my nose. The ensuing near miss with the tunnel floor below ensured I kept my focus from then on.

But while the trip was less engaging than expected, it certainly wasn’t dull the whole time. My vehicle had passed through several increasingly large spaces, each grander and better preserved than the last, light sources still shining out over long forgotten vistas.

There were no huge roots bursting though the ceilings or walls now, no collapsed towers or devastation; indeed the further I travelled the more the place seemed frozen in time, not even the smallest plants or creatures visible any more. Had my transport landed atop a bustling society it wouldn’t have been unfitting.

That was itself eerie however, given the extinction which had supposedly befallen them.

Whatever had happened, it had left no trace on their many works. That was more unsettling than seeing lingering devastation; I had no way to know what happened, or if it could happen again.

I had lost track of how long I’d been in the air by the time I started to slow. I would have thought that the roof and I were on our final approach to land, but there was still nothing but perfectly square tunnel sides and darkness ahead.

Vision revealed nothing out of place, but casting about with my senses for mana was a shock. A solid vertical plane cut straight through the tunnel ahead, extending out beyond my perception in all directions, all movement of mana ceasing at the unseen barrier as if reality itself simply ended there.

Trying to sense beyond the discontinuity was impossible; the sheer concentration of energy present drowned out all else. Gauging the depth of the structure proved similarly fruitless, my senses detecting only sprawling angular flows tracing out intricate patterns on the surface.

While my flight had slowed, I was still approaching the wall of energy. I had to make my vehicle stop.

I tried to change the motion of my mana into the stone vessel under me, to distort the flow of magic, to tell it to turn around, to guide it back away from the danger.

It slid on, mana and motion unperturbed.

Flying into that endless mass of essence couldn’t be good for me or my ride, but I was at the mercy of the programming of my magical quasi-carpet.

Straining my muscles and wracking my brain did nothing; any moment I would hit the surface.

My ride shuddered as it hit the barrier, the sharp stone edge meeting and illuminating a shimmering, iridescent surface like a soap bubble, the colors spreading in familiar spiraling and branching rectilinear patterns, springing to dazzling light as the flying machine applied pressure, filling the tunnel floor to ceiling.

After a moment the barrier let the blade slip through what was revealed to be a thin layer. The rainbow wall advanced upon me rapidly as my ride started moving again.

Unable to take my hands off the controls, I could only brace for impact in the hope that it was just a decontamination field or something of the sort. An airtight barrier that just… happened to be packed with more mana than the whole Eyrie….

Hairs stood on end as the approaching field of supernatural energy made my skin tingle. Even from several feet away I felt it pushing against me as if I were a like magnetic pole. I was in real danger of being pushed right off my vehicle.

With only a moment to act I worked the mana inside my body to supernaturally fix myself atop my polygon mount. Even if I couldn’t control my output, this at least I could manage… just about.

Anchoring was a fantastic technique – you could negate changes to your momentum, even if you would otherwise have been tossed through the air like a leaf! The Harpies made excellent use of the method when smaller women went up against the larger nobles, however they saw it as a method to counter near instantaneous impacts or stand firm against another person, not a viable means to push back against an immovable object.

Using your mana to negate changes to your momentum or stick yourself to the ground was energy intensive, as one might expect of a technique that would have made a physics teacher think they were hallucinating, but my reserve of magical essence was my greatest talent, aside perhaps from linguistics.

Mana rooted me in place just in time. The barrier slammed into me, the square I rode straining against the unexpected impedance.

I would have felt cool challenging the ancient security system to a battle of strength, had I not been hit square in the face by it. At least it wasn’t disintegrating me. My new clothes were fine too, actually slipping into the surface like the stone slab had – at a guess the barrier cared about living creatures.

An observer on the far side might have seen my normally cute and elegant features mashed flat against the angular surface in a particularly undignified manner, but I didn’t have the spare attention to pay to trying to make myself more comfortable.

If this barrier wanted a battle of endurance I was going to make it regret it.

Or so I thought.

After a moment the wall around me started to glow to life, angular circuits of iridescent metal thrumming to life from long dormancy.

Pressed face-first into the barrier I couldn’t turn my head to look, but I didn’t need to. It was easy to sense the huge mass of magical power taking form behind me – a second layer to the barrier activating, trapping me!

I could feel the mass of alien mana gradually closing on me, but I had nowhere to go.

The slab I rode was straining, trying to pass through without me, held back only by my anchoring. The second I relaxed it would lurch onward, then tumble to the ground and crash as it ran out of power.

The barrier ahead showed no signs of yielding to the meager pressure my ride could exert.

The one behind slid closer with languid yet inexorable motion.

The walls all around me whirred to life, grinding as countless panels popped up and slid against each other, peeling back piece by piece to reveal banks of vents, glittering plumes of opalescent vapor thick with mana pumping into the narrowing space.

Supernatural poison billowed over my body, stinging my eyes, my throat burning with each breath. I’d survived worse in my ‘training’, but more was pumping into the chamber every moment, as the barriers pressed ever closer.

Nothing I could sense suggested any limit to the fuel driving the trap.

When the barriers met I’d be pinned, unable to move. If the poison couldn’t overwhelm me then I’d suffocate. If I couldn’t suffocate I’d starve. If I couldn’t starve then….

Was I even able to die of age? My body clearly defied any conservation of energy, why would the passage of time have any greater sway?

But if I were right about that then when the barriers sealed around me I’d be trapped for eternity in the bowels of the Underworld.

I had to do something; something that didn’t involve taking my hands off the controls or my feet off the vehicle under me.

Once again I felt the limitations of the incantations I’d learned – why hadn’t Shukra ever taught me magic to deal with situations like these?! I was trapped, caught by prehistoric defenses protecting no-one from nothing, and for all my powers I couldn’t think of a single spell or tactic to save myself!

But then… hadn’t she only taught me the magic she herself studied? And she had told me many times that incanting alone was insufficient to use more complex, powerful magic.

I couldn’t blame my teacher for my inadequacy as a student.

This mess wasn’t Shukra’s fault at all, it was mine.

It was my incompetence, my repeated failure to control my powers that had allowed me to be defeated and stranded in the Underworld in the first place.

Losing my ride and being trapped in the barrier would be just one more failure on my part.

As the walls closed around me my mind was in Grand Chasm. Apparently nearly dying there still wasn’t enough for me to learn; this misadventure was all in aid of getting back to the surface to… make the same mistake all over again.

Aellope would have laughed if she was still speaking to me.

The vast barrier walls crushed together, pinning me in the sealed plane between them, trying to squeeze the life from my small from.

They weren’t the first opponent to try to destroy me.

The invaders in Grand Chasm had almost killed me then the fall nearly finished the job. Now here I was trying to crawl back out of the pit for round two.

I might as well have just let them end me the first time around.

It would have been so easy to give up back then; to slip into the darkness and disappear.

It would have been comfortable even.

The release tempted me again now. Just give up; stop fighting and accept it. Fade away. Welcome oblivion.

But I hadn’t….

Why?

The memory of the moments before I fell were a haze, but I recalled thoughts of Aellope, of Agytha and Chione, of all the friends I’d come to care for. They came to me once more now.

After surviving I’d resolved to return, to save them, even if I could no longer be other with them.

It was for their sakes that I’d gone to Grand Chasm too, but… they weren’t the reason I’d made it this far.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

I wasn’t a saint, able to live purely for the sake of others.

If I was going to live, I needed to live for me.

Emotions came rushing back to me as something fell into place.

I remembered the thoughts and feelings of that moment.

I didn’t survive so I could save Aellope and the Harpies… I survived so I could save Safkhet. The person I wanted to believe I was now, the person I wanted to be.

I survived Grand Chasm so I could save myself.

Tears sparked and sizzled as they met the barrier, the shimmer rejecting my realization just as I had been doing myself.

Perhaps I’d repressed these feelings after I fell, another painful thing I didn’t want to deal with. Perhaps I’d been repressing them far longer than that.

But I couldn’t deny it anymore. I wanted to live.

Not for anyone else, but for myself.

For all my flaws and failures, for all my weakness and hypocrisy, there was still the spark of something good inside me. A faint glimmer thorough the murk, of a person I could like, a person I and cared for.

That was why I couldn’t give up.

That was why I wouldn’t.

Not now, not ever.

I endured the hell Myr threw me into, even when I knew nothing but pain without end. I could endure this too. I could overcome it.

The barriers were pinning me between their layers, but their movement had stopped. Powerful as they were, they couldn’t crush me.

The gas burned my watering eyes and rasping throat, but my flesh repulsed it. Deadly though it was, it couldn’t poison me.

Self-loathing and guilt swirled in my heart and weighed on my mind as ever they had, yet they couldn’t consume me. Despite everything, I loved myself….

I could see the mana flowing through my veins, welling up in my cells and circulating in my muscles. I felt the swell of essence, the stuff of life – of my life.

Swept on surging emotions I caught up my mana and brought it too rushing outwards. Even as tears poured down my cheeks my magic burst from every pore like never before, not a shockwave but a flood, the shape of the barrier smearing and distorting as something unspeakably thick and dense erupted out from me.

The ward screamed.

Resonant energies collided, the barrier drawing in every rivulet of magic from the circuits around it, the brilliant walls of my prison blindingly bright as they intensified. I pushed harder, straining not muscles but my mind and will.

A stain was blooming where the layers of my prison pressed to my skin, my essence polluting the rainbow barrier with inky darkness, speckled with tiny pinpricks of light.

Face pressed to the surface before me I watched in extreme close-up as the conjuration decayed, the structures of the magic rotting from within.

With all the force I could muster I pushed against the walls of the barrier, muscles straining along with my mind. After a few moments of undignified squirming I heard a crack.

One became two, then four, then many. With a shattering cacophony the barrier ruptured, shards flung in all directions.

I was free!

Each piece of the ruined barrier crumbled apart all around me in a chain reaction, bursting like rainbow fireworks into nothingness.

Breaking and entering had never been so beautiful.

With the barrier destroyed my vehicle slid on smoothly through the gloom that closed once more around me, as if nothing had happened.

Searching ahead I could feel no sign of more defenses, just drained circuitry and open road. I adjusted my posture to a more comfortable sitting posture, breathing a long sigh of relief. My hands were shaking against the metal, my mind still reeling.

The encounter had been terrifying and traumatic, yet in its wake I found myself beaming. I’d never exerted such command over my mana before, nor produced such a volume of power from my body. In my moment of despair I’d finally made a breakthrough!

Soaring onward I recalled the thoughts that had led me to that moment.

Loving myself, even liking myself, they were alien concepts. On Earth I’d settled for forgetting about ‘me’ entirely, absorbing my attention with pastimes and entertainments. Wasn’t that what everyone did?

There had been no alternative; how else could a person live with a self they loathed?

Yet now, for all those dark thoughts still clawed at my mind, there was something else too, something so bright it felt dazzling. It began when I came to Arcadia, and it grew as I met Aellope and the Harpies, as I made friends and learned about my new body, as I pondered who I was now and who I wanted to be.

It was happiness. It was the happiness of coming to accept who I was, to grow to actually like that person and even want to be her.

So much of who I was had changed since Earth. Perhaps this could just be one more thing to be different now.

Perhaps it was okay to just be me.

~~~

I couldn’t have said how long it had been since I’d hit the barrier.

Since then I’d spent much of the journey in thought – making sure to keep my hands on the controls of course. It wouldn’t have been strange if it had been many hours of sailing silently through the long forgotten roads in deep darkness.

Up ahead I could see lights once more.

The source approached rapidly, but my eyes struggled to make sense of the mess of shapes in the far distance down the tunnel.

Moments later the walls fell away as I soared out into immense openness.

Dozens, hundreds of tunnels met here, entering from the floor and ceiling as well as the sides, every square inch of the space exactly that, perfectly flat and orthogonal.

This was a true city, a metropolis as great as any on Earth, sequestered away in forgotten wastes of the Underworld. Sprawling yet dense, the buildings packed together with perfect order, each phasing into the next where walkways and struts linked them. Edifices the size of skyscrapers rose and descended from floor and ceiling, surfaces perfectly smooth and featureless, not a window to be seen.

Lines were at perfect right angles, even the bedrock cut to the same overarching grid the tunnels had followed, as if the whole empire was built on a sheet of graphing paper.

Impressive as it was, it was imposing too. A human city could never have been so unified in theme and style, so controlled. Life in that rigid order must have been suffocating.

Beauty was woven into the powerful architecture however. While the structures obeyed many rules, there was still variation, even creativity within those constraints. No two buildings were identical as far as I could see.

Here a forest of cubes grew like a bunch of grapes into a block of apartments, chaotic despite the precise alignment that preserved the requisite angles.

There vertical planes of stone formed a tangle of standing flat obelisks like cleaved sheets of slate, within whose layers hung a perfect cube of living space, suspended at the heart of the surreal megaliths.

Far in the distance a stepped ziggurat descended from the centre of the cavern, meeting another which rose from below, linking the two cityscapes, terrestrial and inverted, and creating the illusion that one was merely the reflection of the other.

That was not the only interconnection however – pillars linked roof and floor of the cavern in many places – while a web of bridges and pathways meshed together the layers of the city, creating traversable roads and open platform spaces even between the pinnacles of the tallest towers. The city must have been home to millions once, hundreds of millions.

Buildings in the Dweomer’s echo were lit in the same vibrant colors that the barrier and the golems had shown, veins of radiant bismuth circuits shining out from cutaways and grooves. Fitting for the nature of the place, the nearest parallel was supernatural ivy creeping up the sides of the eons-abandoned forms. More sinister was the impression of skin peeled back from some vast organism to reveal the arteries and capillaries within.

The starkly beautiful yet macabre forms were not the only source of light. Through gaps in the ordered chaos of the megastructure there emerged square minarets, pushing up from the floor and spiraling down from the ceiling. At their peaks were metallic beacons of bismuth, impossibly huge and brilliant, daubing their striated chromatic emanations across the buildings about them and bathing the surroundings in shifting ridges of reflected color.

The rainbow luminescence might have been cheery, but there was a coldness to it that only reinforced the rigid world over which it was cast.

The same lightless glow must once have fallen on the Dweomer people, and even now, millennia later, the beacons were still shining in the lonely darkness of the Underworld’s depths.

Yet as I flew through the skies of the long dead city I realized I wasn’t the only thing moving – in the distance I could see automata still operating.

Although they were few, the bright colors of golems walking the streets were easy to pick out against the palette of blacks, whites and grays that made up most of the buildings.

One of several I could see scattered about, a gigantic golem like a hermit crab was carefully dismantling a swathe like a wound through the city, hundreds of limbs forming to pick apart the building it had run into, conveying the pieces to a hopper on its back that was also part of the ‘shell’ of the overgrown bismuth golem.

Behind it smaller shell-less golems followed, these equipped with the faculty of flight. Like worker bees they zoomed around in the wake of the behemoth, busily cleaning up the debris and repairing the half-disassembled structures, often taking pieces right back out of the hopper to do so.

As I watched one of the building golems lingered too long around the opening, and the giant grabbed it in an arm, several more extending to dismantle it too.

With their masters and mistresses extinct there was no-one left to tell the machines to stop. They had simply gone on, unperturbed, doing what they were designed to, picking up the pieces and maintaining a city long devoid of life.

It was reassuring despite the melancholy of the sight. There was no intelligence there, no mind thinking and growing in the absence of its creators to awaken something precious and fragile. Destroying these golems was little different to breaking any other machine.

Not that I was eager to smash up robots, but it was nice to have the option at least.

When my platform finally came to a rest it was atop a relatively small building just outside the dense heart of the city, part of cluster of like structures at least fifty floors high by human standards. That these were small against the heart of the city spoke to the vastness of the superstructures emerging from the floor and roof of the cavern.

The building on which I set down was broader and wider than my mobile roof by far, and once it had settled in place began to absorb it, pulling it down into the innards of the edifice. I jumped off rather than getting flattened inside an unknown mechanism.

My building lacked any rooftop connection to those around it, so I pondered breaking a hole in the rooftop and trying to descend internally, but it seemed likely to attract more golems if I started smashing things.

Instead my legs easily negated the fall to the ground below, thighs tensing like giant springs as I landed.

With that I had arrived.

I’d made it to a Dweomer city, probably their capital if they had such a thing.

It was a shame I was there many eons too late – I should have loved to meet the strange people who conceived of such perverse complexity, using a thousand lines and angles to accomplish the effortless curve of a single arc.

Outside of the windbreaker bubble of my vehicle, I took a deep breath, sampling the air. It had a sterility that I had grown less accustomed to since coming to Arcadia. The concentration of mana was oddly low too – lower even than on the surface, let alone the normally mana-rich Underworld.

I was standing on a street wide enough for several cars to pass, buildings on each side towering over me, giant cubes and rectangles of black and grey stone. The walls and other surfaces felt uncomfortably bare too, little between me and the stark and imposing architecture. If I’d had to live here after the time I’d spent in the mountains I’d have been trying to break out, not in.

The structures would have been less stifling had there been any windows, but if the Dweomer had known of glass they certainly never took to its architectural possibilities. The people inside the structures must have used artificial lights – but then here in the Underworld all lights were artificial.

The surface underfoot was similar material to the walls, smooth and cool, but not unpleasantly so, the street floor almost totally featureless, with no demarcations or features for pedestrians or vehicles. Perhaps if all your vehicles could fly all streets were pedestrian streets.

Quiet shattered as behind me began the raucous metallic movement of a golem rousing itself.

Pushing up on several coalescing limbs, a kick caught it unprepared and shattered the amalgam of iridescent bismuth.

Most of the components were undamaged and quick to start gathering up again, but the noise seemed to have roused more of the machines, the sharply raucous sounds audible in advance of the sight of the golems themselves.

Here in the middle of the Dweomer city there could be thousands of the things; there was no time to slag each in turn with my magic. Better to just avoid them, or at least escape them.

With that thought I was off. Crouching, I felt my toes crack the stone underfoot as I leapt up, landing on another building top, amid a promenade that linked several buildings in a row. Running its length took only a moment, but there was no reason to lose myself in the maze of paths branching around and through the taller tower ahead. Another light hop carried me onwards over the peak, in the direction of the city centre.

I wasn’t certain exactly what I should be looking for there in the heart of dead city. Some sort of elevator or flying machine to take me in the direction of the surface would have been ideal, but I couldn’t very well investigate every single rooftop for a vehicle programmed to head up. I wasn’t even certain if this city connected to the surface at all. No, the first step was looking for information. Maps or even signposts could help, as would any readable information left behind.

Of the latter there were plenty to be found. Each intersection of paths, elevated or terrestrial, had a stone post at the centre, often part of a larger decorative installation where there was room, with directions written in a fittingly blocky, angular script. The lettering was probably the Dweomer language, but while I couldn’t say for certain, I could read it with ease.

The place names meant little, but there were some that I could make sense of, such as signs to local food distribution centers or directions to other regions of the city.

Ahead I noticed one such distribution centre, an alcove on the rooftop walkway. I’d imagined something like a mall or a grocery store, but it wasn’t like either. There were no doors or security features of any kind, just a square arch.

It lead into what looked more like a library than a shop, simple square metal stools arranged around matching tables, either side of the place lined with metal shelves bearing boxes of various sizes, the modest script on the corner of each revealing its contents. There were no product displays or signs in sight, and no indication of prices or places to pay.

Yielding to the mournful gurgle of my stomach I investigated the boxes more closely. Each had faint traces of mana about them, possibly to preserve the contents, however breaking the seals on a few released unpleasant earthy scents that quickly dissuaded me. Even supernaturally sealed containers couldn’t keep food fresh forever.

Trying not to think about eating I stepped back out onto the elevated street. Looking around I realized now why it felt so bare, despite the ample street signs. It was the lack of advertisements, of billboards and posters, flashy shop signs and flyers plastered to every surface.

It put me in mind of the science fiction of Earth’s past, looking forward to a distantly imagined future when things like food were so plentiful that everyone could eat their fill for free.

Now that I was on the lookout there were some billboard-like messages to be seen, but they didn’t appear to be advertisements exactly. One large panel near the distribution centre caught my eye; “The good citizen maintains good health. Healthy citizens make a healthy species.”

Setting off once more I started to ascend, stairs connecting to taller buildings ahead as I moved deeper into the core of the forsaken metropolis.

Progressing through the city I endeavored to avoid further encounters with golems, but their numbers were growing as I neared the centre of the labyrinthine metropolis. With my overflowing mana hiding from them also proved impossible, forcing me to fight my way through the ancient warriors, more trailing behind me as I ran.

After my recent success with the barrier I did attempt to conceal my mana, but running and walking were worlds apart – I could, with great concentration, increase or reduce the rate at which I was emitting essence, but bringing that flow to an indefinite halt would require more practice than I had time for.

Even so I was making progress of many kinds today, and I was determined to reach the core of the burg and find a way out of the Underworld, even if I had to pulverize every Golem in the city limits.

During the trip I picked up some interesting signposts that gave added encouragement – the ‘Research Institute’ sounded very promising! I could imagine all manner of experimental flying machines they could have been working on, perhaps even something better, like a teleportation spell. I wasn’t sure if teleportation magic was actually possible, but if it were, the Research institute sounded like the place for it.

Less promising than the institute was ‘The Incineration Podium’ which stood outside the building, at the centre of a huge gathering point of some sort. An open square of clear space between blocky towers was dotted with benches, sign posts and some rare examples of statuary.

The Dweomer depicted were wrought, of course, in straight lines and right angles only. I doubted they had actually been so improbably formed in the flesh, but then I’d seen stranger things. All the same, I suspected it was artistic license.

Odd too were the poses and scenes depicted, strange enough that I slowed in my running despite the many golems somewhere in the streets behind me.

What sort of people carved statues of themselves burning alive?

The faces of the victims were contorted as the angular blaze consumed them, but not with agony; rapture was etched into the expressive stonework, even as the fires ate away their limbs and torsos.

Disturbing even in the singular, a square full of the grisly figures was chilling.

I wondered if the Dweomer disappeared in a fit of self-immolations – but surely no species was so deranged as to burn themselves alive to the last person.

The immolating statues were orientated towards the centre of the court, where a raised platform stood. Even now grills vented a series of flames from burners idling eternally under the surface of the podium. My ridiculous theory was graining traction.

It was amazing to think how long the fires must have been lit – a testament to whatever strange power drove the city still. Still more remarkable were the fiery tongues themselves; they burnt in the same crystalline orthogonal shapes as the bismuth golems, square spirals coiling upwards, exactly as they appeared on the statues. Clearly they weren’t ordinary flames.

If the flames were depicted accurately that also raised the question of whether the Dweomer had really been a people composed of sharp corners and planes, but I preferred not to take the statues entirely literally, given the implications they carried.

Unfortunately for me, the statues and podium weren’t merely ominous. They were also occupied.

As I approached the podium panels opened around it, multiple golems unfurling from recesses, more emerging from spaces around the edges of the rectangular gathering place, in particular what I presumed was the Research Institute. Gauging by the mana I could sense packed into each and the chaotic magic that they were already carving out these were considerably more powerful than the rank and file I’d been fighting so far.

The golems within the city had all attacked me on sight, and in that these elites were no different – in moments a dozen were charging towards me, twice as many spreading out as they prepared to open fire.

I crouched, preparing to jump over the nearest building to lose them, as I’d done several times already that day. With a quick loop I could double back around to reach my target, the institute, from another side.

As I was about to leap I saw the artillery golems taking to the air. These ones could fly.

Ditching the sentries and slipping inside before they returned didn’t seem possible if they had this degree of mobility. That meant plan B; time to crush the lot of them.

A grin curled up my cheeks as I prepared myself.

“Ready or not, here I come!”