“Eaaugh.” With a gasp, Jasper woke up. His ribs groaned in protest as he sucked in a deep breath of air, and he released the air immediately. Okay, shallow breaths only. Gingerly, he rolled onto his side. His right arm didn’t respond properly to his commands, and his ribs sent shooting pain with every breath he took, but aside from that he felt surprisingly well. What happened?
Dragging himself into an upright position, he glanced around. An immeasurable gloom surrounded him, unbroken by any light save for a faint flicker above. He suddenly remembered the fall, and his heart rate spiked. Crap. The seraph. Calling on his essence, he let blue flames flicker along his left hand, revealing the room he was in.
He was not alone.
The room was much larger than he’d expected. The light flickered off shiny, white pillars that seemed to run in a circle around where he’d fallen and the floor was covered in thick layers of mud and silt. A bare patch in the corner, though, revealed the remains of a brightly colored mosaic decorated with what appeared to be giant blue birds fighting something that looked an awful lot like a dragon. His eyes lingered on the mosaic for only a moment, though, before he caught sight out of the corner of his eye of the other inhabitant of the room.
The Seraph lay in a crumbled heap. His big, black wings were splayed on either side of him, like an angel fallen from heaven, but there was no sign of movement. Jasper watched him cautiously for a few moments, afraid the old mage was playing dead to lure him over. Except…I was unconscious. Surely he could have killed me if he wanted. Comforted by that logic, he worked up the courage to go investigate the Seraph.
The old man’s face was frozen in the position of an endless silent scream and his eyes remained wide open, but he didn’t appear to be breathing. Cautiously, Jasper reached out and touched him only to find the body was stone cold.
Huh. As Jasper leaned back against the wall, cradling his broken arm, confusion dominated his mind. Thanks to the fires that had destroyed the man’s clothes, his torso and arms were bare, but Jasper could see the thick bracelet dangling at the end of his right arm, the same bracelet he’d seen in the vision the Anzuzu had given him. He was nearly certain the Seraph was the man from his vision, and yet…he was dead. Has the vision changed? He knew from what his aunt had told him that it was theoretically a possibility, but he couldn’t be sure. I couldn’t see the cultist’s face in the vision, so perhaps it’s another.
Uncertainty gnawed at him, but he realized he had to move on. He needed to get out of the darkness fast, before the dead gods came looking. And to do that he needed to heal himself. He limped back over to where he had woken up, and sighed as he saw his bag and glaive had been trapped underneath a small pile of rubble. He struggled, one-handed, to roll the rocks away, cringing each time they bounced onto the floor with a clatter that seemed, in the utter silence of the darkness, loud enough to wake the dead - hopefully, not literally.
Finally, he unburied the bag enough to drag it out. Forced to douse the flames roiling of his hand, the darkness closed in on him as he rooted around the bag. Unlike Ihra, he didn’t have a bag of holding, and he quickly realized the fall had taken its toll on the contents of his bag. The leather sides were wet and gooey and small shards of glass futilely scratched at his toughened skin. Five bottles of potion had been thoroughly smashed, but when he reached the sixth he found that, though the neck of the bottle had shattered, the bulk of the vessel remained intact.
Dragging it out, he relit his hand and examined the contents dubiously. He could see small bits of glass floating in the pick potion, and he tried to fish them out, for though his outer skin had been significantly toughened, he wasn’t certain if the same toughness had been applied to his innards. After removing all the glass he could find, he chugged the drink.
A tickle of pain ran down his throat as a shard of glass he had missed scratched his way down his gullet, but the overall feeling of relief that washed over him was immediate. With a crack, the bones in his shattered right hand realigned themselves and his skin healed over. Willing a bit of essence into his hands, he let the fire wash over both of them.
The darkness slithered back almost begrudgingly, sending long flickering shadows dancing along the walls of the room. His eyes immediately were drawn to the Seraph’s corpse, half-expecting him to have risen, like some sort of cheap horror flick, but the man’s mangled body hadn’t moved. He seemed to be alone, but the thought of the dead gods weighed heavily on his mind. I’ve got to get out of here. He glanced down at the floor, where his glaive still lay trapped beneath the rubble. Crap.
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Bending down, he began to move the broken bricks and rocks as quickly as he could while still balancing his need for silence. His ears strained to their limits, listening for any sound of something lurking in the darkness, and his movements were punctuated by repeated glances over his shoulder. Slowly the shaft emerged and, grabbing hold, he tugged it free. Then, scampering over to the side of the room, he placed his back against the wall and looked for an exit.
The room’s shape was odder than he’d realized at first. He and the Seraph had fallen into the center of the room, on top of a large rectangular block buried in too much debris for Jasper to tell if it was an altar or a sepulcher. A ring of pillars surrounded the rectangle, but the actual walls of the room appeared to be in an almost rhombus shape, with two long spikes that narrowed sharply. The light of his fire was not sufficient to illumine the dark recesses of the room, and he was forced to choose a direction. Unable to discern north from south in the depths of the city, he chose randomly and walked toward the narrowing passage.
As he reached the end of the spike, a pale door came into view. It was strangely tall and thin, perhaps as much as six or seven times as high as it was wide, and was reinforced with dozens of thick bars made from the same substance as the door. At first, he mistook it for ivory, but as he stepped close, Jasper could tell it lacked the rich, yellow hues of ivory. Is this…bone? He stared at the grisly door reluctantly, then reached out his hand to open it. It didn’t budge.
He tried again, straining with all his strength, and it did shake a bit, but it still wouldn’t open. After a few futile minutes of effort, he gave up and turned his attention to the other direction. Please let there be another door. One that will open.
He walked back through the ring of pillars and skirted past the dead body of the Seraph again. Venturing into the darkness beyond, his guess was proven correct as another pale door came into view - or at the least, the remains of one.
The door’s bars still stubbornly clung to the sides of the passage, but the center had been riven in two. Large chunks of bone lay scattered on the far side of the exit, causing Jasper to cast a nervous glance back at the half-buried rectangle in the center of the room. Did something…break out of here? Perhaps he was jumping to conclusions, but he immediately wondered if he’d stumbled across one of the graves of the dead gods. Let’s hope they’re not sentimental.
Advancing slowly into the passage beyond, Jasper found the space quickly widened out. It was hard to find his bearings at first in the darkness which, as before, seemed to resist the light in an almost supernatural manner, but as he slowly followed the wall, he realized he had exited into one of the streets that the ancient residents of the city had carved deep into the cliffs.
Pausing, he stood motionless and tried to determine if he could sense anything that would guide his steps. At first, he thought the street was perfectly level, but after a few moments of standing, he realized his weight was slightly favoring his left leg. Turning to his right, he started to head up the street, hoping that the slight incline would eventually lead him out of the city, but he had only taken a few steps when he ground to a halt again.
What about Tsia? And Yas̆gah? He wasn’t exactly sure where they would be, but he remembered what Nēs̆u had said - that Tsia was deep in the heart of the city. He took a few steps further up the road, toward the promise of escape, and stopped again.
“Damn it.” His words echoed off the silent streets of the city, and he immediately cursed himself out - this time, silently, in his head - for the lapse in judgment. Then, begrudgingly, he turned around and started in the other direction.
Jasper's sense of paranoia grew as he walked through the darkness. Without the minimal amounts of light provided by the flames flickering on his hands, the darkness was so thick that he would be completely unable to see where he was going - it was, quite simply, necessary. But he knew too, how dangerous it was. His hands stood out like an angler fish in the depths of the ocean, a lure to everything that hid in the darkness. But the angler fish was a predator seeking prey, and Jasper knew his own situation was quite different; the only thing the light would draw to him would be danger.
But the minutes ticked by, and despite his frequent furtive glances, Jasper saw no sign of anything else around - neither of the pale, gaunt faces of the nizirtū nor that which he truly feared, the as-of-yet unseen dead gods. There was nothing but silence, and his pace slowly picked up as the road’s incline steepened.
The temperature continued to rise, and as he ventured further down, he was finally able to see its cause. A faint light glowed in the darkness ahead, a dull, orangey-red glow that strengthened as he approached. Large crevasses began to rive the road, miniature chasms whose bottoms churned with liquid rock. The heat roiling off the magma was nearly unbearable and though Jasper knew he had fire immunity, he wasn’t quite sure if magma would count.
He picked his way through the field carefully, but despite the danger that magma posed, he couldn’t help but feel a bit cheered by his presence. Sure, falling into it was a probably death sentence, and he had no desire to repeat Gollum’s last moments, but there was also light - glorious, glorious light.
Still, Jasper was beginning to fear that he’d headed in the wrong direction when the silence of the dead city was broken an unexpected noise. He paused a moment, listening intently to the sound, but it was too distant to make out. Picking up the pace as fast as he dared in the dark streets, he headed toward the sound, hoping against hope that Tsia and Annatta would be there.