The Silence. “I know.” Woid insisted, fending off her impatience. “Was craving a cup before we go.” He sipped. “And cakes. Can’t be too thirsty.” Another chasing forkful.
“No gambling to be done down here.” Serib implied Woid was getting bored.
“Up here. Oh there was at first, with the cards - they’re all too busy now after a few games. Recovering from their wounds. Resting. Conveniently. I didn’t even win very many. Fairest warning - you may get a whack from Shay for leaving The Club.”
“So will you, for letting me.”
“Could well, could well. Where shall we go?”
"You have no objections?" The young shaman waited.
"As I said, you know what you're up to. You've that sort of look to you. A cool look."
He helped Serib laugh off her seriousness.
∞
The tea in Serib's mug wobbled, the small plates and forks shook almost to the edges of the table, yet not a noise was made.
“Why didn’t that make noise?”
She stood up, unable to hear herself speak. She looked at Woid and similarly his lips were moving and teeth up-down, but Serib heard not a word.
Woid was already over by the door to this level of The Club, taking a peek on the cameras. Serib wondered where this technology had sprouted from, the lower level being less advanced to her recollection. Perhaps climbing the stairs had shifted an epoch or two around without their knowing. Woid opened up a tab on the screen and typed into the frame for her eyes to read:
“There’s a stone angel in the tunnel.”
∞
On the monitor, The Boiled Angel was sat there defeated, stone completely black and burned, a charred and smoking sword next to them, filling soon the chamber with fumes the camera could not pierce.
“Not been there long.” Serib tried to say, going unnoticed.
∞
Woid umbra-stepped over to the railing peering downstairs. The wounded Shadows too made not a noise, not their rushing feet nor their open mouths could scream a thing, and were going mad with panic unable to hear themselves or anything else. One tender alone, glowing in Grey robes, had sense enough to remain calm. Serib was fiddling with the door’s controls, unable to get it open. Before a thought Woid was again next to her, his hand on her shoulder. His hand moved in such a way, encouraging her to breathe. In. Out. His eyes looking straight into hers he nodded, and she nodded tentatively. Go.
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∞
As the door opened Serib heard nothing, she only felt the scraping of the door's metal plates slotting away, and saw only black smoke escaping from the corridor ahead, gushing against her and Woid. They both tried to fan and bat the smoke away, coughing, keeping each other close. Even his eyes could see through no darkness as this. Some automated system took over as vents opened throughout the corridor allowing some of the smoke to filter elsewhere. The smoke was siphoned off into toxic streams across the walls, roof and floor, all pouring from one source: the boiled angel’s charred sword. A bulb was flashing, likely with a never-to-be-heard alarm.
∞
Serib and Woid waded together through the toxic streams, covering their faces and coughing to no avail or sound. Though Serib could hear but one thing, the sounds of a raging fire. Of all elements she knew Earth in part, the others such as Water and Fire not at all. The sound was no campfire giving crackles to the wood beneath, this flame was one alone, burning only air without fuel or source.
∞
There was about The Black Angel a strange light, sitting there miserably the stone shape, with at least two pairs of wings jutting from its back. It was too big to be in this tunnel, and yet there it was impossibly, almost crumpled so. For had dimensions shifted without warning and large places became small? The fiery hisses were yet louder as Serib approached, feeling the call of nature or of the elements within it, the call of a primordial flame. And an even older cold. She knew how to hear and heed such things, but her master had taught her no mastery of this element. Aloud as the flames were to her ears, before her lay the snuffed, the extinguished sword.
“Your totem…” she felt her throat say, staring at the fuming blade, though there was only flame aloud.
A staff or a wand to a wizard, a sword to a warrior, a totem to a shaman.
∞
She turned back and Woid was unable to yell for her caution, wide as he threw his mouth and full his lungs, reaching out to grab her. He felt unable to umbra-step in the presence of this being, the silence maddening, the dimensions and sizes of things unclear. She touched the drowned angel’s hand and ice bit back at her, as she felt Woid’s touch on her shoulder, and around them all light wobbled as though in the haze of heat and both began to sweat immediately, spinning and dropped and thrown through illusions. The large bulbs of the corridor turned - stretched - to far distant stars. Their faces smacked into the floor.