Clink. Clink. Crack! Another tile was freed from the floor by a decisive blow from Andrew and tossed onto the small pile of terrazzo trophies that projected abstract shadows in the lamplight. Skull breaker chisels and autopsy hammers weren’t perfect for the task but determination and time proved to make the difference. They had managed to clear out a rough circle of flooring tiles about the size of a large manhole after a couple hours of rough labor. Whatever liver ailment had brought Andrew to the hospital in the first place was taking its toll, he pulled himself up next to Paul to recover on one of the tables. Apparently it was a bad idea for any of them to be too close to the ground for too long, with the exhaust levels slowly but surely rising. The alarm had started an ear ringing whine a few minutes ago until Andrew mercifully pulled the batteries from the system.
Paul, mostly recovered, panted out their worries, “Toxic gas. Vacuum. Could be anything down there.”
Andrew tossed aside his tools with a satisfied huff and replied, “We either do nothing and definitely die within a couple days or do something and possibly die in the next hour.”
“I think we’ve got decent odds.” Said Millie, looking over her transcriptions of The Voice’s pronouncements. “The roof’s fine but the quakes are doing a number to the walls and floor, and if Andrew’s guess of the vents having been pumping into some cavern is right it all implies we’re just blocked off from the surface. Put all that together and our almighty friend seems to be hinting that it's hospitable down there.”
“So you trust the voice now?” Snarked Paul.
“Nah. But also what Andrew said - so fuck it, right?”
Olivia’s cautious approach with a large glass container full of mystery liquid, decked out in a full suite of lab safety gear, stilled the conversation as the others were compelled to watch the mad science spectacle. Once the others had moved well away she proceeded, with the same detachment with which she’d filled bottles of water, to dissolve goddamned concrete.
Dissolve was perhaps, to Millie’s disappointment, an overstatement. Rather the caustic brew Olivia had whipped up seemed to create a sort of loose grainy sludge of the topmost layer of concrete, consuming the foundations innards as it slithered into the cracks already formed by the incessant quakes. The chemical wizardry, once neutralized and cleaned away by a separate concoction and a disquieting amount of their water, proved enough to allow Andrew and Paul a good couple dozen productive blows with assorted tools, before more of Olivia’s acid needed to be applied. The repetitive process was neither fast nor easy, but it worked - and slowly but surely they dug down through what remained of the hospital’s foundations to whatever salvation, or damnation, lurked below.
Millie prowled at a distance, continuing her hobbling efforts to regain the ability to walk with no more aid than her cane as she continued to recover from the events of The Day. It did little to provide her a sense of value towards their collective survival as the others labored and toiled past exhaustion in their desperate, possibly doomed efforts. She held unvoiced uncertainties towards her theory but she could do little but feign confidence when diving half-knowledge from The Voice’s vagaries seemed her only true role. Well, that and collecting the scattered go stones they’d used to divine the best location to dig - but that was more a personal project. Continuous efforts to guide the Voice into further elaboration of what they would find below proved fruitless, with Millie’s exhaustive requests for it to define nearly every word it had used producing little more than she’d find from a dictionary. Its definition of ‘surface’ as any portion of the planet that had been in direct contact with its atmosphere at least evidenced her intuition. The only true oddities, ‘Forms’ and ‘Archetypes’, remained too esoteric to really parse.
“Define terminology, simplified - ‘Forms’: The idealized embodiment of anything and everything. Each Form is functionally infinite in scope and scale. There are functionally infinite Forms. All entities, concepts, principles, notions, objects, variations, and individual examples of any and all things have a Form. All Forms are made up of constituent Forms and coalesce into amalgamate Forms functionally ad infinitum. All Forms are one, and many. The comprehension of Forms, though impossible, theoretically grants control over reality’s constituent elements. Define terminology, simplified - ‘Archetypes’: An amalgamate Form transfigured through collective understanding and consensus into a defined expression of intent and purpose via which it and its constituent Forms can be fractionally comprehended.”
‘Wild.’ Thought Millie. ‘A madcap mashup of ideas from some of history's most moon-eyed thinkers. But to what purpose?’
For what felt like the hundredth time since the burrowing began she tried to understand and just ended up thinking about birds. A specific bird; that dumb little crow from The Day. For whatever reason that little survivor and its beady eyed cunning, fitful in its scheming to survive, was at the fore of Millie’s consideration of these ridiculous abstractions. Plato would say that it possessed the Form of a crow, that it was an imperfect and relatively unimportant reflection of the perfect idea of ‘Crow’ which words only flounder to grasp. Kant would caution, probably in between his morning coffee and an afternoon divination of some previously unknown possibility of metaphysics, that the idea of the crow was essentially meaningless without our observation of the crow, and the words we use to define it. But then what about those ‘constituents’ The Voice had mentioned; feather, beak, bone, and all the other pieces - you really could drill down into that pit forever. Crow archetypes then: an omen, a trickster, the Badb, Waang - and that was just to start. The headache wasn’t helping, nor were intrusive thoughts of early stage carbon monoxide poisoning.
‘But… so what? I can think myself in circles about a crow all day but again, to what fucking purpose? ‘Fractional comprehension’ of Forms? Control over ‘reality’s constituent elements’ - what does that actually mean? How can it help us right now?’
A loud crack and a pair of cheers dragged Millie from her morrasse as she blinked her muddled thoughts away
“Holy crap. We’re through!” Cried Paul with triumphant delight, gasping for breath and clutching at his chest as he clapped hands with a fiercely grinning Andrew.
“And would you look at that - we aren’t dead!” Andrew laughed, forehead sheened in sweat, and pulled Paul into a crushing hug. “And here’s to hoping we won’t be dead for a good while yet.”
As Paul and Andrew celebrated, reveling in the success of their backbreaking effort, Olivia solemnly held her lantern down towards the thumb-sized hole and the dark nothingness it revealed. The little flame of the lantern swelled with vital energy, dancing with glee as blessed air flowed past it into what the group had only hours ago thought would be their tomb. A near imperceptible curve at the edges of Olivia’s mouth made them seem, however briefly, alive.
Paul called over to Millie, motioning with a hand he could break free of Andrew’s consuming embrace, “Hey, bring the flashlight over let’s take a look.”
“Careful.” Said Olivia, as she straightened and gestured at the ground as she stepped away from the small hole. “Unstable.”
Andrew and Paul took some shuffling steps away from the acid-and-chisel damaged barrier against whatever lurked below them as Millie shined her flashlight into the hole from a distance. Olivia looked through the hole as if it was the subject of a lab-experiment, apparently unconcerned of the danger she herself had pointed out. After a moment of examination she moved away as her expression returned to its normal placidity.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
“Couldn’t see anything. Deep.”
“We’ll get a better look once we’ve widened the hole some.” Said Andrew, gamefully hefting the little steel hammer, still breathing heavily.
“Why would we do that?” Worried Paul, just now breaking free of Andrew’s grip.
“Better airflow for one, help the exhaust vent. Sooner we do that, sooner this damn headache goes away.” Said Andrew, as he pinched the bridge of his nose. “And more importantly -”
“Food.” Interrupted Millie, winking at Andrew as he grinned back at her. “We’ve fixed the air situation, now maybe we can fix the food situation.”
Millie’s eyes narrowed as she curiously examined the hole, leaning heavily on her cane “Maybe there’s something we can eat down there.”
“Maybe there’s something that can eat us down there.” Pointed out Paul, his glance at the hole more trepidatious than anything.
Andrew snorted, “I’m more afraid of starving than molemen.” as he took a step back towards the opening.
“Come on, let’s get back t-augh!” Andrew yelped, nearly stumbling over before Paul grabbed him by the hood of his too-small-sweater as a sizable portion of damaged concrete gave way beneath his feet and fell into what must have been a sizable cavern. It landed on the unseen floor with an audible crack a couple seconds later. Everyone took a few steps back at the now very apparent danger the destabilized cement represented and the dinner-plate-sized hole left in the floor. Andrew, having made some distance, flopped on the floor with a boneless sigh.
“Nice Save.”
“Thank the blowfish, Andrew.” Replied Paul with a relieved grin.
“Drew’s fine, brother.”
“Alright alright, you can both give thanks to Hootie on yer own time.” Laughed Millie, turning to Olivia. “Think we got enough cloth around here to throw some rope together while the boys do some more careful digging? Sounds like we’ll need a lot to get down there.”
Millie found herself brightening at Olivia’s immediate nod. She was surprised how gratifying it was to finally have something physical, something other than scheming improvisation, she could bring to their effort - however small. Something she’d be able to hold, point to, and think to herself ‘without this we wouldn’t have made it out alive’. Assuming they did make it out alive, of course.
As Olivia went to retrieve the cloth Millie hobbled up to the boys and sat next to them with a grunt, stretching her damaged leg out with a relieved sigh. The duo was still flush with success and that brief moment of fright, joking between each other as easily as if they’d been friends for years rather than drawn together only recently by the most unfortunate of circumstances.
“It’s good work you two did.” Said Millie, indicating with her cane.
“No sweat with mr. muscleman here.” Andrew said, clapping Paul on the back mid eye-roll. “If we weren’t choking on fumes he’d probably have just punched his way through.”
“Har har.” Replied Paul with good humor. “You did most of it.”
“No way.” Drawled Andrew, shaking Paul by the shoulders. “You’re stronger than you look.”
Paul shrugged, dismissing the compliment and looking past Andrew to question Millie. “Leg feeling any better?”
“Eh.” Millie tenderly flexed her leg ever so slightly. “A little.”
“You’re recovering well. Lucky.”
“Yep. Luckiest girl in the world.” Replied Millie with a snort as she cast her hand widely in front of her.
Andrew tilted his head back and laughed. “Hey, at least we’re lucky together.”
He paused and turned to face Millie, speaking with surprising earnestness. “Thanks for finding us a way out of here.”
Paul nodded in agreement, their earnestness casting Millie’s gaze towards the hole.
“Didn’t do much. A lot of luck, a little bullshiting, and spotting out the tools available - a crow coulda done it. Wouldn’t be able to do shit by myself.”
Paul followed her gaze to the hole, and their uncertain future. “Any of us would be dead if we were by ourselves.”
“Pft. Except Olivia.” Said Millie with an amused sniff.
“No.” Said Paul with solemnity. “We’re the reason she’s alive.”
The silence that passed between the three of them held multitudes. Thoughts unvoiced, feeling unspoken, dreams dead and alive. They had never processed what had happened out there, not really. It was impossible, at least not so soon. More so even than the past, the future was a vast uncertainty. Were they it? The last there’d ever be? This brief and honest moment of shared stillness lifted that weight from them, all that deep-down dread, if for only an instant. The first breath of peace, true and comfortable and so needed to truly heal, that any of them had known since The Day. A sea-change, though none of them knew it at the time. This adventure was theirs together now, live or die.
“Hey.”
“Yeah?” murmured Millie to Paul, as he started to stand.
“Shouldn’t we... not be sitting on the ground yet?”
Andrew slapped his forehead. “Dammit - I’ll chalk this up to the poison gas. Let me help you, Millie.”
“Nah it’s cool I-”
The quake struck with a hammerblow force and swiftness that dwarfed any that had come previously, rolling in waves from the dig as if it had been waiting for that vulnerable opening to strike. Paul stumbled back and fell with a cry, cracking his shoulder against one of the vibrating metal tables. Andrew, already reaching for Millie, gripped at the collar of her shirt and tried to pull her behind him. It did little but anguish Millie’s leg. The sound of shattering glass and scattering metal mute beneath the rage of the earth. Titanic enough to rip open the very floor beneath them.
It was as if a great beast mauled their way free of the cavern below, ripping open the once-innocuous hole into an expanding snarl of yawning cement-toothed darkness. Andrew tried to leverage Millie away from the jaws but failed to find leverage as the ground beneath him fell away. As he slipped away into the darkness, too shocked by the swiftness of the devouring to even scream, Millie latched the hook of her cane around the nearest object in a desperate bid to survive. It was her gurney: it had wheels. She felt a weight lock around her ankle; Andrew - a betrayal of survival instincts. She slid into the monster’s mouth, followed shortly by the gurnie as it mourned their doom with a screeching scream of metal. Hers was far less, more of a gasp.
The fall through the darkness crystalized into an eternal instant as the languidly flickering light from the hole - now above - that faded in microsecond fractions proved the only proof of time’s march, and her oncoming death. She wondered at all that had happened up to now, if she’d wake up when she landed rather than falling into a very long sleep. It was a nice thought, but not the one she ended up lingering on.
A crow on a windowsill, all the possibilities of the world behind them yet with an eye only for the show. The funny creatures and their strange little lives filled with complexities beyond its reckoning but not beyond its ability to exploit. You don’t need to know how a machine works to operate it, not really - not if you’re as clever as it was. It sits in a system, a world of rules and ways to break them and delights in that play of possibility and action. You can trick a treat from a trap, manipulate a way into a cold room on a hot day, or find safety by reading patterns and recognizing opportunities: a crow, so tiny and frail, standing amidst humans in chrome-plated hope against annihilation. The humans are so scared and uncertain yet the crow is calm and keen eyed. It watches the show, always looking for the next play, the next necessity of survival. A trick, a tool - that's how you play the game. But that was it really, that was why Millie couldn’t stop thinking about the damn crow. Some things you must be capable of doing. Sometimes improvisation failed to replace the capacities of the innate, of fundamental aptitude. The damn crow and that marvelous gift that made so much a possibility, and the lack of which, in this moment, closed off every possibility to Millie.
‘Wouldn’t it be nice to have wings?’
And so she did.