Hope

All things considered, both girls agreed that things could’ve been worse. Sure, the sudden explosion had caused a mini-avalanche trapping them inside the temple where they might suffocate to death. But at least they were safe from the gunfire. The inner temple walls might have been uncomfortably damp and decorated with statues that would have given nightmares to a grown adult, but they were also the only thing standing between them and a gut full of bullets.

“And if you think about it, death is just another part of life,” Hope remarked as she fixated her flashlight on the mountain of rubble blocking their exit. She still remembered her first time getting trapped underground. It was four, no, five months into her career. It had taken every ounce of her strength back then to not have a panic attack. By the fifth time, however, she’d gotten so used to it, that she’d started keeping a bingo card to make things halfway interesting.

“Murky cave? Check. Caved-in wall? Check. Creepy statues? Oooh, that’s a big one! What else? Oh, yeah, funny writing on the walls. Hey, that’s bingo!”

“Good for you.” Alicia smiled through a murderous glint in her eyes. “Now, if you don’t mind, what the fuck happened out there?”

Hope shrugged. “Still figuring that part out. Sounded like a big blast of some sort. Comms are down too. Gee, I hope the guys are okay.”

“And we’re trapped here.”

“Hey, didn’t we just agree that it’s safer in here? Chill, we’re still alive.”

“Well, serve my shit in a sausage pan if that ain’t the sweetest thing I’ve heard all day.”

Hope considered the mental image and nearly vomited out her dinner. “Anyhoo, there’s gotta be another way out. You’re the local. Don’t you know like a secret shortcut or something?”

Alicia flashed the brand on her wrist like a badge of honor. “Lowborn here, missy. Ain’t allowed within a mile of the temple.”

“Oh, right. Sorry. Wait, not sorry. I thought you didn’t believe in God.”

“Yeah, but that’s my choice. It doesn’t give them the right to refuse the ones that do.”

“That… wow, that’s actually kinda wise.”

Alicia snorted. “What? You didn’t think I was smart?”

“N-no, I mean. I thought, you know, that you didn’t have a proper education.”

“And here comes the stereotypes.” Alicia rolled her eyes. “Ooh, I come from a country without fancy phones so everyone here must be an idiot.”

“It’s not that!” Hope protested. “Look, six months ago, I didn’t even know there was anything outside Lucidea. And suddenly, it turns out there’s a whole wide world out there that we knew nothing about. It’s not easy to, you know, process all of that so soon.”

“Pfft! What’s there to process? We’re just scrubs. Like you. Sure, we look different and speak different languages. But at the end of the day, we’re all here for the same thing, ain’t we? Sucking air till we stop sucking air. And having a good time while we’re at it.”

Hope smiled at the remarkable simplicity of her explanation. In a weird way, it reminded her of Sebastian. He wasn’t the brightest student, by any means, but with her being infinitely worse at every subject, he looked like a genius by default. And yet, every time he tutored her for an upcoming quiz, he made things so easy that she could be half asleep and still grasp every single point.

“Yeah.” Hope laughed. “Sucking air till we… wait, sucking air. Air! That’s it!”

Hope pushed her flashlight into Alicia’s hand and tossed her belt to the ground. “Point it at the stuff, will ya?” She searched the contents with an eagle eye as she looked for the perfect tool. Shrapnel grenades, explosives, ice grenades, sticky bombs, all dangling from the black fiber mesh that decorated her utility belt. Her fingers curled around a tiny cylinder with a cloud painted on its surface. She smiled beneath her mask.

“Whatcha plannin’?” asked Alicia.

“We’ve been here a while, haven’t we? And with the entrance blocked like that, there’s no way any air’s coming in. So, how are we still breathing?”

“I dunno. But maybe the air’s coming in from somewhere else,” Alicia guessed. As the realization dawned upon her brain, a soft “oh” emerged from her mouth and her lips curled into a playful smile.

“Precisely.” Hope nodded and pulled the pin on her smoke grenade. A cloud of gray-black soot burst out of the cylinder and engulfed the darkened cavern. In just a few seconds, it began to thin out. Alicia coughed like a serial smoker while the smoke cleared up as rapidly as it had emerged. Her flashlight followed the cloud toward the Southern end of the cave. Her eyes went wide as bulbs when she observed the wall where the smoke had disappeared.

There weren’t many things in life Alicia hated more than the Arcane faith. The devils dressed in white had labeled her with a brand the moment she was born. Divine punishment, they called it. Seeing the wall covered in scriptures and figures of that very faith made her blood boil. She spat at the emblems of the Nine Gods arranged in a circle around the scriptures in perfect symmetry. They taunted her with the divine light of their sigils that glowed under the flashlight with a brilliance that illuminated the pitch-black cave.

“So,” Hope asked. “What’s this?”

“A test,” Alicia answered. “See that inscription?”

“Those are words? That’s a weird alphabet.”

“Piss off, Ms. Worldwide. Wadinese is a million times more refined than that pile of donkey piss you call English. Anyway, we’ll have to overcome the Trials of the Nine if we wanna get through this door. It says: If pious be thy heart, prove true thy devotion. Through fierce determination, thy shall conquer the trials of the Nine. The Emperor, everlasting regent, demands fealty to the Light. The Empress, everlasting mother, gives love to the true scions of the desert. The Hanged Man, truest martyr, asks one in kind. The Sun, Light personified, grants audience to those free of darkness. The High Priestess, all-knowing and all-loving, begs knowledge of the deepest-”

“Step aside, hon. I got this.” Hope tugged Alicia back from the wall with an exasperated groan. Before the woman could process what was happening, Hope fired an explosive round at the sacred wall. One shot, one targeted explosion was all it took. Alicia watched in horror as the holy emblem of the Nine deities crumbled into a pile of rubble before her very eyes.

As the dust settled and a path emerged behind the once-divine wall, Alicia kept watching. Her eyes seemingly lost the ability to blink. Even her mouth, otherwise rarely shut, was left open and motionless. She knew the Gods weren’t real. Of course, they weren’t. No real being would allow someone to commit such atrocities in their name. But something about seeing their physical representations, their emblems turn to dust was liberating. Like a chain around her neck had been snapped open after twenty years of choking her breath. She laughed, then shuddered, and then laughed some more. This was a good feeling, she thought, and kept laughing.

“Are you okay?” Hope asked timidly, afraid that she’d committed some sort of taboo.

Alicia reassured her with a smile as a single tear dropped down her cheeks. “It’s nothing. Let’s get moving.”

The path behind the wall can be described in its entirety using just one word: stairs. If permitted to use two words, the description would be “dark” and “stairs”, or “dark stairs”, for the more creatively minded. The path ahead was engulfed in such pitch-black that even a blind man would insist they turn on the lights. Even under the full power of her visor’s night vision and zoom feature, Hope struggled to see an end to the descending path. The cool air was but a slight reprieve from the claustrophobic tunnel that felt more akin to the belly of a snake, with an acidic scent to boot.

“Man, that’s a lot of stairs,” Hope commented, trying to initiate conversation.

“Yep,” answered Alicia, in a sharp and decisive voice that seemed to forbid further dialog.

“What do you think we’ll find at the bottom?”

“Got me.”

An awkward silence persisted for a while, made even more awkward by the constant echoing of their footsteps. Hope thought of the previous day and how she’d almost made a breakthrough with the woman. The girls had spent all day strolling through the city with a picture in their hands and a solitary word on their lips: Zaheera. Hope didn’t recall much of what they’d talked about. She’d been too busy ogling at the hypnotic swaying of her buttocks, the intense glare of her sapphire eyes, and the luscious movements of her bright lips as they commanded her to follow in the meanest possible way. Even thinking of it now, she was turning redder than a firetruck.

Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

Despite that, she tried again. “You never told me your real name, you know?”

“It’s Aliyah,” she exhaled. “Aliyah Yassin. Not like it matters anyway. I don’t want anything to do with my old life anymore.”

“Not even Zaheera?”

Alicia stopped in her tracks.

“You never said what happened to her. Look, it’s okay if you don’t want me to intrude. I’ll shut up-”

“No!” she exclaimed louder than she’d intended. “It’s fine. You spent all day hauling ass with me in the sun. You helped me with him. Even now you… it’s only fair you know the whole deal. But let’s keep moving. The darkness freaks me the fuck out.”

Alicia took a deep breath and continued, “Zaheera and I, we didn’t have much back in the day. Father was, well, you saw what he was. Mother didn’t survive him for long either. And if that wasn’t bad enough, we were demonspawn. That meant separate schools, separate slums, and separate shops. If we went to the main city, we were as good as dead. That was no way to live for anyone.”

Hope gulped and listened as the sound of footsteps faded away behind the hatred in her voice.

“When we heard they were opening up travel to other countries, we saw our chance. We thought that we could get away from, you know, all of it. Start a new life. Just the two of us. That was, until one day, when that bitch Yousef decides that no one was allowed to go anywhere. I knew if we didn’t get out before then, we were never getting out. So, I scrapped up all my savings and got a guy to charter us a boat. We were supposed to run away at midnight.”

Alicia laughed with a dulled sadness in her voice. “If only it were that easy. Turns out, about two hundred of the fine people of Noor had the same damn idea. You know, it’s funny. When you live like me, you get used to having terrible days. Days where you’re pushed to your limit. And you pick yourself up and reassure yourself saying, it’s alright, it can’t get any worse than this…… That night was the most awful night of my life. Folks running headfirst into spears, climbing on top of each other to get out of the walls. I never realized how many wanted to run away. How desperate they were. If I’d known there were gonna be that many, I would’ve delayed the plan.”

She repressed her tears by gritting her teeth. Seeing her in distress, Hope held her hand to comfort her. Alicia gripped it as tightly as she could and took a deep breath. That felt better. She gulped and continued. “We were this close to getting out, okay? This close. Like, five steps, and we would’ve been free. But a damned soldier just had to get in our way. Zaheera, genius that she is, says she’ll… she’ll get his attention. Distract him so… so I can escape. Me, of all people. I’ve never claimed to be a good person, Hope. I’ve done bad things. Awful things. I’ve stolen, I’ve hurt people. Whatever happens to me, I know I deserve it. But Zaheera, she deserved better. She was the nicest damn person I ever knew and she deserved a good life. A happy life. She… sacrificed herself… for me. So, I could have a good life. A happy life.”

Alicia cried. She cried like she hadn’t cried since she was a baby. Tears moistened her cheeks as soft convulsive sobs drove her into Hope’s arms. For the first time in nearly twenty years, she had allowed herself to be vulnerable. “I failed her. I was the older sister, god damn it! I was supposed to protect her! I pinky promised I’d take her to see the ocean. I promised her.”

Hope sat with Alicia in her arms for as long as she needed. Even Alicia didn’t protest or try to move away. She felt strangely at peace. The warmth of her touch, the soft pats on her back, and her gentle reassurance of “it’s all gonna be okay” made her happy. Like she’d finally shown an old wound to her mother. Even if the pain remained, she knew that everything was going to be alright.

∆∆∆

Hope felt a cool breeze blowing against the rim of her mask. They were nearing the end. “You know, this is maybe the second longest staircase I’ve ever been on.”

“What was the first?” asked Alicia.

“You ever heard of Matthew the Eternal in Haven City?”

“What? That big ass statue in the Admin Block? I’ve seen pictures.”

“There’s a staircase inside that takes like two hours to go from top to bottom. I was following this crook. Small-time thief. Main problem was, he’d shut down the elevator. I didn’t even have my grapple guns back then. Bastard thought he’d gotten away.”

Alicia scoffed. “Pfft! Of course, he did. What kind of insane person would climb that high for a two-bit thug, right?”

When she heard no response, Alicia came to a sudden halt. She stared at Hope like a mother who’d seen her child run a marathon on all fours. The former hero concealed a sheepish grin beneath her mask.

“You didn’t!”

Hope shrugged innocently. “Hey, silver lining, I got a ton of cardio that day. Besides, nabbing that guy was my big break. It’s what put Vega in the spotlight.”

“You’re mad. I got no other words. You’re mad, girl.”

“Hey look! The stairs end right there.” Hope pointed ahead.

Hope raced down to find a featureless wall blocking their path. Their flashlights revealed a gigantic slab of black stone radiating a pale aura that filled the end of the stairs with a fearful chill. She felt the texture with her fingers. It was cold. Deathly cold. The rock was firm and yet, the material had an unusual softness to it. Hope was half-certain she’d never seen it before but she’d never been the best at geology to begin with. But even so, she could feel that the rock was unearthly. Alien, almost.

She stepped back in hesitation. “Moment of truth, I guess.”

“Want me to blow this one up?” asked Alicia.

Hope shook her head. “It’s fine. It’s just… something feels off about this. What will we find behind this wall, rock, whatever this is? What if it’s something dangerous?”

“You seeing another way outta Mr. Black Darkness?”

“Fair point. Alright, step back.”

With a shaky finger, she fired an explosive round at the wall and it dissipated into a cloud of black-blue dust.

Both girls had their own ideas of what they might find inside the mountain. Hope had assumed it would lead them outside the temple. Alicia was of the notion that they’d find even more boring Arcane scriptures dotting another good-for-nothing shrine. Both their ideas, while reasonable, were lacking in one crucial department: creativity. Nature bears this strange phenomenon where ninety-nine percent of the time, it behaves in completely run-of-the-mill predictable ways. We use this as a notepad for how it usually works and go about our lives never blinking an eye. That one percent, however, is so incredibly curious, so strange and incomprehensible, it takes the notepad, rips it in half, tramples it under the crush force of a locomotive, and then ignites the remains to birth another notepad.

This particular scenario was an instance of the one percent in action.

Once the dust had settled, the girls were assaulted by a near-blinding stream of light. Hope stepped forth with raised arms and squinted as her eyes readjusted to the brightness. Once they were accustomed to the light, what the girls saw was beyond even their wildest imagination.

The inside of the mountain was completely hollow. A far cry from the pitch-black cavern behind them, it glowed with the brilliance of a million bright-blue crystals that dotted nearly every inch of its surface. Hope knew with absolute certainty that those things did not belong on Earth.

She looked around hesitantly. The bottom of the mountain was non-existent. Even peering through the mile-long zoom of her visor, she saw nothing but a bottomless chasm, concealed in darkness and devoid of life.

Save for one thing.

It was a pale creature. Reptilian, she guessed, from its scales that resembled the wall crystals. Its body, concealed in wings as large as sailboats, rested near the top in an inverted position. Eight featureless golden eyes stared at them with a predatory instinct they could feel in their bones. For the longest time, no one made a sound.

Their awed silence, however, was shattered when Alicia uttered the following words. “Is. That. A. Mother. Fucking. Dragon?”

Her abrasive tone snapped Hope back to reality. “I… I don’t know. I mean, dragons aren’t real, right?”

“That thing looks pretty real to me, girl. Is it… is it even awake?”

“I don’t know. Where the hell are we?”

“Look!” Alicia pointed to their left.

Hope followed her index finger to a building in the distance. It was a two-story compound suspended in the center of the chasm. The deep gray coloration reflected a scientific background. A belief that was further bolstered by the giant Research and Development logo painted on one side in bold red letters. Before she could open her mouth in frustration at the third impossible discovery in as many seconds, she found a glass-steel bridge that led directly to the building.

“What the hell is that supposed to be?” Hope asked.

“Looks like some kinda lab. Do we check it out? That bridge looks wide enough.”

A soft rumbling noise echoed from the creature that made the entire structure vibrate like a string. The walls shook with the intensity of a continental earthquake and Hope counted no less than fifty crystals dropping into the chasm below. She begged Alicia to reconsider but to no avail.

Despite common belief, vigilantes were actually quite common in Lucidea, with Haven City being a particularly active hotspot. They just never made enough of a splash to get famous. What little attention they got came from rescuing kittens or helping grandmas cross the road. Hope was arguably the only one with any sort of real achievements under her belt. Busting drug rackets, taking down the mafia, and nabbing serial killers was all in a day’s work for the young hero. But that was, by all means, the extent of her resume.

As she crossed the bridge to the research lab built over a bottomless gorge, inside a crystal mountain, and guarded by an alien dragon, of all things, she wondered if she was maybe out of her depth.

“Do you think Roland built that?” Hope asked, her gaze fixated on the creature above them. When it showed no signs of movement, she breathed a sigh of relief.

“Might’ve. I mean, who else do you see making a lab in a place like this? More importantly, why?”

“Guess we’ll find out soon enough. Wait, what if it’s locked?”

“Then you blow it open.” Alicia walked with a jump in her step.

Safety was, to their surprise, not a pressing concern, for once. The bridge was wrapped in a thick layer of fiberglass that formed a near-direct tunnel to the lab. And while it wobbled with the frequency of an uncontrollable bowel movement, the closest they came to falling was when Alicia decided to sprint for the last fifty meters and tripped over a steel grating.

Hope pressed a button on her visor and captured every feature of the building in perfect detail. “No signboard. No lock. Heck, even the lights are still on.”

“Looks like the place was abandoned in a hurry. Think it might’ve something to do with Mr. Tall Bright and Scaly out there?”

“Let’s keep moving. Something tells me that’s not the weirdest thing we’ll find in here.”

Despite its less-than-lively status, the facility was surprisingly clean. They couldn’t find a single speck of dust within the snow-white hallways or any of the dozens of empty rooms. The girls kept walking until they stumbled upon a big red button labeled: Break glass in case of Atrian Calamity

“What’s that supposed to be?” Hope wondered while slowly backing away from the walls.

The hallway continued for a while until ended in a steel door with a neon sign that read: Operating Room. They opened it as gently as they could.

Once they had finished observing the inside of the room, Alicia was the first one to speak up. “What the fuck?”