Chapter 34 Morgana #2
A deep rumble runs through the street, making the ground shudder.
I fight to keep my balance as the earth groans beneath us, and a crack splits the earth between Caledon and where we stand.
The dark earth falls away as it widens, and I look to Leon, his face locked in fierce concentration.
Instinctively, the Grand Bearer takes a step back, just as the rift stops growing, leaving a twenty-foot-wide chasm carved into the ground.
Leon meets Caledon’s smile with one of his, his gray eyes as dark as storm clouds.
“Clever,” Caledon says flatly, though he suddenly doesn’t seem so amused. He examines the chasm between us, obviously calculating if this is worth his time, and presses his lips together in a thin line.
“I may not be able to walk on air quite yet, but soon I will be able to kill you all simply by glancing at you,” he calls to us, his eyes narrowing as he looks at Leon and me in particular. “I look forward to us meeting then.”
He turns and strides through the doors of Aquila Hall, into our trap.
Leon
“Careful, watch your heads,” Etusca whispers as we squeeze our way through the dank tunnels beneath Aquila Hall.
“Thank the gods Hyllus had the good sense to stay put; he would’ve died in here,” Alastor grunts as he maneuvers around a particularly tight corner.
“It’s why this wasn’t my first suggestion,” Etusca says.
It turns out there’s another way into the gaidonesti chamber beneath Aquila Hall, through the very temple the dryads healed Ana in on our last visit.
It makes sense, given the gaidonesti in that building are connected to those forming the floor beneath the hall—all part of the same, densely packed mosaic of fallen stars.
However, it seems whoever built the tunnels expected it to only be used by those with dryad proportions, which are generally quite a bit smaller than fae ones.
Hyllus took one look at the tunnels and offered to act as lookout in case Caledon has some forces headed to Starfall after all. The rest of us were forced to push our way into the narrow passage or risk Caledon draining the gaidonesti before we’re there to witness it.
After a maze of left and right turns, lit only by the flame provided by Ana’s incendi guard, something glows up ahead.
“Stay quiet now and watch your step,” Etusca whispers as she creeps up to the light. Soon, my eyes adjust, and I see it’s coming from the cracks around a slim door. Etusca eases it open, then nods.
“It’s empty.”
We file through to find ourselves at the very edge of the huge gaidonesti chamber.
This side is bathed in shadow, the light of the gaidonesti glowing about a hundred feet away.
As Etusca promised, we’re the only ones here.
Caledon must still be navigating his way through the maze of Aquila Hall.
I step forward, examining the structures by the door that Etusca clearly plans on hiding us behind: rows of large, open crates.
I sniff, smelling the familiar scent of earth.
“What are all these flower boxes doing down here?” Tira asks, beating me to it.
“We’re not growing flowers,” Etusca says. “They’re gaidonai—star mushrooms. They’re wonderful for gut diseases, and they love the mix of darkness and starlight down here.”
“They grow medicines in here?” I ask Ana, disbelieving.
She shrugs. “That’s dryads for you—a hugely powerful source of magic in their basement, and they grow mushrooms from it.”
We quickly arrange ourselves behind the boxes, aware Caledon could arrive at any moment, though I suspect he won’t be wary enough to check the room for intruders.
He believes he’s invincible now. What does he have to fear?
I’m confident he’ll only have eyes for the stars the moment he gets his first taste of their power.
“Where’s the dark star?” I murmur to Etusca while I still can.
“They set it into the floor, at the edge of the others,” she says.
As I squint through the gloom, trying to locate it, I take in the scale of the chamber once more. When Ana and I were here before, we never even saw this side of it, but it’s easy to orient ourselves because the center of the room is lit by the gaidonesti’s silvery, ethereal light.
It illuminates Caledon as he enters the chamber from the other end, casting strange shadows along the side of his face, making him look only half human.
He walks to the center of the room and starts to bend down, examining the floor with a hungry look, but he finds his movement impeded by everything he’s carrying.
With a flash of annoyance crossing his face, he shucks the bow off his back, tossing it aside.
It skids across the floor with a clatter.
Then Caledon unfastens his belt. It’s heavy with the other three tokens fixed to it and hits the floor with a thud. He kicks it aside.
A fresh surge of hate runs through me. I’m not one for reverence, but those artifacts are powerful objects, touched by a god.
My father died to hide one of them, and the moment they’ve served their purpose, Caledon tosses them like trash.
They mean nothing to him now he’s got his greedy eye on a new, shiny source of magic.
He places his hands against the glowing stones and closes his eyes. Ana’s breathing grows shallow beside me, every muscle in her body tensing.
The gaidonesti’s reaction to Caledon’s touch is almost instant.
The glow of the stars swells, swallowing up his hands, climbing up his wrists, then his arms, until it spreads out from his shoulders, enveloping Caledon in its white light.
I watch carefully, but I have no idea if he’s drawing on the cursed stone too.
There may be some of its magic in that light, but there’s no way to tell right now.
Ana makes to get to her feet. “We should move closer while he’s distracted. We need to be ready.”
But the light around Caledon is already changing, and my hand shoots out, grabbing her. She looks down with wide eyes.
“What is it?”
“Look, something’s wrong,” I reply.
Caledon flings his head back, eyes staring into nothingness as he absorbs the gaidonesti’s power. But the ethereal glow from before is dimming, and something’s pooling around his feet, spreading like a puddle of ink.
It’s black, the low light giving it a sinister gleam. With a shudder, I realize I’ve seen something like that substance before. It looks exactly like the tarry liquid Fairon used to cough up while he was sick—the same darkness Ana said she saw stifling his celestial flame when she healed him.
At first, I think it’s rising up through the stones, drawn from the cursed star, but I’m wrong. The tar is seeping from Caledon’s skin, soaking through his robes and dripping off his legs and arms in thick globs.
“Is it working?” Tira whispers. “Has he been poisoned?”
I shake my head, unsure. Whatever’s happening might be grotesque to watch, but Caledon’s expression is pure ecstasy. He looks too happy to be in any kind of pain, and the way his shoulders are pulled back with his chest pushed out tells me he feels strong.
Ana shifts under my grip, a part of her still wanting to seize the moment, but she sees the change in Caledon too, and it makes her hesitant. Moments later, he releases his hands from the stones and stands, an elated smile spreading across his face.
Then he turns and moves smoothly from the room, either not noticing or not caring about the trail of cursed darkness he leaves behind him.
The tar spreads across the floor of the chamber, oozing into every crack, and a whiff of its scent carries across the chamber toward us.
Alastor curses as several of the others slap their hands over their noses, trying to block out the stench of rotten eggs mingled with something sharp and burning.
“We need to follow him,” Ana says, urgency making her words come out in a rush. I shift my hold on her arm down to take her hand, my voice heavy.
“I don’t think it worked, Ana. You saw him; he didn’t look like he was suffering. That cursed power might have corrupted him in some way, but it didn’t make him weaker.”
“We have to be sure,” she says, her eyes desperate as she tugs on my hand.
“Come with me,” Etusca says. “If we go back the way we came, we may still catch up with him.”
They don’t give me time to argue as we scrabble back through the tunnels. We meet Hyllus, still waiting by the Temple exit, but he shakes his head.
“He’s going back toward the Miravow, but I don’t think you want to catch up to him.”
“What do you mean?” Alastor asks.
Hyllus frowns, disturbed. “I don’t know what he did to his horse, but it sounded horrific.”
As we round the side of Aquila Hall, that smell hits us again and Etusca gasps, muttering some prayer in Agathyrian.
Caledon’s left a trail of devastation. The inside of the hall is dark, the lamps beyond the door all snuffed out by tracks of sticky darkness running down the walls.
Beyond, every flower in the street, every blade of grass, is lying withered and dead, suffocated by the cursed dark that Caledon’s left in his wake.
In the center of the square, a few yards before the edge of my chasm, lies a blackened shape, left oozing in the sun.
Here and there tufts of brown fur show through, and if I squint, I can make out what would’ve been the horse’s head and legs, but its body is oddly flat and shriveled, as if it’s had all the life sucked clean out of it.
“I don’t understand what happened,” Ana says, staring at the scene. “If this stuff is so toxic, why isn’t it killing him?”
Etusca breaks in muttering her prayers. “I-I think the curse on the star must’ve corrupted his immortal form.
If he’s meant to be invincible, and then came into contact with this fatal curse…
then the curse is working through him. Rather than killing him, it’s turned him into something that delivers death. ”
“Do you think we made him stronger?” Drisha asks, unable to keep the dismay from his voice.
Etusca swallows. “I don’t know. He probably has access to the same amount of power, but now it’s twisted. At least with the tokens, the source of his magic was sacred and pure, given it came from sources of life and light like Ethira and the other gods. But this…”
She shakes her head, unable to give words to the unnatural decay so evident to us all. I stare at the darkness, remembering how it slowly poisoned Fairon, destroying him in the most painful, horrible way.
“What have we done?” Drisha murmurs with a horror I share.
“This curse might not kill Caledon,” I agree grimly. “But it could destroy everything else.”
There are footsteps behind us, and we turn sharply to see Tira coming around the side of the hall. I have to confess, in the rush through the tunnels, I’d not noticed that she’d hung back in the first place. But the look on her face—focused and determined—tells me it was for a good reason.
She takes in the street and, with a shudder, turns to Ana. “There’s something you should see.”