26. Chapter 26 The Garden Below #2
Dead plants and dead creatures littered the paths.
Stone walls showed cooling crimson residue.
The air smelled like char, blood, and the mineral tang of old magic, sharp and metallic.
The bench where Renvaya had been reading sat intact in the middle of it, her novel and her teacup still on the seat.
Lucien stood ten feet from the bench with his eyes still burning crimson, his breathing even, his hands at his sides.
"I hope you haven't lost your page after all that,” he remarked with a smile.
He looked at the dead centipede. Then the scattered pack bodies.
He counted nine bodies, two species, one nest. The feeder must have been draining the garden's mana from below for weeks or months, and the scouts had stayed underground until whatever was keeping them contained had weakened enough to let them through.
"Eight scouts and a feeder," he said. "It could have been worse."
He said it to himself, to the dead, to years of habit that hadn't faded. He said it like a farmer naming weeds.
Renvaya heard every word. She stood fifteen feet behind him, near the bench with a charcoal body against its leg, and she'd just heard a student use a taxonomy that didn't exist, assessing a battlefield like a veteran reviewing a skirmish he'd run before.
She said nothing. This was all too much, and she couldn't process what she had just witnessed.
Lucien crossed the garden to the destroyed grate opening.
The hole was three feet wide and dropped into darkness.
Below, the stone walls of a tunnel caught the fading crimson from above.
He could sense the magic resonance still pulling, weaker than the screech that had preceded the breach but present, a low hum in his core that answered something below.
The rift that was down there somewhere was still leaking. If it stayed open, more would come.
"There's a rift below us," he said. He spoke to Renvaya without turning. "That's where these came from. If it stays open, the next group may not be this small."
"How do you know that?" Her voice was steady. She'd collected herself in the time it took him to cross the garden, and the question came with professional precision wrapped around a deeper one she wasn't asking yet.
"I'm going down to close it."
"No." She crossed the distance between them. She was beside him now, looking at the hole, the darkness below, the tunnel walls. "No, you are not going alone."
"It isn't safe for you down there. Your barrier didn't hold against the scouts. What's below could be worse."
"Then it isn't safe for you either."
"It's different for me."
"Why?" she asked flatly. "Why is it different for you, Lucien?"
He didn't answer that. He couldn't answer that, not standing over a hole in the ground with creatures still moving below.
"Professor." He looked at her. His eyes were still crimson, sustained, and at this distance, the red light put color on her face and lit the amber of her eyes from outside. "I need you to stay here. I don't want you to get hurt."
"And I need you to stop deciding what I can handle.
" She held his gaze without flinching from the crimson.
"You killed nine of those things without breaking a sweat.
Whatever is down there, you can protect me.
I'm not going to stand here by myself in a bloody garden waiting for you to come back. I need you to be okay."
The last six words landed harder than the rest. She knew it. She didn't take them back.
"If you're going down there,” she continued, “I'm going with you. That's not a request."
She wasn't asking for permission. She was telling him what was going to happen.
He let her come. Arguing would cost time the rift didn't have, and he could tell from her jaw that the argument would outlast the descent. He could protect her.
Lucien reached through the bond. The connection to Corvath was always there, a current running beneath everything, and he sent a single directed burst: location, urgency, direction.
He pushed the botanical garden on the western grounds through the link, along with what was happening and where they were headed.
Corvath could catch up and put his mapping knowledge to work.
He didn't wait for a response. He lowered himself through the grate opening, found the tunnel floor six feet below, and dropped. Renvaya followed.
"You know, your attire isn't optimal for this kind of activity,” Lucien said. “At least you wore flats instead of high heels."
"Can we please get on with it? My attire is the last thing you should be thinking about."
"Yes, Professor."
Lucien lit the way in the tunnel with controlled crimson, the light reduced to a soft glow that showed ten feet of passage ahead.
The walls were stone, fitted blocks, but the mortar and the cutting style changed within the first thirty feet.
Academy-era construction gave way to something rougher, the blocks larger and darker, the joints tighter.
This section was clearly built differently than the rest of the structure.
The air was cool and stale and smelled like wet stone and the residue of creatures that had nested here. Claw marks scored the walls at shin height, parallel grooves cut into the blocks by claws dragging against them.
Renvaya walked close behind him. Their footsteps echoed ahead and came back with the flat return of a passage that went deep.
"Those creatures," Renvaya said. She kept her tone low, pitched beneath the echo.
"I've never seen anything like them. They aren't in any of the modern bestiaries.
Not Ardenth's collection, not the Keld archive, not even the Calamity-era fragments, at least nothing I have ever seen, and I have seen a lot. "
"They're not from around here," Lucien said.
"You knew what they were. How is that possible?"
He said nothing. She let the silence sit. He didn't have time for her prodding questions.
They passed a junction. Lucien took the left branch, following the pull of old magic resonance in his core.
A black shape materialized beside his boot without sound or announcement. Corvath appeared from a gap in the wall that Lucien hadn't seen, falling into stride beside him as if he'd been there the whole time.
"You're glowing," Corvath sent privately. "You aren't supposed to be doing that in front of curious professors."
"It was either I glow in front of her or let her die right in front of me. I chose the former."
"You and women," Corvath scoffed.
The cat turned to glance at Renvaya and spoke aloud, "I know this network." The words were pitched for Renvaya to hear. "The junction behind us connects to the main drainage line. Ollie and I mapped it."
Renvaya stopped walking. "Who is Ollie?"
"Corvath’s otter friend," Lucien said.
"An otter?" she replied.
"Yes, his name is Ollie and he is my…what do you call it? Yes, pal," Corvath offered.
"Guide us," Lucien said to Corvath.
"If I get too wet I will never forgive you. My paws are already damp and cold."
Corvath took point. He moved through the tunnel with the confidence of a creature who had walked these passages before, his gold eyes reflecting the crimson light, his paws silent on the stone.
“Well, this area is new to me. I don’t think Ollie is aware of this place either. Interesting. Maybe he is keeping it from me? Dastardly beast.”
Lucien and Renvaya moved faster with Corvath leading.
The cat guided them through two more junctions, taking each turn with certainty, and the tunnels narrowed and widened and narrowed again.
The claw marks on the walls were thicker here.
Mana-scorched patches darkened the stone where the parasite had fed, the discoloration spreading in circular patterns from contact points.
They passed the boundary of what Corvath had mapped.
He stopped at a section of wall where the stone changed again, darker and more massive, cut from something that wasn't local granite, fitted with a precision that didn't match anything above.
"This is where we stopped," Corvath said. He studied the wall, then turned back to Lucien. "This place gave Ollie and me the heebie-jeebies. We decided we would explore another time."
Renvaya's hand touched the wall. Her fingers ran along the edge of one massive block. "This predates the academy," she said. "By centuries. Possibly longer."
"I agree with you, Professor," Corvath said. "Nice dress, by the way."
They kept moving. The architecture deepened. The construction grew more intentional, walls carved rather than fitted, the ceiling vaulted in a style that belonged to an era the academy had been built on top of without knowing it.
"What’s all this? It's like we’ve walked into another world," Renvaya said.
"We’ve walked into another time…same world," Lucien replied.
An ear-piercing shriek echoed from the darkness ahead.
One creature, moving fast through the passage toward them.
Lucien killed it without breaking stride, the crimson flaring and cutting off so fast that the dead body was sliding past his boots before Renvaya registered the motion.
A second one came from a side passage. He dropped it the same way, flare and drop and silence.
"I guess we aren't pulling our punches anymore, eh?" Corvath stepped over the body and continued.
Evidence of habitation thickened in the deeper tunnels. Claw marks scored the walls at every height. Old nests filled alcoves, dried organic material packed into corners. Mana-scorched patches covered sections of wall and floor and ceiling, the circular feeding marks of the parasite everywhere.
The tunnel opened into a wider chamber.
Its ceiling rose to twice the height of the passage, and the walls pulled back to form a space thirty feet across, roughly circular, cut from the same dark stone as the deeper tunnels. The air pressed heavier here, thicker, carrying the ambient weight of old magic concentrated in a small space.