Chapter 17 #2
Riven was thrown backward through the air with bone-shattering force. He flew twenty feet across the chamber, slamming spine-first into the unyielding limestone wall. He hit the ground hard, tumbling across the debris-strewn floor like a broken ragdoll.
The crushing, agonizing reality of his mortal body crashed back into him all at once. The pain of his recently healed collarbone flared, his muscles seizing violently in response to the sudden, catastrophic loss of aether. He gasped for air, but his lungs were paralyzed by the impact.
"Architect!" Vael roared, abandoning her post at the door and sprinting across the exploding chamber toward him.
The Nerve Center was tearing itself apart.
The rupture of the primary aether-artery acted as a localized bomb inside the mountain.
Massive chunks of the vaulted ceiling began to plummet downward, smashing into the floor with deafening force.
The blue magical fire from the severed cables whipped wildly through the air like severed live wires, scorching the ancient masonry.
Riven rolled onto his side, coughing up a thick mouthful of blood. He couldn't see the golden wireframe. He couldn't feel the structural limits of the room. He was blind. He was deaf to the stone. He was just a sweep again, bleeding in the dirt.
I miscalculated, the realization hit him with a sickening wave of nausea. I trusted an ancient map. I thought I was a god.
"Get up!" Vael grabbed the collar of his leather duster, hauling him to his feet with brute force.
Riven staggered, his legs feeling like hollow reeds. He looked toward the center of the room.
The colossal, calcified pillar was writhing.
The thick hide was splitting open, revealing glowing, corrupted blue tissue beneath.
Massive, jointed limbs made of bone and petrified wood were tearing themselves free from the floor.
The academy hadn't just tapped a conduit; they had lobotomized a subterranean leviathan and used its heart as a pump.
And Riven had just woken it up.
"The floor is failing!" Carys shrieked, backing rapidly away from the center of the room.
The kinetic rebound hadn't just awakened the horror; it had shattered the architectural integrity of the entire junction. Massive, jagged fault lines spider-webbed outward from the central pillar, racing across the stone floor with terrifying speed.
The ground beneath them simply disintegrated.
There was no time to run. There was no time to carve a safety rune.
The entire floor of the Nerve Center gave way, plunging into a vast, uncharted cavern below.
Vael lunged, throwing her left arm out desperately to grab Carys by the strap of her canvas satchel. She caught the thick fabric, but the momentum of the falling floor was too great. The rock beneath Vael’s boots sheared away.
Riven reached out with his right hand, desperately willing the Lexicon to answer him, begging the golden circuitry to flare and catch them.
Nothing happened. The skin remained dead and dark.
He had no magic to halt the fall. He had no mass to manipulate. He had nothing but the terrifying, stomach-dropping sensation of absolute freefall.
The three of them plummeted into the yawning black abyss, swallowed entirely by the crushing dark, amidst a rain of massive boulders, severed aether-cables, and the deafening, organic roar of the awakened leviathan crashing down with them.
The darkness was absolute. It was a thick, suffocating blanket that pressed against Riven’s eyes, heavy with the scent of pulverized rock and ancient, stagnant water.
Riven lay on his back.
He didn't know how long he had been unconscious. It could have been ten seconds; it could have been hours.
He tried to draw a breath, but the air was choked with a thick, impenetrable cloud of stone dust. He coughed, a weak, wet rattle deep in his chest. Every nerve in his body was screaming.
The crushing, agonizing pain was a stark, horrifying reminder of his mortality.
The divine insulation of the Lexicon was gone.
He felt the cold dampness of the stone seeping through his heavy leather duster.
He felt the sharp edge of a jagged rock pressing into his spine.
He slowly opened his eyes.
There was no golden glow. The comforting, omniscient wireframe map that had guided him through the deep earth had vanished. He stared into the pitch-black void, entirely blind.
Panic, icy and familiar, flooded his veins. It was the same panic he had felt sweeping the Atrium, the same terror he had felt hanging from the crumbling ledge. The brief, intoxicating interlude of power had been stripped away, leaving him raw and utterly exposed.
"Vael?" Riven rasped. His voice sounded pathetic in the vast, echoing silence.
He didn't receive an answer.
He forced his right arm to move. The golden circuitry tattooed into his skin was dark, looking like dead, black ink. He dragged his hand across the rubble, his fingers brushing against sharp shards of shattered limestone and cold mud.
He pushed himself up onto his hands and knees. The vertigo was intense, his head swimming in the pitch black.
"Carys?" he called out, slightly louder, his voice cracking.
Silence.
He began to crawl. He moved blindly, sweeping his hands in wide arcs across the uneven floor, desperate to find anything familiar. The air down here was freezing, entirely devoid of the ambient warmth of the upper strata. They had fallen deep. Deeper than the map had shown.
His right hand brushed against something cold, smooth, and metallic.
Riven stopped. He ran his fingers over the object. It was a thick, curved piece of runic plate. It was a shoulder pauldron.
"Vael!" Riven scrambled forward, his hands frantically feeling through the dark.
He found her chest plate. She was lying flat on her back. But as his hands moved upward toward her shoulders, they hit a massive, immovable wall of solid rock.
A heavy, terrified dread settled in Riven's gut. He ran his hands along the rock. It was a massive slab of basalt, easily weighing several tons.
It was pinning Vael completely to the ground, crushing her lower half beneath the rubble.
Riven grabbed the edge of the stone slab with both hands. He planted his boots in the mud and pulled with every ounce of physical strength he possessed. He gritted his teeth, his muscles burning, a feral grunt escaping his lips.
The stone did not move a single millimeter. He was just a man pushing against a mountain.
"Vanguard," Riven whispered, his voice trembling as he moved his hands to her face.
She was cold. Her skin was incredibly pale, and he could feel a thick, sticky wetness matting the right side of her hair.
Suddenly, Vael gasped.
It was a sharp, ragged intake of air. Her body convulsed slightly beneath the crushing weight of the stone.
"Don't move," Riven said quickly, his hands hovering over her face in the dark. "Don't move, Vael. You're pinned."
"Architect?" Vael’s voice was incredibly weak, slurred, and entirely stripped of its booming arrogance. It was the voice of a girl who was bleeding to death in the dark. "Where is the light?"
"The Lexicon is dead," Riven confessed, the words tasting like ash in his mouth. "The feedback loop severed the sync. I can't see anything. I have no magic."
He heard Vael let out a slow, trembling breath. She didn't hurl insults. She didn't curse his arrogance.
"My legs," Vael whispered. "I can't feel my legs."
The words hit Riven harder than the kinetic blast.
He had done this. He had dragged her down into the dark, promising her an army, promising her revenge. He had looked at a map, assumed he understood the math of gods, and he had crushed her under a rock. His supreme, arrogant confidence had led them directly into a slaughterhouse.
"I'll get it off you," Riven said, his voice rising in quiet, desperate panic. He grabbed the massive slab of basalt again, tearing the skin from his healed knuckles as he pulled uselessly against the multi-ton weight. "I'll find a lever. I'll get it off."
"Riven."
Vael’s hand, heavy and weak, reached up in the dark and grabbed his wrist. Her grip, usually strong enough to crush bone, was terrifyingly fragile.
"Where is the Lore-Keeper?" Vael asked.
Riven stopped pulling. He turned his head, staring blindly into the pitch-black void of the cavern. He listened, straining his ears past the sound of Vael’s ragged breathing and his own hammering heart.
He didn't hear Carys.
But he heard something else.
Deep in the shadows, far across the vast, uncharted expanse of the cavern they had fallen into, something shifted. It was a heavy, wet, slithering sound. The sound of massive, calcified limbs dragging across wet stone.
The leviathan had survived the fall. And it was awake in the dark with them.
Riven knelt beside the crushed, dying warrior, stripped of his godhood, stripped of his vision, and stripped of his arrogance. The ordinary world had returned, and it was entirely merciless.