Chapter 33
Jack
There’s a chance I made a mistake by charging ahead.
There’s also a chance I’m lost in the Deadwood Cove labs.
“Reva? Witch boy? Are either of you there?”
No answer.
It seems I'm alone.
How is that possible? I was with the other two right until a moment ago, then I turned a corner and found myself here. Wherever that is.
It’s impossible to tell, considering I can’t see a pissing thing.
I’m stuck in the pitch darkness, standing still while I wait for the other two to catch up.
I must still be inside the abandoned shop that the two creepy doll people were guarding, but this hallway or wherever I am seems to be going on forever.
“Reva?”
I turn on my heel and listen hard for any signs of life, but I can’t hear a thing.
My senses are too dull in this form. Pulling my magic into myself like a giant silk cloak, I transform into my raven form and take to the air.
I’m going to have to leave my clothes here until I can come back and fetch them, but I can’t see another option at this moment. Not when I’m wandering around blindly.
I try to focus my raven’s eyes in the darkness, but it turns out I’m just as blind in this form as I am on two legs.
I am quicker, though. Flitting through the air in the direction I came from, following my heightened navigation skills to find the way.
... although I should be back at the shop by now.
Yet I’m still trapped in the same never-ending darkness.
I fly on. And on. And on. Until it feels like I must have travelled half the length of the kingdom and found absolutely nothing. No change in light. No feature that shows I’m progressing at all.
It almost feels like I’m trapped inside a nightmare. Bound here to fly endlessly through the night and into the day, not knowing how much time has passed since the only thing I’m aware of is the feeling of my wings hitting the air and the endless dark.
Maybe the golems killed me earlier, and I didn’t notice. I’m now trapped here in limbo or whatever place comes after.
If it’s designed to make me lose my mind, it’s doing a good job.
I’ve never been a fan of being trapped with my own thoughts. One of the many reasons I like to keep myself busy. But stuck here like this, it feels like there isn’t anything other than the millions of inane thoughts rolling around my head.
I wish I had taken those spectacles off Aster before charging off. At least then, I’d be able to see the magic in this place. Maybe if I can find the source, I can work out how to cut it off before I lose all sense of reality.
I close my eyes, girding myself as I force my mind to empty.
It’s a trickier endeavour than most people who know me would think.
To my family, I’m an empty-headed fool, always there with a ready smile and a joke.
And sure, the thoughts zinging from one side of my brain to the other, like they’re hopped up on something seriously potent, aren’t exactly deep and meaningful.
But that doesn’t make it any easier to push them all to one side.
I have to try, though, or I might end up stuck here forever. Who knows where the other two will have got to while I’m trapped here.
Torin’s going to tear my skin from my body if Reva gets hurt while I’m stuck here. I swore to him I would keep her safe, and I’m doing a really terrible job of that right now.
Right. Time to focus.
Be gone, thoughts of never getting out of here.
And you, twinge in my gut that is probably hunger since I didn’t eat breakfast.
Get lost, list of breakfast ideas for when I get back to the ship.
I wonder if the sorceress has bothered to feed Kit breakfast. Maybe we should have brought some food with us.
Right. Kit. That’s who I’m here for.
Rescue mission. Rescue. Mission.
Focus, Jack. Stop fucking about now. You need to focus.
But man, now that I’m thinking about it, I really am pretty hungry.
My pin-sized brain just about clings to the thread of concentration I need to get the job done. I take a breath, filling my lungs as deep as I can, and then I let my magic trickle over my feathers until I transform back, landing on two legs.
Keeping my eyes tightly shut, I then draw on my minuscule vault of magic stored deep down in my gut and draw it out. It’s hesitant at first, a little shy and uncertain about what I want it for. But I continue to coax it out, turning on the charm until I have a tiny ball of light in my hand.
For some people, magic only works when they say the right words at the exact right time, or a bundle of herbs and ingredients all stirred together.
But for me and my itsy-bitsy bit of power, the most important ingredients of all are intention, hope, and a whole lot of luck.
I squeeze my eyes shut again and push all my intention into breaking whatever glamour is going on around me and bringing light into the darkness. There’s an audible pop and light floods in through my scrunched eyelids. A wave of relief goes through me as I risk a peek around me.
It worked.
No more endless dark tunnel. No more being stuck with my own thoughts for company.
I’m still alone, but at least I can move forward now.
There’s a door right in front of me, and as I push my way through, I find myself inside a luxurious bathroom.
Patterned mosaic tiles cover every inch of the space, and in the very centre is a circular bath that must be twice as wide as I am tall.
Torin never talked much about his time here, but I can’t imagine it was filled with bubble baths and spa days.
So, this place must have been meant for the people on the other side.
After a long day of torturing and experimenting, they must have come back here to relax and let all their worries float away.
As I approach the bathtub, I find it’s filled with a weird black goop, thick like tar and stinking of blood and magic. I step closer, and a bubble rises and pops on the surface, releasing a haunting scream that echoes off the walls.
My arse just about falls out as I stumble backward into the hard wall.
Another bubble bursts, and there’s a pained yelp from the bathtub. I’m hit with a waft of the same scent from Kit’s bedroom.
Sorcery.
Pop.
A man’s voice cries out, and my gut twists.
Another pop, this time it’s a woman screaming.
I feel like I stumbled into hell without realising it. The air feels like it’s getting thicker, and there’s an oily film hovering just above the bath.
Pop.
A bestial screech has me ducking my head against an invisible assailant. But there’s no one here but me. I stumble away from the bath. Maybe it’s my presence that’s setting the thing off, making the bubbles keep popping.
I stumble forward into the next room. In here, there are walls and walls that are covered in shelves filled with glass jars. All of them seem to be filled with the same black goop. They’re labelled with names and addresses, like they’re just waiting to be mailed out.
I grab a jar to inspect later, tucking it under my arm since I lost my clothes a while back.
An almighty crash sounds from somewhere above me, and the ground beneath my feet shakes, sending me stumbling again while the glass bottles rattle violently.
There’s another crash as dust rains from the ceiling.
That sounds to me like an angry kraken on the loose, closer than I expected him to be.
The idea was for Torin and Finch would head off away from us, both as a lure to the sorceress and to avoid us being unwitting casualties of Finch losing control of his oversized appendages.
Darting away from the glass bottles that look dangerously close to toppling to the floor, I head back to the room with the gigantic bathtub.
Beside me, the pool bubbles furiously, and I can smell something vaguely familiar, although I can’t quite place where I recognise it from.
I eye the liquid as I summon a tiny dose of magic, releasing it deliberately into the air.
It floats over the bathtub, and the liquid greedily goops, bubbling furiously, and a long-buried memory from my childhood raises its ugly head.
My mother, forcing us into the basement where the walls are thickly painted with a tar-like substance. She makes us practice our magic over and over; me most of all because I’m the most disappointing of all her progeny.
Every time I fail to produce a ball of light from nothing for her, I’m whipped with her special cane.
Over and over, until my back should be ribbons. But the whip she uses never breaks the skin. It just gives off the sensation that it does.
No broken skin means she can keep going, over and again until I lose track of everything beyond the pain.
Eventually, I get so tired of it all that my own whip strikes out. Pure magic releases from me and—
Nothing.
The walls gain an oily tint as they absorb my magic.
That has to be what’s inside the pool, as well as the hundreds of jars rattling away in the next room at Finch’s next strike.
There has to be the extracted magic of hundreds of people here; all concentrated into one enormous pool of goop.
There’s another bone-shaking crash from somewhere right above me.
I summon my magic, switching forms right as the ceiling falls in.