Chapter 27 #2
When I had three legs aligned, my hands quivering with the need to stay steady, I picked up the amplifier with a pinch of my fingers, set it on the floor of the vault, and used the leg-tips to begin to nudge it beneath the crystcore.
I stopped once, watching as power flared from the miniature nova in the middle of the vault. This was it. The moment I had them aligned, we had to move.
“Líadan, are you ready?” I asked, glancing over my shoulder.
She sat with her palms resting on the orbs, staring up at the ceiling blankly, blood streaming from her nose to stain her entire front red.
“Oh. Oh, hell.”
I would have to throw her across my lap. Easier said than done, but there was no point waiting.
With my left index finger, I tapped the amplifier further into the room, just beneath the crystcore.
I had to resist the urge to stay and watch. I felt it align, knew it had gone perfectly. The crystcore flared, and a low hum started like millions of buzzing bees were trapped in the vault, making my teeth ache.
When the first overflow of amplified miasma rippled out, it would swamp this room, even with the glass shield in place. I had ripped the cladding away for that express purpose.
I tore my hands out of the gloves, sprinted for Líadan, and ripped her from the chair, breaking her connection to the fulmen. I felt the jolt of it, trying to connect and feed off me, but Líadan bounced off the wall, mouth open, already blinking as consciousness returned.
There was no time. The hum was building, a tidal wave ready to wash over us, and without the shielding of the vault the crystcore’s surge was more sickening than ever.
I grabbed her arm, hauling her with me as I sprinted for the door.
Talos tossed his equine head, knees bending to lower for us. I vaulted onto his back, dragging Líadan into my lap, and reached around her to grip the handholds I’d built into the base of his neck.
The golem was running before I’d even fully settled my passenger. Líadan slumped against me, pressing her sleeve to her gore-coated mouth, and I hoped she wasn’t permanently damaged by the contact with the orbs.
My head was going to explode. I knew that under me, Talos had achieved a graceful stride, galloping through the long hall, the Fae’s room, then the crematorium faster than any human could run. We were escaping.
But my skull felt like it was splitting open, my jawbones wanted to wrench free from their sockets to escape the buzzing, each vertebrae in my spine was compressed and about to shatter into a thousand pieces.
Talos reached the stairs, vaulting upwards with ease.
The buzz built and built, and just as Líadan gagged, her torso convulsing, and I screamed against the ache that drilled in my ears, it vanished with a pop of relief so vast it was sickening.
And the first wave of miasma rippled outwards.
Talos ate the distance, moving steadily upwards, and I turned just enough to look back.
The bottom of the stairs, and the door to the vault, had vanished into the darkness.
The fulmen flickered, going out entirely: the veins overhead were dying, some of them popping and shattering into crystal dust. There was a sea of sickly green light shifting down there, ethereal and yet solid, a curse given form.
And as the buzz built again, the next wave spilled out.
The ripples of miasma came faster and faster, and even as Talos cleared the floors, the stairs behind us descended into darkness, the fulmen going black, the miasma rising upwards like the tide coming in.
Nobody would ever walk down there again. It was dead ground now, a sea of churning death.
We passed the place where we had first found the stairs, our scattered wrappings and cast-offs littering the stairs. Talos had only just leaped past when another wave of miasma came flowing upwards, the liquid light crashing against the stairs just below us.
We passed an open laboratory, something quivering, red and enormous heaving itself towards the stairwell. It convulsed and died in the next instant as miasma spilled in.
And I was almost shocked when we passed one of the body-pits, the wall sheared away to reveal the scale of death.
Líadan said nothing, did nothing, just clung determinedly to Talos’s back until the golem raced out into a wide open space, the stairs moving upwards through thin air. I looked down, seeing the hive-city below: the Fae’s home beyond the Gates, the primeval garden, the orbs of fulmen.
Then she made a sound, one of awful grief, staring into those quarters, and I felt ill.
Her hand stretched towards the city, shaking, and we both watched as another rush of occult miasma boiled up through the ground, flooding the streets of what had once been her home.
The fulmen lights in the city went out, killed instantly.
She whispered something, lost in the clatter of Talos’s hands, and turned her head away deliberately.
We raced the tides, each ripple building upon itself, seething throughout all Liuridar.
I felt numb, terrified; would the waves even out?
Even the crystcore’s power had to have a limit.
If I had miscalculated…I imagined the miasma swirling from the ground in the world above, sterilizing the earth.
Every insect, every animal, every plant, every person…
all struck from the earth in one fatal instant, for one fatal mistake.
I swallowed the bitterness in the back of my throat, silently urging Talos forward.
The city vanished. My ears were popping again, my legs aching from clinging to my saddle-less horse, and as we rose up the chthonium stairs running through the vast natural cavern that housed Liuridar, I realized the tide was no longer chasing at our heels.
No, it was slowing. But Líadan poked my knee, pointing into the darkness.
I could see it from above. Liuridar, the jewel of a city, nestled in the midst of those dark rivers, its shores glimmering with the deathly green light of the miasma.
The tide washed through the city, and one by one, those twisted towers went dark. The will o’ wisps near the ground thrashed and stilled, a frenzy of sudden, confused death.
Liuridar was gone. I breathed a sigh of relief, even as shimmering veils of miasma drifted over the city. A dead land, with nothing left to sleep for a thousand years and awaken with evil in mind.
The stairs wove up through solid rock, the ceiling dripping stalactites overhead, and I beheld the liminal spaces with deep relief.
We could make it.
It took hours. Maybe days. Years. In the dark, there was no way to tell.
I thought that maybe we had found one of those thin places, merged with it, a last laugh from the Fae.
Maybe I was only imagining Líadan’s warmth, or the jolting motion of the golem beneath us.
Maybe we were just running in a tunnel…forever. And ever. And ever.
Until something sparkled ahead. A star in the distance, so close I could almost reach out and touch it.
As Talos moved upwards, never faltering, I realized I was seeing the light of the sun through a door.
Freedom, beckoning us above.