Frostfire was furious. He was enraged, barely in control of himself. He circled the miserable dungeon space like a fiery tornado, howling as he did so. Slate-scaled fists slammed into the slick, algal surface of rocks and sent chips flying into the darkness. The more he pounded and pummelled the more angry he became and the more his eyes burned like deepest magma, filling his dark enclosure with their hellish glow.
At the centre of his usually cool and calculating mind there was a single question, circling and circling, chasing its own metaphorical tail, building up heat like the gears in a machine. How could a mere human, little more than a boy, best me like this? It was a question to which there was no satisfactory answer, but as long as he was trapped, Frostfire needed one.
Heat built upon heat. Energy spun off that wheel of thought, that dynamo, and it had to be directed somewhere. There was one path which seemed obvious, that path of least resistance in spite of all obstacles. It went like this: first the door, then Ellis.
But the lithe Spiketail had grown accustomed to his dimly lit, internally fuelled isolation, his plans of revenge and escape, and the chips flying away from the walls and his ragged scales, that when a chink of light other than his own – this a soft green – finally did appear in his cell he wasn’t sure how to react. It was accompanied by the clicking thunk of ancient gears and was framed by fronds of fungal colonies and watchful, insect eyes. It was terrifying. It was an opportunity.
The fire within unleashed. All that energy charged and stored in the capacitors of his soul was set free and immediately began along the path that had been prepared. Frostfire charged forwards, his tail writhing behind him, a furious, whip-like flail. He held his claws out first, his eyes flaring brighter than ever before, and then his charge became a pounce as he neared that open gap, leaping towards that strangely verdant glow.
There was a snarl. Claws scraped scales and dug beneath them into soft, succulent flesh. There was a scream of animal rage and then a heavy, sickening thud.
Frostfire lay on his back, his side bleeding. All the energy that he had been building up had been wasted and now he lay in that green glow and wondered what would happen next. His breathing, ragged and sore, echoed along the passageway. A familiar face loomed over him. Softer features than his own stared down pityingly and eyes of leafy green flame flickered sadly.
“How pathetic,” the creature said. There was no malice in its soft, hoarse tone.
“Spriggan,” he wheezed in reply, “I… didn’t know it was you…”
The other Spiketail’s lizard-like features broke into a sharp-toothed grin. A clawed hand was extended. “Get up. I’ll help you find the boy.” It finished with something like a sigh.
“Yes,” the wounded Frostfire replied as he reached out with his own clawed appendage, “that would be a perfect way-” he rose, pulling the other down slightly with his weight so that its muzzles was close to his own, its soft green orbs dancing nervously, “-to show your love for me.”
Doctor Rosetta Barkham, Countess of Skullbridge and President of the Noble Society of Hypostatick Philosophers was feeling pleased with herself, but also tired. The momentous acts of the day: being restored to her full self with all her memories, saving Ellis’ life and travelling between worlds, had been unsurprisingly draining. She longed for the comfort of her study in Skullbridge, filled with the warmth of a crackling fire, a glass of red wine sitting on a side table as she stretched out on the luxurious velvet of a chaise. In reality she was leaning against a cold stone pillar, thick with dust and damp, waiting for the first reports back from her Lithoderm scouts and her back was starting to ache. All around her Spiketails and slithering Creepers attended to the workings of the great machine, which had suffered a little damage during its first proper use for ten thousand years. Grinders patrolled the perimeters. She watched their hulking shadows move between the pillars, pipes, discs and dials of the machine.
She sighed, lifted herself wearily from against the pillar and scanned the room for a reliable looking Stoneskin. She saw a spiketail whose blue flames, veined with purple streaks like marble, were familiar and, taking a moment to remember its name, called over, “Skyspark?”
The creature approached her warily and attempted a weak and awkward bow. “Yes?” it asked, without so much as a hint of respect.
“Have any of the patrols found a room that might be suitable for resting in?” she asked.
The creature seemed to think for a moment, then replied, “There was a room on the first floor which might be suitable. Some of the furnishings were still quite intact.”
“Could you spare someone to lead me there?”
“Perhaps.”
Skyspark disappeared briefly in the chaos of the machine, before returning with a young-looking female Spiketail with pinkish eyes.
“Waterblood here will attend to you,” he replied, before returning to his duties without so much as an ‘excuse me’.
Waterblood gazed at her new charge in silence and Doctor Barkham began to wonder what kind of escort she was being given, when suddenly the Stoneskin said, “If you’ll follow me, Doctor, I’ll take you to the room.”
Her voice was soft for a Lithoderm and Doctor Barkham found it surprisingly comforting. Perhaps Skyspark had been doing her a favour after all.
“Yes,” she replied vaguely, “that would be nice.”
Waterblood led the way out of the main chamber and into the labyrinth of corridors which zig-zagged their way out to all the various other rooms of the building. Tired as Doctor Barkham was, the corridors seemed to blur past her, never really registering as a solid reality. It was only when they started up a slope to the next level that she realised they must be nearing the room. Waterblood marched ahead, seemingly oblivious to her charge, but clearly aware of where she was going and that was comfort enough.
At the top of the slope a long corridor seemed to stretch into infinity; further evidence that the interior of the Silverspire did not feel the need to obey the laws of space and time. Spiketails marched along the passageway here, as they had everywhere else. As they passed one small group, Doctor Barkham noticed that they seemed to have an air of panicked urgency and she called Waterblood to a halt so that she might speak to them.
“What’s going on here?” she demanded.
“The prisoners are missing,” began the tallest of the group, a male with flickering, black eyes.
“What? All of them?”
“The Philosopher and the girl – they used some Hypostatick trickery to summon a flood and nearly drown Statick and the rest of his squad. One of the Grinders is dead also.”
The Doctor felt a tremor of rage run through her body, but she managed to suppress it as she asked her next question, “Has there been any sign of them since?”
“We’ve had units scattered about the building, searching everywhere, but no trace of them has been found yet.”
The tremor became a quake, but there was no point holding it back this time.
“They can’t just have disappeared into thin air! Get more Spiketails and Creepers on their trail and search every stone and fungus in this ruin until you find them. The Philosopher in particular is extremely dangerous and he could jeopardise everything we’re building here! We cannot let him go free, so find him, now!”
The black-eyed Spiketail let out a small growl, but nodded and then called out to the rest of his group to follow him as they made their way down the corridor towards the lower levels.
“Is everything okay, Doctor?” Waterblood asked as the Doctor stared at her feet through eyes burning with tears of rage, “Is there anything I can do?”
Doctor Barkham looked up and tried to make her voice as calm as possible, “Just take me to that room. I think I’m getting a headache.”
Waterblood nodded in agreement and began to turn so that she might lead the way once more, but she had barely moved an inch when there was a terrible roar from somewhere beneath them and the building seemed to shake on its foundations.
“What was that?” Waterblood asked, her eyes trembling like fragile candle flames.
Doctor Barkham opened her mouth to reply, but before she could say anything the halls began echoing with the sounds of screaming Stoneskins, the noise rising to an almost apocalyptic clamour.
Waterblood’s eyes flared in shock and the Doctor turned to look back the way they had just come. The black-eyed Spiketail was hanging in mid air, suspended by nothing. He clawed his hands through the air in a desperate effort to grab hold of his invisible assailant. There was a crack as the scales around his neck shattered and a think red line slowly formed beneath his lizard-like face. An arc of steaming, poisonous gore began to spray forth, splattering across the stones of the floor and the wall and then those black eyes fizzled out and the Spiketail’s arms flopped limply by its side.
“By the Bedrock!” Waterblood exclaimed; her soft, gravely voice laced with terror.
The air around the Spiketail shimmered, thickened like mist the colour of blood, then it swept away from the hanging corpse towards them, dropping its kill as it went.
“It’s a Daemon!” the Doctor shouted, turning on the spot and pushing the terrified Waterblood ahead of her as she went, “Run, or you’ll be as dead as the rest of them!”
The soft-spoken Stoneskin seemed frozen for a moment longer and then her reflexes caught up and she was running along the corridor beside the Doctor. Roars and screams of fear and agony spread throughout the Silverspire above and below, to left and right, and there was a sound like rushing wind, like a mighty waterfall, like a thousand angry whispers building behind them. The Daemon was gaining ground.
“In here, Doctor!” Waterblood called out, diving through an open doorway. Doctor Barkham did not need to be told twice and dashed into the room herself.
It was an unusual room. Clearly it would have been labelled as a study once in its working lifetime. Rotting shelves filled with rotting books lined the walls and the dust and ooze of a thousand decayed pages littered the floor. A desk, nothing left but the frame, and an ancient chair sat at the far side, within reach of the library and on the remaining wall something that might once have been a couch lay, half collapsed, on the floor. This was probably the room she had been being led to, Doctor Barkham realised with dismay, in which case the Stoneskins had a lot to learn about human comforts.
“It’s still out there!” Waterblood cried out and the Doctor turned to see her with her back to the door, holding it tight in a gesture of supreme futility. “I can hear it! Please, help me bar the door!”
But Doctor Rosetta Barkham had other plans. Raising her finger she began to write rapidly in the air and, just as when the Former Baron had been planning to detect her soul as he stood at the entrance to the darkened central chamber of the Silverspire, the imaginary equation she wrote appeared, glowing in the air. She wrote far more quickly than the Former Baron ever had, muttering under her breath as she performed the calculations, and soon the air in front of her was full of symbols and numerals.
“What are you doing, Doctor? Why aren’t you helping me?”
Waterblood was truly terrified, the Doctor noticed, even in the midst of all her Philosophickal equations, and she had never seen a Lithoderm – a Stoneskin – behave like that before. It was curious, worthy of future experimentation. No more.
The air around the Stoneskin was shimmering, turning red. It was hard to tell if Waterblood herself noticed before she found herself lifted into the air, but as soon as that daemonic touch hit, her panic transformed into screaming, and what screams they were. Doctor Barkham couldn’t focus on them too much as she had her Philosophy to work, but through all the calculations and the fog of purple words glowing around her, she still got a sense of what the Stoneskin must have been experiencing. She never knew that the Lithoderms could feel such levels of pain, or such emotional extremes. The fact the Waterblood was weeping before the end was particularly fascinating.
She only looked up when she heard the crack, but by then she was ready. Her finger wrote the last part of the equation, the words glowed bright until the room seemed filled with light and only Waterblood’s shattering silhouette marred its brilliance, and then suddenly there was a wall of shimmering green around her and the equally shimmering, mist-like Daemon hovered on the other side.
“I suppose you came from the Aether, then?” she said calmly.
The mist seemed to quiver, whispered and roared beyond the barrier, then a single word was screeched at her as loud as she could imagine, vibrating painfully in her ears as the vile air seemed to be sucked from the room, rattling the door off its ancient hinges in the process.
WITCH!
Doctor Barkham smiled weakly and then collapsed in a heap on the floor, her barrier still intact around her.
Now, she thought, I need to find a way out of here.
AUTHOR COMMENTARY: This was a very dark episode to write, as was the next one. The shift in tone is quite dramatic and I apologise to anyone who might be offended by the more graphic nature of the violence included. It's not my intention to make Shadow a particularly gory story, but I did want to make it clear that a demon such as the one Franck has just unleashed is not a force to be messed with lightly. Franck shows very little remorse for this, and it is perhaps the case that in the circumstances they find themselves in it was the only viable decision available to him, but at the same time I wanted to make it clear that this is really horrific - I didn't want to shy away from that at all.
ReplyDeleteThe story doesn't linger in this place for long, however. We'll soon be in more cheerful climes and other adventures will be on their way.