Gulliver had no luck. It was a fact, he was certain of it. In fact, he was certain that the universe
conspired against him, that it was actively and maliciously working to make his
life a misery. He did not know why, but
it seemed that all existence hated him.
The proof? Well, need one look any further than this
current predicament? Transported by
mystical (and nausea-inducing) means to a sealed chamber with no obvious means
of escape and no company other than an elderly, tea-obsessed engineer and -
much, much worse than any point previously mentioned - his brother,
Harker. The only light they had came
from a hypostatick sconce on the wall - illuminating nothing but the bare walls
and their increasingly despairing faces - and everything they said, when they
could be bothered to speak, echoed terribly.
Gulliver had decided just to keep quiet and wait for their oxygen to run
out, but, typically, his brother was unable to be so stoic.
"There must be some way
out of here," Harker was saying for what seemed the millionth time,
"you said the last obelisk chamber seemed empty until you found it's
secret..."
"Yeah," said
Gulliver reluctantly, "but those walls were covered in 'ieroglyphs. There ain't nothin' 'ere at all. Ember has left us in a deathtrap!"
"He said he'd come
back." Harker replied tetchily, as if it was Gulliver who was being
unreasonable in the face of the overwhelming evidence of their doom, "but
he usually knows what he's doing, right?
There must be some reason we've been left here."
"I can't say I 'ave your
confidence in 'im. 'E was next to
useless in Searingsands, no thanks to you."
"You know we had to try
and track down Marveille!"
"And look 'ow wonderfully
that worked out. Still at least you and
Siren got to enjoy each other's company, so I suppose it all worked out in the
end."
Harker glared at him. To everyone else he was the suave,
sophisticated pirate prince, but Gulliver saw through all that. He was just as petty as he had been when they
were children.
"I can't believe you're
bringing that up again, Gully!"
"-'Ow many times do I
'ave to tell you? Don't call me that!"
"Alright, Gull-i-ver,
whatever. The point is, there is nothing
between Siren and myself - however much I might have wished there to be -
anymore than there is between Siren and you!
If that's all you're going to throw against me - and at this moment of
all times - then it's really time you just got past it and... and grew
up!"
"Oh, what is the
point. You can never see past your own
glory to 'ave even the vaguest inklin' of what it might be like to be someone
else! Okay. I'll shut up about it. It'll save you some oxygen at any rate!"
Harker let out a growl of
frustration, "You know I have tried, Gulliver, I really have, but you just
make it so darned difficult. You speak
to me of being selfish, when all you want to do is wallow in your own misery! Have you ever tried seeing past the bubble of
melancholy you insist on hiding inside to find out what life is really like out
here? Have you? I think you'd be surprised, but no, that
would be opening yourself up to so much uncertainty, so much vulnerability that
you'd rather just be miserable than accept even the possibility of hope. Well so be it, I'm not going to try to open
your eyes anymore. Just you-"
"Ah, there you are!"
Miss Barkcastle's voice was so
gentle, and yet the echo of the chamber made it such that it cut straight
through Harker's tirade, leaving a wake of almost perfect silence as the two
brothers turned to find her kneeling on the sandy floor, poking at a metal ring
concealed in the dust.
"I knew there had to be
one around here somewhere," she said, by way of explanation. "There was nothing on the ceiling, no
hidden entrances in the walls - nothing else made sense."
She lifted the ring and with
it came a stone cover, sending a torrent of sand pouring into the dark space
beyond.
"Shall we try it?"
she asked with just the hint of a cheeky smile.
Annabella had the strangest
feeling. She often experienced odd
sensations, it was true; so often, indeed, that they weren't really all that
odd, but this one was definitely different, stronger, more tangible, with a
sense of mass, of gravity. It was
pulling at her, drawing her in to something.
"Thith ith
fathinating," Lord Blood Dragon was saying, leading their small group -
the Vampire, the Stoneskin Shaman, Rockspark, and herself - through a
labyrinthine network of passageways beneath the district of Labyrinth
itself. "I have never vithited
Labywinth before, but I've heard tho much about it. I mean I'd love to thee the cwith-cwothing
thtweetth above, of courthe, but thith ith the weal tweathure - the weal
Labywinth, tho to thpeak. The dithwict
above ith little more than a weflection, an affectation!"
"It would be very easy to
get lost," Rockspark remarked drily.
"Oh, yeth, of courthe,
and for that weason, we mutht keep all our witth about uth! But look at thethe carvingth - can you
believe that no one knowth who made them?"
"I can well believe it,
Lord Blood Dragon. Shadow's history is
murky and violent and many things have been forgotten - some for the
better. Do you know where we are headed?"
Annabella thought she did. Every corridor and passage seemed the same,
and yet that sense of something pulling her was not equal in all
directions. It had a source and she felt
she knew how to find it.
"Well, I can't thay I'm
entirely thure, no, but Ember mutht have left uth fairly clothe, muthtn't
he?"
"Ath clothe.."
Rockspark coughed, "As close as he could."
"It's that way,"
Annabella said quietly, pointing down a dimly lit corridor, before letting her
hand drop to her side.
"Pardon?" Rockspark
and Blood Dragon peered down at her.
"Did you thay thomething,
Annabella?"
"I said, it's that
way." She pointed again.
Blood Dragon glanced at
Rockspark. Rockspark shrugged.
"Vewy well. Let'th take a look!"
“Where the hell are we?”,
Ellis asked, wincing at the booming echo his voice made around the impossibly
large chamber he stood in with the Former Baron on one side and Siren on the
other. They were one the edge of a
precipice, on a spindly platform of rock which wound down in spirals, loops and
curlicues, towards some distant, blue-green glow wherein – one assumed – lay the
floor of the cavern.
“I would hazard a guess,”
replied the Former Baron, pausing to let the terrible echo fade, before
continuing in little more than a whisper, “that we are in uncharted caverns
beneath Echofalls, in the far south.”
“And the obelisk would be?”
Siren leaned out a little over
the precipice and pointed down, glancing sideways at the Former Baron as if to
ask, “am I right?”
“Almost certainly, my dear.”
“Then we’d better start
moving,” Siren replied, “because it looks like it’s a very, very long way down.”
“Once again you are quite
right,” the Former Baron conceded with a slight smile, “besides there were
rumoured to be bloodthirsty, man-eating, Lakhma-worshipping, and, if I do say
so myself, rather gaudily dressed Draconics living here, so it would be best if
we didn’t end up meeting them.”
“And what might they be?”
Ellis asked, suddenly aware of a change in the temperature – a sudden warmth –
and a hint of a breeze which hadn’t been there moments before.
The Former Baron closed his
eyes. “I was hoping we weren’t going to
have to do this, again.”
“Do what?” asked Siren.
“Do the whole kidnapped by
monsters, when there are far more important things to be getting on with – like
saving the world, staying alive, having biscuits with our tea – thing, but no. Not this time, either, it would seem.”
“What are you talking about?”
Ellis tried to ask. He didn’t get any
further that ‘talk-’. The giant,
luminous dragon thing rising up out of the deeps of the cave seemed like a very
good reason to shut up. The hundred
others underneath it, however, zipping out from the shadow of its wings to tear
reality as they raced towards them, seemed like an even better reason to
scream. The echo was so loud it hurt.
Good episode!!!
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