by Jeffrey Hall
“I do so!” she shouted, holding up the stone like one would a sword.
Carry held up his hands. “Then by all means. Pop away.”
She opened her mouth to begin the spell, but caught herself. If she were to fry Carry and Shint then who would replenish the black lens? Besides, she wasn’t quite sure how to end the spell on the tip of her tongue…
She lowered the stone. “Next time your neck will be your nose.”
Carry smiled. “You still have your spirit, I’ll give you that. If only you still had your wits.” He folded his arms and sat on the table. “You are a mess, Dashinora. Your sense of reality is barely hanging on. The workings of the world might as well be a formula being worked by the mathematicas of Old Bolliad. You’re becoming a liability.”
“Then find someone else,” she snapped. “Wait, you can’t. Last time I checked there weren’t many Geomages lurking about the Purple willing to make you fire bones.”
Carry laughed and pointed to Shint and then nodded to the tunnel they had come from. “Maybe you’re right.”
Shint slipped his hand onto her back. She shrugged it off as it settled on her like a spider. “I know the way.”
She stormed off, but not before Carry kept going. “Or maybe you’re wrong. Maybe all you are is a temporary solution. A bottom rung on the ladder we are climbing in this city, one that will soon be out of our sight.”
Dashinora stopped, but didn’t turn around.
“Don’t dally. They know!” shouted the shadows.
She glanced in the direction of the darkness and then hurried on. She felt Shint walking behind her, ensuring that she found her way back. It only made her go faster. They were going to find out her ruse. Shint was going to skewer her before she ever felt the relief of the black lens. She was going to die.
“What’s the hurry?” he called at her back.
She tapped at the bag of black lens on her hip.
Shint laughed. “Damn seers.”
She stopped, though she knew she shouldn’t. But the way Shint had just spoken down to her, it made her feel like she was nothing more than a pebble beneath his boot, one that he could kick and throw and abuse because it had no soul. No way to retaliate. Nothing to live for.
“I’m not a mistake,” said Dash.
Shint stopped yards away from her.
“I’m the best there is.”
Shint laughed. “Carry is right. You’ve been gazing into the Abyss for too long, Dash. You’ve lost your sense of reality. Everything is an illusion to you. Your ability. Your insistence that you are not addicted. Your feeling of invincibility that you think your mistakes, your gambles won’t catch up with you. That shit has worn away your sensibility. You play a dangerous game with dangerous people and yet you think you are playing five-fingered drop at a tavern.”
“Listen,” whispered the shadows at her side. “He knows.”
“One of these times you’re going to play the game too loose and there’ll be no coming back,” said Shint.
Dash just stared into the darkness of the tunnel, deflecting the sharpness of his words with her thoughts. He was a fool, same as all the others. He hadn’t seen what she had. He wasn’t capable of what she was. The black lens had shown her places beyond this place, with its petty squabbles and even pettier politics. It was he who was living outside the true reality.
“Do you hear me, Dash? Next time I come knocking it won’t be to say hello.”
“Next time you come knocking maybe I won’t answer.”
“You’ll answer. You’ll answer for the exact same reason you always do. And when you do, maybe you’ll finally meet the Abyss you’re so enamored with.”
“His knife!” The shadows yelled and screeched like the sound of a dagger leaving a sheath.
Dash fled, pushing open the door and returning to the Abyss-filled bottom of Bothane, a crisp wind welcoming her back like a bucket of water to the face. She stumbled across the rope bridge as a green strand of Abysmal gas swirled out from the murk below like a plant rising beneath the sun. Behind it there was the same dark figure laughing.
“Shut up!” she shouted as she fell into the rope railings of the bridge.
But the shadows only laughed louder.
“I’ll shut you up. Now I’ll shut you up.” She ran across the rest of the bridge, taking the rickety planks two at a time. When she reached the other side and the Last Cliff, the final rim of Bothane’s main land before dropping into the Abyss, she pushed past a pair of bird catchers dangling their nets over the side of the stone in hopes of catching a glimmerback. From there she ran beneath the Broken Arch and into the tunnel burrowed beneath the stone. The familiar stench of mildew and Abysmal residue greeted her like a fetid fruit left out in the sun for too long. The few glimmer stones lodged in the tunnel’s ceiling were so small that they created lone beams of light that the tunnel’s residents could congregate to like insects to torches at night. Only the lights of the scattered market stalls erected so far down amongst the Purple gave any other chance of seeing in the darkness, but the shadow did not disturb Dash because of what it did to her vision. It only concerned her for what it held there. She could walk the tunnel with her eyes closed, but as she walked down the darkness she kept them open and wide like passages to let in her fears.
At last she arrived at her small cavern within the Broken Arch, a place marked with a rotted wood door and a faded blue gemstone painted on its front to let customers know where to find her, not that there were many willing customers down in the Purple, but one could always hope.
She pushed aside the door and slammed it shut behind her, latching the lock and checking it twice over. Once inside, she stepped over the piles of multicolored stone sprawled over the floor and made her way to the bed in the far corner of her room. She brushed a small sack of emeralds away from her sheets, letting the green shards fall where they may, and reached into the pouch on her hip.
She pulled out the largest of the black lens she could find and held it up to what little light shone from the chipped glimmer stone lodged in the ceiling and saw the swirling purple captured within its crystal exterior, as if a swath of the Abyss had been taken and imprisoned.
“You know that won’t make us go away,” said the voice. This time it came from the stone itself. “We’ll be back like we always are. Stronger next time. Stronger and stronger until you listen.”
Dash gritted her teeth at the stone, furious at the words it spoke, the truth it told that she didn’t want to hear. She had an urge to run back outside and sprinkle the bag’s contents into the Abyss, but it left as quickly as it came. What would happen to her then? Would she really stop looking? Would the voices ever go away?
Instead, she whispered the spell words she had hundreds of times before and withdrew the magic within the black lens, but did not release it. Instead, she internalized it. Absorbed it into her own blood.
“Shagara asa lagara bo darain…”
The ancient words flowed off her tongue and on the last of them she felt the magic come into her like a violent wind. She fell back onto her bed, her eyes suddenly opaque and purple like grapes plucked too early. And with that force the world was pushed away from her… the oppressive shadow of upper Bothane was gone, the lingering threat of Shint and Carry pushed aside, the unbearable feeling of loss missing, and finally the voice inside of her, the one constantly pulling her away from reality and cursing her every move, was silenced.
With nothing left to worry her, she fell into the Abyss.
She felt weightless, free of her body, a shameful dungeon that kept her locked in a cell of narrow-mindedness, of pain, of phobia.
Her surroundings were gone. So was her history. Her memories. She was an observer, an eye whose only job was to take in and marvel at the swirling menace of the Abyss.
For it was everywhere and everything. A discolored storm crowding in all directions, always moving, always agitated, constantly trying to shape itself into something that Dash cou
ldn’t quite understand, but knew that she would once she explored it long enough.
But it was during that tumultuous state of unsettlement that she saw things in the distance. Apparitions. Visions that the Abyss would reveal momentarily from behind its gaseous curtain before concealing them again like an elusive huckster attempting to drive up the value of their wares by way of mystery and the allure of the unknown.
A trick that Dash kept falling for. One she was selling her soul to purchase.
Cities rising from the gas. Beasts soaring through it like they were birds in a twilight sky. Lands in the distance, alien and terrifying, like something out of a dream. Out of a nightmare. But most important were the faces of people. Ones she had never seen. Ones she thought she knew but could not name. Some with features that made them altogether look inhuman…
This time was no different. As she scanned the purple vapors, somehow lodged deep within the Abyss, she saw the gas slowly start to dissipate. There, she could see a shape forming in the near distance. It loomed large amongst the gas. Sharp and foreboding, like a mountain had been chiseled into a blade. She knew by its size, by seeing many of its kind before, that it would be a glimpse at a strange land.
A place only imagined? A world beyond the stars and cosmos? A glimpse at some afterlife that awaited her?
She did not know, but when the light shifted within the Abyss—a light given by some unseen sun—she saw it more clearly. A fragment of a plain, a meadow of emerald green grass awash with yellow flowers that looked like painted medallions with the way their stalks seemed to curl and bend so far in the distance. But what quickly took her eyes was the mountain rising from its center, if she could call it that. It looked more like a tumor than land. A rocky dome rising with spikes extending from it, each with a tip spewing forth a smoggy black gas. Red veins ran through it, making it look like the thing was living rather than a piece of rock.
It was a horrendous image, but it was still better than what Dash had just left. She found herself wanting to go to that place, climb its sordid steps, and explore every last detail of its oddness, but the Abyss was already pulling it away, the violet and green gases ebbing in to swallow the image whole.
What else? she thought in her distant mind. Though the size of the stone she had taken was large, she knew she didn’t have long before the black lens wore off and she was put back into the world. There was more she wanted to see. Someone she wanted to find.
But the Abyss took no orders and for what felt like minutes it dallied, not showing her a thing until she saw movement in the gas. Fluttering. Something crawling across the air as if it were a pack of dirt that needed traversing. It passed through the gas overhead and Dash saw it to be lizard-like, slithering by her, its long tail taking a full minute to pass. She glimpsed none of its other features besides its hind legs, things that looked more like paddles than normal limbs.
Another monster that roams the Abyss, she thought, and felt exhilarated that she could have a view of such a creature without fear of what it would do to her. She was an attendee of a menagerie, and the bars between her and the beast was the invisible power of the black lens.
An exhilarating feeling, yes, but that was not why she came.
Suddenly she started to feel heavy again, as if slowly her body was materializing around her and she was remembering she was a thing of flesh and blood, of substance and conscious. No, it’s too soon. I’ve only just entered.
But her pleading was in vain. She became heavier, fuller. She felt herself sink through the Abyss as if she were in water and someone had tied stones to her feet. She tried to stay afloat, tried to strain for an extra few moments in that place of freedom and visions within her mind, but the black lens was leaving her. The real world was forming on the other side of the Abyss.
She called out in her mind and fought and spat for one more breath amongst the violent gasses, and she was rewarded for her struggle.
A figure appeared in the purple fog. It strode forward, its shoulders low, its neck long, chest and belly both big and pronounced.
Her entire being tensed as it finally found what it was searching for all along.
Father? she thought gleefully. Is that you?
After so many years, so many stones consumed, so many things she had done to obtain them, at last there he was—
The Abyss pulled away and there came a woman with eyes like a cat and fangs so long that they looked like tusks ready to gore Dash, ready to tear her flesh from her body.
She came to with her hands in the air, trying to protect herself from the tusked woman’s reach. In her panic she threw the depleted shard of black lens into the piles of stone scattered along the floor, making a large crash reverberate through her cavern. She sat upright, thinking there was an invader in her home, thinking the woman had found a way to follow her out of the Abyss, but there was nothing there.
No woman. No intruder. Not even a shadowy figure ready to whisper to her promises of her demise. The black lens had quieted that voice… for now.
And in that newfound quiet she could once more think clearly.
“What have I done?”
With the fog lifted and the Abyss silenced she finally realized how foolish she was. She had tried to fool Proth’s Prodigy yet again, and this time sloppily… by painting a few slabs of iron to look like charged fire bones. A terrible idea, one given to her during her manic need for more black lens. One that would surely be her end.
She had flirted with crossing the line with them for too long, but now she had finally done it; despite their warnings, despite their threats, she still treated their deal like a game that could be won.
She rubbed her head, the proper panic flooding her body. She looked around her room, hoping to find any leftover fire bones from the original box they had given her to charge, but there was none to be had other than the bits of shrapnel garnishing the floor like a seasoning to accentuate her failure. A dozen stones she had burst as she failed to complete the spells to charge them properly.
She needed more stone, but where could she find something as valuable as fire bone other than through Proth’s Prodigy themselves? Only they had a line to the outlawed mines of the world, or at least that she knew about.
She needed money to grease the right hands and stir the right tongues so she could be connected with someone who could find it for her, but currently, her coin purse was about as light as her head.
She needed protection. She could cast a few spells with the stones she did have, but they wouldn’t stop the onslaught that Carry would send at her. She had wronged them too many times. She’d be deemed an enemy of Proth’s Prodigy, and enemies needed to be made examples of in the Purple in order to keep the perception of power.
She needed to run, but to where? To whom? She knew nothing of the world besides Bothane. She knew no one else in it besides the few customers that would stagger in and ask for minor, cheap spells, and they were the type that would just as likely sell her to the Prodigy rather than help her. Maybe Mum Casara would take her back? Maybe the Alley of Fangs could once again be her home?
She shook her head. She had closed that part of her life. Risen from that alley into this cave she called a home.
Besides, she would be turning her back on her lone connection to the black lens. Could she survive without it? Could she give up her search? Could she sustain the voices that would eventually find her and speak so loudly she couldn’t think?
She had a bag of it now, and maybe she would find more.
She stood, frantic, grabbing one of the many upturned bags, and emptied the rest of its contents on the floor. Before she could think anymore about what she was doing she was filling it with supplies, stuffing it with what little useable stone she possessed, the last of her food, and the least tattered of her small collection of robes, but none of it as important as the pouch already hanging from her hip.
She didn’t know where she was going or how she would get there, but so long as she had black
lens she would be okay.
She would stick to the streets that she knew so well. She would wind her way through the hidden passages that bisected Bothane Rock and leave this place for good. She would find more black lens. She would find more work.
She would find a way.
She went to the door, put her hand to the knob, and turned it just as someone pounded on the other side of it.
Chapter 7
The door thrummed with each strike as if it were threatening to splinter. There was rage on the other side of it. Desperation.
It was Shint and a horde of gang members, she was sure of it.
She backed away, fumbling inside her bag for a stone she could use as a weapon, but every one she pulled up was nothing more than a minor gem that held weak essence that she could only draw upon for trickery like smoke and pops of noise.
A nugget of lagolite. A lump eldium. A cut gemini. All stone she had treated with, but none that could stop Shint. At least not with the spells she could remember.
The knocking came again, louder this time. She stepped backwards, her head spinning for some way out, but there wasn’t one so deep in the stone as her cavern was placed.
And as she frantically tried to escape her attackers she thought of the safety of the Abyss and how easy it would be for her to escape to it rather than deal with what was about to come her way.
She stepped back again and tripped, falling into a pile of stones, sending them skittering across the floor in a loud racket.
The knocking stopped. She braced herself for a boot to burst through the rotted wood, but instead she heard a man’s voice.
“Someone in there? I need some help.”
Dash sat there, staring, wondering if the voice she heard was really different than Shint’s, or if it was just the shadows playing tricks with her. But it couldn’t be. She had taken the black lens only minutes ago. The shadows had been put aside, unless they were returning quicker after so many years of her using the lens...