by Jade Alters
“There has to be some purpose for the bridges,” I figure. “It’s risky, sure, but we could use them to get down.” Bart lets his head bob slowly up and down, a hand shielding his mouth.
“Does there have to be a purpose for the bridges? It’s a mystical maze designed to keep us from getting to the bottom. It would make perfect sense for it to be a trick,” he observes. The fairness of his point pinches my brow.
“But,” Helena jumps in. Thank God. I’m in no shape for mental backflips through hoops of fire. “Why would the ancients even bother having created a lock-and-key system that could be unsealed, if they didn’t want anyone to ever have access to this knowledge again? They would have just destroyed the records, flat-out. They made it this way on purpose. So that the knowledge is difficult to get to but attainable.”
“Astute observation, little Witch,” Bart commends her. He paces to the edge of the bridge, where it would be so simple a thing for one little push to give him what he deserves. “Down it is, then.” I’m about to ask just how the old bag proposes we do that, when he surprises me with an about-face. His scarlet eyes flash into mine. Even the way they glare, reminiscent of Lucidous, makes me itch. “You and I should go.”
“That so?” I bounce back at him. My eyebrow doesn’t so much rise, as it does twitch up my forehead. Bart strolls towards me to pitch the idea as casually as lunch plans.
“Our legs can handle the shock of the drop to the next bridge,” Bart says, like I don’t realize it. Like I don’t know what the next words to come out of his mouth will be already. “You can’t expect Helena to make the same decent.”
“But you expect me to dive into the dark right alongside you and leave her behind?” I counter. What sort of idiot does he take me for? I meet him halfway in his approach, each step echoing through the black all around us. “How would she follow us? Or does that even matter to you?” My shoes scuff stone about two inches from the tip of Bart’s. I meet his scarlet eyes without fear, only hate.
“Of course it matters,” Bart tries to defend himself. I’m about ready to dig my nails into those venomous lips of his, when Helena’s soft, but resolute voice floats through the air behind me.
“Why don’t I bring down one side of the bridge?” she breaks in. I can hear the desperation in her tone, even if it is a solid plan. “I could tilt it down to the next one. We could all go down together, one at a time. Share the risks.” My fingers twitch with the urge to dimple Bart’s forehead with my knuckles. But, somehow, Helena has tunneled through the outer coating of fury around my brain, just an inch. Just enough for me to hesitate. Then the idiot has to go and open his big, skeptical mouth again.
“We’d be sharing a massively inflated risk,” Bart points out of Helena’s proposal. “You think these thin bridges could withstand another entire bridge falling on them?”
“They withstood the staircase raining down on them,” Helena argues, but it’s too late. A calculating glaze rises up over Bart’s eye, thinking his way out of the arrangement. My decision is made for me, by the cloud of rancor that’s filling my skull.
“It must be all you know to do,” I say before I even know what I mean. I just know how I feel. That I’m stuck down here with one of the two people I’ve hated more than anything else in my long life.
“Excuse me?” Bart says, genuinely puzzled. That’s fine. I planned on rearranging the pieces for him anyway. I take just one more step towards him. Being that he refuses to retreat, our chests touch. The look on his face, so close to mine now, is no longer puzzled.
“Why in the fuck would I agree to jump down there with you? Everyone and everything is a means to an end for you. You’ll forget about Helena the second we jump,” I spit at him, though I’m not entirely sure when I started caring about Helena, but still, the words tumble out. “You’ll forget about me as soon as it’s convenient too. Just like before. Hell, did Lucidous ever even mention me to you? Or was I so inconsequential that…”
“Darius,” Helena tries to call me back from the brink. But I’ve leaned over that edge too long. The darkness has been calling my name, and I’m just about sick of listening to it.
“You know the Shelves divided us this way on purpose,” Bart murmurs. Despite how close we are, despite the twitch of every muscle that aches to punish him, he remains still. Calm. “It brought you and I together for this very reason.” Some tiny, microscopic part of me knows he’s right. But that part is lost in a raging sea of everything I’ve become.
“Or maybe…” The words creep from my lips as soon as the thoughts creep through the cracks in my mind. “You brought us together for this reason. You planned us to be broken up this way… so that Helena would be left behind, for Horace and the others to scoop up. So you could finish me off.”
“Darius, listen to yourself,” Helena pleads. And I do. I hear the madness in my voice. But in that madness, there’s a suspicious degree of possible truth. I know Helena hears it, too.
“Listen to yourself!” I shoot back at her. “I hear it in your voice… the suspicion. It’s not ungrounded! Ever the tactician, this guy.” I clamp my fingers hard around Bart’s shoulder. Only then does he show the first signs of physical distress. His forehead wrinkles. Not in any kind of aggression, though. It’s more like concern. “He played both sides from the beginning. He used the Academy to serve the Kyrie, but he used the Kyrie to serve himself and Lucidous! I was just a piece of meat, thrown under the bus along the way… why wouldn’t he be doing the same down here?”
“Darius.” Finally, a spark of emotion. It jerks my head sideways, back to Bart’s scarlet eyes. I can hardly believe what I see in them. Is that...compassion? Guilt? “As much as I understand your condemnation, I assure you… my sole intention here is to find information on the Fiends. To protect the integrity not just of the Kyrie, the Academy, or even myself. But all superna-”
That’s just about all I can stand. My fist rockets through the air where Bart’s face had been less than a second ago. Now it’s gone. I know where it’s gone from the gust that rips around in his wake. I spin about with the same degree of agility, elbow cocked to drive. I launch the strike like a bony arrowhead, but Bart leans back away from it like a troublesome bee. I throw a low kick instead. Bart knocks the force out of it with a blow of his own foot from the side.
“Darius! Stop!” Helena screams, only now able to perceive half of what’s happened in our blur of motion. But her voice is distant to me, part of some far-away world where things like reason and restraint hold any sway. In the world I’m in now, all that matters is smashing that uninterested face in.
I feign a punch at Bart, which he swipes an arm to deflect. But I have a secondary bodyshot ready for him. I let it fly, straight for his gut. For half a second, I feel ribs around my fist. Then they’re gone. The next thing I feel is a heel in the back of my knee. Bart kicks my leg out, forcing me to kneel. I turn to sweep my foot, but he stops it with a stomp. The crunch of my ankle reverberates through my whole leg. I wince, but I bite down the yelp before it can jump from my throat. I won’t give him the satisfaction.
Instead, I launch a hopeless fist up at Bart’s groin. He slaps the strike away like he’s disciplining a child. So he really is Bartholomew. He must be, so very much older than he looks, to toss my blows aside so easily. I cock back another fist, but Bart blurs down on top of me. I hardly have time to register his hands on my shoulders before his immense pulse of force flattens them on the ground. The change in position is so drastic, so sudden, it kicks my head straight back. The click of my head on the bridge sends a baritone note ringing through my ears. I have to strain to hear Helena’s screams, even so close to me.
“Bart! Stop it!” Helena says. I float along the floor, then upwards. Bart hoists me up to the edge of the bridge by the collar of my shirt. My shoes scrape along the stone beneath me, listless. I’m not sure if I’ve lost feeling in them, or if I just don’t feel anything anymore. He holds me up to the darkness. “He’s done! Leave
him be!” Helena cries out again. My eyes roll down in my skull to the darkness an inch behind my shoes. There’s never been any record of a Vampire dying from a fall… maybe I’ll be a discovery? That, or I’ll have a shortcut to the bottom. I close my eyes.
“You’re… more lost than I am,” Bart murmurs. It’s so quiet, I’m not even sure he meant for me to hear. The next sound to swim through my ears is Helena’s bellow, bouncing through the Forbidden Shelves all around.
“Damnit!” she screams. My eyes crack open, tracing the sound back to her. I find her down on a knee, palms flat on the bridge. I feel the cracks that splinter out in a hundred directions as the bridge rumbles beneath the tips of my shoes. Bart turns to toss me down, into the black.
I spin around, eyes up at the bridge, Bart, and Helena, as it crumbles to pieces. I drift down through the cold blackness. I watch the stone splinter apart. The briefest thought crosses my mind of Emery’s teary eyes if I make history as a freefall casualty. Then, nothing. I make the best peace I can with the end opening up to swallow me. I watch Bart zip towards Helena, then both of them zip to the falling side of the bridge above me. Not a damn thing I can do about it. Then - crack.
“Shit!” I cough out as my back hits rock. I lay there, still, in the lapse between expectation and reality. I watch the bridge I fell from crumble and scrape down the bookshelf wall, towards the one I fell onto. My hands slide out in every direction to confirm it’s real. It’s not until I hear Helena, though, that my brain accepts it at last.
“Darius!” she cries out, from the far side of my new bridge, behind me. She and Bart managed to get down a level, like she said. The only problems now are the gigantic hunks of the first bridge plunging down towards me. I prop myself up, only to be scooped up by an arm under each of my own. Helena and Bart hoist me up on my feet. I look into the scarlet eyes of the latter and find more ambiguity. No remorse for what he did. No relief that I’m alive. But there’s no wish to do me harm, either. I can’t help but wonder how intentional the way he threw me was. “Come on!” Helena snaps me back again. Bart and I tug Helena across the bridge at blurry speeds.
It takes most of the first bridge to knock the second one from the security of its own hold in the walls. By that time, Helena, Bart, and I are against the book-lined wall. The structure dislodges, and we begin the scraping decent to the next one deeper. It would work, to get us to the bottom, if not for one thing. Though no books actually fall from their shelves, they do get disturbed. The impact of the falling bridges knocks them loose. They pull themselves back in, like the one I tried, but not without compressing the size of the corridor downwards. And, with each bridge that shatters, each level we descend, more wreckage ricochets into more books. The whole book-lined cavern trembles with the tremor. Even I notice the air getting shorter as the walls literally close in on us.
Still, we brace for every impact. We leap from one crumbling bridge to the next. I grab onto Helena when she stumbles. Bart keeps step with a sort of aloof grace, another sign of the long life that brought him here. The three of us plunk down onto the very bottom bridge as rocky chaos unfolds above us. The condensed space, along with the shower of broken bridge pieces results in a constant downpour of rock as huge chunks get trapped between the walls and crumble. The only reason I conclude that this is the final bridge is the sudden surge of light from beneath us. In the tiny slit left between the closing jaws of bookcases, a bright light rages. It’s the brightest thing I’ve seen since the Grand Library by far. The Mystic Core.
The walls jerk in at us. My chest touches Helena’s back while Bart’s sandwiches her from the front. I grab onto her and shove her sideways, through the shining gap that’s left in the floor. Her sudden disappearance puts Bart off-balance at last. For the first time, he trips backwards. His back will hit the bookcase. His age-earned wisdom won’t save him from the mashing jaw of two walls shutting on his body. My urge is to jump through the gap. Take the chance to get to the Mystic Core without him. Let the Forbidden Shelves have his bones, blood, and everything else.
I jump down into the light, right after I crouch and kick Bart’s leg out from beneath him. He stumbles sideways into the light, just before I do. I lock my knees for impact with whatever’s hidden below, only to feel the impact much lighter, and sooner, than I expected. We only drop about ten feet from the bottom of the Canyon of Bridges. There, we hit a wide, shining, ornate platform floating in the shadow. There, I’m treated to the most satisfying sound of my life. Bart screaming. It’s only for half a second, but I hear the strongest hint of emotion in him as true fear when he thought the Shelves would crush him a second ago. It only wears off once he props himself up on the platform below.
The amount of shit I could eat with the grin plastered across my face. I stare down at Bart while he climbs back up to his feet. He doesn’t look directly at me, or Helena, while he struggles to recompose himself. Then, in one solid heave of his chest, he stabilizes. He returns to the neutral Bart of minutes past.
“Th-thank you,” his voice betrays him with a stammer when he tries to speak.
“Whatever,” I shrug. I give him no indication, either in voice or body language, if I actually meant to kick him down to safety. Maybe I was actually trying to secure his demise? I want him to wonder, just like I do about his toss that sent me down a bridge earlier. Helena turns a full three-hundred-sixty degrees to search our surroundings.
“So… is this where the Mystic...” She trails off when her eyes focus on the same thing mine do. “Holy shit.”
Open Books
Emery,
The Forbidden Shelves, Reading Room
“Shit! Can’t you pull the stairs back together with a trick or something?” Cece’s voice rattles through my ear like the lowest vibration of a cymbal crash. She should know better. Of course I’ve already tried that. All I can do now is brace with both hands on the hunk of stone beneath us for the long plummet.
“There’s not enough light for a trick like that!” I shout back to Cece. Just when I think the girl can surprise me no more, she has the gall to stand up. Amidst the colliding shower of debris from the broken staircase, she rises to a crouch. Her muscles uncoil to a proud, braced stance, hair whipping around her in the torrent of wind. “What the hell are you doing?”
“We’re supposed to stay together, right?” Cece fires back. I trace a wave of warmth back to her ankles, where a heat mirage distorts her image. She’s going to transform. “I’m going to round everyone-”
“No!” I scream over her. I launch from my spot just a second before she can launch from our platform. There’s only one thing in the world I’m less thrilled about than braving the Forbidden Shelves alongside Cece. Doing it alone. She still tries to leap but comes right back down to avoid flinging me to the void. Cece’s sapphire eyes glare down at me, shimmering brightly with a slit for a pupil. “Look around! Everyone’s already gone!” Cece’s eyes mimic mine, firing glances everywhere around the eternal chute of bookshelves. Chunks of tumbling debris fall here and there, but there’s no sign of our companions. Not one. Cece knows as well as I do that the bookshelf shaft simply isn’t big enough for us not to see them already. “The Shelves have already separated us, magically. If you try to cross those walls manually… there’s no telling where you’ll end up.”
“So what, we just ride it out where the Shelves want us to go?” Cece growls. I unclamp from around her waist as her muscles uncoil. The wings, born from flame on her back, fold down and fizzle away. The scales around her ankles flatten out and fade in color, back to her natural tan. I pull Cece down to brace her against the stairs alongside me. The darkness below is impenetrable. Who knows what we’ll hit, or when?
“It’s a labyrinth, right? Confusing as they might be, there’s a point to them. There’s a reason the ancients sealed forbidden knowledge in a labyrinth, rather than a box with no key at the bottom of the ocean. There has to be at least one way to get to the Mystic Core, and the tomes we need,” I rush
to explain to Cece while we ride a stony comet down into shadow. The turbulence alone threatens to tear us loose. “It’ll be some kind of test. We have to let the Shelves guide us a little, or we’ll never get the chance.”
Cece’s scowl tells me all I need to know; she doesn’t need to say a thing. I know full well how she feels about letting others guide her steps. I know exactly how it’s worked out for her. But that’s no excuse for the people she’s hurt. All of her justifications can’t heal the people left in her wake. Serge. Darius. All of those people, massacred by the Fiends.
Before I can get too worked up about it, we plummet down to the literal incarnation of a labyrinth. I hardly have time to glimpse it in the briefest flicker of light - a hundred twisting, interlocked corridors of bookcases. Cece and I fire down into it like a meteor.
I wince for a full five seconds, eyes clamped shut. It takes me that long to find that I can still feel my fingers and toes. Either the afterlife is remarkably loyal to the physical world, or we have not, in fact, died. I crack one eye open to find myself kneeling on stone, in a narrow pass of book-lined shelves. Cece kneels beside me, eyes still clenched. I slide my hands out in front of me to find a seam in the rock, where our chunk of stairs fits perfectly into a hole in the floor. I slap Cece’s arm to beckon her to look up, along with me.
Cece and I trace rock after rock plunging from the shadow above, down into the bookcase maze along with us. As each of them reaches the maze, they slow down rapidly to a hover, then lower into a hole in the rocky floor. Every piece fits perfectly somewhere, just like our piece did. The floor builds itself before our very eyes with the remnants of the stairs we came in on.
“You… think this was even here before the stairs fell apart?” Cece wonders aloud as she wobbles to her feet. I grab onto a nearby bookshelf to pull myself up beside her.
“I doubt any part of the Forbidden Shelves is here until the place wills it,” I answer. I stroll idly forward, running my fingers along the dust encrusted spines of the most ancient books in the Broken Academy. Some of them may have been penned by the Dalshaks of a thousand years ago. Some look like they might well predate my family name. Beside me, Cece idly tips a book forward, eyeing the time-crisped pages within.