The Gates of Thelgrim

by Robbie MacNiven

It was almost open. Malformed, writhing shapes, defying all the laws of nature, were half-visible squirming and writhing against the far side of the rift, making it pulse and shudder like a membrane that was a heartbeat away from rupturing. He could hear their whispering, the scratching of their claws. They were scraping at the inside of his skull.

  “Still you fight,” hissed her voice, her claws digging a little deeper. “You should know by now it will do you no good. Unlock it!”

  Shiver’s hand was shaking so badly he couldn’t press the key home into the twisted, arcane lock that had formed at the heart of the portal, suspended by the churning Ynfernael energies. Her hand steadied him though. He groaned with horror and revulsion as, finally, the key slotted home.

  •••

  Astarra managed to stand. For a while it was all she could do. Her body was trembling and riven with pain. She had been utterly drained by the clash with the Hydra Shard, yet it was not over. Not even close.

  She managed a runeword, bloodied lips spilling forth the arcane phrase as Raythen drove once more into the demons ahead. Every syllable made her ache. But still, the Deeprune responded, her ruined staff slick with water.

  It called out to her, made her realize it wasn’t the only stream in the cavern. The desperate fighting had riven the corrupted space, cracking both the floor and ceiling. There was water pouring from the rents overhead, drizzling down into the wild melee.

  She remembered what Shiver and the other elves had said. The cavern was beneath the Blackwater, the lake at the heart of Thelgrim. There was a vast reservoir directly above them, untapped and full of potency.

  Astarra reached within herself and drew upon the Deeprune once more. She let the power of the Turning quest upwards, beyond the slowly cracking layer of bedrock that lay between the bottom of the lake and the buried chamber. She could feel it there instantly, a crushing, powerful weight, the heart that gave the city above them life.

  She tried to direct its pressure, to make it respond to the will of the Deeprune. It was sluggish at first, reluctant, its waters unused to taking commands. It had lain dormant for so long, still and undisturbed, while the evil beneath it had festered and taken root.

  She swung her staff about her head, murmuring her encouragement in the language of the runes, stirring it up and directing a portion of its power into the rock directly above the portal.

  Now came the resistance. The stone of the cavern roof was tainted, rank with the corruption of the Ynfernael. It writhed and shook as Astarra tried to pierce it, to drive an opening in it.

  She snarled with effort, pointing her staff directly above the portal, driving her will and her power via the Deeprune. The lake responded. There was a cracking sound, barely audible over the howls and screams all around. Water followed it, cascading in a sudden flow down, directly on top of where Shiver was crouched.

  •••

  Shiver gasped. He was drenched, the sudden surge of water striking so hard he almost lost his grip on the key.

  He felt the magics of the Turning in the downpour, the essence drawing from the great lake above. It shattered the memory that had been plaguing him, if only for a moment, clearing the Ynfernael fog brought on by the portal’s presence.

  The key was still fixed into the portal, unturned. His hand was upon it. He realized that his shaking had stopped completely.

  “You must open it,” snarled Zorri, reaching towards Shiver, ignoring the drenching flow of water from above. It was driving down on him, seeming to grow heavier and stronger, but he bore it up without question, his whole focus on the portal and the key.

  “It is your destiny!” Zorri shouted.

  He clutched Shiver’s wrist, just above the manacle. It was only then that he realized the ethereal chains that usually held him at bay when memories and visions assailed him, had gone.

  He was bound no more.

  He didn’t even need to speak a word. Ice formed instantaneously beneath the flooding water, running from Zorri’s grip on his arm up to the dwarf’s shoulder. He tried to break free with an unnatural hiss, but the chill was relentless.

  Shiver drove his mind into the Empyrean, sending ice surging up the downpour above him, freezing it solid in a matter of seconds. With a snarl he tore his arm free from Zorri and snapped a word of power. The ice overhead shattered, raining down around him in a blizzard of shards, those that struck him rebounding harmlessly from his hard, pale skin.

  He snatched Zorri by the base of his beard and, with a roar of effort, flung the half-frozen Dunwarr straight at the portal.

  It gave way behind him, the constituency of its surface now like thick, multi-hued oil. It seemed to haul him in, his strangled scream cut short.

  Korri saw what had happened from the base of the mound of bones. He’d been thrown there by Astarra’s magics and had only just managed to regain his feet, clearly shaken by the surge of energies. With a howl, he charged up the mound of bones at Shiver, fighting his way through the broken ice. The elf turned and with little more than a thought, drove a lance of ice into the Dunwarr’s core, running him through. Infected black blood burst from the wound, the treacherous advisor stumbling, staring down in abject shock at the length impaling him. His eyes, Shiver realized, had lost the darkness that had been consuming them before.

  “Go,” Shiver said to him. “And account for your crimes.”

  He grasped the Dunwarr by the shoulders and drove him up, into the portal, after his vanished kinsman. It consumed him utterly, the black smoke broiling from its redoubling. Shiver stumbled back just in time, feeling its power trying to haul him in as well. He fought, broke free from it, and the darkness seemed to harden, its cursed light shrinking. He felt its strength draining, as though the power connecting it to the chamber had been cut.

  He dared look away to survey the bloodshed beneath him. It was nearing an end – elves and Ynfernael alike, few were left fighting. Bodies covered the cavern floor in an indiscernible mess of blood.

  Maelwich had forged a path through, helping Astarra. The runewitch was wounded, looking close to collapse.

  Shiver felt a fresh surge of energies before he could call out to them. He turned back to the portal as a terrible shriek went up from the remaining demons, the unnatural sound echoing back over and over from the cracked, icy cavern roof.

  Something was dragging itself through the portal. The lock at its center disintegrated into the ether as a bulbous, distorted shape broke the rip’s sheen. An arm came first, a great trunk of melted flesh that bubbled and popped like running wax. Another followed, and then a head.

  Shiver found himself looking into the faces of both Korri and Zorri. The twins had been melded together into a nightmarish, screaming visage, their left and right eyes fused to form one baleful, unblinking orb, their mouths, still separate, distended and filled with wicked fangs. Their beards were matted with protoplasmic filth, and their clothing had torn and ripped around the morass of their conjoined bodies. They howled with pain as, through willpower alone, they forced their way through the Ynfernael portal and back into the material plane.

  Shiver felt the agony and horror of their minds as they reentered the cavern as one. It paralyzed him, filled him with equal parts terror and disgust. The monstrosity was halfway out of the opening and reaching for him with hands that, before his very eyes, were tearing open into secondary, screaming maws.

  In that moment he felt utterly powerless, dwarfed by the raw, corrupting energy of the Ynfernael as it threatened to burst free. It would take him with it, he knew, soul and all, a plaything to be forever tormented with resurgent memories of all his misdeeds. He didn’t have the power to stop this, he didn’t even know how to close the portal.

  And yet, amidst it all, five precious words came back to him.

  Atali nametha ren. Nameth hatala.

  The path is the purpose. The path goes on.

&nb
sp; It would not end here.

  No longer giving himself time to think, to fear, he lashed out once more with the Empyrean. It answered him, raising up a thick, glittering wall of ice to block the creature’s passage from the portal. It began hammering at it, each strike sending jagged lines across the wall’s surface, crazing the ice.

  “That won’t hold it,” shouted Maelwich. “We have to destroy the portal!”

  “I can’t,” Shiver admitted, momentarily losing focus. The sheet of ice started to come crashing down.

  “I was only used to open them,” he admitted, struggling to rebuild the ice, both hands raised, channeling Empyrean power through his shuddering body.

  “I can do it,” said a new voice. Astarra had regained a fraction of her strength. She was leaning heavily on her split staff.

  “I’ll seal it,” she went on. “But you have to get back.”

  “How?” Shiver asked. He had no idea how Astarra would know the dark speech necessary to bind the Ynfernael wound shut. He feared she was going to do something foolish, something that would cost her her life.

  She didn’t reply. The last of Shiver’s ice binding the monstrosity that had once been the twins shattered apart. It hauled itself further through the splitting portal with a maddened bellow.

  Maelwich lashed out before either Shiver or Astarra could react, her innate hatred of the Ynfernael driving her to strike. Launching herself up off the jutting bones of the sacrificed elves and dwarfs, she scissored her long, serrated blades on either side of the creature’s trunk-like, bulging neck.

  The deep elf steel bit home, clean and true. It scythed through the monstrous head of the thing that had once been Korri and Zorri, severing it completely. The deformed skull fell with a heavy thud, rolling down from the broken bone plinth.

  Shiver experienced a moment of hope as he expected the bulbous bulk of the monstrosity’s body to give way, but it barely even shook. The ichor was reduced to a pattering flow, and he watched in sickening horror as fresh spurs of bone and chitin formed a new maw set into the thing’s shoulders. It let out a fresh, keening screech.

  The sight of it made Shiver sick. Maelwich kept attacking, slashing long ribbons from its ever-shifting body with her knives, but it barely even seemed to notice. It was healing as fast as she could strike.

  “It’s still coming through,” Shiver shouted, despairing. What more could any of them do? “I can’t stop it!”

  “I can,” Astarra repeated with a snarl. “Get Maelwich back!”

  There was no time to further question the runewitch’s plan. All he could do was follow his own course, but that didn’t mean abandoning her. Shiver snatched at Maelwich and hauled her away from the demonic monstrosity as it dragged more and more obscene bulk from the buckling, writhing portal.

  “Get anyone still alive out,” he urged her, trying to reach the elven leader through the killing frenzy that had gripped her. Maelwich managed to nod, looking back towards the cavern entrance. Only a few elves still fought on, and Mavarin. The Dunwarr was standing on top of a mound of slain demons, drenched in filth, waving his dagger and making a wild, keening noise.

  “Go!” Astarra roared. Shiver could feel the energies of the Verto Magica responding once more to the runewitch’s summons, her mastery of them now almost instinctive. He directed Maelwich towards the cavern entrance, but turned back rather than follow her.

  “I won’t leave you to face this alone,” he shouted over the terrible wailing of the portal and its demonic spawn. But Astarra wasn’t listening.

  With a crack, the ceiling overhead began to split.

  •••

  “Aquatum vestra,” Astarra chanted. “Vestra naii destrus! Teo lasteth!”

  She was delving into power she had never known, driving both body and soul far beyond any limits she thought she had. The Deeprune, ever faithful, was still answering her call. It was directing the might of the Blackwater once again, driving the great pressure of the lake against the bedrock that supported it.

  The ancient waters were obeying her. All across the cavern roof, cracks were beginning to appear, the twisting, corrupt stone being ripped apart by the weight bearing down on it. Water burst forth, first just a trickle, but growing and expanding as the splits spread.

  The sudden springs cascaded down onto the carnage that had overrun the cavern. The surviving demons already on the material side of the portal had gone feral, tearing at one another amidst the littered bodies. Astarra was already drenched thanks to the power of the Deeprune, but she kept calling for more, the words taking on a life of their own. They surged and flowed from her lips like the ocean waves, summoning the Blackwater to lay claim to this undiscovered pit, this buried cavern that had existed, untouched by it, since the dawn of Mennara’s creation.

  The nightmare that had once been Korri and Zorri could not free itself in time. Great lumps of the cavern’s ceiling were crashing down now along with the water, pulverizing the bodies beneath. A stalactite ploughed into the floor barely a dozen paces to Astarra’s right, shards of stone whickering past her.

  She barely noticed. It was almost complete. The whole cavern would come down, drowning and burying the horror of the Ynfernael before it could break through, fully formed. She would perish with it. The thought did not concern her. The power of the runes had burned away her fears, her doubts, every last unnecessary thought, sharpening and polishing the brilliance of her soul. She was as one with the Turning. She would not allow its purity to become befouled by the Ynfernael’s cancer.

  One of the falling rocks struck the mutated horror a glancing blow. Its shrieking redoubled as bones crunched and snapped. It was almost free though. She couldn’t stop it getting out.

  That was when she noticed Shiver. The deep elf hadn’t left when she had told him to. Instead, he drove into the plunging water ahead, summoning his chill connection to the Empyrean. Ice formed rapidly over the lower bulk of the Ynfernael creature, welding it thickly to the crushed bones beneath. It twisted and writhed with a hideous, unnatural, disjointed motion, but Shiver was holding it fast, his hands extended, fingers splayed and shaking.

  He managed to look back and make eye contact with Astarra as she clutched her sundered staff with both hands. A moment’s recognition, an expression of understanding.

  She broke contact with the Blackwater, hauling the energies of the Deeprune back into her staff. The great lake needed no more directing. Its wrath was in full flow, thundering down upon the cavern, crushing it and flooding it.

  Shiver was running past her, snatching her hand as he went. Together they sprinted for the crack that marked the cavern entrance, vaulting bodies and dodging around the few remaining Ynfernael beasts as they ripped themselves apart.

  Water and rock tumbled down ahead of them. Astarra bellowed with effort as they forged through it together, the thunder of the collapsing space filling their senses. Shiver lashed out one last time with the power of the Empyrean, freezing water in mid-flow above them, leaving splinters of rock lodged in them, locked in just above their heads. It lasted only a few seconds before the continuing flow from above melted and collapsed the ice and sent the pent-up mass of broken ceiling crashing down.

  A few seconds was all they needed. They threw themselves out of the cavern, side-by-side.

  Astarra hit the dirt and rolled, turning as soon as she’d regained her balance. She caught a final vision of the cavern and the portal at its heart. The twisted, bellowing monstrosity that had once been Korri and Zorri was being crushed, the collapse near-total. Behind it the light of the rift had gone into wild spasms, its unnatural energies unable to sustain it now that it had been abandoned beneath the pulverizing weight of the Blackwater.

  She lost sight of it as the cavern entrance itself began to collapse, sealing off the surging flood that was threatening to burst through to the adjoining tunnel. She found the strength to ri
se and stumble with Shiver deeper into the warren that had led them to the portal cavern. Maelwich, Mavarin and two other deep elf survivors were just ahead. They urged them on as they reached the confluence of passageways where they’d paused before, the lone jaela root still burning, its green-tinted, fragile light dragging them up from the maddening depths. A last, shuddering crash ripped through the subterranean realm, setting the tunnels trembling and shaking dirt from the ceiling. Then, finally, all was still.

  “By all the gods,” Astarra managed to pant, before the pain and exhaustion finally caught up with her. She collapsed into the dirt, too drained to speak further, her vision swaying as she centered the last of her energies into staying conscious.

  Shiver knelt by her side, concern on his face. He placed a single finger on her brow. It was cold to the touch, yet soothing, making her sigh as she grasped onto the enervating sensation.

  The elf murmured something under his breath, words Astarra didn’t understand. She felt their effect though. Her singed flesh grew gradually less sore, and she experienced the faintest sliver of strength returning to her limbs, drawn forth by the elf’s innate link to the Empyrean. He was giving his own energy to her, his shaking returning as he in turn grew weaker.

  “Can you stand?” he managed to ask. She gazed up into his eyes for a moment, then nodded. Her staff had fallen at her side, split down the middle. She reached out tentatively to pick it up, feeling only the faintest undercurrent of energy as she grasped it. The Deeprune was as drained as she was.

  Mavarin joined Shiver, helping her to her feet. The frenzied warrior he had become in the cavern was gone, replaced by a tired, ichor-spattered rendering of the tinkerer that was somewhat more familiar. Astarra looked around, her thoughts still aching and slow. Maelwich and the last two elves were standing watching her guardedly, one cradling a badly bloodied arm. Everyone looked as exhausted as she felt, though there was still a cold steeliness to Maelwich’s eyes.

  “Are we all that’s left?” she asked them. “No one else made it out?”