The Broken Academy 5: Bonds

by Jade Alters

  “It’s alright,” I put a dark, armored hand on her shoulder. I do my best to force a smile. Anything to stop her runaway ramble.

  “The lower floors? How low?” Serge asks.

  “Jensen says he saw smoke rising in the stairwell from the third basement, so…below that?” the woman tells us.

  “Are the service elevators still working?” Lee asks next. The woman’s head shakes violently from one side to the next in denial.

  “I think they shut them down, because we didn’t,” she says.

  “Alright…the stairs then,” Cece says to us, her fellow party leaders. Then she turns back to lift her voice over the rest of our vigilant perimeter of students-turned-soldiers.

  “We’re taking the stairs down! Remember our strategy. Tight formations. Rows of three go down at once,” Cece tells them.

  “Nearest stairwell is four doors down on the right,” the woman whispers. I nod to her to confirm she was heard. I fall into formation to follow Cece, Lee and Serge to the exit of the room.

  We trade the near-blinding brightness of the Tether’s solid light column for the dim fluorescent light of the empty hallway outside. After a silent scouting group of three returns unscathed, we file out to fill the long, slender pathway. The other party leaders and I let several ranks of three go on ahead of us. If we’re the buffer that guards the Academy, they act as the durable outer coating. They creep on ahead, despite the fear that threatens to cripple them. The fear that, if we somehow stumble onto the Lotus unaware, their lives will end first. Their deaths will serve only as a deterrent. With this in mind, I find myself admirable of every step they dare to venture forward.

  Door after door, our vanguard party finds more emptiness. They peek into each entrance we pass, only to find it entirely deserted. What we saw in the Tether Teleporter room must amount to all the workers on this floor. Perhaps in the building. The ghosts of things done here in the past hang silently in the air over us. Things that some might say justify what the Lotus plan. The great guilt we must carry into the next age, if supernaturals can survive. It haunts every hallway, every empty office, and all of us.

  We reach the fourth door. The vanguard party turns back for confirmation from us. Serge waves them on, a silent assurance that yes, we are all still hidden. The group squeezes through the doorway to the stairwell. The next lines up at the opening, waiting for the signal from the first to follow. Then they, too, enter. One group after the next creeps silently down the concrete stairs. At the turn to descend to the next level, the vanguard sends the signal back up the chain that it’s safe to come down. At least, until they reach the third basement floor, that is. It’s then that the message comes up to us, via a several-row game of telephone that:

  “There’s thick smoke blocking sight from below.” Cece, Lee Serge, and I look in to one another. We debate the matter with our eyes alone, knowing the decision we have to make. That the lives of those in front have just become a tool. We’re all in agreement, much as it turns our stomachs. They all volunteered for this detail, because they knew someone had to. But having it be someone else’s life on the other end of the call makes it no easier for us to say.

  “Proceed…with caution,” Cece sends back down the line. The vanguard group paces a few stairs deeper. Then we hear the first screams. The group in front of us tightens up.

  “What’s happening?” Lee asks them.

  “I don’t kno-”

  The Dragon who tried to answer was skewered to the wall with a railroad-spike bolt from a bow gun. Cece and Lee fall back an instinctual step while Serge steps forward with me.

  “Get me some Fey up here!” Cece calls back. If anyone can save the twitching, skewered Dragon, it’s one of them.

  One of the members of the group in front of us, a Shifter, changes to a falcon, and shoots down the stairs. Screeches and grunts fill the air. The other, a Warlock, fires lightning bolts through the rising smoke. Serge conjures an object that looks like a sliver of crystal in each hand on our way down to the fray. He puts one up to his eyes and hands the other to me. I watch as the crystal fuses to the sides of his head to act as a sort of visor over his eyes. I mimic the movement, and instantly, the smoke seems thinner. We turn the corner, and I see bodies. The bodies of our first few parties, struggling or bleeding out on the floor. I see robed combatants flying up through the shadow.

  “Their eyes- Serge, they can see us!” I realize. Much like our own crystal visors, the Lotus wear sleek, thin glasses. Through their prismatic lenses, their eyes train on us without a hint of difficulty.

  “Damn them,” Serge mutters. He bends the light around us into a translucent pike in each arm. He sends them sailing down the stairs just the instant before one of the Lotus gets up a disabling orb. Serge sticks two robed figures through the chest. But the third activates that horrid frequency. The one that turns Magicians, Witches and Shifters into piles of mush. I watch our own infantry collapse down the stairs. The Lotus put them out instantly with short blades to separate the spine.

  “Get behind me!” I scream to Serge. He falls behind the barrier of corrupted stone that jumps up from where my feet touch the floor. The black wall dilutes the signal enough for Serge to stay up on one knee. I prepare to detonate my wall as the footsteps of the Lotus draw near.

  Just before I can, two human-sized blurs shoot down the stairs past me. One is a deep red. The other a stunning violet. Cece and Lee flood the narrow staircase with a tide of fire, just ahead of their ripping claws. They clear the next two floors down before falling back with hard wing flaps. A twist of fire around them reverts the two to their human forms.

  “A handful more coming up,” Lee tells us. I press my hands to the back of my corruption wall to grow it wider. It fills the stairwell, wall to wall. The orange cracks of light shine on my struggling face. I’m still not completely sharp. But I can do this. I won’t send another fifteen people to die pointlessly.

  “Back away,” I warn my friends. Cece and the others creep up a few steps. I wait until I hear the Lotus round the corner. I dig my fingers into my wall of twisted matter. It disintegrates into a thousand tiny, rocky bullets. A storm of black and orange rages down the stairs, leaving a stain of corruption on everything it touches. Everything except the Lotus. Them, it reduces to pulp. By the time my corruption hurricane spins out to dust a few floors down, there’s hardly enough body parts left over to form even one Lotus corpse.

  “Holy shit, Bryant,” Lee mutters, with a kind of horrified pride. All I have the strength left to do is nod. Serge fans his hands out as the next group behind us creeps down the stairs after us. A whole arsenal of crystal shards materializes in their wake.

  “Everyone take one of these… Wear them over your eyes to see through the smoke,” Serge mutters. The weight of guilt sinks heavy in his voice, that he failed to equip the first group with these.

  “Hey,” Cece whispers to him as he hands out the last of the crystal visors, “none of us knew they had trick-proof glasses.” Her eyes wander to a leftover Lotus head, still wearing hers. Serge’s wander to the Warlock he’d seen get his nerve center cleaved.

  “I should have. They have some fucked-up gadget for fighting all of us,” Serge shakes his head. “This…can’t happen again.”

  “Then…it won’t,” I manage to pant. Lee puts an arm under mine to help me stand up straight. With another shared nod, the other party leaders and I step back, to let a few ranks of crystal-armed infantry take the lead. We follow them down, deeper into the facility, as soon as we get the signal.

  I, like all of us, expect something catastrophic when we reach the third basement. But there’s only more, thicker smoke. The potency of it clogs even my demonic airways. We call a temporary retreat for everyone to be fitted with a Fey air-filter. With these, and Serge’s see-all crystal visors, we delve even deeper.

  The stairwell lets out at the bottom floor, the fifth basement of the Point Arena Research Facility. The smog is thick enough there to feel it again
st our skin. The odd thing is, there isn’t much heat to it. I wonder for the first time all too late: is it not coming from a fire? We push through it to the first collection of doors. None of them seem disturbed. Most of them still have their locks intact. All of them do, as a matter of fact, besides the door to the Runic Gate Chamber.

  “What…could they want in there?” Lee murmurs. But none of us have any more answers than he does. We creep ever closer, with a few rows of infantry before and behind us. The heavy-duty door has been removed from its hinges, and cleanly at that. There’s no trace of explosives or any destructive tools for that matter. There’s also no sign of the door. Just a perfectly rectangular opening, through which comes a haunting sound.

  Whirs. Clicks. Grinding sounds. Hums. The chaotic symphony of some great machine echoes out, the only sound mightier than our hard-pumping heartbeats. Our scouting groups line up on either side of the door. They give us the all-clear to peek in ourselves. I clamp my hand over my mouth to keep from audibly gasping. Through the smoke and noise, I see tendrils of white energy floating up to the ceiling. It looks like the same light that comprises the Tether, though in a much lesser concentration. All of our heads turn downward as we trace it to its source, deep in a pit in the floor. It’s too dark and smoky to see what’s inside it. But whatever it is, it’s the heart of that horrid noise.

  “What…the hell is that?” Cece murmurs.

  “I think…it’s the energy that feeds into the Tether,” Serge whispers. “Look at how it collects into those vents on the ceiling.”

  “And, if the layout of this floor is like those above it…the Tether is directly over us,” I realize. We juggle in the silence of our minds what to do. Turn back or enter? The crunch of some debris behind us puts a new tension on the situation.

  “A few Lotus lurkers just outside our perimeter,” one of our defenders passes up the line. Cece, Lee, Serge and I jerk our heads into a collective space of consideration. Each distant crunch halves our timeline. The fate of our contingent hangs in the balance, against that of a potentially much larger group. If the Lotus is tampering with the Tether…everyone could be in danger. As hard as it is to say, we all know the order.

  “Let’s get inside,” Serge decrees. The rest of our party leaders nod in grim understanding.

  “Go,” Cece issues to our vanguard. We round the edge of the doors a few steps behind. Our force spreads in a wide arc to survey the huge, smoky chamber. There’s surprisingly little Lotus presence up front. We move in farther, close to the edge of the pit in the floor. It’s then that we see it. The Runic Gate lit bright on the other side of the chasm. The portal swirling alive within it.

  “Are they trying to get somewhere?” Cece wonders.

  “Or trying to bring something through,” I add. Some small part of me still remembers when I first stumbled out into this very building, in a confused rage. I never imagined I’d return. I certainly never imagined I would ever have to defend it. Yet here I stand, before the gate that brought my father to this Realm, a man now myself, as much as a Demon.

  “But what…” Serge mutters, right up until the light of the Gate brightens. Even through the thick smog, it’s blinding. I squint at the portal to just barely make out several crossed, twisting chains of flesh. The Silver Fiends? But why?

  Before the question can be answered, we’re surrounded by noise more subtle than the grand machine in the pit below, but also much more terrifying. The sounds of movement, of bodies, all around us. Steps close us in from behind. Chains that dangle from crane-arm contraptions over the pit begin to reel. They lift several platforms full of robed silhouettes.

  “Form a shell!” Serge commands our league of warriors. From the analysis of my initial turn over the room, we seem to be one for one in terms of numbers against the Lotus. Which is to say, we’re sorely outmatched. Serge redraws his protective circle around us, this time sealing the trick with a thunderous clap. The barrier isn’t intended to hide us from sight anymore, but harm. A solid shell of illusory hexagons encloses our forces in a perfect dome.

  “Dragons, with me!” Cece cries out. The rising twist of flame around her reveals her true, fierce, draconic form. She and Lee stand side by side, claws flexed to strike. Cece’s shimmering Astral eyes swim across the enclosing crowd of Lotus robes. Weak as I am, I lift my arms to the encroaching crowd. A stain of orange-cracked blackness spreads to every inch of matter in my reach. The Lotus stands ready with their disabling orbs, their searing whip blades, bow guns and Black Crosses. Everything they need to tear us to pieces. What they have in store for me, I’m frightened to have no idea.

  “Wait,” a smooth voice sings. It seems to come from everywhere in the room, at first. Then the repeating, echoing soundwaves converge in one spot, on the other side of the chasm. In the Runic Gate.

  At the same time, the shine within it concentrates into a solid shape. A human body, swathed in long burgundy fabric. The Lotus robe we all recognize. The key difference is how torn it is. Its hood has been completely ripped off, to reveal the rugged, scarred face of a man who looks ten years older than when last we saw him. Gone is his perfect skin. His golden blonde hair has grayed. His perfect blue eyes have dimmed. I hardly recognize the man as Heren, until Cece snarls:

  “You…son of a fucking bitch.”

  “Why couldn’t you just stay where we threw you!” Serge growls right alongside her.

  “Consider holding your tongue, before you hear my offer,” says Heren. Despite everything his body suggests he’s been through, his voice remains the same. Eerily flat. Unchanged. Unfeeling. Maybe it was an act before. It certainly isn’t now. He paces down the stairs from the fading light of the Runic Gate. His colleagues ease their weapons in their grasp just a little, as he draws near the chasm.

  “What could you offer us, that we’d take?” I dare him. Heren’s icy eyes train on me while he draws closer to the chasm.

  “Your lives, temporarily. Would you rather be corpses, or hostages?” Heren poses. Cece scoffs at the supposed choice.

  “Hostages implies a trade. What would you trade us back for?” Cece growls.

  “A distraction. While we accessed another one of your Academy’s Tethers,” Heren admits openly. A chill jumps down my spine. I can see from the jostles of those around me that it’s a sentiment we share. “You see…there’s a certain degree of inevitability to your situation. All of you will die. We’ll do what we’re doing here to every Tether, until the supernatural world itself comes down from the sky. You’ll scatter to the far reaches of the world. And there I’ll be waiting. I will hunt down every last one of you to protect the order of this Realm.”

  “What a hero,” Cece mocks. Heren’s feet reach the edge of the chasm. He gazes down in admiration at whatever’s down there. Whatever hellish contraption is deafening the depths that feed the Tether.

  “Whatever you call me, I’m a man of duty. And…you’ve all shown me just how important it is I see that duty through. We can’t have gates to other Realms opening. We can’t have Fiends pouring through and plagues of Vampires. I won’t let this Realm fall.” Heren sighs. He opens his hand for a small device, handed off from one of his colleagues. It’s a long, hollow steel cylinder. I see the weight of it in how he wields it two-handed.

  “Do you really see no other resolution?” Lee growls. “You genuinely think we want to tear the world we live in to pieces?”

  “It doesn’t matter what you want anymore. What matters is what you’ve done. It’s no secret that this…arrangement isn’t designed for supernatural success. But it’s the arrangement the Origas created so all could live. And you’ve threatened all of us for better things for yourselves. Now it ends in blood,” Heren decrees. “Now, what will it be? Hostages, or corpses?” I share a glance we hardly need with my fellow party leaders.

  “Let’s shut him up,” says Cece.

  “Then you rot today,” says Heren. He nods to one of his colleagues. The robed figure lobs one of their disabling orbs
into Serge’s dome-barrier. His hexagonal shield blocks crumble to prismatic shards. They shower down around us, unprotected. Another of the Lotus readies a second orb to put a stop to our Big Three infantry.

  But Lee is faster. He spits a concentrated ball of drangonsfire at the man. When the smoke blasts away, we’re all astonished to see the victim writhing on the ground. He should have been incinerated – and would have, if not for the flameproof robe on him. That did little to shield his face, though, which is riddled with boils and blisters. Lee and Cece leap for the air to spread fire from above.

  Railroad spike bolts from bow guns fling up at them and the other Dragons from all around. All that stops them is the wind gusts of our Witches and Warlocks. The tempest they stir is just strong enough to set the bow gun bolts off course. Serge lunges forward to sweep the shards of his shattered dome into a storm of his own with wide arm sweeps. The Lotus shield themselves against the glassy whip with their robe sleeves. A few fall here and there, but the rest make their charge. That’s where I come in.

  With Shifters as gorillas and panthers at my back, I lead the close-range defense. I erect corruption walls with stomps. I lift jet-black pikes from the steel floor with palm thrusts. Lotus robes lift into the air, skewered and hung out to bleed. Still, there are too many of them. For every one I impale, two of our own are cut down, or tossed into the chasm. A small unit of Lotus whip bladers is closing in on our Fey, while they struggle to patch the wounded. Dragons crash down over every part of the room, forced back to their human forms by the sting of bow gun bolts. Every time one plunges, I glance up in terror. Was it Cece? Lee? But they still circle, bringing bedlam to life in flame all around us.

  Through it all paces Heren, as casually as he stepped out of that Runic Gate. Like he hasn’t just endured a lifetime of torture, in just under a week. Like he can’t see the death and rancor on both sides of the battlefield. He waits for platforms to rise on chains from deep in the chasm below, then crosses. One steel grate at a time, he walks across the great gap borne in the earth here. He comes closer to us. To me. He shields himself from illusory weapons with the torn sleeves of his robe. He sidesteps fireballs from above. His sole purpose seems to be to cross. To walk right into the heart of our forces. I keep one eye on him as I fend his cohorts back. But he’s so close now. One more platform, and he’ll arrive.