But Lumi had a point. Something here wasn’t right. Something here was escaping us. And judging by the distant booms outside, I wasn’t sure how much longer we had to investigate. The Hermessi would eventually come down and break this spell. They wouldn’t be able to do anything to Zetos or the Soul Crusher, but they could easily pull us out and torment us, kill whomever they could, and force us out of here, without remorse.
And it would all have been for nothing, unless I walked out of here with Zetos in my hands, first.
“Is it just me, or are you kiddos stuck?” the Soul Crusher asked.
I rolled my eyes. “I think at least one of us has said it before, but, unless you want to help us, you should hold your tongue,” I said.
“Oh, testy. Okay. Well, just to let you know, this puzzle won’t last much longer. Your friends outside are putting up a good fight, but the Hermessi outnumber them, and Brendel… ugh, she’s relentless,” the Soul Crusher replied.
“So not helping!” I snapped. “What did I just say?”
He giggled, but his voice faded away. Glancing at my crew, I noticed Amelia staring at Eirexis in my hand, her tears drying up. Deep down, hidden in the depths of my sullen consciousness, an idea blossomed. A fleeting thought, something so faint and fragile that it might die before it could see the light of day… on the tip of my tongue.
“Tae,” Amelia started. “Have we considered touching the walls with Eirexis?”
As if the fates had aligned and conspired to put Amelia and me in the same orbit, thinking the same things, I felt a smile take hold of my face. “Not until now, no,” I said.
I didn’t need anyone else’s input, at this point. As if guided by a remote, I straightened my back and walked over to the nearest wall. I had no clue as to how this faint possibility, this anemic idea, had wiggled its way through more than one mind, after all the time we’d spent down here, but it inspired frightful hope inside me. As if this move, right here, was our last. Our final option which, if it failed, would bring about our doom and the end of days, all rolled up into one devastating apocalypse.
Eirexis itself wasn’t glowing when pointed at any of the walls. It had only reacted to the painted arrow. This was a gamble, placing my faith in one slice of what-if, but it was sorely needed, in the absence of other, perhaps more viable, options.
I’d picked a wall that the arrow didn’t point to. I pressed Eirexis’s end against the stone, and the symbols lit up white. I held my breath, and we all heard the gears turning, somewhere beyond. There was something happening. Not to the wall, but to everything around us. The entire room was responding to what I’d just done, and my heart skipped more than a beat.
“Is he serious?” Amelia blurted. “He put an arrow on the floor in every room, pointing at a wall. And all you had to do this whole damn time was to press Eirexis against any wall in the room? Really?”
I nodded. “Not even the wall to which the arrow pointed.”
“What was the point of all this?!” Herakles shouted.
The Soul Crusher laughed. “It was simply a test of your psyche. When all else fails, what else have you got to lose, huh?”
“A lot of time in here, to begin with!” I replied, feeling my blood boil. He’d been messing with us this whole time. We’d been running from room to room, trying to follow Eirexis’s lead. “Why did Eirexis glow when pointed at the floor arrows then?”
“Oh, red herring,” the Soul Crusher replied. “I didn’t want you to rely on an object. I needed your brains squeezed properly.”
The ground shook. The floor wobbled, suddenly loose, startling us. I could barely stand, as the rumble swelled and thundered through what sounded like the entire maze that the Soul Crusher had built for us.
“Needless to say, we all hate you,” Varga said, pale and alarmed, unsteady and wobbling.
“Pretty sure this is not supposed to happen,” Raphael managed, his voice trembling with the floor, as he toppled over.
“Oh, but it’s absolutely necessary,” the Soul Crusher replied. “As for your frustrations regarding my games, puh-lease! Had Taeral not listened to his instinct, you’d all still be rotting here. Only despair and desolation bring out the best in people, and it doesn’t happen overnight. It’s about time you all learned that.”
A spine-tingling screech emerged from beneath as the floor simply… vanished. Blackness awaited blow, and gravity did not forgive us. We all dropped, shouting and screaming, through it. We hit something hard, but we did our best to land on our backs or shoulders to minimize the impact.
Seconds passed in heavy silence—except for the ringing in my ears. That persisted for the better part of what felt like a minute. We were out of the hexagonal room, for sure. We’d broken the pattern by randomly pressing Eirexis against one of the walls. How ridiculous, after all the time we’d spent following those blasted arrows. Fury boiled through my veins, and I embraced it. I deserved it. I didn’t stop it from raging inside me like wildfire.
“Is everybody okay?” I asked, grunting from the physical pain.
We’d fallen quite far. It was bound to hurt long after the landing. I wiggled my fingers and toes, thankful to still have feeling in them. I doubted I’d broken anything, but I couldn’t say the same about the others until I’d heard from them.
“Ugh… Yeah, I think,” Raphael replied. “Hold on… Amelia?”
I couldn’t see through the darkness where their voices came from, but I could hear them shuffling and moving against the floor, their bones cracking as they turned and stretched.
“Nothing broken,” Amelia said.
My hand tickled, thrilled to feel Eirexis in its grip. The last thing I needed was to lose one piece of Thieron while looking for the other. That would’ve been the epitome of slapstick irony. One by one, the rest of the crew signaled that they were okay, though I couldn’t even make out their silhouettes. Eira’s voice soothed and alarmed me at once.
“Tae, look over there,” she said, likely pointing somewhere.
Had I gone blind? The panic was quick to freeze in my joints and make my skin feel the wrath of a thousand needles. “Where?” I asked.
“Probably behind you, since you can’t see it now,” she replied.
“What? It doesn’t make any…” My voice trailed off as I turned around and saw it. Zetos.
It didn’t glow. It had no shine. And despite the pitch-black darkness, I could see it. Its arched blade reminded me of the moon’s curve. The metal was a peculiar off-white, with the faintest shimmer along the sharp edge.
There was a hole in the middle of the blade, halfway between the tip and the base. I figured that’s where Phyla had to go. Relief washed over me in honey-sweet waves as I ignored the weirdness of this entire vision, the difficulty of our moment in this strange abyss. We’d found it. Zetos. We’d finally found it.
“Congratulations, kids,” the Soul Crusher said. His voice sounded closer than ever. Compact and concentrated, as if he stood just inches away from me. “You finally… finally did it.”
“Bet you hate us right now,” Varga grumbled.
“Why would I?”
“We beat your puzzle,” Amelia replied.
“True. But you’re also setting me free, after I don’t even know how many millions of years,” the Soul Crusher said, and I could almost feel him smiling. I knew he crouched by my side, because I could feel him closer. “Now, Taeral, touch it. Claim it. And it’s yours.”
I reached out without a single shred of hesitation. Yes, it was mine, dammit. I’d earned it!
My fingers touched the blade, and a sea of white exploded from it, casting its light over everything. Warmth hugged me like a thousand plush blankets, and I caught a glimpse of two galaxies hidden between pale eyelids… the eyes of the Soul Crusher, smiling.
“It’s only going to get harder from here,” I heard him say.
But what did I care? The white light swallowed me whole, and my consciousness simmered away into a distant dream of my
Fire Star. My parents and I, standing on the balcony, overlooking our beautiful land with its rolling hills and reddish dusk sky… All of it coming apart. Disintegrating.
Why did I experience such relief and numbness while my whole world burned? It didn’t make sense. And it didn’t matter, either. Blacking out had never felt so sweet.
Taeral
The rush of oxygen through my throat made me open my eyes.
Water. So much water…
I panicked, suddenly concerned I might drown. But I had my breathing mask back on. I was okay! And I wasn’t alone. The entire crew was here, though they were equally befuddled. Everything had been reset to the moment from which we’d been torn to solve the Soul Crusher’s puzzle. Amelia and Raphael… Eva and Varga… Lumi and Nethissis… Riza and Herakles… and Eira. All of us, back in the coral room, now white and glistening like a massive sculpture made of pearls and diamonds.
Our pulverizer weapons were back, too, affixed to our backpacks. I’d likely find the ammo inside, where I’d last seen it. It was as if everything had been reset.
Light danced through the dome-shaped chamber, breaking into trillions of color shards midway through the water. Our equipment was intact. Our weapons. My hands were… full. Glancing down, I saw them. Eirexis in my right hand. Zetos in my left.
“You did it,” Eira said, her voice delightfully tickling my ears.
My soul was enhanced, in a way. A connection I’d thought lost stirred in my heart. “Telluris Nuriya! Mom, are you there?” I called out.
“Taeral! Oh, Taeral, my baby!” Her voice echoed in my head. “I’ve been trying to reach you for hours!”
“Mom! So good to hear your voice,” I replied, a broad grin stretching beneath my breathing mask. “I got it. I got Zetos!”
She gasped and squealed with pure, unadulterated joy. “Come back to me, honey. Come back now!”
I nodded energetically. “I’ll be with you soon, I promise.”
“Whenever you’re ready to acknowledge me, bucko, I’m here,” the Soul Crusher cut in.
I turned around, my blood running cold. I’d been so overwhelmed, so tightly wrapped up in what we’d just overcome, that I had completely forgotten about him. He stood before us, his bare feet digging into the soft sand… and what a sight he was.
Such a strange creature, yet that smirk on his eerily beautiful face made all the sense in the world. He looked exactly like he sounded. Calculated. Complicated. Otherworldly and ever so slightly insane.
“I owe you the beating of a lifetime,” Raphael said to him.
The Soul Crusher raised a hand to silence him. “That can wait, I’m sure.”
“You’re free,” Lumi replied. “We have Zetos.”
“You’re not out of the woods yet,” the Soul Crusher said.
Riza scoffed. “But I guess we have our powers back.”
The Soul Crusher laughed. “They were never gone in the first place.”
“Wait, what?!” I asked, and it only made him even more amused.
“Part of my power allows me to reach into your brains and switch off certain bits of your consciousness. Specifically, the parts that allow you to tap into your abilities. I admit, I was a tad selective in which buttons to press, but it all made for a wonderful show,” the Soul Crusher replied.
“You mean to tell me I had my magic all along?” Lumi growled.
“Well, yes! I’m not that powerful to mess with the Word!” he chuckled. “I can, however, sever your access to it. Not physically, but mentally. All it takes is the right suggestion, and your body will listen. It’s why Amelia couldn’t heal. Why Taeral and Riza couldn’t teleport. Why none of you could do what you normally could. Consider it a supernatural mind game, if you will.”
“You’ll pay for this,” I said.
He laughed again. “Get in line. Also, chill. I doubt I can pull it off again now that I’m no longer bound to Zetos. It gave me most of the juice for such elaborate scenarios.”
I didn’t know whether to be glad or wary about this. Such an ability would’ve come in handy against the enemy—then again, I doubted the Hermessi had brains he’d be able to tap into.
The distant booms we’d heard in his rooms were much louder now. Significantly closer and more terrifying, as the world had gone ahead without us. We were the ones with a lot of catching up to do here.
“Brendel is out there, and you know she’s not going to let you teleport anytime soon,” the Soul Crusher replied.
He was right. I felt the fire burning bright inside me once more, but my body refused to disintegrate and leap across layers of physical matter. I was stuck, in a way, and that came with frightening implications. The booms we’d been hearing were the result of a skirmish between the Widow Maker and the hostile Hermessi. I then remembered something the Soul Crusher had mentioned earlier.
“You said there were Reapers out there,” I said. “Not just the Widow Maker, I assume.”
“Fortunately, you have more than one ally in these waters, but it won’t be enough to save you from Brendel’s wrath,” the Soul Crusher said.
“Tae, we need to see what’s going on out there,” Amelia said.
Eira nodded. “The Widow Maker might need us.”
“The entire world needs us right now,” Herakles shot back.
“But if we can’t teleport, we’re pretty much stuck here, aren’t we? Might as well go up there and see what we can do to lift Brendel’s blockage on our ability to zap away,” Riza interjected.
The Soul Crusher rubbed his hands together. “Oh, goody. I haven’t been topside in a long, long, long time. Can’t wait to see what’s out there!”
I slipped Zetos and Eirexis into my thigh strap without putting them together. I wasn’t sure it was even possible—not without Phyla to complete the set, anyway. It was getting a little crowded, but it was still manageable. Besides, we had to get out as fast as we could first. Riza was right. We just needed to find a way to disable whatever Brendel was using to stop us from teleporting. Maybe Fallon and Kabbah could help again—they had to be here, chasing Brendel, fighting these assholes and stopping them from breaching the coral room. They’d done it before, as Kabbah had become dedicated to throwing wrenches in Brendel’s wheels wherever she went. Cerix had been just the beginning.
Our unlikely allies had given us the window we’d needed to get Zetos. The least we could do was get ourselves out of this mess and move on to the next stage. First, however, we had to try and help the Widow Maker.
I swam upward, wiggling through the swirling coral tunnel. “Come on,” I said. “It’s time to piss Brendel off some more.”
Raphael chuckled. “Wait till she sees you got Zetos. That’ll grind her gears a bit.”
“And then some,” Amelia chimed in.
We made our way to the top of the coral mound, my heart pounding, nervously battling the confines of my ribcage. We’d gotten Zetos, yes… but there was still the question of getting it out of here. As long as Brendel and her Hermessi were so close to us, we were still in danger.
Our mission, our salvation, still hung by a thread.
“Hold up, I’m coming, too!” the Soul Crusher cried out, like a kid left behind on a school trip. In a way, he was not as menacing as before. Now, that we could see him, he didn’t scare us anymore. In fact, I found his graceful figure compelling, the complete opposite of the calculated cruelty he’d displayed back inside the puzzle, hidden from sight.
“You had better make yourself useful,” Herakles retorted.
“It depends on how fun it looks,” the Soul Crusher said.
How had we come to this? We’d come across the strangest characters since we’d learned about Death’s existence as a standalone entity. These Reapers were like nothing we’d ever met before. Their nature, their characters… they baffled me. The older they were, the crazier they seemed to behave.
The Widow Maker was all brute force and zero social skills. A mean SOB when poked and prodded. The Soul C
rusher was a functioning psychopath with a flair for the dramatic and a penchant for potentially deadly puzzles. I shuddered to think what Phyla’s protector would be like.
Until then, however, we needed to secure our escape. There was no point in wondering what retrieving Phyla would be like if we couldn’t get ourselves out of here. As I poked my head through the top opening of the coral mound, an underwater hell unraveled before my very eyes.
Streaks of colored energy wrestled against not one but two Reapers. I recognized Fallon-Kabbah slightly farther away, battling… Brendel. It chilled me to the bone to see her here. I knew she’d be present, but facing her had yet to lose its terrible thrill. The Widow Maker was aided by someone I couldn’t see well from this angle, but whoever he was, I owed him my gratitude. He’d helped keep us safe down here.
Well, relatively safe. In the cold clutches of the Soul Crusher. Herakles had made a point, though. That long-haired, galaxy-eyed jackass had better make himself useful in what’s about to go down.
Amelia
We were careful upon emerging from the coral mound. No sudden movements, nothing to distract the Hermessi, and Brendel, in particular. Lumi, Nethissis, and Riza had magic at the ready, but we still needed to formulate a plan.
“You know, we could try to swim away,” Herakles suggested. “Go back down to the bottom, get our witches here to make a tunnel or something, and get far enough from Brendel for Riza or Taeral to be able to teleport us again.”
“Sounds wicked, but you know Brendel would see it coming a mile away,” Taeral replied. “No, I think we need a different angle here. We could spread out and distract them. Eira is in water here. It’s her element. She can do something significant with it.”
The only reason Eira had brought a breathing mask in the first place was so she could talk to us through the comms system embedded in the device. Talking underwater was rather difficult otherwise. The girl could breathe down here, effortlessly, as the daughter of a Water Hermessi.
A Shade of Vampire 75: A Blade of Thieron Page 22