by Ky Tyrand
Desperate screams cut through the wind, snaking across the jungle like the vines that sought to bind her. Royal Guardsmen, no doubt caught up in the vicious tree-traps in their attempt to hunt the Princess down. Serves them right, Ki’ara told herself, hoping that Syjak’s brother was among them.
She landed softly on the first piece of solid ground she could find. The roots and vines and – whatever was coming out of the ground – were unrelenting. If anything, they were getting worse. As if the jungle was angry that it hadn’t caught her yet, and was sending everything it had at the girl.
Ki’ara was no longer afraid. She was too angry for fear. But she ran, nevertheless, as jungle tentacles chased her through the darkness, lashing out at her every chance they got.
Her Blue Energy blade lopped through them all.
Je’nna had wanted to approach Sirona’s home using stealth. This was exactly the opposite. About as far from stealthy as one could get, apart from banging pots and pans together.
Smoke from the cutting of wet wood and foliage spread throughout the area, not only carrying a strong campfire smell, but a haze of blue light that flashed across the valley with every swing of the girl’s sword.
Ki’ara realized that she was scurrying along flat gravel, and it occurred to her that she must be on the trail. The towering rock face loomed above her, blocking out what little moonlight made it through the jungle canopy.
There was a light up ahead.
Sirona’s cottage.
Ki’ara swung like mad as she charged straight for it.
She heard more screaming. These ones sounded like they were in front of her, but she couldn’t tell with the mountain ahead. They could be echoes from behind. Men’s screams – not Je’nna.
Possibly CST-1.
She hoped they were echoes.
Up until now, the slithering tentacles had seemed to chase her – gathering where she stopped and pouncing when they caught hold. But up ahead, they appeared to be waiting for her, forming a barricade of moving jungle wood, tempting her to try and cut through.
One last line of defense before Sirona’s hideout.
Ki’ara kept running, determined to cross. Everything around her seemed to be moving, wiggling like thousands of giant worms eager for a midnight snack.
With every footstep, serpent-like roots shot out of the ground below her, trying to catch hold of her ankles.
Ki’ara leapt.
Her timing was perfect, the G.R. opened at precisely the right moment. The girl flew through the air as the uppermost vines of the barrier changed direction and rose after her. She cleared them all – didn’t have to cut a single one.
When she landed softly on the other side, Ki’ara was standing face to face with Sirona’s cottage.
30
The girl spun to face the wall of worms. But they were no longer advancing on her. Perhaps there was an invisible line drawn around the perimeter of Sirona’s home that the jungle dared not cross.
Ki’ara tried to catch her breath as the movement began to calm.
Vines draped. Roots straightened. Wiggly ground things retracted.
The jungle was disturbingly still.
Ki’ara’s Blue Energy blade went dark. She separated the handles and placed one atop each wrist.
The only light now was cast from the warm glow of a window in the front of the stone cottage.
Ki’ara cautiously approached.
The building was small and old, with stone walls that weren’t quite straight, and a thatched roof that looked like it probably leaked. More suited to a Witch than a Healer.
Without making a sound, Ki’ara crept onto the porch. She wondered if there was any point in being stealthy now, for surely she’d already alerted every living thing from here to Olympia of her presence. Nevertheless, moving silently just felt like the thing to do.
She leaned over to peer into the window, but shabby old curtains blocked her view. Ki’ara didn’t even try the door handle for fear that it might hold a trap. If this Witch was powerful enough to make an entire jungle come to life, rigging a doorknob to explode was not out of the question.
Instead, she cut.
Ki’ara seared through thick wood and metal strap hinges with a single swipe of her blade. Followed with a hard kick, the door was knocked down.
She stood there a moment, unsure how to proceed. Wary of a trap, the girl didn’t know if marching in was the best course of action. Then what is? You just cut down the door, for crying out loud. You can’t stand here forever!
With no better ideas, Ki’ara drew the Blue Energy back into the handle, and let the helmet wrap around her head. She turned on the Night Vision, and stepped into the dimly lit room.
The space was cozy and crowded with knickknacks in place of furniture. Its walls were decorated with art pieces made from pebbles, crystals, and wood from the jungle trees. Similar items covered the floor, but much larger and freestanding. Ki’ara would have thought them to be quite impressive, had she not just been attacked by similar looking tree-parts outside.
With odd tools strewn about the place, it seemed more like a little workshop than a living space.
Sirona was some kind of artist?
Light came from two lanterns – one hanging from the ceiling in the middle of the room, and another that stood on a table near the only chair. Also on the table was a single cup of tea.
Ki’ara retracted her glove and brushed the mug with the back of her hand.
Still warm.
Sirona was here, or had been very recently.
Yet the house was quiet.
Stepping across the room, Ki’ara tried to remain silent. But the creaking floorboards prevented that. She peeked through a doorway at the back. A kitchen and eating area decorated with more of the unique sculptures.
But no Sirona.
One other doorway. A bedroom.
Also empty, with the exception of a bed, a small table, and a wardrobe closet.
Ki’ara assumed Sirona must have fled. Perhaps nobody had made it past the jungle before, and it frightened her. Or maybe she was hiding in plain sight. Ki’ara still had Sir Grue’gan’s magical disk-shaped stones, which would allow her to disappear if she placed them in a circle and spoke the words that activated them. It wasn’t inconceivable that a woman as powerful as Sirona could do the same.
The thought made the hair on her neck stand. The Witch could be right beside her and she wouldn’t even know. Ki’ara drove the idea from her head. If she feared that the wrong person could do that, there would be no end to her paranoia.
But the woman could still be hiding, and Ki’ara had to rule out the obvious. There were only two places large enough for a person to hide: The wardrobe – nope; …or under the bed – Huh. Weird.
The bed wasn’t up on legs, it was boxed in underneath. Perhaps not unusual, but Ki’ara had never seen it before. She knelt down, tapped on the side. Definitely hollow.
In a place so starved for space, it seemed odd that such a large storage area would be wasted…
Ki’ara spotted a small latch on the underside of the panel that held the mattress. She pressed it and stepped back.
There was a loud creak and a groan – whatever mechanism she’d activated needed some oil. Ki’ara backed out of the room, unsure of what she’d triggered.
She glanced over her shoulder, half expecting an evil Witch with a gnarled nose and boils on her face to be standing behind her with a kitchen knife in her hand.
There wasn’t.
When she peeked back into the bedroom, she found the entire bed was tipped up – hinged at an angle from the headboard. The footboard was nearly touching the low ceiling.
Ki’ara crept closer.
Even with her Night Vision, the room seemed eerily dark.
She approached the bed cautiously, not knowing what she’d find under it.
What she discovered was not at all what she was expecting.
Stairs?
Ki’ara was lookin
g down a steep, narrow stone staircase that disappeared into a hazy darkness not even the hi-tech Night Vision could penetrate.
31
Ki’ara frowned. Glanced from side to side to find that elusive ‘better option’ that would mean she wouldn’t have to go down there. If an alternative existed, she didn’t see it.
“Okay then,” she muttered to herself, while stepping into the mysterious shaft. “Here I go into the deep, dark stairwell.”
The girl could see a bit better than she thought she’d be able to, at least a short distance ahead. The visor didn’t have any trouble with darkness, but there was a weird hazy fog that seemed to obscure things. She considered removing her helmet and using her Niksuru for light, but didn’t think it would work any better in the fog. And the thought of breathing this murky air wasn’t too appealing. Ki’ara didn’t know what kind of filtration system the combat suit had, but she smelled nothing but fresh air inside it.
The walls were stone, old and far from flat, not unlike the outer walls of the cottage above. The stairs were smooth and perhaps a touch lower in the middle than at the ends, the front edges rounded from use. What she could see of them, anyway. The fog got thicker as Ki’ara descended, and pretty soon she couldn’t see the stairs at all.
There was no railing to hold onto, and Ki’ara had no idea how far a tumble down these stairs would take her – or what kind of traps were waiting for her at the bottom – so she cautiously took one step at a time, feeling for foot placement with the pads of her boots.
Frightened that she was about to enter a sea of murky clouds, Ki’ara was thankful to find the low ceiling open up and level out. But the stairs kept going down until her head was completely submerged in the fog. She couldn’t see a thing, and nearly tripped when she came to the last stair, finding the floor instead of another step. Ki’ara felt her way along, but was not comfortable in the least. She couldn’t see more than a foot past her helmet.
No good, she told herself, opening the Grav-Regulator. The corridor was narrow enough that she could reach the walls on either side of her. Even without the tech, Ki’ara was certain that she could climb it. But with the G.R., lifting herself between the walls was simple. The ceiling seemed high for such a narrow tunnel, but the texture of the rocks made for perfect hand and footholds. Ki’ara was happy to get herself out of the fog to a place where she could see.
The tunnel was long and straight. She was able to propel herself along at a good pace, but before she reached the halfway point, Ki’ara heard something beneath her. Movement in the murky fog below. It was impossible to tell what was down there. Definitely more than one of them. Big enough, and fast enough, to make streaks in the cloudy layer from the wake of their movement. They scurried up and down the tunnel, like they knew she was there but couldn’t find her. Ki’ara had no idea what was lurking under her, but, whatever it was, she wanted no part of it.
She continued along, creeping like a spider near the ceiling of the tunnel. The G.R. kept her from getting tired as she pulled herself as quickly as she could. The tunnel had looked endless at first, but now she could see steps leading back up, out of the gloomy, critter filled, haze.
The steps at this end looked less manmade, as did the walls. Though carved and altered, the stones were huge and not placed – some kind of natural cave formation. As the tiers of small stone gave way to large, smooth rock walls, Ki’ara was certain that she was now inside the mountain.
The ceiling didn’t get higher with the stairs. Instead, the floor came up to meet her. At least the dark fog was behind her, and the girl could see what she was stepping down to. But were the stairs enough to keep the hidden critters at bay? Ki’ara could hear them back in the tunnel, still scurrying about. She hesitantly put her feet on the floor, prepared for something nasty to jump up the stairs at her.
When that didn’t happen, she continued up the cavern, quickly but cautiously creeping into the dark unknown. In stark contrast to the manmade shaft, this part of the tunnel was not the least bit straight. It wound left and right, up and down, and even branched off in a few locations.
Aware that a single wrong turn could surely get her lost, Ki’ara stuck to the main tunnel, convinced that it was distinguishable by how smooth and polished the floor was from years of traffic. The other routes all looked dirtier and far less travelled. Could Sirona have done this by herself?
The ceiling, walls, and floor, all seemed to be of the same type of stone. Ki’ara couldn’t tell the color through the Night Vision, but it was light, and made it easier to see. She guessed that it was a sand color, but it all looked green through visor.
Just like the floor getting higher and lower, now so did the ceiling. Some areas she had to crouch through, while others stretched way up. Likewise, the walls were wide enough to fit six people shoulder-to-shoulder in a few places, but in others she had to turn sideways in order to squeeze through.
Ki’ara wasn’t sure how far she’d gone, but eventually the tunnel opened up into a good sized hollow, where she discovered the first signs of use.
Here, the walls were decorated with ancient cave paintings and etchings, which could have been scratched into the stone just after the beginning of time. Most were hard to make out, but they appeared to depict battles between warriors, hunters bringing down animals that Ki’ara could barely recognize, and what could only be Gods coming down from the heavens. They were truly fascinating, and Ki’ara wished she had a moment to examine them. But now was not that time.
She snuck through a small fissure at the other end and … whoa.
32
Ki’ara found herself overlooking a massive cavern, unlike anything she could have imagined. It had to be at least a couple hundred paces across, lit up by a series of flaming torches spread throughout the cavity. Her Night Vision seemed to automatically dim, reducing the haze around the torches, as well as the green hue that tinted everything.
Oddly enough, the green was still there, but in a different form: leaves. Somehow, the jungle foliage seemed to grow in here, just as thick and lush as it would out in the sunlight. The leaves were the same as the Tanglewood trees outside, spread throughout the cavern on roots and vines that crept across the floor and ceiling; up and down the walls.
It took Ki’ara a moment to make sense of it – to understand what she was seeing. The ceiling was high, with a tall column in the center that, at first glance, looked like an actual Tanglewood tree. But it certainly wasn’t growing as it would outdoors.
Somewhere in the center of a typical Tanglewood tree, grew a single, solid, trunk. It was often hard to spot amidst the jumble of hardened vines that twisted around it. But it was always there, nonetheless. This tree – or whatever it was – did not seem to have one. Though the vines spiraled and interwove their way up in a central column, Ki’ara could see that it was hollow.
At the top, the gnarled branches crept along the stone ceiling in every direction, crisscrossing before spilling down the sides of the cavern. It looked similar to how the roots of a Tanglewood tree would spread across the ground – or whatever they happened to be growing over – except in reverse. Along the way they dropped vines of their own, like stalactites of wood, some reaching all the way to the ground, often hardened to solid columns that connected the floor and ceiling.
Down on the ground, the roots seemed to connect with the vines from the ceiling and walls, forming an endless loop of growth.
Ki’ara had never seen anything like it. Just the fact that the wood and foliage could grow down here, without any sunlight whatsoever, seemed impossible. But, oddly enough, it was not the strangest thing she’d witnessed today.
A stream ran right through the cavern, curving around the base of the Tanglewood column, and ducking under the many roots that crossed over it, before disappearing somewhere out the other side of the cave.
This was a magical place that Ki’ara couldn’t help but be fascinated by. However, she had yet to see any signs of the people she came here for.
And at this point, nothing else mattered to her.
Ki’ara crept into the cavern, unaware that she subconsciously changed the color of her armor, camouflaging it to the shades around her. She moved slowly and silently, aware of the potential for surprises. There were any number of places for danger to be lurking, including tall rocks and roots in the area she was in, not to mention the vines above.
Moving farther into the opening, Ki’ara suddenly spotted something off to one side. Blocked by the vines and an outcropping of rock, she could now see a tangle of woody vines that stood apart from the other foliage.
It reminded Ki’ara of the knot that had coiled around her earlier, and the one that caught hold of Je’nna.
Her heart leapt and she darted toward it in hopes of discovering her friend. When she got around the rock outcropping, Ki’ara found not one, but four separate clusters. And they weren’t protruding from the wall like she’d thought – they were hanging from the ceiling. Rather than coiling around limbs, the masses of wood and vines each formed more of an egg shape; from which pink gel oozed between the gaps, making it impossible to see what was inside.
Each of them was large enough to hold a person…
Ki’ara considered cutting them down. There was no question that the blades of her Niksuru would slice through the cords that suspended them. But she had no idea what was truly inside. For all she knew each sack contained a thousand giant spiders.
Her visor…
After focusing on the closest pod for a moment, Ki’ara noticed a yellow blip flash on her lens. It was working. The suit was trying to analyze what was inside the egg; attempting to penetrate the cocoon of vines and pink goo.
Another yellow dot, larger than before.
Ki’ara kept focusing, wondering if she should get closer, or walk around to the other side.
The screen flashed again, this time with a faint yellow outline.
It looked like …
The outline flashed brighter, with more detail.