Darklight 6: Darkbirth

by Forrest, Bella

  "You're right about that. It's pissing me off, but he's the only person we know in this plane." He shrugged. "And we have nowhere else to go." This situation was far from ideal. The proxy floated beside us, expressing no thoughts on the matter. We decided to forge ahead.

  As we grew closer to the dark shapes, they began to solidify. A strange building emerged from the mist, like the hull of a ship coming out of a fog. The building was a hodgepodge of inspirations. A series of spindly green-and-blue stone turrets sprouted at regular intervals along a sturdy wall that towered above us. The towers were topped with golden domes similar to those I'd once seen in Istanbul. The blend of architectural styles was unorthodox but not unattractive. The wall opened and curled around itself like a nautilus shell as if protecting some precious core. The shape created corridors between the sides of the walls. I followed the turrets with my eyes, noting that they continued all along the path of the internal spiral.

  At the entrance to the spiral grew a grove of stiff, beachy palm trees. Dorian and I approached cautiously as the ground beneath us shifted from the silver material to white, and then suddenly to yellow sand glinting brightly with gold flecks. I drew a line with my foot, suspicious, but it indeed seemed to be normal sand. Dorian cocked a surprised brow but said nothing. Neither of us understood the mysteries of this place.

  This grand, shell-like structure had no doubt been imposing once. It was massive, and the turrets could easily contain entire homes due to their sheer size, but the structure was slowly crumbling. Cracks had formed in the walls. Except for the palms, the trees outside the wall had died, leaving behind skeletons of bark and branches. I peered up once more at the walls and turrets. The windows were strangely shaped—some were triangular, while others were hectogons or weird blobs, all made from the same green glass and all in desperate need of cleaning. I thought back to Irrikus's Grand Senate and the savagery of the green glass. This glass was a similar shade, but its splendor had deteriorated, unlike the Grand Senate’s. My lip curled at the thought. What was Irrikus doing now? I hoped our friends had won their battle.

  "The sky is getting redder," Dorian muttered. I looked and saw that he was right. Up above the cracked turrets, the sky had deepened to an angry red that bordered on black. The mist swirled like a serpent curling its tail for a strike. The hair on the back of my neck stood to attention.

  "Ready?" Dorian asked. I nodded.

  Staying vigilant, we picked our way through a crumbled section of the walls, going in the direction we’d last seen Gate Maker. The proxy trailed us silently.

  Open doors made of old rust-colored wood were set into the base of each turret. Chips of thick teal paint flaked from some of them, suggesting they had once been gloriously bright. Dorian's fingers laced with mine as we dove deeper into the curving corridor. The light was dim, but there was enough to see. The sand beneath our feet moved just like the sand on a Mortal Plane beach, making me unexpectedly homesick.

  Dorian jumped up onto a fallen piece of wall and kept watch as I clambered up after him. Jumping down the other side, we continued walking deeper into the spiral, studying the walls as we went. Neither of us spoke; the silence and tension felt too hallowed and fragile. What was this place? A sad sensation came over me, like the one I experienced when I first set foot in Vanim. There is something about discovering a derelict place that breaks the heart.

  Finally, we arrived at the center of the spiral. It was a small, claustrophobic chamber compared to the rest of the structure. An open door awaited us, lit from the other side by magical torches attached to the walls.

  Dorian shot me a look, searching for agreement before heading in. I nodded, and we forged ahead together. The doorway led to a set of steep stairs. The stone was cracked with age, dry and undisturbed. The stairs spiraled down, turning left and right seemingly without reason, until we reached another door that led into a room. It wasn’t until I spotted the glint of glass tubes that I realized what kind of room we’d come across.

  It was a laboratory. The structure we entered suggested that the lab would be the size of a small bedroom, yet it sprawled on and on, much larger than it should have been. I tried not to puzzle over the mind-bending implications of that. Nothing made sense in the Immortal Plane, and things here made even less sense. I took in every detail. The inside was filled with bright white light from torches buckled to the wall. Dorian kept close to me, his presence a comfort given the unsettling fact that the proxy continued to follow us like a bloodhound.

  We walked through several antechambers, each stranger and more interesting than the last. Test tubes with glittering neon liquids and extensive collections of dull stones in jars lined sagging shelves. Notebooks and loose sheets of parchment overflowed the tables. Suspended from the ceiling, hovering light displays showcased all types of fauna from both the Mortal and Immortal Planes.

  I swallowed a curse as we stepped into the next chamber. The same hovering light displays hung from the ceiling, but this time their contents were body parts. Limbs from all manner of creatures floated in a clear preservative liquid; I suspected one to be a human foot. I averted my gaze from it as an icy thrill of fear ran down my body.

  Dorian gave a deep frown. "He clearly had some obsessions."

  I nodded. Gate Maker had a past, and it was apparently filled with collecting organic specimens. But why? I passed a vat of inky juice that glittered with light. Something squirmed inside that I didn't pause to identify. The golden-brown walls gave me the impression that Dorian and I were stumbling through some far-flung fantasy castle, while the decorative panels of green glass brought Irrikus to mind again. I puzzled over that, tucking it away for further thought.

  Fortunately, everything was clean, and none of the body parts had any trace of blood. The plants still grew, despite the lack of sunlight, although the edges of many leaves had wilted. I marveled over the fact that nothing appeared to have rotted. How was this possible? Gate Maker had been gone for so long. Whatever laws of nature ruled the Higher Plane, I had no hope of wrapping my head around them.

  I turned a corner and nearly knocked my head against a suspended glass case. Dorian hissed.

  "Don't look," he advised, but it was too late.

  I stared at the dissected remains of what appeared to be a human thigh. It looked like something from an anatomy textbook. The skin had been partially flayed and pinned back, exposing the muscles. I gulped down a wave of nausea and glanced at Dorian over my shoulder. He grimaced.

  "It looks…" He lost his words.

  "Like the dreamhouse of a mad scientist mixed with a serial killer?" I suggested, tapping the glass case. The muscles inside remained immobile. Who had this leg belonged to? I pushed the thought away, knowing that I shouldn't linger over it.

  "I'm more interested in the bubbling things," Dorian muttered.

  I followed his gaze over to a row of pristine flasks of bizarre, twisted shapes. Each had a neon concoction in it, permanently bubbling like a just-opened soda can. I swept a look over the room again and shot a puzzled frown at Dorian.

  "How has everything kept… going?" It didn't make sense. Gate Maker had left all this behind at least sixteen hundred years ago, according to the arbiters. My eyes landed on a glass chamber on the far side of the room. A phantom-like wisp of fear wrapped around my throat. That looks exactly like the torture tanks from the sanitarium.

  Dorian gently grabbed my elbow. "Let’s keep going." We forged ahead to the next chamber. Noises, strange and garbled, reached our ears. The proxy floated behind the entire way, undisturbed by our surroundings.

  We froze in the doorway. All around the circular room, tall glass cases reminiscent of coffins lined the wall. Most of the structures were dark, their glass too opaque to see through, but one emitted a harsh white light. Gate Maker's red orb flew up to the glass chamber and phased inside. The entire room lit up with a crimson glow that overpowered the box’s lighting system. His orb exploded and then disappeared, sinking into the fuzzy outline
of a humanoid figure.

  A relieved sigh filled the room. I stared in shock at Dorian, who merely shook his head in disbelief. The glass vanished, and Gate Maker, in a new humanoid body, took a step out. He was naked, but the lack of genitals gave him the look of a doll made for children. He casually rolled his shoulders and stretched. Behind him, the glass coffin rematerialized, now empty and dark.

  He strode across the room to a waiting rack of gray robes, the same kind he'd worn at the waterfall. With his long fingers, he yanked one off the rail and threw it on, humming with pleasure. It was like he'd just returned home from vacation.

  "What are these?" Dorian asked severely, gesturing to the shadowed glass coffins that lined the walls. "Did you kill those bodies?"

  Gate Maker adjusted his robe and tossed Dorian an impatient stare. "I made them. They're stored for emergencies in case I don't have enough energy available to make a new one."

  My skin pricked with goosebumps from the disturbing idea that the ghosts of Gate Maker’s own inanimate corpses surrounded us.

  Gate Maker frowned sourly. "I don’t have time for questions.” There was something new in his voice. “I've got to check—" He cut himself off and dashed into another chamber before I could say a word. My mind tingled as I caught the sudden emergence of frantic worry coming from Gate Maker. He was often sardonic and pushy but rarely fretted. What could this mean?

  I hurriedly gave chase with Dorian. We followed Gate Maker down a corridor and out onto the top of a turret underneath one of the immaculate golden domes. I looked up to see the reddish sky pulsing above us through a hole in the destroyed roof.

  “It looks like someone melted the Canyonlands,” I muttered to Dorian in awe.

  He stared warily up at the red sky. “I just hope it doesn’t rain down fire or something.”

  Gate Maker stood stock still in the center of the room. He gazed up at an empty coffin-shaped glass tank hanging a foot above eye level. It was lit from the bottom, but there was nothing inside.

  "No," Gate Maker mumbled. His body trembled violently. "No, no. Not her!"

  Dorian threw out a protective hand to stop me when I took an instinctive step forward. We stiffened as Gate Maker dragged his hands over his bald head with a wail.

  "They left everything else. Why would they take her?" His flat lavender eyes darted frantically around the room, as if “she” might have been lying overlooked in a corner or hiding behind a pile of debris. "It doesn't make sense. I thought I’d hidden her sufficiently. How did they find her?" His face contorted with anger. He balled his hand into a fist and leapt forward.

  I gasped as he smashed his fist into the chamber. Glass shattered everywhere, raining down in a shower. Dorian used his battered cloak to cover us from the spray of sharp debris.

  Gate Maker raged. He darted across the room and rammed his fist through a glass panel. Curses flew from his mouth.

  "Damn the arbiters. Damn these planes." He rattled off angry, foul-mouthed curses aimed at utterly everything. "I'll wear Un’s oversized throat as a necklace." He landed a kick into another window. It shattered. His body shuddered with rage. "Damn you, Irrikus."

  He spoke the Immortal's name with such loathing that I shivered. As much as Dorian and I hated Irrikus, at that moment, it became clear that Gate Maker hated him more than we would ever be capable of.

  Gate Maker sank to his knees, his fists crashing against the ground. "Damn them all to an eternity of nothingness." He pressed a hand, bruised from breaking the glass, to his head. The skin had deep gouges but didn’t bleed. "And me? I've been a fool. An arrogant, naïve fool." He shook uncontrollably. I pressed closer to Dorian, fighting between an instinctive urge to comfort someone in pain and my own fear and confusion over what was happening.

  Gate Maker's advice came back to me. We’d shared a few moments in the Hive when he voiced his concerns about how the blood had changed me. He and Laini had both encouraged me to channel my anger and learn to control it. A sad weight settled in my chest. Had Gate Maker been speaking from personal experience? He raked his fingers across his head.

  I’d never thought of Gate Maker as having emotions apart from his haughty and prickly attitude, yet now my heart hurt for him. I wanted to console him. Even if he’d messed up, I knew the sting of grief and suffering. But should I? A moment ago, he’d been out of control, breaking thick panes of glass. My bones would shatter just as easily under his fist.

  Dorian touched my shoulder. "We need to go." He gently pulled me from the chamber. His gaze was hard and focused. There was no sympathy there for the emotional breakdown happening in the other room. "We need to figure out how to leave this plane."

  My mind worked slowly as my compassion warred with our primary objective. Dorian searched my face.

  "Everybody says we can't go back to the Immortal Plane, but they haven't proven it yet."

  I let his words sink in. He was right. We couldn't wait for Gate Maker to tug us along any farther. Sympathy or not, we had a job to do. I nodded.

  Gate Maker didn't call for us as we left. He was engulfed in his own private fury and loss. Did he even register our retreating footsteps? No, I imagined he saw nothing but his pain and the red sky churning above him.

  Chapter Three

  Dorian and I left Gate Maker behind, the proxy still shadowing us. Heading back toward the tunnel through which we had entered, I found a crumbling hole in the ceiling that was letting light from the murky red sky bleed in. As I stepped into the slant of crimson light, my boot was consumed, giving it a demonic look. Outside the shell of the tower, the sky rumbled above us. It was so moody, like its own temperamental beast.

  "I don’t know if we should be outside in this," I said to Dorian. Should we attempt to seek shelter? Who knew what the effects of the weather could be in this place?

  Dorian’s jaw tightened as he stared up at the chaotic clouds slashed through with streaks of red and green and blue. What was most unsettling, however, was that despite the tempestuous sight, there was an utter stillness to the air. The lightning brought about no goosebumps from me or sense of electricity. As we left the tower, winding back through the passage and the various chambers of the laboratory to end up back at the front of the estate, we could see that the weather was centered above the tower. The rest of the world around us remained misty gray and endless.

  The proxy still trailed three feet behind us and stayed silent. I cast an irritated glance back at him, but his dark blue eyes were dead. He appeared to be more machine than person.

  "I think we should be fine out here. Let’s keep going," Dorian muttered. “See if we can find anything in this place to orient ourselves.”

  We walked away from Gate Maker's crumbling estate with its crimson tornado until I could no longer hear his furious grief. My own anger at our situation simmered to a low boil inside me. What the hell were we going to do? I caught the reflection of the proxy's electric stare in the mist. I shuddered, unnerved.

  The sand grew thinner and thinner the farther we got from the estate until my feet returned to solid ground. The hard, silver surface with its unexpectedly reflective appearance echoed my confused face back to me. Dorian paused, an unexpected flash of uncertainty on his face as he looked in every direction, searching for a landmark, but there was nothing. We could go back to Gate Maker in his desolate home or forge ahead into the unknown. I squinted into the misty distance while I considered the task at hand. Strategizing in the Immortal Plane was hard enough, but the Higher Plane was like nothing we’d ever dealt with.

  An entire other plane…

  "We have to try to get somewhere," I reasoned aloud. There was no point in aimless wandering.

  "Definitely. The only question is how." Dorian ran a hand over his furrowed brow in thought. "I can't sense the barrier he brought us through or even the Immortal Plane beyond this place. Usually, I can feel the barrier… at least, the barrier between the Mortal and Immortal Planes."

  "Does that mean we need to star
t shouting for help and stir up some of those weird orbs?"

  He shook his head. "I’d rather we tried to figure things out by ourselves first. Something tells me the arbiters are not eager to be of aid, so let’s not ask for anything unless we absolutely need to. We're together, after all." He offered me a halfhearted hopeful smile, but I saw irritation beneath. This was frustrating and worrying. "We'll figure something out."

  I tucked an errant strand of dirty hair behind my ear, grateful to feel some kind of sensation on my skin even if it was only from myself. It was odd to be in a place with almost zero external stimuli, like I’d been suddenly dumped into a sensory deprivation tank. It made me long for a busy day in Chicago, including the nonstop car horns during rush hour. Hell, I missed the chaos of the battlefield, even if it was a dangerous place. At least warfare felt solid, like something I could sink my teeth into, something I could absorb with my senses. This place felt like nothing.

  "Maybe we can backtrack?" I suggested. The Gate Maker had led us to his estate in a straight shot, which meant he must have some way of navigating. "If we can find where we arrived in this plane, you could try to phase through. Gate Maker mentioned something about the barrier being thin there, right?"

  Dorian mulled it over. "Possibly, but how do we get there? There are no landmarks to follow. If we started walking even slightly off course, we’d get completely lost. Besides, even if I could get through, I wouldn’t be able to take you with me. I can’t transport other beings through the barrier like Gate Maker can, and I won’t leave you behind."

  The way he said it, like it was self-evident, warmed my heart. I could argue that we needed to think strategically, that this task went beyond just our personal survival. We had our friends back at the training grounds to think about, after all. But separating across two planes would only put us at a disadvantage.

  "It might be worth it, even if only one of us can go back, but it would decrease our chance of survival. You're right… we're better together." The uncertainty of what was out there made my body buzz with a sense of foreboding. This place would surely drive a non-arbiter absolutely mad after a few weeks. Did weeks even exist here? "To be honest, I have no desire to be left alone in this weird void, even if you were willing to leave me. There has to be some way to go home together."