Darklight 6: Darkbirth

by Forrest, Bella

  Dorian skirted behind a statue of a fat feline with spider legs. An ancestor or early design of his spider-dog proxy? The statue was merely a decoration, thankfully. I still half expected it to spring forward and attack us, its legs and mandibles clicking. I kept a sharp eye out as we walked along. Our feet made little sound as we moved over the smooth stone path, which glittered with peach and black pebbles set into white marble beneath us on the way up to the black castle. We had traversed a third of the path when Dorian threw his arm out, signaling me to stop with him. I stopped, bracing myself and listening for anything.

  He sent me a sharp look, one that said not to move. We stood frozen as suddenly something slithered in front of us. It was an actual serpent, or as close as it got in the Higher Plane. It was a dusty pink color with scales of shimmering gold, stretching itself across the entirety of the path. The snake had to be at least seven feet long, and it was looking at us. No, not looking. It had no eyes, but two massive protruding fangs flashed as the serpent opened its mouth wide. Its three tongues slithered out to taste the air, but there was nothing that made me think it had picked up on us through sight.

  We stood frozen like that for a moment. My lungs screamed for air, but I wasn't about to get my neck torn out by Un’s pet snake. The serpent closed its mouth and slithered on, apparently satisfied that there was no threat within range. If only Ruk had been able to make a proxy tracker; it would have made this process a lot easier. We moved even more carefully now, since it was clear that Un not only had aerial proxies like his cherubs, but more ground-level proxies like his spider-dog and serpents. He must spend enormous amounts of energy on all this nonsense.

  The next obstacle was impossible to miss. There was a part in the path where a large square room had been constructed out of thick hedge walls. If we followed the path, we were forced to go through a narrow doorway cut out of the closest hedge wall. At first, I thought nothing of it, thinking Un was just being complex where it wasn't needed… like usual. Dorian and I walked up to the hedge wall and entered the narrow doorway cut out of the hedge. A soft breeze struck us. I froze. As we passed through the doorway into the square room, the hedge walls opened out to reveal a small courtyard that was nearly filled by two snoring stone dragons with curled horns, sleeping peacefully in front of us. They were decidedly not statues.

  We reversed out of there, fast. Dorian looked up at the hedge walls. Gardens flanked the courtyard, bordered by the same brambling thorns that were too thick to pass through. If we tried to travel by intent to the other side, I was worried what might happen if one of us missed our aim by even a foot. We might end up face-to-face with a growling stone proxy.

  I spotted another snake slithering lazily across the grass, but it paid us no mind. Dorian glanced at me, stooped down, then mimed with his hands for me to clamber onto his back so we could jump over the hedge. Could we make it without waking the beasts?

  I climbed onto his back, but when he attempted to jump, we struck something invisible. Air left my chest as we flew back down to the ground with a thud that sounded thunderous to my ears in the silence. Ouch. I rubbed my head, and Dorian grimaced, knowing I had taken the shock of whatever invisible forcefield I struck. He caressed my head gently. Okay, so Un had thought about someone trying to jump over. Or maybe the invisible forcefield was in place so his stone dragons couldn't escape that way—they were too large to fit through the narrow doors—which was even crueler. I gave Dorian a shrug. It seemed the only way through the gardens was the courtyard.

  I went first. The dragons slept curled up with each other, as if cuddling. Their entwined bodies left less than a foot of margin around the edge of the courtyard. I swallowed and slowly began my journey with my back pressed to the hedge wall. We just needed to skirt one side wall and then the far wall to get through the doorway. I moved steadily, focusing on staying as calm as possible. Dorian followed immediately behind me.

  The snores of these proxies sounded strange, like rocks falling over each other, the noise thankfully covering any sounds the two us were making as we traveled. I successfully made it down the first wall and pressed my back up against the last wall. I glanced at Dorian. He was only a foot away from me, but it was harder for him to move, given his larger frame. My breath caught when his boot gently brushed the edge of one of the dragons’ lethally long talons. We froze. The dragon snorted, and its eyes fluttered, but it sank back into slumber without fully rousing. Keeping our cool, we crept the rest of the way and tumbled out of the courtyard, clutching each other in terror that we couldn't let out. Snakes, dragons, maniacal cherubs; what a mind Un had.

  Thankfully, the path was clear now, and we were only a few yards from the castle's back entrance. We hurried up to it, Dorian checking to make sure there were no strange presences as we darted to the back door. To my surprise, it was open. The handle moved easily, and we stepped inside. Ruk did mention that estate security was hardly a concern here. Perhaps the arbiters were too obsessed with their own estates to really give a damn about anyone else’s.

  We slipped inside the castle, keeping close to the walls. The interior was starkly different from the outside. It radiated with gilded crown molding, and the bricks were a shimmering silvery marble, the interior as cool, pale, and elegant as a cathedral in the Mortal Plane. A small cherub proxy rounded the corner, singing an eerie little ditty to itself as it fluttered through the air. Dorian and I quickly darted left, where a doorway opened up to a spiral staircase. We ducked beneath the empty space under the stairs. The cherub’s singing drifted away as I handed Dorian the tracker from my pocket. It gave off a faint flicker. A look of excitement passed between us. Dorian began to move it around, then headed in the direction where it glowed brighter.

  After making sure the coast was clear, we climbed the spiral steps the tracker guided us toward. My stomach flipped, and my head spun as soon as my foot hit the landing. Like in Ruk’s tower, the stairs decided to flip themselves as soon as we began to climb. I batted at the hair hanging in my face and stared, exasperated, at Dorian. The tracker had brightened almost imperceptibly. There was no choice. We needed to go up.

  We traveled two more flights upside down, then the staircase lurched to the side, meaning that we had to pull ourselves up. When we made it to the next landing, Dorian stopped and leaned so close that his lips brushed my ear. "I sense a large gathering in a room nearby. We need to sneak by them. We need to be careful about transporting in Un’s home."

  I glanced up at the next three staircases, dizziness hitting me as I looked upward, the flights seeming to stop at a landing shrouded with a dense fog.

  "Maybe we can focus on the stasis chamber and skip the stairs," I whispered. In my mind, I pictured us moving up toward the last landing, and my hands wrapped around the railing just below the mist. With my eyes squeezed shut, I took a step forward. For a moment, my hands grasped nothing, and I felt myself plummet, but Dorian's arm shot around my waist. He managed to hold the railing with his other hand, pulling me up enough that I could haul myself the rest of the way. He yanked himself up after me. When our feet hit this landing, everything turned rightside up again. The pearly button on the tracker was glowing brightly. I stared up into the dense fog skeptically. There was a narrow staircase, much smaller than the rest, that led into the mist. The roof?

  Dorian went first. As he walked, the mist cleared slightly, revealing a hatch. We climbed through onto the black stone roof of the castle, into a section that was completely shrouded by mist on all sides. It seemed like we had walked into a perfect cylinder of open air encased by an even denser mist. Dorian scowled at the tracker.

  He pointed the tracker upward, and the light brightened. "It suggests up," he insisted.

  I put my hands on my hips and stared around us. There were no ropes to be found. How could we get inside the cloud overhead? We couldn’t travel up there via intent because we had no idea what it looked like and so had nothing to picture. Arbiters might be able to float or conjure physical s
taircases, but Dorian and I couldn’t. Dorian licked his lips, his brow furrowed. My mind went to Aurora. Her image was burned clearly into my mind after what Ruk showed us. I grabbed Dorian's hand and concentrated. I thought of Aurora, of how devastating she looked floating in that awful tank in the sanitarium. I pictured her scales, bright and shining beneath the water, as she led Ruk down to her city. Slowly, a soft breeze passed over my skin. When I opened my eyes, I tried not to gasp.

  We had ascended into the gray mass of fog and now stood on a floating platform. A large glass tank sat before us. Aurora's stasis chamber. It looked incredibly similar to the one from Ruk's tower, but less elegant and well designed. The fog blocked the contents of the tank from view, but the tracker in Dorian's hand was burning as bright as a flashlight. As we walked closer, a form began to take shape in the tank.

  And there she was.

  She looked like Ruk had pictured her, but… something was off. She looked, well, ordinary. Her scales lacked the flashy brilliance I'd seen in his memories of her. The ring of silver scales around her neck existed, but it was plain and dull with none of the sparkle I’d expected. She looked like an ordinary aquatic wilding, indistinguishable from the others I’d seen. Perhaps Ruk’s fondness had magnified her in his memory, but I imagined it had more to do with being in stasis for over nine hundred years.

  There was one difference.

  Her mangled tail had changed into two stumps that emerged from her torso. Raw, freshly grown scales covered the stubs, perhaps the beginning of legs. Between the scales, the stubs were dotted with glittering rivets and precious stones, which I remembered from Irrikus's experiment. It was different from the open cuts we'd seen in his memories, so Ruk must've used them to seal her wounds before putting her into stasis. Although, the stasis didn’t seem to have completely halted her body’s functions if she had healed this much, slowly, over time.

  I stared at her, transfixed. She looked like she was playing the part of a strange Sleeping Beauty. Her eyes were peacefully closed. I wanted to see them open, to know that she was real. I wanted to apologize to her for all the pain she'd suffered. My breath caught in my throat as I approached her, noting how, even after all this time, a hint of a playful smile seemed to rest at the corners of her mouth.

  I handed Dorian the other devices as we prepared to begin. With his speed, he had a better chance of escape than I did if we got caught. He approached the tank and pocketed the tracker. We had found her. Now we just need to get her out of here.

  "I'll break her out while you keep watch," he said quietly, obviously moved by the sight of the wildling before us.

  I nodded and peered down into the mist, my eyes straining for any sign of movement below, my ears sensitive to any sound of pursuit or alarm rising up from the estate. Nothing appeared to be coming for us, however; it was just the same dense gray in all directions. Dorian worked quickly beside me with the green and purple devices. Aurora floated peacefully as he began to crack open the stasis chamber. I squinted through the fog. A shadow passed, but it was hard to tell whether it was just the brick of the roof coming into view with the shifting mist. Dorian lifted the purple tool to the stasis chamber. His thumb hovered over the pearly button.

  My heart leapt as the shadow darkened, and long, clicking legs curled up over the rim of the platform.

  "Dorian," I breathed.

  Un's spider-dog proxy sprang over the edge, clacking its mandibles together wildly. Its body wriggled excitedly as it charged at us.

  We'd been caught.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  In horrified silence, Dorian and I stood face-to-face with Un's favorite proxy. It paused as if sizing us up, or worse, alerting Un. It made no shrieks or barks to sound an alarm, but I got the feeling that didn't matter. If Jia was connected with Xiu, then Un and his spider-dog were likely to be similarly connected. Who knew how long we had until the arbiter arrived? We needed to get out of here, now.

  "We need to go," I blurted to Dorian. I grabbed his hand and tried to focus on jumping out of there. My mind immediately went to Ruk's estate, imagining the decaying green brick, but my brain reached out and found nothing. It was like passing my hands through the air to grasp at wispy strands of spiderwebs. The image didn't stick. Did Un have some kind of suppressant in his estate to limit travel—which might explain why I’d been struggling at other places in the estate—or had Ruk finished dissolving his estate, so there was no location for us to travel back to? Either way, we were going nowhere fast. My feet refused to move from this platform. I sent Dorian a desperate look.

  "I can hear you, vampires," Un bellowed from below. He swore a string of curses, but under the anger, he sounded almost delighted.

  “Not a vampire,” I muttered, panicked and exasperated as I darted my gaze around the platform, searching for some way off.

  The arbiter was just beneath us under the platform, and I watched as time seemed to slow down—Un drifted up through the mist like a warped angel and landed on the platform. His lips curled into a nasty, pleased smile. The anger drained from him as victory seized his entire being. One of his smirking cherubs darted up from below, hovering beside him.

  "You just couldn't resist, could you?" Un asked.

  "Couldn't resist," the cherub chirped, flying upside down. Un's spider-dog happily trotted up to Un and circled excitedly around his feet.

  He knew we would come. My heart sank like a chunk of cement inside me. His grin spread from ear to ear, and I wondered once again at the contrasting versions of Un. On one hand, he was a stickler for rules and order and tradition, but he also carried personal grudges charged with emotion, took delight in besting Ruk and Dorian and me at every turn, and expressed a far wider array of emotions than the other arbiters I’d met. It made me wonder how different from Ruk he really was, despite his proclamations that were intended to identify him as the Gate Maker’s antithesis. Did some of his apparent hatred of Ruk spring from the fact that he recognized some of those traits that he disliked in Ruk as being present in himself? Were we having so much trouble here in the Higher Plane because Un was repressing his freaking emotions?

  "I've caught you breaking a hallowed rule of the Higher Plane, sneaking onto my property and trying to steal my belongings. Just another charge to add to your list of crimes, really." The way he gestured to Aurora like she was an ordinary vase enraged me. A well of anger burned within me, but I kept it held tightly inside. Calling up my anger now and staining the air around us would be unwise. We needed to keep clear heads if we were going to get out of this. Poor Aurora lay in her eternal slumber beside us, helpless and unaware of the scene unfolding around her. She deserved to be out of this place… deserved to live the life that had been stolen from her.

  "She doesn’t belong to you," I said smoothly but sternly. “Sentient beings can’t belong to you like one of your proxies. She’s not an object to be bandied back and forth.”

  Dorian narrowed his eyes. "We're only here to give a sentient being her life back. She’s been stuck here in the Higher Plane for hundreds of years, far longer than she would have lived in the lower planes."

  Un let out a throaty laugh. "If Ruk was so concerned about the wildling, then he should never have brought her to the Higher Plane." He simmered with delight. "Not only do I now have evidence that he has brought lower-plane beings to the Higher Plane on multiple occasions—breaking the Mandate of Secrecy—but also proof that he sends mortals to break into other arbiters’ estates. That will be a point of interest at trial, which I'll be calling in response to this. You can run away, but my memory of this crime will be shown to everyone at the trial."

  "If you tell the other arbiters that, then you'll also have to admit that you raided Ruk's estate and stole Aurora from him. You hid her, a lower-plane being, from the other arbiters for some unknown purpose." Dorian cocked an eyebrow. "Do you think they’ll side with you as strongly after learning that? You're a creature of logic. If you found our Games activity to be unjust, then I fai
l to understand how you don't see the flaws in your own reasoning."

  I squared my shoulders, feeling emboldened by Dorian's point. "Exactly. You sound irrational and emotional, Un. I thought arbiters hated that. Aren’t you at risk of proving Ruk’s formal accusation and Xiu’s suspicions to be correct?"

  Un paused for a moment, his glee fading as a little flicker of unreadable emotion crossed his face. He clasped his long hands together in front of his fancy flowing robes. Suddenly, I imagined those hands reaching for my neck, and a cold chill seeped into my bones.

  "It depends, really," he said smoothly. The chill grew even colder inside me. "If I unravel your very beings right now, dissolve you into your component energy, then I can simply snuff your existence out instantly. No one of any merit will know that you were here at all. Only Ruk. No one will care about where you went because the problem will have solved itself. I doubt the former Gate Maker will even be bothered by the loss of his pets."

  Dorian scoffed, but I saw fear in the tightness of his shoulders. "You can't simply blink us out of existence without people asking questions. Xiu will be suspicious, and I find she makes a compelling argument in front of your peers. She'll ask where we've gone."

  "And yet your proxy who reports back to her isn't here," Un noted with a little grin. "Such a shame, really." The cherub chuckled, the sound high and sharp, like shattering glass.

  I ran through ideas about how to get out of this. Un might kill us. Surely, someone would sense that, right? I concentrated, letting Dorian and Un fade into the background as I once again reached out with my intentions to look for Ruk's estate but found nothing. My pulse staggered. Knowing that we were in a bad spot, I did what I had done when I was falling and hoped the universe was listening.