Darklight 6: Darkbirth

by Forrest, Bella

  Dorian tapped my shoulder, snapping my focus back to the task at hand. “So how are we going to fly this thing?”

  Technically, I had the most experience flying a skimmer since Dorian lacked the capacity to operate the ones in the Immortal Plane. I took a deep breath, reviewing the possibilities.

  "I'll fly the skimmer, but that means that you'll need to provide the wind to drive us forward." I studied him. His shoulder worried me, but there was nothing we could do about it now. The abyss and how we were going to get across it worried me more. "I have the feeling that if we drop into that murky place, we're goners. Definitely out of the game, for sure."

  He nodded. "Let's do a flight test,” he suggested. I readied myself behind the controls. I would need to be observant because, I was positive the arbiters hadn’t designed this challenge with just a few floating islands over a drop into nothingness. There must be some kind of trap somewhere, and I needed to be on high alert. This was clever of Krysh. Our roles would ideally be switched, since my senses weren't as heightened as Dorian's, and I had more expertise with using the emotional weather. Dorian had spent his whole life burying his feelings, so it made sense that mine were more accessible.

  I gripped the handles of the skimmer hard. "Ready." I choked down my fear at this game and found my focus—trying to remember how it had been to fly the skimmer before. I was keenly aware that this one might not operate in the same way, however, since Krysh had only had a visual to work with.

  A breeze began to stir around us, the cool mist in the air reddened by our anger as Dorian began to generate wind beneath us. I gently moved the controls as we lifted up. Dorian tensed behind me, adjusting his balance in the back of the skimmer by spreading his arms. Ever so gently, I reversed us back to try it out before we maneuvered over the massive drop. The summoned winds buffeted us, but it was only light turbulence. He gently lowered us back down, and I steered the skimmer to land where we had begun.

  He took a deep breath. “Success. Let’s try it for real.”

  "Are you ready?" I asked, searching his face for certainty. He nodded. "I'll try to keep my emotions at bay so I don’t complicate your efforts. I'm sure they have something waiting for us… but I know my emotions might throw off yours. Whatever happens, just try to focus on your feelings." It was such a strange thing for me to say to him. It would've been unthinkable a few weeks ago. And somehow, despite the situation we were currently in, I hoped this experience of being more in touch with his emotions and finding power in them would help him process things in a healthier way in the future.

  Dorian lifted us up on the skimmer once more, the air going red around us as he conjured the wind that would power us across the chasm. I steered us out over the emptiness, trying not to look down, and steeled myself for the unexpected. The flight to the nearest island was bumpy as Dorian found his focus, but bearable. I set the skimmer down successfully on the first island, prepared for it to fall away beneath us, but it held firm. Three more to go. I let out a brief sigh of relief. Dorian gathered himself, breathing hard from the mental strain, while I scanned the surrounding area, still not trusting that this was the only challenge. For a moment, I thought I saw a shadow dart beneath us, far below in the murky air, but it disappeared before I could assign it an identity or even a real shape.

  Dorian gently squeezed my shoulder. I hadn’t realized I was hunched tensely over the controls even as I tried to relax, wanting to keep my emotions turned down low so I didn’t interfere with Dorian’s process.

  "Ready for the next one?" he asked.

  I nodded yes, and eased the skimmer out, careful to hold steady as Dorian’s winds of annoyance coaxed us along. Everything went smoothly as we neared the next island, and for a moment, I allowed myself to believe that it would be that easy. As if I’d jinxed us with the thought, a sudden gust of wind from beneath us struck the vessel. The skimmer rocked from side to side, and a great moan emerged from the abyss below. I clenched the controls harder, the skimmer dropping alarmingly for a second or two as Dorian's concentration faltered.

  A great, spindly creature arose from the shadows in front of us. I jerked the skimmer around the form, but a ghostly hand reached out to smack us back. A veritable giant of darkness looked down at us. It had no mouth, only glowing, misty white circles for eyes that crackled with electricity as it reached out to grab the skimmer. Its body was made entirely of an inky, shifting darkness, transparent enough to see through in some areas. My breath hitched, and I gritted my teeth as I tried to keep the skimmer level. Dorian grunted, clearly attempting to keep his anger at bay so I could fly the skimmer, but it wasn’t enough. We started to fall.

  I have to try, too.

  Anger and fear filled me, but I clamped them down to avoid clashing with Dorian’s winds. Too late. Suddenly, the skimmer gave a giant jump as my wave of emotions caused us to rocket upward until we were eye level with the creature.

  “I’m struggling here,” Dorian cried. “Any idea how to get around this thing?”

  It blinked slowly. I tried to shove the controls hard, guiding the skimmer forward, but it wouldn't budge. No, it wasn't that… it was that the air was harder to move through. “Dorian… you’re keeping us steady, but there’s something else here in the air. It’s like the air got heavier.”

  Suddenly, a smile split the figure's face. Its mouth opened, the inside the bright color of blood.

  "I'm giving it everything I have," Dorian roared through gritted teeth. "Why can't we move?"

  My pulse leapt as the creature suddenly unhinged its ghostly jaw and began to suck up our angry tempest of wind into its terrible red vortex of a mouth. My heart sank as I figured out the secondary challenge of this obstacle: we needed to use our emotions to move the skimmer, but this creature devoured emotion. We could stop using our tornado and winds, which would give the monster nothing to consume, but would lead to us plummeting into the pit, no doubt falling out of the Games’ boundary and leading to us being disqualified. Or we could try to pour our emotions into traveling, but that might only feed the monster more. Dorian and I yelled in shock and fear as the skimmer lurched to the side and then slowly began to inch down toward the open mouth.

  "Send your winds to the left," I shouted. We had the most space on that side. “Maybe if we get around him, we can escape his pull.”

  "I'm trying!"

  The skimmer trembled, and a jet stream of lime green fear rocked us as I momentarily lost my grip on my emotions. Calm yourself, Lyra! I screamed as the skimmer went nearly vertical, the two of us nearly tumbling off into the chasm. Dorian grunted as he slammed into the side of skimmer. My heart hammered in my chest. God, that's not good for his shoulder.

  The creature slurped up my fear like spaghetti, and my palms went clammy on the controls. I barely managed to steady the skimmer as Dorian somehow focused his anger and fear to drive us upward again. How were we supposed to use our emotions if this thing ate them?

  Frantically, I tried to find the logic here, guess the loophole, see the way out. The illuminated doorway seemed like a hopeless goal right now as I wrestled with the skimmer’s steering, trying to avoid the monster’s swiping hand, watching as it struck one of the floating islands and exploded it into gravel. How would the arbiters have designed this to mess with our minds and play against our logic? We dropped another twenty or so feet as the creature consumed Dorian’s anger, the red mist staining the inside of its gaping maw.

  A parade of our first visits to arbiters to try to warn them after we’d been shown the tear by the universe replayed in my mind. Nobody had wanted anything to do with us and what they perceived as our “overly emotional” reaction. They’d dismissed us, saying there was plenty of time. They were fine to sit on their butts and let things happen, not engaging with anything around them in a meaningful way. We’d barely seen any emotion from the arbiters in our time here, certainly not positive emotion they were willingly expressing. They wanted it stripped away, ignored, or shut away inside. />
  Shut away inside…

  I turned to Dorian. Sweat dotted his brow. He gritted his teeth, slumped against the side of the skimmer. He was using all of his anger just to barely keep us afloat.

  "We have to let it eat us," I cried. I knew the idea would scare him, but it was the only way out I could see that didn’t involve crashing to the bottom of the chasm. He would think I was mad. I know it’s crazy, but what else is it going to be?

  Dorian's eyes widened. "Lyra, are you insane? That thing is going to eat our souls."

  “It’s either that, or we plummet to our deaths,” I countered. “Think about it, Dorian. They want us to do everything that seems completely illogical. Counter intuitive. This is it!”

  The skimmer shook horribly, a panel tearing off and spinning away into the darkness below.

  "Trust me." I sent the controls forward. "Throw as much anger as you want. That thing is hungry, and we’ve got some major resistance in the air. I need you to torpedo us.”

  "Lyra."

  I hesitated. What if I was wrong? I knew we needed to do something that wasn’t obvious, but what if flying into a monster’s mouth was too counter-intuitive? I could get us both killed, and Ruk would be left clucking sadly and saying to Jia, “poor Dorian, he trusted Lyra too much. I thought those lower beings could do it, but I guess I overestimated them.”

  I couldn’t make this decision for both of us.

  “I won’t do it, unless you agree,” I said to Dorian. But I hoped that he made up his mind quickly, because soon we would lose too much height, and it would be too late.

  His eyes softened for a moment, and we dropped a few feet. “Okay.”

  “I’m going to be a jerk right now because I have to, but I want you to get even angrier.” I threw him a hard look. "Think about Vanim! Think about Irrikus and Lanzon!"

  A red flurry whipped around us as Dorian screamed out in rage and fear and desperation. I turned back to the controls, a tiny pang of guilt stabbing up under my ribs as the rush of Dorian's emotions exploded. It was uncontrollable. The beast in front of us smiled with bloody glee. I released a wordless howl, letting my own emotions join Dorian’s to propel us forward as its terrible red mouth opened up to swallow us whole.

  We hurtled down through the creature's insides, inky blackness walling us in on either side. Still committed to my theory, I threw myself against the controls. I really hope I was right.

  "Hold on," I screamed to Dorian. "Just keep going and hold on. I can guide us through."

  His answer was lost in the roaring gale that swallowed us up. There was only darkness, and then suddenly the skimmer was shooting across the last two islands as we both continued screaming in shock and fear. Creatures like tiny flying piranhas leapt up from the dark depths in front of us, buffeting the sides of the skimmer. I released a fresh surge of anger, sending bolts of lightning down to burn them to crisps. The skimmer careened to the side while Dorian fought to manage his emotions, and we lost all control as we flew over the last island, sputtering to the cliff edge that plateaued out for several dozen feet. The nose of the skimmer clipped the edge of the cliff, and we flipped over the front of the crashed skimmer, flying through the air.

  I landed first, and Dorian hit right behind me. We rolled over the ground. The world whipped by me in a haze of madness. I hit a rough stopping point with a grunt. This ground wasn't as hard as the reflective ground, but it wasn't as nice as those strange marshmallow pillows. I groaned as I scrambled to my feet. Dorian coughed out a cloud of dark dust, likely accidentally swallowed from the inside of the creature.

  "You were right," he muttered in disbelief as we stared at the grand doors in front of us. "Hell, Lyra, I’ve never been so happy that you forced me to be furious."

  I wiped the sweat from my brow. "I figured it had to be this way. Un and Krysh wanted to force their stupid ideologies on us. Swallow your emotions."

  Dorian let out a bitter laugh. "Yes, they certainly tried to make us listen. It was like the logic of the battle arena, that we needed to retreat to win." He shook his head. "They really did their research on what we’d be least likely to do."

  We took a moment to hug tightly, our bodies still vibrating with adrenaline and remnants of fear. Finally releasing him, I looked back out over the chasm to see the monstrous shadow giant had vanished.

  This game is getting out of control.

  The counter floated to the forefront of my mind. Three.

  “We’re about to start the last trial,” I said. “I can see it.”

  We’d completed three challenges to this point, but who knew how long it would take us to find the final challenge and defeat it? Or how much time was passing in the lower planes while we were trapped in these Games. I shook off that thought; I had to hold on to the last scrap of hope inside me. As Dorian started toward the doors, I didn’t miss the slight stiffness on his left side as he walked, the side of his hurt shoulder. Between the battle in the arena, being crushed against the side of the skimmer, and then landing awkwardly on the plateau, he had to be hurting. My own body ached strangely after our fights and being thrown against the skimmer controls and passing through that inky monster. I found this odd pain disturbing, even though I knew the stasis was keeping us alive.

  "It finally feels like the damage is catching up with me," I said. For the first time, my mouth felt dry and scratchy, and I had a sudden longing for a glass of cold water that I hadn’t had in all the time we’d been there.

  Dorian pulled on the large iron handles, opening the doors and letting light spill out. Gray mist filled the corridor on the opposite side. It was like anywhere else in the Higher Plane, but this passageway was boxed in by barely visible barriers—transparent, milky white walls that blocked us from the rest of the plane. No shadowy figures emerged from the mist. The passageway was unusually wide, at least thirty yards across. I squinted into the distance, not daring to hope that the smudges I was seeing in the far distance were the figures of the arbiters. The edge of the forcefield, a darker milky wall at the end of the passage, looked like the finish line… except there was something deeply dread-inducing about being boxed into an invisible passageway. They must have done so for a reason…

  We moved cautiously. Dorian muttered to me as his eyes scanned our surroundings. There were no traps he could sense. Something about this boxed-in space felt wrong. My throat tightened with anxiety.

  A massive screen spanned across the passage, just above the finish line at the far end. We could see it clearly even though we’d just entered the passageway. Dorian and I stopped several yards from it, giving us enough room to be cautious. Why put a giant screen above our finish line?

  Beyond the finish line, a group of bustling shadows shuffled just out of sight. It must be the arbiters waiting for our return.

  "What are we supposed to do?" I wondered. "We're at the finish line, but we can’t cross it."

  Dorian's jaw clenched. "Are they trying to work around the rules and stop us from technically crossing the finish line?" He glanced up at the misty roof. I exhaled slowly.

  "Another battle?" I turned to look at Dorian. There was a deep cut across his face, but it refused to bleed. I hoped Ruk could heal us, if he had enough energy when we got out of this.

  "But with who?" Dorian mumbled, looking around. He looked over his shoulder and raised an eyebrow abruptly. I whirled around, following his line of sight to a familiar figure a few yards away.

  "Jia?"

  Our proxy friend stood in front of us, his large blue eyes blinking slowly. It startled me, without realizing why at first… until I remembered that I'd never seen him blink before. His face was impassive, but a deep melancholy filled those eyes. The bits of sentient empathy that I’d slowly witnessed awakening in him reverberated somewhere deep inside, but his body tensed.

  "Jia," I whispered. My hands shook as I took a step forward. Some part of me already knew that this wasn't right. He shouldn't be here. He should be with Xiu. He should be with Ru
k. He should be anywhere but here.

  Jia remained unmoving. His lips, usually a flat, unexpressive line, twitched downward. An electric spark passed through the air, crackling between his small hands. I would have sworn that his eyes held the weight of a tortured, silent apology. And then he began to change. His gnome-sized body burst outward and upward. Dorian and I sprang back as Jia's structure erupted, his matter rearranging. When he was done, he was the size of Irrikus. Four extra arms extended from his torso. My heart split open as the cold reality struck me in the face like a slap.

  We had to fight Jia.

  "Un, you bastard," I whispered. Only he would have known how much this would hurt us, and I very dearly hoped he could hear me cursing him out. A red mist already darkened the air around us. Dorian snarled, growling not at Jia, but at the idea of fighting him. This was not what we wanted. Jia, as strange as he was, had been our guide on this weird journey in the Higher Plane. He'd become our friend.

  And now we had to fight him.

  “You must defeat me,” Jia announced. His mechanical voice made my eyes sting with oncoming tears. “Kill me.” The last part was almost pleading.

  Sadness rained down inside me, darkening my red mist to a violent purple. Dorian’s and my combined winds filled the corridor, but Jia stood unmoved. He bowed his head as if giving one final goodbye, and a terrible jolt of grief ripped through me. He was being forced to do this by the arbiters. Had even Xiu turned against us? They're all the same… traitors, every last one of them.

  Jia lunged forward, his huge form surprisingly fast. Dorian and I leapt in opposite directions, Dorian conjuring a tornado as I released a blast of lightening to buffet the proxy back, even though we knew that from our training that it was unlikely to cause any meaningful damage. Although he was fast, he was still heavy. He managed to lunge forward and swing a barrel-sized fist into the ground. The reverberations knocked me off my feet. Dorian cried out, throwing a lightning bolt at Jia as he reached for me with an open hand.