by Clayton Wood
The tunnel began to widen as they continued downward, the walls still completely covered in thick Reaper vines. The dome slowed its descent, until it was barely moving. A sheer wall of the vines stood in front of them, and it was before this that the dome stopped. Ampir strode forward immediately, toward the edge of the dome, and Kyle and Ariana followed quickly behind. They stopped at the edge, and Kyle looked down, seeing the floor some twenty feet below. Or what seemed to be the floor; it was mostly white, with black specks moving about randomly on its irregular surface. He felt Ariana grip his arm.
“I don't like this,” she said, her voice tense. Ampir ignored her, leaping off of the edge of the dome. He dropped through the air toward the ground, and suddenly the floor below him formed a black circle, the white and black specks retracting to reveal Reaper vines covering the floor below. Ampir landed on the vines, then turned to look up at Ariana and Kyle.
“Come on,” Kyle urged, bending his knees to jump. Ariana pulled him back, shaking her head, her eyes locked on the floor below.
“I can't,” she protested, her voice rising in fear. She stepped back from the edge of the dome.
“What's wrong?” he asked.
“Those...things,” she answered, pointing to the white section of the floor. Kyle's eyebrows furrowed.
“What things?”
“The bugs,” she replied. Kyle stared at her in confusion, then took a closer look at the floor. He saw the same irregular white surface, black specks moving all over it. At first he thought the specks were what Ariana was talking about, but then he realized that he was mistaken. The white wasn't the floor...it was the bodies of millions upon millions of bugs crawling on the floor. Round, white-bodied bugs with tiny black heads crawling all over each other, forming a thick layer on top of the Reaper vines Ampir was standing on.
“Oh,” Kyle gasped. He knew where he'd seen those bugs before...crawling all over Ariana in the cave he'd rescued her from.
Come down.
Kyle looked at Ampir, still standing below, the white bugs giving him a wide berth. Kyle squeezed Ariana's hand.
“We have to jump,” he stated firmly. Ariana shook her head vehemently.
“No.”
“They won't hurt you,” Kyle insisted.
“No,” Ariana repeated. She backed up another step. Then she lurched forward without warning, toppling off of the edge of the dome and falling down to the floor twenty feet below. She landed flat on her back with a loud thump, not two feet from where Ampir stood. The bugs had parted under her just in time, leaving a few feet of bared Reaper vines around her. She scrambled to her feet, giving out a loud shriek and clutching onto Ampir's arm, pressing against his side. She stared in wide-eyed horror at the mass of bugs swarming on the floor around her.
Kyle took a steadying breath, then jumped off of the edge of the dome, feeling his stomach lurch as he fell toward the ground. He saw the bugs part under him, and then his feet slammed into the ground. He felt the force of the impact, but no pain, his knees barely bending. Ariana immediately disengaged from Ampir, rushing to Kyle's side and clinging to him with her incredible strength. Then she glared at Ampir.
“You did that!” she accused. Ampir smirked.
“They won't bug you,” he replied. Kyle would've smiled at the terrible pun, but Ariana was looking at him. He restrained himself, then realized that Ampir had spoken with his normal voice – Darius's voice – instead of speaking telepathically. He glanced at Ariana, but she hardly seemed to notice, her eyes still glued to the writhing floor.
There was a sudden rush of air, and Kyle turned around, seeing the huge domed...thing...rising upward. It gained speed rapidly, shooting up into the tunnel in the ceiling far above, vanishing into the shadows there.
Let's go.
“Okay,” Kyle replied. Then he realized Ampir hadn't spoken aloud.
“Okay what?” Ariana asked. Ampir walked forward, to where the domed thing had been, and away from the sheer wall in front of Kyle and Ariana. The bugs avoided Ampir expertly, scurrying away from his feet before they had a chance to be crushed underneath. Kyle stepped forward as well, and the bugs treated him similarly. He heard Ariana take a deep breath in, and she stepped forward, still clinging to his arm. After a few dozen steps, she relaxed her grip a bit, clearly realizing that the bugs weren't going after her. Still, she stayed close to Kyle.
They came to a steep ramp angling down to a lower level of the cavern, and continued down it. The bugs parted before them, and Kyle noticed that their numbers were starting to dwindle as they went forward. The Reaper vines below were fading to a dark brown, the thick cords splitting into numerous smaller ones. A few yards ahead, a thick, white, gooey-looking substance covered these thinner cords, which transitioned from brown to a translucent white color. They looked like roots.
“What is that?” Ariana asked, staring at the slimy goop. Ampir said nothing, but the dozen lights levitating above his head expanded outward, brightening as they did so. Kyle saw more goo-covered Reaper vine roots in the distance, and then his eye caught something glinting at the edge of the wide circle of illumination Ampir's magical glowing orbs cast. Ampir stepped right into the goo, ignoring the squelching sound it made as it sucked at his boots, and Kyle followed suit, grimacing as he went. He could feel the slick, cool slime on the bottom of his feet, even through his boots, due to their strange magic. The sensation was revolting.
They trudged forward, and Kyle kept his attention on the glinting object in the distance. It was a facet of a white crystal jutting out of the goop, he realized. There were lots of them, each about the size of a man's fist, sitting in dense clusters between pockets of goo. Beyond this, there was an unbroken arc of white crystals. And perhaps five feet beyond this, Kyle saw rippling water...the edge of a pool. He followed Ampir to where the goo ended and the crystals began; the Battle-Runic stopped there, crouching down and staring, the crystals reflected in his visor. Kyle followed suit, not quite sure what he was doing; he saw fine white hair-like appendages sprouting from the Reaper vine roots and embedding themselves into tiny cracks in the crystals.
Ampir stood abruptly, lifting his head to gaze across the water beyond.
“What?” Kyle asked. Ampir said nothing, but his lights shot forward above the water, growing almost painfully bright. Kyle squinted, raising one hand to shield his eyes.
He heard Ariana gasp.
The light dimmed slightly, and Kyle lowered his hand, staring out across the water. It was another lake, he realized...and much larger than even the first had been. It formed a circle in the floor of the massive cavern, and along its shore were countless clusters of white crystals...and a ring of the goo-covered roots, and beyond that, the endlessly crawling white bugs.
“Look!” Ariana exclaimed. She pointed down at the surface of the lake. Kyle stared at it, not seeing anything.
“What?” he asked.
“Under the water,” she clarified. Kyle frowned, refocusing below the rippling surface of the lake, into the depths below. The lake bottom angled steeply downward, and Kyle realized that there were white crystals clinging to the rock there. Huge white crystals, each easily as big and tall as a man. He followed these deeper into the lake, making out the vague outlines of more huge crystals. And then...a shadow. An enormous shadow.
It moved.
“Whoa!” Kyle blurted out, lurching backward. “What the heck is that?”
Let's go.
Ampir turned right, striding quickly across the goo-covered roots, circling around the shore. Kyle followed close behind, pulling Ariana along with him, their boots making awful sucking sounds in the goo as they went. At length they reached a tunnel on the other end of the cavern, and they entered it, leaving the cavern – and the bugs – behind.
Ampir led the way, walking further into the dark tunnel. Most of his lights vanished overhead, leaving a few to illuminate the way. The tunnel was small compared to those that came before, maybe twenty feet high and ten feet acr
oss. Like the others, however, it was covered in Reaper vines. Even with the lights overhead, they could only see a few dozen feet in front of them. The lights cast long shadows across the Reaper vines, shadows that shifted eerily as the lights moved forward. The tunnel began to angle downward, slightly at first, then more steeply. After a few minutes, they came to a fork in the tunnel.
“Which way do...” Ariana began, but Ampir strode into the rightmost tunnel without hesitation. She glanced at Kyle, who shrugged. How the man knew which way to go was beyond him. “Are you sure this is the right way?” Ariana called out after Ampir. He said nothing, of course. Ariana turned to Kyle. “Did he say anything?”
“Nope,” Kyle replied. Ariana looked peeved, but there was little either of them could do about it. Wherever Ampir went, they had to follow. They did so silently, this new tunnel taking them on a winding downward slope. Eventually they came to another fork, and Ampir chose the rightmost one again. Kyle felt Ariana squeeze his hand as they went ever deeper into the earth, her gait slowing.
“What's wrong?” he asked.
“I can feel him,” Ariana answered. “It's stronger now,” she added. “Louder. Before it was just fragments of thoughts, but now...” She trailed off, her eyes unfocusing.
“What?”
“He's everywhere,” she replied, snapping to. She paused for a long moment, then shook her head. “It's like being in a noisy crowd,” she described. “I can hear what he's thinking, but he's thinking so many things at once that I can't understand any of it.”
“Are you okay?” Kyle asked, giving her hand a squeeze.
“No,” she answered. She stared at him then, her brown eyes wide against her pale skin. She suddenly looked terrified. “I don't like this,” she continued. “I think he's more powerful than we thought. A lot more powerful.” She turned to Ampir, then, still striding through the tunnel ahead of them. If the Battle-Runic had heard them talking, he didn't show it.
“We've got Ampir,” Kyle reassured, noticing the direction of Ariana's gaze. She hardly seemed comforted by the fact.
“He's only one man,” she countered. “Sabin's...he's big. I don't think he's even human anymore.”
“Sometimes I think the same thing about him,” Kyle replied wryly, nodding at Ampir. Ariana didn't smile. Kyle sighed, putting an arm around her shoulders. “We have to trust him,” he insisted.
“Why?” Ariana asked. Kyle gave her a tight smile.
“We don't have a choice.”
Chapter 33
Sabin withdrew from the minds of the seventy-eight Chosen embedded in the domed death machine that guarded the entrance of his lair, unable to help himself from smiling inwardly. If he could have laughed, he would have.
Twenty centuries, and Ampir hadn't changed a bit.
He felt almost giddy, a sensation he hadn't experienced in an eternity...one he'd almost forgotten even existed. This was the moment he'd been waiting for ever since Ampir had been revealed. The moment to share his masterpiece with the only other person alive who could possibly understand it, and appreciate it. The culmination of millennia of effort, the creation of a mind beyond description, a consciousness greater than anything the world had ever seen.
And to share his grand plan for the ultimate ascension of Man! A path to a nobler race, one no longer so consumed with personal gain at the expense of their fellows. To a people connected to each other in a way that would make their brute, selfish tendencies impossible. To be connected as he was connected; to understand humanity as he understood it.
Sabin ignored the eternal agony of his flesh, knowing that the fruits of his labors were more than worth the sacrifice of his suffering. He scanned his Chosen, sensing Ampir and the two children entering the hive of one of his oldest Queens. A creature even older than himself...and the inspiration for his grand plan, and indeed his very existence.
He turned to another Chosen then, casting a sliver of his consciousness to it. He had a sudden desire to experience a memory he'd revisited many times before. One of his last fully preserved memories as a mortal, and one of the happiest times of his life.
* * *
Sabin barely notices the musty air of his underground laboratory, a single, large room built into the side of a hill. He sits before a long wooden table, upon which are rows of glass jars. He grabs one of them, pulling it toward himself, and stares at it intently. A single insect is inside, crawling madly along the side of the jar. A white, round-bodied insect with a small, jet-black head...and the one species he has been studying almost exclusively for the last three years.
The Reapers, he calls them.
Sabin observes the insect for a moment longer, then pushes the jar away, grabbing another one. This is filled with tiny, needle-shaped crystals, a quarter of the length of an eyelash. Painstakingly extracted from the brains of the reapers he has collected, they are an absolute marvel of natural runic technology. Of course, he never would have realized this had he not, on a whim, created a powerful lens using gravity fields to magnify the crystals. He'd discovered their microscopic runes then, all two hundred and forty-six of them, packed into that tiny space.
He stares at the crystals, then turns to a stack of papers on the table to his right, his notes on those very runes. A page for each one of them, with a symbol written in standard Runic notation, and his observations after weaving each. More pages on the connections and interactions between the runes. A veritable encyclopedia of information, over two thousand pages long, written about something smaller than a grain of rice.
He sighs then, rubbing his eyes for a moment, then gazing across his simple laboratory. It is hard for him to believe that it's been five years – to the day – since he'd escaped from that prison cell in the Orjanian mine. Since the worst day of his life.
Sabin stands up from his chair, grimacing at the steady, burning pain running from the side of his left forearm down to the last two fingers of his left hand. A remnant of the last two weeks, when the pain had consumed his entire arm. His attacks were much more severe now, and were lasting far longer than they had before. And now, even when they finally abated, they never did so entirely, always leaving a slight burning sensation behind. A little weakness, a little numbness.
He was running out of time.
The door to his lab opens, a young woman stepping through. She is tall, slender, and breathtakingly beautiful, with skin as black as night and long dark hair that springs wildly from her head in tight curls. With only a loincloth covering her, her breasts bare, she is a marvel to behold. She walks up to Sabin, leaning over to give him a soft, lingering kiss on the cheek.
“Morning love,” she greets, her sultry voice sending shivers down his spine, her scent intoxicating. Sabin smiles.
“Morning,” he replies. He still can’t believe his luck, that he has found such a woman. Smart, confident, and sexy, she is perfect for him. They’d met a few years ago, and married soon after.
Finally, for the first time in his life, he was truly happy.
“Going to work?” she inquires. Sabin nods.
“For a bit,” he confirms. She straightens up.
“Take your time my love,” she says. “I’ll help you relax when you come home,” she adds with a slight smile. She waves at him, then walks out of the lab, closing the door behind her. Sabin stares at her retreating form, finding himself contemplating far more pleasant things than his research. Then he shakes his head to clear it, gazing at the stack of papers before him. He sighs.
Time to get to work.
He stands with some difficulty, walking to the front door and stepping through. The forest opens up before him, a magnificent tapestry of green and brown, with a brilliant blue sky above. He feels the sun strike him instantly with its warming rays, and it feels wonderful. He closes his eyes, savoring the sensation.
“Good morning,” a man's voice bellows, and Sabin opens his eyes, spotting a tall, black-skinned man waving to him some twenty feet away. Nearly naked, his body covered in
black tattoos, and carrying a long spear, he is someone Sabin would never have expected himself to associate with.
“Good morning, Calef,” Sabin replies, waving back. The son of the eldest Joined, Calef is next in line to undergo the ritual to place the Reaper vines within his flesh. He is also an extraordinarily gifted Weaver; while lacking in the academic rigor expected of students in the Secula Magna, the man possesses an intuition for magic that would have been the envy of the Empire's great instructors.
“Your wife was looking for you,” Calef states. Sabin nods.
“She found me,” he replies, continuing forward.
Sabin shakes his head, marveling at how he'd ended up here, in one of the most remote jungles in the world, accepted and even beloved of a tribe of what were widely considered to be deadly, xenophobic savages.
He had his cowardice to thank for that. After escaping from his prison cell, he'd blamed himself bitterly for the destruction of the Empire, and Vera's murder. He'd attempted suicide – again – and failed again. Then he’d wandered the countryside, living like an animal, using his magic to hunt small animals and create shelter. He'd entered into madness then, vowing to live the rest of his life alone. To never allow his good intentions to destroy the lives of those he loved, and to never love another enough to care if they were destroyed.
Those had been dark times. Times best forgotten.
Eventually, however, his better nature had returned to him, the loneliness of such an existence prompting him to yearn for the company of others. He'd remembered his dream then, to study amongst the legendary Weavers of the Barren tribes, to learn of their strange magic and culture. He'd traveled northwest to find them, and find them he had. They'd almost killed him outright, and would have had it not been for the very invention that had earned him renown across the late Empire: his universal translator. Amazed by this technology, they'd taken him in, and had grown to trust him. And, in the last few years, he'd learned as much from them as they had from him.