Though having never dreamt a day in his life due to his unique heritage, Cage slowly awoke fully refreshed of mind and body. His body naturally recovered quickly due to rigorous and constant exercise, but since arriving in The Deep he had felt off, but now that he could reconnect with his inner energy and a full nights rest had washed whatever blocked it, completely from his system. He spun into a handstand before jumping with a thrust to flip around and land on his feet. “Finally back to a hundred percent!” He said to himself while stretching and working out to limber up. “Much better.”
Cage created a mirror spell to finally look at himself. He was covered in dark dirt and scruffy beyond recognition. The only decipherable reminder were calculating black eyes looking right back. His hair had grown too long and was wild, unkempt and slightly matted from dirt, sweat and neglect. He knew what needed to be done and brought out a week’s worth of water rations and began upending them into a spell which kept everything together, making a clear beach ball of floating liquid and added a magical fire to begin warming it to bath temperatures. He disrobed and brought out a bar of pine scented soap to begin a long overdue bath.
It took time to scrub every filthy crevice, clean his hair and comb out the knots. Next in the dirty water went in the robe. While he mentally tasked it to wash itself he created the mirror again and conjured the black knife to begin shaving off all the beard and the properties of the knife would target only hair and be unable to even nick the flesh. Afterwards he trimmed his almost shoulder length hair way back. His three beads though remained untouched. White being a man of magic, Red signifying musician, and the black of a protector. He didn’t miss the green of chieftain at all. He did keep his hair long enough for his women to run their fingers through the thickness, the way they loved to do all the time.
The dark green robe came out good as new. Cage then cleansed the dirty water, extracting dirt, sweat, blood and everything else except pure drinking water. The mess dropped as the accumulation was the size of a baseball. All the water flowed right back into the ten canteens before being stored away.
“Feel like a new man.” He smirked as being clean boosted his morale and prepped for the coming excitement.
He left the mess behind and put away every other object after a decent morning breakfast.
Cage took a deep lungful of the cool, damp air and lowered his shields to a more personal space and began to fly straight down the large tunnel. Daku hadn’t warned of any traps between the willow and next challenge and that meant he had no worries between them. The shoulder mounted light gave an excellent distance which allowed for more speed.
While flying at upwards of a hundred miles per hour, Cage multitasked and created another seeker’s thread to guide and warn what may lay ahead, making sure there wasn’t a sudden turn ahead that would be impossible to turn down at too great a speed. The white string shot forward, but began to turn as it moved and sensed down the tunnel faster than he flew, many times faster. It was a path that stayed level, neither going up or down, but actually curving. The tunnel was so long Cage hadn’t realized, till he saw the display. It spiraled in an inward fashion. Simple, but maximizing distance in a smaller area. Nevertheless it was a gigantic path, circling hundreds of times before the seeker thread reached the center and crept up for a mile or two and mushroomed into a large, domelike chamber that seemed a dead end. The thread simply could not pass whatever spells bound the room, but it was clear that that chamber was the final destination.
“Then I can speed up.” He said to the glowing map before ending the spell’s fuel. His mana.
Cage leaned forward, sharpened the barrier in front to slice air more efficiently to reduce drag and poured his inner power into the board beneath his feet. Wind howled past, but Cage figured he was flying well over three hundred miles every hour. Distance was eaten and at this speed he could feel the opposing force of momentum pulling to the left as he leaned more and more to the right as the spiral got ever tighter.
An hour at such speeds became dangerous and he slowed accordingly till a hundred miles per hour proved safest.
Not long after he had to come to a complete stop as there was a silvery blue light beaming down. The spiral had at last come to a complete stop, but going straight up was a wide, perfectly circular tunnel with a mile wide width. Cage’s imagination supplied the shaft could be used for giant fliers to glide down or have plenty of room to fly up.
The hard flight took a toll and Cage settled down just outside the bright light to recover his depleted mana without relying on his diamonds. He had the strangest feeling every drop he had stored in them would required very soon. He didn’t know what for, but relied on the feeling. To speed it up he ate several fruits and sugar rich pastries. The quick energy helped replenish his depleted reserves. After an hour’s rest he did a rigorous stretch before the battle and relieved his bladder.
“Here goes nothing.” He smiled before giving Daku the promised signal and slowly began flying straight up on the board as if it were an elevator. It was a whisper in his mind, but he heard “Luck.”
The ascent was easy and Cage took his time to adapt to the blinding light beaming down. It came from an orb, that much was clear.
The huge shaft opened to a simple dome. There was nothing of any interest on the smooth, perfectly symmetrical walls. About two dozen pillars supported the vast room and it was pure simplicity and function. There was no way out of the giant room. The walls were dark and unforgiving. Cage then spun around at the sound of a slowly grating noise of stone grinding against stone.
Between two pillars was a gigantic boulder made in a rough spherical pattern. It was well over ten stories tall, but no more than fifteen. It was a gray and brown chunk of granite and it began to move. The spherical pattern began to change as pieces fell away till Cage realized the golem simply had curled around itself. Four pairs of arms broke out and began rotating while six legs ripped from beneath the floor. It resembled some kind of strange looking giant crab, but it had no clear features like the first golems he’d faced.
Sensing its target, the golem suddenly was surrounded in a red sphere before disappearing with displaced air that made a light popping sound.
“Shit! It can teleport.” Cage cursed and when there was a shadow blocking the bright overhead light, he didn’t bother looking up as he dove into blackness and teleported two hundred feet away, staying air born and looked just in time to see the giant golem attack the spot he just vacated. Cage had assumed that because of its size and weight it would be slow, but the strike was faster than the snap of a whip.
The golem’s magic output greatly tingled Cage’s skin, speaking it contained a lot of stored power and spells capable of manipulating the huge and heavy construct at lightning speeds. Even without, what cage again assumed to be the head, the stone guardian flew right at him instead of Jumping because proximity didn’t require wasting so much energy to reach the target.
A mad grin again spread across Cage’s features as he flipped around at just the right moment to dodge a backhanded blow and that of a kick from one of the spear sharp feet. It sailed on by before reaching out and grabbing one of the pillars to spin around and attack again.
This golem was much more effective and combat deadly than all the others he’d faced combined. Instead of hack, hack, slash and a mace blow, this construct could react to many more situations, use the terrain and match anything a truly thinking creature could come up with and teleport. The complexity of the giant stone crab with four clubbing arms was clearly the original final test before the Stronghold and dead nexus was added and sealed. Cage knew he was the first to have ever reached this place because until now, there had been no signs of the golem’s activating. No scratches or gouges of stone on stone was evidence enough.
As it came around the pillar like a man turning around without slowing, it flew and tried pummeling him.
Cage didn’t even try attacking, merely dodge. When it Jumped instantly, so did he. When it
did something surprising, he’d be ready. Critical black eyes never wavered as they began learning all of this thing’s capabilities. It could not use offensive magic without damaging the controlling diamond. As it attacked, Cage also sent his magic inside it, learning there were hundreds of identically sized holes throughout its interior. He found the diamond easily enough, but it would disappear every ten seconds and fill an open hole at random. Most were in the body and difficult to reach, but there were ten holes, one inside the thickest joint of each limb.
Patience was key. Cage was more than able to keep out of reach while learning the patterns. His mind worked constantly while also keeping his magic going, always keeping a new location to teleport at the ready while his body reacted from memory and repetition, not letting the deadly creation get close enough to even touch a hair. It took five minutes to learn the intricate and complex reactions before trying to see how it reacted to magic.
No spell had an effect. It just attacked or teleported above to crush the victim under its weight or club it, but to do complex or powerful spells meant one had to be relatively still and that meant the golem’s impossible swiftness and power could attack and finish the job. Worse yet, the granite body was magically protected from fire, stone and a few other spells. Simple force on the other hand tore a chunk off a leg, but Cage watched as five seconds later the cavity was healed. The missing piece magically flew back in place and was fixed good as new.
Ten minutes after the initial attack, Cage switched from defense and observation to attack and implementation. He still dodged, getting closer as his power waited for the diamond to teleport to a limb. He had to zip, flip, twist and drop for close to a minute before a chance presented itself. The hidden diamond appeared in one of the legs and Cage’s left fist already had power. It released with a granite crumbling boom! The leg fell as the diamond shot off. Without a constant connection the rest of the golem fell out of the air. Working quickly he jerked the softball sized, perfectly spherical, diamond out of the air while dumping a tremendous amount of power to his palm, so much so the air distorted and darkened, turning into an atom thick blade.
But as he was bringing the hand down to finish off the precious gem it vanished in a flash of red.
Five seconds were up.
Grating sounds had Cage swearing as the gem went back into the crab and started it up again. All of its broken pieces were put back together and it went back on the attack.
For ten more minutes Cage fought and was seriously afraid he screwed up for he hadn’t released the force, cutting spell and it required a lot of power to maintain and it seemed the diamond would not go back to a weak limb. But then the chance came again and Cage knew he had one last shot before he’d need to leave, regroup and hope this thing didn’t follow. The dense sphere suddenly appeared in the lower right arm and he didn’t think as he blasted the joint apart, snatched the ball and slapped his hand immediately down.
The sharpest blade Cage had ever made slid down and cut through his own left hand. Black fingers fell away like sausages, but so too did the diamond as it was forced apart. One slid off and fell away. It wasn’t a perfect slice down the middle, but more than two inches thick stayed in his fingerless palm squirting blood.
With a thought he snatched the four digits before they hit the ground and reattached them all in under a minute.
But when the larger portion of the diamond hit the ground and more than five seconds passed and that the powerful golem didn’t rise again, did Cage hear a slight grating.
Expecting another trap, Cage raised his fists while finishing attaching a nerve in his middle finger, which took about a second. Blue healing light vanished around the painless fixes. At the far edge of the dome, Cage noticed a section of wall sliding into the floor. It was more than large enough for the greatest of dragons and it made Cage feel small again, but that wasn’t an issue he thought upon for long. The opening was dark, yet another lightless tunnel.
Needing a break, Cage flew down and collapsed to his knees, near the larger piece of diamond. He controlled his breathing and leaned up against a large chunk of the broken crab. Overhead, the light began to dim and went out, but his shoulder mounted one remained, keeping most of the room lit well enough. He picked up the largest diamond he had ever seen and sent his mind inside to discover tremendous amounts of mana being dumped out like a dam who broke and the lake was rushing out. All the spells it had contained were now broken and the only way for it to ever hold mana again was to break it down into seeds to grow an entirely new diamond. Now it was just an expensive paperweight to him. Since it had no use to hold magic anymore, it was just pure diamond. He knew what he could do and dropped it down a pocket, both pieces.
Cage closed his eyes and rested for an hour before lifting his palm and again use seeker thread. He told it to just go down the tunnel that had opened up and tell what lay down it. The line went up at an angle for a relatively short time till a thin blue line faintly pulsed and then the end of the thread began expanding like a balloon. “You haven’t done that before.” He told it as it began brightening and dimming the brightness of the white light. The dimmest light revealed an asymmetrical room, one hastily made to fit something inside. The ground was brighter, but as his power focused it began to clarify what lay in the middle. Three huge structures were placed in a triangular fashion surrounding a clear, piece of land riddled with trenches, bunkers and high walls. The three buildings were all mountain in size, but reminded Cage of ziggurats. Square based and pyramid-like, but on a massive scale. At the top was a flat place with a deep drop off, a clear landing and launching platform for dragons. Each second the details grew. The scale alone was enormous and severely underestimated the word Stronghold. The area was clearly at war for many years just by the defenses surrounding a central point, able to be attacked from all sides, at all times. The three main buildings showed tunnels leading to what could only be seen as resting areas for fighters. They all had identical shapes, each designed the same way, able to incorporate the large size of elder dragons, small humans and varying size griffins.
In his head he could see just how the war against the Tiaxm was fought. The nexus was centered and whenever one came through there would be fighters always at the ready. Griffins would hold them down and tear them apart if they could. Humans would fight from the trenches while dragons finished off the encroaching force of soulless eaters. It was here where warlocks came to be. The frontline defense of Raliea till the nexus could be closed after a hundred years of daily battle.
Needing a better way to see, Cage canceled the thread and created his sight mirror on the largest opening underground he had ever seen, even for all he had gone through. His jaw couldn’t have dropped lower.
The entire space was glowing a sickly green, all from the ghosts he couldn’t quite imagine till seeing it with his own two eyes. Ghosts of varying sizes screamed and moaned in agony, making the room a constant dirge of pain. Most were unable to be identified, their forms indistinguishable. They were trapped, filling much of the room. They couldn’t leave, so many trapped for over a million years. The most immense ones were two slow moving entities larger than the ziggurats. Cage just knew those were slain white king griffins, taken out by none other than a queen Tiaxm. They had died so large and been in pain this whole time, never knowing rest and peace. Only a strong stomach kept Cage from retching.
The part of him that wanted to heal all the ghosts flared to life and was hard to resist. The black mist began seeping from his fingers, eager to save them from misery, but as soon as he forced himself to cancel the sight mirror and no longer look at the Stronghold and ghosts did the primal part of magic without an answer settle. The mist vanished and he closed his eyes to settle his heart.
“Daku? I’m done with the golem and just saw the Stronghold where our kind first fought together with the dragons. What I just saw would break your heart.”
His Familiar was right there, always ready in his mind. Sadness also tinted the
thoughts than came. “I know what you speak. If they were my own memories I would feel true sadness, just as you do. You are one step away from returning to us. I was growing worried something had happened. It has been near two hours since you told me you had begun.”
“Damn underground, messing with my sense of time.” Cage cursed.
“I understand, believe me. I spent a thousand years in my ice palace before destroying it. Spending months without light of the sun is disconcerting. We can speak more later. Right now you are almost out.”
“Alright. So where is this crystal I need to touch to get out. The Stronghold is a dead end. My thread couldn’t even find a crack out to the surface. It is sealed tight up there.”
“The last task is infinitely more difficult.” Daku reminded, not that the warlock needed it. “Rex Gralla and many others are around me, including your mates, children and the rest of your flock. The tension is high for good reason. Either you find a way out or they prepare for our fall.” The next pause allowed Cage to breathe, not realizing he held his own breath. “Before I explain how you get out there are words others wish me to relay.
“Rex Gralla says she is impressed you managed to thwart her and knows you did not lie for you had no knowledge on the path you chose. Never has she been impressed with a warlock half as much as she is of you and says if you die she will personally look out and guide the Utala tribe and protect them with her life for the rest of her days.
“Poli and Ulon shall erect a monument for the two of us and make sure your island remains unchanged.
“Zikon has just said to not listen to their pessimism and to trust you will get out… your flock agrees with him more than being cub-sat by Gralla.” Daku chuckled and so did Cage. “He says to hurry up and get out. He is tired of everyone whining on when you will die and escape the impossible.
Ascension of the Warlock (Book 4 of the Death Incarnate Saga) Page 37