Alexis glanced around and saw more of the glowing creatures covering portions of the rock walls, starting at the other end of the ledge where they stood, and illuminating the way to a steep path that would take them more or less safely down to the cave’s lower level.
“How is this possible?” the Traveler murmured. “This must have been built deliberately this way… it is like the runes. The paintings. It is placed here… it must be so.”
Alexis had wondered that, too.
She didn’t answer him, though.
Instead, she motioned with her head to the right, towards the beginning of the path that wound down to the edge of the lake.
“Come on,” she told him simply.
22
The Key To The Door
Before they reached the bottom, she heard it.
A low hum, almost musical, verging on alive, it seemed to come from the very stones.
She recognized the sound, but it didn’t feel any less strange from having felt and heard it before.
Truthfully, despite what she was, the primary portals unnerved her.
There was something decidedly… occult about them.
Ancient.
Dangerous.
Unpredictable.
They almost struck her as alive… like a primordial, dark and light magic breathed around them, like one wrong move, one tweak in the system, and they would bring half of creation crashing down on her head.
She’d been told, of course, that the consequences for losing a primary portal would be severe. She understood the theory.
She knew the history.
But truthfully, she couldn’t say she understood those consequences entirely.
She just knew when it had happened before, entire planets had been destroyed.
The portals somehow maintained a kind of lightness in the worlds… perhaps even a flow of the First Light itself, what had sparked the first stirrings of life in all the universe.
But that didn’t make them any less unnerving in their own way.
She walked cautiously down the damp stone walkway, conscious of where she placed her feet, hearing and feeling water dripping all around them in that humming, buzzing air.
She imagined all of that wet stone vibrating.
She imagined that vibration creating the low, musical hum that grew louder as they rounded the last corner in the path, and a view of the lake stretched out before them.
The Traveler, who walked behind her, didn’t speak the whole way down.
She felt him close behind her again, but she didn’t look to gauge his distance.
Only when they were a few steps from the bottom did he finally break the silence, and then in a low voice, one that sounded almost reverential.
“What can you do with this portal, exactly?” he murmured. “Remind me, Lightbringer. Why are we here?”
She understood what he was asking.
Now that she was actually here, within shouting distance of the portal that linked this dimension with all the others, she almost wondered the same thing.
The kinds of magics needed to create this portal, to hold it in place, were way beyond those of a mere Lightbringer.
It reminded her how insane all of this was, that someone had attacked the primary portals in the first place. That someone had attacked every known realm, killing the Lightbringers to take control of these ancient links between the worlds.
It was madness.
“Alexis?” he said, a touch sharper.
She turned, surprised in spite of herself that he’d used her name.
Blinking, once, she looked away again, and over the floor of the cave.
Something was triggering her nerves again.
At the same time, she knew it could be the vibration inside the cave itself.
She never exactly felt normal down here.
“There is something I wanted to see,” she told him finally.
The Traveler frowned.
“You came all the way out here to ‘see’ something?” he said. “I thought you could see through to all of the portals from any one of them… including the secondaries you have planted all over.”
“I can’t see the primary one,” she reminded him, glancing over her shoulder at his light blue eyes. “Not clearly. I can use it, yes. I can use it to connect through those other portals… to glimpse other worlds, as I did when I verified the other Lightbringers were dead. But it’s not the same. And anyway, it’s not the portal itself I wanted to look at.”
Pausing, thinking about that, she added,
“…Well, not only that.”
He didn’t answer her, but again, she practically felt his puzzlement.
She stepped onto the bottom floor, and the ground seemed to hum through her very boots.
Hesitating only a half breath, she began walking towards the lake, edging around the left side of it.
She kept scanning the entirety of the cavern as she walked, the torch held out in front of her, even though they didn’t need it down here. Her eyes had adjusted by then, making the torchlight more of a distraction than an aid, but more than that, the phosphorous beings in the lake seemed exponentially brighter down here.
They lit up everything she could see, turning the Traveler’s face and suit a vibrant blue-green, turning his hair a darker version of the same colors, shimmering off the black volcanic stone, lighting up the walls, the cave floor, her own hands.
She gripped the torch more like a weapon now.
In her other hand, she gripped the coiled whip.
She knew both things were as much superstition as practicality, but knowing that wasn’t enough to get her to release either one, not at first.
Then the Traveler walked closer, holding out his hand for the torch.
“It is blinding us,” he informed her, when she didn’t hand it over. “There is a bracket right there… on the wall. We will leave it, and come back for it.”
Blinking at him, then at his outstretched hand, she frowned, even as she realized he was right.
After a too-long pause, she handed it to him.
She watched as he walked it over to the iron bracket, and stuck the black, polished handle inside, wedging it into the holder in the center.
Against the wall, surrounded and overpowered by the blue-green glow, it grew even more apparent how useless that single, yellow flame was down here.
Tearing her eyes off it, she began walking towards the portal.
Something still had her uneasy, but she tried to brush it away.
She’d never been down here with someone else before.
“Gods above and below… what is that?”
Startled, Alexis looked back at the Traveler.
He’d come to a stop on the blue and green-lit path.
She watched him stare up at the segment of wall that had just grown visible as they rounded the curve of the cliff, then turned to follow his gaze. She’d been so lost in her head, so conscious of the odd feeling of alarm she still struggled to shake, she’d barely noticed they’d reached the main part of the cave floor.
Up until now, the cliff had hidden the wall housing the portal itself.
Now she looked at it, and realized how insane it would look to new eyes.
The first time she’d come down here, it had been shocking enough, and Alexis had been used to the dramatic settings and odd locations for the primary portals by then.
“How do they move this?” the Traveler muttered, still gazing up at the forty-foot sculpture jutting out of the volcanic stone. “Are they all like this? All the places?”
He didn’t tear his eyes off the marble façade as he spoke.
She shook her head, still staring up at the same thing.
“No,” she said. “They’re all different. But some of the overall imagery is the same. I’ve seen a lot of the same symbols. Similar hieroglyphs and paintings… like that sun in the cave above us. A lot of the same iconography.”
They’d entered the mouth of what A
lexis thought of as “The Canyon.”
It resembled a box canyon from the Southwest back home.
Tall, steep walls rose on either side, all the way up to the top of the cliff on her left, which happened to be the same cliff with the ledge they’d walked on before. The way the stone grew outward completely hid the canyon from view when you stood on the ledge itself.
It wasn’t all the obvious from the cave floor, either, but once you found the entrance, as they had, the drama of the wall at the end was difficult to look away from.
Alexis had spelled it, trying to get people to look away, to walk right past it, even down here, but she had to admit, most of the security on this place had nothing to do with her.
“Is that…”
The Traveler paused, a kind of wonder infused in both his voice and the silence that followed.
“…A Sphinx?” he finished.
That time, she looked at him in surprise.
“You have these on your world?” she asked. “They are a symbol where you are from?”
He nodded slowly, glancing at her with a frown.
Even now, it was clear he struggled to look away from it.
The sixty or seventy-foot high wall sculpture stood out of the black volcanic rock, partly covered in what looked like white marble. Like the Traveler deduced, the wall art depicted a Sphinx, one that joined up with what probably were made as free-standing sculptures of the long forelegs and paws, which stretched another fifty or so feet in their direction.
The cat-like creature sat erect, its features stern, yet its eyes somehow far-seeing, as if it looked off into the other dimensions from where it posed, even as its eyes aimed straight ahead, towards the opposite cave wall.
It might have been the Sphinx at Giza, but everything about it was perfect, unblemished.
And there was that odd black stone, mixed with the white marble.
It was beautiful.
The craftsmanship alone made it fascinating to look at.
The details in the eyes, the long paws jutting out of the cliff wall and stretching across the length of the canyon, the tops of the wings coming out of the shoulders on either side, the depth of field created in the parts of the sculpture that lived almost solely on the cliff––
All of it was stunningly, beautifully done, so lifelike it was jarring.
At the same time, Alexis could feel the power there.
The hum was significantly louder in the canyon.
Again, she wondered if the Traveler even heard it.
If he did, he hadn’t so much as mentioned it.
She began walking towards the Sphinx, moving quietly in spite of herself. She walked between the massive paws when they reached that part of the floor, and the silence behind that hum was deafening now, more distracting than the vibration itself.
She felt strangely nervous about bringing the Traveler here, suddenly.
She couldn’t have articulated that to herself exactly, either.
She couldn’t even decide on the exact reason for her sudden uneasiness around him.
Was it profane, somehow, to bring a being here that had never traveled through a primary portal? Or was she worried about Cal himself? About his potential safety? Was she worried her attempts to keep him safe might end up getting both of them killed?
Or maybe you just don’t trust him… a voice whispered in her mind.
The thought was there and gone, a bare blink inside her.
She shoved it away with the rest.
The hair on her arms was starting to rise up.
She could feel the electrical currents starting to course over her, even as––
“Whoa.”
The Traveler stood right next to her now.
He’d walked there, so quiet and so close, she’d almost forgotten he was with her at all.
“Your arms,” he said, staring down at her biceps. “Your tattoos. They’re glowing. Really, really brightly.”
She looked down, following the direction of his stare.
The strange writing there, what appeared when she first became official Lightbringer for this dimension, lit up sharply in the darker enclave of the canyon, reflecting off the marble and obsidian lion paws on either side of where they walked.
Realizing she’d been right before, thinking she might be endangering the Traveler, just by letting him come here, she came to a stop, turning to him.
“I think you’d better stay here,” she said. “I don’t think it’s safe for you to go any further… at least not until I’m past the automatic safety mechanisms of this thing. And maybe not even then,” she added apologetically.
“Automatic safety mechanisms?” He stared down at her, his light eyes a few shades colder. “What exactly are those? And how is this the first I’m hearing about them?”
It was a good question, really.
“Just wait here,” she told him.
Stepping forward, she walked a good eight or nine paces closer to the base of the sphinx, then took a deep breath, holding up her hands and drawing a set of symbols in the air.
Immediately, a circle of light rotated around her, partly from the spell, but mostly from whatever the Ancients or whoever else had left behind here.
She continued to walk as the symbols spun around her in rotating bands of moving light, like planetary orbits around a star.
She couldn’t read most of the symbols herself.
A lot of them reminded her of Egyptian hieroglyphs, but they felt even older.
She glanced back at the Traveler to make sure he’d kept his distance.
He stood there, watching her from where she’d left him.
Feeling her shoulders relax slightly, she focused back on the cave wall.
Closing the last bit of distance to the main entrance, she drew symbols and murmured a few more spells, those being the ones she’d been taught by her handlers to let her access the primary gate. She was told repeatedly to never, ever risk forgetting those words.
Those chants weren’t written down anywhere.
They were passed down through Lightbringer after Lightbringer, with only living beings and the Ancients to link that chains of knowledge.
Anyone approaching the portals without them risked their lives.
Even now, as she spoke the spells, she did it in barely a murmur, below where the Traveler would hear it.
She felt when the security mechanisms disengaged.
She felt when the energy around that section of wall between those massive forelegs and paws began to shift.
Ahead of her, the wall lit up, showing symbols in the shape of a door.
The tattoos on her arms lit up when it did, burning as she made another set of symbols, identifying herself to the portal, murmuring the last few keys that would activate the gate.
She could feel herself starting to relax now.
Somehow, she always worried she might screw this part up, get her head blown off by one of the mechanisms meant to protect the gate.
Thinking about that now, she glanced back over her shoulder at the Traveler.
“You should be safe to approach now,” she told him.
Still thinking, she added,
“So you didn’t mention whether any of the attackers got past the defense mechanisms of any of the other primary portals,” she said. “Did they? On any of the other dimensions? Because I imagine some of them might have been killed that way.”
The Traveler began walking towards her, his pale eyes a gold-tinged orange as he walked down the center of the aisle between the lion’s legs.
“No,” he said, after a long-feeling pause. “They did not… get past them.”
Pausing, he added,
“And yes, Lightbringer. Some of them died trying.”
Something about the way he said it made her frown.
It took her a few seconds to comprehend what she heard in his words.
Then suddenly, out of nowhere, she knew.
It was grief.
Sh
e heard grief in his voice.
Light flashed from her left, tearing her eyes off the Traveler, off the strange look on his face as he approached her, buttoning the white suit jacket across the front of his pale white dress shirt, covering his black leather belt.
Her gaze jerked back to the portal.
She stared at the symbols around the lit door in the cave wall, feeling her chest clench when she realized what the flash of light meant.
She didn’t stop walking towards it, even as the light flashed brighter, turning a pale blue-white, the color of the sun mural she’d seen on the upstairs landing.
Then, the first shadow appeared.
Staring at it, at the black outline in the brilliant, blinding light of the portal door, Alexis found she understood.
She finally understood.
It was over.
Like her brethren, she had failed.
Like her brothers and sisters, she was dead.
23
The Army
The first shadow moved, leaving the lit doorway before she could fully make out its form.
It passed out of the light and into the darkness of the cavern.
Alexis stared at the strange weapon it held in its hands; it looked almost like a tree branch, something made out of rock and wood. The way the being held it left absolutely no question in her mind as to its purpose, however.
He aimed it straight at her, his dark eyes focused unemotionally on her face.
She looked at him, then back at the light in the door.
It hadn’t dimmed.
The portal was still open.
She could only stand there, frozen, as more beings began flooding out, darkening the opening only long enough for them to pass through, one by one.
She didn’t count them.
Even so, she felt her hands turn cold as the crowd on this side of the doorway grew.
She looked at the Traveler.
His mouth appeared grim now, calculating.
He’d also moved closer, standing maybe five feet behind her, and to her right. She tried to catch his gaze, to understand what he was thinking, but his eyes never left the growing line of beings now covering most of the area directly in front of the portal.
Lightbringer: An Enemies to Lovers Urban Fantasy with Demons, Portals, Witches, Renegade Gods, & Other Assorted Beasties (Light & Shadow Book 1) Page 17