by Clayton Wood
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 across. 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 fin
ally 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.
Sabin stretches his arms to his sides, then walks forward through the forest, his boots crunching on the fallen twigs and leaves. He walks with a bad limp, a reminder of a particularly bad bout of his peculiar disease a year ago. He'd lost all use of his left leg then, and the pain – as if his entire leg had been immersed in boiling water – had been unbearable. If it had not been for the narcotic herbs his wife had administered to him, Sabin would have certainly found the courage to end his life then. The pain had eventually faded, but his leg had never fully recovered.
He limps along, and it isn't long before he finds himself coming up to a sheer cliff wall, and the mouth of a cave. The trees around the cave are without leaves, the shrubs nearly picked clean of theirs as well. Twelve feet high and ten feet wide, the mouth of the cave is shrouded in darkness, the bodies of small animals and birds strewn across its entrance. Most have been stripped bare of their flesh, leaving only bones behind.
The work of the Reapers.
Sabin enters the cave, a small runic device in the necklace he wears converting the deadly carbon dioxide filling the cavern to oxygen and carbon dust. He continues forward, traveling down the long, narrow tunnel as he has so many times in the past, until he comes to the end of it. He spots a narrow hole in the ground, and lowers himself through it, dropping down into the narrow vertical shaft below. The magical boots he wears slow his fall, and it is well that they do; the shaft is over a hundred feet deep, sandwiched between two sheer rock walls. He reaches the bottom, and drops to his belly, sliding under a narrow gap between the wall and the floor. He reaches the large cavern beyond, and rises to his feet. And though he's been here hundreds of times in the last three years, he can't help but smile.
Before him is a massive underground cavern, its floor, walls, and ceiling crawling with black, spindly Reaper vines. A large pond sits in the middle of the cavern, a ring of white crystals surrounding lining its perimeter. The roots of the Reaper vines are embedded in these crystals, and a layer of slimy organic material oozes from these roots, protecting and nurturing them. Beyond this are a veritable army of Reapers, the same small bugs he had back in his lab. They ignore him, well aware after years of daily visits that he poses no threat to them. Or more importantly, to their Queen.
He steps forward, up to the edge of the subterranean pond, staring down into it. A much larger Reaper, at least two feet long and possessed of six tentacles that floated lazily in the still water, sat at the bottom of the pond.
The Reaper Queen.
He stares down at the thing, smiling to himself. It itself has no eyes, no ears, but he knows very well that it is aware of him. That, in fact, it can see him, through the millions of Reapers crawling in this chamber. For, through the tiny crystals embedded in their brains, the Reapers send their thoughts and sensations back to their Queen. And through these crystals, the Queen has utter control over the simple minds of her brood.
What a revelation that knowledge had been!
Sabin stares down at the Queen for a moment longer, then turns his gaze upward, at the Reaper vines crawling up the rock walls to the small hole in the center of the domed ceiling above, through which a small stream cascades into a waterfall down to the pond below. Then he looks down, grabbing a small hunk of white crystal from the edge of the pond, staring at its glittering facets.
The Void mineral, found at last.
Another revelation, that. The same mineral he'd seen in Gunthar's prison cell, the one that had drained Sabin of his magic, the simple white crystal had proven to be the very substance he'd been searching for for years. To think that the answer to one of the most important questions in magic theory had been waiting here, in this cavern, all along. Waiting for him to find it.
Even after three years, it still gives him goosebumps.
He turns back to the bottom of the lake, watching as Reapers come to the edge of the pond, bits of leaves and animal tissue in their little mouths, probably brain tissue. They dive into the water, using their little legs to swim to the bottom, to the hollow ends of the Queen's tentacles. They feed their Queen, who extracts the Void mineral from the
brain tissue and excretes it into the pond, saturating the water over time. The Void crystals form on the irregular rocky edges of the pond bottom, and at its shores, supplying the Reaper vines' roots. The Reaper vines, in turn, use the Void mineral to grow and power their incredible capacity to absorb and discharge magic. Where the Reaper vines grow, magic is drained from the surrounding environment...thus the unique magic-stealing property of the Barrens.
An ecosystem like no other on Doma.
Sabin turns to one of the Reaper vines, studying its smooth, black bark. Another amazing substance, the bark is the only material he knows of that is a complete insulator of magic. He'd fashioned the black cloak he wore from the substance, to limit the loss of magic from his flesh. Similarly, the Reapers chew on the bark and digest it, depositing the black insulating substance into the flesh around their heads. This, he knows from his experiments, is critical for their survival. Or rather, their immortality. For most of the Reapers in this cavern are no longer truly alive; they are undead, kept animate only by the tiny crystals embedded in their brains, and the extraordinary runes within. Without the insulation around these crystals, they would lose magic from the surrounding Reaper vines – whose appetite for magic is nearly insatiable – and they would quickly die.
He'd tested that theory, stripping the insulation from the Reapers in his lab, and watching as they slowly stopped moving. Streaming magic to them reanimated them instantly. Killing a Reaper that was still alive – and not yet undead – resulted in it entering the undead state, no longer needing food or water.