Deepest, Darkest

by William Ritter

  “Tinn,” she managed to call out with a voice that sounded small even in her own ears. “I think something’s happening.”

  “We’re almost there,” Joseph whispered.

  Cole nodded. The main chamber was just around the bend; he would have been able to sense it even if his father had not said anything. The air, for one, was warmer as they neared the cavern of Delvers’ Deep.

  More than the air, Cole’s right leg was starting to feel warm, too. Hot, even. Painful. What the heck? He reached into his pocket and pulled out the disc. “Ow! Ow! Ow!” He dropped it on the path. The little symbol was glowing red-hot as it clattered onto the rocks.

  “What’s it doing?” asked Joseph.

  “I don’t know. It’s never done that before.”

  With a crack, the stone suddenly shattered into half a dozen uneven pieces. The light gradually faded and the shards lay still and quiet on the tunnel floor.

  “Somehow, I feel like that was a bad omen,” Cole moaned.

  Fable emerged from the solid stone wall of Delvers’ Deep with a gasp. The kobold around her shoulders chittered unhappily and buried itself behind her curls. The air down here was muggier then it had been in the tunnels, and the sheer size of the cave in front of her made her head spin. Or, possibly, she had to consider that the feeling had more to do with the hazy layer of mind-addling clouds hovering far too close for comfort in the air above their heads.

  “Something’s wrong,” said Madam Root, sliding free of the wall beside her.

  “You mean other than a kidnapping snake cult trying to kill my friend and destroy the world?”

  “Yes, obviously other than that,” Madam Root hissed. “There’s something in the air. I can feel it.”

  “Hm.” Fable knew how to feel the air. Her mother had been training her to do it for most of her life. She closed her eyes and reached out with her other senses. “Wait. You’re right,” she said. “This place has some heavy magic in it. Oof. Bad magic.”

  “Oh! What have they done to you?”

  Fable opened her eyes. Madam Root was hurrying along the floor of the cavern toward one of the cult’s burly work animals—kobbs, she had called them. She had said they were a relative of the kobolds, but the huge beast looked more like a broad-mouthed guinea pig, if a guinea pig could grow to be the size of a locomotive. The colossal creature was standing near the cavern wall, all alone, swaying ever so slightly. Its eyes, wider than dinner plates, were glassy and unresponsive. Fable hurried to catch up with Madam Root.

  “Do you remember me, old friend?” Madam Root was saying.

  The kobb just stared off into the distance.

  “Oh, they branded you! You! A spirit of these mountains! Like you were some common upland steer!” Fable followed Madam Root’s furious eyes to the creature’s chest. The coarse hairs had, indeed, been shaved back, and the treelike design of the Low Order had been seared into the poor thing’s hide. “We are going to set you free. I swear it.”

  “I’m all for doing that,” said Fable. “But what about my friends? My mama? We need to find her.”

  “If they’ve been taken captive, there are only so many places they could be. You’ve already seen the work crews.” She gestured toward the walls in the far distance, where Fable could barely make out the hazy shapes of a dozen figures milling about. “Anytime they’re not on the crews, they shuffle mindlessly back to the prisoner cabins.” Madam Root pointed to a tunnel in the wall to the left. “Every once in a while the Low Order makes them walk back through the mists just to keep them good and mesmerized, but other than that”—she hesitated, her eyes narrowing as she peered toward the central pillar—“the only other place they might go would be to the altar for sacrifice.”

  Fable followed Madam Root’s gaze. Far away, lit from behind by the warm orange of the magma pool, people were standing at the altar.

  The eerie silence of the cavern was suddenly split by a deafening bellow. Fable threw her hands over her ears and spun around. The kobb was shaking, tossing its enormous head back and forth. Madam Root held up her arms to calm the beast, but it knocked her aside like she was nothing. The sigil branded into the kobb’s chest was glowing red-hot. Fable leapt out of the way as the creature lurched forward. It belted out another roar, and then its gargantuan muscles flexed and it vaulted into the air. It bounded in a wide arc over Fable and Madam Root before diving down into the stony floor like it was water. The ground shuddered as the kobb moved through the charred rocks like an enormous koi skimming through a muddy pond. In its wake, the rocks rippled for only a moment before they regained their solidity.

  Fable gasped. “It’s going for the central pillar!”

  “Then we’re too late,” breathed Madam Root.

  Fable clenched her fists. “No such thing.”

  Tinn tore his eyes away from the magma pool as a roar echoed through the underground chamber. Something was hurtling toward them from the far side of the cavern. It swam through the stone floor like a shark cutting through ocean currents, surfacing and diving as it neared. The enormous shape was closing on them by the second.

  “What is that?” he managed.

  And then his vision went black as a wave of icy darkness swept around him. He felt the lurch of movement and tried to reach out his arms to steady himself, but they were pinned to his sides as if he had been rolled up in a thick, wet blanket. He knew the Thing’s grasp only too well—his bones ached with its unnatural cold. But then, as quickly as it had overtaken him, the darkness ebbed away. It dripped off of him like oil at first, and then vanished like smoke in a breeze, and the searing heat of the cavern returned in a rush. Tinn wobbled unsteadily on his feet for a moment. Evie was a dozen paces ahead of him. He had been pulled fifty feet back from the altar and now stood facing it and the towering column behind it. The Thing took shape beside him.

  “Did you just—” he began.

  And then the altar exploded as the bristling kobb breached the surface one final time.

  The beast sailed high over the magma pool—demonstrating astonishing grace for a rodent the size of a house—and slid directly into the central pillar with a sound like a great boulder splashing into a placid lake.

  The cavern was deathly silent for five of the longest seconds Tinn had ever experienced, and then the kobb burst out the other side of the stone column. It slammed to the ground and kept going, bounding off toward the other end of the cavern and into the safety of the rocks beyond.

  A noise was coming from the central pillar, a muffled crunching, like when someone tries to eat crackers in the back of the classroom during reading time without anybody noticing. Crunch. A sharp crack appeared on the surface of the column. Crunch, crunch. The crack expanded, stretched, and was joined by a spiderweb of smaller fractures.

  “Run!” yelled Evie, and Tinn did not need to be told twice.

  Behind them, the central pillar—the single column on which the enormous cavern, the town of Endsborough, and the whole of the Wild Wood were balanced—cracked in half.

  Twenty-Six

  The ground shuddered beneath Fable’s feet as she pelted across the charred terrain. Just a hundred feet to her right, a hailstorm of rocks as wide as carriage wheels blasted the ground into jagged craters. Twenty feet to her left, a cleft in the floor abruptly widened with a groan, accompanied by a hiss of heat and a burst of ruby light. Her eyes watered, but she could see the central pillar ahead of her, the fractures spreading through it and the whole column shaking. It wouldn’t hold for much longer.

  She heard the slap of running feet and spotted a familiar pair of faces rushing toward her.

  “Fable!” cried Evie.

  Fable’s eyes flicked from Evie to Tinn, and then back to the pillar. “You two get out of here!” she yelled to her friends. “Find cover if you can!” She spared them a momentary hopeful smile, then pressed forward with a determined burst of speed.

  “Fable!” Tinn yelled after her.
“What are you doing?”

  “I don’t know yet!” Fable called back. “But I intend to do it swiftly and decisively!”

  The whole cavern shook again, and one of the horizontal supports that hung high above them splintered into a dozen pieces and fell, spinning, downward. The shards slammed to earth on all sides of Fable, striking like tree-sized javelins as she ran. Several of them hit with enough force to punch holes straight through the ground and into the hellish magma below. Heat billowed up through the freshly pierced vents.

  Fable tried frantically to think while the world fell apart around her. She needed to reinforce the pillar, and fast. This deep beneath the surface, there were no roots to summon—and even if there were, her usual net of woven vines wouldn’t be enough to hold up an entire forest. The remains of the altar platform were crumbling, stone by stone, tumbling into the pit below with bursts of light as the magma splashed and swallowed them. The heat was like a wall, and Fable could get no closer to the pillar without somehow crossing the rapidly widening pool of magma.

  The pillar let out a deep croak. With horror, Fable saw that the whole top of the column had shifted several inches away from the bottom, sliding along the largest crack. She had to do something, now.

  This wasn’t fair! She didn’t have a spell for stone! Stone was stubborn! Stone was not a living thing! She couldn’t speak to it like a plant. She couldn’t manipulate its movements the way she could water or wind. She panted, trying to catch her breath while the magma churned below her. Magma. Fable’s eyes widened. Solid rock might not flow, but liquid rock sure did.

  She closed her eyes and focused all her energy on the glowing pool. When she used the gale spell on the wind, she could direct air currents almost effortlessly with the slightest suggestion. Water took a little more effort, but her mother had insisted that they practice by the little stream near their clearing until Fable could control the flow in any direction, lifting the babbling stream into curling waves and spinning it into dancing eddies.

  Magma was, as Fable had expected, many magnitudes harder. It took precious seconds just to lock her mind on the molten rock, but with tremendous effort, Fable felt it slowly responding. She let out a gasp of victory. She could do this.

  The surface of the magma was the most resistant, but if Fable dug deeper, she could coax the flow from farther down, where it was hottest. It emerged in a dripping cone at first, and then a broad wave. It sank back to the surface when Fable allowed herself a moment to wipe the dripping sweat from her eyes, but she tried again, pressing on the wave with her mental hand as it rose until it flattened into a sheet of scorching yellow-orange.

  Fable’s whole body felt sunburned, and she was starting to get dizzy from the effort, but still she channeled the flow of the glowing magma with every ounce of energy left in her. The curtain of liquid rock swept around and around the broken pillar, red-hot and crackling, wrapping itself around the stone column like a bandage around a broken ankle. Heat poured off the structure in waves as Fable worked, and the cavern around her was beginning to feel like the inside of a furnace.

  For one hopeful moment, the fragments of the crumbling pillar stopped shifting. Fable gulped a breath of hot, dry air and held on to the magma sheet as firmly as she could.

  But then, with a series of angry pops as loud as cannon fire, the towering column shuddered and began to splinter again, broken shards striking Fable’s blanket of lava as if it were nothing more than chewing gum wrapped around a snapping branch.

  The cavern rocked. Huge boulders thundered down, blasting craters into the stone floor. The terrain around Fable was transforming from solid ground marked with patches of lava to a sea of lava marked with patches of solid ground. A spear of white light cut through the clouds above Fable, and she squinted against the sudden brightness. Her heart sank into her stomach. Daylight. If she was seeing daylight, the surface above them was cracking. That was bad. That was very bad.

  “Rrraghh!” Fable growled. Sweat trickled down her neck. She could still feel the magma shifting in response to her invisible grasp, but even her fiercest magic couldn’t hold it any tighter. It was still too fluid, too molten. At best she was delaying the inevitable. If only she could cool it back to solid rock. Maybe, if she hit it with one good burst of wind—but she would have to let go of the flow in order to cast gale, and without her holding the magma in place, the pillar would fall to pieces at once. Her head was pounding. Her chest ached. She couldn’t catch her breath.

  No. She couldn’t give up—it couldn’t be too late. There is no such thing as too late for a queen. But even a queen could need help. More than ever before, Fable needed her mother.

  “Mama!” she cried aloud.

  There was no sound in response but the grim crunching of the pillar giving way above her. And then, so gently that Fable thought she must be imagining it at first, the currents behind her shifted. Fable’s curls blew forward around her eyes.

  “I can’t . . . do it . . . on my own!” she gasped, her every muscle screaming with the effort of maintaining the spell.

  Fable held her breath. And then the air rippled with shadows. The hairs on the back of Fable’s neck stood on end as an icy breeze swept past her, giving Fable a startling temporary respite from the inferno.

  THEN WE WILL DO IT TOGETHER, said the Thing.

  In another moment, the Thing was in the air. It fluttered over the chasm of lava, not gracefully like a bird, but clumsily, like a torn umbrella caught in a powerful wind. Still, it flew. The air around it wavered like the horizon on a summer’s day, bending where the Thing’s aura of cold met the magma’s merciless heat. As it neared the pillar, the Thing sprawled itself out, wider and wider, every sliver of liquid blackness flattening and stretching until Fable could see the glow of the hot magma coming through its sinewy sheets of darkness.

  And then it struck the pillar.

  Shadows hissed and boiled as they touched the glowing rock, and glassy, soot-black bubbles blossomed across the surface. The Thing flinched and shed the boiling shadows from its leathery form, leaving them to sizzle where they stuck to the hot pillar—but it did not stop. It spun around and around the column, dropping shadow after shadow, literally throwing itself at the pillar piece by piece, until the glow began to fade from the stones. The Thing got smaller and the rock got darker, until soon, what remained of Fable’s magma bandage looked like burnt, blackened treacle at the bottom of a ruined saucepan, and what remained of the Thing looked . . . small.

  Fable cautiously released her mental grip. Her whole body was shaking and her head felt adrift, like at any moment it might float away. But the pillar held.

  When the Thing was finally done, the last pitiful scrap of darkness tumbled out of the air. It turned and spun as it fell, no bigger than a tattered dish rag. Fable watched it, squinting her eyes against the heat and the steam, and she could have sworn she saw a living creature tucked within the scrap of shadows, like a mouse or a shrew—small and soft and frail.

  Fable’s vision blurred before she could see it land. There was an awful lot of ground in that direction that wasn’t ground anymore. She swallowed. Her head was spinning, but the horrible clouds above her were lifting at last, venting out into the open air through the freshly broken cracks. The glistening shafts of white light piercing down from above danced in front of her. It was beautiful, in its own way, and it made Fable think that maybe—just maybe—the worst was over.

  It was not.

  “Whoa,” said Joseph Burton. He put a hand over his brow to shield his eyes from the light filtering down through the dissipating mist. He and Cole had watched from the far side of the chamber as a sheet of magma had hardened around the crumbling central pillar. In the distance, at the center of the cavern, they could just make out Fable as she let her arms drop to her sides. “There’s some magical magma witch holding the thing together!” said Joseph.

  “I know her!” said Cole. “She’s a friend of mine. Fable!”r />
  Joseph looked down at Cole. “Do I know her?”

  “Not yet,” said Cole. “But you will. There are a lot of people you’re going to meet.”

  “Cole!”

  Cole spun at the sound of his brother’s voice. “Tinn?”

  “Cole!” Tinn came barreling across the broken ground, and the two of them collided in a spinning bear hug. “You’re alive!”

  “Tinn! I thought I lost you!”

  “You did! But you found me again! Oof. Not quite so tight—it’s been a rough day.”

  “Fair,” said Cole. “Not over yet, either.” They pulled apart, and Cole glanced back at Joseph. “I, um, I found someone else, too.”

  Tinn looked up, and his smile froze as he processed the man’s features. He opened his mouth as if to speak, but it only hung there as the silence lengthened.

  “No, it’s fine.” Evie’s voice pierced the bubble of the moment. “I’ll just carry the hero of the hour across this dangerous hellscape all by myself.” She was slogging forward, a barely conscious Fable leaning heavily on her shoulders.

  The boys hurried to help, taking over, one of them under each of Fable’s arms.

  Evie rotated her neck and stretched her shoulders. “Glad to see you, Cole.” Her gaze landed on the strange, ragged man, and her eyes widened. “No way. Is this really . . . him?”

  “I guess so,” Joseph answered. His expression was straining, but he seemed to be holding on to a timid spark of comprehension now, against the currents of his fragile memory. He stared at Tinn, then Cole, then back again. “And I guess this means she kept it after all.”

  Tinn’s eyes dropped to the floor.

  Cole’s mouth tightened.

  “Him, not it,” panted Fable, lifting her chin just a hair. She looked pale, but there was still a spark behind her eyes.

  “Sorry,” Joseph said. “She kept him. You. Both of you—because of course she did.” He glanced back and forth one more time. “We were supposed to talk about it again when I got home. But I knew she had already made up her mind. I knew it. Which one of you—”