Path of Ruin

by Tim Paulson

  After another turn and twist they passed through a relatively short hall that funneled into a roughly circular great room lined with spiraling columns. Everything was black in this room too of course. In the center stood an oval table that appeared to have been formed directly from the floor itself. It was surrounded by skeletal chairs that gave the room that last macabre touch that pushed it over the edge into truly creepy territory. No wonder Celia loved it here, she thought.

  On the table's surface Giselle could see Liam's pack with their family's embossed griffin emblem and next to that two pistols, a pair of knives and his specially made veil rapier in its scabbard. Perhaps it would be best to move that to somewhere more inconspicuous before her brother was released.

  “We're on the ground floor now I believe,” Aaron said, staring at the wall of the room's entryway, apparently seeing something Giselle could not. “The children are just through there.” He pointed to an arch at the opposite side of the room, then he paused to stare at the ceiling. “Magnificent.”

  “Hand those back now please,” Celia said.

  “No! There's so much! Have you seen the ceiling! It's astounding!” Aaron said dreamily.

  “Lately I don't spend much time staring at ceilings... unfortunately,” Celia said.

  Giselle rolled her eyes. “Oh let him have them for a while! What can it hurt?”

  Celia ignored her and stood next to Aaron, hand out. Why was she being such a pain?

  Daniel appeared in front of Giselle. He was gesturing toward the far side of the room with one floppy tentacle.

  “Should I follow you to the children?”

  The skull head nodded.

  She sighed, why not? The creature seemed harmless enough.

  “Lead on,” she said.

  It led her around the oval table toward an arch on the far side of the room.

  Giselle couldn't help but remain curious about her tentacled companion. “Do you like stories Daniel?”

  The creature paused and turned to face her. Two glowing eyes regarded her intensely before the head that held them began nodding enthusiastically.

  “I had a feeling you would,” she said, with a smile.

  Daniel raised its tentacles to the side in what could only be read as a shrug.

  “When will I tell you a story?”

  More nodding.

  “Let's go see the children, then, perhaps.”

  Daniel was off like a shot. It was hard to keep up, especially going down the spiral stair that was through the arch. With no real stairs and all the darkness it was hard to keep her feet going the way they ought to. She had to slow down some, lest she take a fall.

  “Has Aaron been this way?”

  Daniel paused for a moment as if thinking, then he mimed a stumble and a fall.

  “Oh so he's already fallen here once?”

  Daniel held up two tentacles.

  “I see.” Well, she hadn't ever expected their children to become champion acrobats. That was clearly a good thing.

  Daniel stopped at a circular doorway and pressed something invisible beside it. The door dilated open smoothly, soundlessly. It was eerie to watch it happen so close by. Out of the room poured a fountain of light and sound, including most noticeably the explosive laughter of playing children.

  The room itself was so different from what she'd seen so far that it took her a moment even to see what was going on. Firstly the predominant color, astonishingly, was not black! That was the first thing she could make sense of. It was instead a cool gray similar to the clothes she'd chosen. Further, the floor was soft, it felt to her feet like a woven rug but thicker than any she'd seen and it was patterned with a wild array of shapes. There were basic shapes she knew like triangles and circles and squares, but others she didn't, including an array of different spirals.

  On the walls were an incredible assembly of charts and pictures. Primarily they were black and white images, but there were a few with muted blues, purples and greens. Some of the pictures were of things she knew, she recognized a stylized troll right away, as well as a goblin, but others were not.

  What drew her eye most of all however, were the machines. At least, they looked like machines, like the kinds of things her tutors had explained were used by printers and saw mills to make work go faster, except these were lined up against the wall of the room.

  They were black metallic structures, like ancient predatory insects waiting for prey to venture just a little too close. And prey they had for all the children she'd brought with her from castle Aeyrdfeld, the lion siblings, Min and all the rest, were running around the center of the room, howling with laughter. The peculiar thing being the enormous black lumps that covered the top half of their heads completely excepting only their mouth and nose. It looked like someone had pulled a pitch black octopus from the deepest part of the ocean and plopped it atop each child's head.

  Giselle didn't know what to do. Her mind wanted her to scream. It told her the children were blind and deaf, that the black goo on their heads must be bad for them somehow. Yet her gut heard the laughter flowing so easily like a clear mountain stream. Laughter these children sorely needed after fleeing their home, the troll, and that monstrous bard. The encounter with the bard being, she remembered sadly, entirely her fault.

  “What the devil is going on here?”

  Not a single one of the children had even noticed that she'd arrived. They continued running in circles in the center of the room gamely laughing as they dodged and jumped and waved their hands in the air as if warding away some unseen enemy.

  It was then that she noticed another child. He was not participating with the others but instead sat in one of the machines against the wall. It held him snugly in what could only be called an embrace. This child had darker skin framed by golden curled hair. He wore a single piece gray suit just like hers and his attention was entirely focused on something in the bug-like machine.

  The boy would tap with his fingers at various parts of a smooth black tablet suspended before him but unlike the other children he wore no helmet. Despite his lack of head covering this little boy didn't take notice of her either. Giselle was not used to being around children and feeling ignored, it was unsettling.

  The little boy did notice when Daniel walked up behind him and put a tentacle on his shoulder. He then turned to look at her. His face looked tired.

  “Daniel wants me to tell you this is a cresh. He says the other children aren't in danger. They're playing a game,” said the little boy in a soft voice that was barely audible over the din of the laughing children. Giselle approached him.

  “You can understand Daniel?”

  The boy nodded.

  “Well thank you very much for relaying his message. May I ask your name? I'm Lady Giselle. It's lovely to meet you.”

  “I'm Adem,” the boy said. He was quite young, perhaps five or six and also pale, almost green, the color she might expect a child to be after drinking a large glass of spoiled milk.

  “Are you alright Adem?”

  “No,” Adem said, shaking his head. “There's demons in me.”

  “There are! How terrible you must feel!” she said, presuming the boy must have need of a sink or a chamber pot.

  Adem nodded again, gravely. “Terrible.”

  Giselle looked to Daniel who stood near by watching them both with his glowing eyes.

  “Is there somewhere Adem can go to feel better? A bathing room perhaps?”

  Daniel looked at Adem.

  “He says it's not what you think,” Adem said.

  “It's not? Then what's wrong with this poor boy?”

  Daniel gestured at Adem.

  “I told you,” Adem said, his voice edging toward exasperated grumpiness “It's demons.”

  “Oh.” There was little else to say. She supposed it made sense. If there was anyplace where Giselle might find a child chock full of demons, it would be here.

  “Why... Why aren't you playing with the others?”
/>
  “I did before. I'm different though. Daniel said to try the teacher,” Adem said, indicating the nightmarish machine within whose tendrils he was partially enclosed.

  “That's a teacher?”

  “Yup,” Adem said. Whatever was wrong with him was clearly getting worse. The boy looked jittery and drained as if he might keel over or throw up at any moment.

  “Will this boy be alright? He doesn't look well,” she asked Daniel.

  Oddly, the creature seemed to fret about the question. It rubbed two of its tentacles together and looked away before answering through Adem.

  “He says no,” said Adem.

  “What do you mean no?” Giselle said.

  Once again, Daniel appeared to be upset by the question. He paced back and forth while rubbing several appendages along the surface of the long deer-like skull that housed his glowing eyes. Just like a person might do if they were wracked with guilt about something.

  “Tell me!” she said. “What's going to happen to this poor boy?”

  Daniel did not answer through Adem. All he did was cover his eyes with his tentacles, look down and begin to shake.

  Giselle was about to grab him and shake him herself when Aaron ran into the room looking winded, followed by two more of the skull creatures like Daniel, though these ones had differently shaped skulls.

  “Giselle!” Aaron said, his face red like a beet. He must have sprinted from the main hall.

  “What's happened?”

  “These ones just came to me, waving their arms all over. I don't know what they need but it seems very urgent! I think something's wrong.”

  One of the two walked over to Daniel who gestured toward little Adem, still seated in his horrific teacher.

  The sick looking little boy with the golden hair looked up from his hands where he'd been twiddling his fingers and locked eyes with Giselle.

  “They say we're under attack.”

  * * *

  Henri thumbed the yellow stone embedded in the center of the amulet and felt his body change form from an old man with a raspy voice and a thousand aches and pains back into the capable and physically formidable man he knew. Oddly when he'd been the old man the feeling of being himself had receded. The stooped and wrinkled body had felt more and more like it was the truth and his former life a dream. He wondered what might happen if you wore the trinket too long. Could you forget who you really were? Even now he had trouble shaking the idea that his back hurt.

  There was no sense maintaining the ruse at this point however. It might have been useful if they'd needed to surprise anyone at the back entrance or any of the check points thereafter but they hadn't because all of those places had been deserted.

  The building was completely devoid of the Veil company workers who ought to be there. Not once during his years with the company had he ever seen the guards not at their stations and the halls not bustling with throngs of people, no matter the time of day. The whole thing was very peculiar.

  “Why did you remove your disguise?” Vex said, still an old woman.

  “I'm not a ghoul remember? I've worked here before. Besides I'm tired of feeling my back ache.”

  “You're also carrying very important equipment that we need. It cannot fall into the hands of these grave robbers,” Vex said.

  “It's just as well,” the baroness said. “I was tired of hearing him complain about his back anyway. So where are we going Henri?”

  “I'm not entirely sure,” Henri said with a shrug. “There are many well guarded laboratories in the floors below. However, the more important the project, generally, the deeper they'd place it. So we should find a stair way and descend... Hmmm...”

  “What?” she asked.

  “That's not what's bothering me though,” Henri said.

  “There should be people here,” the baroness said.

  “Yes. I've never seen it like this. Either something terrible has happened and they had to evacuate everyone, which I've never seen. Or...”

  “They knew we were coming,” she said.

  Henri nodded.

  He scanned the long wood paneled hallway ahead of them. A tea cart had been overturned with morning biscuits still on it. These people had left in a hurry. He wondered if something else might be going on.

  “Looks like the people here left hours ago, before morning tea,” he said.

  “Why would they send their people away even before Mia's distraction had begun?” The baroness asked.

  “I don't know,” Henri said as he picked up a biscuit with a bite taken out of it and dropped it again. Whatever it was, they'd left in a hurry.

  “I say we take it as a gift,” Vex said. “Our path has been cleared for us.”

  “There's a stair up ahead and around the corner,” Henri said.

  The place looked Eerie with no one around and debris of what must have been a hasty retreat strewn around the halls. The only figures that remained were those that lined the walls: portraits of company officers and founders of the past. Their stern expressions seemed full of reproof for trespassers like his little trio. Though surely their oil painted eyes had seen it all, they gave no hint as to what had transpired.

  As they rounded the corner Henri saw blood. There was a large pool of dark red on the carpet where it seemed someone had been killed and then a trail where they'd been dragged away. The line of blood disappeared beneath a door.

  Henri lowered the lance Vex had given him, facing it forward like a musket. As powerful as the weapon was when compared to a musket, which had to be reloaded every time it was fired, Henri would have preferred a more familiar gun, or a sword. Anything but this unwieldy weapon that felt so awkward to hold.

  Vex and the baroness raised their hands. He didn't know what they planned to do with them exactly, but the action looked menacing just the same.

  There was a noise from the office where the blood led to, like the sound of a waste basket being knocked over. The door was just barely ajar obscuring anything that might be inside. Henri held his breath and took one more step forward.

  There was a grunt from inside and then the door evaporated into an airborne mass of wood fragments as a horror smashed through into the hall.

  Henri tried to discharge his weapon but couldn't find the triggering place. He kept spinning the shaft in his hands, until finally he hit the right place and a shaft of violet erupted from the blade.

  The horror had already been shredded by dozens of shining silver knives and dark spectral spears from the two wizards. It was just as well. Henri's shot had missed, harmlessly eating a hole in the wood paneling and half of a painting at the end of the hall.

  “I suppose that answers our questions,” the baroness said as the knives pulled themselves from the creature and floated through the air to return to a pouch at her waist.

  “If they've already lost control, it may be worse than we thought,” Vex said.

  “That's a nice trick,” Henri said, raising an eyebrow.

  “Thank you,” the baroness said.

  A series of thuds erupted from ahead as two horrors pushed through the stairwell door, tongues lolling over their needle sharp teeth. The exact door Henri had planed for them to use.

  This time he was ready.

  He fired the lance. The first shot went left, impacting a carved stone bust that evaporated from the nose up. The second shot connected with the leg of one of them, which ceased to exist, causing the creature to stumble and plant its drooling face in the carpet.

  The baroness killed the other one with her flying blades which she directed with lethal efficiency into its head, turning it into a bloody pin cushion. Henri's wounded horror then tried to get up but he finished it with a third blast, coring a hole in its center the size of a large roast.

  “Let's go,” the baroness said.

  Henri led the way down the stairwell, which was bathed in blood. It looked like horrors had been hunting in the rooms above and dragging their kills down below to be devoured. Only a ma
sh of blood and the tattered remnants of several expensive looking doublets and breeches remained.

  The lower they descended the worse it got. Doors had been barricaded on several of the floors but the barricades had been torn open leaving shreds of wood and bent metal as well as blood, always blood.

  Screams could be heard from inside a few of the floors. Henri wanted to charge in and help but Vex and the baroness disallowed it. He knew they had to shut down the gate, but it was hard to hear people suffer, especially since they might well be people he knew from his time here.

  After fighting three more horrors in the stairwell they arrived at level eleven. This was the bottom, where the most secret projects took place. It was where they'd designed the Titan goliaths years ago. If a veil gate machine was anywhere, it would be here.

  When they entered the floor it was clear barricades had been erected but they'd been utterly demolished. Horrors prowled the halls in packs.

  “We're near now. Can you feel it?” Vex said.

  The baroness nodded. “Yes. You should wear your veil goggles now Henri and stay close to us. There will be rogue spirits looking for a host. They should be attracted to me but if you're too far away...”

  “I understand,” Henri said, pulling down the goggles.

  Immediately he saw that she was right. Down the hall ahead several glowing entities floated with a serene grace that belied their malevolent intent.

  “How are we going to get in there?” he asked.

  “Like this,” she said as she strode past him, pushing open the mashed remains of the double doors. Five horrors appeared down the hall and rushed forward followed by three spirits who flew at them like ghostly torch lights.

  Before the creatures could make it half way she'd drawn two glowing symbols in the air, one of red and one of blue that fused together with a flash. Her palm then disgorged a vortex of white fire, except there was no heat. All five of the creatures froze solid, caked in frost so thick it looked as though they'd been sculpted to top the cake for a very rich child's name day.

  “Shoot them won't you? They won't stay immobile forever,” the baroness said as she caught the onrushing veil spirits in her outstretched palms one by one.