The Grey Ghost: Book Two of the Archaic Ring Series

by Reed R. Stevens

  Now that things had reached this point, Jason acted on the fact that he was the only one capable of moving and quickly fled the scene.

  “Humph, you’ve hidden your strength well, Aelia.” Protector Daren ground his teeth, as a thick vein appeared on his forehead. “But that doesn’t matter. If you don’t cease powering your talisman then the only thing awaiting you is death!”

  “My fate won’t change no matter what I do.” Aelia smiled bitterly, her grey eyes now a light shade of silver. “So why don’t we all die together?” On that note, she threw her right hand out and let go of the two remaining slips of parchment.

  Jason ran.

  He had barely run forty metres when the ground let out a rocky creak and gave a few heaving shudders. For a few moments it seemed as if a terrible earthquake had just been unleashed. This is crazy. A person did this?

  Behind him, everyone that he’d just left behind was currently being pressed to the ground as if a giant slab of stone were slowly bearing down upon them. This included Aelia. The weaker disciples were starting to get crushed beneath the overwhelming pressure, some having already compressed into a meaty, bloody paste. Others still screamed in the throes of agony, as their bones began to crack and their appendages began leaking blood in the way that a squeezed tomato leaked juice.

  Aelia’s screams were piercing. She’d laugh every now and then, and constantly assure her fellow victims that she had no way of cancelling the talisman’s effects. It wasn’t long before a deep impression appeared in the ground around them, but Jason didn’t have time to observe it. The quaking ground flung him about two metres into the air, stealing his bearings out from under him and shocking him into dread.

  When his feet didn’t touch down upon grassy soil as he’d expected, he looked down to see that the ground beneath him had suddenly caved in. He plummeted into a world of darkness amidst clouds of dust and fractured earth, realizing that he’d fallen into a deep sinkhole.

  He panicked and began to flail about, fearing an eventual impact with the unseen ground below. At this rate, he could only wait for his death.

  Sensing a mess of ropy objects within arm’s reach, his hand caught hold of a thick vine that had been dislodged by the previous cave-in. Six seconds later, the vine stretched tight under his weight, and held.

  His paltry relief was short-lived, for the vine tore free from its hold on soil and damaged rock, and he plunged downward once again. He could only hope that he wasn’t too far up from the ground, though the fact that he couldn’t sense anything below him didn’t bode well.

  He fell for what felt like an eternity. He was falling so fast that any moment he might hit the ground or suddenly smack into something, which terrified him. His last thought before making contact was a frantic wish that he would survive.

  His landing was surprisingly accompanied by a large splash, the water around him pleasantly warm like a perfectly heated bath. He felt like his entire body had been slapped by a giant hand as he plunged at least nine metres down into the darkness. He kept his eyes closed and relied on his spiritual sense as he quickly swam up to the surface and filled his lungs with air.

  What’s with this smell?

  Everything was pitch-black and he couldn’t sense anything in his surroundings. He fought to keep his cool as he listened for any possible sound. Where is this? He treaded there for a few more seconds before he accidently swallowed some of the water, at which point he freaked out and vomited up a bit of bile. What the fuck, is this blood?

  With no bearings of the surroundings, he swam straight ahead with all he had in the hopes that he might make his way to dry land. It wasn’t long before he stumbled across something that hung suspended above the water for a length that he couldn’t determine.

  He froze and wondered if the object was a living creature. It could be a giant snake, for all he knew. It would stand out if it were a living thing, wouldn’t it? Fresh fear nestled in his heart. No, not if its cultivation is higher than mine. Wait, are those railings? Is that a rope bridge?

  He sensed a few large objects floating over from off to his left. A chill ran down his back at the thought that he hadn’t considered if there would be any dangerous creatures lurking in this frightening environment.

  He hurried over to the suspension bridge and pulled himself up with a grunt and a whimper. The fall had been rough on him, he felt as if his body were one giant bruise. He grabbed at railings of thick rope as the bridge swayed under his weight, his mind struggling to make sense of what was happening.

  The path ahead of him was narrow, the bridge barely able to permit single file. Still the wooden planks were solid and the ropes secure, which gave off the impression that it had been built recently. After he finally collected himself, he pulled out his only remaining spirit stone, aghast when his surroundings were suddenly illuminated.

  The stone shone like an LED light, and a wave of nausea hit Jason as his suspicions were confirmed. Not only was he stained red from head to toe, the warm mass of crimson liquid that he’d just climbed out of was undoubtedly blood.

  There’s no way… Clutching the spirit stone tightly in his left hand, he crept along the bridge at a slow walk and came to a halt as he sensed three more masses slowly floating over on his right. He waited a few moments, a slight suspicion arising in his heart as he recalled that his spiritual sense had given him a similar sensation just recently.

  He had to wait five minutes for the dark forms to finally drift into the light’s peripherals. Three painted bodies floated silently along the surface like logs on water, their robes thoroughly soaked through with gore. One of them was face-up, which prompted a subconscious peek from Jason as the three people slowly trailed closer to where he idled on the unsteady bridge.

  He was a young man with a strong and handsome face, his aggressive eyes widened in surprise and his short hair wet like the tip of a paintbrush.

  These people haven’t been dead for long. His gaze lingered on the young man’s face as the corpses continued to draw nearer to him. Did people’s faces always stay so animated after they died?

  Jason shook his head in an attempt to clear it. Ignore the bodies. I need to get out of here! Keeping his balance was quite a struggle as he ran across the suspension bridge at an anxious pace.

  The longer he walked, the more deeply disturbed he became. He encountered dozens upon dozens of corpses floating amidst the lake of blood—for he could only call it a lake at this point—and that was just within the area along the path that the bridge followed.

  Though it was difficult to tell since they were all dyed the same colour, all of the people were dressed in completely different styles of clothing. Most of them looked thin and wrung out, not from decay, but starvation.

  Four minutes and at least half a kilometre later, he came across a second bridge, an exact mimicry of the one he’d just walked across. These two intersected at an odd angle, and it was at this divide in the path that Jason paused for a moment to consider the situation. In the end, he chose to stick to the original path, hoping that the end of the bridge was tethered to some sort of landmass.

  The number of bodies that Jason came across continued to increase as the minutes bled by, his tolerance for the frightening situation approaching its limits. We were in the middle of nowhere. Why are there so many people here? And why are they all dead? He didn’t even want to think about the blood.

  He glanced up at the hole he’d fallen through, but to his horror he couldn’t find it. Whether it was above or below, there only existed a penetrating darkness that chilled his nerves and left him with the sensation that he was walking over a thin sheet ice and heading farther from the shore. It’s because the moonlight just faded. It’s not like the hole closed up, right? That wouldn’t be possible, anyway.

  After nearly three hours of walking, he’d come across two more bridges and covered at least four kilometres, though each time he stuck to his original path. It wasn’t until halfway through his walk that he rea
lized that if he were to encounter someone walking toward him, then a crossing of paths was inevitable.

  Jason’s worries were unwarranted, for the only people he happened across were stiff and lifeless. He encountered hundreds over the course of his terrifying walk, all wrapped in their own unique styles of dress, all stained with the same red coating. He gradually began to sense something, a subtle energy lingering in the lake beneath him, though he had a hard time focusing on it for more than a few seconds. What is this place?

  He continued on for another hour before the rope bridge finally came to an end at a broad extension of rock. As soon as he got off the bridge, he stared back at it in bewilderment. He’d walked nearly five kilometres from where he first pulled himself up onto its wooden planks, not to mention the unknown distance that it ran on for in the other direction. Despite its incredible span, it held itself with the straightness of a taut string. Wouldn’t the bridge sag down a lot in the middle?

  Under the illumination of his spirit stone, he began exploring the rocky area that he’d arrived at. To his dismay, he confirmed that it was just a small patch of slightly elevated rock no more than twenty metres wide. Connected to this chunk of rock were two more bridges.

  Frustrated and beginning to pity himself, Jason chose the middle bridge and resumed his perturbing march. Over the following six hours, he passed thousands of bodies, so many that he didn’t bother counting. Not all of them were in the lake.

  There had been two women lying atop the bridge about three kilometres apart from one another, both showing signs of extreme emaciation and similarly wearing the faces of people who’d come to terms with a terrible inevitability. Like all the others, their clothes were completely different, one wearing long robes styled with decorative trim, whereas the other wore tight-fitted leggings and a brocade vest over a blood-drenched tunic. Bizarrely enough, their eyes had been wet with fresh tears, which meant that both women had to have died within the past hour.

  After stumbling across the second woman, Jason forcefully composed himself and continued on his way. If he couldn’t maintain his rationale, then he’d have no way of getting out of this place alive.

  It turned out that this suspension bridge was eight kilometres long. As had happened earlier, he arrived at another rocky plateau, though this one was different from the last.

  For reasons that he couldn’t explain, Jason didn’t immediately venture forward. He couldn’t sense anything with his spiritual sense and the light of his spirit stone had a limited reach of about six metres, so he was fairly certain that it was just another empty area. Only…

  Why am I shivering?

  The darkness before him carried a particularly malicious air, something he’d yet to experience since he fell into this hell. It was as if he were blindly walking into the open maw of some giant monster, long rows of fine-edged teeth ready to chomp him into a meaty paste at the drop of a pin.

  Reluctant to turn back, Jason proceeded forward with quiet, cautious steps. Different than the open space he’d just left behind, he discovered that the rocky ground had been fashioned into a cylindrical platform that protruded several metres above the lake’s still surface. The ground beneath his feet had been smoothly polished and was riddled with thick carvings of archaic characters, though they weren’t written in a line-by-line format.

  When did the bridge get higher?

  The first thing Jason did was walk around the fringes of the platform. He was unable to shake a strong feeling of discomfort, an instinctual sense of alarm that ate at his conscious with every unsteady step. The circular mass of hewn rock had a shocking diameter of over a fifty metres, and it was around its base that the largest amount of bodies that Jason had seen thus far were congregated, at least two hundred people floating in a still, silent ring around the stunted pillar of stone.

  Peculiarly, the light given off by his spirit stone seemed to dim whenever he wandered closer to the centre of the area, to the point that it was impossible not to notice the sharp reduction in brightness.

  After doing a full circle and arriving back at the spot where he’d first stepped foot onto the platform, he’d counted twelve suspension bridges in total. All stretched outward into the blackness beyond, perfect imitations of one other in every way. Although he wasn’t sure how large this dark, cavern-like area might be, he was fairly certain that he’d wandered into its centre.

  The indecipherable carvings on the floor were arranged in an odd assortment of shapes, with a focus on the centre of the artificial island. From above, it would appear as an equilateral triangle within a perfect circle within a pentagram. He inched forward with growing apprehension, the light of his spirit stone doing a poor job of illuminating whatever it was that sat hidden within the darkness.

  I can’t sense anything, but…

  At the centre of this meticulous feat of symmetry was a pair of identical stone pillars that stood four metres high, both topped with large rings of metal that were run through by dozens of finger-width chains, which seemed to take on a sudden shine as Jason crept closer. Dozens of small bolts were fixed along the inner faces of the pillars, each anchoring one or more metallic ropes in place. All of these chains created a giant web of silver, with a strange woman hoisted up at its centre like a fly caught in a spider’s trap.

  My God…

  She could have been anywhere from her early fifties to her late sixties, but it was difficult to tell in her current state. She was naked, her body thin and painted in a sickly paleness, her silver hair traced with streaks of black. The long strands obscured her downturned face from view, her expression lost behind the frizzled curtain. She’d been crucified in the most terrible way imaginable, each and every chain running through her body and keeping her suspended in place like an animal carcass on a meat hook.

  Everything save for her lolling head had been threaded through with the strange, glimmering metal. She was captured in an ‘X’ shape, her lean limbs stretched to the limit and then tightly secured in place by the chains.

  This is beyond cruel.

  He subconsciously took a step forward, intent on helping the woman, but he paused on the first footfall. She’s already dead. I don’t have time for this. He needed to get out of this messed up place as fast as possible.

  Almost as if to prove him wrong, one of the woman’s dislocated shoulders suddenly twitched, the chains whispering with light clinks. Jason was so taken aback that his breath caught in his throat and he froze up where he stood. Not a sound could be heard as he watched the unmoving scene with a perturbed expression, the scent of iron strong in the stagnate air that he slowly resumed his breathing.

  Over thirty seconds passed in utter stillness, which was soon broken by a raspy, debilitated voice.

  “Another one?”

  Jason didn’t manage a response, though at her words he became terribly conscious of the countless bodies that floated around the platform.

  “How many years has it been?” The woman mumbled to herself in a drowsy voice, as if she were waking from a long and confusing dream. After a short stretch of silence, her lean frame began to shake, a mad laugh cackling from her obscured lips. “To think that the last one would also be the weakest…”

  How can she still be alive? Jason finally mustered up the courage to speak. “A—are you okay? What happened here?”

  There was no response from the woman, who abruptly stopped laughing as if she’d suddenly recalled an important memory. It was then that her head shot up, her long hair parting to reveal an oval face that still retained a shadow of great beauty, one that would carry an unrivalled bewitchment were it not for the glaring, scabby pits of darkness where her eyes had evidently been removed from their sockets.

  “Your aura,” hissed the crucified woman. “Circulate your aura!”

  Jason stood there agape for a few moments and then belatedly complied.

  “A Neoman?” The lines on her withered face contorted in solemnity, the first sign of worry to touch upon her
mutilated face despite the terrible pain that she must have been feeling. “Boy, you want to escape, yes?”

  “Of course I do!”

  “I will help you leave this place. Only, you must do something for me in exchange.”

  If she knew a way out of this place then Jason couldn’t afford to turn her down. “What do you need me to do?”

  “Is it not obvious?” She fixed him with a dark, empty-socketed stare. “I will help you leave here. In return, you will do the same for me.”

  “What do I have to do?”

  She laughed at his eagerness, and the dry cackle transitioned into a fit of hacking coughs. Struggling to catch her breath at the end of the episode, she spat a large glob of blood onto the ground between his feet.

  “Cut your finger and then press it to that spot.”

  Jason stared at the blood she’d spat out. “Why?”

  “It is the only way to form a Blood Oath.”

  He stared at the woman with a wary expression. “What’s that?”

  “A way to ensure that you don’t go back on your word.”

  “And how do I get you out? It’s not as easy as breaking those chains, right?”

  “This sealing arrayment cannot be broken. A special key is required in order to deactivate it, only I don’t know its location. Though, I now have a clue.”

  Finding anything within this giant, blood-filled cavern would be nothing short of a miracle, and yet the woman spoke as if the key to this so-called ‘sealing arrayment’ was somewhere in the outside world. “How am I supposed to pull that off?”

  “You don’t have to agree to my request,” she said softy. “You’re free to die here just like all the others.”

  He glanced toward the sea of blood, his mouth thick with a coppery taste. “What does it look like, the key?”

  “It’s not actually a key. It’s a ring.”

  End of Book Two

  Epilogue