Tall Tales: The Nymphs' Symphony (Scott T Beith's Tall Tales Saga Book 1)

by Scott Beith

Miners in overalls took turns manually sweeping these dirty uncut gems from the catcher grates as they used poor worn-out old broomsticks to roll the treasures into nearby collection – those men happening to be the only muscular members of their entire excavation site.

  Filled to the brim, we were intrigued to keep watching as we walked further into their mining enterprise, choosing to follow these hefty men as they wheeled the full bin into the next work station, releasing it before their roaming supervisor. Each gemstone in that bin was blue, as each of them were picked up by this elderly supervisor and briefly examined before being placed into assorted piles.

  The supervisor held up each piece to the light, using one stray black glove as he inspected their transparency using a gold rimmed glass monocle that rested tightly upon that man’s old eye socket. He quickly examined each specimen, carefully looking for the best of the shiny blue diamonds.

  “Discard the rest,” he ordered surprisingly, shaking his head, clearly displeased with the results from the batch, only choosing to keep three or four out of thirty and using his offhand to wave back over the labourers to throw the rest away. His valuable few were then handed to another to be passed through a second conveyer belt along another pulley system that must have head the next rooms polishing chamber, which sat behind a huge enclosed thick gold vault room.

  “Imperial! Imperial!” a group of playful children then yelled towards him in excitement, running out carelessly onto the central mining pit just ahead of us, dodging the lava forges and climbing a few hills of sand as they came out from the doors of a track directly opposite to the one we had come in from. The young girl shouting it again and again from the middle of her juvenile pack as she ran with a hysterical euphoria towards the inspector we were approaching. These kids drawing attention from all around as she was accompanied by at least two dozen ecstatic boys and girls also carrying fistfuls of rocks.

  “This one’s flawless, we think,” she stated to the supervisor. “Can you check for us please,” she continued

  That child then begun slowly opening out her palm to show a growing crowd of adults what she and her friends had found. The look of glee across the children’s young faces being enough to draw our own stare as we kept our distance but looked over from afar. Although that probably wasn’t our best judgment, considering we could have used the distraction to pass through the bulk of the crowd undetected.

  “And if it is imperial, would it be worth your life?” the supervisor asked rhetorically towards the children swarming around him. “No running on the factory floor!” he scolded to them patronising, leaving them momentarily stunned as they bowed their heads in guilty shame. “It’s dangerous, and you all know better than that,” he added, leaving the kids unsure of what next to do, “Well… come on then, give us a proper look,” he said, ruffling the hair of one of the boys.

  Everyone peered down, holding their breath, mesmerised. The girl carefully handed over the bright glimmering blue stone, acting as if it were a delicate glass that could be dropped and shattered.

  “Well, it is clear enough,” she said before bringing it closer to his eye and the light. “I think it might be of imperial quality, kids,” the supervisor then stated with a cheerful smirk, all the adults and parents smiling at the kids as they heard his verdict. “So what the real question is… What will you do with it?” he asked curiously.

  The kids all smiled as they looked at each other and jumped about, patting and pushing each other with a modest attempt to control their excitement. “I’m going to donate it,” the girl then generously indicated.

  “Well, if that be the case, young lady, then I think you and all your little helpers should go take it to Midas yourself,” the supervisor courteously extended, setting the kids into a frenzy as they began vaulting towards the gold doors ahead.

  My friends and I looked at each other with unease at the mention of Midas – his name confirming our previous suspicions that this was where he lived.

  “You were right. He is here,” Arlo whispered to me as the small hope we’d had of this mission being risk-free began to fade.

  Amazingly, though, despite the sight of us in the tunnels, most miners here were so focused on their tasks they hadn’t made a big deal of our arrival. Other than a stray one or two who briefly stared at us with curiosity, we were moving through the mine towards the diamond dig site virtually undetected.

  If they were just pretending we didn’t stand out, they were doing a very good job at it. Despite their obvious malnourishment, those cave nymphs were still just as passionate and fanatic about Midas’s operation as he was. They were acting as if their work was saving the world. All of them were loyalists to Midas, offering their services because they wanted to, and not because they were being forced too. Everyone here seemed to not only be blindly following Midas in his quest to destroy The Borderlands, but also faithfully believing in whatever twisted vision he’d shared with them about it.

  “Although it’s savage, and clearly unsafe, I must say this whole enterprise is ingenious,” Anara said, voicing the thoughts she knew everyone was already thinking. “Getting all these people to work together like this would take some serious levels of leadership,” she continued, walking further through the denser areas of the mining crowd as we stepped down from the centre flat factory floor and onto the sandy slopes of the side pits, where much of the physical labour was still being performed. Our direction being towards the strongest level of artificial light being generated in this dome.

  “I’ve never seen anything like this before,” Arlo agreed.

  “And this is not good for us. Taking a large crystal from an organization like this is going to be tricky at best,” Akoni added. “There’s at least a hundred miners here, who all know each other’s names. What’s more, if you look up you can tell there’s a whole connection of housing estates in the tunnels above us,” he added, seeming to have a keen knowledge of the cavern’s infrastructure.

  “How do you know that?” Anara asked him.

  He hesitated, almost as if deciding whether to explain his thoughts or not. “Um… well… the pipes and the smell,” he eventually said. “It’s not just brimstone,” he elaborated. “I think the cooling pipes are also wastewater pipes… They’re being reemployed to create the steam that spins the turbines and powers all their systems.”

  “Haha, gross,” the prince chuckled, amused by the prospect of it.

  “Yeah, that’s disgusting,” Anara agreed, sickened by the thought of it.

  “Yeah, but you have to admit the design is clever,” Akoni said enthusiastically. “They’re using steam made by burning the wastewater in the forges to push and drive these machines, while effectively eliminating toxins and getting power out of it. All whilst cooling the very machines being used in the process. How else would you cleanly and efficiently irrigate an underground place like this without a vast water supply?” he rhetorically questioned.

  “Well, I’d just dig a big hole,” Arlo replied, blocking his mouth in disgust, as if the steam were a toxic fume we had been inhaling.

  “They’re already in a hole, Arlo” Anara quipped.

  “So, are we breathing in—” I began to ask, my curiosity trumping my repulsion towards the idea.

  “No!” Akoni said quickly, interrupting me. “The steam is pure water vapour – everything else gets burned away by the heat,” he explained. “As long as those pipes never break, it’s actually a very clean method to use,” he added, attempting to suppress Anara and Arlo’s looks of disgust while he looked to me, amused by their reaction.

  Neither of us were exactly surprised that a prince and princess born within a castle of solid stone and gold could be repulsed by the prospect of irrigation. “So should we turn around then?” I asked Anara and her brother with a small smile and snicker.

  “It’s as good a reason as any,” the princess said back.

  “No... Well, maybe, only if it starts to rain,” the prince joked, all of us trying to ma
ke light of the foreign environment we had found ourselves within, the prince being first to climb the first abandoned sandpit cut-site and follow a reinforced chrome metal girder ramp that led away from the crowd and over towards the trenches on the other side of the chamber.

  We didn’t really know exactly where we needed to go, but nevertheless we felt safest so long as we kept moving further away from the main excavation area, actively choosing to head towards the much hotter and drier areas, which the overhead plumbing pipes seemed to disappear towards. Walking along a River of Styx fielded by rows of small spotted lava banks popping up and about every couple of yards or so, littering this entire activity site.

  Pssss hissed each lava spurt we passed, a sound similar to that of snakes ready to strike out, when in reality, it was just idle water drops plunking down from pipes overhead as steam was built by the instant evaporation of the water, just as Akoni had so perceptively described to us before.

  What he hadn’t noticed or explained to us, however, was the use of cables carrying electrical current up and down the factory’s walls and deep under our feet, insulated by all the waste deposits of crushed granite sand.

  It had been almost two decades since Midas was exiled from our land, but in this time his mind and technology had only improved along with his maturing age. For now he was clearly capable of using his science for more than just illumination, but also to help replicate other nymphs’ abilities, such as conducting electricity, like his son, via the use of steam generators and thick intertwined golden cables that led outwards from the magma trenches.

  He was also replicating King Helios’s ability to direct and focus light, with the light present being generated from raw electrical energy coming from a crystal in a giant steel cage that sat in one of the unused dig sites to left of us. The fuse box sparking at times as an operator controlled the adjacent conduit machine and used the concentrated light source to carve circuitry grooves into the insides of the refined blue crystals they seemed to be searching for, methods of utilising any and all excess power that was being delivered from the various steam mills that hung over the magma trenches like fans, while pipes of wastewater dripped into those trenches and created the wind that made them spin.

  It appeared that we had entered one of the ‘dangerous’ areas mentioned before to the kids, as we were walking alongside an exposed metal tech yard of wiring and transistor boxes that filled many of the previous dig sites that had been recently repurposed to serve as the mind and battery source of their whole grand enterprise.

  For us, most of it came at us to a point of pure disbelief. The mechanical ingenuity and automation of self-moving clockwork parts were leagues beyond any other sources known, and because of it we were all starting to consider the possibility of whether Midas’s new technology was just as capable of mimicking Camilla’s teleportation techniques and her gateway marble portal stones Midas built for her in the past, as it was on that thought that I realised what the bright glowing obelisk object we were naturally being drawn down towards must have been.

  We approached the diamond dig site indicated by the map and the aluring diamond beacon in the furthest corner, nearing the closest zone of the proper industry walkway and their library-sized gold treasury vault up ahead.

  The dome made us feel as if we were inside Midas’s mind.

  And although the speed and sound of things were quite intimidating to observe, no one could say that it wasn’t sensational to watch. To both a novice like myself or even an expert engineer the man in glasses beside me, we assumed nothing could withstand the heat intensity of molten rock, but the diamonds that were being extracted from the ore down in his final dig site were being dipped into the stable lava ponds by chrome barrels in order to leech the unwanted rock soot from the glossy treasure inside.

  The lava leached out all of the valuable minerals from the ore by merely melting away anything that wasn’t dense enough to survive the extreme heat treating agitation process.

  It was an impeccable reform of automated productivity, as there was no one operating this part of the dig site. It utilised complex harvesting clockwork robotics made up of cranks, cogs and bolts. Four-legged metal lycan prowler creatures programed well enough to cut, lift and carry the rocks without any intervention from the miners who operated in the less hazardous dig site areas.

  These harvesting bots were searching and rummaging through the sands, using their sharpened mining claws as digging paws, they were glowing blue-brained automated creatures with enough comprehensive intelligence and sense to be capable of collecting minerals and categorising ore into varying buckets based on either smell or appearance, strutting as they walked with ore grasped between a big husky set of fanged teeth. Large metallic toys so lifelike they could’ve very well been confused as a type of living, breathing and earthworm-fighting pet companion.

  The creatures ignored us as we dropped down the slopes and into the corner sand pit in which they dug their small mining holes, sniffing through the dirt, as tiny blue crystal brains and red crystal hearts seemed to flash in alternating function and thought. We moved cautiously forward, unsure of the creatures’ speed and hostility as we looked to inspect them. Those creatures all operating around the bright aqua glowing diamond that seemed to lure our attention from the start.

  Blue like the ocean, the crystal stone obelisk they worked around was enormous: a bigger, clearer and crisper centre diamond than we ever could have dreamed of bringing home – a brighter Sunspire crystal than the one we had currently.

  “It’s perfect,” Akoni murmured to us, mesmerised by it as he cautiously timed the harvesting machines movements in order to pass them and get a closer look forwards.

  The diamond was entangled with wires, diverting power through the trenches just like everything else. It was a giant transponder that seemed to dictate commands before the robots. Oscillating between blue, red and green as it flashed with vigorous colour, not a great deal different than an oversized flickering mood lamp reflecting shades of colour based on the movement of things around it. But these changing colours were internal, acting as some form of hive mind remote controller that ticked these clockwork animals and vectored them programmable commands via some control panel that must have been on the rails of the second scaffold piping level still directly overhead above us.

  We started noticing the stares of those feral four-legged raptors as they began bearing their razor sharp teeth at us and growling, warning us with each step not to get any closer to the crystal.

  Up above the pit we were in, a league of loyal workers had begun to ring around and encamp us, their four-legged silver raptors’ barking starting to draw more and more unwanted attention.

  “Guys.” I said, looking upwards in unease, the first to notice the nymphs watching us from above.

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” echoed a strong confident voice from high above the roof railings prior to that man jumping down, sand dusting across the entire pit as he landed just a few steps in front of us, just before the pre-cut giant crystal. Gold springs laced into his boots and bracing his kneecaps as those coils compressed in order to cushion himself from what would have otherwise been an ankle-shattering heightened drop.

  Just as much of an intricate network of hydraulics across his muscular arms and fit upper torso as there were across his legs. A string of thin gold wire frames wrapped around most of his body like a roll cage. And yet all but a leather quiver filled with straw suspended across the large tool belt that completed his arsenal.

  Without a hood, cloak or jacket to conceal his face, we all recognised Midas. The instant shock of seeing him there, had jolted all but Akoni backwards.

  “It’s the largest of its kind,” Midas stated while we stood there waiting for the stunning silence to lapse, the former king walking towards us unintimidated by any form of contestation. “Took us a while to find” he added, placing his gold encrusted right hand just over the top of the giant stone, feeling how smooth its edges w
ere only to move on and slowly enter into our immediate breathing space afterwards. The harvesting robots were all bowing their heads down as his entrance prohibited any of them from further yapping or movement. “Diamonds are almost indestructible by nature,” he continued. “And believe me, I tried,” he said with a smirk, attempting to make light of the heated situation as he advanced forward to greet us all.

  “It’s not well known, but if you change the way the light bends inside them, they can be quite computational, no different than nerves inside a body,” he said with a creepy and almost insidious kind of tone, making us all feel unsettled and uncomfortable as he made it clear that he wasn’t going to be giving us the crystal without putting up a fight.

  He held up his bulky right and left forearms only to detach his metallic armguards as a sign of peace, dropping the heavy arm bands and some of its wire webbing onto the sandpit floor, revealing two crisp and clean muscular arms that hung calm by his side. He was acting so cocky, it was actually terrifying.

  Last time I saw him it was but a glimpse in the dark, but he looked nothing like the man I saw in Ambervale. In all honesty, he looked good... In fact, he appeared so healthy and fit I found it too absurd to consider him the same man that was supposed to be crazy, for he was still so strong, youthful and confident, enough at least to remind us all just how out of our depth we really were to be facing off with him.

  He was hardly the desecrated and scarred up war chieftain we’d seen under the shrouds back at Ambarvale. In the light of the brightened excavation site, his rigged arms and thick tree branched calves made him look quite impervious to harm, even without the gold thorny vines of barbed wire he initially had protecting him. Muscles most likely credited to all the heavy hydraulics he must have been helping to lift every single day in this place since his reluctant exile.

  Akoni slapped out his flare gun with no time to spare, powering it up with one professional rotating spin as the fuel moved right from a loaded canister and into the barrel chamber instantaneously while he aimed it towards his father. The purple spew of plasma radiating as his hands delivered enough charge to have the whole cartridge chamber ready for quick release. “We’re taking this, Father. No ticks, no one needs to get hurt,” Akoni said, his expression angry and anxious.