by Scott Beith
“And yet you’re the one holding a projectile,” Midas replied to his son, appearing completely unfazed by the gun pointed at him. Smart enough to know what the device is. “Do what you have to, son.”
“Just leave alright, before I have to,” Akoni threatened, his hand slightly shaking as he kept the gun aimed at his father. A very dramatic scene for all involved, as even the spectators stood unsurely above, afraid of what our friend might do if provoked.
“So I see you’ve had a look at some of my old designs,” Midas calmly responded, ignoring his son’s warning. “I’m impressed, my son. I never could have got something like that to work.”
“Don’t call me son!” Akoni yelled back to him viciously and vindictively. A true darker and more emotional side of him I had never once seen before.
“Ok…” Midas agreed in tactical surrender, backing up slightly towards the crystal in order to give him more space. “You are right, I haven’t earnt that privilege yet.”
An uncomfortable quietness settled in the pit as we awkwardly watched this family reunion.
“Xenon or radon plasma?” Midas asked curiously while he stared boldly down the barrel of his son deadly flare-gun.
“Argon,” Akoni answered, maintaining an angry frown as he said it.
“But radon would burn hotter and brighter,” Midas argued.
“But radon won’t disintegrate gold,” Akoni retorted.
“That hurts, son,” he quipped, looking at his own roll cage armour only to realise it was useless.
“I said don’t call me son!” Akoni shouted in a stern warning.
“But you are my son, and killing me won’t change that,” he said with a tearful yet proud defiance. “Akoni, please, I mean you no ill-will. I left you that very sword so that one day when you were old enough you could come find me,” he continued, backing away from us and the crystal. “You have no idea how much I’ve missed you, how hard it was for me to leave without you” he said. “And as for you, Kya,” he then said, his eyes shifting to me and shocking everyone with the realisation that he knew who I was. “Yes, I know exactly who and what you are,” he said, reacting to our joint stare of genuine surprise.
“You know, some might say that shadows are servants of the light. That they are the watchers who maintain the balance between the day and the night. And that’s why they require a bit of both to exist. I really do hope you keep that in mind when this day is through,” he then said to me, choosing to look and talk directly to me as I sat there, the least defensive against him.
“Now, I’m willing to bet you have so many questions about your parents – questions others won’t answer,” he said, continuing to lower my concerns as he lured my curiosity and interest.
“Don’t let him fool you,” Anara pleaded, fearing I might succumb to some form of trickery.
Even if the confidence of which he spoke was strong enough to set all shivering nerves solid into stone. He then held out his hand in indication that I should walk over to him.
“Come on, I know it’s you – I’d recognise those amber eyes anywhere… the only real question to ask is why the hell you are on their side as opposed to mine?”
“Don’t pretend you know her,” Arlo responded on my behalf.
“What do you know of my parents?” I asked despite clearly sensing the others were afraid that my loyalty to them was waning, my dire curiosity for answers too compelling for me to even care if I was indeed scaring them.
“Everything,” he responded.
“Kya, Midas is delusional and a manipulator, don’t trust him because he knows your name – there’s many ways he could have worked that out,” Arlo warned, moving slightly forward in an attempted stance that impeded my path further towards the former king. “Look at the state of his people. Look at the monsters he’s created. How many of your own people have starved and suffered just for you to make these metal predators?” he asked of Midas, trying to break me from the former king’s entrancing gaze.
“All for what, so you can terrorize and weaken my parent’s regime?” he said, the first to verbally speculate the gnolls being these metal skeleton creatures under rags of cloth.
“I’ve done nothing of the sort. You have all been deceived,” he stated, backing off again. “See, I’m not the great monster in the night,” he said, staring towards me. “My brethren are skinny due to a lack of light, not a lack of food, but they all choose to remain here and help me build things so we can buy food for those who really need it,” he witted, amused at his own smug sentiment.
“You can’t fool us,” the prince maintained. “You’re no bodies saint or saviour. How many would be dead if our parents didn’t stop you in time?”
“Less than the amount that died because they did!” Midas yelled immediately back to him. “Ask them! Ask anyone!” he screamed, pointing up towards his own cave nymphs as they stood in stare. “It breaks my heart to say this to my son, but all of you are blind fools, and the only monsters here are you,” he said, his eyes lingering towards me once again, almost suggestive that I was the biggest monster in the group.
My feelings were mixed – my conscience nearly twisted. I could only wonder how conflicted Akoni must’ve been feeling, his finger twitching and hovering over his pistol’s trigger, an incendiary bolt of flame readily point-blank from his father’s chest plate. The morale dilemma we all indecisively felt towards the true face of evil and exactly what evil was supposed to look like.
I had no idea how to judge Midas. I’d always believed an enemy would have a hideous face and lack all grace, passion and charm, but having looked into the eyes of a ‘madman’, it was becoming clear that no matter who you are, everyone believes they are the good guys of the story.
I was only just starting to realise that perhaps evil was faceless. That good and bad were simply two different sides of the same coin, and only different depending on what side you were viewing it from. That in essence, everyone believed themselves to be the victim as a means of justifying their own misguided actions.
“I already know you won’t use that,” Midas declared bravely to Akoni, breaking the brief silence as we stood there in heated standoff.
The prince raising Midas’s old reflective sword towards Midas’s throat, being the first one to approach the former king. “He won’t have to,” he declared, despite the growls of metal beasts all resurfacing as they raised their heads and started snapping their knife-like teeth open and closed in a loud sign of aggression. Each growling becoming a bark that jolted us as we tried to remain frozen still.
“Funny thing is, I believe you,” Midas then calmly remarked, staring towards the fiery glowing crystal sword he’d built, gently brushing it away from his neck. “Akoni’s hands look clean enough, as for these girls… their eyes seem pure,” he continued. “But not you,” he told Arlo. “I reckon you’re every bit your mother’s son, aren’t you?” A pause of silence had filled the room as he started to wander around, safely protected – thanks to his miners all picking up weapons, and his robots seated around us.
“I can still shoot you!” Akoni said, flicking the gun barrel in another nervous tick, trying to validate his serious resolve.
“THEN DO IT!” his father shouted. “At least that way I’ll die trying... Unlike the rest of you ignorant murderers.”
“Just shoot him, Akoni!” Arlo ordered without a moment’s hesitation. “I know he’s your father, but his war ends right now if you do it,” he coldly admitted while Anara and I shook our heads in disapproval.
Anara stepped forward. “Midas, he doesn’t want to hurt you, and you don’t want us dead either, so let us just walk away then,” she tried to persuade him. The voice of reason as she was no longer concerned about possession of the crystal but rather over the safety of every one of us. “Please, just have a shred of decency and think of what your son would have to live with if he had to shoot you…” Anara pleaded.
“I can’t,” he said “You all know nothing of what th
at would do,” he forewarned. “You’re just fools fighting a war you know nothing about,” he stubbornly attempted to reason.
“You’re deranged, and that’s all we need to know,” Arlo announced.
“Am I? Is that what they tell you?” he vented. “Look at you all… Intruders, thieves trying to steal from a harmless colony. I respected your laws and made it my very life’s work trying to undo the damage I did when I built that infernal machine,” he ranted, his voice bitter in hostility. “Milena has poisoned your minds, and for what?!” he yelled. “No amount of light and wealth can purge the darkness seeding in every one of your souls. You’re being controlled! DON’T YOU GET THAT?!” he fiercely shouted. “Just lower your weapons and I can explain.”
“Don’t trust him,” the prince said to his best friend.
Akoni was confused and looking to me for guidance, completely unsure of what he should do as he stared towards me. I wished I had an answer for him, but the truth was I had no idea. Midas’s ramblings were so convincing, but the fact is delusional people do believe their own lies. And this certainly did still feel like a trap, and if both boys were to lower their weapons, we would be defenceless against the very smart metal machines that could rip us apart at a moment’s notice. The fact was we were all scared, and none of us really knew what to do to safely end this stalemate
“SHE TURNED MY OWN SON AGAINST ME! DOES NOT ONE OF YOU GET THAT?!” Midas suddenly shouted, making us jump all over again.
Pure fear had overtaken me long ago, but each time he yelled, he sent my heart rate soaring all over again. A fight was imminent, I knew it. I had been in enough of them lately to almost foresee them coming. I noticed all my protective shadows weakly lurking in the mist as they slowly moved towards me.
“Akoni, don’t let their family use you like this,” Midas pleaded. “They managed to convince your mother, but if you just look at the facts, you will know I’m not the enemy here,” he said.
“I’ll be the first of us to admit that I have a lot to be sorry for. A lot of wrongs I need to make right. But with a world falling into darkness, the fact is none of you have the courage to do anything about it,” Midas claimed, unshaken by his son’s wobbling trigger finger, and making a very strange and ironic statement concerning the fate of The Borderlands, considering he was the one leading us back into that famine and darkness. “Unfortunately for the rest of you, though… I do.” He then waved upwards to an overhead supervisor before turning away from us and taking a step up onto the slopes, just as the volcanic floor beneath us began to rumble and shake.
19
Death Trap
Unsure of where I was, I had to recompose myself over everything that had just happened. Suppress a burning pain suddenly spread across the side of my left leg and hipbone, wanting nothing more then to rub the intense aches away as I tried to retrace the memory of recent events and figure out what happened to the solid floor we had stood upon, right after the pit floor dropped and the whole sandy dig site imploded around us.
I could feel bruises already beginning to swell; the burning feeling of skin grazed tender as I was pelted and barrelled downwards along with an avalanche of graphite sands. All of it coming crashing and cascading down into one of the dangerous lava trenches of Midas’s mineral leaching forges that was inconspicuously hidden underneath our feet.
Like pulling the plug out of a bathtub, the edges of the dig site lowered first in collapse, while the mining platform beneath descended and slumped into a cone-shaped slope as it dumped the grey sands down into the earth’s core. Sand that was shredding against my skin roughly as it dragged and pushed me down in heavy waves towards the volcanic magma.
I’m not going to lie and tell you that the drop was fairly padded and soft. I was in a pain all over, my body beaten and tossed around like a ragdoll. The platform was a hard solid metal, and the sand felt like sandpaper as it heated and rubbed against my back, side and elbows while I slid and rolled uncontrollably towards the lava lake just off the edge.
What was worse was the headache I immediately received – the lack of thought and memory and not knowing where the others were, or if they were injured. My mind was merely in autopilot as I struggled to find footing against loose falling sand, swiping in a rabid panic, trying to stop myself from falling off the slope and cliff that were fast approaching. I had just fortunately been able to claw enough of my fingernails against the rivets of steel bolts in the sloping plank floor as I stopped my descent just before its fiery rail-less smooth exposed edges.
My dying shadow was leaning above me as that dark puppet figure fought to pull me up, its arms tearing apart from its splitting core as it did its best to save me despite the intense light causing it to rapidly rip and deteriorate into a fading gaseous haze. Its hands were solid and reinforced like monster’s claws while it clasped under my arm and dug in to sands with the other, helping keep me from falling further down. Its extended arm flaking into mist as it used what was left of its solid body to heave me upright enough so I could hold myself steady without it’s help.
I had fallen the furthest in the group by far. I looked up from the platform’s flexed hill to see Anara was clinging to her brother in horror near the implanted centre crystal up at the top. The two of them helplessly stranded and terrified upon watching me tumble and fall perilously out of their joint control.
“Are you ok?” Anara shouted to me in concern, stuck three quarters up, by the middle of the mechanical platforms steep slumping middle crest, relying solely on her brother and his firmly staked crystal sword to keep her footing.
It seemed that the diamond sandpit dig site was a ruse. When it was flexed the other way it was just one of the lowering chrome tray platforms that helped leech dense minerals out of the rock ore through heat treatment, and, as result of Midas’s deception, we were stuck in a hole between the volcano’s very mantle layer and an enclosed steel roof. Stranded in suspension on a hot piece of mining equipment that dangled just over an ocean of lava below.
And as I was the closest one to one of the four exposed sloping ends, I was the one in most imminent danger. I heard the crackling of molten rock as it frequently boiled and popped. Chunks of liquid fire spurted out spontaneously from below and onto the lower ledges of the platform I stood nearby. Thankfully, the angle of the hill sent the flaming debris rolling down the slope and back into the inferno from which it came.
What remained of my shadow was just a black cloud of smoke by the time I was able to move. It still had some of the features of a person, but with its very last moments of life, it pointed upwards for me to travel towards the others in the steep middle centre of the slippery hill, possibly where the light was less fierce but also where the risk of volcanic micro-eruptions would be less prominent to land.
“It’s ok. I’m ok,” I responded to Anara as I looked to crawl back up the hill I’d slid down, allowing my legs to drag against the platform in limp as I didn’t want to risk dislodging my feet and sliding back down the thin coating of slippery sand left behind across the smooth polished girder platform we were stranded on.
The searing heat alone was enough of a fierce reminder to just how close I’d come to incineration – having been only a few stray seconds away from actually falling into the volcanic bedrock of this mountain’s molten mantle and core.
I had to think how foolish we all were for letting Midas stall long enough for this inferno’s activation, and leaving us buried inside this entombed chasm without remorse. An entire framed metal roof enclosed over the forge’s pit, with all but a few cracks of exterior light left to glare through while we remained eternally imprisoned under the factory floor.
I couldn’t see Akoni anywhere, and for a moment I was terrified that he’d fallen to his death, but after a moment of searching my memories before the fall, I remembered staring into his eyes as he reached for my hand at the moment of our dropping. He was hovering over us as he did it, with two thin booster rockets blasting purple light, suspe
nding him in the air on an angle above us, failing to catch any of us as we dropped through the forge’s trapdoor.
I remember very strongly the mortified look he had upon his face when we all dropped. The look of someone who probably thought all of his closest friends had just died. A man who was suddenly alone in the world while he was tasked with the difficult decision between fighting for either his friends, family or civil duty.
And so wishing to find a resourceful way of communicating with him while squirming towards my other friends, I was looking up at all of the thick spring loaded ceiling frames that had deadlocked into the roof as it caused its instant closure, realising very quickly that the roofing was meant to prevent lava from spurting out onto the mine floor and was going to simply be too unbreakable for any one of us to burst our way out of, regardless of how much combined force each of us could try and deliver.
We truly were trapped and confined. The mining platform was ingeniously built at keeping things locked inside it. It was magnetically suspended in a pulsing levitation above the thick molten iron core below us, with the very crystal we wished to steal being the only thing keeping those roof magnets remotely dialled up and operating.
I had to think that if Midas really did want us dead, then we would have been. After all, the tray we sat on could be remotely lowered into the core, and no doubt he had the ability to drop us into the flames with the press of a button, and yet he left us elevated high enough to the roof that we were kept from burning – perhaps seeing us as trophies or bargaining tools for use at a later date.
Improvisation was going to be tricky, too. As without the use of cables or any form of rope to electronically bypass, this whole sloping structure had us caught in a magical and inescapable free float, levitating above a natural furnace of intense self-sustaining geothermal power.