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

by Scott Beith

  “I need you…” I heard a voice cry out. “Kya, can you...” Arlo was saying to me.

  I felt as if I were swimming in the very furnace below us. I struggled perilously to stay awake, but my senses were all gone. The only thing I was aware of was that I was being carried, that there was a dangling feeling of gravity against my numb legs and head as they both weighed me down. My eyes opening and closing to the sight of myself rising up towards the skyline.

  20

  Titan

  “Kya, that was incredible!” the prince said to me as he lowered me down onto the outside edge of the pit’s exterior side slope. This moment was the first thing I could recall after he successfully managed to pull and heave us both out from the large imprisoning trapdoor roof gap while I laid unconscious across his left shoulder. My body a dead-weight as he carefully planted me down, leaving me free, once again, to feel the sky spin from the comfort of flat powdery but solid ground. Opposed to the rocky seasick feeling similar to that of being caught in a heavy ocean rip and getting tossed around by all of its huge crashing tidal waves.

  From the chaos of combustible platform machinery crackling down in Midas’s fiery hell-mouth forge below, we were finally back up on the ground tier level. Upon re-entrance, we were already hearing and feeling the shockwave of equipment bursting apart as the blurry blinking sight of pipes toppling down came like a volcanic rumble that echoed into my ear from right along the shallow powdery graphite sands of the mine hill.

  Workmen were screaming at each other to move quickly as frantic remarks like ‘just leave it!’, ‘hurry, hurry’ and ‘GO! Move, quick!’ took hold in a loud verbal spray of words.

  The cave pocket and all within Midas’s dome-shaped facility was falling apart, appearing as if it were on the brink of a cave in, while his devoted subjects worked perilously and courageously to prevent its demise. And yet, taking comfort in this, Arlo dropped down beside me to his own weary exhaustion. He was calm and composed as if he’d seen something I hadn’t. He laid down beside me, with Anara lying down on his other side.

  “I could really use some help, Arlo!” shouted Akoni. The only one still standing and functioning as he battled to hold anchor upon an industrial-strength fishing line that was attached to the crystal underneath the pit, upon the adjacent side of the hole from us. Akoni was attempting to suspend the crystal above the lava, before it fell in and became completely irretrievable.

  His gallant efforts required a whole cartridge worth of strong thin woven silk lines from his grapple gun, each strand shot down, stuck and interweaved with the others as it coiled into one overly flexed but durable line of rope. Akoni used the jet pack on his back and all the clips on his belt to both jet and walk away in the reverse direction from the hole, just to keep that precious diamond crystal from drowning and dragging him down with it.

  “Just take it easy, ok? We’re going to be alright,” Arlo calmly reaffirmed to his sister and me before battling for the strength to push his bulky body back up and move over to grip the same cord Akoni held. Some other soldiers then appeared out the blackness to help tug up the crystal from below.

  Both Anara and me stared at those soldiers in one shared delirium, having a real inability to process what was happening and realise that those soldiers belonged to our red and gold flags. They were coming out of multiple side tunnels and joining the effort to retrieve the crystal diamond. What we were both seeing was neither a hallucination nor hysteria, but actual reality.

  Milena’s most loyal combatants had swooped in to the rescue, all of them coming into this chasm via various scattered tunnels, blocking the exits in siege as men roughly and ruthlessly bombarded into the huge mining facility and laid waste to it. Midas’s machines crumbling as they were set on fire and their workers were flung and pinned to the side cave walls aggressively while the soldiers searched for their criminal ex-king from within that crowded cluster.

  After having already valiantly dived down to retrieve Anara and save the crystal, Akoni was the one true hero of those caverns, sparing no measure in ensuring that the crystal was secured from falling down into the unreachable volcanic basement below, even if it meant the destruction of his own equipment.

  He had protected it with great risk to his own life, the jet pack that sat on Akoni’s back was depleted of all metallic fuel reserves, beginning to rot and deteriorate as its thrusters begun to burn and eat away at its own metal lining in order to maintain a fluctuating force of purple-white flame. While this happened, Arlo and some other committed soldiers enduringly dug their feet down into the sands and committed to the combined effort of extracting the crystal from below.

  Successfully, the crystal thudded as it reached high enough up the exterior diamond dig site slope to be dropped and left over the pit’s edge without sliding back down, giving Akoni the chance to throw off his jet pack before its incinerated into purple flames. Much of his life’s work burning up.

  Having resurfaced back onto a more chaotic factory floor than it was before, Anara and I were resting within a growing fog of steam mixed with smoke, which blurred almost the entirety of the ongoing chasm and war zone.

  “She’s a little beaten up, but she seems alright,” said one soldier to another as they looked closely over at their dazed princess, who was stricken with bright red and blue cuts and bruises that were scraped all across her arms, legs, cheeks and forehead.

  “Get a medic anyway,” said a fellow soldier. “Don’t get up, girls, just lie still. Rest, please. Everything is under control,” the soldier said towards me.

  “I’m fine,” I replied, coughing under the inhalation of smoke.

  His attention immediately diverted away from mine to further sounds of fuel barrels exploding from a cave tunnel. Soldiers all ducking for cover before Midas made a brave escape through the flames, running boldly towards the larger ongoing conflict as he leaped towards the hallway and through the thick gold vault chamber doors on the other side of us, leaving every soldier to abandon their prisoner hunt and give chase.

  Surprisingly the fires Midas lit activated a sprinkler system that poured water all across the dome through the scaffolding level way up above, subduing most of the combustible components along the lower floor level and ceasing all havoc being caused, allowing the mining site and its patrons to survive and attempt to flee through the tunnels during the former king’s diversion.

  “Get up you two. It’s time to go,” Arlo dispassionately declared. Eager to be a part of Midas capture, too serious to even make a sly joke or pun about his earlier reference to wanting to leave when it began to rain.

  “Anara, can you get up?” Akoni asked Anara, more polite than his brutish friend, but just as impatient as he too was keen to oversee what was happening with his father’s capture.

  “Inform Milena we found them,” said a stern voice; it was the first time I’d ever heard Zephyr speak. He stood above me, on the highest perch of the little corner hill we remained behind, a bundle of arrows dangling out of his long leg quivers. Candle wicks were lit on either side of his leafy green bow as he entered the siege, ready for deadly combat, the sight of those flames being something I did not wish to see so soon after the whole heated experience we had just endured our way through.

  Absurdly so, Zephyr’s typical brown and green forest camouflage had been changed to a grey, white and black linen outfit, making him the hardest hunter to visually distinguish from the rocky scenery. I had always assumed that the hooded marksman wore his green and brown as a form of cultural identity, but it now became clear that he was an archer who would change his attire to suit and blend into whatever scenery he thought he would be entering into.

  He was a blur in the distance, the marksman skilfully leaping onto the second floor, travelling fast, yet discreetly, as he too joined the pursuit for Akoni’s father. A small supersonic moving rock ball followed after him, whizzing along the main path in a speedy pinball chase towards the large gold doors of Midas’s polished vault chamber.


  The two soldiers vanished from my sight as quickly as they had entered it. I had already made a poor assumption upon my gradual rise that Milena’s war campaign was already over and that Akoni’s father would have no choice but to admit another shameful surrender. But after Arlo and Akoni helped Anara and me up and ushered us towards that door, boy did I get that assumption slightly backwards.

  Out of all the loyal henchmen Midas had at his disposal, in under half a minute of one-sided battle, it was only Midas who was left standing. The only one refusing to submit to Milena’s forces, who were trying to subdue him in the large vault room.

  But through a crack in the two doors, I caught a glimpse of Midas using spring loaded chains that came out of his mechanical suit. His chains were sharp and pointy like crossbow bolts and launched out into various high shelves and walls, pulling him side to side in a never ending tactical side-swipe.

  It seemed his metallic gold armour had grown fatter in both mass and size since I’d last seen him. It was merging with the riches within the chamber and was currently fitted with a huge thick spherical roll cage that bulbously spouted out from his chest and gluttonously covered much of his arms and legs. It was made from a mesh of metal wires wrapped like spider webs across all parts of his legs and arms in one inter-weaved protective spiky carapace.

  For me, Arlo, Anara and Akoni it was a day of facing our inner most demons, and as we pushed through those golden vault doors to see what else might be on the other side, none of us could have imagined the amount of resistance Midas was putting up against such undefeatable odds.

  I had walked in too confidently, half expecting to find Midas already locked up in chains. But instead of being greeted with the roars and chants of glorious victory, I was confronted with a battery of falling treasure chests and gold coins raining down. I had to stick by the doors of where the sturdiest high shelves sat above, and even there I and the others were hardly safe from the treasure crashing down and striking the lesser soldiers foolish enough to enter the middle centre stage of his colosseum-sized storage library.

  Midas was against an entire army of our best and brightest soldiers. A passionate ex-king so devoted to his unexplainable self-righteous beliefs, he didn’t care if he collapsed an entire mountainside of shiny loot before surrendering himself. In essence he was willing for us all to die under the breaking roof rocks, toppling shelves and dangerous gold plunder that was piling up into multiple hills all across a once tidy and polished rock library floor.

  Gold coins were pelting down from above, falling like hailstones as avalanches of collectables slid down from the rocking shelves Midas struck against and crashed into while throwing out his retractable chains and lunging himself from wall to wall.

  Gold and metallic objects constantly crashed onto the floor where Midas and our elite soldiers fought. All of the lesser soldiers were starting to join me and the others against the safety of the walls, unable to interfere without being crushed by the unpredictable falling treasure cascading down from the storage height of endless heaven above.

  Every successful strike made against Midas had come from his own wife Camilla; Milena was fighting with her too, both of them unaware of our entrance. They were the only ones who were brave and skilled enough to stay in the middle and dodge the plunder coming down from the high ledges as they tried to tackle and suppress Midas.

  Inside Midas’s mesh suit was clockwork circuitry similar to that of the demonic harvester machines he created for us, but under his thick protective mesh there was a whole rotating complexity of hydraulics and intricate rotors designed to amplify and enhance his own body. All of that flawless circuitry spinning in alternating sequences together, thanks to long and large elastic gold coils imbued by entire haystacks of straw he had stockpiled in a quiver by the belt of his left leg and side.

  He turned straws into compressible gold springs, he could bounce and propel himself – jumping, crashing and rolling against things, sort of like what would happen if you combined Ode and Zephyr skills together.

  Other than Camilla and her instant disappearances, Midas could do everything anyone else could do – only better.

  And so, latching on to the armour of the king, a brave but foolish foot soldier got caught holding on as the cable chains that came out via huge robotic claws that fired from tiny ballistae at both sides of Midas’s hands. That man was then dragged with him wherever Midas went, until flakes of the mesh armour spat out, accompanied with sharp explosive buzz-saw rotating cuffs that would shoot out each time it was struck. Physical force always releasing those spinning clockwork rotors from their inner turbine circuitry railings.

  Shrapnel was erupting out of his fatty mesh suit faster than Midas could repair it, and he was being bumped just as uncontrollably left and right as soldiers on the sidelines took their chance to dive and stab at him only to be put in immediate harm each time they intended to inflict damage upon him and were automatically attacked due to the counter-reactive razor mesh armour he was wearing.

  His broken engine parts were becoming ballistic projectiles that spun out like sharp missiles and serrated Frisbees while they defied traditional gravity and created little vortexes of wind, spiralling in the air, spinning outwards from their centre planetary mass in an external and ever-expanding orbit until they hit and were embedded into the walls all around us, making everyone duck for cover.

  “Kids, get outta here!!” Camilla shouted upon realisation that we were there.

  Arlo, Anara, Akoni and me looked at each other, but we refused to leave until Midas was subdued. We kept close tabs on the loose material that hovered chaotically above the ground while Milena and Camilla tried their hardest to grab hold of their ex-king and rip him towards the ground. We feared the eventual supernova if too much of his roll cage was broken, and its sharp metal content exposed to explode out all at once, rather than in erratic fluctuating sprays of debris.

  “That’s enough, Midas. Yield! Yield or die!” shouted Milena aggressively at him, a confidence not many others would have shared, given the morale of the room.

  But just like back in the pit, gravity was feeling weird and distorted, and some metal objects floated in the air. Midas’s body armour was made with the same internal electro magnets that the infernal mining platforms were made out of, and that was making his suit as light and weightless as a feather, regardless of how much metal was getting sucked into his self-restoring battle suit as the spiky serrated hull continued to shoot out sharp litters of endlessly collected debris.

  Decades of his plunder were splashing around the room while he recklessly skidded and glided over them undistracted, flicking the polarity of his magnets from repulsion to attraction at the flick of an internal switch.

  More and more springs were being broken as just as many were being rebuilt out of transmuted straw and reworked into his hybrid protective machine each time he tucked and rolled. Zephyr, who was positioned on a high shelf above, shot flaming arrows continuously into the mesh. Every shot ricocheting against the polished floor or being caught in the fat mesh, until eventually one arrow grazed the coils of Midas’s arm.

  There he caught the fierce mad-eyed gaze of Midas, the former king then used the compressed retracted springs by his legs to bend down and cannonball into the sky. His leg springs had compacted like a pressurized pogo stick piston and launched him into the air, surprising everyone as he punched Zephyr through the bottom of the shelf and sent him plummeting towards the concrete floor.

  Milena jumped up and released her best controlled scream. The soundwave hit Zephyr’s body and pushed the incapacitated archer onto one of the lower shelves, injuring him further, but at least sparing him from what would have been a bone-crushing fall to the floor.

  When Midas landed back on the ground, he caused the ground to quake, shaking the room as a firestorm of gold cups and grails exploded outwards from the treasure hill he landed on, followed shortly by a hundred treasure chests and their contents falling down f
rom the rumbling shelves all around us.

  My friends and I turned our faces away in haste as everyone along the side walls was smacked by fist-sized blunt objects that flew into us like a flurry of firm blunt punches. The concussive wind had squashed us against the wall as such kinetic energy of Midas’s own landing converted into turbine torque due to his steel spring coiled boots compressing until the point of buckling and then overloaded in rupture of stored energy.

  He flew too close to the sun with that deadly drop, his suit pushed past its limits.

  We all stood in stare as the threshold of Midas’s armour had been surpassed, parts of his suit bursting open as it struggled to withstand the amount of overloading electromagnetic power it had absorbed and turned into heat upon his fierce landing.

  All three layers of inner rotary turbines had been breached as the buzz-saws came spinning out, fuses built from non-repairable glass products were breaking as splintering gold engine fragments melted against the mesh, exposing the sight of one centre red crystal heart and all dynamos that made up the core of the large bulbous roll cage machine he was inside. All of them cracking and glowing red with heat, unable to conserve such residual power.

  But as Midas took his helmet off to look down at his overloading suit, he smiled, amused that his suit was too hot for anyone to get too close to or touch. His sparking machine ejecting out final particles explosively as only the core of its framework was left alive during its dramatic supernova.

  But like a phoenix rising out of its own ashes, the suit was so hot and overly powered it started sucking up metal, recreating the roll cage as silver and gold objects melted in orbital layers, slowly cooling down the core. By the time the others knew it wasn’t going to self-destruct, it had already sucked up enough treasure from the floor to remake mesh for its hull and start the cycle all over again.