by Scott Beith
Midas walked towards a front shelf ledge, taking from a box spare red crystals and fuses, utilizing in the tiniest of moments his one vital opportunity to repair and alter a few quick new defensive installations along the inner lining of his ingenious machine before anyone thought to stop him. Midas’s roll cage was unscratched and as good as new, while everyone else was bleeding and injured from the fallout of just trying to get the armour off the first time around. We started to realise we might be in a fair bit of trouble.
Midas had obviously been preparing for his doomsday for many years. It wasn’t a retreat or an escape plan to come into this vast vault chamber. He had lured everyone inside because the plunder could constantly restore his suit and its mechanics, making a suit so effective at self-replicating that he was at the point of being indestructible.
Every time his armour sustained damage, those springs harnessed the energy for its own molten and magnetic repair. In its simplicity, Midas had designed a clockwork machine that would only get stronger the more you hit it.
Milena and her soldiers were all in an endless battle of attrition against him, unaware that they would eventually lose this fight once fatigue won out. For Midas, there was no need to use physical assertion of energy, as he gained energy from the condensing retractions of his suits flexing springs.
“They can’t win this way,” I said to my friends beside me, all of us taking cover under the first front level shelves to Midas’s library of riches.
My friends heard me clearly enough, but nobody was listening. As time pressed on, and no extra ground was gained, it slowly became apparent to everybody that Midas was impervious to physical forms of harm so long as he wore his suit and remained in that vault chamber.
“Stay by the door!” Milena commanded, spotting her son drawing his own sword and lingering forward, moving towards Midas, who had his back turned to him. Milena’s attention was diverted long enough for Midas to charge into her and bounce her right into one of the low level treasure shelves along the rear of the round multiple story room. A claw and chain shot out from his ballista and clenched her leg, yanking her along the floor until Camilla could sever the chain with her lance.
Next Camilla stabbed the lance into Midas’s suit again and again, creating sparks as pieces of it broke. Micro-explosions of particles bursting out towards her from the incision seam she had created from within the mesh, her head near the sparks or small sized buzz-saw rotors hitting the blade as she tried to dig it deeper down towards actual flesh, despite all of the cuts and flames projecting out near here hands and face by doing so.
Midas then kicked her away with great ferocity, but her spear stayed in his cage, making her the first one to successfully puncture a small opening in Midas’s suit. Milena leapt back up and recklessly threw her hands boldly into the sparking wire hole.
Her skin was like serpent scale, and with it she ripped out components from the interior nexus of Midas’s inner gold cage with her fingers.
The ex-king was, for the first time, noticeably scared, compressing his leg springs back as he tried to launch away. But instead of jumping, he dropped to the floor and kicked Milena into the wall while he rolled away backwards, towards the shelves directly opposite me and my friends.
Milena had failed to pull out the crystal core that clearly micro-managed his defence systems, but his repairs were slower this time around, and the stitches weaved by his ductile straw more crude. Camilla appeared before him again and again forcing him to keep moving and rolling from harm.
Once tucked into a ball, Midas could bend flexible straw into coils around his fingertips and transmute them into strong gold plated wires before another could uphold his attention. Ode himself had begun rolling and ramming into him consecutively but both of them just bounced off each other and made life more difficult for those of us along the sidelines, who had to move to avoid being crushed.
Between Ode, Milena and Camilla, the fight was like watching three gods take on a titan. No one else could get close enough to make even the smallest of differences. Every weapon ever chosen, and every outfit and battle plan ever created by our borders was once conceived using something from Midas’s ingenious designs. Quite simply like a father to us all, he knew us too well to be bested by any trick or trait we had in our joint arsenal.
“You’re going to need to intervene,” Arlo said to Akoni, willing to defy our queen’s direct orders to stay on the sidelines if it meant taking down Midas before the whole cavern crashed down on us.
“She told us not to move,” Akoni said.
“You don’t need to move to shoot that thing,” Arlo responded, looking down to Akoni’s flare gun pistol.
Without his backpack for fuel storage, the gun would need to be charged manually by Akoni’s highly conductive skin. “Arlo, I can’t,” Akoni said reluctantly.
“Akoni, both our mothers might die if you don’t take that shot.”
“Arlo, were in a room full of metalloids. I take one bad shot and everyone in this place and the mountain implodes,” he warned, the consequences of metal-eating flames being used in a treasury vault being about as potent as lighting a matchstick on a haystack.
“I trust you’ll you get a clear shot,” Arlo stated, still devoted to his earlier demand, feeling the necessity to do something drastic before it was too late.
“Akoni, don’t! Don’t listen to my brother,” Anara immediately disputed. “They can do it. Give our mothers more time,” she said in a frightful but determined hope, watching her mother pounce on top of Midas from behind, toppling him over as she perilously ripped at the back of the mesh, searching for a place to stick her hand in and catch the crystal core moving in orbit around the inner layer cage of the suit.
Midas rammed Milena into a shelf repeatedly, trying to get her off him.
She let out a piercing scream into the mesh, trying to scramble some circuitry, but it only served to expose electrical wire that jolted her off him and through the wooden shelf wall behind them.
“Arlo, get everyone in here,” Milena whimpered out to her son in a shaking defeat, desperately leaping off two stiff firm legs and fishtail-whipping the ex-king in order to momentairly subdue his advances towards her, crawling towards the middle of the floor in escape as Ode charged into Midas, only to have Midas fling consequentially into Milena and into the sturdy rock of pure cave wall.
I was surprised by my own reluctance to help. I was scared for everyone, but all the same, I still stood there indecisively over whether or not to get involved, feeling almost as if I had no part in this conflict. I didn’t feel like Anara, Arlo, Akoni or even Ode had any part in it either, for that matter.
We were all too young, born into their everlasting feud. We never got to make a choice about what side we wanted to be on, nor much recollection of what things were like before Helios overthrew his best friend.
Always obliging to his mother’s will, however, the prince did not feel the same on the matter, choosing to run out of the golden doors to find and call over any extra reinforcements lurking nearby.
“Watch out!” Akoni shouted to our queen, pointing to the multiple shelves collapsing one by one from above her. A heavy amount of tools and jewels crushing onto the splintering storage shelf as it all fell on top of Milena, burying her alive under the thick wooden parts of the ceiling.
Anara and Akoni together rushed through the firestorm of things falling down, while I stayed watching from the sidelines, expecting Milena to humbly explode out of it like the immortal I thought she was.
The hail battered Midas and Ode, but they were unfazed by it, and Camilla shifted in and out like bouts of smoke, managing to dodge the majority of it. The three of them together finding a way to ignore the orchestra of thuds and sounds in the room while they all remained locked in wrestle, refusing to flee for their lives.
“I can’t get a grip!” Akoni yelled, fumbling as he tried to help pull the shelf off our encaged queen.
“She won’t be able to
breathe under there!” Anara exclaimed in fright.
“Kya!” Akoni called to me. “Are you there? Come on… DO SOMETHING!” he yelled to me in a flustered panic.
His shout startling me out of my residual daze.
“Do you think your shadows could help raise it?” Akoni asked me upon my slow approach.
“I… I’ve never… what shadows?” I flustered to say, my hands up to showcase the glare of the bright shiny room and all of its blinding lights.
“Just try!” Anara said to me. “Kya, please. You’ve got to hurry,” she then begged, using her powers to see through the rocks so she could locate exactly where her mother was situated.
I followed Anara’s lead, using every dark crevice underneath the shelf to inflate a cloud and attempt to expand the gaps in between my queen and the rubble. The headache I had was returning tenfold as I managed to solidify enough of the corners to tilt and jack-knife the shelf for Akoni to reach inside. The main wooden plank dropping its contents as the shelf was then elevated by Arlo upon his unexpected re-arrival, effectively granting enough of a gap for his mother to draw a breath and crawl out of.
“I’m fine,” the queen stated as more shelves continued to collapse all around the room. “Just get out of here,” she said, waving away the worried doctor who came over – just one of countless others who’d just arrived on the scene.
“Odysseus, it’s me,” Midas said to Ode, Midas’s helmet worn down to just a crown and protective mesh visor that protected his gritty and dirt stained sweaty face while he was held down by the miniscule sized gnomish stone man. “Come on, boy. You remember me, right?”
”Don’t listen to him, Ode,” Camilla and I said together, and our joint concern was enough to ensure Ode didn’t succumb to letting Midas go. Ode instead used his heavy hugging torso to pin the ex-king down, while Camilla leant over and finally managed to yank out the red crystal heart responsible for the suit’s restoration feature.
“Honey, don’t do this,” Midas begged his wife.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“You’re killing them!” he shouted in exhaustion, loud enough for all the soldiers present to hear.
Camilla looked back at her son, tears in her eyes as he finally got to lower his pistol from his father on the floor. “There are no ghosts, Midas,” she said to her husband, letting her guard down as she straightened to stand up.
Her husband grasping her left leg as she shrieked in pain, with Midas searing two thick gold handprints into her skin before Ode struck his head with club-like stubby hands.
“You’re killing them,” he whispered one last time, delirious but determined to stay awake, as at last the war was over.
21
Conquest
The next few days came and went like a blur. I remember feeling homesick and bored for the majority of it, having spent hours of time at the tail end of Milena’s royal caravan just watching sandy ferns fail to bloom under a slow but everlasting desert sun.
The queen’s army was up early every morning, marching out before the days would break in order to minimize prolonged exposure to heat and exhaustion, hoping the inevitable thirst and dehydration that weighed upon us each new day would eventually cease once a visible water hole could be found.
Having left ourselves alienated and vulnerable to a dry hot desert and its predators, the queen’s entire convoy was ill equipped long before we had even set out from the mountainside. Her soldiers personally chose to discard the most basic food supplies in order to stockpile as much of Midas’s loot as their caravans could carry.
So it seemed every member in her army was willing to sacrifice their own comfort and appetite so that their families could live a life of wealth and luxury upon their victorious return back home. Such thoughts of future nobility and avarice helped boost the base infantries’ spirits, and they continued their marching as they tackled the dry harsh terrain of the white flat barren sands endlessly ahead of them.
Materialistically speaking, I hadn’t taken much for myself, nor had any of my friends, for that matter. To us it felt immoral and unethical to steal from those who had already lost everything.
Milena had overseen the raid of Midas’s treasure vault personally, viewing it as a form of justice and restitution for all the wrong he had done to our borders, hoping that all the treasure that she relinquished to her army might help rectify some of the travesties committed through a decade-long feud between nymphs and gnolls.
Before we left the mountain side, however, Akoni and I took it upon ourselves to search the Caverns’ city estate way up above the dome, walking through their vacant empty streets, looking to find the exact extent of Midas’s foul play. All we could find were hidden families terrified of us invaders, with all but a few patchy leathery shrouds among them to convict Midas of his alleged gnoll activity.
With each abandoned house we had entered, I had had a certain hope that Radament would be found in one of them, that he would be trapped somewhere up there in an inconspicuous jail cell along with all the other abducted Ambervale captives.
But when the time came for us to leave the Caverns, our queen took it on a foolish gamble that our wagons could withhold the heavy cargo without their wheels becoming bogged or buckled upon the steep descent back down the frosty volcanic mountain path.
Lucky to have had nothing go wrong with the convoy’s departure, as it maintained a sturdy but slow pace out into the barren wilderness and back towards our borders. At first, everyone was happy to take on the extended travel time due to the additional weight load when it meant a little extra in their pockets when they finally arrived home.
Whether it be through fear or respect, every soldier was happy to follow Milena’s direct command while Camilla was out of action, resting with the other injured soldiers. The doctor was with her, trying to figure out a way to remove the tight gold handprint melted into her skin from her vindictive long lost husband.
As for Arlo, Anara, Akoni and me, we were given our own cart, which, from the outside, looked as plain and as poor as that of a farmer or merchant’s, but underneath such a crude timber and cloth exterior was Milena’s secret war room carriage. It was made to look just like all the others, but its insides held the softest and most comfortable carriage within her fleet.
Donated to us for our service, but also as a means for Milena and Camilla to be able to keep us safe and watch over us from the distance.
The carriage windows were all covered up and it was slightly cramped for four people to live in, but we were thrilled to have it. It was more spacious and luxurious than anyone else had received for their long trip back home through the wastelands.
As for the first two days in particular, a great deal of time was spent simply in rest and recovery, lying down on a pit of throw pillows, staring at the darkened ceiling’s vivid illustrations while dim and hazy sunrays lit up its thin shaded canvas from the blistering heat outside.
The four of us had laid against the same clustered cushy circle of make-shift bedding for two days straight after having pushed the war room table out of the carriage and replaced it with all the soft things we could find before our departure.
Akoni snored loudly to my left the whole time, his glasses remained pushed up so close to his forehead that the frames looked like they were going to leave a long lasting imprint on his face. As on his left laid my princess, snoozing away peacefully with her many unnatural ‘beauty mark’ bruises spotted across her face and body, as a result of her fall.
Arlo was passed out on a side seat, supposedly on duty, his head pressed firmly against a small side dining table we’d found and kept tucked away against the thin walls of our tiny joint cabin.
I was awake for very little of it. I was always drifting in and out of consciousness, lost in space, unable to regain my composure until all sore muscles and sleep deprivation had been restored. I was opening my eyes every so often to a vast collection of mythical art paintings depicting beasts and wildernesses bey
ond our borders, which painted a clear picture of the entire world we knew little of, and the vast expanse of space we still considered uncharted territory.
Like a long overdue holiday, we all had a completely stress-free sleep, knowing we were finally safe among our friends, protected in a centre room made to be both spacious and comfy: compiled with fluffy blue and purple silk pillows scattered around a rugged up floor we were divided up upon.
The carriage we had was pulled by Vallah and the other spiderlings in our group’s command. They slowly dragged us along with the herd, as despite the entire army being too exhausted to talk or joke, the army was still a fierce and formidable force, should any creature stalk our caravans and consider us easy prey. Not that it was much of an issue, considering there really was nothing around us to be scared of – other than supposably some stray desert scorpions and large scarab beetles, which could easily be missed by our scouts and avoided due to their ability to burrow.
Quite simply, we were in an environment too hot and dry for much life to exist, meaning that the only danger to Milena’s fleet was the tenacious climate. All while we attempted to cross over the flat endless barrens of The Badlands in search for some woods that might eventually help signify the rainforest mountain pass that would lead us back to our own borders.
By the third day, everyone in the wagon’s centre cabin was up and about, working quietly together to divide the middle underbelly of our carriage and separate it into four individual tenting compartments. We hung long unused sheets overhead to convert the main room into four private spaces for each of us, but during the daytime we took them down so we could all sit together and interact.
Along each wall was delicate woven tapestry that worked together to synthesize one huge and long elongated map depicting the world and every constellations once above us in The Borderlands’ sky. It was detailed with fancy forest symbols and repetitive patterns of wind and ocean waves, accurate enough for us to be able to guess how far we were travelling and each extinct tribal civilization we passed through.