by Jaymin Eve
The next orgasm hit me so hard that I lost my rhythm, jerking forward. Coen caught me, holding me tightly while I cried out against him. It went on and on, and when he lifted his hips, driving up into me again, another spiral of pleasure-pain crashed through me.
Heat unfurled inside of me. My power responded to his power like it was coming home to an old friend. Caressing, joining, and then surging together. I knew when Coen was getting close; the pain spikes reached new heights, and I almost thought it might be too much, but then my power and body responded, and I found myself unravelling one more time. Coen joined me less than a click later, his hands lifting me higher so that he could slide a few last times into me, before he let out a low groan and slowed his movements. His last caresses were softer, drawing out the pleasure for both of us.
My body felt raw and yet energised as well. In that moment, I didn’t feel like I’d lost any of my god power the previous sun-cycle. I felt strong.
When I collapsed against Coen’s chest, I mumbled something. I’d been trying to tell him that he almost killed me, but all that came out was a jumble of groans. His chuckle rocked my body as his chest lifted. “Come on, baby. Let’s get you cleaned up.”
When he lifted me, our bodies separated, and I groaned again. The sort of “Pain” he inflicted really should be renamed to a word that represented how freaking good it actually was. When the first steam of the shower room hit me, I dropped my head back, enjoying the heat surrounding me. Coen put me down so that we could clean up, but neither of us moved very far from each other. In fact, most of the cleaning of my body was done by him, and I very much enjoyed returning the favour.
The only problem was that it made me want him all over again, but there was no time. “Are we heading to the others now?” I asked, when we were dry and dressed again.
He nodded. “They’re waiting on the main level. They were only coming back down if there was an issue.”
I took it as a good sign that no one had interrupted us then, but I was still anxious to see they were fine with my own eyes.
Fifteen
When we reached the top of the mountain, it was to find the most perfect of sun-cycles that I had ever seen in Minatsol. The sky was clear and the air was crisp. There was warmth to the sun, but it wasn’t overly hot or uncomfortable. Just perfect.
“It’s like Minatsol got a makeover,” I half joked to Coen. “It’s a new place.”
“Its energy returning is exactly what it needed. The land was dying, and I have no idea how much longer it would have lasted.”
That was a scary thought. The Abcurses were my home, but I also considered Minatsol to be home as well. I couldn’t imagine it just … gone. Along with all the dwellers and sols that lived here.
The broad shoulders of Rome were the first sign of the others. It looked like they were all on the far side of the cliff, staring out across where trees and valleys should have been, but was now just masses of water.
Coen and I picked up the pace then, hurrying to stand with them. “Hey,” I called, distracting them from their silent staring.
A few of them turned in my direction, and I blinked at their expressions. “What’s wrong?” I asked. “Is the water still rising?”
Siret shook his head. “No, the water level is dropping, but it’s not shifting out into the ocean like we expected. Instead it’s being absorbed into the ground at a rapid rate.”
“We’ve been watching it all morning,” Yael added. “The water is definitely not following the normal path I would have expected.”
I stepped closer to the edge of the mountain, staring down at the water world below. It had fully reached this section of Minatsol now; below us, in some areas, only the tops of the tallest trees were still visible. In other places the water line looked to almost be at ground level. It was immediately obvious what had them so confused, because the water was pooling oddly in areas, even when there was no visible barrier that would keep that particular spot so high. Why wasn’t the water spreading out in normal water behaviour?
It was almost like it was moving itself to the places it needed to be, assessing where things were the worst.
We remained where we were as the water continued to settle, and when Emmy and Cyrus joined us, Siret explained what was happening again.
“This isn’t normal.” Cyrus sounded apprehensive. “The water is supposed to have powers beyond our comprehension, but it still runs like water. The only time its course is ever disrupted is when one of us—namely Staviti—disrupts it.”
“Do you think this is his contingency plan?” I asked, frowning. “To redirect the water back to Topia somehow?”
“That would have been my first guess, but the water isn’t going to get back to Topia by sinking into the land here,” Cyrus replied. “Everyone, get your shit together. Something is going on here and we might need to leave immediately.”
“Let’s be quick,” Coen agreed.
We all turned our backs on the strange scene and hurried toward the stairs—though I still slowed as I always did when I reached the stairs, since they seemed to be constantly dampened by rain, sleet, or sea-mist, and the danger of me slipping and somehow falling right off the mountain felt pretty high.
“It must be part of Staviti’s plan,” Aros was mumbling as we reached the first level down and hurried into the lit corridor. “He’s the only one strong enough to completely redirect the water like that without even being here.”
Cyrus and Emmy were a few steps ahead of us and they ran straight past Cyrus’s room, so I assumed that we were all headed to the shared common room—where we had left the supplies from the previous sun-cycle. We were dressed already, and none of us had brought any personal effects, so all that remained were the pilfered supplies from the night before.
“Take the smallest knife, Willa,” Cyrus ordered, pulling a little dagger from one of the bulging packs and tossing it to me.
He was clearly in panic mode, because no person in their right mind would ever toss a knife at me expecting me to catch it without at least one death occurring in the room. Luckily, I wasn’t the only one thinking that, because Rome quickly reached out and plucked the knife from the air before I’d even had a chance to try and catch it. He placed it safely in my hand, and then moved to the pack beside Cyrus, untying a large axe that I hadn’t even noticed attached to the side of the bag. He tested it out by tossing it gently into the air and catching it again, before slipping the cord that had been securing it to the bag around his hips, securing the axe to his person that way. Cyrus handed out weapons to the others, and they all used makeshift fastenings to secure the weapons to their bodies the way Rome had. Siret ended up with two short, curved knives, Yael a fire poker, Aros the top half of a broken spear, and Coen a butter knife. I watched, confused, as Coen slipped the butter knife into his pocket.
“That one definitely looked smaller than mine,” I noted, waving my little dagger towards Coen’s pocket.
Cyrus didn’t even look up from where he was securing a small blacksmith’s hammer to Emmy’s belt. “If I give him anything more dangerous than that, he’ll become a liability. We want to protect ourselves, but we don’t want to be killing people left and right. At least they stand a chance against him when he’s only armed with that.”
“Don’t worry, Rocks,” Siret consoled me, taking the knife from me so that he could tie it with a cord around my hips. “You’re the second-most deadly person in the room—that’s why you get the second-smallest knife.”
“That definitely wasn’t why—” Cyrus started, but five simultaneous voices cut him off.
“Shut up,” they all ordered, causing me to grin.
As soon as we were all armed, we sorted through the remaining food and the few extra items of clothing that we still had between us, before packing it all into one of the bags. Cyrus took the burden of carrying that on his back.
After our rest, we had enough power to head back to Topia and meet up with the other Original Gods,
but none of us were going to leave until we could figure out exactly what Staviti’s contingency plan was, and what strange activity the water was up to. Once we knew what we were up against, we would call in the reinforcements.
It seemed we were all thinking the same thing, because the mood grew quickly sombre as we hurried back out to the stone hallway and up the mountain steps. Once on top, we walked straight to the edge, peering down at the water. The level was lower again and it seemed to be sinking faster than was even natural, considering it had taken all night to stop rising.
“Look!” Emmy suddenly shouted. “I see something.”
We followed her pointed finger down to the valley below, and though I had no idea what, exactly, she was pointing at, a flash of movement also caught my eye, and I focussed in on one of the puddles. A shape was pushing from the shallow muddy depths, mixing with the water as it grew and swelled and threw out a limb, clawing onto the softened dirt beside the puddle. I squinted, trying to figure out what sort of creature it was, until it pulled more of itself free and I realised it was a person.
“Oh my gods,” I muttered in horror. “Someone is drowning down there. We need to help them.” I turned instantly, but Siret reached out and caught my arm at the last moment, shaking his head, his eyes still fixed to the person below.
“It’s not a dweller or a sol,” he warned, seeing something I’d clearly missed. “There’s something wrong with it. Look.”
I turned back to the scene and watched as the thing tore its body free of the mud and rose, straightening up to its full height. Siret was right. There was something wrong with him—I could see his gender now, as he stood there, freakishly immobile. If it had been me I would have been gasping for air or wiping mud from my eyes and mouth. He simply stood there, staring ahead, completely unbothered by the fact that he had just freed himself from being buried alive. The puddle moved again, then, and I watched in increasing confusion and horror as another shape clawed itself free, rising to stand beside the first.
“There are more,” Emmy whispered, sounding terrified.
I scanned the bank and realised she was right. Some had already climbed out of the ground and were standing, immobile, staring forward and blending into the rock behind them since they were still covered in the muck that they had climbed out of. The water began to waver, to shift, and move, and roil, and soon the figures were stepping out of the river itself, walking to the bank to join the others. They didn’t speak to each other or interact in any way, and I had no idea what they were waiting for, but it was clear that they waited.
“They look like servers,” I noted, examining the figures that stepped out of the river, since the mud had been washed off by the water, making it easier for me to make out their details.
Some of them had bald heads; some were only partly shaven, with tufts of scruffiness or messy strands tumbling from patches on their heads. They were all in various stages of undress, with ripped material hanging off their sunken-looking bodies. The material seemed to be older than they were. It was sagging, stained, and crumbling away.
No, not crumbling … decomposing.
“How long have they all been buried under there?” I squeaked, as more and more of them rose from the waters, and those who had been waiting began to walk.
“Many life-cycles, clearly,” Cyrus replied. “There’s no way that this many dwellers have died in recent life-cycles without my knowledge. I may not know of every little thing that goes on in this world, but I would have been aware of a culling of this scale.”
For some reason, it only just occurred to me in that moment that all of the bodies had come from somewhere. They had once been people, just like the servers in Topia, and Cyrus was right … this was too many deaths. Even Emmy and I would have heard about it.
“It was the water,” I heard Emmy whispering. “This was Staviti’s plan. He’s taken every single dweller who has ever died and buried them around Minatsol. In this valley. And no doubt out in the desert beyond the ninth ring. Because he knew that if anyone ever broke his barrier on the Great River and the other channels between the worlds, the waters would flow everywhere. His enchantment draws the water into the land, deep enough to reach where he hid the bodies.”
“And then the water brought them to life,” Cyrus finished for her. “That must be how he creates the servers. He strips away most of their soul and imbues them with his will before giving them the water, and by extension, reanimating them.”
So he’d had an army of servers lying in wait.
“The only question is …” I swallowed, watching as the mass of bodies began to march toward the far end of the valley, leaving room for a seemingly endless stream of their fellows to crawl from the mud and pull themselves from the water. “The question is: What is his will here?”
“It’s his backup plan,” Yael said. “If we attack his water blockages, we’re weakening him. We’re forcing his hand, forcing him to do something drastic to achieve his master plan.”
“And what’s his master plan?” I asked, wondering if there was really any true method in the mind of a crazy person.
“To stop sols from ascending to Topia. To stop anyone from ever threatening his power again. The guardian said that everyone will die. I think she meant it, quite literally. Look at the direction they’re marching in.” He pointed toward the narrow mouth of the valley.
“Toward Blesswood.” Emmy was actually shaking when she answered.
“But this isn’t the only water source that was freed this sun-cycle,” I surmised. “If he has an army buried beneath each one, there will be several armies marching toward the entirety of our civilisation, from all different angles.”
Cyrus swung his bag down and pulled out the maps that he had scavenged the night before, laying them out on the short grass between us all. We crouched as he began placing broken-up pieces of twig on certain landmarks. He dropped one on the map near where we were, at Champion’s Peak, and then he dropped several others down, and I realised that it was an older map. There were still rivers and lakes depicted in the outer rings, where now there was only desert. Cyrus was marking several of the larger waterways.
“These are all the entrances into Topia,” he explained. “They all lead into a river that has since dried up.”
Almost distractedly, he reached for another of the maps and slapped it down onto the ground, showing the valley that was now marked beside Champion’s Peak. I glanced back to the other map, where it showed a river.
“So these are all the places Staviti would have buried his dead?” I asked. “The places where Topia’s water would fall on them and bring them back?”
“Exactly,” Cyrus confirmed.
“That one.” I pointed at the twig that marked a large river running through the desert plains stemming from the Ninth Ring. “They’re only a sun-cycle or two from the nearest town. They’ll hit there first.”
“We need to prepare each ring starting there,” Rome decided. “But we’re going to need help. We can’t do this on our own.”
“We’re going to have to expel our energy to get to the furthest ring in time anyway,” Cyrus said. “So I might as well take Emmy and go back to Topia instead, while you six prepare the dweller people for attack. We’ll tell everyone what’s happening and convince them to help us.”
“We should take the pocket to the seventh ring,” I suggested. “I know that area the best, and it’s only a short journey on foot to the eighth and ninth rings.”
Coen nodded. “It’s a good start. We’ll get there first and evacuate everyone inwards. Send the outer rings toward Soldel. These servers might outnumber us, but they’re moving slowly. They’re in no hurry. We have a few sun-cycles before we need to fight. A few sun-cycles for Willa to figure out how to stop them without killing them, which I know she’s already trying to do.”
“After our quick trip to Topia, we’ll send the other gods to the inner rings to keep everyone evacuating, and we’ll meet you in Soldel,” Cy
rus said. “The best thing we can do is continue to shuffle them toward Blesswood. It’s protected, and the sols there are used to battle.”
“The sols won’t like that,” Emmy said, turning back to the sight of the server army marching down the valley. “Fighting beside dwellers.”
“They can learn to live with it, or they can die,” I said with a shrug. “Personally, I don’t care which option they choose.”
A few tense chuckles met my statement, and then Emmy was hugging me goodbye, her arms stronger than they had ever been as she squeezed me tightly, channelling her desperation to see me safe again through the gesture.
“I’ll be fine,” I promised her. “I always am. Keep yourself safe, Emmy.”
“You too,” she whispered back, before pulling away.
“Don’t die,” Cyrus told me, almost awkwardly.
“You too,” I replied, grinning.
He nodded at the Abcurses, took a hold of Emmy, and they were gone. The others turned to me, but it was Rome who held out a hand. I hesitated before taking it.
“How will we all reach the same place?” I asked. “In the seventh ring?”
“The soul-bond,” Rome replied. “We can all see your house, and the path you walked to school, and the garden of vegetables outside the cottage across the dirt road. We will meet at your old house.”
I nodded, placing my hand in his, and the darkness closed around us without warning, pushing me through nothingness and into the world of colour again as my feet landed against familiar creaky wooden floorboards. A woman screeched, causing me to almost jump out of my skin, and I turned around, noticing her sitting on top of a man … on the bed that Emmy and I used to sleep in when my mother was out for the night. The other Abcurses all appeared then, and she screeched a second time. The man just stared at us, eyes wide and mouth open.
“G-gods,” she stuttered, her entire body locking up in shock.
I realised, somewhat stupidly, that the dweller settlement would never have allowed a perfectly useful empty cottage to remain empty when there were so many others in need of a roof over their heads.