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part seven.
IP: 82.14.67.140
Posted on September 10, 2012 at 02:42:56 AM by georgia

Part seven Beneath Mount Etna, Sicily, Earth In the centre of the Earth, where nothing could live, it was just Mallos’ bad luck that he hit something which could hit back. His body slammed against something hard, which shifted behind him and consequently struck him in the side of the face. The force was enough to send him spinning back in the opposite direction and he crashed onto the rock floor. For a moment his vision blurred and he was unable to move, but he was aware enough of his surroundings to make out a harsh bark of laughter which sounded like Rhaegar. Biting back a groan, Mallos rolled over and looked up to see Allianah’s face slide into focus. “Oh,” she said simply. Ignoring the hand offered him (Aura’s: neither of the other two would think to help) and with some effort, he pulled himself back onto his feet and put a hand on the side of the wall to steady himself. Nobody wasted any time on greetings, although Aura did offer him a small smile and Allianah and Rhaegar raised their eyebrows in acknowledgement to each other. The cavern was enormous: at least a hundred feet high at its lowest point, roughly circular in shape with a circumference of about a mile. In the centre of the cavern, the rock dropped away into a gorge, the depth of which was impossible to determine from this distance. Before the gorge was a crudely cut raised dais on top of which stood what looked like, from here, nine glass cabinets. The first thing they were all aware of was the attack, which came from all sides. None of the creatures stayed still for them to get a good enough look, but they seemed to be large bat-like animals with about a metre-long wingspan and vicious mouths rimmed with many rows of sharp teeth. The mane of fur around their necks and along their bellies gave them a lion-like impression, and they were mostly black or dark brown in colour. There were hundreds of them in the huge cavern in which the two groups had unwittingly stumbled into from different directions; as soon as they’d entered, the bat-creatures had swooped down and started clawing or biting at them. The creatures’ targets, it seemed, were the deities’ heads, faces and throats. They swarmed above their heads, the leathery wings filling the sky and enhancing the darkness of the cavern. Suddenly, a number of the bat-creatures would break away from their fellows, dive-bombing the fairies below, their mouths open, teeth gnashing, the sharp barb-like hooks on the end of their wings being used either to scratch, or to attempt to gain a grip upon flesh or clothing. With a growl, Rhaegar swung his arm through the air, the metal of his arm guard colliding with the bodies of two of the creatures with a dull thud, knocking them from their path. Alianah meanwhile now held her staff in one hand only, leaving the other free to combat the relentless assault of the diving bats. She grabbed one out of the air, throwing it down towards the ground where it were trampled underfoot, as the Nubian landed a square blow upon another. “Can you feel it?” Aura shouted to the others, ducking as one of the creatures swooped at her head. Allianah and Rhaegar both grunted an affirmative, as Alianah caught the demon nearest to Aura in the face with the end of her staff. Gar’s weapon arched through the air, sending a shower of blood down upon the cavern floor. Mallos just nodded; from the way he was working his jaw, it looked like he was trying to get feeling back into it. “Run – the middle!” Allianah batted back two creatures with a single blow and started sprinting for the centre of the cavern, closely followed by the other three. Their magic was still blocked, but it seemed enough have been left to them for them to sense the incredible power emanating from the gorge. It felt like a rip in the fabric of space and time, but it was like no rip that any of them had ever come across before. The entire cavern pulsed with power. The bats appeared to be growing bolder, breaking from their fellows with greater frequency. Gar turned his weapon around in his hands, so that the plate of metal – greatly resembling a miniature meat-cleaver - that protruded from the reverse side, and swung it into the crowd of demons. It came away bloody, a couple of the creatures spiralling down towards the floor like felled planes, their skulls smashed in. One of the beasts landed upon his back, succeeding in getting one barbed claw through the gap between the plates of the armour on his shoulders. Alianah hit the creature in the centre of its body, knocking it off balance and fracturing its wing. A second and third blow was enough to separate it from the wing entirely, and send it flying through the air with a screech. The Nubian spun her staff, round, her arms crossing over and bracing against the resistance as the wooden bough collided with a number of bodies. A scream of protest came from the air above, as the long spike, set onto the crown of Rhaegar’s poleaxe skewered one bat-demon through the torso, and ripped through the wing membrane of a second. Another body crushed beneath Alianah’s heel as she took a step backwards under the strength of a new assault, her arms uncrossing as she moved her staff in another circular motion. When they were only feet from the gorge, a bat-creature swooped up behind Aura, clawing at her back and sending her crashing forward into Allianah. The Nubian toppled forward and would have skidded over the edge if Rhaegar hadn’t pulled her roughly away. She regained her balance swiftly and helped Rhaegar knock back a few of the closer creatures, buying a few minutes for the four of them to glance over the edge of the hole. It was deep, although how deep none could say, since it ended in blackness; judging by the incredible heat, it probably led straight to the Earth’s core. About thirty feet down and hovering in the centre of the gorge was a swirling grey mass, the appearance of which brought to mind a black hole. Like an optical illusion it seemed to be continuously feeding on itself and yet never changed size. Flecks of light and colour were kneaded in and out of sight as the image swam before their eyes, not solid or liquid or gas but something else – some kind of matter beyond fairy understanding. A rip. More than that, though. Whatever the danger was at the heart of the Earth – the monster which callously removed their magic and played them against one another – it had a power beyond any of the original fairies: a power to open a rip to the Realm of the Dead. It was from the rip that the bat-creatures were continually flowing, and it was from the rip that the danger was drawing its incredible strength. “The rip – feeding – the monster,” Aura managed to get out between ducking and weaving. Mallos seemed to be thinking the same thing. “Shut it down,” he agreed, striking at the bat-creatures with the only weapon available to him: his fists. “Glass cabinets – must do something.” Allianah and Rhaegar didn’t waste time on words, but they followed the other two as they leapt onto the dais. Rhaegar took a position by Mallos, Allianah by Aura, and they both focused on knocking back the creatures to give the Spaniard and the Englishwoman a chance to examine two of the cabinets. The glass was mottled, making it difficult to see inside, but it looked like they contained some kind of vase. On the front of Aura’s cabinet were nine faintly glowing squares. On the first square was a picture of a pair of shoulders shrugging, and on the remaining eight were a series of lines, like a tally: the symbols 0-9 in the ancient language. A combination code. Aura tapped in a few common sequences in quick succession with no luck and increasing frustration. How was she supposed to - smash. Aura spun around and saw that Mallos hadn’t even attempted to crack the code on his cabinet, and had simply thrown a rock he’d found on the floor. As he reached through the glittering shards and pulled out a dark blue bottle, she swore under her breath and looked around on the floor for a similar tool. The ground was littered with loose rocks but, before she had a chance to grab one, one of the creatures swooped down and crashed straight into her cabinet, smashing both it and its contents and showering her with broken glass. Aura lifted her arm instinctively to cover her face and felt her skin tear as a thousand tiny glass needles embedded themselves into it. She wasted no time, but moved quickly onto the cabinet nearest her. This one had a three-dimensional rotating cube sitting atop it, with nine smaller squares on every face, each sporting one of six colours. A Rubik’s cube. Aura completed it in twelve seconds and the cabinet doors slid open to reveal a green glass bottle, similar to the one Mallos had unlocked. It had some weight so it obviously contained some kind of liquid, and scratched crudely onto the front was a glyph in the ancient language: a man kneeling and scrabbling at his head while blood poured out of it. The determinative sign in the word ‘enemy’. “The glyphs?” Mallos shouted at her from across the dais, apparently noticing that she had acquired her own bottle. “Determinatives!” Aura yelled back. Determinatives were symbols placed at the end of a word in the ancient language to give a clue as to what that word might be. The determinative here was the clue to the contents of the bottle. “One of them must close the rip!” Mallos studied the glyph on his own bottle. It was clearly carved into the shape of an open eye, which in the ancient language was a word itself - iri, the verb ‘to make or do’. If Aura was right in thinking these were determinatives, then it must have a different meaning too. Mallos put the bottle on the floor beside one of the cabinets, ducked as a bat-creature swooped at him and stepped in front of another cabinet. Without pausing to examine the lock, he hurled a fist-sized rock at it, careful to aim for the corner so as to avoid smashing the contents. The rock carved a hole in the glass big enough for him to get his arm through, but as he pulled the third bottle out one of the creatures ripped it out of his hand. It sailed a few metres across the dais before smashing on the ground, darkening the rock with its liquid contents. The fifth bottle fell into their hands – quite literally – when one of the bat-creatures clawed at a glass cabinet next to Allianah, shattering it and showering her with sharp shards. Aura dove forward and managed to snatch the bottle as it tumbled to the ground. The glyph on the bottle depicted a side-on mummiform figure bearing a tiny crook and a flail, which Aura recognised instantly as Osiris, the ancient Egyptian god of the underworld. The ancient fairy language had basis on Egyptian hieroglyphs, and there was religious and mythological cross-over between the human and fairy cultures. Aura rolled sideways to avoid an attack from one of the bat-creatures, leapt to her feet and breathlessly pressed the bottle into Mallos’ hand. A quick glance lent him the same conclusion. In ancient mythology, Osiris protected the gates of death – perhaps he would do the same today. Mallos’ arm was stronger than Aura’s, and he only had to run a few paces forward before launching the bottle over the edge of the gorge, directly into the heart of the rip. There was a heart-stopping pause, and then… a hundred more of the bat-creatures flew out of the rip. “Nice work, Ormstunga!” Rhaegar shouted. Mallos shrugged. “Apparently Osiris was a false god,” he muttered just loudly enough for Aura to hear, right before Allianah jettisoned one of the bat-creatures into another cabinet and sent the sixth bottle crashing down onto the stone dais. “Behind you!” Gar grunted to Allianah as he speared one of the bat-demons through its open mouth, the spike’s point emerging on the other side of the creature’s skull, “your five o clock.” The Nubian woman spun around quickly, peering through the mass of writing bodies and flapping wings. Two of the creatures were heading straight for her, their clawed feet stretched out. Allianah’s eyes narrowed. She did not have time to react before they gripped her by the shoulders, lifting her from the floor between them. Growling in frustration, Rhaegar ripped one of the creatures from its place as his neck where it had sunk its teeth into his skin, leaving behind a great gash. He smashed its head against the bloodied handle of his weapon, as he pushed his way through the bats after Allianah. He passed close to the dais, just as one of the creatures swooped straight for Aura’s face. She made to duck but wasn’t quick enough, and the demon knocked her over and pinned her to the floor. Mallos saw what was happening, crossed the distance in a heartbeat and struck at the bat-creature with the only weapon available to him: the seventh bottle in his hand, which he’d just released from its cabinet. The glass smashed, forcing Aura to turn her head sideways, and the creature gave a final, pitiful screech as Mallos drove the broken bottle through its heart. A final thrust pushed the creature away and he was able to help Aura back onto her feet. Allianah kept a firm grip on her staff with her right hand and, holding it long-ways, she thrust upwards in an attempt to knock one of her captors enough to force it to loosen its hold. Its long claws dug into the skin of her shoulder, the movement of her arms making each pinch all the deeper. Gar had been shrouded in another flurry of demons, apparently intent on defending their brothers and their quarry. Blood ran down onto the Dane’s hands, tricking down over the lumps of his knuckles and pooling within the gaps between his fingers. He groped at his belt with his free hand, and pulled his dagger sharply from its sheath. The blade of the poleaxe arched through the air once more, felling three of the creatures, and, for the fraction of a second, creating a big enough gap between the press of wings for Rhaegar to focus on his target and throw the smaller weapon across the cavern. The dagger struck the bat-creature on Allianah’s left side in the chest. She felt its grip loosen, and took advantage of it by thwacking it solidly with her staff. The creature dropped like a stone. The Nubian felt herself lose altitude suddenly as the remaining beast struggled to keep her airborne, the tips of her toes brushing against the stone floor. One arm completely free, she was able to club the remaining demon, until it too released her, peeling away with a furious screech to re-join its ferocious comrades. Allianah landed cat-like upon the floor. She straightened up, catching her breath, before picking up a run back towards the dais. She reached down towards the floor, tugging free Rhaegar’s dagger from the corpse of the bat it had hit, as she passed. Staff returned to both her hands, the Nubian waded back into the fray with a determined expression set on her face. Once he had ascertained that Aura wasn’t badly hurt, Mallos went straight over to the eighth cabinet and turned his attention to the puzzle there. Aura started towards the ninth and final cabinet, but something held her back. What was the point? There was a very good chance that the bottle they needed had already smashed to pieces on the floor. Mallos, ever the optimist, was ignoring that probability, but in that moment Aura couldn’t help but succumb to the hopelessness of their mission. ‘It’s not right,’ she thought, frustrated. ‘It’s not right that we’re risking our lives to try and help, and this ancient creature is just toying with us.’ She ducked behind one of the broken cabinets to avoid the clawed attack of a demon, and the realisation hit her: it was just toying with them. It always had been. The train, the insects, the parasitic worm… none of those things had actually tried to kill them. The ancient creature could have murdered them in a flash once it took their magic, but it not only spared their lives by granting them the ability to cope with the heat and the pressure, it sent them realistic challenges. Which would beg the question: if all this served merely as entertainment, who was to say that any of the bottles would close the rip? Mallos had extracted the eighth bottle and was weaving his way over to the ninth cabinet; Rhaegar was swiping at several demons with an expression of grim pleasure; and Allianah had climbed onto a pile of demon corpses in order to reach some of the higher ones. For the first time, Aura turned her mind to the real, known methods of closing a rip. Usually a rip could only be closed by the person who had created it, or by another very powerful divine or ancient being, but a person with limited magic and a good understanding of rips could close them manually. She could do it – of that she was sure – but she needed to be in contact with the rip. While it was hovering half-way down the gorge that was impossible, unless… unless she went through it and closed it from the other side. The nagging thought which had occurred to her while they’d free-fallen down the volcanic shaft returned. There were stories – the myths of Heracles and Hermes – about people who had returned from the Realm of the Dead, but there were no records of such a feat actually being performed. In truth, half of Aura’s soul was already in the Realm of the Dead, from when she had died and been resurrected by her familiar the first time. Her soul would never be complete unless she was able to make the journey to retrieve the other half. One of the bat-creatures landed in front of her, gazed inquisitively into her eyes and turned away to try and prevent Mallos from breaking into the last cabinet. ‘It won’t attack me while I contemplate death,’ she realised, and somewhere in the back of her mind she registered surprise at how calm she was feeling. The chaos was still ensuing all around her, but now it felt like she was watching events unfold from behind a glass screen. The ninth bottle flew across the air and Mallos dove to catch it; he succeeded, but landed heavily on his front and evidently had the wind knocked out of him, because he offered no resistance when a bat-creature swooped down and clawed his back. Allianah’s pile of corpses had swollen, but at a cost: her left arm was hanging limply by her side while she swung the staff in her right. Rhaegar’s expression was almost indeterminable now from the amount of blood which soaked his face: at some point he must have been struck by flyaway shards of glass from one of the cabinets. Their shouts of communication or expletives and the screams of the demons, together with the thumping weapons and the sound of glass smashing, should have deafened her. Five minutes ago it had, but now Aura felt detached from the noise. Images of Shaman raced through her mind. The day she had first walked on its fresh, new grass, the same day she had first met Anneliese; the day she had been reborn; the feeling when her magic returned to her after so long. Thoth, when he first learned to walk; Arthur, when they had begun to accept one another; Juniper, when she had helped her all those years ago. Aura rifled through the memories and extracted the most recent ones of her son, holding them firmly in her mind. ‘You made a mistake,’ she thought to the ancient creature, certain now that it could read their minds. ‘You made a mistake if you thought there was a limit to how far I would go to protect what is mine.’ A sense of uneasiness which definitely wasn’t her own rippled through her, warming her from within. Mallos rolled over and locked eyes with her. Was she imagining the inquiring expression in tanned face, or had he sensed what she was about to do? ‘I’m sorry,’ she sympathised, pitying him in that moment more than she pitied herself. There was no time to explain. There had never been any time. How, in millions of years; how, in immortality, had there never been any time? Aura inhaled and exhaled gently, before sprinting across the dais towards the edge of the gorge. None of the bat-creatures attacked her as she ran, but she heard Mallos’ voice yell her name and the sound of his heavy foot-falls as he raced after her. Being small and quick had its advantages, and Aura was much nearer to her goal than he was to his. She counted her steps – nine – and made a minor adjustment to the length of her stride so that she wouldn’t simply tumble over the edge. ‘Nine steps,’ she considered. ‘The same number as the false bottles. The same age as my son.’ That was her last thought. Peacefully oblivious to the disarray around her, Aura, the first fairy, launched herself over the edge of the gorge and fell like a bullet into the rip to the Realm of the Dead.

Written by Georgia and Merlin.

Replies:

• part eight. - By georgia September 10, 2012 at 02:42:50 AM
• part nine. - By georgia September 10, 2012 at 02:42:40 AM
• part ten. - By georgia September 10, 2012 at 02:42:30 AM
• epilogue - By georgia September 10, 2012 at 02:42:21 AM

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