101. Of changes, worries and a little bit of portals

Cassandra Pendragon

Could it possibly be meant to connect to someone else rather than something else? I had always wanted to learn how to heal, after all. Mephisto had basically told me that my new body would be formed in the image of what my soul desired, without the rationalisations an active mind would use to ignore the sometimes darker nature of what I might long for. If that was true, it wouldn’t be too far fetched to imagine that I had given myself a way to restore what shouldn’t be lost. Unfortunately I didn’t how I could try it out without a Guinea pig. Right then, every time I wanted to move my energy through the wing, I encountered a resistance, a blockade that wouldn’t allow my powers to pass. It felt like knocking at the door of an empty house, in theory it was supposed to open but someone was needed to turn the key and invite you in. For now, it wouldn’t be more than a fancy streak of colour among the silvery torrents of energy.

Much more confident than I had been two minutes ago, with a relieved smile still plastered on my face, I turned my attention to the most pressing question: now what? The cavern was empty except for the end of Mordred’s rope that still dangled down the rabbit hole which had led us here and my white cloak, discarded in the corner where I had woken up. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that Ahri, Mordred, Viyara and Reia had ventured further into the depths, otherwise they wouldn’t have left me here and the rope would be gone. I might have speculated that they had been sucked into another tributary of the time stream but I felt certain that I had protected them completely form the distortions that had swept me away and I also couldn’t imagine that they would have had the time to make me comfortable if they had been dragged off against their will.

I still couldn’t move my limbs freely, cramps and a lingering pain that spiked every time I exerted any part of my body forced me to rely on my wings even for the short distance I had to cross to reach my cloak and tattered clothes. Quickly I shrugged back into them, even though it challenged my willpower to force the gory and torn rags over my head. It didn’t take me long to realise that the emblem was gone. No matter how many times I patted down my pockets, the silver coin wasn’t there.

Ahri or one of the others had probably taken it. Smart, Mephisto might prove to be a lifesaver down there, in case he was willing to help them out in the first place. Unfortunately that didn’t make it any easier for me. I could either head back to the camp or rush after them. Going back wasn’t really an option. I might have talked to my mom or asked some of the dwarfs for help but neither held much appeal. Viyara had probably already informed someone of what was going on and if the dwarfs had thought they could help somehow, they would already have been here. There was no point in going back unless I wanted to abandon my friends. Forwards, it was and once I found them, I would have to ask my love some pointed questions on how she had arrived here, in the first place.

My decision made I tried reaching for Ahri and Viyara mentally, something I should have done the very moment I had woken up, but I had been slightly distracted. The complete lack of a response, even a connection, would have immediately sent me into a panic under normal circumstances but truth be told, I had expected it. The little I already knew about this place, including the circular room, floating gem and guardians powered with transcendent energies made me think that even our tattoos or the link to Viyara might be blocked by wards or enchantments, placed around the inner sections aeons ago. If I added the temporal disturbances which might still be in full effect closer to the centre, I could just about imagine why I wasn’t able to reach them. So much for the topic of a shortcut.

I glanced around the cavern one last time but except for the rich smell of dark soil mixed with my blood and the lingering fragrances I had come to associate with Ahri and Viyara it was just a clammy, barren hole in the ground. Shrugging I pushed my body off the ground and hovered about 50 centimetres above the floor. A flash of silvery light vaporised the puddle and with a thought I moved towards the stairs, quickly vanishing into the bowels of the earth.

The smoke had cleared away but the acrid stench of burnt stone still hung heavily in the air, straining my hurting throat and lungs until I was shaking with suppressed coughs. Despite the discomfort I didn’t rush this time and inspected each enchantment I came across meticulously with my second vision and in the faint light of my skin. Not that I was able to understand much with my rudimentary knowledge of magic but I wanted to know if they were still active. Luckily small craters in the wall, which had blasted away integral parts of the spell formations with the utmost precision, made my job a lot easier. The formations weren’t inactive, they had been destroyed and from the looks of it, nothing bad had happened. At least I didn’t stumble across a corpse or blood, splattered across the walls. So far, so good. I didn’t waste more time and accelerated down the stairs until I came close to the bottom and the site of the explosion.

Streaks of soot ran along the walls and a spiderweb of cracks had formed across the ceiling. The stair below, where I had blasted through the incoming spell, had been reduced to so much as rubble while the nearest stones had been deformed as if they had melted. The remains of the door, a few meters further down the stairs, were gone and the lintel looked like something had chewed on it, chips and larger chunks of rock had been blasted right out of it and a massive fissure started at its centre and continued on into the hallway.

From what I could see the hallway had been devastated as well. The pedestals closest to the door were gone and the walls showed the same signs of destruction as the stairs. Even further away, the erstwhile pristine room seemed more like a neglected and dilapidated underground storage than the antechamber of anything notable. Most important of all, I couldn’t see a single statue. Heaps of crumbled stone, some with mangled pieces of metal sticking out of them like the curled up claws of a dying beast, some with still recognisable faces chiselled into their surface, were all that was left. One or two might have survived further down the hallway but near the entrance a storm of force and fire had devoured everything in its path.

The wind from my passage stirred up grey and black flakes of ash while I carefully made my way through the ravaged corridor. My eyes roamed across the walls and ground, searching for a trace of my friends or a fight that had happened after the initial blast. The darkness didn’t impede my vision and I quickly found scattered footprints where a hurried step had pushed away pebbles or touched the black residue of the explosion. Sharp as my eyes were, I couldn’t make much of what I had found except for the direction they had been walking in and, to no surprise, it led onwards.

I hurried up, trusting that I wouldn’t stumble across anything too dangerous on their trail. Energy sizzled through my wings as I streaked towards the tunnel I expected to find at the far end of the hallway. Clouds of ash rose in my wake while I fretted over the chances one of the statues had remained intact. Could my friends face one of the guardians? Had they been forced to?

When I could already make out the details of the runes inscribed around the tunnel mouth, I suddenly halted in mid air. The last pair of statues was still in one piece, both of them resting on their pedestals, motionless. Multicoloured light, that reminded me of the temporal distortions back in the cavern, played around their bodies and on their chests, a glowing golden, circular mark I had seen before, burned merrily with an inner fire. Intrigued, I slithered closer to one of them.

In the silvery sheen of my second vision I saw the mark attract swaths of energy from deep underground, a haze of power circling around the statues. The multicoloured light was a reflection of the outer edge of the whirlwind, an iridescent display of light while the actual force was directed inwards, locking the statues in place. I couldn’t make heads or tails of the scene, Reia’s mark definitely hadn’t behaved like that. Or maybe that particular effect had just been suppressed? Gods, had I forced more than just a key onto the little girl? Mephisto had been right, I was an idiot. I should never have meddled. Maybe if I had just tried to leave the other stream I would have even been able to survive without a transcendent version of Russian roulette. I had even heard myself voice her doubts about the mark but still I had acted on the impulse. I really had to get another tattoo, something along the lines of: think before you act. And I’d start right now.

I wasn’t going to leave the statues standing, if the mark was to falter, we’d have to battle our way past them once we intended to get out of here. Admittedly, whoever had cast the marks might become alerted to their destruction but chances were I wouldn’t be able to get deeper, without making a spectacle of myself anyways. And who knew, maybe the denizen of the depth, as I decided to call it, wasn’t an enemy. Judging from past experience that wasn’t likely, though.

A small spark of excitement ran through me as I fanned out my wings and allowed the floodgates to open. A sensation like liquid fire spread from my core towards my wings, but it wasn’t painful, it felt exhilarating. The pathways to my wings were filled with sparkling power but they didn’t burn. They easily withstood the onslaught and protect the other parts of my body from the ravenous tide. I heard the air hiss behind and felt small ripples travel through space around me before I brought gleaming torrents of almost solid light down on the immobilised statues.

There were no sparks, no explosions, my wings parted the mesh of light around the golems as if it hadn’t been there and cut through the stone without the slightest resistance. Matter and magic vanished with the briefest touch and the heads, arms and legs of the statues shattered on the ground. The web of magic unraveled along the gashes I had torn and the mark pulsed once before it vanished. A cloud of bluish smoke, smelling distinctly of ozone rose from broken stones around a mutilated torso. The last traces of magic flickered out and silence returned.

Holy hell, that had been as easy as breathing, I didn’t feel strained or burnt in the slightest. On the contrary, I felt a somewhat refreshed, the aches that still plagued me dulled and a rush of strength had returned to my limbs. Smiling brightly I gingerly lowered my body to the ground and tried to stand on my own two feet without the support of my wings.

At first I struggled to remain upright but after a few seconds I became much steadier, my muscles quickly adapting to my weight. I felt less like a walking corpse powered by magic and more like someone with a fever. The first few tentative steps were still a little shaky, but I quickly regained some confidence and when I reached the entrance to the tunnel, I was moving gracefully again.

The intricately designed glyphs around its mouth were as complex as I remembered them, smaller clusters forming larger structure in an infinite loop of swirling lines. This time they weren’t riddle with craters like the ones along the stairs but obviously altered with dark lines forming new and unwanted connections between several glyphs. The flow of energy within the formations had been thrown into chaos, ordered structures bound together to form nonsensical patterns. I was surprised the sigils even existed anymore, if they hadn’t been crafted meticulously, the uncontrolled stream of magic would have eroded them instantly. As they were, they could be repaired easily enough but for now they definitely wouldn’t be able to fulfil their purpose.

I decided to leave them alone, I simply didn’t know enough to meddle, even though I had the distinct suspicion that I could just cut through them, I had seen it before in one of the time streams, after all. Turning my back in the destruction in the hallway I ventured down the tunnel, a narrow and completely straight line with smooth surfaces all around. Somewhere in front of me a small speck of light marked the exit on the other side but I couldn’t tell how far it was going to be.

Carefully I moved forwards, my wings curled around me like an armour made of glowing ribbons. While I sidled across the reflective stone, I felt like the darkness around me became more solid, the sound of my footfalls muffled, my breathing distant. Anxiety gnawed at my insides the further I wandered into the pitch back hole which, with the sparkling glow at its end, reminded me of the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. Every moment I expected something to happen, the walls to close in or a hidden trap to activate, filling the narrow space with poisonous gas or roaring fire. I didn’t know why, but somehow I had to fight for every step, fear begging me to turn around.

“It’s just your imagination,” I told myself and continued to put one foot in front the other. “Your friends got through, they’re somewhere ahead of you and a bout of paranoia won’t keep you from them.” Stupid as it might seem, I even started to hum softly to myself. I’d have preferred for something to attack me outright instead of this mounting feeling of dread. The melody of “always look on the bright side” helped, a lot. Panicking while the immortal lines by Monty Python circled around my mind was close to impossible and I even managed a small smile at my my behaviour. By the Great Fox, after everything I had been through in the last week, I couldn’t believe what kind of fuss I was making. Maybe I had died in here in another time and some of the emotions were still reaching me but whatever the reason, I was done hesitating.

A thought spread my wings from wall to wall and instead of slowly creeping forwards I crackled with power and blazed along the corridor like a lightning storm, traps, enchantments and fears be damned. I nearly lost my balance in surprise when I suddenly rushed through another archway and found myself in the circular room with its carvings of doorways along the walls. Everything was just as I remembered except for the hovering gem at the centre, it had changed colour and was now pulsing in a warm, golden light and an open portal, that filled the gate on the opposite side with a flickering light.

Strands of the same golden hue were woven together to form a magical framework along the pylons and lintel, swaths of energy circling around them. Closer to the centre, a profound blackness like a window to space, filled the formation. A string of shimmering glyphs had appeared around the carved foundations the spell was anchored to and even form the distance I recognise a few of the swirling characters. Their design and structure were awfully similar to Amon’s spell work and I would have bet most of my possessions, even though that didn’t mean much at the moment, that he or someone with a very similar understanding of magic had crafted them.

Unfortunately I couldn’t peer through the wavering curtain and I felt certain that I wouldn’t be able to pass through with my wings extended. I’d probably tear the spell to shreds along the way. So instead, I moved closer to the gem and tried to understand how the contraption worked. As I recalled how much success I had had, interacting with the jewel in an alternate timeline, I wasn’t surprised when I stared blankly at a complex pattern of interwoven strands of energy that somehow flowed form the surrounding rock into the gem and towards the active gateway. At least I didn’t have to figure it out, the door had already been opened. Sighing I turned towards the portal and retracted my wings, wishing for sunshine and rainbows on the other side.