Chương 23: Chapter 274 - Into the Center

Siobhan Month 5, Day 16, Friday, Time Unknown When she became aware again, Siobhan was standing at the edge of something that looked somewhat like a happy little ornamental garden. The shapes of things were crude and twisted, and it looked nothing like an actual garden made of growing things. The purposes of everything needed to be interpreted with squinted eyes, as one might do when looking at a toddler's semi-incomprehensible drawing, but the feelings were clear.

Shapes came together to form designs, but those designs were also somehow sensations, memories, and hopeful daydreams. Siobhan felt that if she stared too long, she might forget who she was in the process of experiencing what they meant. But despite the childish joy, glee, and hope radiating into her from the constructed, walkable artwork, she felt something pulling at her from behind.

She turned to see a path stretching out into the darkness, which somehow obscured everything so that she could only see a few meters in front of herself. Though she did not wish to set foot on it, and tried to go back to that imitation of a garden—to find another way out, the entrance that she must have bypassed to get here—the draw was too strong, and her feet were already carrying her down the path into darkness.

"Claudio," she whispered hatefully, injecting all the venom her soul carried into his name. In an echo of Grandfather's bearing, she pulled her armored jacket closer around her, hunching inward against the violation of this place. The jacket clinked just slightly from some misaligned metal plates tapping together and suddenly became much heavier and more real—or maybe some combination of the two.

Its weight helped press her into herself again, like she was just human-shaped fog in danger of dissipating if left unconfined. She knew it was not safe to walk the spirit realm without protection, but she hadn't realized it would be like this. She tried to remember anything that might be useful. One of Mom's old lullabies came to mind, but the only relevant information she could glean from it was not to stray too far or deep, lest dark creatures tear her soul and leave her wandering lost forever.

And yet, what was she doing? A whimper crawled its way up her sinuses, making her eyes sting and grow wet. She froze, looking about with wide eyes like a startled deer. She was somewhere else. The path was gone. She didn't know if she'd lost all awareness of time and place for some unknown interval, or if the world around her had secretly changed between one blink and the next.

Light had resolved in the distance, in the form of scattered bonfires that threw stark shadows outward from the large, upright-pointed boulders set around them. No fire was so close to another as to allow their lights or the shadows thrown from them to mix, and between each was an area where the shadows had melted back into the general, undefined darkness. Broken obelisk-like columns rose from the ground at random intervals, too, and a few had bonfires of their own atop them. Tentatively, Siobhan stepped forward.

She was wary, but couldn't help but be relieved to find a source of light. Fire had comforted people through the night for aeons past, and it sparked a small, tentative hope in her. That hope petered out long before she drew near. Still in darkness, she felt the emptiness clearly, like a nameless yearning for something to fill her as the lack seeped into her instead. When she reached the far, dim edge of one of the lights, it only left her soul more achingly empty, for it imparted no warmth or comfort.

It was only a reminder of the memory of light, and all the wondrous things born into a world of light, which she would never taste again herself. She was empty and could never be filled again. This despair battled with a persistent urge to get closer. Some part of her seemed to believe that if she just got close enough, it would warm her. She could breathe in its light and flush out some of the barren void within her. Siobhan shuddered with unease and slowed as she approached. Something was watching her.

She thought suddenly of the anglerfish, which lived deep in the cold, dark waters of the northern oceans and would lure in its prey with a dangling light. The boulders… Siobhan crept sideways to view them from a different angle, and suddenly, as if a veil had been lifted from her eyes, she understood that they weren't stones at all. They were crouching, emaciated people, with huge torsos, thin stick-like limbs, and heads that connected directly to their shoulders with no neck in between.

They were completely naked, and their skin was grey and craggy, as if they'd been left to sit so long that they fossilized. She would have guessed that they weren't human, but after seeing what the curse-touched villagers had turned into, didn't feel sure that she could make that distinction based on appearance alone. They were almost completely still, which was why she hadn't realized what they were sooner, but there were still some small movements.

Several of them seemed to be either licking, sucking on, or gnawing at small stones. One, slightly larger than the others, had a worn-clean bone that it nibbled at tenderly, to the jealous stares of the other three. Siobhan's skin prickled and rose with goosebumps. The bone was as large as her forearm, and she wondered what it had been when alive.

Siobhan must have made some kind of movement or sound, or perhaps her thoughts had simply been too loud, in this place where the mind walked without its usual dwelling of flesh. All four of them turned to look at her at once. Their eyes were too big for their skulls, and their irises expanded from pinpricks to huge, ink-like circles of darkness at the sight of her, like a cat noticing prey. Siobhan ran. They arose and followed, crumbling and stiff at first, then faster.

The large one with the bone ran on two legs, but the others fell to all fours. The fiery heat of panic choked her, and her feet pounded the stones beneath, her toes digging in with every step to give her more purchase, more speed. She lost her grasp on time and place in her haste, and when she regained a measure of composure, she realized she didn't know which way she'd come from.

As if the landscape had closed in around her, every direction seemed to have more of those distant, scattered bonfires surrounded by stone-like forms. Despite her exhaustion, she forced herself to unclench her teeth, to breathe easily, and run with light, loping strides that ate up the earth beneath her. She was not faster than the creatures chasing her, but perhaps their wasted and withered limbs would give out before hers did. In the distance to her left, another group of fire-gazers seemed to have noticed them.

They got up to chase, but as soon as the first turned its back, another pounced on it and tackled it to the ground with a distinct snapping of limbs. The others all dogpiled onto the collapsed, injured one, and within seconds were wildly tearing it apart. They feasted with mouths that opened wider than their entire skulls. They were not the last group to notice, and if all the fire-gazers had worked together to run Siobhan down and encircle her, she would have had no chance.

But several of them attacked each other instead, and even more were drawn to the sight of other groups eating and instigated brutal, limb-rending melees. In this way, Siobhan was able to thread the needle between the greatest dangers, but she couldn't help but wonder how long her stamina could hold out. And, as if the thought had reminded her body of its own weakness, she began to slow, her lungs burning and her legs trembling with exhaustion.

Her bare feet were scraped and battered, as even her callouses were not enough to protect them at the desperate speeds she was going. Her inflamed throat burned with every breath of air, threatening to send her into a bone-racking coughing fit. The mob of ravenous fire-gazers behind her was only growing larger, and though occasionally a chunk of them broke away to devour another who had fallen, the number of bonfires stretching out into the distance seemed endless.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. As the fatigue threatened to overwhelm her and hope quickly faded, Siobhan caught sight of an outline that might have been a doorway in one of the stone obelisks. She turned toward it immediately. Even if it was just an internal staircase leading to the top of that obelisk, she might be able to close the door behind her and fight off the much smaller group of fire-gazers settled above.

At the very worst, a staircase would at least mean that only one of their bulbous forms would be able to fit through at once, and she might be able to block the way with bodies. When she drew closer and saw no doorway, she sobbed.

"Please, please," she gasped out, the words almost unintelligible. The rectangular outline might have just been a trick of the light, but she slammed into the side of the obelisk anyway, prying at the edges. As she did so, they resolved a bit more, until she could feel them, and then, suddenly, she was gripping the edges of Mom's frame. Mom's expression hadn't changed at all, bearing no compassion or care, but Siobhan knew Mom had saved her. She pressed at the barrier, sobbing her thanks.

She couldn't get through at first, but as the scrabbling horde of fire-gazers drew closer, she leaned her whole weight into it and pressed with her Will as well. She snapped through. The world twisted, as if simultaneously dissolving and popping like a burst soap bubble, and she woke on the floor of the tower workshop in her real body once more. The difference was obvious, in the same way that waking from absurd, bizarre dreams was sometimes obvious, as logic and reality suddenly reasserted themselves.

For a moment, what had come before seemed almost like a fanciful nightmare. She shifted her head slightly to look around, though that small motion almost made her vomit with sudden, intense vertigo. Claudio was crouched in front of Mom's frame with his hand on the control glyph painted in blood on the floor.

"Just a bit more," he coaxed.

"Just a bit closer, transfer a bit more. This is what you were made for." For a moment, she wondered how he hadn't noticed her falling past as she escaped from where he had sent her, but quickly realized that, of course, it had been a dream. Her body had been here the whole time, while her mind wandered, untethered and vulnerable. Siobhan considered the window, which she might be able to run to and climb out of.

Even if she simply jumped out and broke herself against the ground below, it might be better than Claudio's plan for her. But she would have to go past him, and in her current state, she wasn't sure she had the strength to escape before he caught up with her. She sat up slowly, and as she did, caught a glimpse of the scene through Mom's frame over Claudio's head.

One of her eyes saw a bleak, grievous wound in the world beyond, and her being cried out in pain as the sight twisted and scratched at her sanity, her existence. The other eye saw her own reflection, as if Mom's frame contained a mirror. In that reflection, the orb of Siobhan's left eye was completely quicksilver, rippling and reflective like a deep pool of molten silver—the exact same substance that made up the surface of the mirror.

Her perceptions from each eye were very distinct, neither canceling the other out nor taking precedence, even as her right eye rolled around independently of the left, desperately trying to escape the grip of what it had just glimpsed. She wrenched her head away, trying to suppress the whole-body shivers wracking her frame. Her bones ached, and the organs within her abdomen itched like they'd been rubbed with poison ivy.

Her skin writhed over the muscle beneath, and if the urge hadn't reminded her of the villagers, she might have scratched and torn at it just to relieve the sensation of the poisonous filth that had gotten in through her right eyeball. Siobhan didn't even make it to her feet before Claudio noticed her movement. He sprang up, his mouth comically round with shock.

"How?" he asked, but didn't wait for an answer to lunge for her. He fell to his knees with bone-cracking force beside her and grabbed her head between his hands, pressing as if her skull were a walnut and his hands a vise. His face went red with strain, veins seeming to squirm under his skin as he glared down breathlessly at her. His visible eye—he'd put the patch back on—glowed from within, and Siobhan went under again. Siobhan opened her eyes to find herself on the cobblestone path surrounded by darkness.

"Mom?" she called, looking around fearfully. Nothing happened. Siobhan turned around, but what she saw didn't change; the path stretched out exactly the same in every direction. There was no north or south in this place, only the way forward. So Siobhan walked it. After some indeterminate amount of time, she found herself on the edge of a strange city.

Before walking further, she closed her eyes and tried to ground herself using the simple meditations she had been taught as a child, those used in preparation to learn magic. Methodically, she clenched and released every muscle and catalogued the sensations across her skin from toes to scalp. It helped more than she could have imagined, as if every reaffirmation of herself cleansed and healed the things that had gone wrong in her.

However, as soon as she opened her eyes to the cascading, towering structures before her, the sickness began to seep back in. She tried taking a few steps forward with her eyes closed, but that was too frightening. As bad as the path that Claudio was forcing her down was, walking into the unknown was worse. There could be very real dangers in what awaited her, and she would likely need to fight for her life—and her humanity—again.

Every step forward seemed to move her two to three times the distance she expected, and before she knew it, she was surrounded by buildings. The city was awe-inspiring. It was formed of gleaming white and gold marble, buildings growing atop and around each other with streets tunneled through the hive-like structure. Every building was made of two or three smaller structures and was in turn part of a larger pattern.

Arcing bridges spoke of elegant purpose, and the growth—ever upward and outward—of both meticulous planning and glorious strength of industry. Siobhan felt her own tininess keenly.

"Mom?" she called again, though her small voice seemed to be swallowed by the city almost immediately. She saw no mirror frames among the doors, windows, and alleys, but there was a growing sense of being watched. Every dark hole and entrance into the sprawling marble seemed like an orifice. Eyes watched her and judged her unworthy, and open mouths waited to devour her, for that was the only greater purpose someone like her could serve.

But then, between one step and the next, the city seemed to change again without her noticing, as if it were not the city itself that had morphed into something else, merely her perspective and perception of it. She was walking through the halls of a mausoleum. The number of entombed dead was larger than she could comprehend. Entire generations had died and were resting within—civilizations from rise to fall. The weight of all those lives was crushing, and the presence of the dead beguiling.

Surely, there was a spot among the tombs for her as well. Siobhan rubbed her arms to ward away the chill and closed her eyes for a moment to block the insidious bad thoughts. When she opened them again, her surroundings had changed their presentation once more. She was in a massive hive formed of molded earth and spun webbing. Every inch of the walls glittered with the strands, which were laid in ever-expanding fractal patterns.

Each of her footsteps echoed through the tunnels and returned to her improved, melodious and significant. The sounds echoed without end but never overlapped, compounding upon each other to create the roaring susurrus of an ocean, of a legion all moving toward the same goal. A new tone entered from a great distance. It was alien at first, reedy and thin and grating, but as she listened, she began to feel that maybe she could understand it.

She listened closer as the alien sound began to reverberate and mix with her own. It seemed almost comprehensible, carrying meaning like a language. It told Siobhan of her role in the symphony, her duty of service and sacrifice. There was some small part of her that recognized these ideas as coming from outside herself, and Siobhan, grasping at this inkling of rationality with desperation, veered to the side where a small tunnel led upward.

She closed her eyes, pressed her fingers to the edge of the tunnel, and tried to will it to become a doorway—a frame.

"I'm here, Mom," she whispered. And then, louder, a desperate, sobbing cry.

"I'm here!" Her fingers stung with sudden heat, and she flinched back, opening her eyes to see she had succeeded. Mom's smoldering brimstone frame had appeared before Siobhan once more. She touched her fingertips to the delicate skin under her left eye.

"Thank you," she whispered.

"I love you." Then she threw herself through the barrier between spirit realm and reality once more.