As the stepped pyramid gemstone rose into the air, Connie froze. She knew she needed to run. A killer Gem who'd tried to murder her best friend was about to return with all of her faculties intact and a fresh memory of how she'd been poofed.
And yet, Connie couldn't look away. Of all the marvelous things she had seen, Connie had never watched a Gem put herself back together. The closest she had been to such a sight had been in Stevonnie's fight with Jasper, when Amethyst had re-formed herself. But being part of someone else while battling a rampaging Quartz hadn't allowed Connie much time to appreciate the process. Now, with her legs unresponsive, she found plenty of time for the breathtaking sight.
Pure light burbled from the stone, flowing like water along an invisible map of channels and pathways until a body took shape. Thick limbs sprouted from a tall, stout frame that belied power and strength worthy of the Gem's reputation. As the flow of light ebbed, its glow subsided. Slate gray skin gleamed freshly beneath the lines of a black tunic, which framed the gemstone. Rough brown leggings materialized, and then were draped behind a long square of fabric that formed into an apron colored in warm shades of red. A wave of dreadlocks grew from the scalp and flashed into a rainbow variety of colors.
As the body settled on its final shape, the Crystal Gems' iconic star manifested itself at either of the Gem's arms, spanning her shoulders with five sharp points.
Beneath her terror, Connie felt awed by the beauty of watching a creature make itself. The process felt unearthly, powerful, but somehow profoundly vulnerable. It was like watching an artist paint their own portrait on a canvas of their own body, willing themselves into existence through pure creativity.
Then the newly-formed Gem's eyes opened, and Connie remembered that she should have been running.
Now reconstituted, Bismuth touched down on the floor, staggering under the sudden reacquisition of mass. She grabbed the edge of the lava pool to steady herself, not seeming to mind when her fingers dipped into the molten rock.
"What? Where…?" the Gem wheezed. Her gaze fell onto Connie. "Who are you?"
Connie lifted her hands in a calming gesture. "Please don't freak out," she begged. She could have been talking to herself as much as to Bismuth.
Bismuth frowned. "Why would I…?" she started to ask as her gaze wandered the room. When she looked up, her eyes widened, and she gasped. "What in the Empty Sky is this?" she cried, and collapsed backwards onto the floor to cower from the ceiling.
The Gem's growing terror set off warning bells in Connie's head. She fought to keep her own voice calm and even as she said, "You're okay. You're inside the Gems' temple. This is where they keep the corruptions they capture."
Her soothing tone had the opposite effect on Bismuth. The big Gem's face darkened like a summer storm on the horizon as it rounded back upon Connie. "Corruptions?" she echoed, and the word rolled like thunder. "You mean like me? Is this where Rose stuck all of the other Gems who didn't fall in line?"
Now it was Connie's turn to be shocked. What on Earth did Bismuth mean by that? "No! No, that's not what—"
But Bismuth didn't hear Connie, or she didn't care. Still collapsed on the ground, the Gem's gaze sprang from one bubble to the next as she searched the cloud above them. "Tiger's Eye? Little Larimar? Beryl! Serpentine!" As she craned her head upward, her hand caught on the lump metal that held the poofed Slag Mite. She grabbed up the metal like it weight nothing and stared into the mirrored stone wrapped in its middle. "Hematite? No! She wouldn't hurt a pebble! What did they do to her?"
As Connie watched, Bismuth began to dig at the metal, trying to wedge the stone out of the melted slag. Was the renegade Gem confused from her un-bubbling? Or did she think she could wreak vengeance on Steven and the Gems with pack of wild corruptions? "Wait, wait, wait!" Connie cried, raising a hand.
Bismuth ignored her. Rising back to her feet, she plunged her arm up to the elbow into the lava pool and held it there, submerged. Little splashes jumped from the edge of the pool and sizzled into permanent lumps on the floor. After a few seconds, Bismuth drew out of the lava, admiring the shimmering red heat that suffused her arm.
Connie knew she had to stop the Gem, but as soon as she took a step, she could feel the intense heat rolling off of Bismuth's hand. Whatever powers the Burning Room had to shut down convection didn't work beyond the edge of the lava pool. One touch from that glowing hand could instantly barbecue Connie, and she couldn't gust away Bismuth's hand like she could Flint's fire blasts. "Bismuth, you can't let her out!" Connie shouted, shielding her face from the heat with her hands.
The Gem's bright grasp plunged through the slag. Her heat and strength pushed aside the mix of alloys as though it were butter. "Hang on, Shiny. I'll have you out of there in no time, and then we can get the others out of this messed-up place," she said to the stone.
"Are you crazy? Don't!" Connie cried, too late. The silvery gemstone bounced free onto the floor.
Whirling, Bismuth fixed Connie with a hard look. It wasn't a glare, but only by dint of the Gem's confusion. "Listen, little guy. I don't know how you ended up here, but it's not safe for humans. We're not going to hurt you, but you need to stay out of our way until Hematite and I…"
The big Gem trailed off as she and Connie watched the freed gemstone rising. For an instant, something with two arms and two legs emerged from the stone in a lightning flash. But the white light lost its shape before it even started, and the luminescence piled itself beneath the stone instead, forming an ovoid shape. Long, spidery appendages unfurled from the ovoid's sides and slammed into the floor, lifting body and gemstone to its full, fearsome stature.
Without her stalactite exoskeleton, the corrupted Hematite looked strangely cute. Connie couldn't help but picture it as the unlikely offspring of a daddy long legs, a mirror, and a giant bejeweled watermelon. As she rose up, her rotund little body wobbled, not unlike a newborn deer trying to walk for the first time. In a nicer world, Connie thought she could have found the corruption a home in the world's most exotic petting zoo.
But that cuteness lasted only as long as it took for the corruption to find her footing. Sensing the other two in the room, she reared back, skittering, her feet clacking loudly against the stone. The gemstone on top of her body rose up on a thick pink tendril to whip at the space between them, and the bottom of her body irised open into a hideous shriek.
"Hematite?" whispered Bismuth. A stricken look crossed the Gem's face, an expression so heartbroken that it made Connie's chest hurt to look at it. But then she saw Bismuth's hands reflexively shift into mallets the size of oil drums, and she quickly remembered that there were two deadly Gems loose in the room with her, not just one.
The corrupted Hematite warbled at them, giving them a clear look at the glowing heat in its maw. Then it skittered toward a far corner of the room. Beyond the light of the pool, the corruption seemed to squeeze itself around a corner that wasn't there. The clatter of its feet vanished into some unseen distance.
Connie gaped at the wall where the corruption had disappeared. Then she shook herself out of her surprise, worried that she had missed Bismuth making her move. One missed second could mean the Gem's escape, or worse. Not that Connie would be able to stop anything the Gem did.
But to Connie's utter shock, Bismuth had not run. The huge smith had fallen to her knees, her face a haunted void, her eyes staring into the distance where the corruption had disappeared. "Wh-What happened to her?" Bismuth whispered.
Connie examined the Gem's stricken expression from a safe distance. Nothing in the Gem's reactions, in the choices Bismuth had made since re-forming, made any kind of sense unless…
"They didn't tell you," Connie realized aloud.
"They told me everybody was gone. That Homeworld wiped them out. But I never… I couldn't imagine…" Trembling, Bismuth rose to her feet. Her gaze swept overhead, and her eyes grew even more sunken. "There's too many bubbles here. Rose was persuasive, but even she couldn't have recruited this many Gems to the cause."
As understanding emerged across Bismuth's face, Connie nodded and said, "They're all here. Homeworld and Crystal Gems. The Diamonds did this to every Gem still on the planet as retaliation for what Rose did…to Pink Diamond."
Hearing the name staggered Bismuth, and she collapsed back against the lava pool. "Rose. She got Pink. And the Diamonds…"
Her ragged puffing devolved into a chuckle, and then a ragged laugh, until it tumbled down into a deep, full-throated guffaw. Bismuth doubled over with laughter, burying her face in her hands as her whole body shook.
"Rose bubbled me for the idea. And then she stole the idea anyway! And it worked! It ended the war!" Bismuth crowed into her hands.
Connie's skin tried to crawl inside of her at the sound of the Gem's hollow laughter. "Bismuth?" she said.
Tears streamed down Bismuth's cheeks. "No wonder they didn't tell me!" she laughed, and threaded her fingers through her rainbow dreadlocks to clutch at her scalp. "They must have known how mad I'd be that I didn't get credit for the thinking of it!"
Each laugh became longer and rougher, until they finally choked the Gem into silence. But her shoulders kept shaking, and the tears didn't stop.
Connie wavered, completely lost for what to do. She had steeled herself for an unwinnable battle when Bismuth's bubble had popped. Somehow, this fallout seemed just as bad as the gruesome squishing she'd imagined.
Bismuth recovered quickly, gasping and wiping at her face. The Gem swallowed the last of her wheezing and rose. "Okay. Enough of that. You need to get out of here, little guy. I'm going to find Hematite and…" She trailed off uncertainly, her hands clenching into fists.
"No!" Connie blurted. As Bismuth fixed her with a look of surprise, Connie felt her stomach plummet. "I mean, I don't want to leave you here alone. And there'll be real trouble if I don't make sure the Sla—I mean, Hematite gets back in a bubble."
Bismuth's searching gaze lingered on her. A cold sweat beaded at Connie's hairline, and she smiled uneasily. After what felt like an eon, Bismuth shrugged and said, "Okay. But stay behind me. That meat you're packing can't take as much punishment as good old photomatter can." And she thumped her midsection.
Smiling with a confidence she didn't feel, Connie fell in behind the huge Gem, forcing herself not to dawdle too far outside of the Gem's reach lest it seem suspicious. Her mind whirled, trying to come up with some way of dealing with the renegade smith on her own, but it seemed impossible. The best she could do at that moment was to keep Bismuth in sight and wait for circumstances to change.
Together they rounded to the back of the Burning Room where the corruption had disappeared. To her confusion, Connie found herself walking around a corner that wasn't visible from the other side of the room. Walking around it felt to Connie like circling a mirror that didn't exist; one moment, it wasn't there, and the next moment, it was. The disparity made her insides twist as she tilted herself from side to side, trying to understand where the corner existed.
A soft chuckle behind her made Connie jump, and she glanced back to see Bismuth watching her. "Is this your first time inside a reactive tessellated space?" the big Gem said, smirking.
"Not exactly," Connie admitted. She forced herself to focus on Bismuth as the Gem led the way around the not-corner. Watching the smith's broad shoulders instead of architecture that defied logic made her less dizzy. "I'm just used to rooms with dimensions you can see."
The not-corner led them into a small, dark corridor made of rough walls that framed a smooth, straight floor. At the distant end of the corridor lay some bright exit. The echo of cascading waters murmured in the tunnel, barely audible.
"I've built a few of these in my day," Bismuth remarked, letting her hand drift across the stone as they started down the corridor. "The hard part is squeezing all those extra dimensions into the inside. This one feels like it has a lot of room to spare."
Connie made a non-committal noise as she studied the big Gem's frame. Before Connie had met Pyrite, she never thought she'd see a Gem more durable than Jasper. But the smith would even give Shard's golden champion a run for her money. Bismuth's body wasn't built for speed, grace, or finesse, but she had all the tells of being an absolute bulldozer in a fight. Without Rose's sword to pierce Bismuth's form, Connie would have to inflict enough punishment to poof Bismuth the hard way, and she knew her human hands weren't up to the task.
"So, what's your story?" Bismuth tossed over her shoulder.
"Buh?" Connie blurted, jerking out of her tactical daydream.
"The last time I wasn't a floating decoration, we didn't have any humans lurking around our base. How did you end up down here, little guy?" asked Bismuth.
"I-I wasn't lurking. And I'm a girl, not a guy," Connie stammered in retort.
"Yeah? Good for you!" It was impossible to discern any sarcasm in Bismuth's reply. Worse, the smith kept her curious glance aimed backwards, expecting more from Connie as an answer.
"I'm, uh, a friend of the Gems. Sometimes I help them with, uh, stuff, and they show me magical things," said Connie. "I ended up inside the temple, but I'm not exactly supposed to be here by myself."
"Mmm-hmm," Bismuth grunted. "And while you were down there, looking for 'magical' things, my bubble…?"
Connie winced. "There may have been some accidents," she admitted. That much alone didn't need to be a lie, but the words still tasted like ash in Connie's mouth.
Bismuth laughed. "I bet," she said. Then her face smoothed, and her voice softened. "Then do you know who I am?"
Fighting every muscle in her face to keep from wincing, Connie said, "I've heard them say your name."
"Mmn," Bismuth grunted. "Well, maybe once we take care of Hematite we can get you caught up. For now, let's just focus on what's in…front of us…" Her words trailed off as they reached the far mouth of the corridor.
Connie squeezed around the big smith and lost her breath to the very same sight. They stood at the cusp of a grand chamber, the scope of which made Connie feel infinitesimal. The chamber walls shifted around them, a blackness dotted with constellations and stellar phenomena, a living tapestry woven from an alien night sky. The floor before them was a ring of unidentifiable metal segmented with enormous mirrored circles, and within the ring flowed a pool of pale, luminous water. And above, suspended by some unseen power, were a series of stepped platforms, each one higher and larger than the one beneath it. That same luminous water flowed over the rim of each platform into the pool below to create a small concert of cascading waterfalls across the breadth of the room.
"It's beautiful," Connie heard herself whisper. The words came unbidden, the only possible reaction to seeing the chamber.
"It's Pearl's room," Bismuth murmured. At Connie's questioning look, Bismuth smiled wanly and said, "Only Pearl could make something like this." Her eyes shimmered as she gazed in clear adoration at the room's expanse.
The water at the heart of the pool suddenly thrashed. Connie saw mirrored legs clawing at the water before disappearing under, caught within a current that whorled down at the pool's center into some unknown depths. The creature's last shriek dwindled and vanished underneath the down of the rushing water.
"Looks like we're going down," Bismuth said. She strode purposefully to the edge of the water.
Connie balked at the water's edge as she watched Bismuth wade into its shallows. Illuminated waters rose up past the smith's knees as she forded ahead. "We don't know where that goes," Connie insisted, "or if the corr—if Hematite will be waiting for us at the bottom."
"You can stay if you want," Bismuth called, wading waist-deep to the edge of the whirlpool and the drop at its center. "But it's like Biggs used to tell me: nobody shines forever." Then she leapt into the heart of the whirlpool, letting the current sweep her down and away. "So shine while you can!" her dwindling voice echoed.
The Gem's sheer exuberance staggered Connie. Sneaking into Pearl's room, seeing its beauty after trying to imagine it for so long, as already enough to root Connie to the spot with wonder and guilt. But to see Bismuth rebound after being in tears only moments ago, and in bubbled stasis from a near-lethal battle moments before that… It floored Connie. Bismuth's physical resilience was obvious to anyone who saw her, but Connie wondered if the toughest thing about Bismuth might run deeper than the Gem's adamantine skin.
Then Connie realized that Bismuth had run off alone in the temple, the one thing Connie definitely wanted to prevent. Instantly, Connie's feet came unglued, and she clambered over the edge and into the water. Her clothes sagged in the luminous pool, dragging her forward with the current until she spun into the edge of the whirlpool. Thrashing to keep her head above water, Connie felt herself dragged into the heart of the pool, where a black depth reached up to swallow her into freefall.
Stomach lurching, limbs tumbling, Connie screamed the long way down the pale waterfall. Her body slapped through a floor of a crystal pool and plunged her into bubbly confusion. She thrashed, pushing off of a cloudy bottom, and then surfaced with a gasp, her lungs sucking greedily at the air.
Coughing, she crawled out of the crystal pool, fishing the stringy wet hair out of her eyes. She found Bismuth by touch more than by sight, her flailing hands bouncing off of Bismuth's thick arm. When Connie could see again, she looked up, and felt her blood run cold at the horror in Bismuth's eyes.
"Oh, my stars," croaked Bismuth, "we're too late. Look at all of this! Was this some kind of human sanctuary? Or a shelter? How did she do so much damage in just a few seconds?"
Connie surveyed the disaster into which they had fallen. The room was a dirt floor with large crystalline growths sprouting like monoliths from its depths. Gray walls framed the crystal garden and its pool in a quiet, high-ceilinged cavern. And every single remaining inch of the space belonged to a menagerie of junk the likes of which Connie had never imagined. There were piles as tall as the crystal monoliths, piles as tall as the ceiling, piles stacked on piles that teetered under a precarious, perpetual threat of collapse.
She saw furniture, and boxes, and crates, and electronics that were old enough to have vacuum tubes inside of them. She saw pieces of cars, the front half of a boat, and the back half of a different boat. There were idols, knickknacks, relics, stacked and piled into veritable walls, and mortared into place with pure garbage: wrappers, packages, papers, rotting peels, and plain old dirt. All of it towered above Connie in a parody of organization that would have made her mother break down into hysterics merely to look upon it.
"I think this is Amethyst's room," Connie said, her gaze wandering between the piles. "And I think it's supposed to look like this."
"Really?" Blinking, Bismuth climbed off her knees and took stock of the room again. "Wow. That Quartz is a little twisted, isn't she?"
An piercing skee-runch noise made Connie balk. She whirled around and spotted their quarry at the base of one of the mounds, working her under-mouth at some angular metal shape buried there. Connie took an extra second to recognize the shape of the corruption's snack to be some old, angular car, the weird kind that had been a time machine in one of the old movies her father had shown her once. Hematite tore one of the car's gullwing doors off and crumpled it into her maw, stuffing it up her gullet with her spidery forelegs.
"Hey!" Bismuth shouted, startling the corruption out of her meal. With arms spread low, Bismuth approached, speaking in a soft voice as she drew closer. "Come on, Shiny. You know me. You're better than whatever those Upper Crusts did to you. You're worth ten Diamonds. You can beat this!"
As the smith drew closer, Connie held her breath in silent hope. But then she saw a red glow irising open as the corruption tilted backwards. "Look out!" Connie cried, too late again.
Hematite coughed a ball of slag, and the molten alloys struck Bismuth squarely in the face, wrapping into a mask that swallowed her thick features. Bismuth staggered backwards and clawed at the edge of the mask to no avail. Her stumbling would have crashed through another stack if Connie hadn't caught the smith with a hand and pushed with all her might to warn Bismuth to stop.
As the mask cooled, Bismuth finally yanked it free. Her sooty features pulled into a grimace as she examined the lumpy shape of her features cast into the metal. "Talk about a situation getting ugly," she grunted.
A wet noise made them both look up from the crude mask in time to see another glowing slag ball arcing toward them. Bismuth shoved Connie to the ground, flattening her with a hand and using her body as a shield from the spatter of red fleck as the ball punched through a wooden crate behind them labeled, Days Of Our Lives (Betamax). Strange black cassettes spilled out from the box, which began to splinter and crumple under the weight of the garbage above it. With deadly inevitability, the pile tilted down upon Connie and Bismuth, its structure collapsing with the loss of its load-bearing television show.
Before Connie could finish registering the tumbling garbage that would crush her, she felt her world thrown sideways. Bismuth had shifted her arm into a long scoop and, in one surprisingly gentle motion, had flung Connie across the room and out from under the edge of the collapsing pile.
Connie's scream disappeared under the crash and clatter of a thousand different curious spilling across the floor. She tumbled through the air and hit another pile on the far side of the room, bouncing off the cushions of a sofa looked Victorian and smelled like old tuna. By the time she rolled up off the floor, the collapsing pile had settled again, and Bismuth was its new base.
"Get out of here!" Bismuth wheezed. The Gem's whole body was pinned, with only her head protruding from the flotsam's edge. A few pieces rattled as she tried to burst free, but nothing above her budged.
The metallic hammering of feet filled the room. Hematite charged straight for Bismuth, trailing her long bejeweled tongue behind her. Red fury underlit the corruption as she roared.
Connie froze in mid-heartbeat. Without a sword, she would never stand a chance of poofing Bismuth and returning her to the Burning Room. But Hematite seemed eager to do the job for her. And Connie liked her odds of keeping Hematite in the temple until the Gems came back. Leaving Bismuth to the corruption's mercies made the most sense.
So even Connie didn't fully understand her own decision when she thrust her fists at the corruption.
The air in front of Hematite rippled and exploded. With a shout, Connie blasted the corruption again and again, squeezing air grenades as fast as she could with the power of her half-hollow. The rushing air couldn't do any real damage to Hematite's mirrored hide, but the impacts chased her back, breaking her charge.
Bismuth's eyes widened at the violent winds. "How are you doing that?" she exclaimed.
"Brace yourself!" Connie barked at the smith, and then turned her clenching hands at the pile. Air whistled between the gaps of the collapsed garbage as a new air grenade gathered deep beneath the surface, as deep as Connie could muster it. She squeezed the air until her half-hollow ached. Then she let go of the grenade and twisted away, shielding her face.
A thousand years' worth of hoarding exploded, blasting apart under the wave of tremendous air pressure. Connie gaped at the geyser of Amethyst's possessions filling the air before the pressure wave caught her, flinging her backwards to the floor ahead of a rain of scattering garbage.
Groaning, Connie sat up and rubbed at her ringing ears. When she blinked her watery eyes clear, she grinned at the sight of Bismuth staggering back to her feet, the last bit of debris sliding clear of the smith's massive back. "Bismuth?" Connie half-shouted, struggling to hear herself above the ringing. "Are you—?"
The smith moved fast, so much faster than Connie had thought her capable of, too fast for a creature of her size. Bismuth's hand morphed into a long blade as she charged straight for Connie. A grim expression filled the Gem's features.
Connie shrank back, raising her hands. "Wait-wait-wait-don't!" Connie babbled. Again, too late.
Bismuth's weaponized arm struck, stabbing straight for Connie. Closing her eyes, Connie twisted to one side, hating herself for flinching. She wanted to feel brave in the face of her end. Instead, she only felt scared and sad. She would never get to apologize to the Gems for her mistake.
As the ringing in Connie's ears faded, she heard a choked wheeze coming from behind her. She cracked one eye toward its source, and then gaped fully in surprised at the sight of Hematite impaled beside her on Bismuth's arm. The corruption's spindly forelegs dropped from where they had hung poised to slice into Connie's back.
Tears filled Bismuth's eyes, but her cheeks remained dry. "I'm sorry," she murmured.
The corruption dissipated, swallowing Bismuth's arm in a reflective fog. Hematite's silvery gemstone clattered to the floor.
Connie shambled to her feet, watching as Bismuth collected the stone from the floor to cradle it in her huge palms. The smith's hands shook, and her eyes shimmered in the light of the cavern. "Are you okay?" Connie said.
Bismuth sniffled, but nodded. Then she smiled down at Connie and said, "Thank you to. That was some quick work back there, Gusty. You really pulled my stone out of the pulverizer."
"I think we're even," Connie replied, returning Bismuth's smile uneasily. "Um, now what?"
Silently, Bismuth began to concentrate on an empty spot nearby. The ground next to Bismuth rippled, pulsing upward into a tall new shape. As the gray surface solidified with a frame and a familiar pattern on its face, Connie recognized it as the temple door. A break formed in the door's face, and it parted diagonally, revealing the warp pad and the beach house beyond its frame.
Connie had never felt so glad to see her summer home as she stepped through ahead of Bismuth. The floor trembled with the Gem's heavy steps as she cast her wary gaze across the house. Hematite's stone still rolled in her open palm.
"Aren't we going to put her back where she was?" Connie asked warily.
Shaking her head, Bismuth held the stone aloft. A slate gray bubble manifested from her palm, enveloping the stone. With a little push, Bismuth placed the stone just outside the edge of the warp pad. It would be impossible for anyone entering or leaving the temple to miss spotting the captured stone.
"She's my messenger," Bismuth said. "Now the others will know that I'm out. And in the meantime…"
The smith's hands flashed into a set of thick tongs. Before Connie knew it, she felt the tongs gripping her waist, the tines pinning her arms to her sides. Bismuth lifted Connie without a hint of effort and stepped quickly onto the warp pad.
Panic and anger flooded through Connie. She tried to grasp onto any idea for escape. An air grenade powerful enough to knock her out of Bismuth's grasp would also turn her to paste at such a close range. Her Jade strength would be no match for the smith's, even if she could concentrate enough to summon it.
Then Connie saw a mound of pink fur in the far sunbeam across the room. Her lungs strained against Bismuth's grasp as she drew in a deep breath, and then screamed, "L—"
A chime rang out. The world around them vanished behind a curtain of rushing blue-white light.
"—ION!" The rest of Connie's scream vanished into the empty space beyond the wall of the tunnel. Snarling, Connie thrashed her legs and head, sending her long hair everywhere, struggling out of frustration more than any hope of escape. "Put me down!" she demanded.
"Just relax," Bismuth said in a clipped tone. "I'm taking us someplace safe where we can talk."
"Being picked up like a hot dog off a grill is not relaxing!" Connie retorted.
"I'm not sure what a hot dog is," Bismuth replied coolly, "but like I said, I'm taking us someplace safe."
Before Connie could muster another pithy rejoinder, she felt gravity return as the warp tunnel deposited them onto a new pad. The air burned her lungs, and she coughed, trying to expel the acrid stench of sulfur and ash.
A twilight sky glowed above them from behind thick, choking clouds. Something broad and towering blotted out the horizon, and as Connie squinted past her stinging tears, she saw the silhouette of a looming volcano. Their warp pad was in the volcano's shadow, surrounded on all sides by ashy, jagged stone.
Below them stretched a long slope, the only clear path from the pad, and Bismuth stepped down the trail in long, hopping strides. The path curved around the slope of the rocks, past a steaming ravine, then around a bubbling sulfur pool. Some of the Gem's leaps took them to the very edge of the path, giving Connie a clear view of the stomach-churning drop waiting below. But her surefooted captor never lost a step.
At last they arrived at the end of the path, where a flat slab of metallic stone stood in the cliffside. Nothing else waited for them, save for a precipitous drop beyond the path's edge and a handful of crumbling stairs opposite the slab, the possible remnants of a greater structure that had ceased to exist long before humans started writing histories.
As Bismuth faced the stone, her gemstone began to glow. The slab split open and split apart, revealing itself to be a door, and unveiling another slab behind it. This stone, too, split and parted, and another stone beneath it did likewise, and again, until the last of the cavalcade of doors ceased, and a stairway of concentric squares stood waiting to take them down into the heart of the mountain.
Connie's struggling quelled as Bismuth carried her down the steps. As frightened and angry as she felt, she couldn't help but marvel at the hidden structure. This place had weathered time and war better than any other Gem structure Connie had seen. The lines of the corridor were precise, as if drawn into the rock with drafting tools instead of chiseled or cut, and yet it still held the same beauty as any of the other relics had, evidenced by the ornate doors waiting for them at the bottom of the stairs.
But if a mere stairwell earned her admiration, the room unveiled to her as those ornate doors parted blew Connie's mind. The chamber was a floor of clean, smooth stone, with flat-paned walls surrounding it, their faces split across with dark channels of glass. At the room's heart sat a massive anvil with a flattop that could have doubled as a small banquet table. The anvil stood within easy reach of large barrels of materials, their contents powdery and matte.
And there were weapons everywhere. Lances, maces, axes, war hammers, and swords. So many swords. Half-finished, hiltless, bladeless, discarded, sheathed and ready, boxed and stored, gathered by the bucketful. There was even a massive sword suspended overhead, a weapon longer than any car Connie's family had ever owned, a blade meant for some titanic fusion from a long-lost past.
Connie was so dumbstruck that she hadn't noticed the floor beneath her feet until Bismuth cleared her throat. The smith had set her captive down and returned her arm to its regular shape as she loomed above Connie.
"This is your forge," Connie said, trying to keep her voice from shaking. "I thought you were taking me someplace safe."
"That's right," Bismuth answered darkly. "Someplace safe for me."
The door behind Connie slammed shut.
"I know I missed a few more things since the last time I got poofed, but I'm no fool," Bismuth growled. Her hands clenched into fists as ominous and destructive as any hammer. "No human can just wander into a Gem structure by accident. I know because I used to build them. And I may not be good at biology, but I do know that humans definitely can't control wind like a Beryl can."
"I… I, um…" Connie stammered. She tried to back away, but Bismuth kept pace with her, taking one slow step for every three of Connie's stumbles. The hot metal of the doors pressed into Connie's back as the last of her retreating space ran out.
"You knew exactly who I was the moment I got out. I could see it in your face," Bismuth told her. "You're a human with Gem powers, just like Steven. Tell me who you really are. Tell me what's actually going on here. And tell me why you thought you could lie to me."
The or else in Bismuth's demand rang loudly in the glare she fixed upon Connie.