Lux Aeterna
by
Steven Mayo
Book I ~ The Meager
Chapter 13 ~ The Wooden Box
"So…" said Seville, realizing in the renewed silence how badly his arms and legs ached from remaining in their restricted positions. "Wooden box…"
"Magical wooden box…" Gipson clarified just this side of angrily. "We'll probably be dead very soon."
"Don't say that!" Edrick insisted.
"No," offered Sylum. "They want something of us. Else, Domino would have done away with us in seconds. There's something to this."
"Oh, is that a good or a bad thing?" Edrick stammered.
"Well, Eddie, we ain't dead yet," Seville on the far left suggested, but knew he had little power to comfort the peevish priest in such extreme times. So for fun, he ran the other way. "Yet being the important word choice."
"Quiet, Seville."
"Then you gimme somethin' to do," he said pathetically. "Man, this sucks!"
"No, seriously, quiet. D'you hear that?"
A distinct sound of crackling emitted from the wooden box, like someone trying to step carefully through dried tree branches, and playing over that a constant airy, buzzing sound. Then the sound rose and fell in stronger pulses, the coming and going of a flying beetle, but soon leveled out and featured only the dynamic popping noises. The volume oscillated again, and by then it was unavoidable.
"Got any ideas, Professor?" The rogue implored.
"Magic is not my area of study, especially not something as obscure as this."
"Master?"
"…I hate wizards!" Gipson stated once more.
"Noted. Should I even ask, Eddie?"
"Hey! I know magic…" the priest defended before turning abruptly. "Not that I know anything about this."
"Noted."
"Detect anything particularly offensive?" Sylum entreated to the priest.
"What powers of detection I do have are completely muddled in this place. Can't distinguish evil when everything around you is evil."
Rising and falling, the crisp snapping became less intervallic and thinner.
"What did Domino mean, Professor Sylum? About the princess not being here how we…envisage was it?" Edrick asked.
"Hard to say. If he were lying I don't think he would have been evasive when he was, and yet if he was telling the truth, as it seems to me, then he's being too cryptic to decode."
"If you had a guess?" Seville this time.
"Well…" the professor thought on it for a moment, and the others used the same moment to reflect on the ominous noise of the box. "What exactly is it that we we're expecting?"
The question functionally flabbergasted them. Seville answered first.
"You know, I don't think I ever really thought about it."
"Or I," added Edrick.
"Heh," Seville laughed, "Just what kind of light warriors are we supposed to be? What about you, Master Gipson?"
The knight paced his answer carefully.
"Of course, I didn't know where we would find her; we we're operating on a metaphysical hunch, but, I knew what it was going to look like. The room they kept her in would be small. Small and dark, either a closet or old stable, I figured. Either way, you could expect something of general disrepair and likely damp. She would have been bound and gagged originally, but by now they probably let her go without that as long as she remained tied up while someone wasn't able to watch her and as long as she stayed quiet. They would have beat her for crying, of course, and food and water would have been very slim, just enough to survive. Rape was almost certain. If ransom was the motive then perhaps they would have been more giving with food and more sparing with brutality, but that is an unlikely motive given the circumstances of the kidnapping. No, I…I pictured little hope…"
Nobody responded. The crackling noises of the box rattled off one wall to the next but the sounds had drained away from the warriors' concern and drifted off into the atmosphere. Gipson inserted final words.
"So, yes, I've thought about it."
"That's…" Edrick started to say, but his thoughts trailed off. Seville seemed to pick up on where he was headed.
"For four days now," he said. "That's been our fault."
"No," reprimanded Gipson. "If it were anybody's fault it would be the kidnappers'. We're not to blame."
"Besides, I don't think that's the case here," said a very even-voiced Sylum. "It's not the impression I got from Domino."
"Well, yeah, it's not that…" Seville continued on his own thought, glancing at Edrick to see that he was following the right trail. "The point is: we just haven't been taking this seriously. Making jokes around the campfire, fighting, disbanding…that's all stupid right now. We've gotta keep looking towards the goal. Nothing is on our side here, especially not time."
"This is definitely the most conclusive truth as to which one of us here is actually a warrior, and the other three who are just the meager." Edrick stated. "You should've kept us in line, Master Gipson."
"We've all done what we can, never forget that. Now, what can we still do?" Gipson charged them, and they each let it toss in their too tired minds. "Think about it! The princess is here…here! We're so close now! There is nothing meager about any of you, and I can say already that this is the greatest adventure of my life, these four simple days and nights. We can do it!"
"Nothing. Unless we can get out of these damn chairs, we can do nothing."
"Then that's what we work on, Seville."
The rogue looked to his feet and then away, and he sighed.
"Yes, I know, but that is hopeless. These are magical bindings."
"I am not going to die tied to a chair."
"I've told you," Darrin Sylum interrupted, "They are not going to just kill us, I am certain of that. Domino's not a barbarian, or even a warrior for that matter, he's a politician, and I'm sure he works for one. And if this is politics it means they have a use for us; politicians always want something, and from the sounds of it on what we got from Domino, they've got quite a plan. We can expect a proposition."
The new outlook had to settle on them a moment.
"Well, then, we won't take it. Screw'em!" Seville pronounced.
"That's right!" Edrick said proudly.
"It, eh…it might not be that easy, Edrick." Offered the professor, remaining calm. "We're strapped to chairs, have no weapons, we're in pitiful condition, and nobody knows where we are. Therefore, we've got absolutely no power. We've got nothing to bargain with."
"They will threaten the princess?" asked Gipson.
"Maybe, again it's hard to say. Based on your predictions I would say yes, but the mage seemed to suggest a different situation. In truth, I can't make any guess as to what capacity the princess maintains in this temple. Regardless, if not the princess, they can easily threaten us. Like I said, we're very effectively tied up right now, not hard to slit our throats. Domino wouldn't even have to do that."
The knight nodded with understanding and said as an afterthought, "…I hate wizards…"
"They're not going up on my list," Sylum finished; the first friendly thing he'd said in days.
"So, what then?" Seville asked amidst the opportunity. "We can't just agree to whatever mad thing they've got planned for us."
And we're it not for the heady tension already flowing around betwixt the eerie soundtrack and desperate words; all three of the others would have noticed Sylum pause on his answer, giving it a foreign thought, but then he spoke as he had before.
"Well, I suppose not much has really changed. We'll play the diplomacy by ear, avoid their suggestions, try to get out of these constraints, and if at all possible get our weapons. But the overall goal remains the same: safely obtain the princess and kill her captors." Then, on another surprising up-note, "We'll leave Domino to you if you want him."
Seville also spoke through original sentiments, "I'll do what seems best to do at the time. Threatening Domino doesn't mean anything when the anger builds for stupid reasons. I wasn't taking things seriously then, but I am now. I'll just try to do what's right."
"That's excellent to hear," Gipson affirmed.
"Now that, " said Edrick, "Sounds like change."
"Piece by piece, Eddie, piece by piece."
"We'll be one!" the knight exclaimed.
Had a further minute passed they would have returned to understanding how little they could do tied to chairs and locked inside a small dungeon room, but before that perilous minute could saunter by the wooden box went silent after an odd bird-like chirrup and a thump. Just as quickly the breathy tones returned with a somehow deeper mood behind them; it felt closer, more intimate. Then the box spoke.
"Welcome."
The voice had an alien, fluidic quality, so potent that it seemed to rub over them and massage their skin. It wasn't loud or even forceful, but remarkably full and deep. That it came from the box was certain.
"Welcome…" it said again. The four lightwarriors felt pressed back by nothing, and they tensed and locked onto their criminal thrones. Edrick especially began to take in and release air violently.
"…To the temple of fiends," the box finished.
They looked to Sylum or Gipson for answers, but neither could give any suggestion at all. The air behind the voice crackled a few times and then it continued.
"This temple is the legacy of dark over light. Likely your scholar, Doctor Darrin Sylum…" strangely, the box pronounced Sylum's last name wrong, "…has informed you that this palace was once throne to the demon king Lichern, though he almost certainly told you it was a myth. Know now that not a part of the story is untrue."
Seville shook his head disbelievingly, but Sylum was peering in as best he could with intent interest.
"What your intellectual hasn't told you is just who Lichern was. Not so much a corrupt king, though that title might hold at times, but better he was, no, is a devil, an elemental spirit of the earth. On his darker throne, his kingdom of soil, deep within the planet, he is simply called Lich, and he waits patiently for a time to rise again. Those peasants that rebelled against his territorial throne have only delayed and angered the buried king. But the world is chaos, always chaos, and humans have little time left to make what they can of it."
It went silent a few moments, following two more of the trembling chirps and thumps. Edrick had calmed almost by requirement. The beautiful, liquid voice was like a blanket to the cold or like a dressed wound. It was…comfortable, despite its alarming words, which would be hard to listen to on their surface level because of the lulling motion of the sound, but somehow the comprehension penetrated straight into the brain, and without the slightest affliction. Seville tried to catch Sylum's eyes to gauge his impression of the speech, but the doctor remained focused on the wooden box that created the supernatural voice. The powers of fascination were least effective on Herrik Gipson, who had not yet relaxed his taught and untrusting brow. He eyed the still box and waited for something to strike. With another introductory pop and hiss, the voice returned.
"But that is of little importance to us. What is important, as I first stated, is what Lich left behind: the temple. Not content to reside in a house of such…superficial splendor as it was when he took it, Lich had the temple rebuilt using stone and earth from the planets core: rock and magma dried, smithed, and fashioned into this palace as it stands isolated today. The very earth that forms his own castle far below."
The aural inflections came and went, mixed with the cracking and snapping noises. For a second and supremely quiet, Seville thought he discerned the sounds of feet somewhere in the garble of noises, or at least the distinct sound of people. But as he sat elatedly in the glowing vibe of the smooth voice, he hardly pieced that thought into anything more.
"Filled with Lich's own madness, his creation was unlike any corporeal thing in this world. He created not a building but a being; something with a vivid and powerful consciousness, with especially attuned mental dynamics. Brave travelers coming to the temple of fiends looking for truth or riches never fell to the earth king's bestial army, those creatures are long dead. Instead they found the end in themselves. The persuasive dementia these stone walls can so effectively permeate into weak minds leads to murder and self-slaughter, and their bodies go to the king himself. But those are weak minds, and ours are strong."
The box clicked off again, and for over a minute it sat dormant on the table, giving the warriors time enough to confer. They were each afraid to speak of course, unsure of whether or not the box could hear them, and if it could or not what that would mean. But finally Seville could not contain his query.
"Professor," he practically mouthed, "What's going on?"
Sylum, having more than three words to answer with, had to punctuate a full whisper, "Do you think, maybe, that it could be the voice of Domino's superior? The way it speaks, both personal and distant, like it's trying to hide a common grammar behind a fake one. It sounds like a person trying to falsify his voice."
Playing for the first time in quite awhile on his intuition, Seville could nod to that, but still he felt out of his league.
"Yeah....but what does it mean?" he asked, and the professor opened to respond but was cut short by the box buzzing back to life.
"Do you understand, then..." the box began saying, "...what potential we of strong mind possess through this temple? Do you understand what the true power of this building is?"
And the box paused as if for an answer, but the four were wary to speak. Of course, they looked to Sylum to make the call, trusting him best to choose the right path, but in truth the doctor was mentally writhing, weighing option after option on fatigued scales. There was more to his life than anybody knew, more than even he could remember, but not too long past midnight on the fifth morning of the journey, he was experiencing the strangest time in his life. And he didn't particularly like how it was going.
"Do you wait for an answer?" Sylum finally broke down and asked the brown box. And with its answer their suspicion was finally put to rest.
"A demonstration perhaps," said the box, seemingly disregarding Sylum's question. The voice continued with its tonal, haunting quality. "A demonstration of the power we have only to harness."
"Demonstration?" Seville said blankly.
"Try hard, now, to focus on your thoughts. Let them be what they will..." The box resumed its normal silence a few moments, and then the windy back-noise amplified into a torrent, not loud, but surging. Despite all efforts to the contrary, Seville could not help tensing up.
"Relax," the box then said, almost like a direct response, "I'm not going to hurt you. If you are afraid then I will leave you for now..."
Somewhere within the shoddy wooden rectangle the violent sounds whirred anew and settled back into its regular groove.
"This is pretty weird right here!" Seville said aloud, just under the level that might reissue the pains through his mind.
"It begins..." it said, but nothing seemed to follow.
********************
"What is this?" Seville accused the unbroken scene, stammering with his eyes about the room, searching for altercation. All things were unchanged, and though the box scaled down into lower octaves and the strange human backing behind the voice, the distinct breathiness, dissipated, nothing new occurred in the dungeon room. Although still formidably bound, Gipson was grasping his fists as though around a sword hilt, ready to strike whatever the magic crate might produce. There was such an uneasy, beady tension on the air he thought he might choke on it.
"What do you think?" chimed in the box very eagerly. "Is it not marvelous?"
"What the hell is he..." but Seville let it trail away.
Sylum felt normal as well, normal and confused. But the cynical, inductive reasoning in his brain also ran across a humorous thought he did not voice: this demonstration, this spell, was it failing? He thought for a moment that perhaps the consciousness behind the box, if it were there at all, had truly no idea of what was taking place in the prisoner's cell. No matter how absurd that idea, he couldn't repress it in face of the clues. He careened on the thin edge of a smile until he looked to his left and all cheery color drained from his face.
"Edrick!" the professor yelled over the whelp in his skull.
"What?!" Seville answered and turned and focused, "Eddie! Eddie!"
But the priest was completely gone, and whether they were real or not, before him he only saw the most luscious, florid cacophony of dazzling colors that could not even be thought possible. The multitudinous brightness beamed to him in euphoric chants; visual chants that could only reside somewhere in the stolen places of the mind and yet somehow undeniably manifest upon his skin and through his eyes and nostrils. The prismatic display enveloped him and at times he was unsure whether he was actually blessed with color or just shear whiteness and heat. A churning then sent the ribbons of light into spirals and then into floral patterns; marigolds, tulips, and pumpkin-sized violets blossomed within his retinas. And they danced to the symphony of their own beauty, some upwards, some downwards, and some jaunting into completely unrealized dimensions. They formed a path, a wholesome, welcoming path that with the position of the billowing petals suggested scores and scores of hands wafting him forward to the singularity of joy. As Edrick approached them he smiled and melted into their design...
"Eddie! Eddie!" the rogue yelped with need, frustratingly unable to attract the priest from his trance.
To them Edrick had not gone to a dimension of kaleidoscopic zeal, but some dark and infinite chasm. His lips trembled with ponderous fear, his normally pale face had gone immeasurably lucent, and he shook spastically as if overcome with a deathly shiver. Most terrifying were his wide, staring eyes that had falsely glazed over until they were flatly opaque. He aimed his frightened gaze into the parallel wall so fiercely it was strange the stone did not melt or decay. And for all accounts past that the priest was lifeless; his chest resting temperately under his cloak, static and calm.
"Edrick!" Gipson yelled ferociously.
"Eddie! Eddie snap out of it!" commanded Seville as he struggled again his wrists against the restrictive ropes. Craning his neck, stretching it to the point of muscle exhaustion, Seville tried to slap the priest with the side of his head and somehow break him from the hypnotic spell, but he was just out of reach. For the first time he tried to scoot the chair with what thrusts of the hip he could manage, but discovered then that it was immovable, planted solidly into the stone floor. "Argh!!!"
"Edrick Valance! You will respond!" Sylum attempted, but Edrick was still lost to the flushing organs of iridescence.
The flowering illuminations had given their life to blend and produce a vibrant glowing metropolis of high-standing towers and eloquent veins of flowing channels. Water of aqua, magenta, and even tangerine shuttled from pillar to pillar and traversed the complete estate from gushing fountains. Each abode was itself a gallant castle glamorized with stupendous tufted tapestries and soaring banners of every chromatic variation. All hunching towards the center of the city where dozens, no, hundreds, maybe thousands of picturesque statues of all hues waged endless sports of bombast to the laughing spectators. Somewhere among them stood an alabaster Edrick, wreathed in the most genuine of roses.
"And do you realize the significance of this display?" the box questioned them musingly. "Do you understand the inherent gravity?"
Edrick shuddered against his seat, but he stayed in the clutches of his both great and horrible fixation. It seemed to his friends that he was experiencing the highest of physical agony, some intense internal thrashing, but in actuality he felt nothing that wasn't superimposed by the brilliant images deceptively cast before his eyes. His awareness of the material world was for naught.
"A little more, perhaps..." came the deep voice from the box.
"No. No!" Seville shouted, but he only further proved that the thing could not hear them. "Come on, Eddie, come on."
Two of the statues, porcelain gods, took Herculean lances into grip and squared off to one another. The other promenading sculptures charged to the side in majestic ballet steps on allowed the combatants their proper room. Edrick could only grab to the arm of a spectator and be pulled back, having lost all control of his legs. The western gladiator pointed his finger through the firmament and catcalled to his opponent, his voices pulsating through the air in sonic bursts of chromatics. He spoke in paints and dyes, his voice was truly silent. The eastern crusader hooked the ethereal beacons, sparkling turquoise and fuchsia, and assailed them with the density of his spear-point to craft a picture in the heavens. The ludicrous taunts and ephemeral jibes put into the past, the combatants set their stances and then charged...
"There," said the box, soothing and paternally, "That is done."
Instantaneously, Edrick exhaled gaspingly and dropped his head as it would.
"Edrick!" called Gipson emphatically.
The priest seemed unable to right himself, blinking sporadically and studying the room in a dizzy haze. His eyes, his tired, disoriented eyes conveyed fear, for certain, but also showed a strange sense of lack, like he had been prematurely disjointed from some paradise. For the first thirty seconds he consistently heaved against the ropes binding across his chest, perpetually yearning for something just before him, something that had been stolen away. But then the attacks, like a childish habit, an unconscious act, ceased, and Edrick was left panting and sagging in the chair.
"Eddie?" Seville interceded.
"Huh? What?" the still-dazed apprentice clergyman answered back.
"Snap out of it, man. Are you okay?"
"What?" Edrick said again, wishing he could wave off the interrogation like a swarm of gnats. It felt as though half his body was not with him, in fact, as if it had never been with him. Instead it had been born in another dimension, another reality bound in a world of color. Edrick's pained reaction that moment to the unhealthy darkness of the room mirrored exactly the pain suffered between the others and light. His skull throbbed.
"Listen to me, Edrick," Sylum commanded with sincere concern in his voice. "How do you feel? Slowly..."
"Feel...I feel...not so good..." He wanted to cup his forehead in his hand. He realized how badly his wrists hurt as they chafed against the rope.
"What happened, Edrick?"
"Oh...oh no...that..." That drained empty feeling of his separation from the gifts of the hallucinations almost puts tears to his cheeks. "That was...amazing..."
"Amazing?" scoffed Seville. "We thought it was hurting you?"
"No, no, the very opposite!" Edrick wanted to spur into excitement and relate the tale of his vision but found his head thumped much too fiercely to allow it. He settled for resigned narration. "It was refreshingly pleasant, in fact."
"How...what?" the rogue rambled in disbelief.
"It was," Edrick assured. "I could hardly believe it at first, but then...I also couldn't not believe it. It's like I had no choice..."
The priest looked at them bashfully, realizing what little sense he was making, and Sylum adjusted the flow to be more accurate.
"Again, Edrick, think slowly. What did you see?"
"I saw..." began Edrick quickly before an abrupt stop and a squinted look. He shook it off. "I saw colors..."
"Colors?" Sylum returned to fill the break, and Edrick nodded.
"Right. I saw colors and... and... and I know I saw..." Edrick sighed, looked to his thighs, and grew aggravated.
"What else did you see, Eddie?"
"Flowers, maybe, or...no, buildings, no..."
"Pleasant, Edrick, it was pleasant," the professor reminded.
"It was," the priest repeated himself, "Incredibly!"
"You can't remember what you saw?" Seville, aghast, questioned.
"I can't ..." he sighed again, lost for even apologetic words. "It's not..."
"Once more, I think," said the voice from the wooden box suddenly. The increasingly menacing voice made them jump with its entry.
"No!" Gipson roared from his seat.
"You all likely enjoyed that celestial vision..."
"All?" Seville voiced over the box.
"...but now I will choose one subject to give an even more convincing exhibition of this temple's great mental endowment. Prepare yourself."
"Does it not know?" asked Seville, breathing frantically.
"Cease this!" Herrik Gipson commanded of the box once more, helplessly.
"Edrick, quickly, could you feel it begin?" Sylum pleaded.
"I was here and then I was there. Nothing. Like I said I had no choice..."
"Right, right, well, everybody just try to stay alert. Try to concentrate on where you are now. If you feel something come over you cry out. Don't let it take you..."
So exorbitantly afraid it felt foolish, the four scrunched themselves into their seats and feared the air, the walls, the anything, the nothing. The stagnant mist of oxygen about them spawned tendrils and snaked over them until they tickled and shivered with fright. Each was certain his mind was near explosion. But nothing was happening; in the small dungeon room of four chairs, a table, and a diabolical wooden box, nothing had changed.
Seville had always prized his ability to remain alert and in-the-moment; he kept a solid lock on his focus. Uneasy with just drifting in a fearful ignorance, he took to counting the stone blocks that formed the adjacent wall to his left. One, two, three, he never lost count or fluttered from his task. He admired as he traced the wall how intricate the construction was; not alternating layers of equal bricks with sides set half-off each other, but an ornate plethora of sharp rectangles jutting both tall and wide and sketching with their boundaries a maze-like labyrinth of grooves. He zoomed out to ascertain some larger design of the whole thing, but found it effectively random. When he zoomed back in he rejoined the brave expedition of the black army ant tirelessly scaling up a long trench, yearning for the next right turn of the path. When it got there it didn't stop to camp, it didn't take a breather, it just forced its legs onward a few centimeters, took the left direction, and scaled to its north once more. The trail it was tracking became more apparent with every insectival step, the light from its small helmet illuminating with every pass of the beam the wide footsteps of the criminal werewolf. Two more turns the army ant took until it galloped proudly into the square. The ant approached the cliff despite the murky fog, skittering incessantly after its quarry. A wrong step and the ant toppled forward over the cliff and shuttled to the tempest below. Achieving terminal velocity the ant pierced the ocean surface and forged a swiftly spiraling vortex in the waves. Seville choked with worry for the little insect, comforting himself by dabbling his feet through the skin of the sea on which the chair legs rested. The salty, buoyant water was lukewarm and delicately thin, and even the tiniest droplet of water fell from Seville's naked toes in torrential cascades of cerulean moisture, only instead of coalescing with its mother ocean the streaming waters beaded on the surface and skittled into amoebic pools, then slowly, very slowly, over the course of eons, merged together and formed a second great sea atop the first, with waves mightier and depths more terrible.
"Come on, Seville! Come on!" Edrick shouted, repeating the mantra he'd not even heard the rogue aim at him. "Snap out of it!"
"There is nothing we could do for you, I doubt there is anything we can do for him," Sylum proposed logically.
"But we must try!" the priest stormed back in agony.
Seville was rejecting the hypnotism. Unlike Edrick's gargoyle stare, the rogue rebelled against his confines, pummeled the magical ropes about his legs, wrists, and chest, and hammered the back of the chair. Rotating his hands about the wrists as he could, stretching them, risking their tendons, he scratched feverishly at the ropes. His eyes widened and shut and then widened again, and all the while he hummed a mad tune, violently jumping octaves and tossing the rhythms each way. Sweat rained down his quivering, angry face, and he visibly gnashed his teeth.
"If you can hear me, Seville, please, fight it," the clergyman begged.
"Looks to me that he is fighting it, good priest," Gipson said softly but firmly in trying to comfort Edrick. "Patience, now. If did not injure you it will probably not injure him."
Edrick bit his lip and nodded, the emotion watering his eyes.
"Such imagination can be momentous under the will of the earth king's citadel," said the wooden box cryptically.
Swimming, churning, paddling frenetically with its six tender legs, the singular ant made headway across the globe-spanning body of marine torture. Seville could feel it approach, like every slow inch was another grain of sand in the hourglass. He could feel distance, feel time, feel the above and the below, feel life and death. As the ant swam nearer and nearer, though still ages away, the tropical clouds above, fiery, burnt goldenrod, bifurcated into two quaking fronts that met at their ends to form an ovoid rounded much as a human eye, the pupil, iris, everything radiating a heartbreaking sapphire. The optical mask in the sky started speaking in a high, demon's voice, but the language was foreign. Seville could comprehend the magnificent sight no further, so he looked back to the infinitesimal bug, but saw it nowhere. His telescopic eyes examined through each peaking tsunami but the thing was gone, gone until he heard the minute pecks on his chair leg. Shooting downwards, he saw the ant crawling up and up once more, over the lip of the seat, to the top of Seville's thigh, and then towards his chest. The rogue cringed and rocked on his floating throne, but the ant was irrepressible. Carefully finding its footing along Seville's sternum the now palm-sized insect studied with its million eyes its final destination. Seville wanted to cry, wanted to scream, but from his larynx he spoke only levitating bubbles of water. And despite that fact, he realized he was thirsty. So thirsty...
"Seville! Seville!"
He was surely dying, surely suffering a burst heart. Had he the ability he would be sobbing and sobbing until his illusionary ocean had become real with tears.
"Come on, Seville! Come on!" Edrick chanted now, mindlessly, hopelessly.
Seville hiccupped and coughed and gulped down air only to upchuck it hysterically. He traded gruesome hums for ever more grim whelps and grunts, all low and fierce enough to tear apart his throat. It was unlike any sound the other three had ever known or would want to know. It was the definition of awfulness. The ragged, painful sight was eventually too hard to watch for Edrick or Sylum. Only Gipson's age-backed mentality could stomach it.
The ant paused on his shoulder, paused and stared. The demon's foreign cackling barely resounded over the new, stout cracks of lighting inserted to punctuate the thundering emptiness between Seville and the beady insect. Seville looked at its sharp pincers and its strangely still antennae, and the ant looked at the rogue's drenched and soft skin. The otherworldly tongue from above finished its sermon with a release of meteoring brimstone, with each collision igniting its own personal hurricane of fire. Seville burned in the impossible searing heat, and the ant scuttled in, reared its weapons, and bit...
"No!" Seville shrieked out of his rapture and belted another furious bout of coughing and hacking. His vision was one complete mosaic so he couldn't find the source of the hurting bruise he felt on his forehead and right cheek. And the sounds he heard behind and above him were too meshed and frantic to translate, as if several people were barking orders at him. He couldn't handle the pressure, couldn't handle the intensity; he wanted to keep his face laid against the frigid stone surface where the temperature soothed his aching body. Nothing seemed better than to curl up like he did on that dungeon floor and wheeze himself into another stupor, this one of restful sleep. Tears trickled from both eyes; it was all too much.
"Seville, do you hear me?"
"Seville! Seville!"
He thought he heard his name, but all the words were so enjambed with symbols and foreign linguistics. The voice of his friends perhaps, but also there was the inkling of darker beings hailing at him.
"You're free, Seville, you're free!"
Free, he thought, free, but what did it mean?
"Can you hear me at all?" an external voice exasperated.
The traumas dissipated quickly. First the dizziness slinked away and then the demon's recurring voice was no more than a mumble. Too much fatigue was pounding through his body for him to feel pain, but awareness to other senses did surge once more through him. That knowledge revitalized his eyes and limbs, and though he was angry he couldn't remember what had happened, he was also joyous for it. His focusing eyes scanned along a gray bumpy plane that instantly configured itself into the ground. When he wanted to reach and make it real with his hands, he couldn't move them, but as inwardly frustrating as that was, it finally dawned upon him where he was.
"I'm free!" he shouted, allowing the walloping migraines to do their worst. Seville rolled over to his back and looked up, seeing first the low ceiling, but then he nodded forward and saw his three friends staring at him blankly, still imprisoned in their chairs. Flat against the dungeon ground, back to the floor, he admired all that was around him; so real and palpable, but somehow not more real than the forgotten dream. There remained an itch in his head that tinkled just near the lick of his scalp, as if some metal piece in his brain had dislodged and begun scraping at the membrane. Could he trust these new friendly images? Had the box released him or had he actually broken free? Quandary wrapped him like a blanket, but he had to rebel against even that. He strained his abdomen and sat up, wonder-eyed.
"Incredible!" Sylum blathered, awestruck.
"You did it!" encouraged Edrick.
The bindings about both Seville's chest and legs had been torn apart, literally exploded into ropey slivers that even then were wafting in the damp air.
"But...but...how?" asked Seville, like the priest out of his own daze.
"You just pulled yourself free, man!" Gipson confirmed, "Brute force!"
"I ... I don't remember..."
"Neither did I," Edrick said empathetically. "But it's over now!"
"The box ... the box said ... it was over...?"
They each raised their glance from the spectacle and found the box as it had been the whole time. It had not spoken for over two minutes.
"Well, no, but what does it matter?" Edrick said.
Seville shook off the question tiredly.
"Can you stand?" asked the knight authoritatively.
A wave of ache washed over the rogue, but still he said, "Yeah," and did so. The rope enchanted tightly around his wrists still remained, and he walked cautiously, never nearing the box lest the proximity incite it to further action. The quiet from the evil wooden thing was dreadfully alarming.
"Do you think it knows?" Seville asked, scrunching behind what was once his chair as if the box would barrel at him.
"Can't say. It hasn't responded," Sylum answered.
"I've gotta get these last ropes off!" said Seville, searching for any aid in doing so.
"But how, Seville?" the priest asked innocently.
"I'm workin' on it, man, I'm workin' on it," and then he saw something, something that just might work. Seville squared off with his former chair and kicked across the seat. As he'd hoped, it remained planted; it didn't even shake. "Maybe. If I've got enough strength left in me."
From either side at the top the chair's back jutted three extra inches of metal, rounded into a jagged bulb on the top with essences of Cornerian gothic. Seville turned his back to the chair and looped the narrow stretch of rope between his wrists into that pike.
"Let us pray I don't tear my own hands off," he said before struggling forward as fiercely and mightily as he could summon. He felt like he was back in that chair raging weakly against too great an enemy, and could not in all capacities of his mind understand how he had managed to break the other ropes, but he continued to tug away at those around his wrists desperately. Then with a shock so sudden he almost stopped fighting he jolted forward a matter of inches and heard the uplifting scratching of the tether being undone. Moving his step forward to accommodate he pulled harder still, growling in his throat to be done with it, and then in one instantaneous pop the rope snapped apart and Seville launched forward to the stone ground. It hurt more inside his head then it did upon it when he fell, but for once he cared little about that. Zealously, Seville jumped to his feet, stretched his arms and looked at his fellows.
"What are you waiting for, Seville, get us out of these things," commanded the knight happily, just as a familiar and unwelcome voice rejoined them.
"Quite enough, I imagine. You may rest," said the oblivious voice from within the box. Seville shot away from it and parried for a strike though one never came. The leap putting him closest to Gipson, he made to untie the intricate knots above the knight's wrists but stopped very shaken when the box spoke again.
It was not common, or even the Elvish or Dwarfish that was sometimes heard about larger towns; it was something older, something more archaic.
"What is that?" Gipson asked concernedly.
"...Leifen," said Sylum was an impressionable smirk. "The ancient language."
"What does it say?" Gipson demanded, preparing his options.
"I don't speak Leifen, nobody does. I just recognize the syllables."
"Now ... behold..." started Seville.
"Huh?" the confused knight implored.
"It says ... it says..." Seville began again, trembling at the lip and fingers. "It says, now behold the true power of the temple of fiends."
"You speak ancient?!" cried Edrick and Gipson simultaneously.
"No, no he doesn't," the professor answered first.
"Seville, how do know what it says?"
"Just ... I ... wait a minute, quiet!" assailed the unnerved rogue. He translated the ancient inflections of the mysterious voice further, "It's saying, is it clear to you now the supreme power in our hands. We can transmit knowledge across the planet instantly. From this very palace we could give dreams to the elves, nightmares to the dwarves, and ideas to the kings of men. We can speak to the universe, and through our voices harness it."
"How are you doing this, Seville?" sputtered Edrick, affright. Seville groaned and palmed his cranium, drooped his head and panted.
"The language is in me," he tried to explain somehow. "The dream ... the dream taught it to me."
"That's impossible," exasperated Sylum, truly emotional for the first time.
"Oh..." Seville moaned, "Oh, I can feel where they put it my head. Like it's trying to chisel its way out."
"Try to forget it!" suggested the kinetic Gipson. "Don't think about it! Push it out of your mind!"
"It's in there like a stake, Gipson!" the rogue stammered impetuously, now sweltering his agonizing skull with his hands like a bleeding sore.
"Seville, you've got to try to get us out of here," came the abrupt order from Darrin Sylum. Seville breathed away what pain he could with one more heavy sigh.
"Right," he said, and went to work on Gipson's bindings. It didn't take him long before the knight's arms were released and Seville moved on to Sylum and then Edrick, all the while the box was orating in Leifen, speaking just for Seville. The rogue catalogued in the back of his mind what it was saying, but didn't concern himself much with it. It was more of the pompous semantics.
And then the four light warriors were standing and extending their tired muscles into restful positions. They noticed when the box stopped speaking, trailing off like the end of a speech, but as so many times before nothing happened afterwards. Just a pause in the flow it seemed. Grouping and readying themselves they approached the door.
"Wait," Edrick said.
"What? What now?" Gipson asked, resuming leadership now that they were back on their feet.
"Should we, you know, do something to thing?"
"What?! No! They'll probably know if something happens to it."
"Are you sure? They don't seem to have any way of..."
"Yes, I'm sure this is different. Besides, as long as that thing keeps talking we can go unnoticed. At least, that's what I'm hoping."
The matter settled, they bundled into the hallway and Gipson at point took the handlebar in his grasp. With a collective intake of air he opened the door, slowly. Millimeter at a time he could avoid most of the metallic screeching, and then it was open fear enough to slip through. As they stepped through the box began to speak again, still in Leifen.
"What is it? What is it?" the nervous priest rambled, and Seville took a few moments to collect enough context.
"It's still just talking, Eddie. It don't think they suspect a thing."
Leagues and leagues away from his element, yearning sorely for a feel of home, Edrick nodded resignedly and followed them out the door. It was another dark hallway much like those they had seen the entire time before being captured. They didn't recognize it, but did recognize the torch light down the armor-laden hallway.
"We're close, be very quiet now," recommended Gipson, trying to master the upended hairs on his neckline. "I'll go in front. Softly now, step by step."
"Guys ... guys..." Seville whispered strongly.
"What?"
"You're not gonna believe it!"
Following Seville's gaze of wonderment to the floor a little ways down the hall opposite the torches, there was a pile equipment and glittering silver, topped impressively by a blade shimmering very modestly the most stunning aura of blue.
"There's no way!" vocalized Gipson with a suddenly smiling awe.
The four light warriors went to their weapons, and they readied for battle.
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