John fell to the floor, breathless and clutching at his side from the run. Not so hard to imagine when lugging about thirty pounds of equipment up a collapsing stairway in increasingly thin air after having sweat out half the water in his body inside a volcano, but not entirely heroic either. Once he'd collected himself, he sat up, and looked around—
"LOOK DOWN!" cried a shrill voice. "DON'T LOOK HIM IN THE EYES!" John obeyed immediately, and his ears were filled with that glorious trumpet-blast of a roar. He'd noticed it was musical on the way up, now he realized it was beautiful. A bright light filled his vision, leaving him dazzled even through his eyelids. There was something else going on in the background. Harp music. "Come closer you three," the voice repeated, "crawl along until you feel shade."
"Why can't we look?" asked Roxy.
"You'll go blind like me," John could swear the voice was smiling evilly. "If you want to do that, go on ahead."
The children crawled towards the music. It was a jaunty tune, for a harp. Something you could dance to. The brilliant light was suddenly not there and it felt just a smidge cooler. John opened his eyes and saw a troll in a wooden cage set deep inside a cave. He had the sudden realization that they were directly underneath Pyralsprite.
The troll was in her twenties and her teeth may have been even sharper than the Empress's. She was holding a lyre made of gold and red wood, with a soundbox shaped like a highly stylized face. The wooden arms came out of the top of its head, and made it look like a troll's horns. The lyrist herself might also have been pretty, under the teal scab covering the bottom half of her face that had spread from a pair of now completely lifeless eyes. "Sorry I couldn't get my makeup on," she said mockingly, "but I've had to keep Pyralsprite calm all these past days."
"Call this calm?" asked Roxy, voice dripping with sarcasm so thick John was surprised that it didn't collect in a pool at her feet. "Is this one of those 'cultural' things, like how you guys use 'love' and 'pity' interchangeably? Because that's wrong too."
She cackled. "Has he left the mountain? Wreaked a swath of fury and destruction across the Great Sea? Caused a second cataclysm? Your welcome." She winked, and a flake of teal crumbed off and fell to the floor. All the while her fingers danced across the strings and played their jaunty tune. "And Karkat's the only one who talks like that anymore."
"Teacher!" Aradia shouted, rushing up to the cage and clasping the bars. "You are alive! I knew it!"
The other troll snorted. "Of course I'm alive."
"Guys," Aradia said excitedly, turning back to the Hylians, "this is Terezi Pyrope. She's Pyralsprite's Handmaid and my instructor. Karkat wants to pail with her." Roxy snorted. John wasn't sure what that meant but it sounded dirty, so he dutifully turned red for the sake of argument.
"Hey," she said with a nod, leaning back in her seat, "bastards tore my wings off and made me look Pyralsprite in the eyes. He didn't like that. They thought he was just a dumb animal but I've been with him since before I pupated, so He ate them and locked me up in this cage, for my own protection of course. And because He doesn't want me to leave." Terezi stopped playing for an instant and the great voice of the dragon became trembling and quiet. She pointed down to the floor. "Something down there is hurting poor dear Pyralsprite," said Terezi, lips pursed as in concern for a loved one. John was shocked to hear this gargantuan deific monster whose voice cracked stone and whose mere gaze could apparently make your eyeballs explode out of their sockets referred to as a 'poor dear,' but even more shocked to find out that something could actually hurt it.
"He's in terrible pain," she went on despite John's minor panic attack, "He could just leave, but if He does the thing will get out. He can't kill it Himself either, something about ancient contracts—"
'Wait," said Roxy, "he talks?" She cleared her throat. "He I mean?"
'Sure," Terezi drawled as if it were unimportant. "Dragon language. I've been taught to speak it since I was a wiggler, and I've been doing the same for Aradia."
"We can't make the sounds with our mouths though," said Aradia, "we need instruments!"
"This is weird," John said, ears drooping. No one paid him any mind.
"So could you all be dears," said Terezi, resuming her song; Pyralsprite's roar changed tone, and it almost sounded like contented purring; the troll reclined on her cot, an earthen ledge cut into the cell-wall, splaying herself out dramatically and showing off her new-looking red boots, "and go down there and kill the thing for me?"
"Okay!" Aradia said, nodding enthusiastically, wooly curls bouncing.
"Umm," John said, tugging on her sleeve. "Aradia, maybe we should go to the Empress, huh? Tell her what's going on, get a whole fucking army to go take care of the thing that's hurting a god?"
Terezi leaned forward, smirking. Her unseeing eyes focused on John, then on Roxy, then, longest of all, on Aradia. "I think you can handle it," she said. "In fact I'd do it myself but, well, 'locked in a cage, need to keep Pyralsprite calm, it's actually pretty comfy in here', all that sort of thing, you understand."
"Okay," John said, nodding more to assure himself than for the benefit of the blind troll. "But we'll need another way in. The stairs collapsed on our way—"
A look of feigned shock spread across Terezi's face. "Aradia you took the stairs? Like a Karkat? For shame!" Aradia however just laughed at the abuse. "Most people climb up the back way," Terezi explained. "It's faster but much more likely to get you killed. I guess it's the only way up now," she said, licking her lips. Terezi sniffed in a considering manner. "Hey, your human male is pretty attractive. Make sure to tease him extra hard for me."
"Please don't," he said, just as both girls responded with a resounding 'okay!' Terezi cackled as John groaned. "Here, take this," she said, producing a heavy golden key. It was decorated with a red and purple enameled eye and a pair of stylized horns, and the teeth were curved and narrowed to a point, like the teeth of an animal. It was longer than John's hand and probably weighed two pounds. The big key was a good compliment to the silver key they'd already collected. "They put a lock on the door to the sill to keep anyone from killing it. Give me that other one," Terezi said snappishly. "It goes to my cell. I'm sure I'll want to leave eventually."
"How can you tell?" John asked, eyebrow raised quizzically.
Aradia gasped. "There's a monster in the forge?"
"Sure," said Terezi, as if she were saying that the sky was blue. "The god of it, in fact. The thing your precious stone-men were worshipping, at least by the end of their time here."
"But how do you know that?" she asked.
"Pyralsprite's got a lot of stories," she said with a dismissive gesture. "The Bokoblins locked the door to protect themselves as much as to hurt Pyralsprite. Now go! Go! I need to keep playing before he takes the mountain down." And with that she struck her fingers against all the strings at once, creating a cacophony of sound like chocolate gold. The children said their goodbyes and left her cave, stepping into Pyralsprite's blinding light.
The great dragon roared, the sound shaking the children to their very bones, and started pounding with his mighty claws again. The sound almost masked the heavy, solid flapping of a trio of kargarocs flying in out of the sun. Each carried a monster in its claws; two deep green Bokoblins, wielding fine cutlasses and decked in chainmail, and a hulking brute of a Moblin, easily half as big again as the ones John had seen at the Forsaken Fortress.
The three monsters were dumped onto the ground in front of the party and John sighed, drawing his hammer and shield. Aradia cracked her whip warningly. Roxy yawned and drew a pair of her knives. "These guys look stronger than normal," John warned.
"Sure," said Roxy, "but we've been outnumbering the poor things all dungeon. It's finally a fair fight," she winked a big pink eye.
John chuckled. "When you put it that way," he said, grinning evilly at the Moblin. "I'll be a gentleman and fight the big one." Terezi's cackling was carried on the raging wind. She struck up a tune that was at once melancholy and adventurous. The winds seemed to join in, zephyrs acting as accompaniment, with Pyralsprite's trumpeting roar providing the percussion.
The Moblin bellowed and charged at John. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Roxy loose her knives and heard the crack of the whip; then he was running at the monster, easily twice his size, and completely unafraid. Was he trying to show off? Who knew? Who cared? The Moblin took a swing with its massive spear, raking the ground in front of John, kicking up a cloud of dust, but the heavy blade caught for just an instant and John snapped it off with a single blow.
Grunting in surprise, the monster backpedalled and jabbed at John's chest with the jagged end of the broken spear, but John smacked it out of the way with his shield. He had yet to break his stride and completed his run with a leap, delivering a vicious overhand swing to the Moblin's head. Its eyes rolled back and its teeth cracked, but surprisingly enough the monster stayed on his feet.
Even more surprisingly, it had enough coherency left over to punch John almost all the way back to the cave-mouth and run away. Terezi laughed at him. Although John was seeing stars, he could tell she was also pointing dramatically, as the music had stopped.
Iron chainmail is all well and good for stopping things weaker than iron. A bullwhip made of steel cable is not one of those things; it shredded like tissue beneath Aradia's first strike, leaving the Bokoblin defenseless and his leopard-print undergarments exposed to the air. Aradia stuck her tongue out and gagged. He bowed his head in shame. She advanced, cracking her whip as if driving cattle, or so she'd heard, trying to push the Bokoblin away from her friends without hurting it too much. It tried to deflect the blows with its cutlass, but his heart wasn't in it, embarrassed as he was, and sustained a lot of angry violet cuts and welts before deciding to run for it.
Aradia smiled victoriously. One enemy, at least, had been taught a lesson about messing with her without having to meet an unseemly end. He would warn others, and diplomacy would at the very least be considered. Truly, this was the start of—
John's Moblin, looking at least twenty percent lumpier about the face, staggered up to her Bokoblin and laid it flat with a meaty fist. A strangled cry was followed by an ugly, cartilaginous scraping sound as it hit the floor, neck looking distended and crooked. Aradia felt the spirit leave the body. The Moblin picked up the Bokoblin's cutlass, the huge blade looking like a knife in the green-furred ham it called a hand, and bellowed. Aradia bared her teeth at it and growled, an ugly pressure building up in her left temple. She lifted up her whip and sent its silver yards streaking at the ogre's arm.
Her aim was off by a just little thanks to the anger, and the whip wrapped around the monster's arm instead of cutting like she'd wanted. It grabbed a handful of the length and yanked her off her feet, twisting her around and dragging her along the ground by her back, scraping her sensitive wings. She cried out as she wondered if she'd ever be able to properly fly.
The Moblin bellowed yet again once he had Aradia in front of him, raising his stolen cutlass, when another shadow passed in front of the sun, not black but dark blue. It landed lightly on his shoulders, and buried five knives in his skull, one right after another, and slit his throat, dragging at the Moblin's head to direct the fall away from Aradia. Roxy rode it down to the ground like clinging to a falling tree.
"Did you know that taking a throwing knife to the knee is a Windfall euphemism for getting married?" asked Roxy as her Bokoblin rolled around on the ground agony, clutching at length of steel currently buried in its knee. The first two knives had bounced off its chest. Pretty stupid, Rox, she berated herself, looking at one of the recovered blades, which had snapped in half. "Quit your wining," she snapped, throwing another knife at its face with an authoritative gesture. It twitched and lay still. "You don't have to replace any valuable equipment. Okay, I got it cheap by flirting with the merchant, but still."
Then she heard Rae-Rae cry out in pain. Roxy rolled up her sleeves. "Time to get my not-ninja skills rolling," she said, and jumped twenty feet into the air, her shadow splashing beneath her like a puddle of water.
A minute later, Aradia was beaming up at her, eyes gleaming. "That was amazing!"
Roxy scraped some viscous brown Moblin blood off herself. "Nayru, why's this so thick?" she said, black lips pulled back in a disgusted sneer. "It wasn't that hard," she said in a more friendly tone. "John already softened him up for me, literally," she snickered. "And I have plenty of experience in cold-murdering these pig suckers. Um, piglike suckers I mean. They probably don't…do naughty things to pigs why the hell am I still talking," she said, scowling. "I need a fucking drink," Roxy moaned, "and there's not a drop of booze anywhere—"
"I want to kiss you," Aradia announced. "Huh?" Roxy enquired.
The troll stood up and dusted herself off. "No!" Roxy exclaimed, beginning to panic, "we're supposed to make John uncomfortable, that's what your sensei said and—" Aradia caught her friend in a crushing hug and stood up on her toes to give Roxy a chaste peck on the cheek.
Roxy's face burned. "Oh. Well, duh obviously that's what you meant," she said, looking at the smaller girl.
"Of course," said Aradia, big smile shrinking down slightly. "Wait. You think that just because I'm a troll I'm a crazy sexual deviant, don't you?"
"No," said Roxy slowly, somehow giving the word about four extra syllables.
"You do!" shouted Aradia. She stamped her foot. "I'm twelve! I'm too young for quadrants!"
A sharp whistle issued from the cave mouth. "Blue boy over here's dying of a concussion," Terezi called. "You probably need him for something," she intoned, voice dripping with sarcasm. The two girls forgot what they were arguing about and forced several jars of raw chuchu jelly down John's throat.
He woke up, smacking his lips. "Cinnamon and…cheap honey?" he asked as Roxy pulled him to his feet. "Did I win," he asked, surveying the battlefield.
"Well, you got away with your life," said Roxy, with a big fake smile, "and the other guy is certainly dead too, so let's say yes."
"YOU GOT KNOCKED THE FUCK OUT KID!" Terezi shouted. John sighed.
There was a ladder down the back of the mountain, bolted to the stone with rusted irons. It was long and ancient, bleached white by the elements, wood long fossilized, or something like it. It felt like climbing bone, or so John imagined. Below them, the angry brown cloud raged, conjured up by Pyralsprite's wrath—or rather his pain. Once again, it seemed that John had somehow been contracted to slay a god. Well, at the end of the day, he was going to have to find the hero, and help him kill the gods' greatest enemy. This was the equivalent of 'baby steps'.
The climb was surprisingly uneventful. Descending through the cloud, it occasionally flashed with white and green sparks. The air inside was thick and hot and smelled of dust. It hurt the children's throats but they were through it soon enough, and safely on a ledge, wide enough for the three to walk side-by-side to a door some twenty yards ahead. "That'll take us to base camp 05," Aradia said. "Just be careful where you step."
The path was strewn with the bright blue bomb fruits, so ripe they were almost bursting with juice, looking as delicious as they were in fact deadly. "What is the point of these things?" John snapped. "What possible purpose would explosive fruit serve?"
Aradia shrugged. "I'm an archaeologist not a botanist."
"I don't know what either of those things are," John asserted. Ignoring him, the girls walked on down the path. And the mountain cracked.
The sound was like standing next to a canon and the force bounced the children up a whole foot, throwing back to the ground. Behind them, an enormous split appeared in the stone wall, as deep as a wound, and bleeding like one too. A geyser of molten lava shot out of the crack like the breath of a dragon, incinerating the lower reaches of the ladder before it subsided, the pressure in the sill equalizing. Bits of pale wood rained down from the upper reaches where the quake had broken the ladder as well; there was no going back.
More pressingly, and enormous boulder slid down the sheer faced, settling right on the path, not one inch away from the clutch of bomb fruit. John slapped his forehead. "This is stupid. Now what the hell are we going to do?"
Roxy rubbed her chin. "I think I can fix this," she said.
"Do you think we can roll the boulder off the ledge?" asked Aradia. "We'd have to step really carefully though."
"I know," said John, turning to Roxy, "You'll use your magic!"
"She should save it for the monster," Aradia argued.
"Better than trying really hard not to explode while we shift a ton of rock," John countered.
"Well maybe I could just fly you guys across," Aradia reasoned.
"Do you really think you should?" John asked. "Your wings have taken a bit of a beating…" as the two went back and forth, Roxy uttered a brief prayer, drew a dagger, and threw it at one of the bomb fruits.
Compared to the quake just now, the blast was miniscule. By its own standards however, it was a monster of an explosion that nearly burst the kids' eardrums and singed off Roxy's eyebrows. When the smoke cleared, and there was very little of it, bomb fruit being a very clean-burning substance, the boulder was gone. As was most of the path.
John wiped the dust off his glasses and shouted over the ringing in his ears. "Looks like you're flying us after all Aradia!"
"What?!" she shouted.
Within minutes, they were standing inside the demon's mouth. Ahead was a pool of magma stretch from one end to another, bridged by a narrow length of stone that was cherry red on the underside. Beyond that was a rocky outcropping, a mound of stone onto which stairs had been carved. At the top was an enormous door, held shut by an enormous lock. It was a golden globe shaped like a stylized, horned eye, binding a mass of golden chains together across the door.
As the kids approached the door, Aradia stopped them. "Let's use up the last of the medicine right now, to fight the monster to the best of our abilities."
"I think we should wait and see if anyone's fatally injured," said John. "We're not that badly off, except your wings."
"We might need my wings," said Aradia. "It'll be easier to fly in there too because of the updrafts."
Roxy wandered off for a second to examine the area. A few ancient potshards, a cookpot that was so hot she couldn't touch it, a skeleton of indeterminate race clutching a sword, rusted to ruddy powder. It also had a fine red leather belt with a brass buckle decorated with a black enameled eagle. Roxy snickered as she picked it up, the skeleton crumbling. It was too big for her but John could use it as a sword-belt, er, hammer-belt. It would look more heroic than just dangling it awkwardly from the hip like he did right now.
Right in front of her, the magma bubbled, and she jumped back to avoid being splattered by the molten drops. It took a second for the depression made by the bubble to subside. Another, bigger one appeared, but it did not burst. Instead, it crawled onto solid ground and Roxy jumped back, dropping the belt and drawing a blade.
The lava sloughed off the creature, revealing something like a centipede with stone armor. Its body was burning a bright cherry red with inner heat, igniting the air around it. It had enormous jaws, as long as swords, and a single gem-like eye, luminous blue sclera, neon-pink iris, and a slit pupil like a cat. It opened its jaws with a sound like pruning shears and Roxy readied a knife—
There was a bluish blur and John was standing between her and the monster, smashing his hammerhead into its eye with an expert thrust, smashing the organ in. it shattered instead of bursting, spraying out crystalline shards; the jaws spasmed, almost slicing John before hanging limply as the body collapsed in on itself, inner fire beginning to cool.
"Okay," said Roxy, putting her hand on John's shoulder, "I think I may actually swoon this time, no shit."
He laughed nervously. "I've got to be good for something, right?"
"Ooh, a magtail," said Aradia, approaching. She had a finger near her mouth, a sign Roxy was beginning to associate with deep contemplation. "We should come back later to examine the remains," she said. "There might be some useful parts."
"Ew," said Roxy, cringing.
"Oh, these things are mechanical," Aradia assured the Hylians. "We won't be rummaging around in his guts or anything."
John looked at it, kicking the stony carapace, a sizzling sound escaping his sandal. "Really?"
Aradia nodded. "That glow is from their power source, it keeps their gears spinning and turning forever. Look, it doesn't even have a mouth; they're just the guards of whatever it is that lives in the forge." She stepped closer, squinting hard. "But the other ones I've seen are way older. They have nicks and cuts all over the shells and missing bits and their eyes aren't nearly as bright, and when they move there's all this clicking and whirring and screeching. This one must be brand new."
She straightened up. "It's making more," she said.
Without further ado, John handed Aradia the big key. She spread her wings, visibly scraped and scratched from being dragged along the ground; they seemed to tremble for a second before she caught an updraft and flew up to the lock, inserting the key as if she were driving a knife into the eye of a monster. With a twist, the lock groaned and fell to the floor, the chains binding the door hanging limp.
She drifted down, and John asked her to produce the rest of the medicine. "I'm fine," he said, "but you two are looking a little worse for wear." He smeared some across Aradia's wings, a process she found incredibly awkward, but bore it in appreciation of the soothing medication. He then moved on to Roxy. "I could make so many jokes right now," she said, as he spread the red slime onto her face, singed from the explosion earlier, "but I'm not going to. Yet. I'm gonna compose a list and read them all aloud once we're off this island." John smiled.
"One last thing," she said, handing him the belt. "You'll look more heroic with this around your chest," she explained.
"Thank you," he said, accepting the present. He secured the sword-belt, hanging his hammer and shield on it experimentally before taking them down and arming himself once again. "No more playing around," he said. "Let's do this." He walked up to the door and kicked it like he'd seen Aradia do. It slid up smoothly as all the others.
If he thought it had been hot before, he'd been a fool. The forge was a hell on earth. A ring of stone surrounded a perfectly circular pool of glowing magma, golden red, igniting near-transparent cherry flames in the air just above it.
Then, without ceremony, it surged upward, a plume of fire reaching up to the high ceiling (Pyralsprite's roar of pain was heard through the stone), bursting to reveal the god of the forge. He was an enormous black figure, a grim giant wreathed in fire, with two eyes like enormous glowing coals and a hammer the size of a house in his hand. It was crafted from enormous gemstones, the striking head a single huge ruby, and clockwork gears of such fineness they couldn't have been made by mortal hands, thin as spider webs and a thousand times more intricate. The door shut itself behind them. John produced the pictobox and snapped a pictograph.
"Hephaestus," he read aloud, "god of the forge. The Hylian Edda describes him as the smith of the gods; the middle section of book I describes his forging of time itself on his work bench. Hephaestus Minions are mechanical centipedes colloquially known as magtails; like all Minions they share their master's face. His hammer, Fear No Anvil, is also the most precise clock known to exist, keeping time with the very concept of time itself. Hephaestus' glowing red eyes are in fact part of his protective coloration."
John was surprised at the much more lush description. He'd been hoping for something briefer and more importantly, something that actually told him what to do. He didn't have to dwell on these thoughts long however, as Hephaestus ponderously raised his hammer and brought the thing crashing down. John only survived due to being pushed out of the way by Roxy. "Pay more attention Johnny," she snapped. "Nothing that big and slow should ever get in a sucker punch like that!"
She stood up and unleashed a flurry of daggers. They struck with a high pitched hissing sound like water thrown onto a hot pan, leaving spots of brilliant liquid. Roxy almost smirked, until she realized that her daggers had merely melted instantly into liquid upon touching the giant. He moaned, a sound like an angry whale that the children could feel in their teeth, and raised his hammer once again, swinging the thing in a violent red crescent along the ground.
This entire time Aradia had been watching the creature in awe, but at the sight of the approaching ruby wall, reflecting her own face back at her, she screamed, hooked her arms under John's shoulders, and launched herself up into the air, narrowly avoiding the hammer.
"Shit!" John shouted. "Roxy! Holy crap she's dead!" he struggled to get out of the troll's grasp.
"You will be too," she snapped, "if you keep squirming around—" she was cut off by another swing of the massive hammer, this one vertical. The wake of its passing unbalanced her and sent them both tumbling to the ground, knocking the air out of them. Hephaestus turned his head as if looking for them, though his eyes didn't seem to move at all. "Ow," Aradia muttered angrily, "you make it hard to like you John," she said.
"It's not my fault," he snapped, or rather began to snap. Hephaestus was now focusing on them and raising his glorious weapon for another blow. "Hey, giant flaming fuckass!" a voice called from the other side of the room. The god's head snapped to the side and three more splatters of liquid metal appeared on his face as Roxy, entirely unharmed, hurled another barrage of daggers.
"We thought you were dead!" John shouted excitedly.
"Nope!" she said with a wink. 'Shadow magic is just the tits you guys."
By scattering, the kids found, they could easily avoid his ponderous blows. He wasn't trained to fight like John had been and was merely practicing his smith craft on the miniscule interlopers. At the moment, John was conferring with Roxy, trying to keep the creature distracted while Aradia devised an aerial attack. The hammerhead bounced off a dome of shadows with a metallic sound. "Read me the picture," she said, struggling to maintain the barrier. Another blow caused it to temporarily separate into a hundred colored squares before reforming. "What the fuck is Rae-Rae doing?" she muttered.
"Smith of the gods," John quoted.
"Uh-huh," said Roxy, reeling from a third blow.
"Time itself," said John, starting to hurry.
"Oh god my nose is bleeding!"
Minions share their master's face—"
"No they don't! Not at all!"
"Protective coloration—"
Roxy growled and turned to snap at join, spraying a little fleck of blood onto his face. "Who writes this sh—"
It suddenly hit her. "Those things aren't his eyes!" she said, pointing.
John raised his head as if to nod but didn't lower it so as not to seem like he was agreeing to anything. Roxy sighed. "Thank Nayru for that ass," she muttered. Whispering in John's ear, she explained. "He can't see us! He only attacks when he hears a sound, which is why he isn't looking for Aradia."
John gasped. "So we should be really quiet!" The barrier fizzled and sparked under this last blow and disappeared.
Aradia had built base camp 05 near the top of the sill where some fascinating cave paintings depicted an incredibly complex pattern of spider webs, bringing up planks of bleached-white wood from the structures outside the mountain to create a crude scaffolding, as well as some strange seeds and a jug of water. That had happened about a year ago; surprisingly the water was still there, in a different form.
Some kind of bacteria that could survive at these temperatures had turned into a spongy green mold in and around the water jug, and had given rise to a tiny ecosystem of insects such as hardhat beetles and lanay ants, and amazingly enough, the seeds she'd brought in and forgotten about had sprouted. They were bomb fruits.
She spent about fifteen minutes examining the miraculous oasis of life and shedding a joyous tear over the beauties of science, and then another five trying to pick the fruit without setting it off. This proved…fruitless. She snickered at her joke, then took a running leap off the scaffold, diving towards her friends who appeared to be reeling in horror at Hephaestus' next blow. She'd rescued John last time, so this time she picked up Roxy, grabbing her around the waist and veering upward, flying faster than she ever had, almost as fast as Karkat with his mutant wings, so the pressure around her face stopped her from breathing for one awful, exhilarating second.
Roxy gawked at her, pink eyes huge. "My fuckin' hero!" she declared, throwing her arms up and herself off balance so she let out a yelp and almost fell. Then she kissed Aradia on the cheek. The troll snickered as she alit on base camp five. The wood creaked under the extra weight.
"Why didn't you attack though?" asked Roxy, folding her arms in a poor impression of sternness. "We talked about this."
Aradia showed her the bombs and explained. "So," she said, "Do you think you can magic at them, make some magic happen, do a magical thing with magic?"
Roxy sniffed up a drop of blood, cringing slightly. "I am going to have such a migraine tomorrow," she muttered as she sat down in a lotus position.
John laid on the ground, perfectly still, trying to breathe as quietly as possible. He wondered how good Hephaestus' hearing was. It definitely hadn't been able to find him, just as Roxy had said. She'd figured it out so quickly; what the hell was wrong with him? It seemed as if John was going to be the least helpful person on his own quest. Sure he had the Breath Waker, but that wouldn't be any help here. Maybe it could summon hurricanes and shatter forests and whatever else the voice had told him, but he didn't know how to use it. He sighed.
Hephaestus' head turned. Oh shit. John was damn near exhausted from running around in this heat. The wakes from the hammer blows scalded his skin, and the impacts sent out a rain of hot shrapnel in every direction. A direct hit would leave him as a greasy smear on the forge floor, but fighting like this was death by a thousand cuts. He didn't know if he could dodge again—
A multitude of multicolored squares appeared in the air above Hephaestus, combining into shape with the strangest sound John had ever heard, like some combination of an unoiled machine, chirping crickets, and alien music. Hephaestus looked up; the squares had become a swirling black vortex and out of it tumbled a mass of wood and stone, with a cluster of bomb rocks growing out of it. They hit him square in the face.
The god of the forge roared in pain, clutching at his face with one hand, scraping off bits of refuse and what must have been burnt flesh. John saw a piece of something glowing cherry red fall into the magma. That's right, he thought, protective coloration—
The words stopped when John saw what was underneath; Hephaestus' true face. It was an enormous eye taking up half the smith god's head, with a glowing turquoise sclera, its iris a violet starburst with a violently pink core and a slit pupil. It was the eye of that magtail creature in flesh instead of stone and metal, beautiful and hideous at once. John remembered this was the same class of creature as Abraxas.
The huge head and eye swiveled with unnerving speed, up towards a small platform where the girls were standing, jumping up and down victoriously. The eye began to glow gold. John did the only thing he could do. He shouted.
Unused to using his eye, or perhaps just startled by the sound, Hephaestus' eyeball swiveled towards John at the last second, firing a rapid-fire burst of white-holt bolts of light, exploding against the stone walls and making the mountain quake as if make its way from where the girls had been over to John himself. John had been wrong. He still had some running left in him.
The explosion shook the shoddy, damaged scaffold off its supports and the girls tumbled to the ground. Aradia's wing was bent and crooked, and she bit down on her tongue to keep from screaming at the pain in the sensitive magical tissues. Roxy was lying prone on the ground next to her. Panic rising in her throat, Aradia raised a shaking hand to her new friend's throat and fumbled around for her pulse. It was there, faint, but present. She laughed a quivering snicker of relief. Her attendants were standing all around her, staring with cold white eyes, those that had eyes of course. But she couldn't stop laughing. There was something else rising pounding against her temple, welling up, ready to burst. It was heady and intoxicating and made her want to laugh more, but it was getting harder to breathe now. Her mouth was still smiling but her eyes were terrified. Oh no. Could it be…the blood rage? She thought she didn't have it, the lower bloods almost never have it, but maybe….
She watched John run. He was getting close. The forge was a circle, after all. Soon he'd be there and those flaming bolts would follow. Could Aradia run now, with Roxy unconscious and herself hurt? John solved that problem for her. He stopped in his tracks, raised his shield, and was enveloped in flame. Aradia's mind spilled over and she stopped laughing.
John wasn't about to lead that thing back to the girls that was for sure. He threw down his hammer and raised his shield with both hands, kissing the edge before raising it in front of him like a holy relic. The bolt of light exploded against the shield. The heat was intense, the sound overwhelming, the light dazzling. The shield held, ringing like a bell and humming like a hummingbird's heart, but it held. The enamel wasn't even scratched. John laughed, lowering the shield and thanking every god he knew of, asking them to bless his Nana and whatever wonderful, clever, magical ancestor had built this shield, forgetting the no-longer-blind evil god trying to burn him to death for a moment. Which was just as well, as he was no longer in immediate danger.
With a gasp, he noticed Aradia staring down the creature, floating a foot above the floor despite her right wing being bent into a horrible shape. "Look out!" he shouted, too late. Hephaestus fired off another burst, and Aradia didn't even try to run. The bolts of light hung in midair, crackling and sparking, a burning chain linking her to the god.
Her eyes flashed every conceivable combination of colors without rhyme or reason and curls of energy rose up from her hands, red on the left and blue on the right, long wooly hair spreading out behind her like an angry black cloud. With a wave of her red hand they went flying back to their sender, blasting enormous holes in Hephaestus' black carapace. He roared in agony, attempting to submerge. A scrim of purple light surrounded him, and he rose up instead. The mountain shook. Spires of stone tore themselves from the wall, impaling the deity through the gaping cracks in his armor. Out spilled glowing white fluid, like liquid light. With a weak hum like a dying whale, he struggled weakly as the purple aura split off into read and blue, the blue taking away his mighty hammer. It exploded into its constituent parts, hanging in the air for a second before flying into the god's body. The moaning cut off. Hephastus was dead.
The mountain didn't stop trembling. More and more hunks of stone ripped themselves out of the walls and hung in the air like balloons. The magma in the pool churned and bubbled like a stormy sea. Pyralsprite could be heard; he was livid. John imagined the great beast as if he were a frightened animal, whites of his eyes visible all the way around. It was not a pretty image.
Aradia was doing this somehow. He had to stop her. But how? He trudged towards her, the air becoming thick with power as he approached the troll, and harder to walk through until it felt like drowning in mud. She hadn't noticed him yet; he produced the Breath Waker and conducted the same song as before, commanding the air to make a path. He took in a deep breath of air and proceeded.
Aradia noticed him, or at least she turned her head towards him. Who knew what she saw with those lights in her eyes? She was so expressionless, she might have been dead. What to do?
Hands trembling, he threw down the Breath Waker. It could be seen as a weapon, couldn't it? He didn't want her to think he meant any harm. "Can you hear me?" He asked. She said nothing. The mountain raged. He approached. They were one yard away, one foot way, closer, closer still. John put his arms around her neck and pulled her down to him.
Author's note: when I said 'tease John with everybody,' I meant 'tease everybody with everybody but especially John'. I fully expect a slew of John/Roxy, John/Aradia, and Aradia/Roxy smut set in this universe to pop up. Now.
Hephaestus is nothing like the actual boss in this area, sorry. Especially to the guy who really wanted Dave to be snapping these ironic pics. Funnily enough no one has asked me whether Dave was still alive even though I never provided any information as to his whereabouts. I suppose, what with him being the Hero of Time and all, that this is to be expected. I mean come on; I can't pull any suspense out of that. We all know how this is going to end, Dave being all legendarily heroic and shit, John having paved the way like Jaspers said. It's the journey that matters, man.
fanfic dot netters; the Ao3 version of this chapter has music. Why wouldn't it? It's the internet age and this is a Homestuck fanfic.
I know that none of those songs involved a harp shut up you get the idea.
Fuck, this chapter was supposed to be short….