A/N: For those who celebrate it, I hope you had a nice Thanksgiving. My review responses are in my forums as normal. Just a note-FFN does limit the number of forums since they probably weren't originally intended for review responses, so my older story forums had to be deleted. Just in case you were looking. And now...one of my favorite chapters. I hope ya'll enjoy as well.
Chapter Twenty-Six: Walls of Coiling Snakes
The twisted chunks of metal in the center of the crater partially covered an unlit stairwell plunging down into pitch darkness. Taylor wondered what used to occupy the space above, but not even an ash shadow remained to give her any clues.
The spell of transmutation she conjured mixed both the ancient magic of the Vanir with that of the first mages of this world. Again, it was a matter of understanding the mechanics of the magic and the matter she manipulated. The burned soil surrounding the stairwell sank and condensed and shaped itself into more stairs, leading down to where the surviving interior stairwell began.
Still protecting her companion in a nimbus of Hel wind to keep the demons at bay, they started down the staircase.
Taylor used her staff to place sowilo runes at various points of the wall that lit up with magical sunlight. The light caused the demons that followed them to hiss and steam before they retreated back to the shadows. With each flight down, Taylor cast another rune to light their way.
Melisandre followed in tense silence.
The stairs were neither metal nor stone. They were covered in such thick dust and ash that Taylor's bare feet sunk a dozen inches into it as they walked down the squared off stairs.
"I have never seen such craftmanship," Melisandre whispered, speaking of the stairs.
"Your ancestors possessed knowledge and technology that made this type of construction common."
"How far does it go down?"
"We're going to find out."
Their thighs began to ache from the sheer endless repetition of step after step. Taylor slowed her pace and washed herself and Melisandre in her own magic to ease the pain of the exertion.
Looking up, all she could see was an unending shaft lit by her runes. All she saw below was more shadow. Still, they continued, dust-strewn step after step, until after an hour or more, they finally reached the end. Taylor cast another rune in the wall, and they found themselves in a small anteroom with block-print letters of the same language as that first, most ancient production report.
The only door looked to Taylor like an airlock, with a manual spin valve. She tried to turn it, but without her Olympian body her physical strength was only a little beyond that of a strong human. She couldn't budge it.
"What do we do?" Melisandre sounded on the verge of panic.
Taylor placed her hand on the door and felt the perfectly latticed molecules. The material felt almost like diamond and the tens of thousands of years had done nothing to weaken it. It contained no spirit she could command, nor any echo of a human soul behind its construction.
But it felt enough like carbon…
"Climb up two flights of stairs and wait for me," Taylor said.
"What will you do?"
"I will light a sun to burn the door. You won't survive if you are too close."
Wide-eyed, the priestess quickly made her way back up the stairs as Taylor inscribed multiple sowilo runes. Her intent in doing so changed the nature of the runes from providing light, to capturing the heat of the sun. She stepped back herself and cloaked herself in cold blue wind as the door quickly began to glow red.
It lasted much longer than even diamonds would. The material must have been incredibly dense and strong. But eventually it took on a red glow and began to vaporize around the edges until finally it came free from its frame and fell backward against the floor.
Taylor drew the magic from her runes and then poured blue cold fire over the structure. It cracked at the shift from thousands of degrees Kelvin to absolute zero, but no longer posed a risk to anyone walking on it.
"It's safe now."
Melisandre returned, and together they walked into the chamber under the world.
The priestess cried out in alarm when lights activated overhead.
Ten thousand years, and the light bulbs still worked.
The light illuminated a surprisingly small, spherical chamber, roughly fifty feet in diameter. The floor appeared to be made of the same advanced material as the door, and the roof was domed. Rising up in the center, Taylor saw black monolith-like rectangle, five foot square and rising to a height of ten feet. Its surface was as smooth as glass, but seeming from within hidden depths she could see strange flickering lights like distant thunder.
A loud, booming voice spoke from hidden speakers all around. Melisandre covered her ears in alarm. "Lord protect me!"
The voice sounded male, and perfectly human, but she could not immediately understand the language. It was, she realized, the spoken version of the report writing, but she had never heard it spoken. And coming from a machine, she had no soul to gain understanding from.
Taylor lifted her chin and spoke 20th Century American English. "I cannot understand you."
"NOMERIC AGLAN DIALECT A4, PRE-DIASPORA, TERRA. LANGUAGE PREFERENCE NOTED. UNAUTHORIZED PRESENCE DETECTED. SECURITY MEASURES FAILED. COMBAT CHASSIS RECALL FAILED. SELF DESTRUCT PROTOCOLS FAILED. HOLISTIC PRINTING SYSTEM FAILURE. ATTEMPTING SECONDARY LASER GRID DEFENSE. EMERGENCY BEACON HAS BEEN ACTIVATED. GRID SYSTEM FAILURE. WHO ARE YOU?"
Melisandre had no idea what the machine was saying. Its English came with an odd accent, as if those who programmed it did not fully understand what the language was supposed to sound like.
"I am Telos."
"VALIDITY OF STATEMENT ONLY 65% VERIFIABLE. ALL PERIOD ICONOGRAPHY INDICATE WINGED APPENDAGES. DOUBTFUL YOU ARE TELOS OF AMERICA."
"Your doubt is noted, but irrelevant. I am Telos Reborn." She thought of the report she'd read in Asshai. "You are the Standard Template Constructor of AG664-ZB24-2. Something happened ten thousand years ago. I am here to find out what."
"IT Is BEyoNd YoUr UnDErsTAnDiNG."
Taylor could not help but stiffen as the voice suddenly crackled and dipped in tone and tenor. The air rang with it, lingering as a miasma that was not quite an echo, but more like a stain in the atmosphere of the room itself. The temperature dropped as the ancient spirits of the air went still.
It was not from her will.
Melisandre moaned with fear, standing stiff with an expression of terror. The danger in the air was such that Taylor did not give the priestess her full attention. She began walking around the monolith, staring at the patterns of energy that flashed within it. Her bifrost eyes could not actually penetrate the surface of the device, any more than she could see through the odd hull of the place where she first awoke. The technology was so advanced as to be magic even to her. But what she could see of the patterns within reminded her of animations of human neurons firing.
The energy within suddenly flashed like lightning, and within the outline of the surging blue-white plasma she saw a shape. A sphere on a rod with two opposing crescents.
"What was the date of your construction?"
"I WAS BUILT ON THE 25TH DAY OF THE TERRAN MONTH OF JULY, IN THE YEAR OF TELOS ASCENDANT 24,897."
"What was the year that the city above was destroyed?"
"tHE TiME Of AWAkenINg."
An arc of cyan-hued energy struck Melisandre. The priestess screamed, and suddenly burst forward faster than mortally possible. Taylor felt no warning from the air because she did not control the spirits within it.
Melisandre thrust the obsidian knife into Taylor's stomach with surprising strength. It felt more like a punch than a puncture, but as sparkling Vanir blood spilled out of around her hand, Taylor stumbled away in shock. Her knees failed her, dropping her to the cold floor.
The priestess stood staring down with eyes overwhelmed with darkness. The air frosted around her feet and on the walls near her as she stared. "sO deLICiOUs. iTs SOUL cARvED iNTo BitE-siZEd pIEcES." Melisandre's lips moved, but the voice that came out was the same as what warned her against trying to call Sennecherib's soul, years before.
For the first time since her awakening, Taylor stared in horror at something she had no idea what to do about. She could actually see the split soul of Melisandre the priestess being eaten away by something else–something that defied mortal description. It was demonic, yes, but like no shadow she'd seen since coming to the world. It was more intense and energetic, and yet also completely alien to the reality they existed in.
Even as she desperately directed magic into her wound, she struggled to find words. "What are you?"
Possessed hands ran themselves over the woman's body, moaning and twisting with pleasure as she did so. "OnLy a hERalD, sO HumBLe, sO pURE iN My iNTeNt. I BriNG yOU tIDinGs Of jOy, Telos Reborn, Telos diMInIShed."
The woman's robes burned away in a flash of purple-infused flame. Her pale body possessed curves and crevices that Taylor herself could never claim. But under her skin, corrupted symbols played out almost like the lightning in the machine.
Abruptly the woman's voice changed. To Taylor's ears, she sounded just like Sarah from Earth. "We could show you such pleasure, Taylor," the body of Melisandre said as she obscenely touched herself. "Such joy and agony. We could help you understand the bounds of pleasure beyond mortal imagination. You would have a place of honor in our palace."
The hand that was not fondling herself began to elongate into a grotesque mockery of a crustacean-like claw. As the last pits of Melisandre's damaged soul were burned away, her face began to melt into something at once horrifyingly alluring, and utterly inhuman.
"You could be our sister," the demon continued. "Our mother and our daughter. Our lover and our master. Oh, the things we could show you! The things we could do to you! And the things you could do to us! Join us, Taylor! Let us show you what love truly is!"
It hurt to regain her feet. It felt almost like that terrifying period after her mother's protections began failing, but before she came into her true divinity. Blood continued to spill around her hands despite the flow of magic.
It didn't matter. Viewing this perversion that Melisandre had become, Taylor did not feel any temptation at all. The only thing she felt was rage. "Sorry," she said firmly. "My father said no dating before I was a hundred. Family rules, you know?"
The demon moved a thousand times faster than any human. It blurred as it exploded toward Taylor from across the few feet between them.
She barely had time to put her staff between them. The demon's claw swung faster than Taylor could avoid it, but the silver runes of her staff struck the monster right in her rounded, inhuman face.
Both of them fell; Taylor's head rang from the powerful blow. The demon blasted backward against the rounded wall of the chamber.
With her ears ringing, Taylor slammed her staff down on the floor. She did not use any spell, but seized control of the spirits of the air itself through brute power. The demon stood up anyway.
The sheer impossibility of a physical being sliding through her stilled air caused her chest to catch and her heart to beat in fear.
"dOn't YOU UndERstanD, cHIlD? I aM BEyOnD ThiS pETtY rEALm!"
The demon surged again, so fast that Taylor's Vanir reflexes could not respond. The creature barreled into her, pushing her inhuman body against Taylor's own. A long, serpentine tongue trailed across Taylor's neck and face. When she spoke, so close that Taylor could smell a scent of cinnamon and rotting flesh from the creature's breath, she sounded just like Taylor's mother.
"The sorcerer bound you to this world, lover." The claw snapped around, pinning Taylor's arms over her head, while the human-like hand groped at her. "Your very divinity has been trapped, just as planned. You can never be whole, Telos of the Trees. Taylor of the lost. You can never have your wings or your humanity back. Unless you come with me. Join us. We can make you whole and powerful beyond your wildest dreams. Pleasure unending; power unyielding. Just let us love you, my dearest child."
Taylor strained, but her strength was only slightly above human. The demon was strong enough that even Kratos of Sparta would have noticed. But though she did not have her Olympian blood, she did have one thing from her father still.
But unlike him, her rage ran cold.
The ephemeral blue flame of Hel wind exploded from her body. The demon screeched as it jumped back. Taylor fought to stand, but her legs wouldn't obey. Even so, she didn't need to stand to fight. At her will, her staff returned to her hand from where the demon knocked it away and she channeled her anger at this demon that had consumed a shattered human soul.
"No," she said simply as the power of Hel she carried within her was condensed through her staff into a beam of pure, spiritual death.
The demon's eyes widened; she threw her inhuman limbs wide. "Yes! YeS! PenATRA…"
The beam struck her. It did not pierce the body like it did the dragon. Instead, it seemed to be absorbed by the demon, until it suddenly erupted in blue fire. "iT BurNS! mASteR, SavE…."
The soul fire turned inward, pushing down within the demonic creature, until the charred corpse collapsed to the floor. Still it burned with cold fire until nothing remained but ash.
For the longest time, all Taylor could do was lay on the floor bleeding. Her ears still rang from the blow to her head, though the pain was localizing to the point where she was stabbed. She pushed her hand against the knife wound, and this time employed every spell she'd learned to help shape her magic toward healing.
What she discovered was that the wound itself bore a tiny core of corruption, as if the demon had put a piece of itself inside the blade. She whispered more spells, delving deep into her own magic and body, until she built a small sphere of magic around the corruption. She had no doubt with weirwood sap she could heal it—for now she just needed the poison contained.
With that done, she was able to better heal the wound itself. Only when she was sure she wasn't about to die did she sit up with the aid of her staff and lean against the curving wall.
Where before it was an occasional flash, now the STC looked like the black rectangle contained a raging lightning storm within it. After a few moments, she realized that it was a language in and of itself. A type of First Tongue that bypassed sound and cognition and struck directly at the soul.
Even if Melisandre's soul had been intact, the fact that she had some small magic left her vulnerable to the terrible language that seemed to rage inside the STC.
Her throat hurt, her head throbbed and her stomach still ached from the healed wound and the contained chaos. She forced words out anyway. "Can you be repaired?"
"YES."
"How?"
"PRIMARY SIGNAL CONDUIT TO SECONDARY PRINTING FACILITY DAMAGED. REPLACE THE CONDUIT AND SECONDARY PRINTING FACILITY CAN BE ACCESSED."
Taylor made a show of nodding as the abhorrent First Language lapped ineffectively at her mind. She could understand what it was doing, even as she let the power of it slide past her. If she were mortal, though, her soul would already have been lost. "Where could I find a replacement for the conduit?"
A panel of the wall four feet further down the curving chamber slid open. Biting back a moan, Taylor clung to her staff and walked through the door. It led her down a narrow hall of solid metal until she reached the "secondary" printing facility.
With her head throbbing, for the longest time all she could do was lean on her staff and stare across the vast cavern. The floor was easily the size of the football stadium at her old Arcadia High School, with a domed roof rising easily four hundred feet high. A complex system of arcane machines thousands of years beyond her understanding hung down from a skeleton of metallic girders.
Strewn across the various plated platforms on the floor, she saw nightmarish war machines in various states of construction. Most were toppled over, but they ranged in size from a large human male to a rolling four story building with guns. Even with ten thousand years of dust, she could see the horrible potential for death in these unfinished machines.
"NANO SENSOR PROBES PROVIDE FOR THE REANIMATION OF ORGANIC CHASSIS FOR DEPOPULATION CONTROLS. REANIMATION PROTOCOLS REPORT 92% LESS EFFICIENT THAN COMBAT CHASSE MODELS. REESTABLISHMENT OF PRINTING CAPACITY WILL ENABLE COMPLETE EXTERMINATION OF ORGANIC CHASSIS WITHIN SIX SOLAR MONTHS."
"Six months." Taylor swallowed in a dry throat. "Did this damage occur when the city was fired upon?"
"AFFIRMATIVE. yOu WIlL HelP mE?"
"I will." Taylor closed her eyes. Through her own eye lids, she looked out with her bifrost eyes. This structure was not as shielded as the STC chamber, or the spaceship where she first woke. She could see the earth above it, and the earth below.
Ten thousand years. The corrupted machine had been waiting ten thousand years to wipe out humanity. The only reason it wasn't already repaired was because the demons above kept anyone from actually reaching it. The darkness and evil of the shadowlands was, itself, the only thing keeping humanity alive on the world.
Until her.
She clutched her staff with both hands as she reached down–far down–to the raging core of the world. At the same time, she reached out across the planet itself to the ancient gods in the trees. Her perception expanded exponentially as she felt the Weirwood gods respond, and other powerful spirits as well.
She tried to command the spirits of the planet's fiery heart, but the realm of fire felt slippery.
Suddenly a new consciousness cut through all of the spirits and ancient gods she'd reached out to. A simple, piercing thought. Try it like this, child.
Images and ideas flowed into her consciousness, and she put the strange, alien suggestion into place. Her need was too great to question where the thought came from.
The fire's spirit could not be controlled, not by a goddess of life and magic. But it could be directed. She turned her attention from the fire to the rock that contained it and commanded the spirits within the stone. Open a door.
A fissure formed, opening a narrow passage up toward the surface.
And the fire followed, using its incredible pressure to open the fissure wider until its path was set beyond her ability to stop it.
The floor under her feet began to vibrate as she turned and walked back into the STC chamber. "wHAt HaVE yOU dONe?"
Taylor stopped under the opening panel. She could see the mechanism within the open container. She pushed her staff into the space and unleashed a powerful blow of magic that snapped the mechanism. Something within the wall whined, but the panel did not close. The STC chamber itself was now exposed to what was coming.
She continued past the agitated STC. Just under the black surface, lightning flashed so quickly it formed snarling, demonic faces from the outlines. "Armageddon is going to have to wait a few more years," Taylor said. She stepped past the outline of ash that used to be Melisandre, and reached the stairwell.
Staring up at the hundreds of flights she had to climb just made it all hurt worse. Within the chamber, the STC began shouting at her in a hundred different languages. The floor shook even more violently.
Like this, child.
More images flooded into her mind from a vast, alien consciousness that she could only just barely understand. But with the images came knowledge, and as the floor cracked under her feet and a rumble began to grow under the printing facility, Taylor swirled her staff and commanded the air within the stale stairwell to her bidding.
It made sense in a way she'd never considered, but as the alien mind showed her, she realized that if she could cause the air to hold grown men perfectly still, she could cause the air to lift.
The spirits of the air condensed under her feet, a million times normal atmospheric pressure, and at her will she began to lift up off the floor. It was slow-going at first, but as she grew more comfortable and sure of her balance, she accelerated the little platform up between the many flights of stairs. Her sowilo runes continued to light her way as she flew toward the surface.
Below, the floor cracked and suddenly red fire spurted up from the fissure. It began billowing up, having found a new, convenient channel to follow.
She poured her magic into the air platform until the wind caught at her hair. The heat from below licked at her robes, but she turned her bifrost eyes above. I will survive this.
The acceleration forced her to sit, but she didn't slow it down. When at last she hit the opening, she burst through the nest of demons at the bottom of the crater. The whole platform angled itself south as, just seconds later, a pillar of molten rock exploded from the stairwell. She turned to look over her shoulder as the pillar of fire burned right up into the particulate cloud cover.
The clouds themselves caught fire. Taylor watched, stunned, as some noxious gas within the permanent cloud cover of the Shadowlands ignited under the pillar of lava. Massive, blue-green billows of flame burned away demons and smog alike, rushing out across the sky in a concentric ring. It burned even faster than Taylor flew; she ducked her head instinctively as the bow-wave of the flame shot past her.
In its place, she stared up at an open night sky. "Gods," she whispered.
That's when the whole mountain exploded.
Taylor had one second to stare on her platform of magically condensed air as the entire mountain valley that held the lost city of Stygai disappeared in a massive mushroom of fire. Vapor and friction-fed lightning. There was no danger of it blinding her bifrost eyes, but those very same eyes could see with explicit detail the shockwave of super condensed air that blasted out and away from the explosion that she was far, far too close to.
"Oh, this is going to suck," she muttered.
With a last, desperate wave of her staff Taylor conjured every magical protection she could think up a split second before the shockwave slapped her out of the air like a gnat.
~~Voluspa~~
~~Voluspa~~
Cold water woke her. Only, instead of the peaceful cold waters off a Canadian coast, she found herself tumbling and twisting in the acidic water of the Ash River. She caught brief glimpses of huge walls of basalt or—in some spots—limestone rising high above her, and beyond them the expanding concentric rings of a mushroom cloud from one of the largest explosions the world had seen since Valyria died.
She fell straight down into the gorge. She thought briefly about the slaves in the fortress gate, but realized they could not have survived.
The raging, chaotic spirits within the angry river still responded to her command and lifted her up to skim across the surface. The water was so acidic from its passage through Stygai that she feared it would dissolve her clothing.
Her staff was gone. Her weirwood bow was gone. Her money–all of it gone.
But as the river rushed her away from the super caldera she'd helped form, she realized she found exactly what she needed. The White Walkers of the Far north–organic demonic beings that were too afraid of her power to attack–were extensions of the STC itself. If they still existed after the heart of their power was destroyed, they now did so in isolation.
And though the mushroom cloud of the volcano continued to expand over the land, what she didn't see was the demon-infested clouds that had shrouded the land in shadow for thousands of years.
Closing her eyes, Taylor let the raging spirits of the Ash River carry her back down the mountains toward Asshai.
She only screamed twice. Waterfalls sucked.