(Next update to on 12/13/23)
Chapter 149: Labyrinthos
Midnight's Deep was closer than it had ever been—a great silver tower, reaching out of the depths of the sea and up into the depths of the sky, a multicolored flame burning at its tip.
"How do you...reach it?" Alma asked, from her place near the cliff's edge.
"You don't," Cletienne replied. He had laid out a wide array of magical devices around him—stone tablets dense with runes, glowing crystals, metal objects she didn't fully understand. He stood at their center, his staff throbbing with power that poured out of him and into each of them artifacts he'd prepared. Still, he barely sounded out of breath. He'd needed only two days to prepare himself, just as he'd said.
"What do you mean?"
"There is no entrance. And there are wards on the tower." He nodded towards the great flame burning at its top. "A Templar ship tried to cut a hole once. It was burned to ash." He smiled. "I doubt it's the only one. Just the only one we know of."
She looked back out at the lighthouse, and its great flame. She imagined that fire convulsing, surging into a pillar, raining down upon would-be intruders in slow, searing bolts. "Did Elidibus build it?"
Cletienne shrugged again. "Rebuilt it, at any rate. Hard to be sure exactly what the Ydorans had here, before..."
He trailed off. Alma asked no more questions. She was still staring at the fire. Still thinking of the man they were seeking. The legend they were seeking.
She knew too little of Elidibus. Everyone did. He had entered the Gariland Magic Academy at the age of 13, a year before the rebellion in Zelmonia had sparked the first battles of the 50 Years' War. At 16, he had left the Magic Academy behind him, and traveled alone to join the thickest fighting of the war. The stories told of him described him as a force of nature—a man who had descended upon battlefields in a storm of his own magic, turning whole brigades and divisions aside with his singular strength.
He was older than her father, older than the Thundergod: he had to be nearly 70 by now. He had disappeared before the War had ended: had built Midnight's Deep, and vanished. Why had he disappeared? Why did Vormav seek him now?
Alma had no answers. But again, she felt that terrible sense of smallness: of being just a mote of dust in the beam of the burning sun, or of being a minnow while a whale swam by beneath you. The world was so enormous, and she knew so little.
She felt magic simmering on the back of her neck. When she looked back at Cletienne, he had finished his work: his power flowed into the structures he had created, and ignited into seething magic. Four figures there were in total: a living flame with a skeleton of demonic ash at its heart, a womanly figure of shuddering ice and sharp edges, a cloud like an old man with lightning thrumming in his limbs and in his would-be eyes, and the earthen-skinned figure of Titan.
Cletienne gestured with his staff. She followed. Cletienne alone could have compelled her. Before his Summons, she had no hope at all.
They wound farther back along the cliffs, until they reached a sudden valley cut into the rock, almost like a quarry. Cletienne picked a careful path down among the jagged slopes, until finally he cut back into one deep ravine. The light of the fiery Summon showed worn steps hidden at the back of this ravine: with the demonic shape before them, lighting their way, they picked their way down the worn steps.
There were many steps, some crumbling underfoot: Alma's ankles and thighs had started to ache long before they reached the bottom. When the switchback stairs finally reached their end, she was stumbling: only Titan's strength kept her standing. Pathetic as she felt doing so, she clung to those brick-skinned arms, trying to keep herself upright.
Finally, they reached level ground—an enormous, ragged tunnel, sloping gradually deeper within the earth. There were signs of old breaks and old collapses throughout—in the flickering light provided by the fire demon (Ifrit, Cletienne named him, after some questioning), she could see the pock-marked ceiling, and the places where rubble was neatly heaped from the Templars' long efforts to clear the way.
They were a long time walking in that dark. Alma stumbled from step to step, desperately trying to keep her feet. Still, she had to lean on Titan.
But she refused to ask for a rest. Vormav had been so cold, so condescending, so dismissive, when he mocked her for thinking herself important. She wouldn't prove him right. She wouldn't prove herself weak.
"Why...did you need..." Alma trailed off, panting, not sure what she was asking for.
"The gear I used?" Cletienne asked. She was gratified to find his voice sounded more strained than she had ever heard it. "It's...what we talked about...before." He had to breathe deep to keep talking. "Summons...are more like...Workers...than spells. But each command...is like a spell...and making new ones is..." He waved vaguely with his staff. "But you can...prepare ahead of time. Have some of what you want...prepared. So they can...do more. For longer." He looked ahead of them. "We'll need it."
It was awhile longer before the darkness in the tunnel began to lighten. Before she realized that the light was coming, not just from Ifrit, but from some distant point ahead of them. They picked up their pace without a word—both were eager to escape the darkness around them. The light swelled, slowly but surely, until-
Until...
She could not believe her eyes.
She stared in disbelief at the vista before her—at an expanse of rolling green hills surrounding a glistening sapphire lake. At the center of the lake sat a great stone island, terraced and mossy. Against the foreshortened horizon, mottled clouds of light rippled, like the reflections of sunset upon the sea, bright and fiery and distorted. Upon the hills, figures moved—here, a flock of chocobos, wheeling like birds, and here a trudging column of minotaurs, the ridged blades upon their right arms gleaming in the light of the false sun. That sun, sitting at the apex of the dome that the rippling light-walls rose to, was a burnished assemblage of roving discs, each sparkling with runic lights that flowed like ink from moment to moment, changing as she watched.
"Do you see now?" Cletienne asked.
Alma looked back at him. He stood beside her, on the lip of the tunnel entrance. The Summons stood ringed around him, smaller before the grandeur of the place he'd led her into. He looked smaller, too, somehow—like a child beside their parents.
"This was what they could do," he said. "They built a world in miniature. An artificial sun. Beside them, even the mightiest and richest among us are naught but...peasants." His grip upon his glowing staff was white-knuckled, nearly as pale as his face. "How long and hard we have striven, to reclaim but a fraction of their knowledge. Of their power."
She looked at him for a long time. "And you'd kill me. To claim it all."
Cletienne looked at her, and smiled sadly. "I'd do, and have done, far worse than that."
He started walking down to the left—away from the lake, from the chocobos, from the minotaurs, taking a winding path towards the forest. Ramuh and Ifrit floated closed behind him: Shiva and Titan stuck close to her, Titan pulling her along with strong stony fingers whenever she tried to slow her pace or go her own way.
She didn't try too hard. She was captivated by what she saw. Birds with immense wings traced solitary paths through the sky. With a sound like distant thunder, one herd of tan-skinned minotaurs met another with red, and they began baying and bellowing at one another, making intricate slashing motions with their bladed arms. At the sound of this, a flock of multicolored chocobobs went charging in the opposite direction, rounding the lake.
And as Alma watched, the island in the lake moved.
Just a little—a slow, languid turn, towards the chocobos. But it was unmistakable, if only because of the ripples it threw in all directions, stirring the gleaming lake to a froth.
"Cletienne!" she shouted, looking back to him.
"Keep your voice down, please," he sighed. "Even I'd have a hard time dealing with some of the things in here."
"The island moved!"
"It's not an island."
"So...so what?"
"I'm not sure," Cletienne admitted. "I think it could be an adamantoise, but..."
"An island turtle?" Her head snapped back to the false island. It was thick with growth, not quite the right shape, but she could almost imagine the turtle that might sit beneath the surface of the now-calm water.
"They're supposed to be extinct," Cletienne said. "But they're also supposed to be exceptionally long-lived, so..." He shrugged, and kept marching. Titan had to pull her a little more forcefully to keep her following along.
They made steady time across the rolling plains. When they had nearly reached the edge of the distant forest, the golden sun far above dimmed a little—not enough for true night, but enough to make everything seem twilight with sunrise. A cool mist rolled up from the ground, blanketing everything in dew. Cletienne dismissed the other Summons save for Titan, who unloaded tents and supplies it had packed upon his back. As Titan made camp, Cletienne sketched runes in the dirt around them, so that a faint dome of light ensconced them for several yalms.
"You can run if you like," Cletienne said, as he headed into his tent. "You won't get very far."
When the artificial sun brightened the sky again, and the mist had faded back into the ground, Cletienne led her into the woods. She saw things out of the corner of her eyes—sylvan shapes of graceful leaves and wooden limbs, that disappeared when she turned to look at them.
"Dryads," Cletienne told her. He seemed wearier than yesterday: he had summoned only Titan and Carbuncle to ward their way today.
Alma shook her head in numb disbelief. Dryads...there were rumors of such things in the deep woods, creatures that shaped their bodies out of the living forest. She had seen a dead one preserved in the Royal Menagerie at Lesalia, and had thought it only a clever carving. Seeing them move, however dimly and distantly, was something else.
The forest sloped gradually downwards, over the hours they traveled. The trees thinned slowly out, revealing a rocky mountain slope, winding down into wide, dry plains. Alma stared in disbelief, watching wide-winged birds soaring in the distant, more packs of scattered minotaurs and chocobos, and even thick clusters of huts where strange shapes capered.
"Goblins," Cletienne answered, to her mute question.
Alma looked up towards the sky, and found it was gone. She could not see the artificial sun either: instead there was only a great dome of fiery light overhead, casting everything in a baking afternoon glow. The forest-covered slope behind her provided the illusion of mountains—a great stretch of rocky mountainsides, with no peaks to complement the foothills.
Someone had made this place. Shaped a compelling illusion of nature. An illusion so compelling creatures could live in it...survive in it...thrive in it.
They skirted the plains themselves, winding across the slopes. It took two days to cross the winding, rugged paths. Once, she heard the thunder of great steps, setting the rocks vibrating around her. A small pack of deep violet behemoth cubs, each the size of a chocobo, hurried past them far above. Two larger beasts—one yellow as the false sun, the other black as night—trailed along behind, their horns sharp as spears. Each was as big as a house. They looked down at them, and Cletienne looked steadily back, and eventually the behemoths continued on their way.
There was no night here, as there had been no night above. Instead, when every few hours, the bronze sky turned red, and cool mist trickled down out of the slopes and rolled across the plains, masking everything in a bloody fog. Every time the sunset haze rolled in, Cletienne found them another place to camp.
On their third day, they reached a crater. It took a moment for Alma to understand what she was looking at—the blasted rubble thick around her, and the dragon's bones scattered at their heart. A skull nearly as large a full-grown behemoth presided over the bones.
"Dragons, too?" she asked.
"No living ones that I have seen." Every day seemed to leave Cletienne wearier than the one before. Yesterday, he had stopped summoning Carbuncle: now only Titan kept them company, carrying their dwindling supplies on his great back. "But that's hardly surprising. The Ydorans hunted most of them down."
"Why?"
"The Dragoners." Cletienne picked a careful way down into the blasted crater. "Dragons are creatures of incredible magic. The Ydorans figured out a way to bind their magic—their souls."
"Like the Lucavi?" The back of Alma's neck prickled. She was thinking of Reis, and of Vormav, and of herself.
"That's where they got the idea, I think," Cletienne said. They were near the nadir of the crater now, and Alma saw that Cletienne was leading them towards a crevasse cut into a distant wall, almost like an ancient river rut. "There are creatures in this world with magic more powerful than any man's. One of the ways the Ydorans learned how to wield their magic so effectively was by experimenting with such abilities. Like those behemoths."
"What about them?"
"The purple ones are natural beasts, no different than a panther...though a bit more dangerous. But the yellow and black ones we saw...they have magical abilities. Powerful ones."
Alma felt butterflies in her stomach. She had never seen so many behemoths in one place before, and had been scared enough when she was the pack yesterday. She hadn't imagined one of those things raining magic down upon her, as well.
They camped again by the dark rut in the crater. Cletienne was already drowsing beneath the bloodred sky, without even climbing into his tent. Alma, sitting on her bedroll, stared at the distant dragon skull until her eyes finally drooped closed.
The crevasse was another tunnel, just as dark as the one that had led them to this strange place. But the farther down the path they went, the worse the smell became. And there was something else, too, something Alma didn't understand: a feeling like static, but inside her mind. It panged her the same way the toe she'd broken when she was a little girl sometimes panged her, when it too cold.
The stone underfoot gave way to mud as they exited into a thick bog. The sky ahead was the deep blue of twilight, speckled with false stars that were far too big, far too close, and far too golden, like miniature suns themselves.
Things moved in that bog, the same way they'd moved in the forest. Even through the dim twilight of the false stars, she could see shapes slithering, writhing, crawling. But like a bug flying in the corner of your eye, they'd be gone almost as soon as you turned to look. And every sighting left Alma feeling more frightened, more irritable. She felt stretched thin, like fabric pulled almost to its tearing point.
There was no cycle of day and night here—only a pall of muted darkness, dimly illuminated by the false stars overhead. And dry ground was hard to come by. She felt clammy, and filthy, and exhausted. And with every passing hour, the panging in her head deepened.
"Can't you light a fire?" she snapped at Cletienne, after he'd finished setting their ward for the night around a patch of scrubby, damp grass.
Cletienne blinked at her as though he couldn't see her. "Do we...need one?"
Alma scowled, and huddled under her bedroll, and still could not sleep. The feeling in her head was worse than ever: it prickled as it panged, itched and hurt. She felt it like an infection in her eyes, in her mind. When she could not bear to sit beneath her bedroll any longer, she pushed her way out of her tent and paced around their small campground.
Something moved. The feeling in her head intensified.
She stared, frowning, through the dim gleaming of the ward around them. And the longer she stared, the more she felt she...sensed something. She couldn't see it, but she could feel it. Almost like a buzzing in her brain, tickling the same places that still hurt from her passage through the Maelstrom.
"Cletienne." Her voice rasped in her throat. That something moved again, and this time she could see it—a mirage shimmer like a spell, swirling dervish-like against the opalescent ward.
"Cletienne!"
"Oh, Saint Above!" Cletienne groaned, stumbling out of his tent with his staff in hand. "What!"
She pointed. Cletienne's eyes flickered towards the strange motion, then widened. "Shit!"
He slammed the heel of his staff against the grass. The light of the dome flared. And that something outside the ward screamed in pain—she heard it inside her head, felt it clawing down the scream-worn places that had been aching inside her for days. It was high, desperate, and inhuman. It reminded her a little bit of how the Marquis' had sounded, had felt, when she heard him die.
The dervish shape faded from view. The dome glowed more brightly. The feeling in her head had changed a little: now it was a crackling that stretched above her, the same way you can feel a shudder building in your spine just before it shakes you, or feel the weight of a gathering storm just before it begins.
"You can feel them?" Cletienne demanded. She nodded, tentatively lowering her hands, and Cletienne hissed between her teeth. "Of course. I should have realized..." He shook his head fiercely. His eyes blazed especially bright in contrast to the dark circles that surrounded them. "Do you sense more of them?"
"I..." Alma nodded shakily.
"Where?"
Alma shook her head. Cletienne glared around them, then took a deep breath and spoke more slowly, more calmly. "Close your eyes. Reach for them the same way you reach for a spell. Feel the direction the same way you can feel the heat from the sun."
Alma tried to do as he said, but it was hard. Every turn of her head seemed to set the pain rolling again, thundering between her ears. But...shifting this way hurt differently than shifting that way...and he was right, she could feel a qualitative difference, like the shudder was rolling out from the base of her neck, flickering in the back of her head, clenching between her teeth...
Finally, she pointed. Cletienne nodded, and slammed the heel of his staff into the ground once more. Grass and mud roiled together into a ruder, squatter shape than Titan, too sodden to be solid. It trudged off, though not quite in the direction she'd pointed.
"That should draw them for a little," Cletienne said grimly. "We'll have to carry our own supplies from here on in. I'll need to save my magic."
He packed with haste, and left their tents behind—just two supply backs and bedrolls. In the distance, the teeming sense of crackling movement intensified, shifted directions—following the creature Cletienne had summoned. When he shoved a pack into her hands, she slung it around her shoulders and stumbled after him. With every step, the feeling in her head lessened. Soon, she could breathe more easily, see more clearly.
"It's...working," she managed.
Cletienne nodded. Exhaustion and fear had alloyed in him: his eyes were feverish as they scanned their surroundings.
"What..." She was still out of breath, though more from the movement now than the pain.
"Revenants," he said grimly. "I should have realized..." His eyes flickered around the twilight murk. "That's probably why we haven't seen anything living."
"Revenants?" she repeated.
"Souls. Bodiless souls. Hungry for the magic of others."
A chill went down her spine. "You're talking about ghosts?"
He started to shake his head, then stopped. "Maybe I am. Maybe that's all a ghost is." His mouth twisted into a gruesome smile. "I never thought of that way. The Ydorans harnessed ghosts."
"They made these?" she asked.
Cletienne nodded. "Another of their experiments. Magic comes from the soul. There are magics that can make a dead body move as though it were still alive. I suppose...they wanted to see if it could work the other way. How long the soul could live, without a body to hold it."
"That's...horrible."
Cletienne nodded again.
There was a pattern to the false stars above them—they waxed and waned, brightened and dimmed, by some logic Alma couldn't follow. It was especially dim when Cletienne finally called a halt on a bare outcropping of rigid rock. "Do you sense anything?"
Alma closed her eyes. Dimly, distantly, she felt a prickle far behind them, much more bearable than it had been before. "I think we lost them."
"Good." He grimaced. "We'll rest her a little while. Let me know if you feel anything else."
Alma slumped against the rock, and was asleep almost before she had finished sitting down. She awoke in the murky dark, still drowsy, with the pain steadily swelling in her head. Still dim, still distant, but as unmistakable as the warm, still morning air that preludes a hot summer day.
"They're getting closer," she mumbled. Wading through the muck had left her sore and tired: it took a monumental effort just to rise to her feet.
Cletienne stirred, and levered himself upright just as painfully and gingerly as she had. "We must be close."
Alma's head snapped towards him: she could hear the desperation in his voice. "What do you mean?"
Cletienne looked back at her. The feverish quality was gone from his eyes—now they were even more leaden than they had been before. "I've never been down this far."
Alma stared at him with mounting horror. Through the haze of her pain, her fear, and her exhaustion, pieces of what he'd said, and what she'd seen, were beginning to click together in her head. "You don't know where we're going?"
Cletienne shook his head again. "There's no maps. Hashmalum's memories of this place are...hazy, and incomplete. And there's the changes that nature has made." He paused. "That Elidibus has made, too."
She thought of the crater they'd found, with the dragon's skull at her heart. If she'd thought of that crater at all, she'd thought it the mark of some ancient battle. Now she began to understand more clearly.
"What if these things killed him?" she asked.
Cletienne laughed shortly. "I doubt it." His face went solemn. "These things...they feed on magic. If they'd eaten him, there would be...more. And they'd be stronger."
Alma was quiet for a moment. "And...whatever makes me a host for Ultima...that's why I can sense them?"
"I think so." Cletienne leaned back against the same outcropping of rock. "It's all the same thing, isn't it? Souls without bodies...souls that make more bodies...bodies that are many souls." He looked around the twilight dark. "I have a gift for Summoning. Others a gift for healing. Others a gift for the sword. You...you have a gift for the soul."
Alma said nothing. But as she had in those days by the cliff, she wondered: could she control this power, rather than letting it destroy her?
They left the rocky outcropping, searching through the murk and muck for any way further down into Labyrinthos. Cletienne summoned nothing but a little light to the tip of the staff, to ease their passage. But no matter where they waded, no matter how they searched, they found nothing that pointed the way downwards. And with every moment that passed, Alma could feel the revenants drawing closer.
But as the heat of their approach became almost unbearable—a pressure in the back of her throat, reaching up into the base of her skull—a shape took steady form in the dark. As they drew closer, they saw it was a flat stone dais, perfectly rectangular, clearly shaped by human hands.
"This has to be something," Cletienne mumbled. Exhausted as she was, Alma was more worried about him. Every day seemed to wear on him more. He was leaning on his staff as though it were a crutch.
But at the sight of the dais, he managed to pick up the pace a little. She stumbled after him, desperate to escape the things drawing closer behind them.
As they drew closer to the white stone dais, she saw that there were broken corpses littered on its top, the bones of a half-dozen creatures she couldn't recognize, all shapes and sizes. Another battle Elidibus had fought?
Cletienne stumbled to a stop, frowning. "There's magic here," he mumbled. "Another ward..." His eyes flickered behind him. "If it's a barrier like the ones he wove before...I'm not sure I can pierce it."
Alma did not dare look back. She could already feel the revenants, too close, too hungry. They were close enough now that she could feel that longing, that hunger, an ache in the pit of her stomach and in the pit of their heart. The hunger was both physical and emotional. They would be consumed, body and soul, to fuel that ghastly hunger.
"We have to try, right?" she asked.
Cletienne looked at her. His eyes flickered past her, towards the oncoming revenants. Then he nodded, and headed to the dais. There was purpose in his step now, focus and energy.
He stepped onto the dais. She was just a step behind him. And as their feet closed upon the stone, she felt a fresh pang in her skull—a surge of hate and violence, just in front of them.
"Wait!" she cried, too late.
Geysers of seething light erupted from the piled bones. There were three distinct columns, surging like a waterfall in reverse: one a deep orange, one crackling white, one a muddy blue. And within those geysers, flickering shapes moved: shapes she couldn't see so much as feel. The bones shifted in that light, cracked together into new and terrible shapes. The light did not fade, but settled down like cloaks around each form. Three enormous, gangling figures, power crackling in their uneven joints, rattled towards them.
The things in front of her were focused in their malice. But behind her, she could feel the teeming hunger of the other revenants, drawing closer all the time.