Chapter 8 – Between a Rock and a Hot Place
"If I ever meet the guy responsible for building this place, I'm giving him a piece of my mind," Sonic grumbled, watching the stone block that served as impromptu raft sink into the lava pool behind him. He wiped sweat from his brow and tried to catch his breath—difficult in the heat-choked tunnels—before turning to continue down a twisting shaft of ledges. Glowing veins in the walls peered out between rough-cut bricks, lighting his footing as he descended.
Always down. He had to be nearly to the planet's heart by now.
A rumble shook the passage, knocking Sonic against the wall where it met the ledge. His shoulder—re-bandaged when he'd stopped for a memory-troubled nap earlier—protested at the mistreatment. Loose chips of rock and grit pattered down on his head. Somewhere in the darkness below, he heard a crack.
Sonic held still for a while after the tremor passed, listening. The only sounds that cut the silence were the thud of his heart in his chest, the rush of blood in his ears.
"If I get out of here I'm never going underground again."
He shook the dust from his quills and scrambled down the rest of the shaft as quickly—and a bit recklessly—as he could manage. Stones rolled underfoot, and at one point he slid off a ledge and landed in a heap on the next one down, pebbles raining down after him. He muttered a curse that would have gotten him a long lecture from Uncle Chuck, then carefully dropped down the last three feet.
To a dead end.
"Really?" he shouted. His voice bounced back only faintly. The space was too small to really echo properly. Barely big enough to pace in as he mentally retraced his steps.
When was his last turn? How far would he have to backtrack to find a different route?
How long had he been wandering in this stupid place?
He stared back up at the ledge-lined shaft and sighed. The top wasn't even visible from down here, shrouded in darkness and winding out of sight. And before that was the lava pool, and the tiled chamber where he'd napped, and the maze of hallways...
He kicked a rock in frustration. It skittered across the gritty floor and bounced off a low ledge near the opposite wall.
Sonic eyed the ledge. It looked...off. A little too even. A little too precise to be a natural formation. He got down on his knees and squinted at it closer in the dim light.
There! More of the floral pattern he'd seen elsewhere in the ruins, a crisp join between ledge and floor. Not connected, but set on top.
"I wonder..." Sonic rested his hands against the ledge, then threw his weight into it and pushed.
The stone resisted for a few moments, before sliding with a protesting scrape. Sonic took a deep breath and heaved against it again, bracing his sneakers on the floor and straining as muscles complained and sweat ran in rivulets between his quills. Rock groaned against rock, but the young hedgehog slowly gained ground. One more push, and he nearly fell headfirst into the hole the stone slab had covered, catching himself against the edge with an ungainly pinwheeling of arms.
"Sweet!" Sonic pushed himself back to his feet, adjusted his pack, and with a brief glance to make sure it wasn't too far down, dropped through the opening into a lower corridor. A wall capped off the tunnel to one side, but the other end extended off into the dark. More lava veins illuminated things, just barely, and broken pillars and fallen stone cast odd shadows against the walls.
Sonic looked up at the hole he'd uncovered, more than twice his height above him. "Well, not getting back out that way." He turned to head down the passage.
The ruins rumbled around him again, stronger this time. He stumbled to one knee.
Crack!
Sonic's eyes widened in alarm at the unmistakable sound of splitting stone.
...Directly behind him.
He whirled to face the wall.
The glowing veins were thicker, and one bulged out. Parts of the wall protruded with a barely audible groan. Heat rolled off the stone.
Another rumble. Another snap! of stone.
A trickle of lava oozed from the largest vein.
Sonic's dread-frozen brain finally jump-started again, and he turned and kicked into a frantic run. Behind him, the wall burst open. Lava spilled out with a gurgling rush.
Sonic vaulted over fallen stone, heedless of the pain as he scraped his side against the broken edges, knocked his elbow against a wall. He skidded past pillars, ducked and rolled beneath low ceilings. His pulse pounded in his ears like a war drum. Fear surged through his veins like fire. A wall of heat and death licked at his heels.
He slid feet-first beneath another low outcropping, glancing back at the lava mere feet away. The adrenaline sharpened his sense of time, seemed to slow the moment down. The heat pressed sharply against his skin for an eternity as his speed carried him in a slide through a gap too narrow to stand in.
And there, beneath him...holes? And a glint off something metal. Instincts screamed danger—what, more?— and then Sonic was out and the spikes slammed up into the low ceiling just as the lava swallowed them up.
Sonic rolled to his feet, vaulted a last block of masonry, and leaped to a higher ledge where the ceiling opened up. He scrambled for higher ground as the lava crashed into the wall, fountaining up briefly before settling into a bubbling pool.
Panting for breath, Sonic knelt on hands and knees, shivering as everything tingled with screaming nerves and adrenaline. His face and arms hurt, and he gingerly tested the raw skin with his fingers. Burnt. He was missing fur in a few spots too.
A bubble of lava popped as though mocking him.
"Definitely not going back that way," he muttered.
A faint tremor rumbled through the walls. Sonic scrambled to his feet and hurried as far away from the lava as he could manage, wincing at his new aches.
"I hate this place!"
—
Hours—days? Weeks?—later, Sonic stumbled around a winding, half-collapsed turn in what was probably the millionth tunnel in the ruins he was sure would be his tomb and into a wider, better-lit hallway that tripped him up figuratively with its incongruity, and literally with its scattered rubble.
Wider because of the irregular gouging along the walls that left whole heaps of broken tile and chunks of displaced rock along the floor. Better-lit because of the high-tech fluorescent pucks affixed to the walls at very regular intervals.
"Okay, either the people who built this place had a sudden leap in technology," Sonic muttered, rubbing at his stubbed toes through his sneaker, "or someone else is here." He poked experimentally at the nearest light puck. It turned off at his touch, and sure enough, there on the front was an unmistakable emblem of a face with round spectacles and a walrus mustache. Go figure.
"Now what could ol' Walrus-Face be looking for down here?"
A grinding screech echoed down the hallway in answer, metal on stone. Sonic winced at the sound and flattened his ears to his head, then sighed. "Not like I had better plans right now. Like not adding to my injuries."
At least it was easier to see where he was going now, with proper light rather than the lurid under-glow of lava. And easier to see the relief on the walls as he went along. What started merely as decorative floral designs progressed into symbols of rings and, unsurprisingly, gemstones. Just like the pillars around the arch back on the surface. And...yes, there were the weird angular Mobians as well, in poses that looked like they were paying homage to something, or perhaps cowering. Sonic reached for his pack to pull out his journal.
The grinding screech rang through the hallway again, accompanied by a very concerning rumble that shook the floor and knocked Sonic to his knees. Loose stone chips rained down from the ceiling in a dusty cloud. A tile fell from one wall with a clatter.
"Maybe check the journal later." Sonic eyed the ceiling warily when the quaking stopped. "I should probably go ask them nicely to not bring the whole roof down on us." He picked up the pace, hopping lightly over fallen brick and tile down the hallway's next twists and turns.
And skidded to a halt at the edge of a ledge as everything—walls, ceiling, floor—opened up into the wide expanse of a vast, steamy chamber.
"Whoa," he breathed, then choked briefly on the cloying air.
Everything glowed. At first Sonic thought it was more of the light pucks, but while their bright pin-pricks did illuminate some of the higher ledges and platforms in the room, most of the light came from the wall-to-wall lake of lava down below. It gilded the edges of the dark purple stone and picked out deep shadows in the green marble columns that supported some of the platforms, throwing up puffs of steam that hung in the air like ashy clouds. From the depths of the room came more of the metal-on-stone screeching, and the steady crunch of breaking rock and the hiss of water flash-boiling, and a chink-chink-chink of something chipping away at the ruins. There was even a faint breeze from somewhere, stirring the steam gently and playing with Sonic's quills.
Sonic ducked behind a larger hunk of fallen stone at a sudden movement above, flattening himself into the shadows just in time to avoid...a bat?...with hooks for feet and an engine exhaust on its butt. It flapped in place for a moment, scanning the spot where Sonic had just been standing, before moving on.
"Okay," Sonic breathed, "so Whiskers also makes bat-bots." He peered back out at the room, sizing up his next move.
There. At the far side of the room, high up, a passage opening that looked like a promising exit. If nothing else, it went up instead of down. He'd just have to get past the machinery he could now make out, grinding and crushing as caterpillar-shaped bots dumped in stone pulled from the ruins and sifted through the debris for...something. Grimy water slopped about the crushers and spilled into the lava, the source of the steam. More caterpillars gouged at the walls behind them, digging through...wait a minute.
Sonic squinted.
It was some kind of building. Green marble roof, carved pillars, tiled steps. Half-set into the walls, and the caterpillars were chewing away at it like it was some child's block castle rather than ancient ruins.
He should ignore it. Get to the exit passage and leave the bots to whatever it was that they were digging for.
Leave them to make the ruins more ruined.
The steam cleared a bit, enough to make out the gem shapes above the angled roof of the structure. Seven of them.
Really. The exit was right there. Just a few hops along the high ledges. Watch out for the bat-brains. Scot-free in the fresh air.
Another grinding screech from the caterpillars. Another rumble through the floor. The lava bubbled.
They were just ruins.
Curiosity got the better of him.
Sonic ducked out from his hiding place and began negotiating his way down into the chamber. The ledges along the wall here had clearly once been stairs, but time and tremors had long-ago worn away at many sections, leaving Sonic jumping precariously from one stretch of stone to the next, and he only hoped that he'd be able to climb back out again. He teetered on the edge once when a loose stone turned under his foot, and had to make a quick second jump when one landing dislodged another stair from the wall, but finally he reached the lowest level, just above the lava, and had a clear shot toward the structure and its mechanical assailants.
Something shrieked overhead.
"Oh sure, now I get spotted!" Sonic ducked as one of the bats dove at him, its butt-engine flaring with a tiny gout of fire that would have been absurdly cute if the bot wasn't trying to murder him. He rolled aside and kicked up at it, knocking it askew to careen into the nearby wall, and ran for it as the other bots looked up at the commotion. He'd have to weave past the bots and the crushers to get at the structure, to see what was inside.
With his luck, it'd be a dead end. Deader end, with the bots outside it.
Why was he doing this again?
One of the caterpillars reared up in front of him, mouth opening to reveal sharp drill-teeth before swinging down to bite. Sonic ducked sideways, then threw himself at its side, curling up into a ball before impact. The squeal of quills on metal was muffled this time, the attack hampered by the rucksack he still wore, but he still managed to hit one of the joints between the bot's segments. Apparently a weak spot, as the segments suddenly broke loose from each other, scattering in a spray of spiky spheres. One clipped Sonic and knocked him into the wall against his injured shoulder, and he grunted in pain as his vision went dim at the edges.
And of course, there were no convenient rings down here to give him a quick boost.
Another caterpillar crashed through the scattered segments of the first, and Sonic pushed away from the wall in an awkward dodge that might have gone worse if the new bot had better aim. It still clipped one of Sonic's quills in its lunge, but then found itself with its drill-teeth buried in the wall. Sonic wasted no time, and ran for the structure.
One more caterpillar and a small flock of the bats stood in his way. He ducked around the bats, tricking two into crashing into each other, but his injuries burned with the exertion and he stumbled into the path of the caterpillar. Drill-teeth flashed. Sonic rolled. Each missed the other.
Sonic skidded out of his roll in a crouch, one hand braced against the floor, the other ready to drop his pack so he could use his quills more effectively. The caterpillar whipped around, spiky segments crashing into the columns supporting the marble roof, and the mural-covered facade beneath. Brick and tile fell to the floor, revealing a dark cavity beyond.
Something green flashed in the shadows.
Sonic and the caterpillar both drew up short at the sight. Glanced at each other. Back at the green light. Both lunged.
"Oh no you don't." The caterpillar was closer, but Sonic was faster. He slid beneath the bot's bulk, wove around one of the half-felled columns, jumped the fresh heap of rubble.
There. Between two fragments of a relief covered with Ancient Mobian script and more of the angular figures.
A gemstone. Bright green, brilliantly cut, and glowing with its own inner light.
Sonic reached out.
Touched it.
Time froze.
All the hairs on Sonic's body stood at attention as the air filled with energy, like the build-up before a lightning strike.
And with a crackle of raw Chaos, he was torn away from reality.
—
A/N: Fun Fact Time: About 1/3 of the way through this chapter (at the section break) is where I stopped writing this one for a long chunk of time. I got sidetracked, worked on other things (most of them not fanfiction-related), and wasn't feeling the story. Last November, I decided I was going to finish this story for NaNoWriMo, so the latter portion of this chapter is where I started, and is much more recent writing. Don't know if it's obvious to anyone else, though. But I did manage to blitz through writing the rest of this fic up through the end of December, so accomplishment! Hooray for fresh hyperfixations!
Also, hoo-boy, cliffhangers! The next chapter coming up is one of my favorites.