The Ashes of Allmau: The Orfolk of Allmau

Chapter 34

The stairway corkscrewed into the ceaseless darkness that had grown in the depths of the archive. Dyll gasped, Ahna turned to see him on her shoulder, holding out Rune, who's glow was becoming brighter and brighter with each step.

"She does that sometimes," Ahna explained.

Dyll nodded, "It's nice." He said, feeling soothed by the soft light emitted from the tiny seed.

Flickers of light traced like nerves through the darkness, briefly lighting the floors of books.

"What is this place?"

"It's like an old library," said Ahna.

"Library?"

"A place where people keep books." She said.

"Books?"

"You don't have books?"

"What are they?"

"They're like, uhm...well people put all their thoughts and ideas in them, so other people can read them."

"Like ideas?"

"Yeah, but written down."

"These must be some really old ideas." He said.

Deeper they went, and older the ideas became. Like stepping back in time, to the early memories of Langsine, back to the beginning.

Ahna gasped, as Rune's light lit the balustrade of the stairway. Some odd slime gathered on it. Dyll hopped off her shoulder crawled close to it, he held the light of Rune to it and watched as it seemed to slowly move towards it. Curls grew from it, which flaked into hairs which dissolved into flickering ephemera. He backed away as the mist came Rune, holding her away and quickly finding his place on Ahna's shoulder again.

"Try not to touch that stuff," he advised.

The slime become thicker, appearing in odd veins around the end of the stairway, at the ground floor, where they came to the source. A large hole in the floor, from which a thick mat oof slime had grown out. A dense mist of glistening aetherforms swirled around it slowly. All about the place it was as if the books were melting into the dark slime, dissolving into a slurry of ideas that fed into the darkness below.

Rune's light could just pierce the first meter, revealing an odd shanty stairway, cobbled together from all sorts. They both stared into the darkness. For a long moment, Ahna reflected on looking down into the dark beneath Langsine, when compared to up at the light of Allmau. Both were unknowns to her. She took a deep breath, and thought of young Rosalyne, trapped in a darkness just as unrelenting as that in front of her. She thought back to herself, sitting on the hillside of the Common. Both waiting for something else to come into their world. Kydd had come for her, and helped her out into the real world, now she would pay it forwards and rescue Rosalyne from the dark below.

"Ready?" She asked Dyll.

"Uh," he kept Rune tight, "Yeah."

They entered the darkness, stepping down the shanty stairway into a world beneath the archive. The world behind the oldest ideas and thoughts, the world of forgotten memories. The all consuming darkness quickly devoured everything that stepped into it. The soft light of Rune was enough to illuminate both Ahna and Dyll, but nothing else. She continued to step forwards, daring not to touch the wall less the pitch slime touched back. With each step she felt herself seem to peel away from the real world, this was becoming far too similar to the abyss she'd found herself in.

Dyll held out the light of Rune, they saw no steps further ahead of them. Ahna continued onwards.

"It's so dark," thought Dyll.