The Time Eater

Chapter 10: Magic masters wise

Evos was in place. He said he would take care of the distraction itself once Tavia turned off the lights. What he was planning to do, she didn't know. He had just smiled, held a finger to his lips and left, sneaking out of the lab and back down the hall out of sight of the two Wardens.
There were three paths to the stairs. She was on the path that approached from the right, and Evos intended on causing some sort of commotion in the left most path and then making his way down the middle path to meet up with Tavia. He had seemed confident, but she wasn't so sure it would work the way he wanted it to.

Evos had said to give him two minutes before turning out the lights. Tavia used her vox to keep an eye on the time; she may not have been able to make calls out, or even connect to the corvex, but at the very least, the time was displaying properly at the top of the screen.

At the two-minute mark, she reached up to the box and grabbed the alther slab itself. Her fingers curled around the edges of the warm slab and she pried it free. As soon as the spell-set was removed, the lights above her head shut off, followed by the lights in the halls and presumably the nearby labs. In the darkness, the cyan glow of Althier still lighting the engravings on the slab illuminated her hands, but it was slowly draining away, the Althier leaking from the engravings like tears. Tavia took in a sharp breath and dropped the spell-set to the ground where it landed with a dull thunk. The Althier, oozed out onto the floor where it pooled, a glowing, viscous mess that began to slowly evaporate. Tavia checked her hands—if normal Althier was toxic, then liquefied Althier, a heavily condensed form of Althier, was even worse. Even just a small drop would cause severe burns.

There were probably easier—better— ways to stop the spell-set, but any thing else would have required an aura, so it simply wasn't an option. Tearing it out of the system had been Tavia's only real choice. It wasn't elegant, but it worked, and right now, that was all she needed.

She turned back to the door, which they had left open just in case the door didn't open automatically once the the power to the door stopped, and she stepped out into the hallway.

The only lights on were the exit lights, their dim light cast the hallway in shades of blue. She hadn't realized they had their own supply of Althier, but they didn't throw enough light to see by. The small windows lining the walls were a bigger issue; they didn't let in a lot of light, but it might be enough for her to be seen by if she got too close.

Tavia crept down the hallway, towards the stairs, wincing at every footsteps that seemed to echo through the hall. The men were muttering to each other, too quiet for her to hear. She paused in the darkness nearby, waiting.

A thunderous crash of something heavy and metal skittering across the hard floor came from the leftmost hallway. The sound threw echoes, reverberating until it was hard to tell just where the sound had come from and what exactly it was.

"What the void was that?" one of the men asked.

The same question was running through Tavia's mind. What had Evos done to make so much noise?

"Better check it out," the other man said. "Who knows what Ikarios'll do if we let something slip by?"

She heard receding footsteps, heading away from her and into the hallway. She took a few steps forward, peering into the darkness, but it wasn't like she could make out anything in the little amount of light streaming through the windows.

Had Evos made it away in time? He was supposed to meet her at the stairs, so she wouldn't know until she got there and either found him, or didn't.

Moving with slow, deliberate steps, she made her way to the stairs, hoping the men wouldn't return immediately. The distraction would only give them a minute at most, and Tavia didn't even think they would get that much.