Penult (The Liminality, Part Four)

Chapter 14: Ravaged

Roots converged like guided missiles, joining to tear my consciousness free of my earthly body and drag it through the seams that separated our world from the Liminality. I descended through the netherworld between, twisting, tumbling, regaining my flesh at the bottom of a deep, dank pit that had the feel of a basement exposed by a bomb.

Shaggy shreds of torn, inert root jutted from the walls, wafting in the draft. The foul vapors of tunnels infested with Reapers vented through the gaps.

But I had no desire to enter the underworld. The surface was all that mattered to me now, as it was with any Hemisoul who knew of its existence. I wanted out of this ragged pit.

As with every entry in the Liminality I was naked, but I did not bother to weave myself any clothes. I just got up and started climbing. When I reached the top and pulled myself over the rim, the sight that greeted me made me disoriented and queasy with doubt.

Where was I? I recognized nothing. I expected the pitted plains—that scrubby veldt dotted with sinkholes. What I found was a jumbled mess, a wasteland of shattered rock and shredded roots, heaped and churned and gashed with gulleys. Chunks as large as city blocks had been ripped apart, piled up and upended.

Here and there, a few undisturbed patches of plain loomed over the devastation like steep-shored islands. In the midst of each, lone obelisks jabbed into the sky like radio towers.

I was drawn to them like a wasp to cola. I scrambled over jumbles of shredded root and shattered rock to reach the nearest island. I climbed its sheer face, using loops of root as handholds and footholds, hauling myself up onto what was once a flat patch of ground, but what was now a mini-plateau.

The shrubs and soil on top were undisturbed apart from some bulges in the ground that ran radially out from the pillar. It stood on leg-like buttresses that jabbed deep beneath the soil into the bedrock and roots below, each as thick as my thighs. The main shaft reminded me of a neo-modern totem pole, its segments bearing abstract patterns, no faces. I placed my hand on the pillar and found it uncomfortably warm. Some patches were translucent and gave off a faint glow.

I looked out over the sea of devastation that had been the pitted plains. Parts of the horizon looked sort of familiar. But entire mountain ranges and mesas were missing from the landscape I remembered.

I could see no trace of the sprawling metropolis of castles and towers and spires that Luther had constructed at the base of the foothills. The land, it seemed, had opened up and swallowed it. Luthersburg, or its surface annex at least, was no more.

Whatever had torn apart the plains had taken down many of the foothills and even some of the larger peaks, reducing them to low mounds of rubble. The nearest remnants were studded with broken tree trunks, many of them now raising their roots to the sky. Where the mesas had been, only stubs of rock remained.

My heart leapt at the sight of the familiar bluffs that flanked the opening to my favorite sanctuary, the hollow ringed by cliffs with its pond and the creek that poured from a hanging valley

At least now I had a destination. My refuge remained intact, or so it appeared from a distance. I climbed off the island and lowered myself back into the chaos.

It was a hard slog over and around ridges and pits. In some of the deeper rifts I could see some evidence of healing. Some of the more motile roots had infiltrated the wounds and meshed together. Much of the root mass closer to the surface was now inert matter, impervious to my attempts at weaving. Somehow, it had been killed, like flesh deprived of a blood supply for too long. Much of it was already crumbling into dust.

In some places the roots were so jungle-like I could make no headway and had to backtrack. Some patches were unconsolidated. I would step on them and just sink into the tangles like quicksand and had to practically swim back to more solid terrain.