The forest floor literally opened.
A trap door I hadn't noticed swung up. Two males emerged from the shadows, black cloaks draped over them and their faces concealed by their hoods. One of the men was a vampire, the other a witch, and there was something very, very wrong about them. My magic buzzed in alarm. It was as if a foul, noxious cloud hung about them.
I kept utterly still.
The vampire closed the door and moved some of the forest debris around with his foot to cover the secret exit. I had to strain my hearing to catch their words.
"They will need more time," he said, his voice tight and rushed, "the magic input is too weak. I told them to move closer to the epicenter!"
"That's too high a risk," the witch replied, his voice more calm, "They might detect it. We're already too close. We can't ruin this opportunity, it is not everyday that we get this much magic accumulation in one place. And high quality magic from all the Five combined, nonetheless."
They walked away, opposite the direction of the castle. Their voices, albeit faint, still reached me. The vampire grunted, "Even so, It will take time for the aperture to stretch open."
My hands went cold. Not from the chill of the night, but from the ugly suspicion that erupted in my guts. They spoke about an aperture. I really hoped that my thoughts were wrong. But I wouldn't count on it.
I waited for a few minutes until I was sure no one was around, then carefully climbed down the tree.
I wouldn't have spotted the door had I not known it was there. As it was, it took me a few minutes to find it. When I finally did, it was shrouded with traces of magic.
It was hidden using some kind of spell. It wasn't a strong spell, thoug, nothing like the spell that disguised the true size of Arthur's island back in Portland. Besides, once I knew it was there, magic would find it difficult to trick me.
But finding it was only half the work. I had to open it. I carefully looked all over its edges and surface, the darkness didn't help.
It wasn't me who found the tightly embedded lever, though. After watching me fumble around for a few minutes, the white owl landed next to me, its talons silent. The bird pecked at one particular spot in the side of the closed entrance. I explored cautiously with my fingers.
There!
There was no way to know who or what lay beneath that door. So before I took out my sword, I sent my coordinates to Amanda and Charles, letting them know that it was underground.
I wasn't suicidal, after all.
Well, maybe I should've waited for back up, but I didn't know if it was worth calling everyone else here right now, and I couldn't sit on my hands and wait until they came.
Ok, so maybe I was a little bit suicidal.
I pocketed my phone, took out my sword and pulled on the small lever. The door opened with no resistance and no sound. The owl flew away, melting into the night, the fluttering of its wings almost inaudible.
I went down to the unknown. The stairs were eliptical. Around the entrance itself was dark, but I could see a faint light deeper down.
I hesitated only a second before closing the door behind me. The stairs were rough and uneven, the walls the same. But the air wasn't stale and there was no rubble around as far as I could see through the dim light. The walls pulsed with an odd kind of magic that made mine quiver. I didn't like it.
After a couple of minutes of carefully climbing down the stairs, I reached the part that was lit by wall torches. They were few and far in between, but they provided enough light to relieve the strains on my eyes.
And to illuminate the dark glyphs on the walls.
At first, I didn't pay them any mind. It wasn't until I reached the second wall torch that something made me pause and look more closely.
I stepped closer to the wall and squinted my eyes. They looked like characters of some long forgotten language.
My magic stirred, urging me closer to touch the wall. My ears rang and my vision narrowed, dimming around the edges, until all I could see were the symbols.
Whispers. Voices in my head. Words I couldn't make out yet I could somehow understand reached my ear as if from underwater. It was all inside my head.
I had lifted my hand without even realizing it and was about to touch the blood that called out to my magic like a siren.
It was the smell that broke me out of my haze. Blood.
I blinked and took a step back. The glyphs weren't black, as I had thought. They were a crimson red, dark but glistening near the light.
The glyphs were drawn using blood.
Blood magic was not, under any circumstance, a good sign. I took a deep breath and gripped my sword tighter, stepping back from the wall. I viewed the symbols with an analytic eye.
I had very little to no knowledge of spells, either written or spoken. But for some unfathomable reason, I could actually make sense of the symbols on the wall. At least the ones clearly visible near the light source.
Then it hit me. I was reading the symbols in the First Tongue.
The First Tongue.
But of course! I had been born with the ability to speak it and understand it- as did immortals who came from the purest of lines- so why wouldn't I be able to read it?
The symbols were drawn in a band running along the wall, about shoulder height. Not all the symbols were words in the First Tongue, there were numerous glyphs I couldn't understand. But the words I made out made me shudder.
Gate...Blood....bird of life...flames of death...Other realm...
My head was swimming with the effort to make sense of the dispersed words, but I had to move on. I didn't know when someone would come down- or up- these stairs again.
So I ignored the strange pull in my chest, assuming it came from the strong magic on the wall. I wondered for a moment if Amanda had told Arthur about my message. She probably did. They would be on their way. Or not. The evening wasn't exactly going according to plan.
My mind flashed back to the kiss-
I shook my head. This was not the time to daydream about that. I would deal with it later. Right. Later.
The stairs felt like a never-ending spiral. Whenever I reached a torch light I checked the glyphs nearby. They were the same, at least the ones I could understand. Apparently they were drawn in a loop.
After a few minutes, I heard a faint sound. It was coming from downstairs. Just how deep underground this place was?
The faint sound cleared up as I kept descending. It was the humming of several voices at once. Unintelligible words that sent a chill down my spine and ignited a sense of extreme panic in me.
I breathed in and out, trying to shake off the impending sense of doom that constricted my chest. I had to hurry. I didn't know why, but I had to hurry. Following my instincts, my steps down the stairs became more urgent.
Finally the curve of the wall revealed a long, dimly lit hallway, at the end of which was a large arched entrance. I crept along the hallway. The noise was louder here, but I saw nothing but walls beyond the arched entrance. I realized the reason when I reached it.
There was a huge damn hole in the ground.
The floor sloped downward from the entrance I was standing in, until it leveled out about a hundred feet or so down. The place buzzed with a dark energy.
The hexagon shaped "room" had a domed ceiling and five other entrances similar to the one I was standing in. Six in total. The floor sloped sharply down from the entrances to the bottom level ground where all the action was taking place.
Glyphs similar to those I saw on the stairway were drawn all over the ceiling and the walls, all the way down to the roughly constructed stairs going down from the six entrances to the bottom.
I shuddered, thinking of the amount of blood needed to paint all the symbols.
Six standing torches illuminated the circular scene below. One in each corner of the hexagon. I lowered myself on the ground and crept closer to the edge in order to see more clearly. Keeping an ear to the stairs behind me was difficult considering the level of the blood-curdling noise down there.
At first, my mind didn't want to process what my eyes saw.
Three thick chains hung from the domed ceiling, on each a limp human hung by their ankles. Immortals stood in a wide circle down there, clasping their hands in front of them as if in prayer, humming incomprehensible words. In the middle of their circle was what looked like a pond, its surface smooth and shiny, swirling with colors of countless shades of blood red.
The immortals were all wearing dark robes, with hoods covering their faces.
Of course they would wear black robes. Why would they settle for being anything less than creepy.
The immortals' voices rose in volume. The sense of urgency in me only spiked when I saw the strikingly beautiful birds and heard their faint squeaks of fear and pain.
Three birds with wings of a faded flame orange, patchy feathers that would have been long and lush and dazzling had the birds not been in such a miserable condition, their ankles were shackled to the ground and their bodies sported multiple wounds leaking blood.
The humans suspended from the ceiling, too, bled from countless cuts on their person. They looked close to death. As did the poor birds. I had to get them out of here, and soon.
As I watched, a man who had just poured what I assumed was blood in the pond, walked back with leisurely steps to one of the limp birds, produced a dagger from his robe and cut open a fresh wound.
My magic was screaming to be let out as the chants grew louder and louder. It was as if the blood in my veins was boiling, rushing to my ears and driving my heart to beat at an insane rate.
Before I followed my guts, I somehow found the presence of mind to pull my phone and send a message to Arthur.
Come. Urgent.
I did not stop to think whether my message was indeed sent, or not since I was underground. My dagger was already splitting the air toward the man's throat as I took the stairs two at a time.
The dagger hit its mark. The rhythm of the chants was disrupted for a couple of seconds as heads turned my way. The man who had been cutting the bird dropped to the floor, my dagger looking quite lovely as an accessory to his neck.
One of the voices sang more firmly and the others were quick to follow suit. They resumed their cryptic humming more vigorously. Their incantations, suffused with black foul magic, stronger than before.
A few broke from the circle and ran my way as I reached the bottom. Retrieving swords and blades from inside their robes, they wanted to stop me from reaching the ranks of the individuals left performing the spell.
The three males, all vampires, were good fighters. Their blades moved smoothly with the intent to kill. But I was trained by Robert Walsh ever since I could crawl. My sword was unstoppable, and my magic was a driving force that felt more invigorated and potent than usual.
I swung my sword once, sending a tiny tendril of magic down my arm until it extended into an arc, leaving blue flames in my sword's path. The fire touched all three men in their chests, burning through their robes where it grazed before exploding and ravaging their entire bodies, making them look like blobs of blue fire. A moment later, the fire died and with it the men floated to the ground in ashes.
Oops. That was not a tiny tendril. Oh, well.
More people broke from the circle and crowded around me while those left behind raised their voices, the amount of magic they were feeding the spell increasing by the second. If they were not stopped, they would succeed in whatever they were trying to do shortly.
If the humans and birds weren't around, I would've burned the whole damn lot of them to the ground, but I wouldn't be able to target my magic so pointedly.
As it was, I didn't hesitate in using the blue flames this time. I raised my hand and sent a barrage of flames outward toward my attackers. But there was a witch among them, one who could create some sort of shield. My flames hit the invisible barrier, the latter pulsed red for a moment, absorbing the power of my magic. The blue flames died down.
Well, then, we would do it the old fashioned way. I raised my sword and was about to charge forward when the ground and the walls shook violently.
An earthquake?
Everything happened at once.
A column of violent red exploded upward from the pond in the middle of the room, shooting up like a reversed waterfall that connected the floor to the ceiling.
The walls around us cracked loudly a second before the entrance through which I came burst outward, a good chunk of the wall crumpled making the entrance twice as big as it had been. Debris rolled down the slope.
I moved to keep the entrance in my line of sight. The remaining people left to perform the spell hadn't moved through all of this, focusing entirely on their magic. But they did waver when a colossal monstrosity of a wolf broke through the opening, slid down the slope then sailed over our heads to land right on top of the witch, where her shield didn't stretch. He was so fast even I had a difficult time keeping up with his movements.
A shapeshifter.
The black wolf was in the process of severing the witch's head from her body. The other two, a vampire and a witch, charged towards me. They dodged my fire balls, the vampire reached me first, clashed my sword with his long blade and tried to push me back as a commotion broke out up in the entrance.
A glowing orb of dark green hit my side. Despite the burning pain, I thrusted my sword in the direction of the vampire and sent a wave of magic with it. He leaped out of the way, but it was enough time for me to dodge another bolt of green magic sent by his witch friend.
After that, there was no time to do anything. The vampire and the witch I was fighting were flung back by an invisible force until they hit the wall and dropped motionless, their necks twisted in an unnatural angle.
A group of new arrivals, among whom I recognized Mariano and Charles, pushed past me and headed towards the immortals who'd stopped performing the spell and focused all their attention on the ensuing fight.
Several of them were already lying limp on the ground when a familiar presence landed beside me.
"You're hurt," Arthur said, glancing down at my side. I realized I was holding my left side and, when I looked down, saw that the wound was not closing. Blood was dripping down my black clothing in heavy, red droplets. This wasn't normal. My hand spasmed, my sword clattered to the ground and my knees buckled. Arthur's arm was the only thing that stopped me from meeting the floor.
Arthur's eyes were pure black, his magic a roiling force that shook the earth beneath us. He called for Amanda who had just descended the slope on lithe legs despite her gown. Arthur lowered me to the ground. I tried moving, but my body wouldn't obey. The cold fingers of panic gripped my heart, battling with pain.
Amanda hunkered down beside me, cutting open the side of my top to reveal a nasty wound. The cut had bared my flesh to the bone. Black veins were quickly spreading from the heart of the injury toward the smooth skin of my side.
I felt light headed. The noise of the fight around us sounded more distant by the second. Venus and the rest of the Five headed to the center of the room where the blood pillar started glowing. More powerful immortals had joined the fight. The robed immortals were losing.
Arthur gripped my chin and turned my head his way, intense emotions warring in his dark, dark eyes.
"Arthur, go!" Amanda said, putting her hand on the wound.
"Stay alive. That's an order." he told me through gritted teeth. I had no intention of dying, but I didn't appreciate the order anyway. Arthur made his way through the fighting before I could tell him where to stick his order.
He joined the rest of the Five. They surrounded the glowing red pillar, and thrust their hands inside. An insane amount of magic exploded from them. They were attempting to destroy the pillar, which, a distant part of my mind realized, was probably the beginning of a gate to the other realm.
"Help...the humans," I told Amanda, my tongue heavy. She pushed me down to lean against the sloped wall behind me, then hollered a name I didn't recognize.
"Already on it, you should worry about yourself." Amanda said as a man came running down the stairs towards us. A witch. A few other individuals were already working on lowering the humans down.
"Why do you always get yourself in such situations?" Amanda said, her voice shaking and her hand brushing back my sweaty hair. The witch crouched down beside us and checked my wound. My muscles spasmed. I was breathing heavily, the pain in my side somehow muted and sharp at the same time.
The witch said something, but my hearing, like the rest of my senses, was gradually dimming. My eyes shifted from Arthur's stiff back to meet intense green ones so much like my own. The blond man held a bloodied sword.
The shock on my father's face was unmistakable. He walked through the mass of limp and injured bodies that had fallen victim to his sword. Slowly. A Myriad of conflicted emotions played on his face; disbelief, shock, pain. Slowly, ever so slowly. His lips parted and shaped a name I knew all too well.
Orla.
Before darkness pulled me under and everything shut down, I saw the red pillar begin to fade away, and hoped the humans and the birds would survive.
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Thoughts?
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Mia <3
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