LIGHTNOVELONLINE 73. Dark Below
Excerpt from Yenna Bookbinder’s ‘A Travelling Mage’s Almanac.’
“Would that I were an artist, and could illustrate the madness of this place—would that I were a musician, to replicate the hideous sounds, that I were a perfumer to grant you a hint of the smell, that I could treat your senses to that which assailed mine in every other little way. But, I am none of these things—read my words and understand as best you can, an experience I would not willingly inflict on another being.”
Immediately upon stepping hoof on the ramp, Yenna was overwhelmed with a keen sense of wrongness.
There was no single definable factor at play for the sensation, but rather a combination of sensory inputs. The ramp itself had seemed normal enough at first glance, but it felt more like wood than stone underhoof. It was also one solid piece, not a single line of joinery anywhere to be seen between ramp and wall. It wasn’t unusual for conjured materials to completely lack the natural joins of mundane constructions, but the material felt more like it had grown in place than been created with magic. Smooth and grey, the surface of the material had a porous texture similar to pumice or, in a more biological extreme, sea sponge.
It was warm too, within the shaft leading down. The air transitioned suddenly from the slightly stale underground chill of the structure above to a warm, damp air. An uncomfortable wind moved back and forth over them like the breath of an immense creature, carrying with it the distant sound of voices. The echoes of those voices carried in a very strange manner, as though the not-stone of the ramp was absorbing some of the sound and letting other bits echo, strangely selective in a way that normal materials simply weren’t.
Yenna had seen privacy enchantments that prevented the voice of a chosen speaker from carrying beyond its confines, even filters that moderated large groups of public speakers to censor vulgar or impolite words and phrases¹, but this was only superficially similar—the sounds allowed to echo seemed arbitrarily chosen, some voices rising and others waning at random, leaving all of it unintelligible. The end result left every word maddeningly close to being understandable, as though listening just a bit closer would reveal some dark and terrible secret.
The others were silent as they continued down, unwilling to disturb the whispering madness that emanated from below. Nadhan’s grip was still as tight as her focus on the path ahead, but Mulvari distracted himself by rolling a series of small glass orbs between his too-long fingers. The nervous motion betrayed a sense that the man was thoroughly uneasy coming down here, as worried about what he would find as Yenna was. Perhaps, Yenna reasoned, he hasn’t come down here before. Or perhaps what is down below is just as dangerous to the alchemist as it is to me?
As they went further down, the ramp widened. It was such a gradual change that Yenna barely noticed, until she realised that the central gap they were spiralling around had become a yawning chasm, and that she could see the continued path well below them. Yenna risked craning her neck to look down and immediately regretted it—the path below seemed an impossible abyss, fading from idle darkness to an ambient red glow. That hot breath-wind blasted her as she looked down, the sickly humidity of it carrying the vague scent of sweat and rot.
They walked in silence for half an hour. The only thing keeping her from going mad from fear on that dreadful walk was to count the passage of time. They took a step roughly every second. The chasm breathed out for five seconds, and breathed back in for five more. The breathing was perfectly precise, keeping time with remarkable precision—or, at least, it seemed that way. Perhaps it was subtly off, a ploy to further weaken the mage’s perception of reality.
As the chasm beside them yawned wider, the ramp increased in size too. There was no logical sense to it, but though the gradient of the ramp hadn’t changed, the ceiling above them seemed higher and higher with every step. It was as though they were getting smaller, or the area was simply increasing in size around them—either was likely from the strict sense of magical possibility, but Yenna could detect no spell or magical effect performing such a function. The place defied her understanding of natural laws, and even threatened to call into question the way magic was allowed to bend those rules to its own end. Looking up the chasm revealed an endless spiral with no visible end—they hadn’t walked down that far, surely?
At the fifteen minute mark, Mulvari’s nerves collapsed far enough that he put away the things he had been fidgeting with. He adopted a kind of blank-eyed stare into the distance, looking at nothing and concentrating just as hard, halfway between boredom and the terror of meeting someone you really wanted to impress. Nadhan had not once faltered, slowed or changed her expression the entire time—gone was the mocking warrior woman, ready to tease and prod, replaced with a stone-faced war goddess. Yenna realised she desperately missed seeing Narasanha make that exact same face.
Yenna’s counting of the seconds was not all that was on her mind. A tumultuous storm of feelings pooled deep within her chest, turning into a tight knot. Would Narasanha, bruised and bloodied, be able to free herself? Would Valkh and Jiin recover from their respective ailments? What was Demvya doing, pouring herself back into Mulvari’s alchemical contraption? And, were the rest of her friends okay? Captain Eone, Chime, Tirk and Hirihiri, even Muut, Mysilia, and the remaining members of the so-called expedition, were they still safe back at Highshine? Some expedition, Yenna sighed. See the world? So far all I’ve seen has been life-threatening perils.
That sobering thought dropped into place alongside her worries, her fear and anxiety, animal instinct and higher reasoning all in agreement that they were in danger. The knot in her chest felt fit to explode, but the corresponding release of emotion-driven witch’s magic was nowhere to be seen. That, ultimately, was the one thing worrying Yenna the most. Between Mulvari, Nadhan and this place, something was preventing her from using the magic that had saved her multiple times already. No discharge of black lightning, or eruption of crimson flames—just stubborn refusal to release energy at all. Yenna didn’t like her odds of trying to fight off Nadhan, but even a warrior like her couldn’t possibly deal with the mage steeping herself in the full, emotional might of a proper witch, could she? Why, then? Why won’t it come out?
Yenna realised she had been clenching her teeth. Her jaw ached as she straightened out her face, shook her head to clear her thoughts. The voices all around them had grown from a buzzing, awful whispering to the chatter of a crowded public space heard through a thin wall. As the minutes passed, the sound grew louder and louder, and Yenna’s eyes watered with the pain of being so close to such an awful cacophony. Blinking tears out of her eyes, Yenna nearly missed it—the ramp ahead changed direction, curving off out of sight where there should have been a wall. The mage’s heart pounded in her chest as a feeling of finality gripped her. For reasons she couldn’t fathom, she knew they had nearly arrived at their destination.
When they turned the corner, Yenna gasped. The ramp continued down a hundred or so more metres into an enormous space, an immense cave of the same seamless not-quite-stone as the ramp. The ramp met up with a walkway wide enough to fit Chime, even if the silupker laid themself out lengthwise from one side to the other. Either side of the walkway dropped slightly into a round depression that stretched on for what must have been kilometres around a round central platform. The pit, a hellish parody of the standing space for watching a play at the theatre, was filled with countless people.
They all moved as one, many fingers of some immense beast. Those withered, tortured souls faced the central platform and all bowed prostrate before it. The sheer scale of this place made mockery of any gathering of people Yenna had ever seen before—the population of a grand city all turned to the singular task of bowing before this central place. Leathery skin hung like paper over the bones of those closest to the base of the ramp, and further away Yenna could see that some of them were not people at all, but rotten bones nonetheless fixed in the constant act of rising and falling in open worship. Ghouls and animated skeletons, souls bound into eternal servitude—worshipping, and muttering dark secrets beyond understanding.
More ramps far off in the distance rose into places in the walls, ascending to parts unknown. More places within the city of Milur, or was this space so disconnected from reality that it could circumvent even the great walls that held the place shut tight? Yenna couldn’t say—she was so far out of her depth that all prior knowledge felt useless. A kind of deep despair fell over her, as the enormity of what she faced sunk in. Even as she looked, others were descending those distant ramps—shambling ghouls, other cultists, perhaps even others like her who had been captured?
In the middle, on that central platform, existed only two protrusions to disturb the smooth not-stone surface. It wasn’t until they were at the base of the ramp that Yenna could even make out what they were, so distant was the sight of all this. In the exact centre of this immense chamber was a flat pillar, several metres high, covered in rectangular recesses. Standing beside it with the stillness of a statue was the black-armoured figure Yenna had seen before, the one who had inflicted the cognitohazard upon her and Valkh before they were taken through the portal. It felt like an entire world away, the thin safety of that research chamber shattered forever.
The walk to the central platform felt like an eternity. Yenna lost track of her count of passing time, her ability to concentrate destroyed by the strangeness of this place. Coming closer, the source of the breathing wind became clear—not only were the masses in the pits moving in perfect unison, but they were breathing in unison too. What seemed to be the heaving, steady breath of an immense beast was instead the collective operation of countless sets of lungs.
Close-up, the pits of people were even more horrific. Each of them was undeniably a reanimated ghoul, some bearing the wounds that slew them in life, but the freshest of them could have passed for a sickly member of the living. Bound to the unending torture of necromantic reanimation and forced into this sick parody of worship—Yenna retained the contents of her stomach through sheer force of fear, the dread of joining their ranks overcoming her desire to vomit.
When the three of them arrived at the edge of the platform, the black-armoured figure stirred to life. They had been staring at the central pillar, arms crossed behind their back, the very image of someone appreciating a fine piece of art. In motion they were like liquid, no hitching of metal joints cutting off their range of movement. They turned to face the group, their helmet tilting towards Yenna.
The last time Yenna had seen them had been a scant handful of extremely stressful moments, most of which had been torn from her memory intentionally to remove any trace of cognitohazard. Now, Yenna was able to appreciate the strange, immaculate craftsmanship of this armour.
The pitch-black metal reminded Yenna of the cover of the black book, the material textured with nearly invisible grooves and lines. Apart from that, the armour itself was plain and unornamented, a Miluran suit of overlapping plates without any hint of flourish. The helmet had no visor or eye-slits, instead forming a featureless dome that swept back to a point near the back. The grooves across the ‘face’ of the helmet had an infuriating habit of nearly forming a face, though Yenna’s mind couldn’t agree on the exact form, or whether it was there at all—simple pattern-recognition of the sentient mind, or an intentional effect on the part of the creator of this piece?
Between the joints, in the thin spaces where mail or padded leather would have covered a gap between the plates, was a material like glittering diamond. As mobile as cloth, it resembled moving stone—Yenna could sense some thin glimmer of magic emanating from it, though the air here was tumultuous with a constant pressure of flowing energy.
As they drew closer to the armoured figure, Yenna could feel the pressure of magic pouring past her. It was pouring out of the worshipping masses, straight towards the central pillar. Countless millions of ersatz prayers washed over her in a tangible wave that made it hard to breathe, let alone feel out the specifics of the magic in the area. It reminded the mage of being lost in a crowd, with countless people bustling past with a specific direction and no time to move around the sole, witless obstruction.
Then, Yenna stood before the figure.
Nadhan let her go, and stepped away from her. Some witless urgent voice at the back of her head said that this was the chance she had been waiting for, to run back and free Narasanha, and Valkh and Jiin and Demvya. Her hands were free! Now she could weave together a grand spell, to bind Mulvari and Nadhan faster than they could blink and speed her back up the ramp and out of here.
But, she didn’t. Yenna was not a legendary hero, waiting for her moment to pounce. She was no warrior or huntress. Yenna was a school teacher, who crumbled under the pressure of social anxiety and fear, who would have paid any price at that instant to be swallowed up by the ground to never be seen again by mortal eyes. She did not make a grand, magical circle to blow the armoured knight down. She did not draw her quicksilver dagger and stab at their heart. She did not raise her fists or rail against the injustice here. Yenna stood, perfectly still, frozen in the depths of true terror.
In a voice like liquid midnight, the armoured figure spoke. Cutting through the cacophonous ringing of the crowded masses and their endless, jumbled prayer, through the pounding of horror and panic in Yenna’s mind, they spoke with the authority of an emperor and demanded no less singularity of attention.
“The page turns, Yenna Bookbinder. Cast your eyes upon what comes next, and rejoin totality.”
¹ - Aulprean public forums are a time-honoured tradition, allowing speakers to share their thoughts on anything and everything. While debates on broader topics often have an elected moderator to ensure a sense of civility and order amongst speakers, some truly public theatres for speech hold automated enchantments designed to filter out unnecessary hostility, rabble and other elements inimical to giving a public speech. As applauded as they are derided, these enchantments are frequently tweaked at the demand of those who see them as too harsh or not harsh enough—and in fact it is not unheard of for debates to take place about the nature of the enchantments themselves.
