Outside Influences

Orseis’ questions about Bel’s motivations were troubling the young gorgon, but she wasn’t going to gain any sudden insights while falling through an endless tunnel. She was too on edge for deep philosophical thoughts.

Bel looked around for any sign of progress, but there was nothing to see other than an endless spiral of steps and smoothed stones. She reached up and smoothed down her mischievous snakes – she could feel some of them growing restless. The last thing she needed was for one of them to start bothering Crecerelle and cause the more experienced gorgon to drop her. Her snakes are so well behaved compared to mine, Bel thought as she inspected Cress’ neatly coiled serpents. I must be doing something wrong.

Bel’s sigh was eaten by the passing wind. She waited as patiently as she could, silently mulling over her conversation with Orseis. Doing something about Technis before my mom flattens the country is clearly the right thing to do. I’m sure that Ventas would have done it.

Bel remembered all of her kind uncle’s description of hunting down the bone melting disease, following people back to their remote mountain camps so he could finally eradicate the plague. She knew in her bones that Ventas would have kept pushing to save the people in Satrap, even if they didn’t want to be saved.

Is that really who am I though? Or am I more like Beth, only doing these things for revenge? Or could I just be doing this because my mom implied that it was my purpose?

Bel didn’t like that last thought, but she couldn’t be sure it wasn’t true. I spent years wondering who I was and what I was meant to do – maybe I was eager to be given a task. She frowned as she tried to dissect her own emotions, but found that were more confounding than a barrel of eels, twisting and writing together.

She huffed in frustration and turned her attention back to the real world, staring at the bottomless pit as the floors rushed past. She stared angrily into the distance, willing the world to give her something to simple to do – smashing something would probably make her feel better. Eventually her challenge was answered with a pinprick of light at the center of the empty hole. Her heart thrummed with excitement as they approached it, but, rather than speeding up, she could feel that they were actually slowing down.

Bel began paying attention to the things around her once again. The air was growing thick and heavy with moisture as they fell, different from the thin, dry air on the fifth layer. Bel could see traces of Cress working her abilities on their air, droplets fleeing before them as she cleaved a path ahead of them to reduce their drag, but the air-master’s efforts decreased in effectiveness as they descended. She and Orseis had been dangling from Cress’ arms, but as they slowed the two of them rose up to be roughly eye-level with Crecerelle. Bel looked at the other gorgon with surprise when she realized that Cress had folded her wings and they were simply falling slowly.

“Is this safe?” Orseis shouted with a slightly quaver. “And why is the air turning into water?”

Bel opened her mouth to respond, but closed it when she couldn’t think of a response. She glanced at Cress, but their local expert didn’t understand what they were talking about. “James said that some of his students think that the world is hollow,” Bel said tentatively.

“And?” Orseis prompted, impatient for a better answer.

“I don’t know!” Bel shouted. “I’ve been busy with other things, so I haven’t really thought about it. Maybe the world is filled with water?”

Orseis looked like she wanted to throw something at Bel, but she was clearly too scared to try it while they were falling. Cress seemed unconcerned by the experience, but she said something in a soothing tone.

Bel looked down at the pinprick of light and saw that it had grown to be a rectangular opening. The heavy fog hanging over it made any details impossible to see, but Bel guessed that there was water at the bottom. “I think we’re just going to fall into that pond,” she shouted at Orseis. The other girl seemed relieved at the thought, although her expression still said that she was blaming Bel for not knowing what they were doing.

I should have gotten James to make another talking earring for her, Bel thought. Then she remembered how much teasing the other girl had done with the original talking stones and reconsidered. It doesn’t really matter, he said that making this one required a bunch of rare stuff that they found in the Dark Ravager’s melted pyramid. A second one would have been impossible.

Cress tightened her grip on Bel’s arm, dragging her attention back to reality. Bel looked down again and saw that the misty pool was growing larger as they approached, although the thick, moist air dragged at them, as if refusing them entry to the water at the bottom. Mere mist couldn’t stop their momentum though, especially once Cress reoriented them face first and flapped her wings to gain speed for a sudden dive. She pulled up at the last moment so they would hit the water with their feet, but Bel was disoriented by the rapid changes in momentum.

Her stomach flipped when Cress jerked them upright, and then they plunged through the surface of the cold water. The water moved more lethargically than she expected, meandering back to fill the void they created rather than rushing inwards and crashing into her ears. She prepared to kick her legs to get back to the surface, but to her surprise she abruptly found her legs out of the water. Her body soon followed, and Bel felt an incredible sense of disorientation when she found herself falling upwards feet first.

Despite the clinging mist, her surroundings were suddenly bright and warm. Cress flapped her wings and pulled Bel and Orseis away from the pool and Bel opened her eye. Bel looked down and was surprised to see that the water had changed – before it had been a rectangular slit, but now it was a circular pond. When her feet touched the grassy ground Bel was surprised again, this time by the pull of gravity that was slightly stronger than she expected. Then she looked up, trying to get her bearings.

She shook her head at the dizzying sight and tilted her hear farther, bending backwards until she nearly fell over.

“What the hell is happening?” she asked aloud.

“Yeah,” Orseis agreed quietly. “Where are we?”

A small valley around the lake was filled in a thin mist and dewy grass. The ground rose up around it – and kept rising, climbing into the sky until is disappeared in the distance as if the land was wrapping in upon itself. She spun around and the sight and was astonished to see the same view in every direction: the land rose unbroken into the sky until it was swallowed by clouds and distance. The sheer scale of it made her mind struggle.

Bel fell backwards onto the soft ground so she could stare upwards without straining her neck. Huge blobs of clouds so dense that they were practically floating lakes drifted through the sky, skimming along the tops of tall, thin trees. The weather thickened into an impenetrable haze as she looked closer to straight up, turning the sky into a near uniform gray that was broken by the occasional glistening spike of metal – the Pillars that ran through the world. Even those enormous constructs shrank to tiny pins as that extended into the distant sky, at a scale that made Bel’s imagination break down. From her current perspective she could see tens – no, hundreds, maybe even thousands – of them, stabbing into the heavens.

Bel followed the lines traced by the Pillars to the center of the sky, where a great orb of light hung like the shrouded ruler of the mind-blowing new world. It wasn’t the sun – Bel knew that for certain. It was wider and more diffuse than the light she was used to on the surface, but she couldn’t begin to guess at its true nature.

The glowing orb was pincered by two great funnels of darkness that extended from opposite edges of the horizon. The funnels narrowed into narrow tendrils that just barely touched the bright glow at the center of the sky. Pinning it in place? Or were they caused by the orb itself? Bel couldn’t guess.

The rest of the sky was filled with storms of dust and water. Small clusters of stone drifted higher in the sky, although the small stones may have been great mountains loosed from the control of gravity for all she could tell. The incredible distances robbed Bel of her sense of scale.

“We must be in the center of the world,” she whispered, awestruck at the sight. Tears actually formed in her eyes as she looked around a space more vast and incredible than she could have dreamed.

“Cress,” Bel said suddenly as she pointed to the bright globe in the center of the world, “what is that?”

The other gorgon tilted her head as she slowly digested Bel’s words. Then her snakes flicked their tails with irritation as her vocabulary came up short. She thumped her fingers against her chest and gave Bel a questioning look.

“Heart?” Bel guessed.

“Heart,” Cress repeated. She pointed to the glowing center of the world. “Heart of Olympos,” she proclaimed.

Bel looked up at all of the pillars that grew from the surface down to the Heart – or maybe they grew out of the Heart and into the world. “Maybe they really do support the world,” she mused.