Chapter Thirteen: Vertical Migration
Written by Jeff
Even though goggles protected her eyes from the whipping winds and rain, Elinea still found herself wincing as her Manta sped along the barren sand sea, its belly steadily hovering just above the surface. She leaned forward to minimize drag and gripped the curved handlebar tightly with her left hand, the liptis on her right arm open wide and positioned readily over the gyroscope accelerator. No matter how many times she drove the craft, she never quite got used to it, both in how it looked and how it handled. In appearance, the Manta still looked strikingly similar to the way its shell did when it was alive; Drescel had done little to modify the ray’s exterior, aside from the control bars that extended from behind its head and the carved, slightly-radiant gemstones inserted into its eye sockets. But the inside of the creature was now almost entirely mechanical, and with the slightest movement of her hand, Elinea could will the Manta to dart across the desolate sea floor at speeds far faster than any vessel she’d ever seen.
Her partner didn’t seem to share any of the same apprehension with moving so swiftly. Elinea looked over at the blind wanderer and he was standing straight up, staff planted firmly in his left hand and robes shaking violently in the wind. His Manta was configured differently than hers, as he needed his hands to see the environment, so his feet were fastened securely into the Manta’s back with no handlebars or control gyroscope at all. He controlled the craft with the slightest movement of his fingers, just as he perceived the world around him, by touching currents in the air. As Elinea stared at him, she heard his voice pipe up in her ear through her comm device.
“We should be getting close to the confinement shrine. Keep an eye out for anything that resembles an entrance, either leading underground or into a rock face. This one was imprisoned in stone somewhere under the water, but there isn’t any more specific information available about how this one was confined, just a general sense of where.”
“Seems strange that they’d have incomplete records for something seemingly so important,” she said.
His voice chuckled through the comm. “You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But if I’ve learned anything from accessing this cache, it’s that sometimes even world builders cut corners and don’t fill out their paperwork thoroughly enough.”
Even after two years traveling together, it was still hard for Elinea to believe that her partner had access to an info cache left behind from the Settlers. She’d never actually seen it - he wouldn’t let her, or anyone else, for their own safety he claimed - but she didn’t doubt that he had it. He hadn’t even fessed up to owning it until they had been traveling together for over 14 months, when she finally lost her temper at him and screamed, “How do you know so goddamn much about anything and everything?” She never asked him many questions, and in return he said little about himself or his past. But he did answer her on this, thoughtfully and thoroughly, though honestly she had expected him to retort something snide like, “Because I’m smart.”
He hadn’t gone into exceptional detail about it, but he had given her the full story, which cleared up more than a few questions Elinea had wondered about but had never asked, waiting instead for the man to divulge the information on his own terms. Many years before, he had been a scholar for the Central Islands specializing in what he termed the obscure. An Iso unit in the Outer Rings had found some strange, intricate ruins deep in uninhabited jungle and called it in to the Capital, who sent out scholars and archeologists to investigate. He explained that after days of making their way through labyrinthine passageways, they found a central chamber sealed with a seemingly invisible barrier. They tried everything they could think of to penetrate it, but nothing worked. One of the members of the party was an irritable, impatient bureaucrat sent along by the Capital to keep tabs on the mission, and after several fruitless days, he snatched an avtimag charge from one of the Iso officers out of frustration and threw it at the barrier. It bounced off backwards before exploding and the man was covered in searing blue light that burned his skin like acid. As he flailed, trying in vain to get it off his skin, he fell and passed through the barrier. He died from his carelessness, but the others learned from it, and eventually were able to fashion avtimag suits for themselves that allowed them to pass through the barrier without the blue material directly contacting their skin.
The inside of the chamber was a monument to the beings that many ancient texts referred to as the Settlers, though it was unclear whether it was made for them or by them. At the center of the monument stood two pedestals, and above each floated small, glowing idols, each no larger than a fingernail. One was shaped like a conch shell and the other like a hammer. Everyone in the party who entered the chamber was immediately drawn to the items and rushed forward to claim them. The scholar and one of the Iso soldiers each grabbed for the conch shell at the same time, and as they did, their minds were bombarded with stimuli, taking in unfathomable amounts of information in an instant. Senses overloaded, their eyes popped like lightbulb filaments, dropping each of the men to the floor. The scholar didn’t know what happened to those who touched the hammer, and didn’t particularly care about the Iso writhing on the floor next to him, because he knew what he had just found. He knew the boundless knowledge it offered. So he grabbed it again, steadied himself against the onslaught in his mind, and pulled the glowing conch from the pedestal. Blindly, he escaped the labyrinthine passageways, carefully remembering the many twists and turns through which he had entered. Once outside, he disappeared from the life he had known before, never reporting back as a pawn of the Capital again.
Though he didn’t say it explicitly, Elinea knew the blinded Iso from the story was Finnegan, the man who had shot her in the chest and killed her. She had asked her partner if he knew what had happened to the hammer idol, and though he wasn’t sure of the specifics, he knew that at least someone else in his party had escaped the ruins with the “technology cache,” which eventually became the foundation for a group of advanced marauders now known as the Techniks.
Now blessed with access to knowledge that contradicted everything in the Capital’s doctrine, the scholar never associated with the Central Islands again, though at one point he did return there. It was in acting as a soothsayer for peasants in a tiny peripheral village that he was sold out to Capital forces as a mystic and banished to the Outer Rings. At his sentencing, when asked if he had anything to say for himself, the blind man made caddy reference to the judge’s poor complexion, remarking that he could clear up his skin with a regiment of barbuta extract and apple cider vinegar, which infuriated the arbiter so thoroughly that he sentenced the man to Vlyk, the most heinous penal colony in the Outer Rings. The scholar was thrilled at the verdict: Now he would finally be able to consult with Magi who understood the world on a deeper level, as he did.
This was the full extent to which the blind wanderer had told Elinea about himself, mainly because it was the full extent to which she had asked him about his former life. Elinea hated speaking about herself, and so she assumed that others - at least others she identified and empathized with - did as well. If she needed to know something, she was sure he would tell her. If not, it wasn’t pertinent information. And that was why, even after two years traveling together, sharing nearly every moment day-in and day-out, she still did not know the man’s name. She never asked him, so he never bothered to tell her.
After escaping Vlyk together, the two had worked diligently to do what they could to help prevent the world as they knew it from collapsing and being thrust into darkness and death. Not necessarily because either of them was naturally the heroic or altruistic type, but because the world was the place where they too lived, and they would prefer to keep living there. And more-so than most people in the world, they had abilities that could greatly benefit the cause, though for Elinea her confidence was still only gradually returning after dying and having lost her powers. She never spoke of it directly, but the events on Koa that led to her death had been deeply traumatizing, and she was still in the process of re-learning how to assert herself without that trauma manifesting itself in debilitating ways.
Even now, speeding through the endless seas of sand on her Manta, searching for a lost orb chamber, a piece of Elinea’s mind was plagued with what she had seen in the orb chamber on Koa. The visions that the being of light had shown her - a being she now knew was called the Remnant - were etched into the fabric of her mind. There had been three visions shown to her, and all three had come to pass to some extent. After escaping from Vlyk with the blind wanderer and Drescel, Elinea’s travels had taken her to several islands in the Outer Rings, and it was there that she saw the first two visions manifest. They had hopped from island to island, helping Drescel acquire everything he needed to work remotely after his lair was destroyed. In areas where Värlof’s little pubescent murderer had taken out the resident Touched, the barriers had fallen and the storms pounded the islands, killing the crops and dooming the people there to starvation. That was only when the Nemarus had swooped in and removed the barrier orb, though - otherwise the island would be turned into a column by the Vist before anyone had time to starve. The emergence of the Vist was what usually happened in the Outer Rings, and it’s how Elinea saw the second vision come to pass: The ocean, still raging in that part of the world, but only because it was being actively sucked there from seemingly everywhere else, the water rising and falling simultaneously on columns all across the horizon.
As for the third vision Elinea had seen in the orb chamber, that one hadn’t exactly come to pass, though she had lost her powers, she just hadn’t drowned. Yet. There was something comforting in knowing that her end was predestined this way. It made her slightly less terrified as she zipped across the deadly sinking sand, riding on the back of a mechanized, orb-powered manta ray.
As a former Touched, someone who was theoretically bound at their foundation to the barrier orbs, there was something unsettling about Drescel using shards of a shattered orb to keep these speeding monstrosities afloat. Looking at the gemstones in the Manta’s eye holes made Elinea cringe. Drescel has found some way to restore a fraction of their power again inside of this organic machine, carving them and giving them synthetic facets. The gem shards did their job, keeping both the Manta and Elinea safe above the sinking sand. She supposed that was better than the shards no longer doing anything of use at all.
As she looked at the dim gems in the Manta’s eye sockets, Elinea realized that in a strange way she sort of related to those little orb shards. They were both broken, a fragment of what they used to be, but they were still finding ways to be useful nonetheless. Especially now, hunting down the containment shrines of imprisoned deities from an ancient age, it was easy for Elinea to feel out of her league; to feel powerless. But after seeing Värlof and his puppets burn down Hallister’s keep and feeling helpless to do anything for those trapped inside, Elinea vowed that she would never feel that way again.
The blind wanderer’s voice piped into Elinea’s earpiece, urging her to stop. She rolled her liptis hand backward on the control gyroscope slowly, causing the Manta to gently decrease in speed. She could see little in front of her because of the storm, but she could clearly make out her partner at her side, and he was slowing down much faster than she was. Before he could speak up in her earpiece again, she slammed the gyroscope backward, causing the Manta to jerk harshly and skid mid-air, almost flipping her over the handlebars.
The blind wanderer came to a smooth halt at her side, and when she looked up, Elinea saw that they were stopped at the edge of a massive crevasse dropping off into blackness. She’d seen something like this only once before, when the Shift first occurred and she had walked from Koa to the edge of the Shelf. This was a similar sight, but it didn’t take much investigation to see that this was not a naturally-occurring drop off like the Shelf was. The face of this cliff was continuously crumbling, the edge rough and ragged, as if the world itself was eroding away and falling into the abyss.
“This…is not great,” said the blind wanderer. “The containment shrine was supposed to be somewhere around here, but the entire area has collapsed away into nothingness.” He rubbed his fingers together. “I can’t even see the bottom of this hole. There’s no knowing how deep it goes. There was a small island with a barrier orb not too far from the containment site, but it appears to have been wiped off the map as well.” He placed a finger to the comm device in his ear. “Drescel, we’ve reached the edge of a massive cliff and can’t proceed. Can you take the Spine over top and see what you can find?”
“Roger that,” came Drescel’s voice into their earpieces. “The storm’s not too violent here, it should be fine to make a descent.”
In the distance, Elinea and the blind wanderer could barely see the ship slip down through the blackened clouds and begin to inch its way closer and closer. Drescel’s ship looked like an enormous cream- and black-spotted pufferfish, with sharp spines protruding in all directions from its exterior. On its sides, comically small wings beat imperceptibly fast like a hummingbird, keeping the spiky balloon aloft and propelling it forward, slowly but surely. The vessel floated over the top of them and above the enormous crevasse, becoming a mere speck on the horizon before Drescel reported back.
“There appears to be a column descending into the pit, right in the center. There’s a barrier orb pedestal on top, but there’s no orb on it. The Nemarus or the Capital must have snatched it away. There’s no barrier to hold the platform up around the column anymore, and so this one appears to have just crumbled away. I’ve never seen anything like it before.”
Though his eyes were covered, there was a look the blind wanderer got on his face whenever he accessed the memory cache, and Elinea recognized it instantly. It looked like he was uncomfortably holding in a fart, but she never would have told him that.
“There’s no record of anything like this happening in the past,” he reported, “but I don’t suppose there’s any good reason why there would be. There’s information about where all the columns are placed, but the Settlers didn’t leave details about which ones are specifically load bearing. Theoretically, they should all be, though I guess some are more important than others, since plenty of the barrier orbs have been removed at this point and this is the first sinkhole we’ve encountered. I don’t think the Settlers ever expected anything like this to happen when the columns were built.”
“I’d picked up lots of strange seismic readings in this area recently,” said Drescel, “but I didn’t suspect anything like this. The Nemarus have been preemptively removing barrier orbs all across the world to prevent more upward columns. I can’t imagine they would have known that doing so would cause giant sinkholes to occur.”
“Mmm, impossible to say,” mused the blind wanderer. “Their motives seem to be entirely their own. This is troubling, for sure, but we can’t lose sight of the mission. We have to make sure that Feeg is still imprisoned. The world can’t handle any more disgruntled deities exacting vengeance after eons of imprisonment.”
“So far, Värlof is the only one who has figured out how to escape its containment orb,” said Elinea. “And from what you’ve said about this Feeg, it doesn’t seem like the smartest of the Immured Eight. It was dangerous - they all were - but the records say that Feeg wasn’t particularly crazed or power-hungry when it was contained. Even if it was able to break free of its orb, maybe it’s fine being left alone at the bottom of this pit. It might even do us a favor and take care of whatever else is down there.”
“Maybe, but it’s a chance we can’t risk taking. I’m not entirely sure how we’re supposed to get down there to check, though. We could take the Spine, but if we get to the bottom and the ship is damaged by whatever might be down there, we’re probably never getting back up.”
“Oh heavens!” exclaimed Drescel through the comms. “It’s…it’s miraculous! How is this possible? This is the most beautiful specimen I’ve ever seen!”
“Drescel, what’s going on?” asked the blind wanderer, finger against his ear. “What do you see?”
“Take the Mantas east around the hole!” squealed Drescel. “See for yourself!”
Elinea motioned the liptis forward over the gyroscope accelerator and the Manta began to skim along the sandy surface, keeping a wide berth from the ever-crumbling edge. After several minutes, she began to see a faint light emanating from the sheer wall of the cliff, and as she grew nearer, the light seemed to gradually climb higher and higher towards the edge. There was lightning crashing in the area, and after a few bolts, she realized that it was hitting the same spot again and again. It was striking whatever was climbing out of the pit. The Spine was hovering a safe distance away, just barely far enough so that it wouldn’t get struck itself, but Drescel was cutting it awfully close to get a better look at whatever this thing was. It was impossible to tell from her distance, but Elinea swore it looked like a snail climbing up a garden wall.
Upon closer inspection, it was something like that, but not exactly. The creature wasn’t instantly recognizable - Elinea had never seen one alive, only their shells in Drescel’s lair. The Mantas came around the corner just as it was pulling itself over the crumbling cliff edge, sticking unnaturally to the sandy surface as the exposed sea floor broke away all around and beneath it, like it was hardening the sand to glass as it climbed. She could see it clearly now: In front of her stood a gargantuan nautilus, at least 20 meters tall, moving freely despite the fact that it was on land and not in the water. The bottom of its curved shell slid effortlessly across the sand, somehow not sinking, while a cluster of extending tentacles that emerged from the creature’s front pushed down and out like oars, propelling it forward. Each of the tentacles glowed and crackled with energy, emitting sparks that grew in size and intensity until lightning crashed down from the skies and exploded around it, sending electricity zigzagging through the air like fireworks.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” cooed Drescel, seeing that his companions had made their way to the massive cephalopod. “I’ve never seen one so large. Never seen one able to move out of water, and definitely never seen one conducting electricity! Who knows how far it must have traveled to get here. All the way from the underworld I would guess. What an incredible feat of vertical migration!”
“How is that a good thing?” asked Elinea.
“It doesn’t have to be good to be impressive,” said Drescel. “All nautiluses migrate vertically, moving upward from the depths to feed. They are truly unique and spectacular creatures, and they have been integral to my work. Even you were revitalized in a chamber fashioned from one of their shells. This beauty is ten times that size! Imagine what I could do with it!”
The blind wanderer was making that scrunched face again, checking the memory cache. “Hmm. Apparently all nautiluses that exist in our world at some point came up from the world below. This ‘vertical migration’ Drescel mentioned is particularly strong with these creatures. The Settlers knew that nautiluses were somehow able to breach into the oceans of the overworld but made no attempt to stop them because they were harmless. Any record of them in the cache has them designated as small creatures though, only a fraction of this size, and none of them shot electricity out of their tentacles.”
Elinea stared on skeptically as lightning struck the gargantuan nautilus again. At her side, the liptis was buzzing, enraptured by pure magical essence wafting through the air.
“This creature does not appear harmless. It’s full of magic. The liptis is begging to feed on it.”
The blind wanderer began moving his fingers in delicate patterns to take a closer look. His hand jerked back and stopped suddenly, and the man’s eyebrows raised in surprise above the black cloth that covered his eyes.
“It sensed me. It looked back using the same channels I use to see. It is not pleased.”
Suddenly, a black orb emerged from the nautilus’s mouth and floated in the air. As it did, a bolt of lightning crashed down onto it, causing it to glow a faint purple. It shot back inside the tentacles and the creature bucked up into the air on the back curve of its shell, writhing and emitting a sea of sparks into the sky. It let out a deafening screech, but there was a clear word spoken inside the shrill noise.
“Did you hear that?” asked Elinea.
The blind wanderer nodded stoically. “Yes. It said ‘Feeg.’”
In an instant, the creature was scooting away across the sand at incredible speed, not towards them to attack as they had expected, but away, in the opposite direction. Elinea and the blind wanderer instinctively followed after it, pressing their Mantas to top speed.
“Where do you think it’s going?” Elinea shouted into her comm.
“Nowhere good,” said the blind wanderer. “We need to subdue it before it finds whatever it’s looking for. Better open up your reservoir.”
As soon as she heard the words, the liptis perked up on Elinea’s arm, knowing that it was finally time to start feeding. She clicked a button on her right hip and a latch opened, creating a small suctioning sensation on the liptis between a tube that ran from what would be her wrist to a series of transparent containers fastened to the small of her back. These were new upgrades that Drescel had implemented in the last few months, and while she was still uneasy about the idea of acting like a living battery, the liptis was thrilled by the modification. It meant the parasite could eat and drink almost endlessly, feeding without ever getting full, though she wasn’t sure it could ever get its fill.
Both of the Mantas caught up to the rampaging nautilus, keeping pace by its side but unable to overtake its speed. The creature wasn’t moving directly in a straight line, but changing directions slightly here and there, as if it were following an unsteady beacon in the distance and constantly correcting course. Elinea noticed that two of the smaller tentacles near the top of its beak were sticking into the air like antennae and not being used to propel the creature forward. Though their movement was slight, she recognized something similar in the way they behaved. The creature was using them the way the blind wanderer ran his fingers through the air. They were its navigation system.
“I’m going to try and get on its back,” Elinea announced into the comms. “I can see which tentacles it’s using to guide itself. If I can cut them off, it won’t know how to get wherever it’s trying to go.”
“No!” shouted Drescel reflexively. “Don’t hurt it!”
“Whose side are you on, crab?”
Drescel huffed into his receiver. “Ok, yes, fine, do what you must. I’ve just never seen such a marvelous beast. I want to study it. Alive if possible.”
“It’s not just a nautilus anymore and you know that,” added the blind wanderer. “Feeg has control of that thing. This is a powerful, clearly-enraged ancient deity we’re dealing with. Unless we can suck Feeg out somehow, I’m afraid the creature is probably going down in the process.”
Drescel let out a sad whimper into the earpieces. “Thankfully, I don’t think I’ll be present to see it. You two are moving at a much faster speed than the Spine can keep up with. I’ll keep pinging the Mantas and following behind, but it looks like you’re going to be on your own for this one.”
“What do we know about this Feeg?” asked Elinea, dropping back to a safe distance as a bolt of lightning came down on top of the creature’s shell. “I didn’t think it had the ability to control hosts. I thought that was Värlof’s thing.”
“There’s no mention in the cache of Feeg taking over the forms of other creatures. It’s hard to say exactly what it was in the previous world, but as far as I can tell it was something like a giant, electric gelatinous blob; definitely not a nautilus. It ate and ate and ate, and as a result grew and grew, consuming everything that got too close that was stunned by its electricity. But it wasn’t a hunter, or particularly dangerous if you knew to keep your distance. Still, it was immensely powerful, and essentially immortal, so the Settlers locked it away all the same when they built up the new world.”
“How did it take control of this enormous nautilus then?” she asked.
“That’s something we’re going to have to find out. But clearly, like Värlof, it’s operating from inside of its containment orb. Puppeteering from inside of its banishment realm.”
Without saying anything more, Elinea veered her Manta directly next to the nautilus, clicked a button next to the gyroscope, and steadied herself for only a breath before jumping onto the back of the creature’s shell. The handlebars fell down flat against the Manta and the craft shot up into the air, floating well above where Elinea was grasping onto the nautilus shell’s grooved surface with the talons of the liptis. With her left hand, she tossed a weighted tether that was attached to her belt up into the sky and it sucked over to the belly of the Manta like a powerful magnet, allowing the craft to glide behind her like a kite on a string. Her boots slipped and struggled to find footing on the shell, and if not for the tenacious grip of liptis, she was sure she would have fallen. The parasitic insect that had replaced her right arm was absorbing magical essence from the creature, but only barely. She knew that to fully feed on it, she’d need to attach the liptis to its flesh, not its shell.
That was going to be difficult. Getting to the top of the creature was going to be like scaling an entire building, and not only that, a building that was moving at breakneck speed. Elinea tried to pull herself up with her left hand, but there were only slight ridges in the shell and not enough to get any real leverage. She reached up as far as her arm would stretch, and though she found a ledge deep enough to press her fingers into, a bolt of lightning struck the top of the beast as soon as she started to pull herself up. She almost lost her grip completely, dangling from the tips of the liptis fingers, which were trying to suck magic through the shell like a thick milkshake through a flimsy straw.
Thankfully, the pearlescent shell didn’t appear to be an effective conductor, as the bolt didn’t electrocute her so much as give her a little jolt. The electrical energy was being actively absorbed into the tentacles: a nest of wriggling appendages where the orb was hiding away deep beneath. Elinea tried to reach and pull herself up and stumbled once again before hearing the blind wanderer’s voice in her earpiece.
“Don’t forget about your spear.”
Elinea grimaced. She had forgotten about the spear. It was even newer than the reservoir tanks Drescel had installed.
“I was just about to try that,” she yelled out, not using the comm.
“Sure you were.”
With the flick of her left wrist, a harpoon extended from a bracer wrapped around her forearm. It too had a tube connected to the tanks on her back, which were just beginning to fill with glowing white liquid, drip-by-drip. Elinea wound her arm back and tried to jam the spear tip into the shell. It ricocheted harmlessly off. She tried again. Ping. Harder still. PING.
“You’re going to break the damn thing doing it that way,” said the voice in her ear.
She lamented the words that came out next. “And what would you recommend, know-it-all?”
“Use some juice. Just enough to heat up the tip, then sear it in.”
That’s smart, she thought.
“Of course I was going to try that next,” she said.
“Yes, of course.”
Elinea pressed down with her ring finger on a small lever that extended out from the bottom of the bracer along her wrist. The liptis hadn’t been able to absorb much magical essence through the shell yet, but it was enough to heat up the tip of the spear white-hot, and with gentle pressure instead of a stab, Elinea was able to sear the end of the harpoon into the outer surface of the nautilus’ shell. She pulled her legs up and rested them more comfortably against the steep surface, putting weight on her toes and feeling less shaken by the steady winds blasting into her body. Lightning struck the top of the shell again, but she didn’t flinch or falter. For the liptis to actually absorb this thing’s power in a way that would allow her to fight back, she had to get within reach of the edge of the shell around its eye, and that was still a long way away.
Eventually, Elinea noticed that the creature wasn’t changing direction anymore, but now was traveling on a fixed course.
“You have any idea where this thing is headed?” she called out to her partner.
“That’s more Drescel’s purview than mine,” he responded, still dutifully riding alongside the charging nautilus on his Manta. “But he’s out of range now…maybe I can pull up some maps from the cache and triangulate its direction.” He paused, and though Elinea was looking directly at the surface of the shell, she knew he was making that face. “Hmm, that’s not good. If I had to guess, I would say it's going straight towards the Central Islands.”
“I don’t want to go there,” she sighed.
“Me neither. But it doesn’t look like we have much of a choice. It makes sense though. I’m starting to pick up on the trail it’s following. There’s a very specific energy signature that emanates off of anything left behind by the Settlers, and in this case in particular, it’s barrier orbs and Touched. There’s a large congregation of both in the Central Islands. Like Värlof, I think Feeg is looking for retribution for its imprisonment.”
“Can’t entirely say I blame it,” said Elinea.
“There’s something else as well,” added her partner. “Not much we can do about it now, but it’s troubling nonetheless. The creature is laying down some kind of pheromone trail behind it. If anything else crawls out of that massive hole, it’s got a scent trail leading directly to the Capital.”
It took the better part of three hours for Elinea to incrementally climb up and around the nautilus from the place where she had jumped on, fending off brutal sidewinds and lightning strikes. The real act of patience was waiting for enough magical essence to be collected through the shell so that Elinea could heat up the tip of the spear and force it through the tough, nacreous exterior. The liptis was able to siphon so little of it through the shell, and so much of it was required to get the spear tip in, that Elinea found herself just dangling and waiting on the parasite for long periods of time, trying to give the liptis encouraging vibes to suck up as much essence as it could. By the time she was finally close enough to dig the liptis fingers into the relatively soft flesh around the creature’s side-facing eye, she could see the horizon in front of her, and see the silhouette of the Central Islands approaching in the distance.
Elinea had never been to the Capital, never seen the buildings that stretched into the sky, a sprawl of development that existed here and nowhere else in the world. She could see the outline of it now, but that wasn’t what caught her attention. Instead, what Elinea noticed in the distance was a faint arched outline above the mainland that glowed a dim orange. She’d seen that several times before, on Vlyk and other islands in the Outer Rings. The Central Islands were being protected by an enormous barrier, one so large she couldn’t fathom how many Touched it took to hold in place.
Lightning struck again, and this time Elinea felt the energy pass through her body and singe her insides, leaving her nauseated and breathless. The shell wasn’t keeping her protected from the currents anymore. A splash-back of energy from the lightning that sucked into the tentacles was jumping up at her skin. As if the creature sensed her discomfort, another bolt of lightning came down immediately after, catching Elinea off guard and causing her to lose balance and slip. But the liptis was dug deep into the nautilus’ flesh, and even though it seemed the weight of Elinea’s body falling would have pulled it loose, the parasite was so enraptured with the pure magical essence it was consuming that nothing was going to make it stop feeding. And so, as the nautilus angrily charged toward the Central Islands, Elinea just dangled off its side, unable to pull herself back up.
Her body swung around like a pendulum when the creature finally came to a stop, or rather, crashed into the invisible barrier with a thud. Knowing the barrier was in place, Elinea was ready for the moment, and as her body flung forward she jabbed the spear into the creature’s eye in one fluid motion, causing it to rear back and scream in pain. The translucent containers on her back were completely full now - the first time she had absorbed so much - and she wasn’t sure exactly what would happen as she drove the gleaming white harpoon into the creature’s flesh. The nautilus was still brimming with so much of the same energy she had drained, and feeding that magical current back into itself caused a violent explosion that finally dislodged the liptis and sent Elinea flying and thudding to the ground in the distance.
Pulling herself up, Elinea was thankful to find that she had landed on actual hard soil and not sinking sand. The side of the nautilus - where its eye had been - was blown clear off, but it hadn’t debilitated the creature. If anything, it had only enraged it further. The colossal mollusk was slamming itself down onto the barrier, shooting electrical bolts in all directions, lightning crashing down again and again from the skies, feeding the creature’s fury. Elinea saw that they were on the waterfront, or rather the place the waterfront once stood when there was still water around the islands here, and that there were buildings just on the other side of the barrier.
The blind wanderer flew up next to her on his Manta. His footholds released and he casually hopped down next to her.
“We need to coax out that orb,” he said. “We’re not going to beat Feeg in a fight, that much is certain. We have to focus on re-containing it.”
“Any big ideas?”
“Yeah, I think I know how to get its attention. It’s after a certain scent, one that I have plenty of, but have been keeping obscured. I’ll play diversion; you get into those tentacles and find that orb.”
For the first time in the two years they had traveled together, Elinea saw the blind wanderer remove the black cloth that covered his eyes. The left socket was black and vacuous, but the right emitted a vibrant yellow light. Inside, where an eye used to be, a small glowing conch shell rested instead. The blind wanderer put both hands up to the eye and moved them outward towards the nautilus, as if directing a scent in its direction. It took only a moment for the monstrous creature to stop slamming itself against the barrier and turn its attention to the man instead.
It rushed at him, bursts of sparks shooting from its tentacles, and he gracefully hopped back aboard his Manta and dodged the charge. He stood directly in front of the beast, dwarfed by its immensity. Each of the writhing tentacles were more than twice his size, all attempting to smash him into the ground or wrap him up and pull him into the creature’s beak. But with each slam and swipe, the blind wanderer effortlessly dodged, ducking and swerving on the Manta with incredible precision. He held his staff with his left hand, fingers tapping against the wood as he gripped, using it to dispel blasts of energy the tentacles shot in his direction. As the creature tried to pummel him, it screamed, both guttural and shrieking, the same three words repeated again and again:
“WHY. TRAP. FEEG.”
Elinea brought her Manta back down from its floating tether and positioned herself well behind her partner, surveying the scene. From this spot she had a clear look at the creature’s mouth. It was attacking in the same pattern, and after a few repetitions she could anticipate which tentacle would come down next. When the tentacles spread out evenly, she could just barely see the orb, tucked away at their base, nestled in the creature’s beak.
She jerked her hand across the gyroscope and shot forward, knowing that she didn’t need to give her partner a word of warning. Right before the Manta would have gone barreling into his back, she slammed on the breaks and propelled herself over the handlebars like a living harpoon. Instinctively, the blind wanderer bent backward at the knees, feet still secured, going completely horizontal like a limbo while Elinea sailed forward over his chest, the glowing white spear extended in front of her body.
The instant the tip struck the exterior of the black orb, Elinea’s entire perception changed, as if a new field of vision had overlapped her own. She saw an environment made entirely of yellowish, pulsating, viscous material, crackling with electrical energy. This was Feeg’s banishment realm, and inside of it, suffocatingly, there was nothing but Feeg. It had continued to grow the entire time it was imprisoned, filling an entire dimension with itself, bursting at the seams inside of its cage. She felt the spear’s edge puncture the gelatinous surface and release Feeg’s siphoned energy back in on itself, crackling through the realm like synapses burning out across an infinite brain.
Focusing on the part of herself still tethered to her own realm, Elinea pulled the spear back and fell, landing not into a nest of writhing, electric tentacles but into the arms of the blind wanderer, who scooped her up midair and pulled away from the mollusk just before it released a blinding electrical discharge. The nautilus shrieked again, but this sound held no words, and a dull black orb fell from its beak and tumbled to the ground. Dazed, the colossal mollusk peered at the Callans floating on a Manta in front of it, then the barrier at its side, before charging away from them all, back into the barren sand sea.
The blind wander landed his craft and set Elinea down on her feet, and they both approached the orb with caution. The man took out a satchel from his robe and opened it up. Inside was a liptis, much like the one attached to Elinea’s arm, and he whispered a few words at it before tossing it down in the orb’s direction. Its spider-like legs opened mid-air and clasped around the orb, enveloping it almost completely. The man picked it up and examined it momentarily before stuffing both the parasite and the containment orb back inside the satchel.
Once the orb was secured, Elinea looked up at the barrier and was shocked to see that there were throngs of people standing just on the other side. They appeared to be cheering. Along the ground, a dome-shaped door opened up in the barrier and several people walked through to greet her - three Touched and a few dozen Callans following cautiously but eagerly behind. Elinea could hear them clamoring: “Is it her? Is it really her? It is! She’s come to us! The Returned has come back to us!”
“Greetings, Elinea,” said a Touched man in the front of the group. “We are so very excited that you have come.”
“What did those people just call me?” she said acridly, unmoved by the warm welcome.
“Ah, yes,” he smiled. “The stories of your resurrection from the orb, and subsequent journeys through the Outer Rings, have become something of legend here in the Capital camps, both among the Touched and the Callans. They are calling you the Returned. You are quite revered by all of us who have been relocated to the Capital, and for good reason.”
Elinea scowled. Another name.
The blind wanderer laughed, hearty and loud. “It appears you’re famous, my friend.”
Static began to feed into the devices in their ears, and both Elinea and the blind wanderer turned away from the gathering crowd and placed their fingers to the comms. After an awkward few minutes of the crowd standing in silence, watching their idol stand and squint with her finger to her ear, Drescel’s voice finally broke through.
“Can you hear me? Yes? Good! Finally in range. Did you manage to contain the orb?”
“Yes, we got it,” said Elinea. “And we managed to secure it without having to kill your precious gargantuan nautilus. You should be able to find it scurrying in the sands somewhere north of the Capital.”
“Good! Good!” said Drescel. “But I’m afraid there’s actually terrible news from that giant sinkhole in the ocean we found. I think the nautilus might have been secreting something as it moved.”
“It was,” said the blind wanderer. “A pheromone trail of some sort.”
“Yes, well, I took the Spine into the pit a little bit - to see if there were any other nautiluses - and it turns out there’s all sorts of nasty things on their way up out of that hole. They’re escaping in the exact same spot Feeg did, and the ones that have made it up to the top are following the scent trail. I’m afraid the largest of the underdwellers aren’t confined to the world below anymore, and the ones that have found their way out are headed directly for the Capital.”
Fate Index:
1. Antagonist gains great power
2. Protagonist’s hangover leads to some incredibly fortuitous turn of events
3. Protagonist has/develops some incurable urge they must sate daily
4. Someone gets refueled
5. Protagonist’s identity is thrown into question
6. Flashback episode
7. Protagonist gets overzealous and makes a major mistake
8. A character begins to doubt reality
9. A great artifact of the past is found, calling to a new owner
10. Something consequential turns out to be an illusion
11. An antagonist is offered a moment of possible redemption but must decide to act on it
12. Betrayal
13. Protagonist finds powerful item or treasure
14. Magic finger traps, but for the brain or heart
15. Millions of insects start their march to devour everything in their path
16. After a long string of losses, a character begins to succeed only to jeopardize someone else's success
17. Protagonist takes up cause of beleaguered
18. Razor clams
19. Protagonist becomes famous
20. Nothing happens when something is supposed to happen
Outcomes Used:
1. Antagonist gains great power
19. Protagonist becomes famous
Added outcomes:
Interspecies relationship becomes a little one-sided
(thanks to Peebs @seadubzez on Instagram)
Virtue of protagonist is tested by an ally
(thanks to Cream)
