Chapter 91

~~Day 152~~

~~David~~

They found another statue. And another. And another. The same thing, every time: an angel lamenting a child of the Old Ones, a breed called zetasa according to Laoko. And the rune inscription was the same, every time: ‘Navameere, and his love, Desiderata. Their last moments before Lucifer’s war.’

The group walked along between black forests and tall, sharp, obsidian grass. At this point, no one knew the way, not even their guide, Sazillia. Tsila and Moriah knew the way as the crow flew, and they pointed ahead, but that didn’t help navigate the jungle maze.

David, riding Pegasus, petted him along his back, between the spiky spines, and out along where his extra arms grew into wings. So big now.

“Morgana,” the tetrad Sazillia said, marching at the front with Laoko. “She hasn’t used the spire aura yet?”

“No,” David said. “You’d feel it if she did. I can suppress spire auras, but not perfectly. And maybe it won’t happen?”

Sazillia shook her head. “It always happens. The spires go to war with each other, and use spire auras against each other. The moment one province gains ground, they lose it to the other’s aura.”

David ground his teeth. “A system practically engineered to ensure war. Mia would hate this.”

But Sazillia shrugged, like the whole situation were weightless. “Lucifer created the system.”

“Maybe,” he said, “but I’m guessing Lucifer just made do with what he had. Spread the spires out, created the Old Ones from them, and the constant fighting was a side effect. Not exactly in the devil’s favor if his soldiers keep trying to kill each other instead of the real enemy. And—what the fuck is that?” The group stopped and looked back at him, and he gestured down to the ground. “I swear there’s something down there.”

“David,” Jes said, the gargoyle coming up to Pegasus’s side. “You know we can’t see what you see, right?”

“Sorry. I just, I keep seeing it. There’s tunnels down there.”

“Yeah, but unless you want to take a detour, who cares?”

David sighed. Caera would have cared, but he didn’t say it. Maybe that was why he kept noticing it? Some misguided attempt to fill in for her? Mia would know. She’d plop open a textbook, point at a paragraph, and beam at him as she diagnosed him with half a dozen mental disorders; not that that meant much, when second-year psych students were convinced their pet rocks had avoidant personality disorder.

“Hell cares,” he said. “Quite a bit, to have all these statues cropping up. This is important.”

And right on cue, the next bend around trees that pierced the sky showed the telltale hint of blackstone wings. Angel wings. A man, kneeling over a woman almost twice his height. And the woman, dying, had the lean and muscular curves of a demoness, but with extra eyes, and sharp spider legs sticking out of her back.

David gave Pegasus a couple gentle nudges with his heels, Pegasus took him closer, and David hopped down. With a squinting eye, he looked the statues up and down.

“Sazillia,” he said. “You said you’ve seen a lot of these statues around. This many?”

The tetrad shook her head and gave the statue a low kick with her clawed foot. “When we push into this province, it’s chaos, unmarked. Fighting for every inch. We don’t exactly take stock of everything we find.”

“But?”

“But, it’s true, I don’t remember seeing these statues this often.”

David sat on the statue’s circular platform, and everyone gathered around. Well, most of them. Laoko and Sazillia were happy to walk around, examine things, and basically look like they didn’t obey him. They still didn’t get that David didn’t want to be their leader, and was just the guy who kept getting handed the hot potato. That was fine. When shit hit the fan, he could trust them to help. Maybe. Hopefully.

“We know,” David said, “Hell seems to grow monuments to important stuff, right? And way back in the day, demons wrote stuff in the ancient language. Some of it was just etchings in stone, made by the children of the Old Ones. Some of it’s in amber veins, and probably written by the Old Ones themselves, or Lucifer. But this”—he gestured down at the amber veins gently glowing in the plaque below the statues—”doesn’t seem like something they’d have written. I’m guessing Hell wrote it herself.”

“Hell reads and writes?” the little Lasca said, squatting in front of him. “Sounds strange.”

“Strange, yeah. But we’ve seen some strange things. The cavern with Azazel, and all those statues of the children?” He knocked on the statue’s base with his knuckles. “I bet there’s something down there, too, like in the Scar.”

“Abaddon,” Moriah said. The angel sauntered up and, unless David was going crazy, she made something of an effort to gently touch Pegasus’s closer wing with her own. But the hellbeast snorted, stepped aside, and Moriah wiped away her disappointment with a quick slash of her thumb across her lips. “The Old One Abaddon is below us, if Azazel is correct. What do you hope to do by finding an Old One, David?”

“I never said I—”

Moriah flapped her wings at him, and he winced and covered his eyes against the wind. “We can all tell your curiosity is eating at you with every mile—”

“Kilometer.”

“—that we take, David. These statues pluck at your mind.”

“Yeah, they are, because each statue I find, I can feel there are tunnels and stuff beneath us.”

Daoka clicked several times and gestured at the ground.

“Dao makes a good point,” Jes said. “Every province we’ve been through, there’s tunnels beneath us. Why’s this province so special?”

David gestured at the statue behind him. “Because these tunnels are all going somewhere, somewhere specific, like a bunch of streams connecting to a river. It wasn’t like that in the other provinces. This almost feels like someone is waving a sign at me saying: ‘come here’.”

From the back of the group, Acelina stepped up and gestured out to the path with a huge wing.

“We are but weeks away from False Gate, David. Do you truly wish to deviate from the path?”

“I don’t know. But this feels weird. Feels like ... like I’m just walking past something I shouldn’t be walking past. All the other times, all the other things we’ve seen, felt like strolling through a museum. This is different.”

Tsila took to the sky and scanned the horizon. “The strangeness in the River Styx remains. That strange, raised red line. Do you truly think your sister has found a way to reach the Forgotten Place?”

He nodded sternly. “Yeah, I do. She’s not dead, we know that. And there’s two more unmarked out there, assuming there were nine of us in total like you think. Maybe one of them reached False Gate and did that? I don’t know. All I know is, I trust Mia to reach the goal. And here, there’s something weird happening under my feet, and ignoring it feels wrong.”

Everyone sighed, even the Las, and they idly dug at the sandy ground with hoof or claw. Pegasus copied everyone else, and Dao chuckled and patted his head and horns.

“Hey,” David said. “I’m just saying, we should take a peek.”

“And Morgana?” Sazillia asked. “A bit over a week from now, she’s going to use her spire aura to try and break Khazeer’s forces. You promised you’d stop that.”

“And I will. I can do that from underground, too.”

Jes raised a wing. “A detour underground means we’ll be stuck in Navameere Fields longer, David. Which means you might have to block her spire auras multiple times, or something, and I remember how much that fucked you up last time. The faster we get through this province, the faster we don’t have to worry about the spire bitch.”

Sazillia marched up to Jes and glared down at her, making the angel-sized gargoyle look like a child.

“Khazeer needs our help,” she said. “David promised to help suppress Morgana’s aura.”

“We’re helping Khazeer by saving the damn universe.” And like a spunky child with no sense of self-preservation, Jes poked Sazillia in her stomach. “Which do you think is more important? If I had my way, we’d be back in Death’s Grip right now, killing Diogo for killing my friend, and killing Tacitus for what he did to Dao. We’d be in charge! We’d have the spire, and David would be there too, and Caera and...” She hissed, looked away, and everyone shut up.

Before the silence strangled them all to death, Daoka clicked, chirped, and rubbed a ram horn against Jes’s demon horns. Whatever she said, Jes rolled her eyes and softly pushed her girlfriend away.

“I know,” she said. “I know, I know, I—fine. David, you wanna make this trip through Navameere Fields take an extra week or ten, by all means.”

David nodded, stood up, and nudged Pegasus away from him and back with Acelina and the Las. The others joined them.

“Abaddon is probably listening,” he said. “I’ll keep the music quiet.”

Laoko snorted, standing at Sazillia’s side. “Doubtful.”

He looked back at her and waited for the inevitable argument. Of course Laoko would want to keep going, to do whatever was needed to see the mission succeed. And he’d have agreed with everything she’d say.

But this nagging feeling wasn’t going away. No way Hell was practically growing statues in their path for no reason. And Hell didn’t connect underground tunnels into others like the roads of Rome. But that’s what was below him right now.

With a small flick of his fingers, he played a gentle tune, and peeled away the sand and dirt. Quiet music meant slow, but thankfully he wasn’t trying to move a mountain, just dig a hole. And this time, the hole, once it cut ten meters into the ground, connected with the tunnel.

Not a jagged mess of a tunnel, something that Hell had naturally formed over millions of years, with rocks half barring paths, and dips in the ceiling forcing anyone to crawl. No, this was a proper tunnel, with flat walls, a flat floor, a few amber veins to light the way, and a straight path down on a slight slope.

“This,” Sazillia said, snorting as she hopped in and took the lead, “is not normal.”

“Agreed,” Laoko said. The two tetrads walked in front with Moriah behind them, and the rest of the crew behind her. “You are sure this is not Abaddon’s work?” she asked, looking back.

David shrugged. “I don’t think so? I didn’t hear any music play. I mean, there’s always a background hum, like all existence around me has a sound to it. If an Old One plays music, I can hear it, if it’s nearby. If not, then probably not? But why would Abaddon set this up?”

“A trap,” Moriah said, giving her wings a flutter. “To lure curious unmarked down to their deaths. That is the goal of the Old Ones, is it not? To eat the unmarked?”

“Could be,” David said. “And maybe it will be. But these statues aren’t new, right? I bet the tunnels aren’t, either.”

And maybe he wouldn’t mind a trap. Maybe he’d like to throw his weight around a little, see how loudly he could play the music. Or maybe, see if he could transform again, and throw around more than just his weight. Maybe it’d be nice to sink his teeth into someone who deserved it. Maybe it’d be nice to bash someone’s brains in with a rock—

He looked down at his empty hand, squeezed nothing, sighed, and leaned his weight on Pegasus beside him. The winged unicorn of Hell leaned back into him, shoulder to David’s, and let out a quiet neigh sound that was almost a purr. If the horse kept growing, it wouldn’t be long before he’d be too big for shoulder-to-shoulder ruminating. If he grew to the size of that other unmarked’s spider, the tetrads would be riding him.

“You okay, Pegasus?” he asked, and nodded at the tunnel walls, floor, and ceiling. “Your first time being underground like this.”

“Not so,” Acelina said. “He saw much as an egg, remember?”

David blinked, and Acelina waited, eyeless. “Wait, Pegasus could see things while in the egg?”

“Not literally, but I am sure he felt and heard much.”

Maybe it was David looking at her. Maybe it was her voice. Pegasus slowed and walked beside Acelina, gently bumped against her side, and pressed a wing against hers. And after a bit, Acelina looked down at the horse, sighed, and ran a hand down the membrane of his wing.

“He remembers you, you think?” David asked.

“I ... suppose. Normally, zotiva do not care for eggs, like I did with him. We watch them for the first few weeks to know which eggs are strongest, and set those eggs in the hatching pit when they are about to hatch.”

“Never?” Jes asked. Daoka mirrored her with a chirp.

“Not never,” Acelina said. “Sometimes, a glorious egg is born, a fellow zotiva, or even a child of the Old Ones. I have heard stories from my sisters, of zotiva before them who cared for eggs they prized, from birth to hatching. They spoke of a connection. And they spoke of betrayal.” She shrugged, but when Pegasus nudged against her again, she traced her claws softly down his wing again. “I ... do not think a hellbeast knows of the concept of betrayal.”

Tsila, walking in the back with the Las, smiled past Pegasus at David. What was that smile about?

~~Unknown~~

A man ran for his life, as fast as he could. Sweat poured down his naked skin. His bare feet slapped the shoreline of False Gate. To his right, the Red Sea. To his left, the ruined wasteland of broken buildings and shattered land. Ahead, the Red Sea rose, a giant wave that reached high into the sky and refused to fall. And the closer he got, the more obvious what the giant wave was.

A split. Someone had split the Red Sea, and the two colossal walls of water towered over the trench with a might unknowable. He could hear the song. Three songs, playing at the same time. He didn’t know the runes, hadn’t absorbed them or activated them, but he recognized them. He just had to get there, get to the split and the tunnel awaiting him. He’d be safe in there. The lady in armor had told him! Get to False Gate, and then to the Forgotten Place. If he could do that, he’d be safe, safe from the rider, safe from the aliens, safe from everyone. Just go!

But it didn’t matter. White dots filled the burning sky. A thousand golden arrows fell upon him, and he tore apart.

~~Day 153~~

Slowly, David sat up and looked around the secure cave he’d carved for the group last night. Most of the girls were up already, chatting and chirping as they examined their armor. Acelina was already sitting with the Las, checking their wings, and when she was done with one, they joined the others checking hers; her wings were much longer, practically drapes. Laoko and Daoka checked each other’s hooves. Sazillia and Jes bickered about something. Moriah and Tsila talked about something innocuous from their time in Heaven.

Pegasus got up, trotted up to him, leaned down, and pressed the side of his head into his.