Book 8 – Chapter 12 – The Darklands

I found out what happened to Superior.

He had the good sense to send me a quick message the moment he was free, alerting me that after deep consideration, he had concluded that it was unfair I had my very own occult teacher while he’d missed out on that. So he was going to get his own tutor. With better hangar games, poles and a few other unmentionable items

A good investment I think, I’d have done the same if I were him.

Yank me out if you get in trouble, Prime. He paused. When you get in trouble. Hopefully by then I’ve learned a few extra tricks. Have fun in the Darklands, don’t talk to strangers and make sure you look both ways before crossing Logi catwalks.

We waved goodbye for a moment again, and he vanished back beyond the mite territory. The connection from the mite lantern dimming into a very faint line to his blood fractal on the other end beyond.

As for my current victim beyond the walls of this fortress, once the snake was ripped apart with the gun batteries and shards of the biome itself, there wasn’t much more of a resistance. Wrath and To’Orda had the good sense to get out of there after delivering a good opening for me to get the shots in, and the mite fortress admirably handled the rest by herself. With the complete chaos around here, most of the sphere that surrounded the fortress fell away in every direction, breaking apart from the sound waves coming from the fortress cannon rounds.

Once I was sure almost everything was dead or chased off, I got off the guns and started to make my way back outside.

The airlock door clicked green as I held my hand to the panel, and the fortress voice chirped a curt pre-recorded goodbye, and sealed the doorway behind me as I passed through.

Problem with Wrath and To’Orda clearing the area in the chaos: I had no idea where they’d gone and it had been ten minutes now. That wouldn’t have been a major problem, except that this was a biome where scanners ran the risk of upsetting the very delicate terrain. I swapped my view to infrared, but other than spotting a few of the fish running around, I couldn’t see any larger blips.

Which meant finding the pair flying around here was down to luck, visual sight, and possibly good hearing. Impossible.

I flicked through the HUD options and toggled the in-built navigation. A three dimensional compass showed up, already calibrated to the biome’s magnetic fields, and an orange nav point pinged just under my feet, along with an estimated distance.

Fortunately, Journey’s HUD kept it’s own internal sensors and map, so I wasn’t completely confused.

I could try and spend a few hours flying around the local area, looking for Wrath and To’Orda. The same area where a few dozen different swarms of machines would likely start coming to investigate the sounds real soon.

Or… just head directly to the rally point into the Darklands. The Odin were waiting for the group there, and I strongly suspected once Wrath and To’Orda failed to find me, they’d start heading there too.

I took a breath, launched an occult mirror outwards, and followed it with a lash that got me off the metal plating of the mite fortress and into the air. I spun myself midair, felt light pings across my armor as I flew through a shard of now inert glass, until I landed on the nearest slab.

And then I got to work and repeated that process a few dozen times over, in a zen-like meditation. Good practice for controlling the occult, especially with what I had in mind for the mite dimensional cape.

With good preparation, that thing could be the most ratshit item I have on my arsenal. I just needed the right practice.

Traveling from slab to slab was a fun little adventure in keeping quiet and out of the line of sight from other machines too. While I could probably deal with a swarm of fish, I also really didn’t want to unwrap that ration bar and end up with more than I could eat.

A few swarms of fish had showed up, checking in on the dead machine snake carrier near the center of the biome, but since I was under a communication blackout, they were too. Only the ones who were in hearing range had come, and I’d rapidly sped away from the murder site a while back.

The path to the rally point wasn’t very long for me, taking me only one hour to travel completely through. I had to halt my progress every now and then, as there were more of the snake machines lazily slithering in the air between the slabs. Massive things that were oddly silent, but clearly visible from the occult sight. I would have been more worried about all this, but knowing they weren’t using sensor pings of any kind to avoid breaking slabs, I knew they only relied on hearing and eyesight.

I had the occult sight, so I could hide myself deep within cracks long before any of them could spot me visually, and I’d also know exactly when they’d passed by and were out of range. Handy.

If I didn’t have the means to fly around like this, I think this biome would have been almost impossible to traverse. There were glass stairways and other slabs that would slowly pass into range of each other, letting someone theoretically jump from slab to slab, but it would take hours of waiting for each level to be in range. And they’d be harassed by the swarms of fish and snake carriers flying around here, since those slabs tended to be very open and exposed.

One hour later, I spotted the end of the biome. A massive white wall, with black dots all over it where tunnels would lead to the underpassage. One in specific was pinged with my HUD, where a small shelf ahead of the tunnel waited. And a few more moving balls of black feathers and gear waiting there.

They’d setup camp, affixed into the walls. Little upside down tents used like nests, where the Odin were quietly waiting. The machine fish swarms didn’t attack them unless they started flying around too close, according to Kres’s briefing on all this. So, sitting within their little nests, they were perfectly safe even if caught in visual sight.

They gave a beak shake when I landed, having gotten used to watching the human fly around faster than they could. I returned the Odin version of a nod, drew out my occult blade and started to scratch out a quick message in large letters.

‘BEAT YOU HERE.’

I’d write more, but it was taking a bit of time to cut this into the wall, and given it’s the standard imperial language instead of ancient human, there wouldn’t be any doubts for Wrath and To’Orda when they inevitably came here.

After that, I slunk into the underpassage, so I could properly hide from any visual sight by machines. Don’t want to start any kind of fight here. Kres followed behind me, hopping on the stone floor. “Were you successful in your ventures, human?”

I gave him a thumbs up, remembered once again they had no idea what that meant, and unfolded my newest item. “Want to see a magic trick?”

He was suitably impressed with what I could do. After that, I’d taken a short power nap on the wall side, then got back to reading through Hexis’s final tome of power for more interesting occult spells to use and practice.

It took Wrath and To’Orda seven hours to arrive, and both looked disheveled. Like they’d gone through a small adventure to get here. Or got caught multiple times into fights. To be fair to them, they lacked the soul sight that I had, so if they could spot the enemy, the enemy could spot them. And the enemy was on high alert. A lot of the fish by the fortress snake had died, but there were a lot of them. Some survivors would sneak out, join their fellows and snitch on us.

Tough world.

The Odin began to pack up their little nests back onto their backpacks, helped each other tie those down, and then swapped their perch with To’Orda, who just grunted at being the impromptu hoversled for the squad.

He can’t complain much, the birds weighed less than snow basically. And he had such giant wide shoulders, perfect for carrying an entire squad of squabbling ravens.

The darklands were everything the name suggested. The moment we crossed the underpassage, sneaking along the different snaking tunnels within the hour, we came out into the next strange biome, which according to machine maps, should lead to the sanctuary biome right after that contained only a grove and a pillar heart where Drakonis could be relaxing at.

Describing the Darklands was going to be a little difficult.

First of all, we were greeted into the Darklands by one human-looking post with a lantern of blue fire on top. It flickered there, shining pale light all around. The post itself looked decorative, gothic even. The lantern on top equally matched. It was at the center of a platform, with a few black steel benches here, as if we were in some old human train station. Except the stone ground under us was porous, with only the area around the lantern being smooth slabs.

The connection to that era ended there though. Just like the expanse behind us, this biome also had no floor. A few steps in any direction, and the platform would end, showing nothing but darkness beyond. Not even a proper cliff either, the platform jutted out of the wall completely.

There was no ceiling either, or at least it was lightless enough even Journey couldn’t see anything on any wavelengths up there. Scanner pings also simply never returned back.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Besides the pale lantern light here, there were smaller pale lights further off beyond the darkness, scattered around like stars but far brighter. They helped illuminate the outline of the zone.

If we were the size of ants, then this biome was built like a spike trap. Thousands of different stone pillars of different sizes, all mildly coming to a point the further up one went and they stretched out in the hundreds beyond. All of those pillars had small lights of lanterns just like the one on our platform, that helped illuminate the general silhouette of the spike.

Extending out from those lantern platforms, including from our own, was suspension bridges of various distances. Some seemed to stretch out forever, vanishing into the darkness before reappearing near the light of an extremely distant spike. Others were small enough I could see the entire bridge and where it connected to. Mostly. All of them went just about any direction, including upwards or downwards, but they at least went straight and didn’t have any weirdness there.

“So. What’s the catch to this place?” I asked, stepping up to one of the suspension bridges leading away from our platform out into the darkness.

“There is Death that floats beyond in the darkness.” Kres said. “Stay within the light’s edges, or you will die.”

If it was actual death, I think Father would have had a headache looking out into this zone given what his soul sight revealed for him. “What exactly causes the dying part?” I asked.

“We do not know.” Kres answered back. “Only that it is Death.”

“Don’t look at us for more info kiddo.” To’Orda’s rock said. “Machines aren’t in this biome for that reason too. Even non-sentient drones just drop dead if they fly off too far into the dark. Other than a few warnings on the files here, there ain’t no map, nothing. It’s like the pale lady didn’t bother to send anyone here, and To’Naviris also didn’t care to work here either once he realized his palaquine swarm would die off before being able to carry an organ anywhere.”

“The machine generals speak true.” Kres said. “The last time my expedition arrived here, we never found any trace of machines.”

“How did you survive out here?” I asked. “Doesn’t look to be anything that grows.”

“We did not.” Kres said. “The Expanse had nothing that grew, we could not replenish our rations. Once we reached here, we searched for food sources and found nothing as well, forcing us to return home the moment we approached the halfway point on our rations. The only mercy we found were puddles of water forming on the rock ground.”

Hence why the Odin maps had ended here. And why they’d been quite happy with Wrath, To’Orda and myself being able to lug a lot more food and rations with us.

“We may have an alternative.” Wrath said, looking down at the rock. “I detect quite a plethora of biological signatures under. Insect life primarily, as well as fungi of various types living within the rocks.”

I swapped to infrared sight on my HUD. Wrath and To’Orda lit up, along with small balls of red and orange over all the Odin, superimposed over them. But they weren’t the only ones to light up. The entire rock was glowing slightly warm. And wiggling. I suddenly felt like I was standing on top of something alive.

“It’s rock.” Cathida said on the speakers. “Journey confirms it. The heat source is geothermal vents deeper within it. Everything else you’re seeing are insect maggots and some fungi. Assuming mushrooms are still made of the same thing up in this biome.”