Spear of Destiny by James Baldwin (little bear else holmelund minarik .TXT) 📕

“Go for it,” Suri replied. “Try not to get crushed.”

Gar scowled. “What was that about us not being the ones to bring this place down?”

She rolled her eyes. “The whole place, mate. A hallway’s more likely to collapse than the whole structure. These Chorus Vaults are massive, because the Warsingers are massive.”

“Won’t believe it ‘til I see it,” Gar said.

I ducked under the doorway and crept into the flooded hall. The water in here was shallower, only about a foot deep. The floor twisted back counter-clockwise as I picked my way over broken pillars, and came to what was absolutely a sealed bunker door. It reminded me a lot of the door we’d used to exit the chamber in Lahati’s place, except there was no puzzle. A weak amber light spread over it as I brought the Spear in close, barely illuminating the rest of the mangled room. The wall it was set into looked to be in good shape.

“Go back out, tell the others we’re good to proceed,” I said. “And if I get crushed when this door opens… well. You know where to find me.”

Karalti hesitated, but then nodded and backtracked part way down the hall. “Come on, guys! We found a way in!”

I set the Spear against the metal surface, and the Clinohumite snapped to its slot. This door screeched as it slowly, jerkily rolled into the wall, coming to a stop above halfway.

“Urgh.” I pressed forward, looking to my left and right. There was a room on the left, hopelessly crushed and full of debris, and another coral tube on the other side. At the end of this corridor was a small round room with a portal dais and a lectern-like counter. It had a small, inset bowl, and an engraved panel with a single paragraph of ancient Meewfolk writing. I dusted a crust of salt off it, but couldn’t understand a word of what I was looking at. “Rin! We need you for this one!”

“Coming!” I heard her automatons crunching over the rough ground as she picked her way down the corridor behind me. When she entered the room, I stepped aside and let her take the helm.

“Let’s see here…” Her blue-on-blue eyes scanned it, bright in the gloom of the cave. “Mmm… Oh! It’s a riddle.”

“Uh oh.” I rubbed the back of my neck. “What’s it say?”

“I never was, yet always shall be. No one has ever seen me, and yet I am remembered. I am the expectation of all and the doom of many. Some pray I shall never embrace them, yet all life pursues me by its nature. What am I?” She read the last stanza uncertainly. “Hmm.”

“Hope?” I shrugged.

“We can try!” She looked up at the portal. “Mah’waan?”

There wasn’t even a spark of mana in the portal.

“Bleh. I thought ‘hope’ was the answer, too.” Rin scratched her head, then crossed her arms and re-read it. “Some pray I shall never embrace them, yet all life pursues me by its nature. Time? Aging? Or maybe Youth?”

“What are we doing now?” Suri had to duck to enter. Gar and Karalti followed up behind her.

“A riddle. Me and Rin are kind of stumped.” I shrugged.

Rin read it out again. When she finished, Karalti smacked her fist into the palm of her other hand. “Ooh! I bet it’s dinner!”

Gar laughed. “It’s ‘tomorrow’, you dipshit.”

Karalti scowled at him. “You don’t know that.”

“Sure I do. Tomorrow never was, but everyone thinks about it. You can’t see the future, but you remember it when it becomes the past. Everyone expects to live another day, but nothing’s guaranteed. The folks that made this place were fighting for a better tomorrow. Makes sense that’d be their password.”

“Oh! He’s right!” Rin turned back to the pedestal. “Irra’ao’oww!”

The portal spluttered to life with a clear, amethyst purple film of energy.

“See? Look what happens when you use your damn brains for something.” He shook his head, lighting a fresh cigarette.

Rin shot him an exasperated look. “I’ll go first again. Hang back—my guess is that wherever this takes us to, it’s probably flooded.”

We watched anxiously as Rin stepped through, waiting. After a few minutes, she messaged us.

“Alright: there’s a lot of water in here, but there’s ways to get around. Platforms, things like that. You just have to be, umm, extremely careful. I think there’s a sunken floor, but everything down there looks crushed and I don’t think we’re getting into any rooms by swimming. It’s really different to the Chorus Vault of Withering Rose… it’s almost like a bunker.”

“Platforms!” Karalti chirped aloud. “I love platforms.”

“I hate platforms,” Suri muttered, watching as my dragon happily bounded through the portal. “Big old bitch like me isn’t made for cave crawling.”

“Me either.” Gar grimaced. “I ain’t no damn frog.”

The portal dumped us out into what looked like a cistern. The water here was deeper, at least six feet, luminous and blue-tinged. There was a great pit in the center of the room, where trickles of water tumbled away into some unknown abyss. There were doorways in every direction in this place—assuming we could reach them. Only two of the doors were walkable from where the portal had deposited us. The other six had to be reached by jumping from platform to platform, or by hanging and going hand over hand along pipes and broken slabs of stone.

“I’m guessing the Big-Ass Door over there is the one that leads to the Warsinger vault.” I motioned to the dragon-sized gate at our nine o’clock. It was similar in size to the door that had guarded the entry to Withering Rose, sans ornamentation. There was no decoration to speak of in this place. Everything was functional and had been built to withstand insane amounts of force. That fact, and the tumorous-looking coral, were