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Save Point: Dark Places Of The Earth

Crescent Moon Bay - The Wound In The World

Inside the rock, the wind and weather is muted. The stone in here is less friable, less weathered, some sort of greywacke of fine sediments long-solidified that has lost all color with age to become a generic dark material.

What looked like some sort of observational or gunnery slit from the outside is revealed to be a repeating feature, part of a tunnel that runs at an angle behind but not parallel to the cliff face with the slit like apertures heading off into darkness where they do not reach the outside air. The tunnel length and each of the slits seems to be cased with some sort of concrete, but this has become like stone itself, with crystallization of veins that seem to hold more calcite in comparison to the zeolites of the surrounding greywacke.

'This is incredibly old," concludes Terrowne as he looks around, the light that makes its way in through cracks and slits enough to see by as it is scattered around the depths. In one direction, the tunnel comes to an end where movements within the exposed slope have caused slipping and sliding of fractured blocks down into the empty space, but the other end is open. 'We're talking geologic lengths of time here, yet this is clearly an engineered structure. It's not ruins, it's even older than that. Everything that could degrade to nothing already has. See how there's no sign of any sort of wooden or metal objects, or any kind of structural reinforcing? There's nothing left here but the original geometry."

Cleo heads down the tunnel in the direction that's still open, sharp cat's eyes spying a possible path to places deeper in. After a short stroll, she comes to a right-angled turn that runs directly into the cliff face, onward into darkness. The tides have opened a fracture in the cliff wall at the end of the turn, and another than runs along the floor, so a shallow concavity of green sea-water floods along the length of the center of the floor, and the stray hairs of her mane are haloed by the brutally sharp whiteness of the light that slants in between the the dark clouds. As Cleo walks, her feet skiff up the salt water, which plays around the almost sandal-like underlayer of the armour leggings that is all that remains after she insisted on discarding the layered skirts and boots.

There's something almost playful about the way she walks, although she is still wearing the blade mounts that arc outward from her shins, lethal half-moons of black combat steel with razor edges decoratively inlaid in what looks like thin lines of brass, perhaps for the sake of visibility and to prevent the wearer from colliding with themselves. Sea water beads on the lower tips of the blade crescents and then runs off back into the in-flooding rivulet.

Terron is still rhapsodizing about the geology of the place. "Amazing it's still level, or mostly so, after all this time," he notes. "Probably what's contributed to keeping it mostly in one piece, being tilted sideways would have disrupted the structural weight distribution and broken the corridors apart... it must have been lifted very slowly as a whole block, until it was back above the current sea level. There's no way of knowing how much of it's still down there somewhere, under the water and completely flooded... still, could be a lot worse, it could all be all at a diagonal and half caved in."

As they get deeper it gets darker, and Cleo's eyes gleam green with hints of sea blue when she turns around to look at him, light glancingly reflected back off the retina, but there are limits to how far even she can see in the total absence of light.

"Stop for a second, we're going to have to break out the flashlights," she insists, pulling off her light pack and placing it to the side on the ridge created where the sea has yet to corrode the edge of the corridor floor, adjacent the to the wall. She sorts through their equipment and pulls out a couple of polished concave discs, roughly the size of the extended fingers of her palm, fitted with elastic bands to be worn about the forehead, or in her case at a sort of jaunty angle just above the brow ridge. There's a small fitment for adjusting the angle where the light is attached, and a tiny almost spherical light-emitting diode with expendable battery in the exact center of the disc, designed to project the light as much as possible only towards where it's needed.

When she gets it fired up it's almost dazzling and makes her look like some sort of lesser deity in her best ceremonial wear. "I could probably run this even without the battery," she notes as she hands Terrowne his own instance of the solar diadem and he warms it up. "The concept is pretty simple, it's just a little curved mirror. If I were to ignite a tiny fireball in the center of the disc, it would keep going indefinitely."

"Something to try if it gets broken, then," suggests Terrowne, letting his vision adjust.

They keep going and it becomes apparent that the uplift hasn't been entirely level, because the corridor rises up just slightly and out of the sea after a quite considerable distance. The variation is seemingly only visible across a great length. At the end of the corridor, the path ends in a black space that resists their illumination until they have actually crossed the threshold.

"Damn, this is huge," exclaims Terrowne, as Cleo whistles, because he can't. Who knew a cat could whistle? But she most assuredly can, because the space they are in is incredibly vast, and just as totally denuded of everything by the sheer passing of time as the rest of the corridor.

From the faint and intermittent bouncing of stray photons off the distant walls, the static seen in darkness behind closed eyes, the vision of a cat or a dragon has just enough to work with that it is possible to resolve a roughly cubical open space a couple of hundreds of metres in width and height. The sheer volume of it swallows all light and is totally empty. The intense illumination of the lamps is lost in such an enormous space, only revealing the blank floor in front of them. The whole room, if this is a room, seems to be made of the same concrete turned-to-stone as everything else.

The sound of the whistle echoes faintly back at them, disturbs nothing.

One of the distant corners seems darker than the others, suggesting a possible debouchement onto another room or open space, so they start walking. There are no objects, nothing to trip over, not even any fallen fragments of the roof, which is just as well because the unsupported load on it must be enormous. "I would not want to get into a firefight in here," exclaims Cleo, and he can totally see her point. Every muzzle-flash or burst of light would overload any night vision, turning it into a deadly game where any shot taken would give away your position. Cleo's silent compound bow or his heavy knives would still be effective, but just spotting the enemy and then getting close to them in this vast dark space would be a lethal challenge.

In a way he's glad they're within the range of the sethura weapon-suppression system. He's not sure how well it works this deep in the rock, but guns down here could be a very bad thing, especially if they were to be discharged toward the roof or any supporting walls. It's going to have to be kinetic weapons only until such time as they can both reach the surface and disable the suppressor.

Because there's clearly nothing here, they fall into conversation, admittedly as small whispers that are almost overwhelmed by the size of the space.

"It's really not how ancient alien ruins are supposed to be, is it?" complains Cleo. "I mean, almost everyone and their brother has had a go at doing ancient ruins in games and movies and stuff, but there's just, you know, nothing. Not even any interestingly glowing monoliths or inscriptions."

"Enough time destroys everything," shushes Terrowne. "Even the rocks themselves bend and stretch given enough time. Things sag under their own weight, like the glass in a window frame."

"I was just hoping for something, you know, visually interesting," she clarifies. "Lacrunta was a mess but at least there was all sorts of interesting scenery... that red algal stuff like blood, lots of weird dead things that hadn't gotten the message yet, the room with the vapor grille. Here there's just nothing and empty space."

"I think I prefer the nothing," points out Terrowne. "Anyway, remember, we're not here to explore, we're here to find a way up the top of the headland. Kilseth seems to be drawn to these ancient sites for some reason, it's a fair bet that he's tunnelled down into here if only to secure his own position. If you see any actual stuff, it's a sure sign that the sethura were here."

~*~

It's more enigmatic than anything else. They move through rooms, spaces, more corridors.

In places there are pits filled with incredibly still water, dead and dark, descending down to depths that will remain forever unseen. The water reflects their headlights and the shapes of the ceilings, other passages bored in and out of the walls high above in symmetrical distributions too high up to reach. In some places the outlines of shallowly submerged structures can be seen just beneath the current surface, blurred by what might be some form of unimaginably resilient living coating or just the outward growth of minerals from the stones themselves into the still water.

In one of the lower-ceilinged rooms, slender pale white growths like nitre descend from cracks in the ceiling between crisply edged vertical pillars that hold up the roof, but when Cleo then tries their strength between her subdermally padded fingertips, all her strength is not enough to snap them and they are revealed as being completely solid milky quartz. "How long would this take to form?" she mutters to herself in amazement.

Across a disjoint where a small fault has manged to dislocate one of the corridors, a slender gap too small for them to pass through has opened onto the next room in, which is entirely filled with water except for a series of concentric circles, which are intermittently and cryptically visible just below the surface as they play the lights across them. Something about the way they are placed and shaped makes Terrowne shiver despite himself, perhaps because of something the Dragon knows down its subconscious that he isn't completely party to.

"I'm creeped out by shallowly submerged things," he explains when Cleo touches him on the thigh and he jumps. "I know, it's weird, but I just don't like shallow murky water. There could be anything down there. I don't mind the open ocean or a deep river or what have you, I don't even mind a nice clean swamp full of rushes and growing things, but that disturbs me."

(The Dragon is imagining a dark tunnel where two slender metal rails, polished to high shine by the repeated passage of sleeper wheels, glimmer in the dark and there are patterns like a random splash of concentric circles discharged into the dull soot and dust of the walls, where the particulates have been burnt black. A girl with dark hair and golden skin, and the inky rosette flanks of a melanistic panther, streaks past as a light builds behind her....)

He carefully quashes the non-memory before it can proceed and concentrates on the present. It would be much too easy to get time-lost down here, where there's so much time to play with.

There are occasional hints of light, where narrow apertures like drilled bore-holes descend from somewhere far above. The stripped remains of the rooms show all sorts of conduits and openings where there must once have been fittings of some sort, maybe pipes or some kind of transmission wiring, and some of them are intact enough to let a little light in from above, although most have been pinched closed by tectonic movement, blocked by fracture breccia or mineralization. Tiny amounts of rain and grit seem to have made their way down these paths, and even if the sun was at noon they'd be too irregular to let the illumination in directly. They manifest as brighter areas in the corners of the eyes when Cleo gets him to turn the lamps off for a second, to confirm that what she thinks she's seeing is real. The dark closes in and is everywhere for a moment, until the faint glow reveals itself in the edges of his vision as well.

Depth is difficult to argue, when the sea is somewhere just beneath, but as they get further away from the cliff faces it gets drier in the air and the walls, and there are spaces that are not filled with water that also go downwards. Terrowne is reluctant to go down into these volumes beneath water level, but so far they've failed to find a way upwards, only deeper into the cliffs, and Cleo argues that where there are ways down, there might also be ways up.

Whatever cycle of uplift has raised this ancient structure to the surface must have now shifted into subsidence, is the only way he can rationalize it. The entire block containing the excavation must have been raised above the surface all of a piece, drained and dried out, and is now sinking back beneath the surface as erosion has its way with the outer surface, transforming it into the weathered headland they saw on the way in. The sea has percolated its way slowly through the outer rock, out near the edges, and has filled up all the empty spaces it can reach, but the more watertight sections near the middle are still holding out like a tall glass placed in a shallow sink. Another few feet down and it will flood entirely, through the same vast spaces and corridors they are currently exploring, but for now the insides are still waterproof.

Pairs of matching grooved ramps descend at one end of this space and rise at the other, for all the world as though there were once pairs of escalators in the space, and a separate tunnel off to the side at a level just below that of the floor suggests the shape of a boarding platform for some sort of underground transport network. "I wonder if they had trains, or whether this is just something else entirely that kind of looks like a station?" muses Cleo.

"I don't think we should step on the surface of the tube," Terrowne warns her as she peers over the edge of the platform. "If they had depth trains then that surface might have started out nominally frictionless. It wouldn't be anymore, of course, but going sliding down into the black depths doesn't exactly strike me as safe. I could probably get us out, even with the suppression system damping down my abilities, but they'd definitely notice."

Cleo leans and spits graciously over the edge in a sort of tidy little cat sneeze, her nose and upper lip wrinkled up into a compact moue. The clear droplets of cat-drool simply run off the surface, to slide at a steady speed away into the darkness. "Yes, definitely depth trains," she concludes.

She works her pink tongue around her lips, cleaning her mouth, feline pride adding unwillingness to admit that he just might have saved her with that warning.

They travel through more empty rooms and corridors, and then down some oddly spaced stairs into a very strange area where the rock of the walls abruptly changes, halfway down in some cases, as though the tunnels have been carved through two separate strata of rock. The lower layer is a sort of brittle, crumbly, red-stained material that compacts underfoot, dead and dry.

Cleo gets her own back by being the first to figure out what its is. "This is the blood liquid," she announces, picking up a small piece and rolling it into fragments as she sniffs at it. "The same stuff that was at Lacrunta. Only it hasn't actually gotten to do anything here, because there was nothing for it to interact with. It's just soaked into the walls, died, dried out and formed a sort of crime scene sedimentary layer. Wash, rinse and repeat until you've literally got rock made of the stuff."

"Someone must have left the lid off," concludes Terrowne. "Either that or it gets cracked open at regular intervals by earth movement. It gets spilled and dried, spilled and dried, until it clots itself off and coagulates until the next time."

"I'd better be careful with my flames. Sethkill pretty much proved that the fresh stuff would go up like naptha last time. I don't know about the dried stuff though, it's kinda... well, dead. Maybe it's already used up all its energy reserves trying to grow and spread and then dying anyway."

Another couple of storeys down they come to a basal layer, where the red stuff forms a thick block all the way up to a short distance beneath the ceiling, creating a narrow crawlspace just under the roof with a damp, rusty tang. "I am not going in there," declares Cleo flat out, upon scenting it. "It smells like a bitch having her period."

Despite being tactless, it's dead-on. The main portal aperture and its accompanying seal-cover are doubtless down there somewhere, buried under a solid crust of dried liquid biotechnology, and there is no way of knowing how far down you'd have to dig to get to it and seal the opening permanently. The stuff may not even be combustible in its solid state, which rules out the extreme solution they used on the previous occasion. The only real upside is that this little downstairs diversion provides a an extreme lower bound on what paths they might be able to take.

"Back up the stairs," sighs Terrowne. Climbing in body armour is never fun.

~*~

The support beam drops out from under them suddenly, in complete silence, plummeting into the depths without a sound.

Terrowne comes to an abrupt halt with the capped tips of his heavy combat boots overhanging the lip of the fracture plane, and it is only the sound of his sudden drawing-in of breath past the teeth that alerts Cleo, sees her turn around to observe that the floor has literally fallen out from under her behind her heels.

The space they are crossing extends into the unseen darkness along some vast expanse where an existing fault line has intersected unknown number of levels, destroying the floors between them as it slowly parted at tectonic, glacially slow speeds. The square pillar crossing the intervening gap does not seem to have fallen into place, rather it seems to have been an existing structural element of the floor that, independent to its surroundings, has been left mostly in place rather than being dragged along with everything else.

Cleo was the first to suggest crossing it - "It's held up for millions of years, what are the odds it would fail exactly now?" yes, a ridiculous argument, but oddly compelling, especially when she extended both arms gracefully and walked smoothly across the abyss, feline hips swaying in curves most gracefully designed to minimise individual load on any of the points she just happened, coincidentally, to be individually stepped on. There wasn't even the slightest iota of a tremble until after she'd made her way across and then wham.

"I suspect the deep train tube is down there somewhere," says Terrowne, apropos of nothing. "They would have had to reinforce the rock around it."

"Just stay put!" Cleo exclaims. "If we move, something else might break!"

Nothing else breaks. There is a tenuous silence.

"I can't jump that far without bending a few rules," points out Terrowne. "I could use my powers to leap across, I suppose."

"No, wait, wait, we already discussed this," counters Cleo, raising her palms as if to halt him from a distance. "They'd detect us. Let me think for a second. Okay, I'll throw you the end of one of my kusarigama chains. I think they're probably just long enough. That's why I bought them, after all, in case we had to climb up the cliffs or something. You can swing across."

She starts to spin up the blade-hooked end of one of the gilt-dipped chains, but now it is Terrownes turn to hesitate. "No, wait, don't!" he suddenly exclaims.

Cleo lets the chain spin to a halt. "Why not?" she asks, looking confused.

Terrowne looks hesitant for a second, as though there is something he is unwilling to divulge, then asserts his inexplicable secret. "I think history might be repeating itself."

"What?"

"Do you remember the story Sethkill told us, about him and Keselt exploring Whitepoint Cove, and how they got separated when part of the wall and floor fell out from under her?"

"Uh... yes? He was censoring stuff, I know he was. There was clearly a lot more that went on down there than he was telling us, but..."

"History is forming a circle. Actually a series of concentric but variably offset circles. The different cycles all eventually catch up with each other and meet at a single moment."

"Huh?"

"That's why I was so creeped out by those underwater circles we saw before. They were reminding me of a future event that hadn't happened yet. Well, actually a series of repeated events... you have to go on ahead without me. It's the only way to be certain you survive. In all the timelines where I go along with you, _something really terrible_happens."

"That's insane," objects Cleo, but she is unavoidably swayed by the way he says_something really terrible,_the informed certainty, the tone of his voice. "Keselt met a dragon, you're already a dragon, or at least you will be when we finally break cover and bring some pain down on this lot. You _need_to come along with me."

Terrownes eyes are starting to go Dragonish, black ink and gold, which is probably more than he can afford. Somewhere a warning is flickering slightly. "We meet up later, just under the surface," he says, looking out sideways into a place that doesn't exist. "At least in all the possibilities where you survive. I can't be sure you'll survive, you see, even if you go on ahead. You're the one thing in the world that's just a little like me, and so even I can't predict exactly what you'll do next."

Cleo witnesses the grief of a Dragon, and inside her head, something finally clicks.

"You could have saved Azatlan," she says, feeling out the words as they form across her tongue, exit her mouth, terrible and irreversible. "You have enough power. Why didn't you?"

Terrowne is silenced for a moment, caught out with nothing to say. "There are so many things we say to you at this moment," he concludes finally. "And all of them are wrong. We say, something even worse would have happened, we could see it indistinctly out in the distance. We say, we can only see those things we would know ourselves at some point in some version of history, and this is the single path where we get the nearest to understanding what happened and why. We say that this right here and now is the moment where we prevent the _really terrible thing_from happening and maybe, just maybe, both of us survive."

Cleo just looks at him.

"None of these things sway you," admits the Dragon. "Which is why we tell you this. You were not there, but when Sethkill first came to get me, I was feeling very depressed. I should have been filled with happiness, but I had twisted everything around me so that so I could one day meet you and you could survive. Your life matters more to me than than everyone else living. And all the lies and compromises I had to make in knowing that I could never see you until then except in the pages of a magazine, the women I lay with who did not love me, the emptiness until I saw you, it weighed on me. I should have been joyful but I wasn't filled with joy, not until I saw you on that stage."

Cleo finds herself silenced in turn as the part of him that is a man shines out even through the black ink and inhumanity that is the Dragon. Eventually she shakes her head and laughs in disbelief. Her mane flicks in the shadows and the illumination plays across the stone.

"Well. You really are a very fucked-up person, aren't ya?" she concludes brightly.

"We are seriously fucked-up," agrees the Dragon, and wipes a trace of blackness from the lashes of one eye, which is fading back to deep blue again from golden. "Please come back to me."

"I'll come back to you," says Cleo, and walks onward alone into the darkness.

~*~

Up ahead the tunnels narrow.

She guesses that he hoped that she would just accept the going different ways thing, or maybe even suggest herself that they took different routes to try to get back together. After all, if even he can't quite predict her actions, then he couldn't be certain whether or not she'd figure it out. But as it turns out, her determination to keep him with her is what has convinced her most of all to trust him.

The main complex, with lots of rooms and levels and stairs, seems to have been the area around the depth train station, which was presumably underground anyway back when it was first built. Where they came in, and the area she is now heading into on the far side, must have been subsidiary areas hosting support infrastructure, engineering and utilities, as well as whatever else was conveniently suited to be deep underground with its own transport lines. Emergency shelters maybe, or research locations, or who knows what.

flicker

and the time sinks open and she is Keselt, walking under Whitepoint Cove in a torn open bodysuit that bares her breasts to the cold air, wiping off the tiny leakage of blood from small scrapes around her taunt nipples and smearing it across her skin and_the time sinks close and_

flicker

She regains her attention with a start and finds that she has gotten distracted by the monotonous lengths of tunnel sliding into view from the darkness and then receding back into it. She heard once that spending too much time in complete darkness could affect your perceptions of passing time and relative space, so she isn't that surprised.

The tunnels aren't really that narrow, wide enough to handle a decent number of people should it be required, so they might be some sort of emergency egress in case the depth train were to fail, not for everyday use but adequate if needed. There also don't seem to be any rooms off them much, just the occasional branching where one splits off from another at right angles. She takes the larger path each time, on the basis that this is most likely to eventually lead to an exit.

Around an oncoming corner, she spots another faint light source like the ones from before, a barely visible glimmer, so she slows down and suppresses the light from the head-lamp with one cupped palm. Sure enough, there's light up ahead.

She rounds the corner and nearly crashes into Viryx.

Viryx is looking different. The last time she saw him he'd just been merged with the long-fossilized remains of something from a different geological epoch and was looking distinctly stoned, but now there's something faintly volcanic about him, a glow from underneath the plates and between the scales that must be the light she saw around the corner. He seems to be reviving from whatever was done to him, even as his heavy scutes grow ragged and overlap at the edges, a transformation from dead sediments to something resembling living basalt. The only thing she can compare it to is the way lava moves as it flows down a mountain, cooling and stiffening and then overflowing itself in a continuous crumbling progress. He's still no magmatic demon beast, and the heat glow is sparse and doesn't radiate much warmth, but the plates are formidable and whatever runs around in his veins must be molten enough to flow despite its considerable thickness.

"You are going to be fucking delicious," he growls in slurred snarl.

Acting swiftly, she adjusts the notched ratchet that sets the compound bow to maximum pull, then nocks up an arrow, one of the explosive-tipped ones with the heavy spiral-pattern conical head. The swelling muscles in her upper arms pull taunt as she draws the wire cable steadily back, storing more and more energy into the deformed recurve of carbon fibre, even as she steadily falls back, until suddenly she releases the steel arrow with a clean 'snap' like a sudden exhalation and hundreds of pounds of stored pressure launch the projectile at Viryx as he lunges around the corner, talons first, not even thinking for a second.

The arrow sinks deep into Viryx's slavering muzzle just under the eye socket and above the jaw, but unfortunately at this point reality diverges from how she had imagined it, when there is in fact no awesome explosion, and the penetrating warhead fails completely to detonate in a brutal burst of impact.

At first she's confused, even as she simultaneously keeps running to gain distance and half turns to grasp another arrow and see what is going on behind her as she retreats, but then she realises that it must be the suppression field in action, damping the highly energetic sequence of reactions whereby a tiny silver lithium cell battery upon compression triggers a small blasting cap which in turn ignites a pointed wedge of fragmentation explosive. The sum energy output must exceed whatever arbitrary lower limit has been placed on an energy weapon, so the suppressor is countering it by applying a localised stasis field to prevent the detonation from occurring.

As she readies another arrow it becomes apparent that the sheer size of the warhead is still having an effect, as Viryx roars and claws at his face but keeps coming. The spiral shape, designed to tear into things as deeply as possible before exploding, is doing far more damage than a standard slender point ever could on something that large. It's like stabbing someone with a big steel nail instead of a small toothpick.

Blood like thick glowing volcanic ichor is dripping down Viryx's muzzle as he gives chase.

Cleo has seen what it looks like when a real dragon reacts metals and limestone to make true hydrogen flame, and this isn't it. Gone is the snappy, crisp incendiarization of a true dragon - this looks more like a drunk hurling outside a pub, as Vriyx laboriously heaves up something that looks like thin molten rock and splatters it across his surroundings, cooling near instantly where it spreads outward in a thin puddle against the walls, and turning into a thin crust of black lava that continues to steam and smoke, corroding into its substrate.

It doesn't bloom like real dragon-fire would, and she sprints off of the wall in mid run to gain some height over the vile liquid as it flows, then barely hits the ground at a roll as Vriyx flings his muzzle sideways for a counter-spray, careful to keep the bow out sideways so it won't be damaged by her evasion. Vriyx's slaggy stone-plated chest rises and falls and he makes terrible gagging sounds as he recovers from the attack, spitting out a few further spurts of the same nasty substance down his chin like a whore failing a blowjob. Then he screams at a truly epic volume and just keeps going after her, heaving himself off the wall he'd staggered against to recover and digging in his claws into the floor to gain more traction.

She shoots him again. The howling is terrific. This one misses the front knee she was trying to hit to slow him down, but lodges somewhere in the upper back thigh. Snarls of rage!