18. Labyrinth

18

LABYRINTH

E ntering the tomb of Staphylogenes’ heart, we head down only six steps before we’re whisked away—sucked through a portal to some place else. The place we arrive is as mystifying as it is astounding; as if someone built a Nexus Realm, then abandoned it before it was finished, the space contains nothing but a strange, grey-blue mist in every direction.

There is some sort of ground; we stumble on it as we arrive, heaving hard breaths after being startled by that portal. The portal itself was not unpleasant, however. Indeed, a strange radiance lingers here, as if this place remembers the Ascendant power that once made it.

As unfinished archways, doors, even pieces of stone fountains, drift slowly past through the mist.

Then disappear.

“Where the hell are we?” I ask, as Quinn and Ariana stare around with as much confusion as me and just as much awe.

“Perhaps a Nexus Realm Staphylogenes or his peers never quite finished.” Quinn muses as we watch an entire tower drift through the mist, spinning slowly through space as if it isn’t tethered to what keeps us on the misty ground. “Perhaps it’s a Vir all its own—like our Seventh Vir , which is the Twilight Realm—a vibrational Realm the Ascendants began to create, then abandoned for some reason, after making part of it with the Music.”

“Who knows what gods do with their endeavors,” Ariana adds with quiet awe now as she looks around, “or why they abandon them.”

“I guess this is the start of Staphylogenes’ labyrinth.” I glance at Quinn. “It seems appropriate, with all this mist and unfinished spaciousness. So, where do we go from here?”

“Ariana?” Quinn looks at her again, because so far, her truth-reading power has been the most helpful to us.

Though she shakes her head now with a delicate frown, as if confused.

“I’m not getting any intuitions about this place.” She looks around. We suddenly see an entire waterfall, with water pouring from nowhere and going nowhere, drift by us, large as life and cacophonous with sound before it drifts back into the mist.

All the sudden noise of falling water gone.

“It’s as if the Music here is… fractured. Broken.” Ariana scowls more. “Things here are… untethered to reality. I feel not that this world was unfinished, but that something or someone broke it long ago. And now, it is what it is. A nothing space.”

“Broken.” Quinn scowls deeply now as I feel a deep flare of his power roil through us—and not in a nice way. “Master Ilyov warned us that the Music can break reality if wielded the wrong way. Are you saying you feel something like that happened here?”

“Yes.” Ariana answers without hesitation, as every one of my hackles goes up now to understand this was a world which had once been complete.

But which was broken by the Music.

Irreparably.

“Fuck.” I growl now as we look around. Some kind of whirling energy goes screaming through the mist now—making us all duck fast, to not be hammered by it. It disappears.

And with it goes all my comfort in this place.

“We need to leave here. Now.” My own deepest instinct is flaring inside me now, that this place is vastly dangerous. Things still exist here, I understand. It’s not just broken palaces and earth that drift through the nothingness; it’s things the ancients created.

One of which comes barreling through the mist now—straight at us.

Like a manticore as big as a mansion, a massive bull-like creature with flaming, poisoned horns and twenty tails made of scorpions comes at us. As it roars, diseased green spittle flies from its mouth. That mouth is nothing but fangs; Quinn and I are fast on the defensive to stop it.

We come together, slamming up a hard wall of magic before ourselves and Ariana, protecting her with our seething auras and wings as this creature barrels in. It doesn’t stop as it sees our vast flare of magic, but slams right into us.

As if confused, or beyond enraged, the thing hammers into our seething wall of magic, staggering both Quinn and I like a bomb went off before us. But our wall holds, as the rageful creature is suddenly bounced back.

Right into the mist—disappearing.

“Gods!” Quinn’s dark breath says it all. “There is more to this place than it seems!”

“Where did it go?” I whip my head, scanning the mist, even as Quinn and I hold our wall of magic before us.

“Things get lost in the mist,” Ariana says from behind us. As I risk a glance back at her, a terrible feeling sweeps through me, matching the horror on her face. “They get lost in it, Lucca. They get lost… and then they go mad. Forever.”

“Trapped.” Quinn growls, a vicious sound as he watches the mist. “If we step one foot wrong in this place, we’ll be lost in that mist, too. Going mad forever… as the Gold Eyes celebrates. ”

“I don’t know if he can even sense we’re in here,” Ariana says with even more horror now as she regards the nowhere-space. “He used this place as the start of his labyrinth, but remember, even he can’t solve this puzzle anymore without his Light. We have our Light, still. I say we use it… and see what comes.”

“Light this motherfucker up, then.” I say, as I see something that makes me think Ariana’s right. At the edges of Quinn’s and my wall, where my brightest rainbows and his most seething fire touch that impenetrable blue-grey mist, I see it curl away. I see there’s something beneath our feet, as well.

A golden road, perhaps.

Long decimated, pitted, and decayed.

“Look.” I nod at our feet as Quinn and Ariana glance down. I feel them see what I’m seeing; that the area we’re standing on might have once been something, before this mist took this entire broken world over.

It’s something we can use now, an anchoring-point of sorts, that might help us survive in this place.

“Push your Light harder, Lucca,” Quinn’s gaze sparks. “Ariana, brighten yours, and I’ll do the same. Let’s shine like diamonds in this place… and see what we’re actually standing on.”

“Done,” I say, as I raise my power to the max.

I’m burning up into a towering flame of Light, as I feel Ariana and Quinn do the same. As our power brightens a hundredfold, the mist goes rolling back all around us.

It shows us we stand upon a broken, golden road now, high upon an upthrust piece of rock, like a promontory. We push our power harder; suddenly in the near distance, we see the glimmer of an ancient city through the mist. It’s only there for an instant before the mist swirls in, taking it back.

As if incensed we tried to push at it, however, I feel the mist swirl in harder now. It rises like a leviathan, pushing back against our power and swamping our boots as it surges back towards us .

It takes everything we have to keep it off us.

“Balls!” I glance at Quinn, fast. “It’s responding to our Light, Quinn! Getting stronger…!”

“Stop! Stop your Light, Lucca—quickly! Ariana, you too,” Quinn says. Trusting his instinct, I shut my power off with a snap, though everything inside me roars to do it. Ariana does, as well. As we’re drowned only in Quinn’s Night magic now, which he’s holding carefully free of his Fae fire, I see the mist ease, dissipating. At last, everything nearby is free of that ancient, diabolical sea.

Showing us a golden path.

“Follow the yellow brick road,” Ariana says wryly now as we regard it, and the strange resonance of magic that occurs in this place. “Why did raising your Night magic work when our Light failed?”

“I don’t know.” Quinn glances around; I see him predict which direction of the road would most likely take us to that nearby city, as he nods at it. “I think we need to head this way, though. Whatever is in that city, I feel it calling to me, like a beacon in my Night. I think we’ll need both Light and Night, however, to solve this labyrinth. Staphylogenes may not have been stranded here upon this overlook by not having his Light; it may be further along that we’ll need ours. Standby, Lucca, with your power. Ariana… do the same.”

As we nod, Quinn takes point. We slowly make our way along the pitted, ruined road in the direction of the nearby city.

I see now that hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of golden phrases scroll across the road, giving it its ancient shine. It’s actually a road of white stone, as we tread carefully upon its broken, upheaved flagstones.

But it was so thoroughly inscribed with these golden sigils, which I still see scrolling through over and over in what looks like ancient Archangelic magic, that it looked gold at first glance, rather than white.

Most of it is ruined, the magic it once had now gone. There is enough, however, to keep us grounded, tethered to reality here in this nowhere space as more strange oddities, buildings, even a bleating goat pass by .

We see nothing like the enormous manticore-bull again, though. Until we come to a sundered archway of that same marble-white stone and infinite gold, shining all through with haunting panes and pinnacles of broken glass.

They whisper to me now as we gaze up at it.

“There is Light magic here,” I say to Quinn and Ariana as I peruse it. “May I?”

“Do it.” Quinn nods.

Risking the mist’s retribution, I raise my power; slowly, the surrounding area brightens until I’m flooding it with the vast light of day. Gradually, hidden sigils in those ancient, broken panes and pinnacles of glass in the archway come to life. They scroll through with power; though the road and this arch were broken ages ago, nothing could break the Light inside those ancient pieces of glass.

They speak to me now—flooding my mind and heart with information. I stand very still as that ancient speech inundates me.

I know it, yet I don’t; like the most ancient Fae dialect, it somehow makes sense, even though it doesn’t. My power understands it, however; I feel Ariana and even Quinn being flooded with echoes of that most ancient language now as their Light magic gets some, too.

I have the most Light in our trio, however, and it’s me those ancient sigil-phrases speak to.

As I’m flooded with radiance—before it suddenly flashes out.

“This was a city of Ascendants.” I am amazed as I come out of my trance and look at Ariana and Quinn. “This was a place they once made their High Seat, as physical immortals after their initial Fall. It was from here that they built countless worlds to which they could travel, enjoy, and create upon their whims. This was their starting-point—their origin in the flesh, so to speak. But they ruined it, somehow. This gateway is a warning to any who might tread within; that evil still taints this place. And for any with the brightest Light… to stay away. ”

“Which is why the mist tried to push us back the way we came,” Quinn understands as I see his dark eyes clear. “This mist is a failsafe, put here by the ancients who made this place after it was broken. So no one with Light would ever come here. And be ruined by the evil that still exists in this place.”

“Apparently,” I say, though it’s Ariana I look to now. She’s been quiet for so long. Quinn looks at her, too, as she frowns harder than I think I’ve ever seen her.

As the truth-reading energy inside her churns.

“Ariana?” Quinn goes to her. He’s dropped his Night magic a little, and the archway is once again swallowed up by mist as I step to them and we all draw close.

“I don’t think we should go any further,” she says. I see her swallow as an alarm goes off inside me now, and I take her hand.

“Why not?” I ask, even as Quinn opens his mouth to say we need to get to the Gold Eyes’ heart. I hold a hand up, forestalling him as I stand in this sudden heartfelt space with her. She’s more uncertain than I’ve ever felt her. And that’s not good, as Quinn finally feels it and relents on his mission.

Cuddling her in his arms as he moulds to her back.

“Forgive me, Ariana. I am too preoccupied with the blood-oath I made to the Gold Eyes.” Quinn heaves a hard sigh by her cheek. “Speak to us; tell us what your deepest truth-reading power is saying about this place.”

“I feel like… like it’s not just something evil that lives here.” Ariana gazes off through the hidden archway toward the golden city we glimpsed. “It’s something… unending. Even the ancient Ascendants themselves could not undo the calamity that happened here; neither could they cleanse it from this place, Quinn—and it’s that very detail which scares me now. They left a warning to anyone with Light in their power to never come back to this place, and put a powerful failsafe mechanism here to stop them, too. The mist protects us from whatever lies here. Something Staphylogenes used to hide his heart… in a place no one with a single drop of Light in their magic could ever reach.”

“So why can he not reach it, either?” I am confused as I mull Ariana’s words over. “Does he still have Light in his power?”

“I think we can all safely say he doesn’t,” Quinn says, shaking his head. “But for whatever reason, when Staphylogenes braved this location initially, to place his heart here, he did it so no one with Light in their power could ever get it.”

“A failsafe from having his wife Iris get it, perhaps?” I say, still confused to the max and trying to sort it all out.

“Perhaps,” Quinn says.

Though Ariana suddenly shakes her head.

“Staphylogenes was a renegade among his kind,” she says decisively, as she looks at us. I can feel her listening to her truth-reading power as she thinks all this over, using it to point us in the right direction as we ferret all this out. “Somehow, he was their black sheep—a true innovator. He did something none of his kind ever did when he tore his heart out and stashed it beneath Florence. But he still did it in the place he was most comfortable, where he lived, loved, and lost. Here; somehow, this entire realm is connected to Florence. Our maps of the city have lines of Light crisscrossing them—Staphylogenes didn’t just use this place to hide his heart, somehow this place is Florence. Maybe even the original city of Florence… before it all fell into ruins and was broken.”

“My gods…!” Quinn goggles as he holds Ariana, even as the same shock fills me. “Ariana! You’re right! Our Florence in the Twilight Realm must not have been the original Florence! This place, this countryside, these creatures… all of it is so strikingly similar to Florence in the Twilight Realm, even in the human world, that they could be close cousins. What if Staphylogenes and Iris did not Fall to earth in either of our Realms, but here, first? What if this was the first Earth they created… and they ruined it somehow. And Iris only remembers the path to the First City of Florence… the place her husband was most likely to hide his heart. Here. ”

“So it’s not a labyrinth, not like we originally thought.” I glance around, seeing more arcane items float by in the mist, then disappear. “It’s a broken world. The first world of Earth… broken beyond repair by whatever happened here. Before the ancient Ascendants even came to the Twilight Realm.”

“But they Fell in Rome.” Ariana frowns.

“They Fell in Rome in the Twilight Realm.” Quinn corrects as he stares off through the mist, in the direction of the golden city. “But perhaps their original Fall was here… in this most ancient City of Florence. Which Staphylogenes and his wife never left, though the others went elsewhere.”

“The rest were too traumatized by what happened to stay in their original city and rebuild, even in the Twilight Realm,” I say now as I get it. “They went to Rome instead, when they came through to our Realm. But the Gold Eyes and his wife gave their original city another shot.”

“They loved it too much to leave,” Ariana says as tears fill her eyes. “They could not abandon it, so they tried to rebuild… and it was their undoing.”

“Whatever darkness pervades this place must have infected Staphylogenes,” Quinn says now as he takes a deep breath. “ Something about the original creation of this place put darkness in his heart. It made him dark in his ego, torturing his only daughter with the Music when she wasn’t what he thought she should be.”

“She wasn’t what he wanted,” Ariana says with sadness as she looks at us. “And his darkness, his hate towards her, tore their family apart. Then made him tear himself apart.”

“To never be put back right as he stashed his heart here, in the original Florence,” I finish. “Forever.”

As we stare through the mist, a terrible sense of foreboding fills us, though even I know we have to continue on to find Staphylogenes’ heart.

In this original Florence, that was ruined for all time.

Which even the Ascendants themselves never dare visit.