Scorio closed his eyes, inhaled deeply, and summoned his Igneous Heart. The sooty clouds in the cave seemed to have replenished themselves while he slept, and with strong, muscular sweeps of his spirit, he stirred them about himself once more, around and around and then down into the treasure.
It filled and then jerked to life.
Snapping open his eyes, Scorio saw the bridge erupt upwards, the effect almost immediate, its far end disappearing into the darkness. He gave it a push, speeding its fall, and it dropped down to bounce against the ledge.
With only five or so seconds remaining, he had no time to waste. He scampered up the planks as quickly as he could, gritting his teeth against the pain in his leg.
One, two… he did his best to count slowly, lunging up to grab at cracks in the timbers. Three, four…
There, the ledge. Not knowing how many seconds he had left, he surged up and to the side, leaving the bridge to catch hold of the rocky lip.
The bridge shuddered and contracted upwards, recoiling and then dropping down from the shadows to bounce upon the ledge.
Scorio levered himself up, and let out a defiant, “Ha!”
It’d worked! He’d used his… dark cloud manipulation abilities… to activate a treasure and accomplish the impossible!
Taking up the bridge, he limped into the oblique tunnel, a fistful of moss held high, heart pounding, and felt the first hint of confidence since being thrown through the Final Door.
Chapter 10
The next three waking cycles were a continuous exercise in defying probability by exploring the extreme limits of ingenuity.
The rough caverns weren’t exactly infested with fiends, but that almost made it worse. Scorio could climb and walk for hours without seeing another living thing, only to stumble into a gigantic leech whose innards contained mesmerizing star clusters that stupefied his mind and made it nearly impossible to think.
The longer he went without running into a monster, the greater his sense of dread; on some irrational level, he started to believe that the duration of solitude corresponded to the monster’s lethality, so that he was almost relieved to cross the path of a flame-breathing centipede twice his own length right after escaping the trap of a dog-sized antlion that sought to suck him into its trap.
The chalk proved to be his greatest defense, though he was increasingly loath to use it. His lantern-moss had nearly grown completely dark when he turned a corner and awoke a sleeping carpet of mushrooms that began to glow brightly, their gills emitting a green, noxious light, and which then released a cloud of spores into the air that began to float in his direction.
A step backward, a quick scrape of the chalk across the tunnel, and the gas and spores were held at bay.
He experimented with different techniques after realizing that closing off an entire tunnel was unnecessary. Thus, when he ran into a boulder-sized toad which sat in the center of a cavern, its smooth, eyeless sockets shadowed under peaked horns, he simply backed away. But when the toad began to shorten the ground between them, however, somehow compressing the distance so that Scorio felt as if he were falling toward the fiend, he simply drew a two-inch-wide line on the ground. This invisible pole smashed into the toad’s face, shattering its jaw and knocking it off its perch.
He considered different tactics as he climbed and rested. What if he drew a circle about himself? Would he remain trapped for hours, or eventually run out of air? What if he drew a line on a pebble, then turned the pebble over so that it faced an oncoming enemy—would the invisible wall turn into a lance, or a razor-sharp curtain on which his foe would impale himself?
That one was quick to test—the chalk wouldn’t mark any handheld object, and drawing the line on a pebble that lay on the ground nailed the pebble down as if it had melded with the floor.
When he was next in a larger cavern, he drew an inch-long line on the wall, with the result being an invisible pole that extended clear to the far side of the cave. Easily ten yards. Which didn’t mean it would extend forever, but gave him a sense of its flexibility. Nor was it particularly sharp—it felt like the rounded edge of a rod, perhaps half an inch thick.
His experiments were curtailed by his desire to conserve the chalk. Already he’d used a quarter of it escaping five different monsters, each distinct from the last. At the rate he was going, he guessed the chalk would last him another fifteen or so moderate applications, and then it would be gone forever.
The rod and bridge were much harder to use. They required focus, summoning an image of his Igneous Heart, and then tediously sweeping the dark clouds around and into each one that he wished to activate. Useful for crossing the innumerable chasms or scaling sheer rock faces, but far too slow to use in combat.
Not that he could think of how to use them to stop a charging foe.
The occasional stream or silty pool assuaged his thirst, but by the third day, his hunger pangs had faded away and left him in a state of lethargic stillness. Running caused him to grow dizzy, and he found it incredibly easy to just sit and do nothing, resting contentedly while feeling light and hollow.
But always he pulled himself back up to his feet. His wounds scabbed over and began to heal without signs of infection. The deep, sucking pain in his core that Praximar had dealt him also began to fade. He’d discarded the last of the lantern-moss for a glowing sapphire he’d stolen from a large nest while its occupant was gone, and not stuck around to see what might come back to complain.
On he went, climbing, struggling for the surface. Resting when he had to, pushing on until he reached an obstacle that he thought would be his last.
But between the bridge and the steel rod, his determination and the ability to create invisible rods with the chalk to grab hold of, he managed to keep climbing. Each hour a success. Each time he awoke unmolested from sleep upon some high hidden perch was another improbable victory.
Until at last, half-delirious, dragging his feet across the ground, he crested a sharp rise and saw a cavern saturated with a sulfurous yellow light. He froze, one hand clutching the now-dull dagger, the other already fumbling to put away the sapphire in exchange for his chalk, and stared into the pocket cavern, searching its confines until he saw the source of illumination: a ragged crack in the ceiling.
For a moment he thought it might lead into the Gauntlet, then realized that this was a different kind of light; not a hazy, apocalyptic orange glow, but rather a washed-out, dusty burn.
Scorio had learned the value of patience, of caution, so he remained still, just watching, waiting for some sign of danger or a trap to manifest. But after a long spell of immobility, he simply couldn’t restrain himself any longer.
He had to look through that ragged rent in the ceiling.
Had to see what lay beyond.
Exercising as much care as he could muster, he leaped silently over the crest and landed in a crouch. Watched the walls, expecting something awful to rush him at any moment, and crept to the spot where the yellow light was brightest. Stowed the sapphire in his robe and raised his hand to look up through his fingers.
After so many days spent in soft blue radiance, the cadmium yellow burn from above felt unnatural, felt wrong somehow. Yet, grimacing against the glare, he slowly began to distinguish a slender glowing wire stretching across the sky.
Scorio’s heart began to surge within his chest. The space outside was vast, a cylinder so huge he could barely grasp its enormity. He took one final glance around the cave, set the bridge upon the ground, and swept black wind into the treasure’s funnel.