They raced around its curvature till the ground fell away beneath their feet into a deep ravine. Its depths blazed with thousands of glowing blue spheres, clustered like grapes along ledges and ridges. Small, albino Tokalauths crawled over these, their antennae fluttering feather-like over the spheres, their hides pearlescent.
Scorio skidded to a stop, arms going wide, nearly spilling out to fall into the ravine proper. The rocks pulled back here, revealing a darkness above that hinted at the sheer size of the Wall, and everywhere hung curtains of lichen that burned with ambient Bronze mana, and which the white Tokalauths were harvesting, severing entire sections which they devoured.
Amongst the glowing spheres, ambling as if without purpose, moved Bronze-burning rock fiends, their huge fists nearly dragging on the ground, their flarings quiescent, their passage untroubled as they patrolled the broad terraces that dropped away into the depths.
“Oh, no,” said Fyrona, grabbing on to Scorio’s shoulders to steady herself as she came to an abrupt stop. “Oh, no.”
The ravine descended to some untold depth, and its length opened before them like a canyon, extending farther than Scorio’s darkvision could make out, though the clustered eggs that dotted its sides glimmered in the distance.
Some signal rippled out through the egg tenders. Hundreds upon hundreds of milky-white Tokalauths reared up, feather feelers rippling, all of them orienting on where the small group of Great Souls stood at the ravine’s edge.
And that’s when a royal Tokalauth rose up from the depths. A behemoth whose size dwarfed even the one that the Shadow Petal had slain, its huge segmented form rose into view, eyes as large as entire dunerunners, maw wide enough to swallow a man whole, its body rippled in white and gold, its feelers questing ropes some twenty yards long.
The gigantic fiend focused on the four of them and parted its pincers so that its maw delivered a piercing shriek of such unadulterated outrage that Scorio stepped back, hands clapped to his ears.
Every one of the white Tokalauths picked up the cry, and then the rock fiends looked up from their many paths and bellowed, markings flaring bright. Above them, along the walls, other Tokalauths screamed forth and began to descend, coursing down the rocks toward them.
“Go!” screamed Nyrix, raising his crossbow and aiming at a distant ledge. “Go, go, go!”
Chapter 42
Scorio grew his wings even as he leaped, reaching back to grab Merideva’s wrist and tug her out over the edge with him. For a second all was chaos as they fell, the other Dread Blaze momentarily wrestling with him as she cried out in panic, but then he guided her arm over his shoulder, twisted about as he snapped his wings out wide, and flew over the ravine.
The royal Tokalauth rose, and rose, and rose, ever higher, gigantic, its whole body quivering with outrage, and Scorio banked hard to the side, wings almost at a vertical as he skimmed the sides of the cavern, desperately swerving around lunging fiends who sought to interrupt him. Merideva tried to wrap her legs around his waist, but his pack was in the way and she slid off with a cry, only her iron grip keeping her from toppling into the ravine proper.
Her weight pulled him away from the wall, and out of the corner of his eye he saw the queen Tokalauth dive toward them like a collapsing building. His instinct was to turn into flame, but that would have doomed Merideva, so instead he went with it, allowed her to pull him down, and dove past the terraces’ outer lips, almost hitting each one and swerving violently from side to side as he avoided fiends.
The queen crashed into the wall above him, so huge that she could barely control her weight, and boulders broke free to tumble down around them. Scorio rose, flew under her body as if it were a bridge, and then nearly crashed headlong into a beam of blue light that a rock fiend flung at them.
With a jagged cry he banked again, came in hard around the queen’s body, and saw that far below it ballooned into a translucent mass from which small Tokalauths were drawing eggs even as they fought far above. Straining, Scorio fought to rise up, spiraling around the queen’s body and then speared away toward the ravine’s far side as more rock fiends hurled blasts of ragged energy after them.
One clipped his left wing; it went numb, and they immediately dropped into a spinning spiral. Merideva cried out in terror, but then feeling returned to his blackened wing and he forced it to beat sluggishly, lifting them out of their descent. Struggling, straining, he rose again, sensing more than seeing the gigantic queen pulling around, head raising high again for another smashing lunge, and to his immense relief he saw the ravine’s far end emerge from the darkness.
Nyrix, Fyrona, and some guy continued to appear every fifty paces in a blaze of golden light, emerging only for the Dread Blaze to immediately squeeze off a new shot and then loose a bolt at his feet and dive into the new portal before they could be assailed by fiends. In such manner they leaped from ledge to ledge, keeping pace with Scorio’s labored wing beats.
The queen trumpeted her fury and Merideva twisted to look back just in time to cry out a warning. Scorio furled his wings and just fell, twisting in time to see the behemoth glide by overhead, her huge plates sliding over each other, hundreds of legs scrabbling as she collapsed against the ravine wall and once again dislodged a mass of rocks.
Grunting, wishing he could just rest for a moment, Scorio drank deep of the rich ambient Bronze, flooding his Heart, and climbed, climbed, climbed till the queen was below. Beams of blue light flew past, but the rock fiends had terrible aim past a dozen yards, and the attacks spread out to become diffuse and slow.
Nyrix appeared high up on a ledge beside a broad tunnel mouth, and Scorio aimed for it, till at last he flew over the rim and dropped, Merideva mercifully letting go so that they both staggered into Nyrix and Fyrona, who steadied them.
For a brief second the five of them glanced back over the great ravine, its thousands of glowing eggs, its titanic queen, and then they fled into the darkness.
Scorio fought to catch his breath, and fortunately the tunnel was narrow enough to prevent the Tokalauths from swarming. Scorio flung his Shroud before them, knocking fiends back, only to drop it as Fyrona blasted them apart. On and on they ran, alternating this pattern, pursuit loud in their ears, till the tunnel opened into another great chasm running laterally before them, a seam between monumental boulders.
This time, however, they all saw the faint glimmer of light far ahead. Letting out a hoarse cheer, they crossed the gap, everyone crowding through Nyrix’s portal, and emerged on the far side to race around the curvature of a ledge and then run wearily along a high path that hugged the smooth boulder’s face toward the light.
They all used their Shrouds now to clear a path, simply angling their shields so that dropping fiends bounced out into the darkness or were shoved from their path by the tilt. On and on they ran, the brightness broadening, growing absolute, blinding, till they finally burst out and found themselves on a ridge of rock some eighty yards above the Telurian Band.
Gone was the bone white sand of the Bone Plains, and instead they gazed out over brackish lakes of metallic hues that stretched in broken links toward the horizon. Utterly opaque, their waters sat still as mirrors, reflecting the tumultuous sky, broken up only by sharp-edged rocks and shattered hills of rust and brass, cadmium yellow and slate blue.
Down below and to the right Great Souls were streaming out of a parting in the rock. Scorio felt his heart swell with relief, and with weary resolve he turned to the others.
“Go on. I’ll hold the entrance.” And so saying he summoned his Shroud for what he hoped was the last time before the crack through which they’d exited.
Nyrix nodded wearily, aimed his crossbow down at the rough terrain, and squeezed off a bolt. It flew, burning palely in the arid air, to splatter against the rocks.