TIME August 14th (continuing) LOCATION Aboard the buried vessel, Borthanza
BACKGROUND:
The guardian beast was dead and Raven was back on her feet, but the corridor ahead – strobing light, slick organic walls, air gone humid and warm – made it very clear this wasn’t part of the temple any more.
WHAT HAPPENED
With Raven patched up enough to move, the stairwell up turned out to be choked with the same shell-like growth sealing every other exit – down was the only real option.
One door along the way was too strange to pass without a look.
A round iris hatch, prised open by hand into a domed chamber of dark, glistening purple, steps spiralling down in concentric rings toward a single large chair at the centre, a mass of thick, ropey tendrils descending through a hole in the ceiling and another in the floor, dripping steadily.
Nobody much fancied sitting in it.
Not interested, for now, they left it and carried on down toward a fainter, greener light two floors further below.
The stairwell ended at a column of blackish crystal, threaded through with silver flecks, punching down through the ceiling and into the floor of the room beyond – Krusha muttered something about warp cores and cryostasis, more out of habit than any real belief it meant anything here.
What they found in the room beside it looked uncannily like Sam’s own workspace back at the Section House – a long metal table, alchemical glassware, cylindrical tubes of dark, glistening material stacked against one wall.
And, hunched at a desk with its back to them, something that matched the pictographs on the door upstairs exactly.
Pale mauve flesh, a face of writhing tentacles, two colourless eyes that turned toward them without any visible urgency at all.
It asked, in a rasp that seemed to arrive directly inside their skulls rather than through the air, what year it was.
And with the question came a vision, uninvited, in all their minds at once: a clock, a bell, a tree in snow, the snow melting into budding leaves that grew, dropped, and died back to snow again, over and over, a rock circling a candle whose wax burned steadily down with every revolution.
Krusha answered without thinking – 999.
“What are you?”
he asked.
“Tired,”
it rasped back, and stood. It told them to move away, holding a metal urn with one clawed hand, tentacles writhing across its face.
Ash slipped out into the corridor rather than press the confrontation.
Krusha and Raven held their ground and paid for it – a psychic blast dropped both of them to their knees, a migraine and a freeze and a mustard-gas burn all at once behind the eyes. Krusha swung his mace twice and connected with nothing but air as the creature batted the strikes aside almost lazily.
Raven, pressing past to help, found a second one of the creatures slumped motionless face-down under a nearby table, whether dead or simply lost to whatever had been done to it here nobody stopped to check.
And turned back just in time to catch another wave of the same mind-searing attack alongside Krusha, both of them dropping their weapons to clutch their skulls in agony.