Interlude 2.E.4: Emma--Of Nadirs and Negations
Emma had followed the labyrinth of tunnels down from the forest. She'd been worried, at first, that her feet would freeze on the bare stone. She might as well not have. The meandering downwards warren of stone passageways had grown gradually warmer as she went. From bare grey moon-rock, the walls had slowly lightened to a strange pale off-white hue, where they weren't threaded through with veins and seams of metal, a silver so bright she was almost convinced it gave off its own light. Certainly it'd explain why she could still see, despite the surface being who knew how far or long a travel away at this point. At some point, hunger had come back, gnawing slowly on her insides like an old, dry piece of beef jerky or an old fingernail, left out on the dresser from where it'd been clipped. For the most part, she ignored it. She had to know. She had to see. Why was she here?
The further she went, the more the tunnels seemed to grow almost organic in their structure, and the increasing warmth, humidity, and fluid-organic contours of the walls made it hard to tell at first if the low, steady percussion she was hearing was real, just her own heartbeat, or some feature of this place. She realized it was real and not her own at the same time that she realized the veins in the walls really did give off their own light. She'd followed a narrow passage into a wide chamber, the entryway leading her into what seemed almost a colonnade of ceiling-to-floor stone columns with veins of that strange silvery metal almost flowing through them, but they were spaced far enough apart that shadows had pooled between them. With every pulse of the not-heartbeat of the place, the silvery-white moonlit glow in the traceries of metal intensified, pushing back the shadows before a strange kaleidoscopic not-light crawled in when the light ebbed. It made Emma uncertain, for as the unlit hues roiled through them, the veins on the walls seemed to slowly writhe before the waxing moonlight affixed them back into place once more. She tried rubbing her eyes and checking again, but she couldn't tell if it was a trick of the light or real.
It was somewhere in the midst of this vast cavern of towering stone pillars and innumerable passages that Emma first noticed something about the pillars themselves. Set into the very stone were a multitude of doors, all of varying sizes, shapes, and styles. Some were simple and rough-hewn, while others were intricately carved with filigree-work so fine she couldn't make out what it said without leaning until she was mere inches away from it. Some were person-sized or smaller, others so immense she suspected you could've float the tankers in the Boat Graveyard through them, if you managed to make them seaworthy again. That thought pulled another along behind it. As she thought of floating the rusted hulks of the Graveyard away, her mind made the connection, this ebb and flow of light and mad shadow was its own sort of tide. The light pulsing out stability and a sort of gravity before it ebbs away and the madness underneath rises only to be drowned again in a wave of silver strength. She didn't know why, but somehow Emma knew she'd stumbled across a very important idea with that. It had something to do with both the what and the why of this place, she suspected, that dance of madness and moonlight.
Further thought on the subject was forgotten a moment later, as what was unmistakably a voice echoed ever so faintly from far down the chamber, off out of sight in the clinging shadows beyond further columns. Though it stung her feet, still Emma ran. Recognizable or not, a voice meant a person, and a person might mean answers or a way back. Running despite the way it stung her bare feet, Emma hurtled through pools of shadow and reaching waves of light, seeking the source of the high, echoing voice. Past columns, around corners, she rushed on as the voice grew steadily clearer. Just as she grew nearer, however, she skidded to a stop up against one of the doors and took a moment to catch her breath.
Something in the timbre, the tone of that cold, airy voice gave her reason to pause. It wasn't the way the voice was too beautiful to be true, or the way it felt as compassionate and warm as shivering on the barren stone above had. No, what made her hesitate, what made her worry, was that it sounded, if not afraid, then at least concerned. Pulling away from the door she'd leaned against with a shudder as she noticed for the first time that the trails of madness ebbed back into the network of metal from the direction of the doors themselves, Emma crept around the portal-studded pillar, seeking to see who it was she'd been hearing.
Her first impression of them came in textures: silk and feathers, fluid and fluff. Feathered hair--like the cut, not like the cape singer Canary--and smooth silken cloth, over skin like polished, unblemished marble. After texture came color: bone and blood, milk and murder. Bone white shifting and saturating into a deep and bloody crimson at the tips was a bold look, to be sure. Emma was also sure she'd never seen
anyone carry a look even half so well as she--the figure before her had a lean grace whose femininity could not be denied--managed to pull this off. All the color bled into her form at edges and angles, at striking surfaces and endpoints. It was as though someone had dipped her hair in blood, or the hair had exploded from her head in a feathery burst of gore. At elbows, at knees, and at fingertips it bled back in, as if left there by fierce violence. Tufts of actual feathers at her elbows reinforced that impression. It combined with a sort of willowy, sinuous grace to remind Emma of nothing so much as a serpent waiting to strike or a bird of prey preparing to dive.
That last thought was when it occurred to Emma that the woman before her, the monster cape, she guessed, had actual, literal claws tipping her fingers, not merely long blood-red fingernails, but actual talons, wickedly curved and sharp as an eagle's. There was a hunger for violence there. An her eagerness to hurt someone, something that Emma had seen before. On Sophia's face in the field, on her own face when thinking of Taylor, on the gangers' faces when she--,
Emma shook the thought off. If she froze here, she'd not survive. What point would all her faking it have had if she didn't, in fact, make it in the end? No. That was unacceptable. So Emma returned her attention to the figures before her. It turned out there were two of them, Emma had just not noticed the shorter of the two for the brilliant and bloody boldness of the first one. Blood and feathers spoke with a less willowy woman patterned in a strange dappling or scaled silver-into-blue set of hues like some aquatic serpent or predatory fish. At rest she stood out less than her companion, but then Feathers asked her a question just as the moonlight pulse of the shadow-tide crashed into the room, and as Scales turned she cast off a cascade, a constellation of shimmering lights reflecting and dancing about the room.
It was beautiful. It was terrifying. It was almost enough to make Emma forget she was lost and alone in a strange place where reality seemed to blur at the edges. It was almost enough to make Emma forget the feral viciousness lurking in every single move the pair made.
Almost.
What it did succeed in making the redheaded girl do was to gasp, every so softly, as she remembered to resume breathing. Soft though her whisper of a breath had been, she knew immediately it was enough. She knew immediately it was too much. She couldn't
not know that, for in the instant she'd made the sound, both figures had turned--far faster than she'd have thought possible--and locked gazes--one silver-blue and dispassionate, the other blood-red and furious--upon her. Heart hammering in her chest, Emma wheeled and ran for the main corridor, not really thinking, just knowing she needed away from the pair. She ignored the cruel voices calling out at her in alien syllables yet familiar tones. "Stop!" or "Die!" or "Surrender!" or "Get her!" or the like. It didn't really matter which it was. They all added up to the same thing coming from so sinister a source, she was sure. And while she wasn't sure quite what it was she wanted, she knew it wasn't to die. She'd had too many chances to just let that happen already. Answers, maybe. But she did not want death. Not now.
Running was perhaps not the worst thing she could have done in that situation. She even managed to make it far enough from her starting spot that by the time Feathers caught her by the throat and lifted her up, she was able to slam her bodily against the next-pillar over from Emma's original hiding spot, letting the ornate bas-relief work on the metal door dig painfully into the bared skin off Emma's back and backside. Frantic, Emma clutched and kicked and struggled to claw and bite at the taloned arm that held her suspended and squashed against the metal madness-gate. It didn't accomplish much. Feathers tightened her grip fractionally and hissed something cold and hostile at Emma. Emma, meanwhile, was too preoccupied with trying and failing to draw in her next breath to even try understanding her cruel, clawed captor, much less to answer her.
It was just as Emma was starting to feel lightheaded and see her vision going vague at the edges that the cruel, elfin figure--the sort of terrible fair creature that even the Fairie Queen could only
try to evoke--loosened her grip enough for Emma to wheeze out a rasping, hacksaw series of coughing gasps for air. As she did so, she looked desperately around for something, anything to distract the pair--for Shimmer had followed, apparently at her leisure since her partner had so easily caught Emma--from their interrogation and possible execution of her.
She found it fairly quickly. She just wished she hadn't.
Behind her captors, back at the immense, silver madness-gate the two had initially been standing and arguing beside, a figure had stepped, nonchalant as you please, from the pooled shadows of madness. It was as if they oozed forth from the very substance of unreality the moment the silver light hit its lowest ebb. His cloak was made of the starless darkness of an empty night, his every move radiated amused and indolent malice, and in one hand, held over his shoulder at a jaunty angle, her bore a weapon of terrifying strangeness.
It wasn't a halberd like Armsmaster's, but that was the first thing that came to her mind. It was of a kind with one the same way different kinds of swords could be totally different and yet still be swords. This weapon was less like an axe-spear and more like a sword-spear-scythe thing. There was probably a word for it, but Emma had no idea what that might be. Whatever its kind was called, it was set on a haft the empty black of outer space, like a hole in reality more than a substance. The blade itself was more striking yet. It was a curl of cold, silver metal that at times glowed like the moon and at times faded into shadows and the innumerable, unnamable hues and shapes of madness, all in
the same rhythm as the veins in the walls. Whatever tide this place was attuned to? That blade was at least as tied to it, if not more. Emma would have bet anything, had she had anything to bet, on that fact.
Feathers must have seen something she could understand in Emma's expression, for she dropped her and spun, shrieking at the shrouded scythe man something that probably had a "No, don't!" or a "You madman!" in it somewhere. As fast as Feathers could move, the man moved faster. One moment, he was standing there smugly smirking at Feathers, the next she'd leapt for him, lightning-quick yet still too slow. Already, his weapon had waxed with dark, crawling madness before burning a bright, moonlit course through the air, through the door, through its wards, and through part of the floor as well, leaving a gaping rent in reality around which the two halves of the immense door collapsed with a floor-rattling slam. For a long and lingering moment, nothing further happened beside the light-tide rising to its high-water mark. Everything hung, as if suspended for long seconds. And then the light ebbed and something
else flowed into the places it had abandoned.
Roiling darkness and mad filth came boiling in out of the hole in reality, laying siege to what light remained. The very air seemed to crawl as some immense, gargantuan, reeking dead thing began to drag its oversized carcass through the sundered portal, one immense and misshapen limb covered in spiny digits or sub-limbs all grasping with a strength fit to sunder stone as it strove to drag itself through the breech in the sealed room, the cracks in reality tearing wider around the edges at the passage of the thing. Even as it started to move, Feathers shouted something to Shimmer then leapt upon the dead thing's part, claws rending and slashing into its not-quite-flesh.
Emma didn't get to see what happened next, for suddenly the shimmer-scaled monster cape was in front of her, snapping something in that strange language of theirs before gesturing in clear dismissal behind her.
Looking where Shimmer had pointed, Emma took in the unlit ramp or slide deeper into wherever this place was that had opened up at her feet at the gesture. When she turned to ask if there was a better path forward than falling down to snap her neck in the dark, she was interrupted by the cape roughly shoving her into a headlong tumble down the new tunnel. She squawked out a protest, but didn't manage much more than that before her world was motion, darkness, a sense of speed, and periodic pain as she fetched up against or bounced off of various rocks and walls of the steep tunnel.
Eventually, Emma's careening, caroming path bled off enough momentum that she rattled to a stop in a small island of broken glass. Trying to regain her equilibrium and her bearings, she noted it had grown light enough to almost see again. Well, mostly. She stared close, catching the reflection of a full moon off the glass beneath her. Eyes tracking the reflection to her source, she wondered how she even got outside, much less in an alley, surrounded by buildings, with a...dumpster blocking the far end of it. Several shadowed figures were proceeding her way from around the dumpster. Heart lurching, Emma tried to stand, to run, to get away, even if away was back to whatever that dead
thing had been, it had to be better than here.
Anything was better than here. The
Birdcage would be better than being back here.
She didn't get a chance. The moment she got her feet under her, they were roughly knocked back out from under her, and strong arms forced her face-first against the filthy, glass-studded alleyway.
