Elizabeth Haydon - Prophecy - Child of Earth

A solid wall of newly fallen rock blocked the passageway ahead of them. Achmed ran his hands over it desperately, then pointed off to the side. A tiny opening beneath heavy stone slabs was the only break in the wall.

Quickly Rhapsody sheathed her sword, dropped to the ground, and crawled into the hole, breathing in the bitter dust as she did. The broken fragments of basalt ripped through the fabric of her trousers and the skin of her hands as she pulled herself through to the other side, then immediately began clearing as much of the debris as she could from around the hole.

A moment later, Achmed’s head appeared, his face contorted in pain. His shoulders caught as he struggled through, wedging him in the hole. With great effort he pulled himself back again, then reached an arm through first. Rhapsody grabbed his hand and pulled, bracing herself against the rockwall with one foot. She could feel the crack of the bones in his hand and shuddered.

“Pull harder,” Achmed mumbled, his face in the gravel of the floor.

“Your ribs—”

“Pull harder” he growled. Rhapsody set her teeth and repositioned her foot once more, then pulled with all her strength. A sickening popping vibrated through her hands, and she heard the intake of breath as Achmed swallowed the sound of agony. His head and shoulders emerged. Rhapsody slid her hands under his armpits and tugged again, hauling his upper body free of the hole and striping his back with streaks of blood as it grazed against the jagged rocks of the floor. A moment later he was free, clutching his broken ribs, and she helped him rise. They exchanged a quick nod, then turned and ran up the passageway again.

They scrambled over a pile of broken granite that had once been the great archway, the shattered words of the inscription now littering the ground in mute testimony to the wisdom they had once held. The Sleeping Child was no longer within their sight. Achmed’s foot slipped as he reached the summit of the mound and wedged in a crevasse. Rhapsody pulled it out before following him over the hill.

Before them yawned the tunnel opening to the Loritorium.

“Can you see the Earthchild?” Rhapsody gasped. Achmed shook his head, then rapidly descended the hill, running until he reached the smooth marble of the Loritorium floor.

The flame of the firewell was twisting brightly in its fountain, casting grim shadows around the streets and over the silent buildings. Rhapsody ran to the central square where the cases that housed the elements stood, then stopped and exhaled in relief. The Sleeping Child was standing there, near the altar of Living Stone, eyes still closed. The Sleepwalker.

Rhapsody slowed her gait and walked toward the tall figure as quietly as she could, taking care not to frighten her. The Earthchild ran her hands blindly over the altar of Living Stone, then turned slowly. She sat down on the top of the slab and then lay back, crossing her arms over her waist, resuming the position in which she had once rested on her catafalque. The shadows from the firelight illuminated her face, relaxing into a peaceful countenance, as they danced over her. She let loose a deep sigh.

Then, as Rhapsody stared in astonishment, the body of the Sleeping Child seemed to become liquid and began to shift and expand. Her chest and head glistened, then glowed with a light of their own. The flesh of her long, stone-gray body became translucent, gleaming in the flickering light from the firewell, then stretched in an absurd dance, twisting hypnotically, grotesquely, in earth-colors more intensely beautiful than Rhapsody had ever seen, a multiplicity of subtle shades of vermilion and green, brown and purple. Like bread dough being kneaded , she thought as the child’s abdomen elongated, then distended upward. Ethereal bread dough .

An acrid odor shattered her reverie and snapped her to awareness. Rhapsody turned away from watching the transformation the Child of Earth was undergoing to see Achmed raking his sword through the slender channels of the Loritorium’s street lamp system, as if driving a herd of small animals within the narrow arteries. The blistering odor brought water to her eyes and nose, and panic flashed through her as she recognized the smell.

He had unplugged the stone dam of the lampfuel. She looked behind him to see it was gushing from the reservoir, running in a great corpulent river from the center of the square to the tunnel into the Colony, filling the streets and pooling dangerously close to the firewell.

“Gods, what are you doing? ” she cried. “Get away from there! It will ignite!”

Achmed continued to drag the blade through the channels, directing the thick ooze back to the halfwall closest to the tunnel leading back to Ylorc.

“That’s the idea.” He turned and stared at her as he shook the thick liquid from his sword and sheathed it again. “How else do you propose to kill the vine? You said yourself that fire cauterizes it. It’s already tapped into the power of the Axis Mundi, in case you couldn’t tell. If we don’t cut if off, burn it into oblivion here, now, that root will eventually reach all the way down to the other Sleeping Child.” He slammed the plug back into place and stared at her again. His mismatched eyes glittered ominously in the shadowlight. “Light it.”

“We can’t yet,” Rhapsody answered, feeling suddenly cold. “Grunthor and the Grandmother are still in there.”

Achmed nodded behind her, and she whirled around. The Sleeping Child’s body had become incongruously distended, swollen out of all proportion. An oblongated peninsula of earth-flesh grew large, stretching vertically, then horizontally. It surged upward in a smooth rolling motion, as if dividing itself, and rose to a monstrous height. The section made a final, twisting turn and then separated from the body of the child, now lying, significantly smaller and motionless, on the Living Stone slab.

The glowing light of the newly separated piece dimmed into the color of stone, then warmed before her eyes into gray-green skin, oily and hidelike. Instant by instant it took on a more delineated shape, taking on human lines where a moment before it had been a formless mass. Rhapsody’s eyes widened.

“Grunthor!”

The giant exhaled and stumbled forward, catching himself by clutching the altar of Living Stone. “ Hrekin ,” he muttered weakly.

Rhapsody started toward her friend, only to feel a viselike grip around her upper arm. She looked up into the eyes of the Firbolg king, burning with a fury hotter than the flames of the firewell. He pointed to the trail of lampfuel, a liquid fuse from the firewell into the darkened cavern of the Colony.

“It wouldn’t have mattered if he had been in there still. There’s no other choice anymore. Now light it.”

Rhapsody shuddered at the all-consuming anger in Achmed’s eyes, the hallmark of the unquenchable racial hatred his half-Dhracian nature held for the F’dor and all their minions. It was an animus that no love, no friendship, no rational thought could sway or defuse when it was in full rampage. “The Grandmother is still in there,” she said haltingly. “Would you leave her to die with it?”

Achmed stared down at her a moment longer, then closed his eyes and let the path lore he had gained in the belly of the Earth loose. His inner sight sped through the pale marble streets, following the flood of lampfuel through the hole in the earth-dam they had crawled under, over the broken walls and slabs of shattered stone that had once held the last colony of his kind. His mind flew over the crumbled archway and its scattered words, under the twisting vines and rootlets writhing with mounting strength. Even where he stood in the streets of the Loritorium he could smell the stench of the F’dor growing, see the clay of the Earth shuddering as it prepared to give way.