Cory Herndon - The Fifth Dawn

“And showed up on the mountain with a pack of goblins,” Glissa said.

Raksha nodded. “A few months after I’d entered the tangle, I encountered Ghonthas while tracking a vorrac. The human had been wounded by a pack of kharybdogs, but she recognized me. She remembered everything Vektro knew, including the length of Memnarch’s hibernation, the Miracore, and the part you were bound to play. And you’ve confirmed everything she told me. That cannot be a coincidence.”

“What made you believe her?” Glissa asked. “A dying human wandering in the woods?”

“She knew things,” Raksha said. “Things about you. The story you told at the trial did not fall on deaf ears.” He flicked his ears in leonin embarrassment. “And perhaps I believed her because my heart wanted it to be true. It gave me hope.”

“Well, it’s a start,” Glissa said.

Glissa awoke to the sound of Raksha putting on another kettle of homebrew. He offered the elf girl a simple meal of fruit and jerky, which they ate in silence. Neither spoke as they filled their packs with a two-day supply of food. Even Geth remained quiet.

“The journey down the lacuna will take the rest of the day,” Raksha said when they had finished packing, breaking the spell of silence and anxiety. “That will give us the night to reach Memnarch. Will that gemstone of yours work for me too?”

“I think so,” Glissa said. “Bruenna said it had an infinite charge.” She pushed back her tunic sleeve and held the blue stone up for him to see. “Here, try it. Just put a finger on it, then say ‘Fly, fly, fly.’”

“Clever,” the leonin rumbled. “I really must speak thusly?”

“It’s simple,” Glissa replied. “Easy to remember. Stop stalling, your Kha-ship.”

Raksha placed a fingertip on the gem. “Fly, fly … fly.”

The leonin floated a few inches off the ground, as if blown by a gentle breeze. “Amazing!” he said and cautiously floated about the room. “Forget what I said, we can get to the interior in about an hour.”

“We should still be on the move,” Glissa said. “I’d rather have a chance to peek around the corner before we walk in. Ghonthas didn’t say that would ruin everything, did he?”

Raksha did an experimental loop, and a stalactite nearly took his head off. “What?”

“I said we should get moving, and you should be careful,” Glissa said. She hung the Miracore around her neck and tucked it under the leather jerkin, then slung Geth onto her back, eliciting brand new insults as she cinched up the strap. “Are you ready, Raksha?”

Raksha slowly descended from the high ceiling. “Let’s go,” he said and patted his belt to make sure his longknife was still there.

Glissa placed a clawtip on the blue stone and said, “Fly, fly, fly.” Together, they floated out of the cave.

The second major attack against Krark-Home came just as the suns went down on the fourth day and the battlefield fell into blackness. The few scattered stars in the sky provided little light to fight by, but Bruenna had been impressed with how quickly Yshkar scrambled to troops. Jethrar’s unit had joined six other detatchments of leonin warriors and half again as many goblins. The goblins seemed excited about something and were talking animatedly, but she didn’t have time to ask them why.

Fortunately, their enemies glowed in the dark. Finding them wouldn’t be a problem. Seeing her environment and her allies would present a greater challenge. She’d been saving her strength for more aggressive magic, but at the moment they needed light more than energy bolts. Bruenna whispered a few arcane words and described a symbolic pattern in the air, calling up a silvery blue aurora that materialized in the night sky.

As if cued by the light, a dozen aerophins broke in one direction, while a pack of eyeless, bat-winged nim shriekers dove in the opposite. Bruenna’s well-trained zauk squawked in challenge and stood its ground as a pair of shriekers dropped on her from above. She thrust her sword into the sky and twin spheres of crackling blue-white energy flew from the blade, each one homing in on a shrieker and encasing it in writhing worms of electricity before they plummeted, smoldering, to the ground. She kicked the zauk’s flanks and charged into the fray.

Bruenna didn’t have time to cast a spell before the next attack came: twin streams of silver fire that slammed into the ground behind her and threw up shards of hot iron that struck her zauk’s haunches. The bird bolted.

Rather than attempt to regain control of the terrified animal, the mage released the reins, wished the bird luck, and quickly conjured another flight spell, rising from the zauk’s back just before it disappeared beyond the edge of the blue aura that covered the field.

Bruenna felt back in her element, but it wasn’t hers alone. She wove through the swarming constructs and nim, striking with her sword where she could and sent more bolts of deadly magic singing through the air.

The Neurok mage heard explosions below and saw a trio of aerophins flying in a tight formation, scattering the forward defensive lines with energy bolts. As the goblins and leonin ran for cover, they ran into the waiting claws of a line of nim lashers, where they were easy pickings.

Bruenna summoned another energy bolt and wondered how much longer Krark-Home could possibly hold out.

“That’s not good,” Glissa whispered.

“No, definitely not,” Raksha agreed.

They had reached the end of the lacuna without further incident, and pulled up short as agreed. They had crawled the last few yards on hands and knees, and now sat crouched at the lip of the exit.

Glissa had forgotten how dazzling the blazing mana core was after the long, dark descent through the lacuna. And now, the light was reflected from a thousand different silver surfaces that comprised…something. Glissa truly had no idea what she was looking at. Just that it was huge, as big as the interior itself.

The rebuilt Panopticon was still in place. The massive round disk with the hole in the center sat directly below them, attached to the towering structure at roughly midpoint. But other than that, Glissa didn’t recognize anything.

The crystalline mycosynth towers were gone, leaving most of the interior surface smooth except for scattered shrubbery. In their place, millions, maybe billions of silver needles-the mirror images of those that littered the surface-pointed from the interior surface directly at the core. Five enormous buttress-like structures, each as big around as all of Taj Nar and also a gleaming silver, were mounted to the inside of Mirrodin like gigantic parodies of the needles. They ended not far from the core, where they held the most amazing part of the bizarre structure in place: a skeletal spheroid made up entirely of interlocking pentagonal rings. The mesh completely encased the core.

Glissa cast her gaze back down to the ground, and saw that it was still crawling with billions of small, scuttling constructs. Amongst them walked, crawled and flew much larger construct-beasts, all heavily armed but so far seemingly unaware of her and Raksha’s presence.

That was about to change. Four columns of marching steel centipedes were scuttling right for them, undulating over their kin like quicksilver ribbons. It seemed that Raksha’s prediction about Viridia’s fate was coming true all too soon.

They ducked back into the lacuna, out of sight. “We need a plan, fast,” Glissa whispered.

“Doesn’t change anything,” Raksha said.

“There’s an army about to march in here!” Glissa almost shouted.

“No one sends an army against two people,” Raksha said. “Those are reinforcements or scouts. Trust me, they will ignore us.”