Jim Butcher - Cold Days

We had reached a small chamber, the floor and walls lined in the same stone used in the lighthouse and cottage. I put a hand on them and could feel them quivering with power, with the dissonance of conflicting energies. Actually, looking back, I saw that at some point, the walls of the stairway, and the stairs themselves, had begun to be constructed of the same material—every single stone of it invested with impossible amounts of power and skill.

“Uh,” I said. “Question?”

Demonreach had stopped at a stone doorway shape in the wall. It was surrounded with larger stones covered in intricate carving. The burning eyes turned toward me.

“Um. Who made this place?”

It didn’t speak. It pointed to the door. I looked. There was a sign in the middle of it, a sigil. It wasn’t something I recognized as part of any set of runes that I knew, but I knew I’d seen it somewhere before. It took me several seconds of sorting through memories to run it down—I’d seen it on the spine of a very, very, very old journal on my mentor’s bookshelf.

“Merlin,” I said quietly. “That’s whose sign that is, isn’t it?”

Demonreach did not respond. Why say YES when silence will do?

I swallowed. The original Merlin was the real deal, Arthur and Excalibur and everything. Merlin had, according to legend, created the White Council of Wizards from the chaos of the fall of the Roman Empire. He plunged into the flames of the burning Library of Alexandria to save the most critical texts, helped engineer the Catholic Church as a vessel to preserve knowledge and culture during Europe’s Dark Ages, and leapt tall cathedrals in a single bound. There were endless stories about Merlin. Popular theory among contemporary wizards was that they were more apocryphal than accurate. Hell, I’d always figured it that way, too.

But staring around at this place, I suddenly felt less sure.

“WATCH.”

Demonreach stretched out one long arm, still shadowy and indistinct in the feeble light of my glow stick. It touched one of the stones framing the door, and the stone erupted into emerald light.

I hissed and shielded my eyes against it, and took note of the fact that the air suddenly crackled with power.

Demonreach touched a second stone, which also began to glow. When it did, the sense of building energy was palpable in the air, and the hairs on my arms began to stand up. That was when I got what was happening here: Demonreach had wards around whatever was beyond the door—much like the wards that had been put into position around Butters’s apartment. Only they had to be fueled with freaking mystic plutonium or something to generate this much ambient energy simply from being bypassed .

The giant spirit reached for another stone, but paused before touching it.

“REMEMBER.”

The stones. They were like a security keypad. Demonreach was giving me the combination to its security system. And given how much dangerous energy was in the air right now, it stood to reason that if I ever got the combination wrong, well . . . you’d need a bloodhound, a Ouija board, a forensic anthropologist, and a small army of Little Folk to find what was left of me.

I took careful note of which stones the spirit had indicated. Really careful note. Demonreach touched the last stone, and the granite doorway in front of us didn’t move, exactly—it simply stopped being there. The leashed violence in the air, that angry, watchful energy dwindled and vanished, and Demonreach moved forward through the doorway. I followed.

We emerged into a familiar cavern, and once again my chest lit up with phantom remembered pain.

It was surprisingly well lit, for a subterranean chamber. When I’d last been there, I hadn’t been in any shape to go over the details, but I could now see that several glimmering clusters of crystal in the floor, some kind of pale green quartz maybe, gave off a dim glow. No single patch of them really provided adequate illumination, but as a whole they filled most of the cavern with wan green-white light.

Roots burrowed down into the cavern through its ceiling, though I had no idea how in the hell they’d gotten there. No plant sent roots down as deep beneath the surface as this chamber. No normal, earthly plant did, anyway. Water dripped slowly down from above, and where it fell from the ceiling was where the patches of crystal lay.

Over to one side of the chamber was a hollowed-out section of soft earth no deeper than a very shallow bathtub, about seven feet long. I recognized it, even without seeing the withered vines that lay strewn forgotten all around the area. It was my sickbed, where my body had lain for months while Mab and Demonreach exerted themselves to keep the pumps working while my mind and spirit were doing a Casper impersonation.

My chest panged again and I looked away. Waking up from that particular nap had been one of the top two or three most painful moments of my life. Something inside me had changed. Not because of the pain of the experience—though that had been profound. Staring at that place, I felt as if the pain had been a side effect of a deeper and more significant shift in the way I thought of myself, saw myself, and how I should interact with my world.

Fire isn’t always an element of destruction. Classical alchemical doctrine teaches that it also has dominion over another province: change. The fire of my tribulations had not simply been pain to be endured. It had been an agent of transformation. After all that I’d been through, I’d changed.

Not for the worse, I was pretty sure—at least, not yet. But only a moron or a freaking lunatic could have faced the things I had and remained unfazed by them.

I blinked myself out of my reverie to find Demonreach watching me. There was something intense about its eyes.

“MEMORY,” it said, “REFLECTION.”

I frowned. “What do you mean?”

“THIS PLACE.”

I pondered that one for a minute. “Are you saying that I just went into an internal monologue because I came in here?”

Demonreach did not seem to feel a need to clarify. “MEMORY. REFLECTION.”

I sighed. “Well, if I ever need to mull things over, I know just where to go, I guess.” It was chilly in the cavern, and damp, and the air was thick with musty, earthy smells. I turned a slow circle, surveying the entire chamber. “What do you call this place?”

Demonreach said nothing and did not move.

“Right,” I said. “You don’t call it anything at all, I guess.” I scrunched up my nose, thinking. “What is this chamber’s purpose?”

“CONTAINMENT.”

I frowned. “Uh. Of what?”

“THE LEAST.”

“The least what ?” I asked, feeling exasperated.

Demonreach just watched me.

“Uh, Harry,” Bob said in a small voice. “Maybe you should look at the crystals?”

I glanced down at the skull, shrugged, and walked over to the nearest formation. I stood over it for a moment. It was a large clump, maybe twelve feet long and four or five across. And . . . and the shadows passing through the translucent crystals seemed to indicate that the floor beneath it had been hollowed out, much the same as my own recovery bed. In fact . . .

I frowned, leaning closer. There was a form beneath the crystals, an outline. The image of whatever it was got to me only after being refracted through multiple crystals, so it was awfully blurry, but I peered at it, trying to unfocus my eyes and look past it, the way you do those magic paintings at the mall.

The image suddenly snapped into disjointed clarity. The form beneath the crystal was a lean creature of basically human shape, maybe nine or ten feet tall and lithe, covered in shaggy hair of golden brown. Its arms were too long for its body. Its hands were too big for its arms. Its fingers were too long for its hands, and were tipped with vicious claws.