Chapter 67: 67. Narrow Corridor

Excerpt from Sivilyi’s ‘The Winged Sage’s Proverbs.’

“The nature of living is to define meaning from the meaningless.”

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“... Valkh?”

An edge of panic crept into Yenna’s voice. Valkh stared into the distance, her pupils wide and dilated. 

“Totality is expressed as the sum of all things between the beginning of the word and the end of the word.” Valkh continued to ramble, her voice distorted slightly by the swelling in her cheek. “At the zenith of time, when infinity elapses at the junction between the inner self and the outer self, the word finds the end at its beginning, forever. Free will crumbles to insignificant rounding errors in the enormity of the totality of the word–”

“Valkh!” Yenna shook her, a bit harder than she intended to. “Valkh, snap out of it! Focus on my voice!”

The researcher continued mumbling, nonsense words spoken in flat monotone, read off a script. Looking closely, Yenna realised that Valkh’s eyes were darting back and forth in miniscule measures, observing something so enormous that one needed to ensure they had the entirety of it in their sight. Yenna bit her lip and suppressed a small whine—one thing at a time, yeah?

Yenna called forth her dagger and cut through the last of Valkh’s bindings. The lizardly woman straightened out, stretching her limbs—something so thoroughly normal, contrasted by the incessant, maddening murmuring.

“It was once that the word wasn’t there, but the existence of the word predates the word, returns to the origin and goes back, ensuring that the word was, is, and will be, always.”

“Valkh, I don’t know if you can hear me, but I really need you to focus. There’s something in your head… I think.”

Yenna could feel her arms shaking, a small crackling of electricity up her spine threatening her with the consequences of giving into terror. She grabbed Valkh by the hands, carefully stood herself up and pulled the researcher up to her feet. The mage had expected it to be difficult—Valkh was rather heavy, after all—but the ease of it nearly threw her balance off. Valkh hadn’t resisted, or remained dead weight—instead, she had rather handily cooperated in standing up. The researcher still stared blankly at nothing, but she was standing on her own power.

“Okay…” Yenna let loose a sigh of relief—she wouldn’t have to carry Valkh out of here. “Okay, Valkh? I’m… I’m going to try and help you, okay? Can you understand me? Nod, or take my hand or… something?”

“By knowing the word we become it, but we are already less than the stroke of a letter of the word, inside it unknowing.” The woman did not make any sign of understanding.

Reaching out with her magic sense, Yenna attempted to make a diagnosis. Valkh appeared to her as most people did through that sense—tiny flickering lights that disturbed the magic in the air, a shell at her core around what most agreed was likely the soul. However, the flow of magic was reacting strangely to Valkh’s head. Motes and strands of potential energy washed over her as usual, only to become suddenly drawn into an unusual eddy. A tiny whirlpool, a loop of fluid magic with no beginning or end.

This phenomenon drew to mind the frozen mass of magic within the still realm, back in Hilbar. It was the only way magic could properly be still without stagnating, by repeating a perfect loop with no beginning or end. Cutting the loop would be easy—forcing a small wave of disruptive magic through this whorl would realign the currents, back to the regular flow. The problem was, what effect would that have on Valkh’s mind?

Without her usual suite of tools, Yenna couldn’t be entirely sure if the whirlpool in Valkh’s head was the cause of her unusual state or merely a symptom. If it was the former, cutting it would likely snap her free—the shattering of an enchantment over her mind, bringing the dreamer back to the waking world. If it was the latter, washing it away might break some subtle balance, and wash Valkh’s mind away with it. There could be any of a number of reasons why this had happened, and what was causing it—Yenna recalled the armoured figure performing some magic on her, though her mind had intentionally expunged the memory of any details.

“Agh, if I knew what spell was cast, I could– wait, the memory is…?” Gone? Yenna thought about that for a moment, traced back through the ledger of her memory, through the haze of panic and fear and pain. She was aware that the armoured figure had cast a spell, but her mind had made an extremely specific edit—the shape of the spell circle, the detail of its contours and connections, all of that had been erased. It was the paranoia of mages before Yenna’s time to train this kind of protection, designed to snap oneself out of a dangerously recursive enchantment. The armoured figure had employed a very cruel kind of magic—a cognitohazard.

Cognitohazards were a very specific—and highly illegal—branch of mental enchantments, symbols and patterns that were so dangerous to the minds of living beings that it caused them to shut down, destroy themselves or become trapped in a dangerous loop. Even knowing what they looked like was a problem, which was why even the riskiest of records detailing them had only vague descriptions. Putting together the full image in one’s mind could often be enough to trigger the threat of cognitohazard once again, which was exactly why Yenna’s mental discipline had chosen unconsciousness and forgetfulness over the alternative—cognitive oblivion.

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Without knowing exactly what kind of symbol affected Valkh, Yenna couldn’t do much for her. Her knowledge of cognitohazards ended with the bare overview, and the training to avoid falling prey to them. Yenna’s best guess was that the vortex of magic around her head was a side-effect, the impressionable energy caught in the same loop that Valkh’s mind was. Unwilling to attempt unguided mental recovery in the midst of a jailbreak, Yenna simply hoped that she could coax the woman to follow her to safety.

Taking Valkh’s hand, Yenna made for the stairs. It was awkward, the tall kesh having to bend her spine forward slightly to reach, but the diminutive woman complied without fuss. Valkh still seemed to be aware of obstacles, of how to move her feet when guided in a direction—a heartening retainment of faculties, a sliver of hope for a full recovery. Yenna took that hope and crystallised it into courage as she began to ascend the steps.

That crystal of courage shattered instantly at the cold weight of logistics. Yenna’s quadrapedal body and narrow hooves were not built for steep, narrow staircases—the mage suspected that even a kesh would have trouble with these. They look almost too small even for Tirk! Oh, I do hope everyone else is okay.

Pulling Valkh and ascending the steps were two mutually exclusive options, and she wasn’t about to attempt to climb them backwards. A slightly demeaning alternative presented itself, a way to extend Yenna’s grip without having to spend her concentration on a spell—Yenna tied a section of rope around one of Valkh’s wrists, long enough to extend behind her. With the rope held in one hand and her dagger in the other, Yenna carefully ascended the staircase.

Yenna shuffled up slowly, using one of her elbows to steady herself against the wall, the awkward height of the tunnel forcing her into a thoroughly precarious balance as she leaned her upper body down. To her immense relief, the staircase quickly opened up to a small landing, flat ground with a roof Yenna didn’t have to duck under. Carefully tugging Valkh up the steps, Yenna observed her surroundings.

They were in a corridor, the walls windowless brick, the air bearing the tell-tale scent of earth—they were likely still underground. The corridor extended several paces in either direction, lit at regular intervals by wall-mounted lanterns similar to the one in the round room below. Each direction the corridor took a sharp turn, entirely occluding what lay beyond. The tap of Yenna’s hooves on the stone floor felt as though she was knocking on the door to Death itself—Valkh’s quiet murmuring, echoing in the tight chambers, might as well have been a plea for Death to take them¹.

Yenna paused, the tips of her pointed ears pricking up to listen for any clues—the location of an exit, of her friends, of her captors. Valkh’s mumbling was incessant, a constant distraction that tore at Yenna’s frayed focus. Every word she said carried the promise of some legible, interesting information, never a phrase repeated. Yenna gritted her teeth in frustration and forced herself to tune it out. Down the hall to the left there was the faint sound of metal on stone, gentle sounds muffled by something decidedly more liquid—an underground water source perhaps, dripping and trickling.

To the right however was a far more interesting source of noise, the sound of a distant argument. The words were muffled by distance and angles, the sound barely reaching Yenna’s ears by way of the echo off the stone walls. Two voices, deep and low, not quite shouting but definitely not happy. Even with the vaguest notion of tone, Yenna could tell that it was a fairly one-sided affair—one voice, sharp and mocking, clearly had control of the situation, while the other rough, infuriated speaker barely restrained themself. The second voice was so familiar, though she had never known its owner to speak with such deep rage—it was almost certainly Narasanha. Yenna’s heart fluttered with delight, for all manner of reasons she didn’t have time to fully unpack.

Taking Valkh by the hand again, Yenna stepped as carefully as she could down the corridor to the right. The last thing she wanted was the click of her hooves alerting some hidden guard, or a misplaced step activating a concealed security measure. She swept the area ahead of her with great care, following along with her eyes—there was definitely magic in the walls, enchantments Yenna didn’t recognise, but nothing that looked like a trap. It took her nearly a minute to walk the handful of metres to the end of the corridor, to peer around its corner. Yenna didn’t want to risk setting off any magic-detecting alarms by casting scrying spells, so she pressed her hands gently against the edge of the wall and leaned her head around.

Iron bars, sturdy but mundane, blocked the path forward. A staircase to one side curled up and out of sight, lit only by a dim light up above. Yenna, spotting no guard or trap, moved to check the bars for some way to move them—only to stop short, just shy of touching it. The inside of each metal bar pulsated with internal energy, a magical conduit transforming the bars from simple obstruction into a deadly livewire. Being near it wasn’t safe, and Yenna shuddered to think of what might have transpired had she touched it. The magical inscriptions weren’t etched into the outside of the metal but somehow embedded within the iron itself, a feat Yenna was starting to understand was something of a specialty of the Cult of the Word. It was difficult to do, but it also meant that Yenna couldn’t simply read the spell and fashion a counter—she would have to either guess at the spell’s facets, or take a louder, more violent approach.

“Oh?”

A tiny sound, the warm surprise of the host of unexpected but welcome guests, echoed down the narrow corridor. The suddenness of the sound made Yenna squeak in surprise, an undignified noise escaping her lips as she whirled about to confront the speaker. It was the withered yolm, one of the few Yenna had seen stepping through the portal before she lost consciousness. His demeanour and posture had all the bearing of a kindly old man, a friendly figure that might have a fascinating story or two to tell—his appearance rather marred that image.

Slightly shorter than Yenna, his withered appearance resembled desiccated fruit far more than the weathering of old age. He wiped long, clawed hands with tiger-like stripes on the front of his stained apron, and adjusted a pair of tiny, gold-rimmed spectacles back up to his stony, grey eyes. The man looked like a stiff breeze would knock him down, and he seemed equally as sorry that it hadn’t—his hunched shoulders and drooping eyebrows a constant apology for merely being, the thin remnant of a shattered horn seeming for all the world as though he had broken it off himself in repentance. It took a moment for Yenna to process that his apron was dripping slowly with fresh blood, light red over the ancient stains of many encounters with the substance.

A tense moment passed. Yenna, frozen in place, was stunned by the man’s sudden appearance. Valkh’s constant muttering didn’t falter, nor did she even look at the yolm. The man with the tiger-like claws waited as though expecting some answer or response, the patient look of a man awaiting an explanation. When he spoke, Yenna’s blood ran cold as ice.

“I really must ask you to wait your turn. I’ve only just finished with my first subject.”

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¹ - Death as an entity is portrayed in many cultures as either an enigmatic, inscrutable character or a very straight-forward one. Even in Aulpre, folklore persists through the general populace’s devoted atheism—to a kesh, Death is a very real being who the living can never see. It exists beyond a metaphorical door, and the knocking of one’s final acts causes the door to open and allow one in to meet Death. Some individuals claim that Death can even be reasoned with—that pleas of promised good deeds, great accomplishments and proffered gifts may convince the unseen, unheard entity to keep its door shut tight.