Chapter 390: 391: Journey through the underworld

Fresh flies across the landscape, leaning down against the front of the broomstick, holding on as tightly as she can, as she shoots through the colorless night, guided by the glow of the lantern.

She looks down at her hands, which fearfully clutch the shaft of the broomstick. The color has faded from them, just like it has from her sleeves, from the forest beneath herself, the trees of which are now all wrong. The straight, healthy pines that usually surround the city are now odd, crooked things that have twisted inwardly and around each other in some unnatural fashion, now more closely resembling a field of giant brambles, rather than a lush pine forest. But they too, like the odd blackness of the starless night itself, are colorless. The dead wood, covered in thick, pungent needles, is an odd tone of ashy gray, that the light of the lantern does little to alleviate.

Fresh can’t help but feel, the longer that she stares at the many trees beneath herself, that they’re turning and twisting, the forest shifting and changing, as if they were worms embedded into the surface of the ocean floor, waiting for something to swim close enough to grab, to latch onto and to drag down into the darkness below.

The broom lifts up higher, the lantern pulling away from the forest more and more. But never high enough to go into the sky, into where the clouds ought to be. Lifting her head, she looks that way too, but sees nothing. No stars, no clouds, no moon nor sun. There’s just nothing. It’s hard to pinpoint why, but she has a bad feeling about the sky as well. If she goes up there, she’s not going to come back out again. That ink, that total bleak, lightlessness… it’s more than just darkness. It’s the end, it’s the empty thing that comes after darkness.

The broom shoots through the night, the lantern guiding her, knowing which way to go and how to safely navigate this place.

Is the underworld supposed to look like this? Obviously, she doesn’t know. But she hopes so. She hopes that this… taint. This odd, spiritual realm, that looks like someone has crushed it with a thumb smeared in black ink, she hopes in a way that doesn’t make much sense, given the damage that she has caused over the world, that this place doesn’t look like it does because of herself.

She isn’t sure, but looking down over her shoulder, it almost looks like the trees behind herself, down there where the light can’t reach anymore, it looks like they’re parting blades of grass that somebody is stepping through in pursuit of her.

The broom flies faster.

The south.

The drowned bottom half of the world. From what she recalls hearing and reading about it, it was once, in the very distant past, where the great forest that has swallowed the entire continent originally stemmed from. The deep woods.

But, according to Basil, after that ancient war, the fertile ground that covered the entire continent not only gave nutrition for the world-tree to grow, but for an entire forest to sprout up in every section of nature outside of the four main cities.

Though, that was a very, very long time ago.

After that, the world supposedly became heavier and heavier over the duration of generations, because of the weight of the souls of the people who lived here, until eventually, the physical landmass itself sunk down into the spirit-world. Slowly at first, creating an odd quagmire with sections of forest half-drowned in black-water.

Thousands of people left and fled, migrating to the other cities. Used to forest-life, these people were unprepared to live in the larger, more ‘modern’ cities that the west, east and north were. These people, being entirely unprepared for city life, were often seen as naive or foolish, hence where the mocking phrase of being ‘from the south’ stemmed from, from the people of the other cities. It’s just an insult, a way to call people who don’t know any better stupid.

Worse still, it was said that, because of the merge of the worlds, that things, creatures, restless entities from the spirit-world were starting to rise to the plane of the living.

- Demons.

The holy church, in order to get this problem under control and to better fight it, began conducting their own experiments on these ‘undead’ people, going so far as to create their own, in order to learn about the process of demonic transformation. This was Jubilee’s fate. They were one of many.

She doesn’t know for sure, but she assumes that the almost supernatural man from the thieves’ guild, Patala, that he is one as well, a demon. There are likely others, many others, who have escaped and managed to keep their heads down low. But she understands now that Patala, in his desire for revenge against the world that wronged him, had found her as his tool of choice to get his payback.

Was Jubilee involved in this? Were they part of the plan too? Did they knowingly not only meet up with her, but guided, trained and conditioned her to help fulfill a plan to harm the world that they were a part of?

Most likely.

But Jubilee, forced to endure her presence for so long, actually really did end up becoming her friend and the entire plan of the thieves’ guild fell apart. Sort of. She supposes that the end result has been just about achieved either way. The goal of the thieves’ guild and the fountain both seem to have inadvertently aligned; the destruction of the world. At least this side of it. The fate of the other half is still unknown. But she hopes that it’s fine. It needs to be, for her escape-plan, after all.

Fresh looks over her shoulder, trying to see if anything is still following her. But she can’t make out anything in the murk.

The forest stops, giving way to a swampy, brackish landscape.

She turns her gaze back forward. The south. She’s here.

The broom hovers downward, flying through the trees of the swamp, guiding her now down lower, as there is apparently something in the air that needs to be avoided here. She doesn’t know what it could be, she doesn’t see anything up there. But there is a presence in the air, as if there were really something there in the darkness above the swamp.

Her eyes look up, looking through the arched branches of the swamp-wood trees.

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A giant, yellow eye hovers in the sky, staring back down her way. The body that it belongs to is indistinguishable from the rest of the darkness.

Fresh gulps, lowering her gaze, doing her best to look ahead and to not look back up a second time, because she has the feeling that if she does, that there are going to be many, many, many more eyes staring back this time.

The broom suddenly shoots to the left, ducking out of the way as a gust of wind swipes over her head.

She yelps, clambering down against the wooden shaft to not fly off as the lantern makes a rapid, sharp adjustment to their course, dodging something that she couldn’t see, but could feel.

Water splashes. Fresh looks over her shoulder, the wind rushing past her ears. Something disturbs the water behind them, splashing as if running after her. But there is nothing there, at least nothing that she can see.

She looks back ahead, focusing on the path through the swamp, doing her best to ignore the sound of the thing that pursues her, the thing with long invisible hands and arms that reaches for her, the thing that she can’t see, but she can feel.

It’s been a while now, half an hour maybe? An hour? She can’t tell, her sense of time feels off. She hopes that her friends aren’t worried.

The broom begins to slow down, rising up a little higher, just above the tree-line, but no higher than that. Something moves alongside her face.

“Hey. We’re almost there,” says a familiar voice.

Fresh tilts her head, strands of her hair dangling downward, looking at herself. It’s her double, the reflection she always speaks to. Of course, it’s hard to say if it’s exactly the same ‘person’, given that she looks exactly like herself, but the presence of the girl feels familiar, if that makes sense. “What are you doing here?” asks Fresh, trying to raise her voice so that she’s audible through the wind.

“Me?” asks the reflection. “I live here. What are you doing here?” asks the other Fresh, flying alongside her on a broom of her own.

“Oh, I wanted to talk to the other witches,” says Fresh.

“Aaaah, things are getting rough, huh?”

“Like you wouldn’t believe,” she sighs, looking back ahead of herself. “Do you really live here?” she asks. “It’s pretty scary.”

“Eh. You get used to it,” replies the reflection. “Once you figure out the rules, it’s pretty easy.”

“The rules?” asks Fresh.

“Yeah. You know,” replies the reflection. “The rules. But don’t worry about it. It looks like the lantern has everything under control.”

Fresh nods. “Yeah,” she says. “So, we’re almost there?”

“Just about,” replies the reflection. “Anyways, I gotta go,” she says. “The water stops here.”

“Huh?”

The reflection waves. “The water stops here. Good luck!”

Fresh blinks, the broom, which was faced sideways so she was hovering with her face above the water of the swamp, twists back upright and breaks through the clearing, coming out at the edge of what looks like a small settlement.

Fresh sighs in relief, turning her head around to stick her tongue out at thing that she can’t see. The thing that has pursued her since she left the house. The thing, the unseen presence, which stands there at the edge of the water, unable to take a step further for no other reason than because it just can’t. That’s just what the rules are.

It is what it is.

The broom flies into the settlement.

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