Chapter 10: Chapter 10 – ADVICE

The Gargoyle glanced back at me, lashing its tail back and forth. “We can try to push past it and make a run for it, but I don’t think I can hold it off for long.”

I looked him over—he didn’t seem to be in great shape. One of his wings, where the spider had gotten a bite, was leaking trails of shimmering golden blood between the shards of broken feathers. The glow around that injured area had faded somewhat, as well as on his left upper arm where the spider had pinned him.

“Are you… gonna be okay?” I asked. “What happens to you when the dragon gets hurt?”

“The dragon keeps the wounds until they heal over time,” Huang said. “My human form will be fine—but that’s not going to help us much right now.”

“How long does it take for something like this to heal?” I tried, hoping that it would be something like a few hours.

“Days, weeks…” The Gargoyle shrugged, then flinched at the pain. “He heals fast, but not that fast.”

“Okay,” I said, forcing myself not to panic. “There’s gotta be a way out of this.”

“Sorry. I let my guard down on this one,” Huang said, still keeping a careful eye on the spider. I could barely see the shape of the monster, only the barest shadow of its body lying flat on the ceiling. Urgh. “I should have realized something like this could happen. I was too confident.”

“Trust me—if there was any way we could have known there were giant, horrible spiders down here, I would not have come,” I said. I moved toward the concrete wall that marked our dead end, exploring with my spatial sense for anything that could help us: an area we could break through, maybe.

“There’s just so much we don’t know about this place. I forget that,” Huang continued as I searched. “What is this dimension, why is it here? What are these demons doing here? What does the Grey City want with us?”

“You made it sound like you had it figured out before,” I said absently, focusing on my task. The concrete wall was several feet thick and there were no structural weaknesses to be found.

“Well, I thought I did, more or less,” Huang admitted. “I guess I sort of felt that the Grey City was on my side, you know? I know how that sounds, but there’s obviously some system of fair play here. If it wanted to draw us in here to be killed by demons, then it didn’t have to give me this form to fight back. I’m stronger than… than most of them.”

“This is the first one that got the drop on you?” I asked. Judging by the strain in his voice, he was starting to freak out, and somehow that was making me calmer.

“It’s the first one that’s actually outmatched me, yeah,” he said. “I’ve lost fights before, but mostly because I didn’t know what I was doing. And that was a while back. This is… different. It sort of feels like we’re in a level of a video game we’re not equipped to beat, you know?”

“I didn’t realize this was such a game to you,” I muttered, placing my hand on the wall. It seemed like there was something interesting in the upper corner where it met the ceiling.

“It’s not,” he said sharply, “I’m just trying to figure out what this means. If there are demons here that are stronger than me… the Grey City is having me face something I can’t win against. And I didn’t think that was its goal.”

“You’re so sure that the City itself is doing all this stuff—what makes you think there isn’t a person pulling strings somewhere in this?” I suggested, taking a step back.

“Just another feeling I had, I guess,” Huang admitted. “It has to do with my life sense, actually. This place… the dimension itself—I can sense it a little. I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s alive, but it doesn’t seem like a stretch to me to say it might be autonomous.”

“Can you come back here?” I asked.

“I’d better stay here in case the spider tries to get in again,” Huang said.

“Ordinarily, I’d agree, but I think I found our way out.”

The Gargoyle took a hesitant step back. The spider remained planted on the roof. “Really? What did you find?”

I pointed up to the ceiling. “You see these bits of scaffolding? There’s a small gap up there, just big enough to crawl through. It lets out into another tunnel.”

“I can’t believe it,” Huang said. “That’s… really lucky.”

“Well, I’m not about to look a gift horse in the mouth, so boost me up there quick,” I said, gesturing to where I’d been able to sense the gap at the intersection of the wall and ceiling. It was blending into the shadows so well that, without my sense, it would have been impossible to spot. Even with the sense, it had been hard to find amid so many other textures and shapes.

“Okay. Be careful, we don’t know if it’s dangerous.”.

As Huang moved toward the wall to help me, the spider shifted. We both froze, but it settled down a moment later.

Huang made his way toward me slowly, step by step. The spider remained still. Just how intelligent were these things? Could it know about the small passageway on the ceiling, or would it simply lie in wait for us to go back out the only exit it could see?

“Alright, climb up,” Huang said, lowering a wing next to me. I grimaced and placed a boot on the part I figured would be the least delicate, but I needn’t have worried. The Gargoyle may have appeared birdlike, but there was a heavy solidity to it that made it clear I wasn’t going to do any damage.

I climbed up onto his back, then shakily stood and reached for the ceiling. I couldn’t see it, but I could clearly sense the square-shaped passageway just above me. I managed to hook my elbows onto it and pull myself up onto a short ledge.

Alright, this was going to be difficult. There was barely enough room inside the crawlspace to turn around, but I managed to wiggle myself around on the ledge until I faced outward, then reached a hand down the wall.

“Okay, go human and I’ll pull you up,” I said.

The Gargoyle shot a glance behind it, toward the spider. “Maybe I should stay.”

“Huang.” I said flatly. “First of all, it won’t do you any good. Second of all, it’s not going to do me any good if I can get into the next tunnel, but I don’t have a dragon to kill the demons for me. Understand?”

He hesitated, but nodded, then suddenly shone brightly with light as he switched back to his human form. Huang was tall, but the wall was about nine feet high and it wasn’t going to be easy to get him up.

Behind us, there was a terrible noise as the spider darted away, then leapt at the narrow tunnel. I swore under my breath and caught Huang’s arm, trying to haul him up. He was able to walk partway up the wall, but with no purchase except for my hand he quickly fell back.

“It can’t get to us,” I hissed, trying to pull Huang up again. This time he managed to get one hand up to the ledge, and I caught his other wrist as well as I could. I started to scoot backward into the tunnel.

“It’s getting in!” Huang shouted, and I pulled again with all my strength. I felt him catch his own weight on the ledge as the scraping of the spider’s legs on the side of the tunnel drew near. Without the Gargoyle to deflect it, it looked like it was going to be able to squeeze its way after us.

“Come on, come on!” I panted, crawling backwards.

My spatial sense identified Huang coming in right after me and—unbelievably—the spider already approaching the wall beneath our tunnel, reaching up toward us. I crawled backwards as fast as I could, scraping my hands and knees on the concrete. My sense showed that we were almost on the other side—

I fell backwards out of the tunnel and landed, only a few feet below the passage, on my ass. On cold snow. Multi-coloured light was flooding my vision and I groaned, covering my face.

“Get out of the way!” Huang shouted. I rolled to the side and heard his feet hit the snow beside me, so I forced my eyes open to look around.

We were back in the real world. The relief was so great I almost started crying. Of all the ways to die, that one would have been among the worst. We’d made it out.

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“Jeez,” Huang said, sitting down on the snow next to me. “That was…”

We had emerged in an area I knew, down the street from my apartment. The hole we’d both just tumbled out of was a small gap in a nearby wall where the bricks had crumbled. Someone had put a few boards over it while leaving a roughly square-shaped gap. It couldn’t have been deeper than a few feet. I shook my head.

“I can’t believe we got out of that,” I said. I still felt strangely calm, but my voice was shaking. “That was the worst experience of my life.”

“It was not fun,” Huang agreed, which I had to say was the understatement of the century.

I laughed weakly and flopped onto my back in the snow, staring up at the night sky crossed with power lines.

“Hey,” Huang spoke up again, “You having a panic attack or something?”

I let out a long sigh, then propped myself back up to look at him. “No. You?”

“No. I’m fine.” He hesitated. “I feel like we should be, though, after that. Something’s wrong with us.”

“You got that right,” I groaned. My heart was still pounding like crazy: I knew there was no way the spider could follow us into this world, but some animal instinct was still screaming that there was a predator on the other side of this wall. I scowled up at the building: it was a Laundromat.

“I guess… um…” Huang got to his feet and brushed the snow off of himself, jostling the cotton nose of Rudolph on his dumb sweater. “I guess we just go home?”

“We need to come up with another plan. We need… I don’t know, there has to be another way…” I swallowed. “Huang, when we re-enter—is it going to drop us right where we left off?”

Huang shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know. Even if it doesn’t, we have to go back underground anyway, don’t we? Or risk it at the Waterfront.”

We tried, for a few minutes, to work out some kind of plan, but we were both exhausted, afraid, and soon also quite cold. We elected to discuss the problem again the next day, working on the assumption that the Grey City wouldn’t drag us back in so soon. There wasn’t much to do but hope at this point.

I got back into my apartment and hung my coat, only to find Eli was actually home, sitting at the kitchen table doing something on his phone. “Jeez!” he exclaimed. “What happened to you?”

I remembered that I looked like I’d been through a war zone, and falling in the snow had dampened the dust and dirt all over me into mud. I scowled at Eli and said, “I slipped.”

He started laughing, which I took as a good sign and marched past him to try and get cleaned up. I tried not to look too closely at the shadows of the apartment.

 

* * *

 

I don’t know how I got to sleep that night, but I did, and it was to another dream.

I was deep underwater. There were ruins around me, and a huge sword in front of me. I slowly began to turn. Where was the dragon?

He was there: he had backed a ways off and was watching me with those white eyes. “The game is unfairly stacked against you,” said the voice from everywhere.

For the first time in the dreams, I had the clarity of mind to try and speak. “Are you talking to me?” I asked the dragon.

It drifted a little closer. “Ah, Second finally responds. I feared your mind was too weak.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. I didn’t feel afraid or nervous, as usual for the dream, but I was now beginning to feel the barest hint of confusion. “What are these dreams?”

“So you understand we are in a dream. Good,” said the dragon. “I have kept it simple up to this point, fearing you would not cling to the memory of them. But you are clearly in need of my help.”

I just looked at the dragon. “I am?” Something nagged at me: I’d recently experienced something frightening, but I couldn’t quite remember.

The dragon bared its teeth in a snarl. “Very much. Your ally, the First. He was defeated.”

“He… he was.” I saw the image of a shining dragon pinned to the earth by an enormous spider. I not only experienced the memory, but actually saw it in front of me, until the water currents dissipated it.

“The form he uses to fight,” said the dragon. “He does not know it. He uses it poorly. He does injustice to the warrior who held that form before him.”

“I mean… I think he’s done decently, considering,” I said.

The dragon hissed a few times, bubbles rising from its mouth, and I realized it was laughing. “Both of you are pathetic in your current state. I will help how I can.”

I scowled at it, feeling a twinge of anger. “Then help instead of insulting us.”

It tilted its head. “Second, hear me. The creatures who live underground have a great weakness.”

Another picture formed in the waters in front of me, but this one was not my memory. It showed three of the giant spiders reaching up out of a hole in the ground, frozen in time as they pounced on their prey. The prey was… it was the Gargoyle, exactly how it looked when Huang transformed into it.

As I stared at the scene, it began to move. The spiders were twice the size of the Gargoyle and would easily overcome it. But the shining dragon turned to them and flared its wings wide, and the slight glow emanating from it increased a hundredfold, casting over the spiders like a floodlight. The spiders instantly retreated, scrambling back as if in pain.

The image dissipated and I saw the water dragon floating there behind it, looking at me expressionlessly.

“I… was that your memory?” I asked. My brain felt sluggish, it was hard to wrap it around what I’d seen.

“In a manner of speaking,” said the dragon. “Second. What did you see?”

“I saw… the Gargoyle, it was able to shine more brightly. And the spiders hated it.”

“Good,” said the dragon, swimming forward. “Use that knowledge. Save yourself. Do not perish in this place, or we are both dead.”

I felt like I had questions, so much more that I needed to understand, but I was losing my grip on the dream. My surroundings faded, the dragon disappeared, and other dreams took over, of the ordinary variety. Images and thoughts jumbled senselessly together, bringing me in and out of a restless sleep where images of monsters lurked at every turn.

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