Chapter 8: Chapter 8 – SENTRY

For a split second, I felt like I understood everything. The entire Grey City spread out in front of me, its every secret and purpose plain to see. But, like a dream, it slipped swiftly out of my memory before I could make sense of it.

I was floating in a void: a vast, white space. My spatial sense provided zero feedback, as did the rest of my senses. I wheeled around uncertainly.

“What did you do?”

The way I turned to face the voice was strange, as if I’d somehow managed to turn around more than 360 degrees, but I soon saw Huang in the void as well. Huang the human stood on a small platform, still wearing that dumbass sweater, and above him Huang the Gargoyle loomed, mimicking his stance.

“Me? What’s happening?” I demanded. “I’m guessing this isn’t how it worked for you last time.”

“Well, no,” Huang said, rubbing at his temple. The shape of the dragon above him mimicked the motion exactly, raising a talon to its head. Something about the shining dragon seemed off to me, as if it were a puppet only somewhat responding to a puppeteer, its movements a little delayed and awkward. “I shouldn’t be surprised, though. Just stand back…”

Huang closed his eyes and the white void around us suddenly thrummed with energy. I tried to step back but, looking down, I realized I was standing on a similar platform to Huang’s without anywhere to go. I whipped my head back to check for weird puppet monsters looming behind me, but there was nothing.

The humming energy changed pitch and, below us, the white void started to shift. I watched in amazement as shapes began to form out of the whiteness: physical, jagged shapes like a cityscape. It was like standing over a model city, though the scale was difficult to parse. Was this… the Grey City?

The buildings only seemed to form partway and remained white, but within the half-formed city two bright lights appeared—one gold, one green. I squinted—they were at the top of a large, sharp tower.

“That’s us,” Huang explained.

“Wow,” I said. “So this is it? You’re detecting life?”

“Watch this,” Huang said, raising a hand as if to conduct a choir, the dragon-shape doing the same. The cityscape below us shifted, and suddenly we were looking at a different part of the Grey City. The shapes were so vague it was difficult to identify, but there were fifteen or so white lights lurking around a flat area. I realized that we must be looking at the waterfront and the demons that were guarding it.

“And there are most of the demons,” Huang said, frowning. “That’s all I got. Nothing we don’t know already, unfortunately.”

I crossed my arms and frowned. “So, how do I try?”

“Just try to use your sense and see what happens,” Huang suggested.

That seemed like weird advice—the sense wasn’t really something I used, more like something that just existed. Still, I tried to feel for the place where it usually was.

“Okay, but I don’t—” I stopped talking, because something had just clicked for me.

The sense wasn’t necessarily tied to any part of my body like sight or smell would be, but the feeling of it did seem to relate to my physical self… I perceived the sense as resting in my spine. I could lean into the sense and intensify it, or lean out of it to “close” it down a bit. What had been a struggle for so long was suddenly effortless.

What I sensed now was different from what I saw: my spatial sense could clearly still feel the glass tower around us, and the floor under our feet. The experience of sensing one thing and seeing another in the same place was incredibly disorienting, but I pushed past it.

As I pushed my sense out further, something seemed to… catch it, and direct it elsewhere.

Instantly the scene we were looking at changed. The tower took my sense and spread it out over an incredibly wide range, but I didn’t receive the feedback myself: instead, the miniature cityscape began to change and redefine itself. It split into several different planes, which rose to different heights, neatly staggered. The shapes of the buildings sharpened into greater clarity and roads ran in an intricate pattern between them.

Before us was a complete reproduction of the Grey City, with each “district” floating on a different platform. As the image settled in, a darker colour began to suffuse the buildings until they were grey instead of white.

“You did it!” Huang exclaimed, leaning forward. “Look at this! It’s the whole City. This is amazing.”

It was pretty astounding to look at. We could view pretty much the whole City at once: from our two little lights atop the tower, floating above the other districts, to the waterfront with one edge crowded with white lights, to the main City and the Garden District, complex and currently empty of life.

As I leaned toward the waterfront platform to get a better look, the map seemed to respond to me. The waterfront rose up and expanded, revealing more details.

It was almost similar in shape to Toronto’s waterfront on Lake Ontario, a curved lakeshore dotted with buildings and docks. The water was a wide circular basin, evidently smaller than the lake it was based on.

In the centre of the basin, too far away from the shore for us to have spotted it in person, there was a small island.

“Interesting,” Huang said, making a hand motion like he was zooming in on a phone screen. I felt a strange focusing of my spatial sense and the image before us zoomed in on the island, showing us a jagged little top of rock with a small building on it. Underneath the water, the island continued down in a long cylinder, terminating at the bottom of the platform. The faint shape of a spiral staircase could be seen leading up the inside of the cylinder.

“Looks like you can climb up that thing,” I said. “If we could get to that island, we could bypass the demons by approaching from behind. But how do you get in?”

“The districts don’t connect to one another in a physical way,” Huang reminded me.

“I know that,” I muttered. As I studied the platform, my eye caught a faint glimmer. “But… maybe these threads have something to do with how we move between districts?”

I had noticed some tiny, gossamer strings that appeared to be leading off the edges of all the platforms. There were a few bunched in the water of the waterfront, as well.

As I leaned forward to get a better view, they became more prominent, like spider’s web highlighted by sunlight. They stretched between the different platforms like bridges, connecting all of them.

“You could be right,” Huang said. He zoomed us out, his eyes scanning furiously. “Look at this. Most of the platforms are connected to each other in all kinds of places, but this island here—its threads just go down; they don’t lead anywhere.”

I frowned and tried to focus my spatial sense on the place where the threads seemed to fade away beneath the platform.

A window shimmered into existence over part of the map, showing us a zoomed-in view of the thread. Now it looked less like a spider’s web and more like a tube. Shimmery dots, almost like specks of glitter, were flowing through it in both directions.

“Well,” Huang commented, “That’s new. What the hell does that mean?”

“Look,” I said, pointing. “There’s blue flecks and black flecks. The blue ones are flowing downward, away from the Waterfront, and the black towards the Waterfront.”

“…So where are the black flecks coming from? Where does this thread lead?”

 I tried to follow the black flecks and another platform rose up out of nowhere.

Something was different about this one. For one, it was much less defined, and there didn’t seem to be any buildings or streets. It looked more like hallways inside of a building, intersecting one another and curving in a maze. Instead of grey, this new district was inky-black.

You are reading story Knights of the Grey City at novel35.com

A few white lights pulsed slowly through the paths. It looked like some were clipping through the walls.

“This is weird,” I remarked, unable to articulate the feeling of unease this particular platform was giving me. “It doesn’t really look like the rest of the City.”

“There’s definitely something different about it,” Huang agreed. “But, hey—we found a new district.”

He pointed to the island on the waterfront platform, now floating some distance above, and traced the gossamer lines that led down from it to this new, inky district. It was now clear that blue flecks were travelling from the Waterfront to this new District and black flecks doing the reverse: an exchange of data, maybe? “We can get to the island through here. And check this out.”

He now pointed to the Glass District and to some of its threads. They also reached the inky district. “The Glass District is the only place that’s connected to the new one. It looks like we’d start our journey here, find this inky district, and from there we should be able to reach that island.”

“There are monsters down there,” I said, gesturing to the lights that were patrolling the labyrinth. “And it looks easy to get lost in. How will we even know how to get to the island from there?”

“I can protect us from one or two demons,” Huang assured me. “I’m confident we can do this. We’ve gotten this far.”

I tried to think of another excuse not to go to the new district, but couldn’t. If we wanted to access the Waterfront, we’d either have to do it this way and risk a few demons, or make a frontal assault and face, like, twenty of them. I sighed through my nose.

“All right, we have a plan,” Huang said, and suddenly disappeared from the map.

Whoah, what the heck? Had he… simply disconnected? In front of me, the lights of the map all faded out and the buildings darkened to a near-black.

I took a step back and drew my sense back into myself, and it was as easy as that: whatever I was looking at disappeared and we were back, standing in the teardrop-shaped landing of the tower. Huang was still standing in the centre and I was off to one side. For a moment, my sense reeled with vertigo: an awful, dizzy sensation that seemed to wash completely through me.

“Not bad,” Huang said, failing to notice. “Looks like the tower can do more with the two of us combined than just with one. Shall we go look for that new district?”

Right away? A small breather would be nice. But he was right that there wasn’t much sense in delaying. The Grey City might spit us out soon, anyway. I nodded my agreement, but groaned when I realized what that meant.

“The flight down will be easier. I’ll stay away from the tower to avoid whatever was bothering you last time,” Huang assured me, and his body started to shine brightly. I squinted through it this time, watching as his form seemed to dissolve into a bright light, then effortlessly reform into a much bigger shape with a huge pair of wings and a long, graceful neck.

“Be. Careful.” I snapped, moving toward the edge of the landing. “And give me a second to—”

Before I finished speaking, a pair of talons closed around my arms and the gargoyle was in flight, soaring off the landing.

To his credit, the flight down was a bit easier, if only because he flew away from the tower and didn’t get close to its weird energy. The Glass District spread out beneath us and we eventually touched down in a plaza, the jagged shapes of buildings reaching up around us.

“What’s the plan, then?” I asked as the Gargoyle shrank back into a human.

Huang surveyed our surroundings. “Well, these places seem to work off of associations, right? So if you want to go to the Glass District, you follow any glass you see and that association somehow creates a path. What do we know about this new district?”

“It looked like a maze?” I suggested.

Huang shook his head. “I would say it looked more like hallways in a building rather than a maze. So, maybe in order to get there, we should try following the largest buildings we see.”

“You’re the expert,” I grumbled. Why did he even ask me if he knew what to do already?

We set off down the street with the largest glass structure we could see, and I stretched out my sense to alert me of any danger. I could tell Huang was alert, too, in the way he quickly glanced down every street we passed.

After some time, it seemed clear we weren’t getting anywhere. When we’d been making our way toward the Garden District, it had been pretty clear that the closer we got, the more frequent the trees and cobblestones became. But large buildings were pretty few and far between even after we’d been wandering for a while.

Finally, Huang stopped and crossed his arms. “Okay, I guess tall buildings aren’t the one.”

I tried to envision the new district. Our map didn’t have much in the way of material definition, so it wasn’t like we could identify what the walls were made of or anything like that. “Maybe it isn’t inside a building at all. It definitely looked like there were walls, but maybe those were just really narrow alleyways? We could look for enclosed spaces.”

“Enclosed spaces?” He raised an eyebrow. “I don’t know. There has to be something else. Let me think for a second.”

“Let’s just try my thing first,” I insisted.

“I know this place pretty well, Camilo,” he sighed. “The triggers are more obvious than that.”

“And you’ve travelled through what, three districts?” I demanded. “Three districts makes you an expert?”

“Comparatively.”

I scowled at him. “Well then, expert, think of something else while we walk. I’m trying my idea.”

I started walking and hoped he wouldn’t call my bluff—I wasn’t about to go wandering around here alone, even if the only other human was an annoying tool.

Thankfully, he joined me, and I moved towards the nearest narrow alleyway.

My approach didn’t seem to work at first, either. But the more we sought out narrow, closed-in alleyways, the more frequently they appeared, until we were in a section of the Glass District built entirely out of narrow alleyways with arches and roofs overtop.

“We’ve got to be getting close,” Huang said excitedly, instantly forgetting that this was my idea. He picked up the pace, changing forms in a bright flash of light as he pulled ahead.

I stepped a little faster to keep up with him, but stopped when my sense detected something worrying just ahead of us. I swallowed. “Uh, Huang?”

“What?” he asked.

“I think we’re here, but… I don’t like the look of this.”

The alley opened up into an optical illusion. The buildings and alleyways around us had twisted shapes, like someone had grabbed all of them and smudged them downward using photo editing software. Everything was smudged toward a huge, circular hole in the street, about thirty feet wide and pitch dark. It looked like a painting of a city being sucked inside a black hole.

“Oh,” Huang remarked, “I guess it’s down there.”

You can find story with these keywords: Knights of the Grey City, Read Knights of the Grey City, Knights of the Grey City novel, Knights of the Grey City book, Knights of the Grey City story, Knights of the Grey City full, Knights of the Grey City Latest Chapter