Chapter Twenty-Nine
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It was quiet on the way out of Nephele’s dungeon, and dark. If there were any other lights than the dim glow that had illuminated our cage, I couldn’t see them. I didn’t look too closely, anyway. I didn’t want to know, especially when I was already so overloaded.
Fortunately, neither Saori nor I needed much light. And we could both produce it, anyway. I had lightning crawling through my fur, which cast a dim, eerie green glow. And Saori had some sort of fire magic playing through the fingers of one hand. She’d never done that around me before. I wasn’t sure whether that was just because she’d never needed it, or because she’d wanted to keep her link to the Order of the Shadowed Flame private.
Learning about that had explained more than a couple things about her. I’d noticed on numerous occasions that in addition to the fox-and-spice smell of kitsune, there was an admixture of something else in Saori’s signature, smoke and dark incense. It wasn’t hard to guess that had come about because of her association with Shadowed Flame, and I could feel that scent of smoke particularly clearly right now.
Her fire was a low, bloody crimson light. Taken together with my emerald lightning, we looked like a macabre parody of American Christmas traditions, something that was so funny to me that I had to work to keep my giggles quiet when I noticed. It was, I noted absently, probably hysterical in nature.
In any case, we didn’t leave the room bright enough to see more than our immediate surroundings. I was just as glad for that. I got to confirm my initial impression that Nephele’s dungeons were huge, cavernous even, and we passed several other cages, all empty, all made of clouds. I didn’t feel the need to see more than that.
“Alright,” Saori said, after what probably wasn’t nearly as long a time as it felt. We were approaching a wall, and she pulled open a door set into it that I hadn’t even noticed was there, the clouds of the door and wall fading into each other too smoothly to see. “C’mon, it’s a little cramped through here but not bad.”
To my surprise, she was telling the truth. Even by my standards, the hallway concealed behind the door was small, never mind by comparison to the rest of the castle.
“This is kinda ridiculous,” I told her as she closed the door and started walking. The hallway was lit, at least, the same sourceless illumination that had characterized most of this domain so far. “You found a secret passage?”
“Something like that.” She shrugged. “I think there’s a whole network of these. I’m not sure whether they’re supposed to be secret or just, like, servants’ hallways or something. But I don’t think there are any guards in here.”
“Damn.” I was legitimately impressed by this stunt. “And you’ve never been here before?”
Saori grinned at me over her shoulder. “Not once,” she said. “The Court events I did were nowhere near this fancy. And I never had much to do with nymphs, definitely not on this level.”
“The hell did you find these things then?”
Saori kept walking. “This is kinda what I did for Shadowed Flame. They handle a lot of infiltration and sabotage stuff. I’m good at it.”
“Huh.” I was quiet for a moment, then said, “You know, I was expecting you to be cagier about them than that. I thought you were trying to keep me out of that whole topic.”
She shrugged. “I mean, I’m not telling you how to contact them. But you already know I like to sneak around blowing shit up, so I kinda doubt it’s a huge surprise I did it then too.” She paused for a moment, then said, “Ah, yep. Here we are.”
The kitsune pivoted to the side and opened another door, just as invisible to me as the last until she pulled it open. I looked through, and then just…stared.
“Is that what I think it is?”
“I mean. Probably? Not a psychic, but it seems pretty likely you’d figure it out.”
“You’re right,” I said after a moment. “I hate it.”
Saori grinned. “Come on. It’s just a little skydiving.”
“It’s a ninety foot shaft straight down,” I said. “This seems like a pretty bad idea.”
“I thought so at first too,” she told me. “But stick your hand through the door.”
I did so, and felt something very…strange. As soon as my hand crossed the threshold into the open shaft in front of us, I could feel a very strong wind coming up from below, like a wind tunnel running at full force. But right up to the edge of the shaft itself, the air was perfectly calm.
“How the fuck does this work?” I asked, suddenly and deeply curious. This just…wasn’t how wind worked.
Saori just shrugged. “Not my magic,” she said. “I guess a weather nymph gets good at some things. I’m pretty sure this is just another part of the same network of passages, something like an elevator. Step in, and drop or rise to the floor you want. It’s like indoor skydiving.”
“I’ve never actually done that,” I said. “Skydiving in general, I mean.”
“Why not?” she asked. “It seems like you’d enjoy it.”
I shrugged. “I haven’t done much of the physical thrillseeker stuff in general. I mean, you already know my feelings about rollercoasters.”
“Sure, but skydiving isn’t like that at all,” Saori said. “The only strong sensory input is kinesthetic, and that’s pretty manageable from what you’ve told me. The hard part is mostly controlled body movement and how fast things can change, and you handle both of those fine.”
“Maybe,” I said, feeling a little dubious. “I mean, I trust you on it. I guess it just never came up.”
“Well,” the kitsune said, grinning, “first time for everything. You’re racking those up pretty good today, I guess. We’re dropping about halfway to the bottom, this keeps going underground. We’ll go tandem, so I can help you balance and show you where we’re going. I’m pretty good at this, and you’ve got great reflexes and enough fur for decent air drag.”
“This is a terrible idea,” I said after a moment. “You do know that, right? Like, a really terrible idea.”
“It’s the fastest, most direct way down. I can look for a staircase if you want, I guess, but….” Saori shrugged. “This is the only route I found that I don’t think has any security at all.”
I considered it, and then sighed. “Fine,” I said. “But I want to note that this is more than enough to make up for getting us tossed in that cage to begin with, for your vengeance tracking purposes.”
“That’s fair, I suppose,” Saori said. The kitsune was grinning. Then she stepped closer, and wrapped her arms around me.
It felt…strange. We’d hugged plenty of times, of course, but there was a kind of intimacy in this embrace that felt different. It probably helped that I was about to be doing a trust fall down a vertical wind tunnel with her, but it felt like it was more complex than that.
I took a deep breath. She smelled like fox and smoke and laughter. I felt dizzy, wasn’t sure why. The height didn’t bother me, and I was pretty dissociated, but not enough to be light-headed.
That was all the time I had before she was pushing off, falling backwards into the void without any hesitation. I went with her, and suddenly we were falling.
It felt…strangely simple. I’d been pretty damn nervous, but once we were out in thin air it was simple. I could feel Saori starting to adjust my posture, but I was already moving ahead of her, twisting to catch the wind on instinct. Everything felt so slow as we fell, and the wind sounded like silver laughter. I let Saori guide where we were going, since she was the one who knew, but actually maintaining my balance and manipulating air resistance to control height was instinctive, like I didn’t even need to think about what I was doing.
When she guided us over to one of the many doorways that opened onto that shaft, I didn’t even fall down. I stepped out into the hallway, and it was the sudden absence of wind that actually made me stagger a bit and have to lean against the wall.
“Well,” Saori said, while I was still struggling to get my thoughts in order. “That went well.”
I laughed. I felt a little breathless, but more from adrenaline than either effort or fear. I felt excited, and it felt good, right up until I thought about it, and remembered what Gwydion had said.
Fortunately, you’re mostly just a giddy lunatic who gets off on the adrenaline rush, and that’s much more stable when accelerated. The memory was strong enough that I didn’t have to work to recall the exact phrasing.
“I guess it did,” I said, feeling a whole lot less carefree than I had while actually riding that adrenaline. “You know where we’re going next?”
“Yeah,” Saori said. I wasn’t sure whether she’d caught the change in my voice or not. I couldn’t read hers at all right now, was way too overloaded after the whirlwind that had been my day to process the emotions I could hear in it. “Not much further.”
Little more was said as we kept walking. The halls down here were just as quiet, just as empty as those above. Eventually, Saori stopped and turned towards the wall again. “Through here,” she said. “Cross the room, out the window, and we’re pretty much there.”
I nodded. I trusted her, certainly trusted her sense of direction more than my own. Even at the best of times, tracking position could be an issue for me. And this was definitely not the best of times for my cognitive functions in general.
“Sweet. This is fun.” She grinned, and then popped the last door open.
We were in a larger space now, a large hall of some kind. I didn’t pay enough attention to tell what it was in detail; Saori was running across the room, and I had to work to keep up. Then she dove, literally dove headlong, out a window. I wasn’t sure why; there didn’t seem to be anyone around, and it seemed kinda pointless.
But hey, when in Rome, right? And while I was guessing this was just something Saori was doing because she thought it was funny, it was possible there was a guard rotation or something that we were working around. I wasn’t going to take the time to ask, even if she would have given me a straight answer, which was laughably unlikely. So, I sprinted after her, and dove out the window next to her. There didn’t seem to be any glass, at least; I guess a powerful weather nymph doesn’t exactly worry about keeping the rain out.
I regretted this decision about half a second later, when I saw that we were still twenty feet above the “ground” and this was not another wind tunnel. We were falling fast, and while the kitsune was enough of an acrobat to do a flip and land still in motion, I…wasn’t. I managed not to seriously injure myself, but it wasn’t a great time.
“Ow,” I said, once I’d pushed myself upright again and gotten my wind back.
“Wimp. Okay, here we are.” Saori grinned at me, and we walked across the courtyard to the Way. At least she didn’t feel the need to make this part into a random action movie without telling my stunt double.
Somewhat to my surprise, the Way actually was there. It looked just the same as when I saw it last, a two-dimensional doorway made of darkness and extending in a direction I couldn’t name.
I hoped it was the same one, anyway. I had no real way of telling. But I trusted Saori, as insane as that might be, and I was guessing it was the same.
“We just walk in again?” I asked, starting towards it.
Saori put a hand out to stop me. “Yes,” she said, “but one more thing first.” And then, grinning, she dug around in a pocket for a moment before taking out….
“Wait,” I said, staring. “You couldn’t fit lockpicks. But you brought fucking spray paint?”
“A girl has to have priorities,” she said, grinning even wider as she shook the can. It was a small one, smaller than I’d known they made, but still, just…spray paint. Saori was so very much what she was.
The paint adhered surprisingly well to the clouds that served as paving stones here. I watched her work, pretty quickly all things considered, and then sighed and followed her into the Way.
Behind us, in jagged, sharp black lettering, she’d written KITSUNE SEZ HI on Nephele’s floor.
The Way was as painless on the way back as it was the first time, and it did, in fact, drop us back at Saori’s car. It was no longer visible from this side, but I supposed that made sense; the party had started at sundown. And apparently, when Capinera said that we could trust in it being just the night, she’d been speaking very literally. We stepped out into the first rays of morning sunlight.
I had to wonder how that worked. It didn’t feel like we had been there that long, and we’d also definitely bailed before the party was over. Was it set up so that no matter how long one stayed in that domain, you would be done just as the night ended? Trying to figure out how that sort of time dilation even worked was way beyond the capacity of my brain right now, but it felt really weird.
I was staggering by that point. It had been rough before, but coming back to my native world actually made me feel way worse. Over there, there had been one energy signature that permeated everything. Here, while the flows of power were weaker, they were chaotic and disorienting. I couldn’t close them out well, and at the same time abruptly leaving that vivid, overwhelming world felt almost painful. It was a lot like cutting myself off from the full experience of my own senses, really. Sure, Nephele’s realm had been overstimulating in the extreme. But going from that to this washed out, pale reflection of those impossible experiences was…sad.
With all of these different strains on my mind I was barely even conscious by this point. I got myself into Saori’s car, and then just zoned out completely into a semiconscious haze, somewhere between dissociation and sleep. I wasn’t even sure whether I had my eyes open for most of it, and considering that I was riding in a car driven by Saori, that was impressive.
She had to nudge me a couple times when we got to the Blackbird, although to be fair she looked almost as rough as I felt. The kitsune looked exhausted, in enough ways that counting them was pointless. I could taste the fatigue in her gait, and considering how graceful she usually was that was saying quite a bit.
Capinera was up waiting. She looked worried as she let the two of us in, but not particularly surprised, and the blackberry scent had almost no yellow in it, so she wasn’t anxious about the future, just concerned about our current experience. I got the impression that coming home looking like this after your first time at a festival of the high Sidhe wasn’t unusual, though we’d probably had a more intense time than some.
Maybe for the same reason, she didn’t ask a single question. Which was good, because I wouldn’t have been able to parse enough language to understand it easily, and replying was out of the question, and Saori seemed to have spent all of her resources on the drive and was now barely more conscious than I was. Capinera just walked us over to her bedroom, literally holding my arm to help me balance, and put us to bed.
For once, sleep found me almost immediately. I collapsed into Capinera’s bed and was out like a light.
My nightmares were a chaotic mess, running through a wildfire while being hunted by some strange, monstrous creature. I ran and bled and burned as this wild, howling beast hunted me down again and again. It caught me repeatedly, and each time I died screaming, and then it started over again. It wasn’t until the last repetition of the cycle, having already died half a dozen times at least, that I got a clear look at the monster that was hunting me.
It looked sort of like a wolf. Black fur stained red with blood. Claws and fangs, likewise. A wild grin that had very little sanity and no mercy in it at all. Just a whole lot of glee, and a thread of what felt disturbingly like love. The monster leered down at me like a lover, and its eyes were mad, feral green storms, and it was only then that I realized this whole time I’d been seeing myself from the outside as I hunted amidst the wildfire.
As I realized this, I watched from behind a rabbit’s eyes as I leaned down and tore her throat out, and drank the blood, and it tasted like love.
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