Snippets Thursday: Spargus is Haunted and Haven is About To Be
We're in the endgame now, there's only a couple more chapters before we're in post-3/epilogue territory
The lower levels of the temple had always been a subject of both curiosity and apprehension for Damas. It was a part of his history: the birthplace of his grandmother, and his mother, even though his grandmother had been all but shunned for consorting with spirits.
At the same time, it was a temple to Precursors, and Damas had mixed feelings about the offworlder pantheon. The Precursors asked so much of the descendants of their beloved Mar. And Damas had lost Haven — and presumably their favor, given what had been done to his son.
Damas would have been content to never visit that Oracle statue again. He'd sealed those passages for a reason.
Leave it to Mar to find a way in by accident.
The four effigies surrounded the pillar, each holding up two platforms at slightly uneven heights. Unbalanced scales. Damas was keenly aware of the way his boots echoed off the plates and into the near-bottomless chasm below. He scanned the idol anxiously, looking for the slightest hint of what Jak had seen.
"It's not a real Oracle! The faces are new, Dad!" he'd insisted when he'd first returned from Haven, "The bodies are original, but something changed the heads. The eyes aren't right. They hurt."
The eyes hurt. What did that mean?
Now that he was looking, Damas could see what Jak meant. The impassive faces of the four Explorers — Pirun, Sparga, Veshok, and Cerar, according to the traditions of the peoples who eventually formed the Wastelander Federation — seemed to match their bodies at first glance, but closer inspection showed cracks at the necks, the sides of the heads.
What would have been powerful enough to replace the faces of four massive statues? For that matter, what had happened to their original faces?
"Heir of Mar."
The booming voice made Damas jump. He swung his staff into a ready position, but the voice was coming from one of the stone faces. The eyes weren't open wide like a Haven Oracle's would be. They were narrowed into hostile slits. They felt...wrong. Unnatural in a way Damas couldn't put his finger on.
"You meddle with fate. This is a dangerous path to tread. Let the hero face his destiny alone, or suffer the consequences."
"Your "hero" is a teenager!" Damas protested, "I was here all these years! There was no reason to make my child suffer when you could have sent me!"
The lights flared, and that visceral unease tightened in Damas’s throat.
"You are too prideful, king of wastes. You would not have heeded us."
Their meaning was plain: they'd needed a toddler to indoctrinate into blind trust and obedience to whatever handlers this so-called Oracle chose. They'd needed a soldier who didn't know he could stand up for himself.
"You are not Sparga. And I very much doubt you are the spirit of Cerar, Pirun, or Veshok," Damas challenged, "Who are you really? What right do you have to interfere with their tribes or allies?"
"Foolish hu'men-!"
"Sorry, neither."
No, whoever this was, they didn't know the line of Mar had become inextricably linked to the spirit world. They were charlatans.
Damas watched outrage spark in the glowing eyes. There was a soft pop, and then one of them flickered before the blue glow faded entirely, replaced with gold.
Damas may have been much too young to see them at their most functional, but he'd read enough treatises on Hagai, the Mother of Modern Mechanics, and her use of power cells to fuel lost technologies.
The eyes were power cells.
There was a mechanism of some kind in them.
The new moon was weeks away. Damas couldn't rely on size here, he'd have to do things the old-fashioned way. The king of Spargus took two steps back to get a running start, then swung his staff to vault up onto the arm of the statue in front of him. Granite and marble slammed into his chest as he scrambled to catch hold without dropping the staff.
Probably should've left this down there...
Nothing for it now.
Damas slid the staff into a carrying sheath across his back and began to climb, ignoring surprised rebukes and threats of divine retribution.
He was out of practice free-climbing at this size. It was a lucky thing his son couldn't see him now, or he'd never live this down.
Damas took five minutes to scale the shoulder of the statue. Jak, the goblin, would've just transformed and taken it in two or three jumps.
The hum in the back of his mind that was Grandfather's presence, even when he was dormant, went suddenly and unnaturally still. Suppressed. Silenced.
For a moment, panic struck. What had happened? Where was Grandfather?
Deep scratches marred the stone beneath him. Something heavy had been dragged across it, towards the neck.
At the statue's neck, invisible from the platform, a string of black feathers, knotted together on a rope, sat like a foul necklace. Eyespots quivered and blinked on the end of each feather — one for every lifeform that tried and failed to bargain their way out of the King Owl eating them, so they said. He liked to keep score.
But King Owl couldn't enter temples! Colossal size notwithstanding, the evil spirit wouldn't have been able to tie such small knots.
It couldn't have been the Owl.
But...the Wind-Serpent wasn't the only spirit to have offspring with opposable thumbs.
Some were the issue of the Owl and a thankfully long-dead spirit who had been described to Damas as a crab and octopus and albatross all at once.
Others had been allegedly created from drops of blood lost in battle, or captured souls of Marauders slain by comrades, fed into half-shaped boulders that "hatched" as the bloodthirsty birdlike creatures that reportedly terrorized the Marauder settlement every new moon.
The sole redeeming feature of King Owl was that even at his most neglectful, he was a ferociously protective parent. This unfortunately meant some six to eight Hazard class spirits who would do anything their monstrous sire required of them — with the exception of the Panic, who did the opposite of anything you told him to do regardless of if you were a mortal, a Precursor, or the Owl himself.
If the Marauder colony really did suffer attacks by gargoyle-like men, it was possible that one of them had hung the sealing feathers here.
But for what purpose?
Damas wouldn't touch the feathers with his bare hands. He swung his staff out, sharpened glaive tip slicing clean through the decades old barrier.
Immediately, cacophony flooded his mind, nearly knocking him from the statue.
Discordant static or hissing, garbled voices-
No, that
That wasn't in his mind.
The eyes of the four statues were all flickering gold now. The power cells were visible.
Over the false Oracle's voice, which carried on like it had no idea there were other sounds, the hiss rose to a roar like a hurricane.
"BLIND THEM."
Damas was, in that instant, paralyzed with a fear he had not felt since his first new moon in the desert. The voice awoke a hindbrain response: an instinctive knowledge that to some angered spirits, hu'mens classified as a prey animal. A genetic memory of something his ancestors had known they couldn't fight.
"BLIND THE WATCHERSSS!"
The suffocating pressure choking his lungs shifted. Fearful hope and instinctive dread held him immobile for three more seconds.
Could it really be that simple?
After all these years, had he really been that close?
Removing the power cell from each eye socket was a job for people who liked jumping around tiny ledges. Damas’s momentum was carried only by the galvanizing knowledge that it might be the only barrier between him and fulfilling his childhood oath.
His staff knocked against things, thudded into his back while he climbed. He couldn't afford to stop and adjust it.
One power cell.
The hum at the back of his mind returned, carrying an urgency with it.
Two.
The stone vibrated under his hands and feet, but he would not be shaken loose. He leaped to the next statue to destroy the feather rope there as well.
Three.
Four.
At the fifth power cell, a deep rumbling filled the chasm.
At the sixth, cracks began to snake their way up the pillar.
The seventh power cell burned Damas’s hand. More failsafes than just the feathers, evidently. He paid it no heed.
The last power cell popped free, and Damas almost didn't have time to put it in his bag. The statues shook like an earthquake, and clinging tightly to stone did little good when the stone was shattering around him.
Deafening cracks rippled across the chamber as the faces of the Precursor statues exploded outward. A good-sized stone struck Damas in the head, and then he was falling.
Shadows filled the chamber as he tried to twist mid-fall, to see anything he could catch hold of to save himself. His ears were ringing, smaller pieces of debris had bruised his body, but that hardly mattered when he was falling to his death, did it?
Forgive me, Mar.
The last thing Damas saw before shutting his eyes was an indistinct blur burst out of the hollowed pillar with a roar that managed to cut through the ringing.
His fall was halted swiftly and unceremoniously when he struck a hard, warm surface. Smooth and dry beneath his hands, he slid off as quickly as he'd landed. This time, however, he didn't fall more than a second before striking the same surface again. Damas’s eyes flew open with a renewed hope of survival. If he could see what he'd landed on, if he could get a good grip on the surface, he could try to climb back up.
It looked like a pillar in width, cobalt blue and metallic green like a peafowl. And it was moving. It undulated and twisted over and around him, folding in on itself to trap Damas in a coil of muscle of an impossible scale. Despite his survival instincts insisting that he was about to die, Damas knew where he was and what had stopped his fall.
He still remembered the phantom coils filling that terrible cloister when he experienced his first transformation, winding around him in the darkness to comfort a frightened, betrayed, thirteen year old boy.
"Grandfather-?"
His voice was faint. Breathless.
The sound of scales sliding against stone overwhelmed everything. Damas barely realized that he was being lifted until he saw torchlight again.
The body of the Wind-Serpent barely fit in the chamber. Coils looped haphazardly over every surface, obscuring and even crumbling Precursor carvings.
Quetzaleh could change his shape, he was perfectly capable of taking a smaller form. But after fifty years of imprisonment, Damas didn't blame him for wanting to stretch.
A broad head curved around the broken decorative pillar, easily the width of a Slam Dozer if not wider. Damas was transfixed by fiery eyes — now red and blue, now red and green — as the colossus bent close enough for hot breath to ruffle his hair.
Absurdly, he found a small, panicked part of his mind wondering if the Wind-Serpent recognized him or not.
"THERE YOU ARE."
The voice was nothing like the weakened whisper Damas had grown accustomed to.
"OATH-KEEPER, YOU ARE BLESSSSED."
Oath-keeper.
He'd done it. After twenty-five years, he'd finished what he'd set out to do.
It remained to be seen what would change now.
There were so many things he'd wanted to say. Some affectionate, some reverent, some insecure. None of them made it past his teeth before being overtaken by the overwhelming certainty that had driven him below the temple in the first place.
"Jak is on the mainland! He- the Precursors, or, or their echoes, they're trying to use him for something, Grandfather! I have to get to him before they do-"
His words were cut off into a grunt when the coil around his waist tightened uncomfortably. It took the Wind-Serpent a moment to adjust his grip carefully enough, but he raised the curve of his body to bring his demi-serpent grandson close to his right eye.
"I sssenssse many guardiansss moving. Sssscylla and Weaver and Elk and Tigorilla and Bisssonlion."
That was as close to a whisper as an Inevitable class spirit could manage.
Only three of those were associated with Wastelander clans, and they'd lost contact with the savanna clan nearly one hundred fifty years ago. If their regional guardian was on the move, did that mean the Pirun clan had survived the metalheads after all?
The Scylla guarded only her own territory. The archipelago, the coast, Kras. Whatever she used as a hunting ground, she guarded jealously. Damas knew she was out for blood, she had made some notably brutal contributions to Spargus's defense against the Dark Maker incursion when their bio-ships tried to use the ocean for cover. Were the Inevitable class all intending to repel the invaders? Would even the Owl fight if the moon was covered?
The Wind-Serpent's pupil expanded, then narrowed to focus on his face.
"Damasss," he said, startling the man with the directness of the address, "Call your clanssss. We go to war."
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