Aether Engineering

Chapter 44

Hydrabridge

The Voidlands North of Maston

The day passed into night without event. By the time Lira collected her to make the ascent out of the mines, Kate had seen no sign of Myles or Silas. She begged Lira to let her see them, but Lira just gave her a sympathetic smile.

“They will bunk by the entrance to the depths tonight.” She had said.

Kate was left with nothing else to do but climb back towards the surface and reclaim her bunk. The empty bunks that were set alongside her felt like a memorial of sorts.

Throughout the day, Kate had heard horrible stories of the depths. The miners in her group had told her that she should stay away if at all possible.

“I heard half the new ones fall to their deaths within the hour.” One of the members of her group had said.

“No,” the most senior of the group had commented, “it’s the monsters that get them. I used to pass by the entrance every day on my old duty. Every morning I would hear noises like growls and teeth gnawing on stone coming out of there.”

None of the miners seemed to know exactly what when on there, but they all agreed that it was incredibly dangerous. Kate was worried, and she determined that whatever happened, she would be heading into the depths after them first thing tomorrow.

…

The dark room stank. If Myles could see, he supposed it must have been covered in blood. If Kate were here, she would have been yelling at him and Silas to leave. She would have told them that the blood would be like a beacon to other monsters.

Kate wasn’t here, but Myles still left the area behind him as quickly as possible. Already, they could hear the sound of more claws scraping against stone, and the growls were ever present. In many ways, it felt they were being circled by monsters. Myles desperately hoped that was his own imagination conjuring horrible thoughts from the paranoia brought on in the dark.

For what felt like hours, he and Silas wandered together through the seemingly endless interconnected tunnels and crevasses. At this point, they were hopelessly lost. Their only real hope was to stumble across an area they recognized. That was a vain hope though considering they wouldn’t be able to see the space to recognize it.

Supplies were another problem. They had left everything except their spears which they had strapped to their backs far above.

In what Myles imagined had to be the first hours of the morning, they came across the faintest of glows. There was something sinister about it, but they followed it to its source, nonetheless.

What they found sent a spark of alarm through Myles’ chest. They had come across what they were looking for. A root broke through the wall on its way further down. The root itself was in perpetual flame. It was on fire yet didn’t burn. The flame itself felt wrong, twisted in a way. Orange flames were shadowed with what looked to be black shadowy fire. The black flames followed the same movements of the rest of the flame only a second later.

The image was eerie. It brought back a memory from right after he had started at the academy. He had been following Reah when he had seen it. A flaming tree. That memory brought with it certainty that they had found one of the roots that Rufus had told them to investigate.

They investigated what they were able. The root they had found was only visible for a short way, but they followed it everywhere they could. In several places, it cut through the stone, seeming to find no difficulty in piercing through the tough rock.

The most alarming thing they found were for lack of a better word, cocoons. Some of them were filled, seemingly with an early version of monsters. Myles saw claws, teeth, and other horrible things that he didn’t want to think about. They also found some of the cocoons split open and empty.

Myles thought about the ogren they had fought earlier, wondering if any of them had come from these cocoons.

A detail that Myles found especially interesting came in the form of an ore vein. The root had wound itself around the metal in intricate fashion. It took Myles a moment to recognize that the way the root had grown seemed to form runes. The runes themselves, Myles didn’t recognize, but he determinedly memorized the shapes. Rufus might be interested in learning of them later.

All in all, they weren’t able to make any sense of the root. It was hard to tell what intent it had. Clearly it was producing monsters and seeking out ore, but to what end?

Myles couldn’t answer that question and honestly looking at the root, he had little interest in doing so.

“Think we have enough information to bring back to Rufus?”

Silas nodded idly. “We should be good on that front. Now we just need to find that beast the foreman has.”

Myles looked at his partner. In the light of the roots, it was a threatening sight. Myles could see Silas’ head going to place that Myles had no interest in following.

“Are you mad? Why would we try to find the beast that Samuel thinks can destroy the soldiers here?”

Silas turned; his eyebrows raised in annoyance. “We can’t not do something.”

Myles shook his head adamantly. “We’re not soldiers Silas!”

Silas turned in a fury. “That is what we are training to be. How can you ignore that!”

Myles shook his head in disbelief. “I’m here to learn to be an aether engineer! I’ll fight through whatever I have to do to get there, but there is no reason to take unfounded risks. If we try to fight whatever beast they have sealed away, we will die!”

“So, you’re a coward then.” Silas shoved Myles back.

A fire seemed to light in Myles’ chest. “What’s your problem? Do you want to die? What good will that do anyone?”

“If that monster gets out, it may kill hundreds.” Steel entered Silas’ voice now. Myles had never seen his friend like this. “If we don’t do anything those lives will be forfeit.”

Myles suddenly realized Silas had never told him why he had come to the academy. Myles had always just assumed that Silas wanted to learn. He was a naturally curious person after all. Now, Myles was starting to have doubts.

“I knew that you had no interest in becoming a soldier.” Silas shook his head and took in a breath filled with stress. “I thought that was because you didn’t understand things. I thought that when push came to shove, you would step up to the plate. I thought you were a good person. I never would have thought you would abandon the helpless to die.”

“We are the helpless ones here.” Myles pleaded with his friend. “We can’t move mountains. We’ll warn the soldiers of course, but I don’t see what else we can be expected to do.”

Silas tore a chunk of the flaming root off the wall, bringing it away in his hand. “I’ll go alone if I have to. I swore to myself that I would do everything I could to keep that tragedy from happening again.”

“Silas!” Myles got his friend to turn back towards him.

“That story I told Lira. It was true Myles.”

“The one about your sister?”

“I remember how every morning, I used to wake up to her voice. She used to sing while she set up our family’s shop. I used to get so mad. She was a terrible singer.”

Myles stood silent. Silas had never talked about his family except in a vague sense. All Myles knew about them was that they were craftsmen of some sort. Silas himself had always been more interested in the merchant side of things. Myles knew he had been in charge of getting hold of the raw materials his family needed.

“I was supposed to go on the trip that my sister left on. I got sick though. She stepped up to fill in for me and then never came back.”

“I’m sorry.” Myles wasn’t just trying to placate Silas. He did know what it felt like to have a family member return and never come back.

“The shikari the town hired to find them came back with the bodies.” Silas closed his eyes, looking upwards. “I remember how we had to look through the wagon they brought back so that we could find all of her to bury. Whatever monsters that caravan ran across had torn her apart. She wasn’t the only one either. Everyone in the caravan had been torn to shreds until they were barely recognizable.”

Silas looked back down, catching Myles’ eyes. “I swore not to let that happen again. We’re the only ones who might be able to prevent something even worse from happening here. You’ll have to finish this mission alone.”

With that, Silas turned his back and left. Before he knew it, Myles had torn off a chunk of the root for himself, noting how the flames didn’t burn his hand. His own footsteps dogged Silas. “I’ll come along this time.”