Through shuddering tunnels and black stairways, Leon and Xaphan raced, Leon still carrying Nara and Serena over his shoulders. The passages below Tell Kirin shook from regular quakes originating far below the surface, kicked off by whatever had happened in the deepest chamber.
The Primal Devil was coming. It was now beyond Leon’s ability to stop. His only option was to reach the ark chamber and hope that the ark they’d tried to fix was capable of flight.
The passages were still deep and dark, but in Leon’s state of desperation, he ignored all caution, plunging through the darkness with reckless abandon. The darkness around them was growing more intense with every tremor, but thankfully, Leon’s power and the ancient runes were keeping him and Xaphan safe.
But Leon doubted that would remain the case for long. He did his best not to dwell, focusing instead on the map Mbana had given him, and putting one foot in front of the other as quickly as he was able. Fortunately, his feet were swift, and so were Xaphan’s, though the much larger demon had struggled to keep up with Leon even with Leon weighed down by two other people.
With adrenaline pumping through his veins almost as thickly as lightning, it seemed like both an eternity and no time at all before Leon and Xaphan emerged in the lift shaft through which they’d descended. Barely more than two hours had passed since then, but Leon didn’t think about that as he halted only long enough to reach out to Xaphan as much as he could with his magic, which wasn’t that far with all the Devilish power in the air. But their contract was enough to make things relatively easy, and Xaphan was pulled back into Leon’s soul realm.
Then, without a moment’s hesitation, Leon concentrated strength and magic power in his legs and leaped with all he had. His target was the open door at the top of the shaft, hundreds of feet above him. An easy jump, let alone flight, under normal circumstances, but as his feet left the ground, he felt the pressure from the darkness around them more acutely than ever. This power had kept him from flying until now, and after it broke both of his wings when he’d tried transforming back in the wastes around Tir’s monastery, he’d avoided transforming again.
Now, however, as he barely managed to jump fifty feet up the shaft, he spared enough time only to feel another tremor from far below before he made his decision.
His body bulged and bent as feathers sprouted from under his skin. The power of the Thunderbird filled him as he transformed in only a moment, leaving him standing a little more than three times his normal height. As delicately as he could, Leon took Serena and Nara in his talons and then spread his wings. The Thunderbird’s power flowed through him, lightning flickering amongst his feathers and forming two silver-blue eagles to circle him, keeping the darkness at bay. His ancient runes glimmered within his plumage, adding further protection. With his preparations complete, Leon beat his wings and launched himself into the air.
The darkness around them thickened and beat against his runic barrier, but the eagles flew ahead of him and dissipated much of it, allowing him to force his way up the shaft with heavy, rapid wingbeats. He didn’t have much room, but he powered upward, the open door tantalizingly close.
The darkness was unwilling to let him go, sticking to his barrier like molasses, threatening to drag him back down. He could feel the strain in his wings as every wingbeat grew more painful, but he ignored the pain and just kept going.
His effort paid off; he reached the door, but his enlarged body was too big to squeeze through. Instead, he mashed his talons against the door, roughly pushing Serena and Nara through with little regard for their comfort—not that they were conscious enough to complain—before digging his talons into the stone around the door. He couldn’t transform back without falling, so he could only force his way through as he was.
Lightning flashed around him as he ripped and tore into the door frame. Another tremor shook the tower complex and the darkness below swelled, crashing against his runic barrier. His eagles dove to alleviate the pressure and both were swallowed whole, leaving only the power in his body and his runic barrier to protect him.
With frenzied strength, Leon broke through the door, pushing Serena and Nara forward with his beak as he did. The flood of darkness was almost an aid to him in that moment, giving him some added force as it pushed against his defenses.
He was through; he had no time to second-guess. He only took a moment to transform back into his human form before scooping the other two back onto his shoulders and taking off through the tower complex.
[It’s not out yet!] Xaphan shouted, his voice strained in a failed attempt to keep calm. [There’s still time if you can get to the Grave Wardens!]
[Don’t think, just move!] the Thunderbird shouted in response.
Leon was more greatly stirred by the Thunderbird’s words and tuned out all further conversation from within his soul realm, concentrating solely on not being consumed by the darkness billowing out through the lift shaft and tearing through the tower complex.
He barreled through the familiar passages and chambers with none of the caution he showed coming through the first time. Nothing tried to stop him.
Every footstep felt like a lifetime as the tremors intensified. Leon could hear crashing from above, and he wondered if the towers were falling from the strength of the quakes.
His legs burned as he pushed himself ever faster. Nara and Serena grew heavy, though not once did he think to drop them to speed up. They were still alive, thankfully, and he was determined to save them.
Within what seemed both like hours and mere moments, Leon barreled out of the central tower and into one of the smaller adjacent towers, where he only had to follow the trail of destruction that he’d left earlier to make room for Mari’s Ulta suit. He almost laughed at himself, the panic he felt then seeming almost tame compared to what he felt now, despite the similar circumstances.
‘Wish I had that day back,’ Leon thought. ‘Should’ve committed to fixing the ark or stopping the fucking ritual.’
What was done was done, however, and after that one self-recrimination, Leon put it out of his mind.
He wasn’t sure how long it wound up taking him to get back to the ark chamber. Xaphan could’ve told him it had taken him ten years and he’d have almost believed it. Regardless, he’d made it, and he found that many of the more decrepit arks had collapsed, their decayed landing gear having given out. He also laid eyes upon what might’ve contributed to at least some of the crashing he’d heard: Tir had blasted a large hole in the side of the chamber that they could use to escape.
Tir himself was close to the door, evidently having been torn between following Leon or waiting in the ark. As soon as he saw Leon, however, he rushed forward, all doubt in his demeanor vanishing. He took Nara off Leon’s hands, and the two sprinted for their ark.
The door was open; Leon charged through, followed by Tir. With what care he had time to give, he laid Serena down on the floor of the foyer.
“Tend to them!” he shouted to Tir as the old monk shut the ramp, then the bulkhead behind them.
Tir immediately began channeling his light magic, but Leon wasn’t quite sure what he could do; Leon’s lightning had surged through both Nara and Serena, and they were still unconscious. But Leon couldn’t think about that, as another quake reminded him.
With frantic alacrity, he ran for the engineering room, finding Mari there looking absolutely terrified.
“Leon!” she screamed.
“Can it fly?!” Leon demanded.
Mari froze, terror writ large across her face.
Leon took her shoulders and lightly shook her. “CAN IT FLY?!” he shouted again.
Mari spared her work a quick look. Metal cables, crystals of all kinds, and sparking thunder wood surrounded them in a messy web of jury-rigged engineering. She then looked back at Leon, closed her eyes, and nodded so quickly that Leon was almost worried that her head might snap off at the neck.
Without a word, Leon turned from her and shouted over his shoulder as he ran for the door, “TURN IT ALL ON! WE HAVE TO FLY!”
“Yeah!” Mari screamed as she sprang into action.
Leon, however, didn’t see her work as he barreled through the ark’s passages. Engineering wasn’t that far from the bridge, and he arrived at the latter in seconds. In the course of doing their best to repair the flying machine, he’d done his best to familiarize himself with the ark’s controls. This ark was, as far as he could tell, the oldest he’d ever been in, and it had a design lineage that differed greatly from the Thunderbird and Thunderbird-descended arks he was more used to. Even then, he’d never had much more than a crash course in operating an ark from Nestor and the Ravens.
The bridge was much smaller than many others he’d been on, with the command chair being only slightly elevated compared to the other stations, which were mostly against the wall. He silently thanked fate, the gods, his Ancestors, and anyone else who might’ve been able to hear him for this ark to have been the one to have resisted the corrosive darkness the most, and not larger and more complex arks.
‘Should make flying this thing easier,’ he thought as a trickle of power reached the bridge, allowing most of the enchantment consoles to illuminate, and then their screens a moment later. No lights turned on, but Leon didn’t care; he only launched himself at the command chair and, after some fiddling with the controls, brought up the ark’s internal diagnostics.
In short, the ark was an absolute mess. There were a dozen micro breaches in the hull that they’d missed, power was at less than ten percent, and the vast majority of the ark’s systems were nonoperational.
But what little power they had was getting to where it needed to go, so Leon shot out of the command chair and almost crashed into the navigator’s station, where he then frowned at the arcane controls in front of him.
‘Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck,’ he thought as he stared at symbol after symbol on the control console.
Another tremor shook the tower, and he heard the tower groaning and straining to stay standing, so without much to lose, he made his best guess and did his best to engage the engines and try to take off.
He felt the magic power in the ark fluctuate and the frame itself tremble, but the engines began to turn on. Unfortunately, of the ark’s four main thrusters, only two were intact enough to engage. The ark’s secondary thrusters were likewise decayed, with most remaining silent as he awkwardly directed the ark into the air.
The engines sputtered and whined, and lights flashed over half a dozen consoles that Leon was sure indicated major problems, but the ark slowly pushed itself off the ground.
Under normal circumstances, the ark pilot would use dozens of instruments telling them where they were and where they were going, but Leon had none of them, having to rely on nothing more than the screen in front of him showing the outside of the ark. He’d have to pilot the ark using nothing more than a front-facing view that wasn’t even complete—the light-capturing enchantment for this view was on the top of the ark, so the ark’s body obscured his view of the ground.
Regardless, his fingers slid across the control console as he coaxed the ark into moving forward. A little extra power flowed into the engines, indicating that Mari was doing her best to keep them moving.
The ark slowly approached the hole, its nose poking through into Arkhnavi’s bleak outdoors. However, just then, the tower shook again as another tremor struck it, and the ark was battered hard enough to throw Leon out of the navigator’s seat and another half dozen red warning lights to flash across the bridge’s consoles and for alarms to sound throughout the ark.
But Leon hauled himself back into the seat and pushed the ark further out of the hole. With his limited view, he was unable to correct when the hull scraped against the rim of the hole, filling the air with a horrendous screech as the ark’s heavily decayed engines struggled to push it clear of the tower.
Leon directed every spark of spare power into the engines, and the ark managed to push itself free. However, almost as soon as it hit the open air, new warning lights on the navigation console went off, and the ark began to glide downward.
“FUCK!” Leon shouted as he did his best to steer clear of other towers in the tower complex. He wasn’t sure how to correct their downward trajectory, but he was fortunate that he wasn’t alone; thanks, he presumed, to Mari, more power suddenly flowed into the ark. It wasn’t much, but it was enough that he was able to get the engines to do what he needed them to do, and the ark’s nose tilted up as the main thrusters engaged with all the power Leon could feed them.
The ark pulled out of its shallow dive and began to crawl upward. It slowly accelerated, and Leon was confident enough that it would continue to dart over to the engineering console and begin shutting bulkheads, sealing off all of the ark’s compromised compartments.
In the end, nearly all of the ark’s compartments were sealed, save for the bridge, engine room, foyer, and the halls connecting them.
A moment later, Mari came running into the bridge. “I’ve given all I can!” she shouted. “I don’t know how long it might last!”
“It’ll have to do!” Leon shouted as he ran back to the navigation console. “Monitor the ark’s status!” he added as he pointed back at the engineering console.
Mari responded, “Yeah!” and took Leon’s place at the indicated console.
The ark’s frame groaned and creaked as they rose higher. There was a terrible screeching sound coming from the engine, causing the ark to dramatically shake. The darkness outside pressed in, tarnishing what little remained of the ark’s untainted hull and putting greater downward pressure on it than it would’ve otherwise experienced.
Despite all of this, the ark continued to climb through the sky, and Leon was able to spare enough time to find the controls to open one of the ark’s rear-view enchantments.
As the screen came alive, he saw the tower, now with dreadful black smoke pouring from out of multiple holes in its exterior. The shaking had already brought down three of its twelve wings, and given how badly it continued to shake, Leon knew that the remaining wings were standing on borrowed time.
Sure enough, only a few seconds passed before the wing that had housed the ark chamber came crashing down, sending dust and smoky darkness billowing over the complex’s surroundings.
A moment later, another wing came down, and the central tower collapsed. In less than a minute, the entire tower complex had fallen, and black darkness thicker than any storm cloud billowed out of the hole.
As he watched, transfixed, he saw the darkness spill out over the land, covering everything it touched, until the remains of Tell Kirin had been completely submerged in deep, opaque darkness.
‘Shit…’ Leon thought, his heart racing madly. He understood what this could mean. If he couldn’t reach the Grave Wardens in this ark, if they weren’t on the lookout for anything strange on Arkhnavi, then he could be witnessing the inciting incident for the end of the universe.
The ark, thankfully, continued to rise, and Leon tore his eyes away from the rear-view enchantment to risk tilting the nose further upward, putting more power into rising than simply flying away from Tell Kirin.
As they pushed through the darkness and ascended, the downward pressure that darkness exerted on the ark lessened, allowing them to accelerate faster. Leon had no idea how far Qo Weylekh’s defenses of Arkhnavi extended, or if they were even still active. He just kept the ark moving as quickly as possible with no regard for the fragility of the frame.
A new, loud screech tore through the ark, followed by a horrible metallic bang, and one of the two remaining main thrusters died. Leon was almost thrown from the navigator’s chair again, but he managed to remain seated and directing the ark upward.
‘Hold together…’ he thought. ‘Just a little further… You can make it… Just hold together…’
He could hear Mari quietly praying, to his surprise, though he didn’t judge her in this trying time.
They’d risen dozens of miles, and even with a single main thruster, continued to climb at a good speed. Leon spared the rear-view enchantment one more glance and paled as he saw Tell Kirin completely lost in a sea of darkness. That sea was rapidly spreading across the Mandian Lands with no sign of slowing, and a great pillar of darkness miles high had formed directly above where Qo Weylekh’s tower had been, and it, too, was growing.
And then another metallic bang came from the engine room, and all external view enchantments went down.
Leon contorted his face in a silent scream as he checked and re-checked that their last remaining thruster was still engaged. Fortunately, it was, and they continued to rise.
For how much longer they could keep going, he didn’t know. How much more time they had, he didn’t know. If anyone would find them before their last main thruster inevitably died, he didn’t know.
He could only keep them pointed upward and hope that that was enough.
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