[YF] Chapter 257: Bottom of the Pit

As I stand over the fresh cliff only a few dozen metres from the mercenary’s barracks and headquarters, I can’t help myself from looking back over my team. It feels wrong to leave almost as soon as we meet again.

Leal looks decidedly uncomfortable to be left behind, but she doesn’t complain. I notice her veer closer to Grímr, and I’m glad — for both their sake’s — that his vicious visage hasn’t soured her opinion of him. This will be good for her. She hasn’t met any of the others in my team, so they can spend the time I’m gone with introductions.

Glancing back down the dark pit, I find my mind returning to that fight with Kalma. She was terrified of something down there. As much as I’d love to brush off the idea as her seeing she had no way to fight against both Tore and myself, I know that wasn’t the case. Kalma, the terrifying existence that she was, was panic-stricken by something down beneath the earth.

Anatla? That is the only thing it could be, right?

Before my doubts can swirl into hesitance, I throw myself down into the dark hole. Leal and my team quickly fall out of sight, and soon the darkness surrounds me.

With walls a kilometre apart, it takes a tongue of white flames to illuminate my surroundings once the light from above trickles to nothing. I fall. And fall. And quickly realise that I’m not gaining speed.

The last time I fell with Tore, the air pressure was almost non-existent. In-fact, it felt more like it was flowing in behind us to increase our speed. If I allow gravity alone to pull me down, it’ll take an hour, if not more, to reach the bottom.

A jet bursts out behind me, and suddenly I’m diving far faster. Flames spread out from my front to try and consume the air, but even then, I find the resistance building. I allow my body to disperse as it becomes ethereal. No longer trying to interact with the air at all, I drop faster than ever. My trailing physical jet of flames press against the air to crash me through what I barely interact.

Honestly, if I didn’t need to carry Leal — or need to burn through forests to keep it up — I would have flown like this rather than in my bird form. There are regular beasts along the walls as well as the frequent metal deposit that I have no problem keeping up the energy expense. Instead of the small body sized form I started with as I fell, my flames quickly spread to every corner of this oversized pit as I push ever downward.

I wonder if my flames are visible from up top? I’m certainly bright enough.

So bright, that I can see it reflected back from below. Of course, with how fast I’m moving, it doesn’t take long to realise what that reflection is. The distorted space remains. As I fall further, it becomes apparent that the strange mess that space becomes down here is far worse than it was the last time.

My flames pass through sections of air, only to find themselves flowing in directions they weren’t a moment before. The strangest are the areas where my flames will pass through, and I’ll immediately feel at the edge of my perception, well over a kilometre down. There are others that try to snap my mind further, but with how uncomfortable the feeling is, I simply allow those flames to disperse before I can get a true feeling for how far they connect.

Despite my desire to reach the bottom as fast as possible, the density of these strange complications in space grows too great. Too much of my flames gets divided and spread where they are both a metre away, and a thousand. It puts a strain on my focus. Not to mention my momentum gets dispersed every time my flames pass through these portals.

Not even my ethereal flames can penetrate the oddity of space.

Fortunately, with my sense of self spread as wide as it is, I can get a reasonable sense of the overall geometry and which way is down. I’m sure that anyone who has to rely on sight, or even their sense of gravity, will grow confused.

When my flames spread through some portals that connect to a point a kilometre or two down the pit, it makes it far easier to simply flow through them than fall. Even if it strains my mind and gives the uncomfortable feeling of being in two places at once.

The way I would lose track of Tore, and see multiples of him back when I was here first was odd, but the density of this spatial misalignment is greater than even the border to the Middle Elevation. Something has happened. Are these oddities in space related to what Kalma feared? Is it an Anatla that creates them?

When the earth finally appears below me, I decide to find the Riparian Treasure as fast as I can. There is no ancient structure down. If there truly is an Anatla creating these distortions, then there will be nothing holding it back from attacking me directly, unlike the last two times I came into contact. I will not be searching for it.

My flames slam into the earth, spreading out through a dozen tunnels leading out from the base of Kalma’s Pit. The ethereal nature of my flames tries to push through the rock as quickly as possible, but I find that just as every other instance, it takes effort to push through physical objects.

When, after a minute, my kilometre spanning blaze only pushes a metre deep, I grow impatient. The earth instantly grows hot and melts beneath my flames. The orb survived a direct strike from Kalma’s decay; it isn’t going to break with a bit of heat.

Magma pools around me, and flows through the thousand hidden distortions below the earth. It is strange to look at, but suddenly there are a dozen waterfalls of magma raining down on me. Some pass through other distortions, leaving a couple rivers of molten rock completely suspended in air.

My flames follow the super-heated earth as it flows deeper downward, giving me room to spread and melt further.

It has been years since I was here, and yet in that time, enough rock has fallen to create a mountain to dig through. Somehow, an extended network of tunnels has formed within that fallen stone. They make spreading easier, but it isn’t something I ever would have expected to find through earth piled up from what collapsed above. I won’t complain though; it makes spreading my fire easier. Quicker than when I needed to find Mum’s spear.

I have to abandon the idea of leaving any part of my fire above the magma; I’ve spread too deep now, and stretching my mind that far remains as uncomfortable as ever. So, with my full body submerged through magma — picking out any bits of metal I can find — I am surprised when I feel the earth fall out beneath me.

My flaming eyes land on the amber wall.

There is nothing between the rock I burn through and the perfectly smooth surface that holds the most subtle of amber glows. Nothing besides a forest of spatial distortions so complex, that I feel a headache just looking at it. Magma flows down through the now broken ceiling, and threads through the millions of portals, but never seems to get close to the barrier.

That’s what it looks like: a barrier.

I don’t know how accurate that is, but as I stare deeply into that amber wall, it appears both opaque and transparent. It invites me to stare further. Discover what lies beyond.

With a small ball of flame, I weave through the mesh of distortions, avoiding all of those that would split my body too far. As I get closer, the portals visibly pop in and out of existence. Many appear through my flame, and if I had been any more physical a being, I’m sure some would have torn me apart.

I touch the wall.

Less than anything I expect, there is no reaction. My flames simply slide along the surface, unaffected. But my flames are ethereal, and they cannot push through no matter how hard I try. Is this holding back an Anatla too?

I snap my flames away, but there’s no reason to fear. It still doesn’t react. If there is an Anatla hidden behind this barrier, then it does not care for my existence. But the material of the barrier is incredible. Not even the scorching heat of my white flames comes close to heating it.

Deciding to back off and not tempt fate, I spread my flames out beneath the ceiling of this strange region without rock. We saw that barrier the first time Tore and I came down here. But back then, there hadn’t been nearly as many portals. Had Kalma’s attack stripped the area of its typical confusing nature?

Wait… doesn’t that make this search all the more difficult? With all these portals around, could the orb have been carried off to some far off location? There’s probably no chance that it is just stuck in the earth and waiting for me to melt through the rock that holds it. Is my whole reason for coming down here pointless?

If these portals have carried it off somewhere, maybe I should just give up here and get back to my team so we can move on with our task sooner.

Almost as soon as I’m ready to give up and return to the surface, I find it.

The silvery orb laden with inscriptions is suspended by a portal only ever so slightly too small for it to slide through. I burn through the air and surround it. A tinge of sheepishness rolls through me at how close I was to giving up on it, when it was this close.

My fire circles the orb, and I lift… or at least I try. The treasure is jammed. As I pass my fire over its surface, I find that there is a deep line of bent metal along where the portal surrounds the orb. Did it try to close while the sphere was stuck within?

Gingerly, I try to pass my flames beneath the edge of the distortion and free the treasure without damaging it further, but the portal is too tight. Without any other option, I pass my ethereal flame into the sphere. I don’t know how this will affect the inscriptions or artistry of the piece, but there’s no other way for me to reach through.

The orb resists my entry, but cannot fully hold my flames out. Eventually, I pierce the other side, and find a horrid landscape beyond anything I could imagine.

A endless cavern with walls like liquid, yet not molten, rock. Rivers of gravel bridge the ceiling and ground, but defining them as either seems pointless. At one point, what might seem up will be down the next. The entire place seems to defy logic.

But what hits the hardest, is the sound. A mighty, unending chorus of grinding stone. Like the scrape of metal on stone, but a thousand times a second, and amplified to a volume that could rupture eardrums.

I don’t feel the odd sense of being in two places at once. Wherever this is, it is so far, I can’t even feel the instinct directing me to the rest of my flames. At least it doesn’t give me a pounding headache like some of the others, but I’m not sure I want to know where this is. If this is another part of the Anatla’s realm as I saw through the chthonic window…

In an instant, I yank on the orb. It, thankfully, snaps out of the portal easily. The distortion collapses in on itself, but not before the intense rumble of a crumbling mountain of earth echoes through me.

The destroyed world is gone in a mere moment. It is gone, but I can only linger there, watching where the distortion once was, thinking how lucky I am that the immense forces at play across the portal had not reached through.

I glance down at the orb in my hands. A tool that withstood Kalma’s strongest attack and nearly held off my ethereal flame has almost a third of it missing. A million stone scratches having carved at the surface of the hard metal.

The Riparian treasure is broken.