“So why did he not use the Magisoul for evil?”
“All good questions,” said the Lurk. “I have no answers.”
Kevin nodded. “Then I will open the door.”
Four turns, and the door swung open silently on a smooth tunnel which curved gently away to their left. Kevin let out the breath he had been holding.
Then the floor of the tunnel tilted.
The Lurk let out a bellow of dismay as his great bulk plowed into the Human and the Dryad, and swept them all away down the steep,
glass-smooth tunnel. He tried to use his huge palms and splayed pads to create friction, but the surface was too slippery. In a moment, the threesome shot out into a volcanic wasteland and came to rest in a bowl-like depression in the middle of a cavern of similar size to the last.
A pillar of fire confronted them. The
blazing mass was perhaps a hundred feet tall and ten feet in diameter, although it was hard to be sure because of the intense heat. Flames licked slowly across its surface with an obscene kind of hunger. Kevin’s quick glance at his surroundings confirmed that they were surrounded by ponds of lava and glowing red cracks amidst black, glassy rocks laced with spits of fire. A stench like rotten eggs greeted his nostrils–sulphur, no doubt, although his knowledge of volcanism was sorely tested by the pillar before them. Perhaps it was molten rock? Heat seeped through the soles of his boots. It must have been excruciating for Alliathiune, who was barefoot, and Snatcher, who as a swamp-dweller was sensitive to heat.
He offered to hold the Dryad.
“I’ll survive,” she replied tartly, and he was not sure if her face was glowing because of the pervasive rubescent light or for other reasons. “Besides, you have more pressing concerns–like that!” Her voice rose to a squeak of horror as the pillar expanded toward them.
The second Dragon! An Elemental of F
ire! No time now to pack away the Key-Ring. How could he oppose fire? With water? Ice?
A furnace blast of heat seared his skin and blistered his lungs.
Kevin was sure his hair was crisping at the ends and that his clothes would soon begin to smoulder. He stumbled backward, fearful, and saw how the fire matched their movement. Snatcher gathered the wincing Dryad into his arms and raised Kevin by his backpack, intending to flee, when walls of rushing, hissing flame gushed up all around them.
The heat
escalated. They were lit a scorching red, the tiny Dryad, the pale Human, the towering dark Lurk. There was no escape!
“Do something!” Alliathiune st
ruck Kevin on the arm. “You must
do
something or we will burn!”
But
Kevin nearly throttled himself with horror as he saw the keys–his precious Key-Ring–tumble out of his bad, blue hand at the force of her strike and disappear into the fringe of the fiery pillar. His eyes registered accusation and betrayal; Alliathiune bit her tongue in speechless remorse. The prospect of burning must be horrific for a Dryad, he realised, gripped by a vision of the great Mother Forest consumed with fire rather than weeping at the Blight. They must fear fire more than anything else.
“
Trust me,” he said. Peace and lucidity cleared his mind–or was it an onset of sudden madness? He wriggled loose of the backpack and dropped two feet to the ground.
“
Kevin?”
He rolled back his sleeve to expose his blue hand, ruined by defeating the Dark Apprentice at Elliadora’s Well.
“Good Kevin?”
There was no sweat on his body, for it had been evaporated by the rising heat. But he mopped his forehead anyway, summoning his formidable reserves of mental strength for an act
of complete cowardice. There was neither water here, nor moisture in the superheated air. One could not make ice from a furnace, even if that was the logical opposite.
“What are you planning to do?” the Dryad pleaded.
He deliberately shut her out. He shut out everything–Alliathiune, Snatcher, the Elemental Dragon of Fire, the tightening of his skin as it began to resemble a roast crisping in an oven, and the crackling energies that would incinerate him in a millisecond if he did what he was planning to do. He focussed on shutting down the feelings of fear, the paralysing inability to act, the conscious recognition of what he was about to do. When there was only one thought left in his mind, he acted.
Holding his blue hand before him like a sleepwalker, he stepped away from his companions.
“Kevin!”
Alliathiune’s scream hardly registered on his consciousness. She must think him insane. Was he sacrificing himself?
Kevin did not know if that was his intention or not. He bucked these thoughts like a surly mule feeling the sting of its master’s crop. There must be
no
thought.
Kevin
had learned from Elliadora’s Well. To unleash the magic he had to disassociate his conscious mind from the process of summoning, forming, or controlling it. Having set his rational barriers aside, he could find the necessary freedom. He could find a oneness with the elemental forces raging about him, without seeking to confront or calm them. Kevin
allowed
the fire to pass around him. That space became a depression in the towering wall of flame, then a hollow, then a tunnel. Some little of it leached into him–he could sense it, an unavoidable excess that seeped into his ruined hand, making it tingle like an unbearable attack of pins and needles. Partway, he bent to retrieve the Key-Ring, and saw his companions following him into the haven of safety he had created. Five steps, ten steps, fifteen, and they were through.
Fresh, cool air filled his lungs.
The elemental collapsed in on itself, perhaps attempting to engulf a prey that was no longer present, and this allowed the companions to slip away into the surrounding wasteland.
Kevin
looked to Alliathiune. “Are you … uh, feeling alright? You’ve gone pale.”
“If I am pale,” she replied, not meeting his gaze directly for the first time that he could remember, “then it is with good reason.
Good Kevin, I cannot abide you acting as you did–without word and without warning. I swear by Elliadora’s Peace that you will be the death of me!” Her ire rose along with her volume. “How can I stand by when Driadorn’s chosen champion chooses to barbecue himself in a Dragon’s fire? What was I to think?”
“But, well
… I just–”
She flared as hotly as the lava surrounding them, “You just didn’t think,
Kevin!”
“Yes, but–”
“But nothing, you insensitive, uncaring fiend! You are the most foolish and impulsive creature ever to walk the Seventy-Seven Hills! Why, a simple word and we wouldn’t have been standing there gaping like bullfrogs when you entered the fire!”
Kevin
vented his exasperation. “I wasn’t sure I could do it, Alliathiune. The magic never does what I expect!”
“That’s my point exactly!” she howled back. “You don’t know what you’re doing and you don’t ask for help! I could just shake you sometimes, you make me so furious!”
“Well it worked, didn’t it? Tell me I didn’t just rescue your sorry green hide back there! Tell me that, why don’t you?”
Kevin
glared daggers at Alliathiune, who burst into tears and flung herself into his arms. “I was so scared,” she sobbed, clutching him so tightly he could hardly breathe. He glanced over her head at Snatcher, who he could have sworn wiped a grin off his face and pretended a suspicious level of diligence in searching for the next door.
He patted the Dryad’s shoulders tentatively. “Uh, I
… come along, Alliathiune.”
She sniffed fiercely.
“Gosh, Alliathiune. I’m sorry … um, you know.”
He was sure her fingernails were digging bloody trenches into his shoulder blades. Frighteningly strong sometimes, vulnerable at others
; he would never make any sense of her moods.
Alliathiune mumbled something into his shirt. Doubtless wiping her snotty nose! He said, “What is it?”
She stiffened in his arms. “You must be the most awful hugger in the world, is what I said!”
“Huh?”
“You’re such a
man
sometimes!”
“What
ever do you mean by that?”
Alliathiune patted his back just as cautiously as he had hers, and a naughty quirk touched her lips as she gazed up at him. “For your
information, good Human, that gentle pawing motion you attempted is as far removed from a real hug as we are distant from Driadorn. You need to put your arms around the person and hold them like you mean it.”
“Sorry.” His mouth twisted and bitterness crept into his voice. “I haven’t had much practice, Alliathiune. My dear family, as you’ll recall, would rather have struc
k me with the business end of a chunk of wood.”
She swallowed and said,
contritely, twiddling her hair with her fingers, “I’m very sorry I stirred up those horrible memories, good Kevin. Will you forgive me?”
Kevin
was so dumbstruck that he just stared at her with his mouth hanging open. Good grief, at a mere word she could touch him like that?
Alliathiune took his arms and put them around her. “This is a hug, good
Kevin. And when you forgive someone, it’s as simple as saying ‘I forgive you’. As long as you mean it, you don’t need to say more than that.”
“Oh.”
“Why don’t you try it?” she murmured into the crook of his neck.
The Dryad’s
breathy request very nearly undid him. And she slapped him for a kiss? Who was flirting with whom now? “Of course I forgive you, you silly girl.”
Out there, the fire blazed up anew. Whirlwinds of flame spun off from the main body–hunting them, he realised. Perhaps a Fire Elemental had no eyes. As Alliathiune thanked him, he said absently,
“Though I was sure you were about to slap me again.”
“I said I was sorry!”
“My cheek still hurts.”
“By the Hills, that’s
the cut, you rude man!” Alliathiune stamped her bare foot down on a sharp stone and yelped in pain. “Ouch! There, see what you’ve done now?”
A whirlwind roared across the barren landscape. Lava spurted out of the ground nearby. Alliathiune hopped from one foot to the other, gasping. Kevin felt the heat burning his own soles, despite his protective footwear.
“Quickly, on my back.”
He gave the Dryad no choice. Alliathiune had barely grabbed his neck when Kevin galloped after Snatcher. They should not have tarried, he castigated himself. Somewhere behind them his companions were probably fighting hundreds of Trolls, and all Kevin Jenkins wanted to do was to flirt with a
pretty Dryad. He skirted a pool of molten rock at a dead run. The Lurk beckoned urgently. Pause. Wait for a whirlwind to roar by. Quickly, now.
They dashed into a short tunnel, and found a new stone door.
* * * *
The third door yielded its secrets to a key that
Kevin had already owned when he had arrived in Feynard, one that Great-Grandmother had collected during her travels. She must have been a fascinating woman. What a shame that Father had kept them apart for so long, he thought.
Snatcher gave a trill of surprise and pleasure when the third cavern was revealed to them. It was a grey and misty realm, so soggy underfoot that
Kevin soon found his boots sinking deeper than his ankles in a layer of slimy mould and other disgustingly organic materials. He held his nose. But the Lurk tested the breeze with his snout at considerable length, gurgling and singing to himself in Lurkish, until Alliathiune grew impatient and demanded to know what was amiss.
Snatcher turned his luminous orbs upon her and said, “I wish I could be certain, noble Dryad, but such a thing cannot be. I detect the smell of Lurks hereabouts. That would be strange and wondrous indeed.”
“Did the old woman who lived beside the Utharian Wet not intimate that Ozark the Dark had brought the Lurks here, to the dungeons of Shadowmoon Keep, to guard the Magisoul?”
“Quite so, little one. But how is it possible to live deep underground like this? Does every creature of Driadorn not require Indomalion’s eye, however briefly, to light their ways?”
“If not by magic?”
“By the laws
of biology,” Kevin interrupted. “Some creatures do not require light in order to live. Perhaps you photosynthesize, Alliathiune, or you, Snatcher, feed upon plants that depend on Indomalion and Garlion for nutrients, but there are other creatures who generate their energy in a variety of amazing ways.”
T
he Dryad gulped. “I photo–what did you say?”
“Your Dryadic patterning,” he said, running his finger along her arm.
Alliathiune snatched her arm away. “Don’t.”
“One prominent theory holds that Dryads have little requirement for ordinary sustenance due to the
Sälïph-sap ingested once a moon, and the ability of their greenish skin to capture and process Indomalion’s energies.”
“You presume to know all too much about Dryads!” she said
, coolly.