“Maur says ‘Screw that!’” Maur yelled, and he broke away from Ronan and tackled the mage around the midsection. Both of them crashed to the ground. The net of electric energy evaporated from around Jade’s head. She fell in to an unconscious heap.
Kane moved to help her, but the Grey Clan warriors unfroze and swarmed them. Kane was violently knocked to the ground. Bodies piled on top of him and seized his limbs. He swung and struggled, but a series of vicious kicks and fists hammered his sides. His vision went black and white. Metal scratched and pounded his body.
His vision dimmed. Kane only dimly registered the fact that Maur had somehow overcome the Grey mage and turned the tendrils of dark energies back on him. The crackling head-cage that had gripped Jade now surrounded the mage’s skull, and he stared blankly into the air while Maur held the warlock’s wrist tight.
“Maur says let us go, or you’ll be cleaning his brains off the street!”
“ That won’t be necessary ”, a voice said. This time, the voice was real, and it was human.
Kane was on the brink of passing out. Everything hurt. He couldn’t move, and the weight of angry bodies pressed down on him. The world blurred.
The speaker came into view. He was tall and lean and had thick brown hair. A jagged scar, obviously left by a creature’s claw, ran down the left side of his face, and the eye on that side was clouded. The man dressed all in black and wore an armored coat, and even through the green sludge Kane saw the slash sigil of Black Scar on his uniform.
“Burke…” Kane groaned. Everything faded.
He dreams of water. He floats in the middle of the sea. He’ s a little boy again, and that ’ s strang e because he’d never actually seen an open body of water until After the Black.
There is no land in sight. The plank of wood he clings to looks like it was once part of a sailing ship, bu t the rest of the vessel is gone, c laimed by the pitch black ocean.
Clouds roil in the sky. The waves froth and churn with violent motion. He swallows freezing seawater.
He ’ s never felt so alone.
Kane woke in a cold sweat.
The air was normal again: there was no gel to breathe, no green haze. He was alone in a sealed room.
Not good.
Kane’s head throbbed, and his hands were wet with refuse and the dank water that dripped down from the green-grey ceilin g. He was in a holding cell, a metal c hamber that contained a shallow pool, broken furniture and a pair of massive portal doors with wheels for handles. It all reminded him of the vampire city-state of Krul, and for a moment that’s where he thought he was. He struggled to remember what had happened, where he’d been.
Kane sat up, went to his knees, and tried to focus. He steadied his hands on his legs and breathed deeply, just like he used to do with Ekko whenever the stress of a situation was too much for him to handle.
Ekko had taught him a lot of yoga. He had difficulty remembering most of it now, but at least he was able to get through some of the simpler motions. She always used to guide him through the tougher steps.
I miss you, Ekko. I wish you could come back to me.
Tears rolled down his face and into his beard. Kane did his best to stay calm. The events of the past few days slowly came back to him, and he tried his best to make sense of it all. They’d been taken prisoner by a common enemy of the vampires, treated like dirt, and… altered somehow, a s well as shown visions of a damn creepy place. Kane had the sense th at he, Ronan and Sol had been prepared for something.
Congrats, dude. Your first time out as a leader and you manage to take everyone straight into the weirdest shit yet.
He knelt and meditated for what felt like a very long time. He ’d woke n up without a shirt, and after a while his skin grew cold. The air tasted like seaweed and brine.
Eventually the door opened, but there was no one there. Darkness poured through the doorway. The wind was cold and heavy.
Kane cautiously stood up and stepped forward. He expected something to leap through at any moment.
Open air waits be yond the doorway. The world h e steps into is impossibly dark and vast. Hard wind cuts up steep cliffs of brown rock covered with twisted black thrush. The air is thin and cold and filled with ebon mist. H e walks through the door and realizes he’ s been relocated to an impossible height.
H e emerges from a square building made of rusted steel. The structure is covered with many doors, a hub at the center of a small island of rock and thorny undergrowth.
Only a narrow ledge surrounds the structure. One wrong step and he ’ ll find himself in open air, as the island stands thousands of f eet above the surface, on the ti p of a narrow tower of red stone. The wind tears against him, and he feels the ground shift from its force.
A dark landscape waits far below. Everything drowns in blood-colored shadows.
The sky is filled with choking dust and grit. Black fumes congeal the air. A nother cold gust of wind nearly p ushes him over the side, but he twist s himself so it blows him back towards the building instead. He falls hard against the wall.
Wow, he shouts, but his voice is just a thought, a deep sound that resonates through his mind.
Kane?
Ronan comes around the corner. He looks colder and thinner tha n usual. Sol is with him. All of them appear inconstant, and darker. S hadows cling to them.
Guys, he says, and the sensation is strange. His voice is not a voice, but an echo. What the hell is going on? Where are Jade and Maur?
There’s no sign of them, Ronan says. Kane sees his words thicken and fall like sludge rain.
Sol’s eyes fall on something in the air behind Kane.
What the hell is that?
TEN
They flew through tunnels as vast as fields. Subterranean wind howled out of the depths of the Netherwere: the underworld, the realm beneath. It was a place of lightless pits and dank coves, a haven of things made of shadow, and born to it. In those troubled deeps lived things bred and raised in dark ness. They had never seen light, and never would.
The tunnels were smooth and unnatural, dug by the arcane engines and dread behemoth work beasts of the monstrous Cruj. Entire cities had been built in the soiled deeps, rune stone dwellings chiseled from rock and salt. Stalactites had been crafted into inverted towers. Sinkholes became watch posts.
The Cruj had unexpectedly left earth a decade ago, abandoning their vampire allies to face the human s alone. No one knew why they fled, including the vampires. One day the giants were simply gone.
But there in th at network of tunnels called T he Way stood ample reminder of the cruel black giants and the power they’d once held. There were sta tues of the twisted Drann, the Cruj’ succubi deities, monstrous threefold creatures twisted into a singular entit y, dread angels made molten and twisted, vaguely erotic but monstrous, all edges and splayed blade wings. There were shell remains of the gruesome Iron Eggs, intelligent arcane orbs, chromatic iron artifacts that commanded legions of the barbaric Sorn with their psychic transmissions and terrible power. There were vast bridges that spanned underground canyons, waterfalls of black water that flowed into complex aqueducts, blank slates of housing built into the rock like parasitic organisms.
The tunnels smelled of smoking carbon and glaciers, bat guano and wet clay. The air was dark and thick. Only phosphorescent algae lit T he W ay, as the ancient Crujian furnaces went cold long ago. Deep clefts in the earth led to shafts of frozen water and piles of scorched bones, bubbling pools of white slime and rock lizards, giant bats and eyeless walker fish.
Hard wind blasted from the depths of the tunnels. Depending on which tunnel it came from, that wind smelled like dead animals or raw ice, industrial smoke or human waste.
The ecology of the Netherwere had been forever altered not only by the presence of the Cruj, who twisted everything they touched with their arcane genius, but by th os e who came after the giants fled, the humans who
