“Let’s go to the fountain in the middle of the city,” Isu suggested. “That’s where I created the curse. I did it in response to Lucielle’s Beauty Blessing she gave to that fountain, which turned all the citizens into narcissists. Despite the folly of my youth, I still don’t quite regret it. Ignorant twists. . .”
She muttered the final sentence under her breath, and it ended with a venomous hiss as a familiar anger flickered across her eyes. I had to let out a chuckle. Isu hadn’t gone soft. I was glad to see that some of her sharp edges remained; she wouldn’t be the Isu I knew without them.
We walked to the old fountain in the center of Aith, where every Arachne in the city would take a daily drink. Isu sauntered over to a cobblestone near the rim of the fountain. It was much darker than the other stones.
She pointed to the dark stone. “This is where I stood when I created the curse.”
“Let’s see what I can do,” I said as I stepped onto it.
I would have to draw on the power of Death; that had to be part of it. I had done this—dived through the layers of dirt underneath our feet—many times. On those previous occasions, I’d drawn on the lingering dark energy of death that festered in the earth, where thousands, tens of thousands, millions of bones lay buried as they rotted and turned to dirt. Usually, I channeled this kind of power into a weapon, a potent striking force, but now, I’d have to do something very different with it.
“What I did,” Isu said, “was pull the power of death apart into thousands of little threads rather than concentrate it into a powerful beam like you do. Think of it as unraveling the fibers at one end of a thick rope, making it all frayed and splayed out. Separate each little fiber from the rope, but leave the other end of the rope, the one rooted deep in the core of the earth, intact. This rope is tight and intact at one end, anchored to the depths of the earth and frayed at the other. Each separate fiber is woven through the stones and bricks and mortar of this city, like the wick of an oil lamp. Imagine the rope being made of very dry, absorbent material, and imagine the power of Death deep below the ground as icy oil. So, this frayed rope would be sucking that power up from the ground, slowly, like the wick drawing oil. The curse I created would be like a flame, burning slowly at the ends of every little fiber woven through the structures of this city, a fire slowly roasting every person living here.”
I simply nodded, and proceeded. With a lurch, my soul blasted through the dirt beneath Aith like a meteor crashing through the earth. There was Death energy here, oh yes, and plenty of it. It called out to me like blazing light in a dark night.
Except the inverse: a pure darkness, blacker than anything one could imagine. It produced sensations colder than the eternal snow and monumental glaciers beyond the Northern Wastes. As I focused on this energy, I saw the strands of Death magic connecting the millions of dead things in all the layers of soil below Aith. Like a horde of giant black fingers, they wound a passage up through the dirt and rocks and skeletons and fossils. They pierced the surface and spread like choking vines through the city, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions.
Isu had done a thorough job here. And I had to somehow unravel it.
Even though it was my soul traveling through the layers of soil, I felt a physical presence appear in my spirit hand. When I glanced down, I saw my fingers gripping Grave Oath. The dagger’s blade, however, was now the same intense hue of black as the fibers of Death energy. It was perfect to sever the numerous cords, but cutting each and every strand near the surface would take days, weeks even. I remembered what Isu had said about one end of the wick being like an intact rope, deep down in the earth. If I could find that and slash through it, I would kill everything above it.
I pushed myself deeper, like a diver swimming ever deeper below the waves, past where the skeletons of men and familiar creatures rotted in the dirt. Here, there were skeletons so old that the bones had turned to black stone, huge, lizard-like things resembling dragons but of a great variety of species. Creatures that certainly didn’t exist today, and hadn’t existed, I was sure, for millions of years. It was here, in these most ancient depths, that I finally found the end of the wick Isu had planted hundreds of years ago. It was as thick as the trunk of an ancient cyprus tree.
I wasn’t sure how long it would take to cut through so large a thread with only a dagger, but I had to try. Layna wanted the curse lifted, but her people would benefit too. And my motives weren’t completely altruistic either. If I vanquished this ailment from the city, the Arachne would likely worship me, providing me with more power as I ascended toward the heights of divinity.
With this in mind, I swam through the icy soil and started hacking at the massive black cord. At first, only small chips broke away from the cord. I growled in frustration after what felt like hours proceeded with little effect and a whole lot of effort.
Still, I continued. I was starting to get exhausted when the massive cord seemed to groan and shudder, as though it was somehow alive and my cuts
