Into Darkness

65

A warm rain accompanied them along the climb up the mountain. It made the air wet and heavy, and difficult to breathe. At times it came down in sheets, harder than any rain he had ever known before, almost like standing under a waterfall. It was so heavy that they could barely even see.

When the rain increased to an intensity that Richard and Vika found unendurable, they had to crouch behind some of the forest of rock towers that had overhangs enough to shelter them somewhat. Sang warned him to stay out of any low places because this kind of rain often created flash floods that could sweep him away before he realized what was happening. It could easily be disastrous to be rolled down the mountain in such floodwaters. From time to time they came to those kinds of sudden, rushing, muddy rivers and had to find a way around them.

The Glee didn’t at all mind the rain, at times standing in it with their arms held out and their faces turned up to the sky, but Richard and Vika found it miserable. Traveling into the heaviest of the curtains of rain was arduous. It was also hard not only to see where they were heading, but also where they were stepping. He worried that either Vika or he might fall and break a leg. Richard had grown up outdoors, and so he was familiar with walking in challenging terrain, but Vika hadn’t, so it was harder for her to walk among the jumbles of rock during the downpours.

There were no healers that he knew of among the Glee, and he didn’t think that they had any. They seemed to be too simple a species to have healers. If he or Vika was injured, there could be no help. They had only each other, and while he knew about healing, both with magic and with herbs, he could certainly heal Vika, but she couldn’t heal him. He also didn’t know if this world had any healing herbs they could use.

The landscape they had to travel through was completely devoid of any kind of life; there was just rock and, in the rain, mud, much of it rushing down at them. There were no plants, not even a blade of grass. Just continual rain. Since starting up into the mountains, he hadn’t seen a single bird, or even one of the bats that he had seen in large groups down in the swampland. He remembered that Sang had said that where the device was located was a dry place, but getting there beneath the leaden overcast certainly wasn’t dry. He was looking forward to getting up into the mountains above the clouds that were dumping so much rain on them.

A lot of the rock was sharp and crumbly, making walking difficult. This world was a strange mixture of lush swamplands, sandy drylands, and desolate, lifeless mountains. The skies seemed to be an odd mix, too, of dark clouds that carried no water and heavy, wet overcast. From what he had seen so far, it seemed that nothing lived anywhere other than the swampy lands down lower, where all this water running down the mountainsides eventually collected in the swamps.

Richard came across holes in the upslopes of grainy rock. They appeared almost big enough that he might be able to crawl inside. He wondered if they might be able to be enlarged and in the future provide some kind of cavelike shelter for him and Vika. He stuck his head inside one of the holes, trying to see how deep it was. All he could see was blackness.

Suddenly, Sang put both claws around his arm and urged him back out. Richard pulled his head out of the hole and turned to look back at Sang. Sang shook his head in warning. It seemed clear to Richard that Sang didn’t want to talk about whatever lived in those caves. Richard could tell from the looks of the others that whatever was in the holes scared the other Glee speechless.

Right then, the device was Richard’s priority, so he didn’t want to waste the time to be concerned about the holes and what might be in them. He would have to ask later.

After he nodded his thanks for the warning to Sang, he turned back to the trail and kept going. But now he was concerned about what lived in those holes that he and Vika might one day have to deal with. Unlike the Glee, the two of them weren’t equipped with claws for protection.

Lightning flashed nearby, and the ground shook with a sudden thunderclap. While the rain didn’t bother the Glee, the lightning clearly made them nervous. It made Richard nervous as well. The Glee looked around, as if they thought they would have time to run if they saw lightning. Some of them sought shelter behind rocks whenever there was a particularly bright flash and crack of thunder. Richard knew that hiding like that was pointless, because by the time you saw a close bolt strike, it was already too late to run from it. Richard disregarded what some of them did and kept climbing.

“Being up high like this is dangerous when there is lightning,” Sang said, almost apologetically.

Richard looked back over his shoulder as he pulled himself up over a projecting shelf of rock. “I understand. I know the way from here, so you don’t need to go the rest of the way up to the device. You can all go back, now, and when I’m finished destroying it, I will come back and join you.”

As he and Vika waited, Sang consulted with a number of others. Richard couldn’t hear that debate in his mind, so he didn’t know what was being said, but he was hoping they would turn back. He didn’t particularly want an audience. Flashes of lightning lit clouds from the inside in a frightening display of the power of the storm that was rolling in on them. The heads of some of the Glee sank into their shoulders as they cast worried looks to the sky.

Finally, Sang returned. “We will go with you. I want to see the device destroyed, and so do many of the others. It has ruined many Glee lives. We want it ended once and for all. The ones who used to follow the goddess wish to go as well.”

Richard worried about those Glee, but didn’t want to get into any kind of disagreement that could prevent him from destroying the device. So, he simply nodded and then turned back to the trail up through the rocks.

They had to scramble up steep areas of scree, almost running in order to make progress against the ground sliding away underfoot. The rock was loose and difficult enough to climb in the dry, but when it was wet it was even harder to get up because the water coming down helped it to slide out from underfoot. After an exhausting climb up through the loose, wet rock, they finally made it up into rock that was still slippery in the wet, but at least solid and much easier to climb. Richard’s legs ached, but he didn’t want to stop to rest. He could rest once the task was completed.

As they climbed higher into the low clouds, the fog became so thick that it was difficult to see very far. Richard could see Vika’s dark shadow behind him, along with a couple of the Glee, with what looked like ghosts following them, but the rest were lost in the poor visibility.

Thunder rumbled almost continually through the desolate landscape. Lightning flickered somewhere off in the distance, illuminating the cloud they were in. Because they couldn’t see where it was coming from, the light and sound instead seemed to be everywhere. It was unsettling.

Richard didn’t like the idea of being on a mountain in a storm with such violent lightning, but his need to destroy the device made him ignore the danger and drove him onward. After he destroyed it, they would be forever trapped in this awful, wet world.

After hours of climbing, they finally began to emerge above the cloud cover and into the strange, dry forest of small rock towers. The sun was still obscured by an even higher layer of clouds, but at least it wasn’t raining, and it was brighter. The lightning moved some distance away along with the huge, dark, billowing clouds, but Richard could still see the near-constant flickers of lightning inside those clouds down below them, lighting them with an eerie reddish, firelike glow.

He didn’t know that he would ever be able to get used to this strange world, but he knew that he didn’t really have a choice. It made him wonder if life would be worth living here after he destroyed the device.

As Richard and Vika wove their way through the maze of rock spires that had been carved, shaped, and softened by the weather, they finally reached the cathedral of those stone shapes surrounding and overlooking the device. It sat across the way at the edge of an expanse of white sand.

He could tell that Vika, not usually given to emotion, was feeling as despondent as he was at the prospect of destroying their way back to their own world. But it had to be done.

Richard drew his sword.