Outside Influences

The world opened up around her as Bel fell below the edge of the cliff. The people of the Golden Plains talked about the pillars in near reverent tones, but Bel hadn’t understood why until that moment. The glow of the far off Barrier combined with her newly acquired eye of the huntress revealed the details of the cavern as she fell. The walls were nothing but craggy rock for as far as she could see, but one of the pillars that support the world was in between her position and the Barrier, a column of near darkness backlight by a hard, blue glow.

The pillar was enormous. Mind bogglingly huge. Bel was nearly as shocked as the first time she’d seen the ocean. Her mind fizzled at the sight – an unblemished, reflective metal cylinder that thrust up through the bottom of the cavern and out through the top, like a whale cutting through the ocean without a care for everything it displaced.

She had seen the top of this pillar under the remains of the Dark Ravager’s collapsed pyramid, but it had looked like an uninteresting decapitated cone from the surface. When they began to excavate it, scrattes had poured from an opening on the side until they reburied it, so its true size hadn’t been revealed. Daran claimed that the pillars that dotted the surface of Olympos went all the way to the Heart of Olympos, the center of the world.

James dismissed the idea as impossible – something about pressure and molten cores of superheated metal – but the moment Bel saw the gradually widening pillar she felt that it could be true.

Bel marvelled at the structure – surely placed by the gods when Olympos was formed – as she fell, careless to her destination. Finally, movement on the surface attracted her attention. With a sigh, she finally broke eye contact with the enormous pillar.

It would be nice to go exploring somewhere that isn’t dangerous. One of those – what does James call them? A vacation?

Bel looked down. Still far below her dangling feet, she could see the scratte nest that they’d been warned about. It didn’t look like the small, green bipeds were able to scratch the metal of the pillar itself, but wherever there was an opening in the pillar they had suspended platforms and rope bridges, forming a spiderweb around the base of the structure.

How do they make rope? Bel wondered. Actually, how do they make anything? Didn’t the ones I fought with Beth have tools? One of them had a necklace with a creepy religious symbol, too.

Bel pondered as she slowly descended, but at the halfway point she finally remembered that she was supposed to be aiming for a landing spot. Luckily for her, she was drifting along the same course as burning disk, blown by the same gentle currents of wind as her target. The lead parachute was easy to see, glowing like a beautiful jellyfish from the fire it carried. The parachutes of Cleis and Pelagius were off to the side, probably to avoid falling straight into the fire after it landed, so Bel tugged on her parachute until she aligned with their trajectories.

She frowned when she realized that the guide flame was going straight into the center of the sinkhole, but Cleis kept guiding to the side so that he would land much farther up the ridge.

“No skin in the game,” she muttered to herself. A couple of her snakes nodded in agreement. Her frown turned into a grimace as the guide light illuminated movement among the rocks and loose soil of the sinkhole’s slope. It looked like scrattes were already rushing to investigate – they stood out against their dim surroundings, glowing with a faint, angry aura in Kjar’s Sight. With her new eye of the huntress ability she could see a veritable ant hive of activity around her.

Now I almost wish that I hadn’t taken this ability. I don’t want to know how many scrattes are running around down here.

Bel touched and double-checked all of her parachute’s buckles and straps, making sure that she’d be ready to release as quickly as possible. It didn’t look like the scrattes would be giving her much time to prepare.

Bel saw Cleiss hit the ground first below her. He fumbled for a moment, but released his parachute before any scrattes reached him. A moment later he began spinning his poleaxe in wide, deadly arc. Bel angled her descent away from the enormous hippo and his deadly weapon. She didn’t fancy being caught by an errant swing.

Pelagius landed a bit to the side and ended up in a tangled heap. Bel clicked her tongue in displeasure as the awkward fish-person’s predicament. She pulled on the cords of her parachute to angle her trajectory back in Pelagius’ direction.

She struck the ground with enough forward momentum to send her skidding, but she was only a few seconds of hard running away from Pelagius. With practiced motions, Bel released her parachute from her back and ran to Pelagius. Bel quickly loosened the strap holding her sword in its sheath as she covered the distance. Pelagius had already attracted the attention of a couple of scrattes, but she was hopelessly entangled in her parachute and in no position to defend herself.

Bel caught up to one of the short scrattes and stabbed it straight through its important organs, just like Beth taught her. Its death warble halted the second scratte in its tracks, which gave Bel time to kick the first from her sword and come to Pelagius’ defense.

Bel prepared to glare, but both she and the scratte were surprised when a tentacled mass leaped from the shadows. The scratte shrieked in fear as it was wrapped in tentacles and squeezed like a juiced fruit. Bel had seen Orseis kill a couple of hairy elves before, so she quickly turned away from the sight before the scratte’s organs were pulped out of its body.

She had originally assumed that the woman would fight with the same finesse as Beth since the two of them got along so well, but that couldn’t have been farther from the truth. Orseis fought with a raw brutality that made Bel’s snakes twist, literally ripping her opponents to shreds.

Bel slowly spun, looking for more threats and checking on her allies. Cleis had gone into some kind of rage and was swinging his poleaxe around wildly while invoking the name of his god. He was fine though, and there weren’t even any living scrattes still near him.

In fact, Bel wasn’t experiencing anything like the horde of scrattes that she had expected. A quick glance in Flann’s direction provided an explanation.

The old fire mage’s parachute was hovering above the ground, suspended by the updraft from the incredible blaze he’d started out of a band of a dozen scrattes below him. He was tossing a fireball every few seconds, blasting away at his surroundings and killing any scrattes that still moved.

That gave Johan and Simon, the bird and snake people respectively, plenty of safe cover to land. They touched down without a problem and calmly packed their parachutes back into their bags. Bel turned to help Pelagius with her own disaster, and by the time she’d disentangled her the fight was over.

Pelagius made some noises that Bel decided to interpret as thanks. Bel nodded back and jogged over to retrieve her own parachute. She began the annoying process of wrangling it into her bag, trying to work as quickly as possible. She would have to check it over and repack it later, but she didn’t want to get it cut to ribbons in a sudden fight.

Once everyone’s parachutes were in order they gathered around Pelagius, who was somehow still struggling to shove her parachute into its bag.

“That was passable,” Cleis declared as Bel trotted up. “Now I will distribute the essence equally among the fighters. That means two in ten for each of Pelagius, Simon, and Jonah. I will take the remaining four.”

“Uh…” Bel raised her hand and Cleis glared at her.

“You are not fighters,” he huffed, “so you do not need to grow your essence.”

Bel stared at him. “Say, what’s your goal down here? Like, were you ordered to come, or did you volunteer?”

The hippo grunted as he reached down and drained the essence from a corpse. “I won’t bother explaining things to you; you obviously haven’t embraced our culture here in the Golden Plains. I doubt you would understand.”

Bel nodded. “Cool, cool. Hey, Pelagius is carrying the backup hot air balloon, right? Maybe we should take that off her load so that she can concentrate on fighting. It looks like she twisted an ankle when she landed.”

Cleis stomped over to Bel and looked down from his towering height. “Are you planning to abandon us while you return to the surface? You should know that I brought along a device that will allow–”

Bel laughed. “Return? Abandon you?” Bel shook her head. “Never. I’m just trying to help you be the best that you can be.”

Bel glanced at Pelagius, awkwardly limping with her scaled legs. “And believe me, Pelagius needs all the help she can get.”

For a moment Bel thought that Cleis would take a swing at her, but instead he went to Pelagius and pulled the second, smaller hot air balloon from her pack. It was still a heavy burden, and Bel nearly fell over when Cleis deposited it into her outstretched arms.

Bel thought about leaving him the moment that she put her hands on the tightly wrapped bundle of silk, but instead she turned towards her real companions to get their thoughts. Wisely, they waited for Cleis was wander away again before opening their mouths.

“We could just kill them all,” Orseis suggested. “The fish would wash the disgusting taste of the scratte from my mouth.”

“Whoah, don’t be startin’ anything crazy,” Flann urged. “They’re just a bit, you know, young and inexperienced. Maybe a bit simple.”

“What is Hanti thinking?” Bel demanded. “I understand that she wants to set us up for failure, but Pelagius is going to get herself killed. Failure here is going to make it take that much longer to get into Satrap.”

“Sure,” Orseis hissed, “but Hanti knows that elder Robète has already delayed the beginning of the campaign. With the extra time she’ll frame you as incompetent, and your sister by extension. Then she will take full control of the operation, all in time for elder Robète’s schemes to lose momentum.”

Bel grit her teeth. Maybe I should have learned something about the local politics.

“What about you two?” Bel wondered. “What are you hoping to get out of this?”

Orseis laughed. “Suddenly worried about the company you keep?” The tentacled woman patted her on the back. “Don’t worry about me – my folk want the Barrier to disappear so that we can expand our coastal hunting grounds.”

The woman’s wavy pupils narrowed. “We wouldn’t mind having more possible mates too.” She shrugged. “That part goes without saying.”

Flann chuckled quietly. “You water folk always were the direct ones. Food to eat, mates to bed, maybe some kelp to wrap yourself in at night and you’re happy.”

Orseis clacked her beak. “We are a practical folk.”

Flann’s tail swished behind him. “I can’t deny that.”

He smiled at Bel. “I suppose I’m here because I’m hopin’ for a better future for my family and my friends’ families. I’ve seen too much blood shed for the people of the Golden Plains to just let us all fade away.”

“How altruistic,” Orseis mocked.

“Hey, don’t you two start fighting,” Bel warned. “So what do–”

“We are leaving!”

Bel looked up to see that Cleis was stomping on the ground, ready to fly into another rage if they didn’t get going quickly enough.

Flann patted her on the shoulder. “We’ll leave ’im behind soon enough young’un. We got a long way to go – it won’t hurt us to let ’em stick their feet into the ant’s nest first.”

Bel suppressed a groan and hurried to catch up with the ornery hippo.

Despite Flann’s assurances, Bel had been worried that the trek would be too strenuous for the old fox. He was having no problems though, at least compared to their fish and snake companions. Pelagious’ feet were mostly flippers, and were terrible at traversing the rocky downhill of the sinkhole. Simon was a snake with tiny feet and legs: Bel could have rolled up the slope faster than he was carefully picking his way down.

The scrattes had been pushed back – temporarily at least – but that didn’t meant that the descent was peaceful. They were confronted by a nearly constant stream of small, essence corrupted insects, but, luckily for Bel, Flann didn’t let them get closer than a stone’s throw.

Much to her annoyance, Cleis insisted on collecting each corpse and distributing to himself and his cronies. It bothered Bel in two ways: the distribution wasn’t fair and it was also a waste of time. Ventas had taught her that the essence a person absorbed from a broken core only came from the outer shell – everything else went back to Olympos. According to James, the surface area of a four dimensional essence core grew at the cube of the radius. Bel didn’t know what the hell that meant, but apparently draining the essence of something weaker than you would accomplish a big, fat nothing. Unless these jokers were still working on their first core, smashing some insects was a waste of time.

Bel gestured at Orseis – Flann was busy looking for threats – and the cloaked woman stuck out a tentacle to make a strangling gesture.

“Hey,” Bel said aloud, “stopping for all of these little critters is slowing us down. We’re giving the scrattes more times to organize a real attack.”

Cleis glanced back at her and snorted. “The scrattes are too simple for such a thing.”

“They’ve built a nest, you know. Back in Satrap they also set ambushes, and we saw some that got their hands on some kind of explosive.”

Cleis waved a meaty paw. “Stolen, I’m sure.”

“Sorry, they stole an ambush? What are you talking about?”

“Don’t twist my words, little gorgon. You know what I meant.”

Bel’s snakes hissed. “No, I really don’t because you don’t make any sense.”

Cleis thumped his poleaxe against the ground and slightly picked up the pace. “Be quiet. All this talking is what will draw the scrattes to us.”

Bel fumed for a minute, and silence fell over the group. Then there was a loud clatter of rocks from above them. Bel spun around and saw a large number of loose rocks bouncing down the sheer side of the sinkhole right above them.

Bel tapped Flann and Orseis and gestured to a large, stable looking rock.

“I think we should get behind some cover,” she announced.

Cleis turned to her. “And why would we do that?”

“I think we’re about to be ambushed. James used to tell me about a movie – oh, movies are, well, we don’t have time – anyway, in a movie called ‘Spartacus’ they rolled flaming logs down a hill to scatter an opposing army.”

Cleis stared at her with his tiny eyes. “And what does that matter?”

Bel shrugged. “I just don’t think that standing downhill where the scrattes can roll rocks at us is a good idea.”

Cleis thumped his poleaxe into the ground. “The scrattes don’t set ambushes,” he insisted.

Just then another clatter of rocks heralded the arrival of several large boulders. Bel jumped behind her chosen refuge with Flann and Orseis while Cleis and his men gaped in surprise. Johan leaped into the air and into the sinkhole, taking himself both out of the path of the boulder and out of the fight. Simon shoved himself into a small crack in the ground and Cleis stomped his foot into the ground and activated some kind of ability; the boulder that hit him smashed itself to pieces on his unmoving body.

The last boulder clipped the slow moving Pelagius in the side, sending the woman spinning downhill.

Cleis roared – and then charged uphill. He was intent on fighting the scrattes on his own, apparently.