Zaldizko - Chapter 34 The Lotus Core

Cold air and low whistling sounds brushed my face as we fell at great speeds.

“Come on!” I fumbled open the portspell whilst not letting go of Colin. His body was weighing me down. He was slipping out of my hold. We were falling like shooting bullets.

My breath got caught in my throat, heart nearly stopped beating when the portspell slipped out of my fingers and landed onto Colin’s pocket. I grabbed it and managed to flip it open, pointing the top mirror part at my own face and the bottom half towards the rapidly receding view of the platform’s underside.

“Utz nazazu!” I shouted. “Please!”

My voice was lost to the rush of winds.

Relief surged through my body when I felt my downward fall change direction. The underside of the Lotus Bridge platform sped into view.

My thoughts went back to Death’s hypothesis shared with me when we left the lantern room. When he saw the platform’s image in my mind, he recalled blueprints of its architecture in an alchemist’s guide he read. This architecture used minerals, wind and water to formulate electrical alternating and direct currents (whatever they were) to power things. He guessed the tree roots were power links to a mineral power generator (thing) on the underside. His hypothesis concluded that the Lotus Bridge was not powered by magic but science. As a creation of science, it would require physical maintenance. As a machine, its mechanics would be shielded under a hood. In this case, on the underside of the platform directly beneath the tree.

Colin and I slammed into a steel grate scaffold that was suspended in mid-air beneath the Lotus Bridge platform. It was held in place by the olive tree’s roots.

“Ugh,” I winced at the grazes to my arms. My heart thumped wildly as a felt the knight stir about.

I gripped the steel mesh with all my might and hauled us onto the safer side. I instinctively clung tighter to Colin to push past all my aching pain. I’m sure War would have been impressed by my muscle strength, I know I was.

“Crap!” I cursed when the portspell slipped from my sweaty hands and fell into the unknown depths.

“You still with me Famine!” Death’s frantic voice made my head ache.

“Kind of.” I panted.

“Thank heavens.” Death sighed with relief. “I’m going to balance the platform. Hang on tight!”

I swallowed my curse when the platform grunted and groaned as it tipped back into an upright and stable position.

My nose slammed into the platform’s galvanised underside.

“I can’t take any more pain!” I yelped with tears slipping from my eyes.

On the plus side, we were lying flat, face up, on the scaffold. Stable for now.

“You better come to Captain.” I pulled Colin’s soporose face towards mine and kissed his lips to bring him around.

He returned to consciousness with a gasp for air. I laid back, staring up to galvanised steel.

Man, I was beat. Ever since that night of Gat Shiem’s fire, I had been thrown into one situation after another. There was no time to rest, I had to get Death back into his body and see that the world was safe. Especially now that it was clear of Moralta’s intentions in transforming Hell’s Labyrinth into a big tsazcuth portal to Zyon. In doing so, bringing more demons and that world’s power into Sol.

I was still uncertain of Abraham Reiner and Aidoneus’s visit to Gat Shiem. What were they really after that day? I probably should have asked that question before that X-scar freak fell. He may have slipped out something unintentionally.

“Ugh!” I smacked my head, hoping it would shake out smart thoughts. Nothing.

“Why’re you beating yourself up? You figured out that horrible demon’s plot for this place. Plus, your good fortune has brought us this far. Think better of yourself Baby Brother.” Death’s smooth voice reassured my self-esteem.

My mind reeled back to the time before the attacks at Gat Shiem. I never saw the visitors because I was with Bulldog at the pond. Since it was hidden from the temple grounds, they would not have seen me either. It was close to evening when I had returned, so they would have been long gone. Pesti and the others had said nothing about their visit. I was none the wiser.

Why didn’t Pesti tell me about the visitors? What did Abraham mean when he said he had owed a favour to the family Pesti had forgotten? Sure, it was common knowledge to all the monks that the four of us weren’t blood related. This knowledge coming out of Abraham’s mouth made me squeamish.

“Whether people know of our biological families are irrelevant. The four of us were surrendered children to Gat Shiem. We are a family. That’s all that matters. I must be attentive now. Moralta and Brystagg are fighting with magic again.” Death’s voice went silent.

A light tap to my shoulder drew my attention back to Colin. I faced his thankful smile.

“Are you okay?” I weakly signed. My hands were still shaky from the earlier heavy lifting and hauling.

“Fantastic.” Colin signed with a cocky grin.

He looked up to the metal, his eyes were squinting through his glasses at a symbol of a blossoming lotus flower stamped into the square panel within arm’s reach. He raised his arm, placed his palm on it, closed his eyes and became still like he was listening to the vibrations and sensations of the metal. An abrupt jolt made his hand recoil. He opened his eyes and faced me.

“This is the panel opening for the Lotus Core circuit board. It’s the nervous system of the labyrinth controling everything,” Colin signed.

“How do you know this?”

“Anyone who wears a maplink knows. Why we should know is one of the unexplained facts, but I suspect it was a flaw in the bridge’s design. Lucky for us,” he answered and added a question. “How did you know I’d be aware of this?”

“I didn’t. I just hoped that since you were a Captain and the Light Grimoire, you’d know something useful,” I causally signed back and coped a stinging finger flick to my forehead.

Looks like I had insulted the man, like I cared.

Shrill cries and a disturbance within the air reminded us of the battle occurring above us. No time for dawdling.

“Can you open the panel?” I asked

“And do what?”

“Reverse the dimension slip so the Lotus Bridge is back in the correct time stream.”

“I could, but fiddling with time is tricky, and dangerous as you know. Then there’s the interwork of a Lotus Core’s” Colin paused his explanation.

“Huh?! How did this knowledge come into my maplink?” He subconsciously signed out his surprise.

“Colin?” I prompted.

“The demon had used his own crystal for the dimension slip right? It may be possible to use a similar method. I would need zirconia or a similar crystal carrying residue of the correct time to lock on. Do you still have that key crystal I gave you?” Colin asked with surety.

I frowned, thinking that the crystal would work since it had been used in a spell and in another time period. I searched the junk in my memory, frustrated at the amount of useless stored trivia garnished from Bulldog’s secret back editions of Velvet Rose news magazines and photogravure books. An image of a sparkly marble surfaced to mind. I carefully rummaged through the inside of my belt pouch, ignoring the strange emptiness I felt at not sensing Small Cap in there.

“I think I have something better,” I whispered as I raised the nikiaku ball into Colin’s view. “Will this do? It’s from our time; been in my pouch since after my trip to a theater. Never touched it since then.”

Colin responded with an overexcited grin and hand signage. “Wow, more than perfect for the job.”

His hands gracefully danced around the pane’s lotus symbol as he said a spell. The lotus glowed. We heard four clicks triggered behind the panel.

He pressed the square panel, so it came loose and pulled it off. We swapped objects; I took the metal from him, he held the nikiaku ball tightly.

The core’s inside was a sight to behold. It was a white space sectioned off in four distinct portions, further broken down by four diagonal lines to form eight pie sections.

Each section was lit up with tiny gold crystal dots that made constellation patterns and formed a series of gold paths, which intertwined with each other. There were also some grey, green and red dots twinkling in random spots, spread out across the pie sections.

I gasped with awe when I saw the gold dots move around, disappear and reappear; pushing the other coloured dots into different areas or making their lights turn off completely.

“They’re the walls and everything moving about the labyrinth, right?”

Colin nodded. His forehead was furrowed with a serious frown.

I followed his line of sight to the far left of the panel quadrants, noticing the excessive white space. It was a contradiction to the right margin area, which was almost off the edge where some dots dangled precariously. The top margin area was hidden from view and the bottom was a lot of white space.

The sight made me gulp. The First Tier of Hell’s Labyrinth was obviously out of kilter.

Colin’s hand swiped over the pie section panels to change the colours of the crystal balls.

The white was replaced with blue, the red to black, grey to orange and green to pink. A different tier? Likely, since he repeated the hand motion two more times, causing the crystal balls to flash a different set of colours in different places.

He eventually returned to the first view with the abnormal quantity of space at the left and bottom margins. The constellation panel was inching dangerously out of existence towards the right.

His hand danced around the left space with a graceful motion. A lotus flower outline was drawn to the surface with fine threads of gold light from the tree roots dangling from the top margin. The flower’s disc was blank space.

He held the nikiaku ball before the flower disc and said a spell. I hoped his fancy magi-mojo was the fix.

I gasped when the ball was sucked into the flower disc. The scaffold trembled beneath us. I caught Colin’s hint to hold to something tight when he grabbed the panel from me and slammed it over the Lotus Core to seal it back up.

Winds whipped our skin. Static charged the air, raising the tiny hairs on my arms and neck. My vision blurred. To be accurate, the vision before me blurred and churned out of focus. Almost like we were imploding!

“What happened?!” Death shouted in my inner ear.

“Hang tight to your knickers. Shit, crap, Buddha protect us, think we’re gonna implode!” I mentally crapped myself.

“NO, WE’RE WARPING!” He yelped.

Howling and the clanging of metal assaulted our eardrums. I held the scaffold’s rails with all my might and groaned when I felt Colin’s weight pressed against my body as he clung to the same rails.

The howling was unbearable. Flashes of white were blinding my eyes.

In a blink, I was

Sucked.

I felt sucked and spat out like a big wad of lint. It took me a while to realise I was still lying on the steel scaffold with Colin next to me.

He was already composed and was fiddling around with the Lotus Core. The square panel was off again.

“Did we do it?” I whispered, feeling uneasy with the silence surrounding us.

Colin sighed with disappointment.

“So, what now?” I gulped.

“Good news, we’re linked to the correct time. The walls, in theory, should stop moving. Bad news, the Lotus Bridge is still out of alignment with the labyrinth,” Colin signed.

“What else is needed to pull the bridge back into working order?” I whispered, not about to give up.

“Sacral magic, but that would only achieve the demon’s aims. The only other magic I know of that can reset and revert time slips without moving destiny is Null. I’ve never known anyone with that power. I don’t even know if it’s real or some magis fantasy.” Colin gravely stated our options.

“If we were to use sacral magic, not playing into the Hiruda’s hands, that would restore the balance and working order, right?”

“Yes, the time part, but the destiny the Hiruda had set here will become permanent. It requires the Power of Preservation to isolate the fate, so it doesn’t move when time is restored.” Colin’s explanation went right over my head.

He broke down his explanation with an analogy similar to the one Death had provided on time cells. Basically, Sol was like a vinyl record, the Lotus Bridge a song track, time was a gramophone playing arm and needle, and destinies were grooves on the record. False destinies were light scratches over the record’s grooves. If they were left unattended for too long, they would deepen and become a permanent destiny to overwrite the original score.

The Power of Preservation was like a container and an eraser for those light scratches; re-coating the shellac so proper destiny could resume its natural course uninterrupted.

That was good for the destiny issue, but we also had a time problem to deal with. I was doing my best not to feel our situation hopeless.

“Brother. The Power of Preservation will not be enough to reset the false destiny you are facing” I recalled Pesti’s words from that vision. It was a dream, right?

“Hey, what if we had both the Power of Preservation and Null. How would that work exactly?” I threw out.

Colin raised his brows. His expression was clearly telling me not to waste time on a ridiculous hypothesis.

Abrupt quaking to the scaffold reminded us of the villain topside. Colin resealed the Lotus Core. I understood that we had done all we could here. We needed to be topside as well.

I was worried Brystagg was at his limit, and the Aueralius Brothers’ chi was almost gone as they continued being the power boost for the bridge to keep it stable.

“So how do we get up there?” I glanced around, not seeing a way off this swinging and creaking scaffold. I gulped down a nervous breath and counted numbers to calm my rapid heartbeats when my leg dangled over the formless space.

Colin answered my question with a knowing smile and a tap of his fob watch.

Magic of course. He used an elemental spell to move us back to the platform.