The Riddle of the Labyrinth 52 - Aftermaths

On the shore side in the pale morning light of the aftermaths Cleanthia remained standing on the river bank, in her hand something hot, hard and hexagonal. She knew not what to do with it. Not yet. Not for the first time did she wish for her father to be around, so she could ask for his advice, hear him telling her what to do with the diamond she was cradling like a talisman. As she stood there watching the sun filter through pale clouds and glean on the now harmless river, she felt the lacuna in her chest, the emptiness, the aching absence in her heart where the sweltering wish for revenge had been – and prior to that her father. She had attained her revenge, with the help of Lady Saphira, Sarah, who might yet live or die – as nothing was certain in this world of endless probabilities.

So now what?

o0o-------

Orora scuttled to the castle, wild-eyed and frantic, cradling the wounded Sarah like a baby in her arms. She called her attendants together, telling them it was urgent, that they had to haste. Her outcry of emergency and distress also reached Jareth himself and his extraterrestrial visitors. As she placed the broken form of Sarah in a sick bed and began stripping her of her burnt and destroyed clothes, she realized the girl was clinging on to life by the thinnest of sustenance, that the reedy line could be clipped at any movement. She was heavily scorsed, large burn marks laced across her whole body and she was afflicted with several fractures of arms and ribs. The distant heavens knew if there weren't inner bleedings too, damages done to central organs.

Orora had to work with what she had - yet what she had was better than most. She had access to the regenerative mycelium, this magic biotechnology which she hardly understood, but which might be the only hope Sarah had. After a second of shameful hesitation, did she turned to her attending nurse, a round old man with a snow-white beard that curled out from his chin like an oncoming thunderhead.
"Iskelon," she ordered. "Go to the safe locked fridge and bring me two of the test tubes on the topmost shelf in there!"
"You mean the..." Iskelon began as his face turned if possibly even whiter than it had been before.
"Yes I do."
"But the risk, doctor..."
"That risk is for us to take now. It's either that or losing the life of this young heroine! And she deserves better than our cowardice, since she put her neck in the snare for all of us."

Iskelon murmured something under his breath and hasted away to fetch what is superior had asked, even though fright was contorting his face, and he returned perhaps even more disconsolate and handed the physicist the two test tubes with the blue-shimmering liquid. In a frenzy Orora set at work, inoculating strands of mycelia into the prone form in the bed before her, using all her skills to judge where the worse damages might be and how they could be mitigated. For an hour she administered the mycelia, toiled phrenetical, then there was nothing more to do for the moment, but sitting down and wait. To muster hope.

Jareth kept a stone face as he came through the door to Orora's studio. He was followed by two of the extraterrestrials – the Cyborg Atrey and the Ebraan diplomat and spy Tilathian, the latter someone Orora had only spoken briefly to during the visitor's first evening in Infraheim.

"How bad is it?" the King asked without as much as a greeting as his eyes wandered over the bandaged woman in the bed. During the night, he had twice awakened from a dream in which the tide flowed red and the river throbbed with a terrible light. As nightmares go, he had seen worse, still this one refused to relent its grip even in the wakening hours, and it made him feel insubstantial as a creation of ash. Now, his features were tense in that way they got when he was controlling some intense emotion; the tic in his jaw, hands up to shield his eyes from the unearthly glare of the mycelium at work.
"She may yet live," Orora told through pursed lips.
"And the Alien?" Atrey asked.
"You'll have to ask the Voidwalker of that," the doctor glanced over at the Cyborg. "She was down by the river when I came down there, but of the Alien there was not a trace."
"So you think they killed it?" Jareth asked, slow and low like a storm breaking in the distance.
"They did something to it at least. The Voidwalker claimed it prostrated. Whatever that might mean. Banished perhaps."

While Orora was wetting Sarah's parched and peeling, red-raw lips with the purest virgin oil, stroking her battered cheek, Jareth came forward and slumped down in the sole chair by the bed. Insane or not, he wished with all of his might, with such strength that he shook, that with a swipe of his hand, he could erase the past and rewrite it wholly. Eradicate this showdown that might very possible cost this brave young woman her life. Substantiate Reikan's prophecy.

"It's my fault," the elegy was raw and bleeding, unlike anything Orora had heard from the King earlier. "I shouldn't had let her... I should had put a guard at her door, dissuaded her from going down there alone."
"Sire, there was nothing you could have done," Atrey offered comfort. "She'd found a way down there eventually."
"You don't believe in that damn prophecy, do you?" Jareth lifted his head and gazed heatedly at the Eraldan.
"No, but I believe in the stubbornness of a woman who have decided that something is very much her business," came the frank reply. "I tried to tell her off last night, but I relented as I saw in her eyes that she was not listening. There was nothing anyone could to do to impede her without harming her severely – even more than she's harmed now as a matter of fact."

Jareth wanted to tell Atrey it was nonsense, that she was reconstruction things after the event, making up imprudent excuses. But he felt his voice waver, his mind reeling and his chest contracting, an unexpected loneliness surging in immediately to engulf him. He forced himself to take his eyes off the ailing Sarah in the bed and instead return his attention to the Cyborg.
"Go find the Voidwalker," he asked of her, more a plea than a royal order. "Ask her to explain what happened, try to find out what she knows about the... Alien." The last word was spit out with a grain of anguish blended with anger. That frenzied ire nearly made Atrey smile, a little spark of zest in the midst of all that desolation made her almost feel a bit of a hope.

o0o-------

The brilliance of a light-storm penetrated her body, tore a fiery passage beyond her heart and brain, unfolded titanium wings that glittered and exploded in a galaxy of collapsed stars. The remarkable light imbued her with glory. It blazed and blinded her, burned away the vestiges that remained of her senses, folded and sculpted them anew, rebuilt her body from the nothing. Cerulean light pulsed through her like a roaring river, overwhelming her and she opened her mouth to scream, for she was drowning in fire and water, borne away on a rising tide of power. She felt the light tear through her and for one moment there was an excruciating jolt as if all of her bones had been ground to dust and then she was floating in a soothing wave of warmth and sea-green light. Since she felt the light remaking her, she held fast to this new thing of wonder. Yet she knew that to keep this magic she must refute the reality of her very existence. With this thought came the power to do so, and she rose her hands to the imaginary firmament up there and let go!

It became a great rush of flame, hotter and more vivid than the earlier fervour and it leapt through her skin and into her flesh. Linked to the staggered beating of a distant heart she felt the vigour like lightning speed home within her, suck in the divine essence of something old and alien, something with the origins laying eons back in time and lightyears from where she existed now, beyond the border of this universe and this stretch of time. She couldn't name the force tearing into her being as sharp as a laser beam, but it ripped through a long and dark night, hurtled to its mark faster and truer than any target-locked missile.

o0o-------

Hours passed and Orora watched the battle raging inside of her patient. The battle between a body about to fail and the regenerative mycelium doing its uttermost to mend it and hold on to life, to steady it and anchor it in the body again, pulling against the soul gravity threatening to tear Sarah's life essence away from her body and thus away from this cluster of universes and hurl it beyond where any living was able to go. The sun outside the window became robed in shadow, the sky was tinted scarlet and grape. Soon the night beckoned and news reached Orora that the portals were operational again, that it was possible to leave and enter Infraheim for those who so wanted. But that didn't help her or Sarah, she was convinced of that. Or at least until Tilathian appeared at her side.

"Dr. Orora?" his voice was temperate and melodic, like caramelized cream floating across her eardrums. "Is she improving?"
"I'm afraid not," Orora took her hands from her face and looked up to regard the Ebraan who was standing there in the middle of the small room with his arms on his back and his lemon-coloured eyes burning and compassionate at the same time. His essence wasn't consuming metaspace like Jareth's, still there was something powerful within him. A restive, static strength like a kundalini waiting to uncoil from the inner cavities of his subsoul. Smiling meekly at him, Orora went on. "This regenerative mycelium might be outstandingly powerful, however I must admit I don't really know how to administer it, therefore I might not have used enough. Or too much of it, I'm uncertain. But it doesn't seem to be sufficient for her to survive. She might live through the night, then it's all at the mercy of the laws of the Primordials."

Tilathian blinked, he wouldn't have guessed this woman for a religious kind, then again you never knew with medics, they saw so much dead and horror – and unexpected recoveries - that they might very possible become inclined to transcendent belief.  
"It might be, yes," he bowed his head slightly. "Or I have a better suggestion. As they say where I come from, the Starmaker helps the ones who help themselves."
"Let hear," a miniscule grain of hope was perceived in Orora's soft soprano as she urged him on.
"Now, when the portals are open again, let me take the two of you across to Ebraa. There is a place called Lailizza in Terandabar, my motherland. A place where the water runs pure and clean, the air is high and there's something in the very essence of that area that heals the ailing. Not many people know of this place of remedy, since it's a well-guarded secret. Yet it rectifies even those you might think were lost. Even the worst cases face a turn around there and can begin anew in restored bodies. If we take Sarah there tonight, I do believe her odds will improve drastically."

"What do we have to lose," Orora smiled. "I'll go arrange for it immediately." With new hope filling her heart, she stood and almost danced away to a closet, from where she started to retrieve the most essential things. Others might follow later with more objects of need.

***

"It's in there too now?" Chervin didn't know what to think as he regarded the transparent hexagon laying on the night-black marble table in front of them. The fist-sized thing didn't look substantially different from when his lord Orinian had harvested and bounded a part of the Alien soul in there about a subjective month ago. The light which then used to be pinkish had now taken on an eye-hurting lime hue and didn't pulse, flicker or ripple the way it had done earlier. Instead it shone with a nearly steady beam, a sheen that bounced off the polished table surface and gleaned in the shiny parts of the surrounding as if the light returned was stronger than the light emitted. He was petrified, regardless of that he couldn't restrain himself from reaching out with an almost trembling index finger and poke the object lightly.

As a response the light flashed like a beacon, three steady and long flashes and one shorter. Surprised Chervin and Cleanthia faced each other.
"Is it trying to – communicate?" the Voidwalker whispered.
"I don't know," Chervin disclosed, also in a muted voice. He paused as he looked intensely at the object, but there were no more variations in the emanated light and he didn't think it a good idea to touch the hexagon once again. Finally, he took his eyes of the shining thing and regarded Cleanthia again. There was something with the way her blonde hair seemed to reflect the light that made it appear radiant too. As if it was woven not from humanoid cells and proteins but from the purest of light instead. It was breathtakingly salient and something told Chervin that this had nothing to do with the Voidwalker's disposion of being non-present.

Forcing himself to shake it and concentrate on the matter at hand, he forced his attention insiede the box again and asked the more or less expected question.
"How did it get in there? Not even Lord Orinian can accomplish such a deed, or so I hope at least."
"It wasn't effortless," Cleanthia almost smiled as she shook her head, a minor sparkle came and went in her eyes. "Sarah took the beast down, used some kind of brute force on a mental level. Fought it, and let it beat itself weak against her. That's what caused her battered and acutely injured body which to me looked like beyond salvation, even though the doc seemed to think differently. When the beast had given her almost all it got – I imagine it was unused to fighting in the end – she gave it all right back the way it came from. Right into the core foundation of the beast."

"But it survived, right?"
"Yes," Cleanthia breathed in. "Barely," she added and her blue eyes, locked on his, remained unblinking. "It began morphing, losing its corporal structure and I feared it was preparing to abscond this reality. So I proceeded rapidly and was able to catch it in that state. To scope it up and transfer it to the inside of the hexagon. Now it cannot get out. Due to the bad state it is in and due to the old matter it's locked into and the pungent magic binding it atom by atom to the coal of the diamond. It won't get out, of that I'm sure, because it's locked within its own singularity as well, caught in its own trap. At the same time, I'm not sure it's safe to keep this object around for much longer. We don't know how it might affect us on a long-term basis," Once again she drew breath, braced herself. "This light," she went on. "I fear it's doing something to us. Something we cannot really forsee what impact it'll have us in the long run."

Chervin nodded sombrely. In the back of his head he was reminded of when he had caught some of that pink glue upon his hands and how it had sort of melded with his body. It still tortured him with ghastly nightmares.
"So what do we do?"
"I'm not certain," the Voidwalker shook her head. "I advocate we should talk with the others. Show it to them. See what they can have to say about this."
"And meanwhile?"
"I'll keep it safe," she undertook. "For the time being, pending a definite solution. I think I can protect myself at least somehow against it, by staying away from it using unusual dimensions."
"By being non-present?"
"Yes."
"Just be careful, will you!"