***
Master Sisyphus was juggling a number of dials and levers of an arcane design, intricately arranged. His controlled, delicate yet swift motions revealed him to be an expert. Whirring sounds and the occasional clanging noise reverberated throughout the bizarre machine as he handled it with attention to every detail, feeling his way to the mysteries of the crystal under scrutiny as it revolved slowly in a receptacle which glowed with a multitude of strange, faint lights.
The two boys, Damon and Fidias were both pedaling hard on a doohickey made of leather belts and iron-cast wheels connected in a complex way to the tatar device. Sweat ran down their foreheads in a torrent, their faces flush-red from the exertion.
“Are we done yet, Master?” Damon ventured, panting.
“Be silent. This is delicate work! Keep pedaling!” Sisyphus replied hastily without turning his focus away from the machine. “This is fantastic. The thaumaturgic levels are nothing like I have ever seen,” he murmured audibly.
“So much for being an expert,” Fidias said under his breath. To his dismay, Sisyphus overheard the comment, even though he was evidently enthralled by the study of the crystal.
“Haven’t I been definitive about being a smart-ass, Fidias? Triple chores for you tomorrow. That involves fetching water from the leaf-spring.”
“That’s ten miles away!” the boy complained painfully and slowed down reflexively. The tatar device began flickering, becoming unstable.
“More pedal! Don’t slow down, not now!” Sisyphus urged the two boys and Fidias groaned, pedaling back up to speed. The flickering stopped and the machine resumed its normal, still unsettling noises.
“If that seems to be the case, then... By the Gods, I need to write this down. Keep pedaling!”
“We know!” Fidias groaned again, his voice brooding from the physical effort, only to elicit Damon’s weary eye and a thorough, disapproving shake of the other boy’s head. Master Sisyphus was engrossed in finding a clean piece of scroll and a pen in what undoubtedly was a mess of a laboratory; pieces of equipment were lying about in various states of working order, ranging from nuts and bolts to full-blown monstrosities ready to go if one dared to use them. Still though, a simple writing apparatus complete with paper and ink wasn’t easy to find under a heap of books, plans, grocer’s lists and thingamajigs.
“Will someone get me a pen and a piece of paper? A scroll? Anything, at all?” Sisyphus shouted.
“But we’re pedaling, master!” Damon said with a strained voice.
“Bah! What good are you two when you’re most needed?” Sisyphus wondered and shuffled at various desks and shelves at random. Before long, he found a suitable piece of scroll that had only been used in the most rudimentary way; an old shopping list with enough room in the back. He picked up a jarred piece of a broken glass tube, very much like a sharp-tipped pen, and dipped it in a nearby pool of spilt, always-wet ink.
“It will have to do. This could prove the greatest discovery ever!” he intoned momentously.
“Could you hurry up, master? I can’t feel my legs anymore,” Damon asked petulantly. “I’m burning up inside. I think I’m going to throw up,” Fidias added morosely.
“Would you have it on your heads if the world crumbles away and the universe is engulfed in the eternal flames of destruction?” Sisyphus asked the boys in all seriousness even as his hand scribbled down in a muddied, dense script, notes, numbers and designs that seemed to make no sense. The two boys barely had the energy to venture a miserable look at each other.
“This will change everything. At least, everything that matters,” Sisyphus said staring at the piece of scroll he had just finished writing down. He let the piece of glass dripping with ink fall on the dirt floor, and simply stared at the crystal in awe.
“Can we stop now? Please, master,” Damon said even as the lights on the machine began flickering on and off alarmingly once more.
“Haven’t we discussed the merits of perseverance, Damon?” Master Sisyphus said even as a terrible cracking noise thundered above them, followed by a series of thuds and howls. It sounded like a whirlwind had ripped the roof of the house in a violent, sudden turmoil. Sisyphus looked up, as if the noise was unsettling only in the way a pesky rat might be.
“Boys, how do you feel about some extra points in combat orientation?” Sisyphus asked, looking at the wooden floor above them with a sense of impending danger.
“We’re kind of beat, to be perfectly honest, master,” Damon said as his pedaling slowed to less than a walking pace, while Fidias had given up entirely and was resting his chin on a handle of the pedaling apparatus. “I want to go to sleep,” Fidias murmured drowsily, right before the wooden planks above their heads were ripped apart by half a dozen blue and black claws. Through the gaping chasm, tendrils of livid flesh writhed and squirmed like living things with a mind of their own, reaching for the two boys.
“I’m afraid that’ll have to wait. Pole-arms! On the double, boys! Cover!” Sisyphus said and reached under his robes, uncovering a minuscule repeating crossbow loaded with unusually sharp cone-shaped bolts. The boys fell on the ground instinctively, the clawed hands and tendrils grabbing nothing but air. Sisyphus had an easy enough target, a blue-black mass of flesh that was stuck half-way into the basement. He let fly his shots wildly, turning a crank that reloaded the crossbow in less than a second. All the bolts found their target; the monsters seemed to feel and acknowledge that they’d been hit, but it didn’t seem to slow them down.
They ripped another whole section of flooring and just when they were about to jump down, they began trembling uncontrollably, faint rivulets of milky fluid oozing from where they’d been stung. The next moment, their heads exploded like a toad on a hot summer’s day without warning, in a messy, gory fashion, milky blood and pieces of tendrils and Ygg brains flying in all directions.
“That wasn’t supposed to happen,” Sisyphus said puzzled, while the boys reappeared from the weapon rack, each armed with a wooden training pole-arm easily three times as tall as them. Lernea popped her head through the flooring, milky white blood stuff dripping from her dangling hair.
“Master, we need to move. Right now,” she said urgently while behind her Bo flew past in an amazing flying leap, shooting fireballs that left a sizzling sound long after they’d flown into a couple of directions.
“Not the training pole-arms! The real ones!” Sisyphus exploded in anger, while tucking the crystal and the piece of scroll safely under his robes.
“But master, you said we weren’t ready,” Damon countered in a confused fashion.
“Ready or not, you’ll have to do,” Lernea said and reached for an arrow in her quiver before standing up and away from the hole in the floor. The sounds of battle echoed down below, as otherworldly cries rose up from numerous directions.
“You heard the queen, boys. Consider this a pass if you live,” Master Sisyphus said, making sure to pickup his old, venerable quarterstaff before pulling down the small wooden staircase and climbing it in a hurry.
“If we live?” Fidias wondered and Damon shrugged. “You don’t suppose this is just another elaborate test?” Fidias said, as they too climbed the creaky staircase, wielding the pole-arms in a cumbersome manner, very much like fishing poles. What they saw at ground floor, left them speechless.
The roof of the house had been ripped apart, as if shaved off. The walls had mostly turned into rough patches of still standing wood and bodies of the same hideous black-and-blue monsters that had attacked them lay everywhere.
The bunny that had only barely singed a couple of locks off their hair, was hopping about, letting go fire-bolts with dead-eye accuracy at the ranks of the approaching, abyssal foe that the boys had only believed existed in sweat-breaking nightmares, of the sort you really can’t wake up from. Lernea was picking her targets wisely, covering for Bo, and Theo was levitating a foot or so above ground, holding his hands against his ears, as if trying to block out everything from his m
ind.
“What happened?” Sisyphus asked her.
“I went to search for Theo and Bo. They were out fishing on the docks, with little success if I may add, when the whole village turned on us,” Lernea answered flatly.
“Turned on you? Where did those monsters appear from?”
“The villagers, they were Ygg in disguise. Almost down to the very last one,” Lernea replied shaking her head.
“Is it possible that you brought them here, my lady?” Sisyphus said ponderously.
“No way that I can think of,” she replied in earnet.
“Then they were here already. Waiting...” Sisyphus said and let his voice trail off.
“We need to carve out an escape path. I’m not sure we can take all of them head on,” Lernea said and let fly an arrow at nearly point blank range right in the head of a flying Ygg who was very mute about its death.
“Excellent tactical analysis, my queen. But on the strategic side, if those Ygg were already here, lying in wait... That only meant they were waiting for you, and that crystal,” Sisyphus told her as he stood by her side, reloading his crossbow with spare bolts from a cupboard-turned-armory.
“What did you find out?” Lernea replied as she nocked another arrow in her bow, waiting for a good target to approach them. Bo was having a blast, literally, but she was too busy turning Ygg into crispy stumps to even send a thought on the matter.
“Their father,” Sisyphus said nodding at Theo and Bo, “he’s alive and well, but hiding. He knows what the Ygg are truly after.”
“That information was inside the crystal? Who is he?” Lernea asked impatiently.
“A very talented, ingenious individual by the name of Athmoor Radaniel. What’s even more important, he’s marked a way for us to track him down.”
“What are the Ygg after?”
“The Netherspring,” Sisyphus said with a voice full of untimely melancholy.
“What’s that? What’s so important about that thing?” Lernea said as she let a double-shot fly, felling two Ygg, their heads perfectly pierced where it mattered.
“Everything!” Sisyphus said, sounding excited and scared at the same time, a feeling he very rarely exhibited.
“I suggest you take some kind of cover, master,” Lernea told him, looking at Theo with a cautionary gaze.
“Why?” Sisyphus wondered, as if the hordes of the Ygg trying to kill them were not justification enough.
“Theo is right about ready to blow them all to pieces,” Lernea explained.
“He can do that? How?” Sisyphus asked her, sounding very interested in the mechanics.
“Something called Rho,” she replied and closed her eyes.
“Did you say Po?” Master Sisyphus said and Lernea replied with a shake of her head and said ‘Rho’ once more. Only, no matter how loud her shout, her mouth seemed to simply open and close, in a slow, languid fashion, the sound of the compression shock that expanded from Theo visible in the air, blanketing everything in all directions.
And indeed, just like a stone makes waves when it lands on water, so did the power of Rho reverberate in a radius all around them, the Ygg writhing in sudden, terrible agony before their heads exploded in a gory mess of milky blood, pieces of tendrils and cerebral matter flying about, leaving their bodies slumped hard against the ground, exactly like a puppet on torn-away strings.
“I hope to the Gods Master won’t make us clean this up,” Damon said under his breath before Theo collapsed on the floor with a dull thud.
“Is it over yet?” Fidias was heard then and seeing his master’s squinting gaze, realised he’d asked the wrong kind of question again.