Chapter Five:
Meanwhile Back at the Stairwell
Leira hurried down the circular stairwell, feeling rather than hearing the bellowing rage of the demon that was currently trying to kill her son and his companion. With every new tremor Leira imagined she could see cracks open along the walls. As she neared the bottom of the stairwell she heard what was unmistakably the report of Davien’s pistol. She knew she had to hurry, but the large sack she had carried from the upper floors weighed heavily upon her back.
Just keep fighting Davien. Just keep fighting. Leira repeated this thought over and over as she made her way into the opulent hallway. Large onyx hands, holding crimson and white silk, seemed to move ever so slightly as she entered. A moment later Leira smelled something caustic waft from far along the hallway stretching to the right. The smell was followed momentarily by fumes and roiling smoke, acrid and suffocating, she quickly began to feel her eyes sting, tears fell freely and ceaselessly as her body tried vainly to end the irritation.
Coughing with worrying force, Leira tried to calm her mind as Davien and his mentor had been teaching her. Muttering an incantation to clear the air, she slowly drew several lungfuls of fresh air while fighting against the urge for further coughing. Striding forward into the hall she looked grimly at the ruined drapes, what remained of them, and the badly cracked onyx hands.
She noted with growing concern that the marble itself was shockingly pitted, gone were the gold and silver inlays that once highlighted the natural beauty of the stone. She knew without a doubt, and without knowing how, that her son, her special child, was at the center of whatever caused this devastation.
No longer caring whether she made extra noise and drew attention to herself, Leira shouted her child’s name as she ran headlong into the darkness. She had hope, she told herself, to find him before the Fiend could finish whatever had been started, his mentor had kept his promise to cure and teach Davien. Despite her strong misgivings with regards to this ‘ancestor’ she knew that her son stood a good chance of survival. She had seen, however, the harm this power did to her son. Soon, she thought grimly as she continued to race towards where the devastation became worse, there would not be any of him left.
Leira had enjoyed, for the majority of her life, the ability to see equally well in light and, to an extent, darkness. The darkness ahead quickly revealed its secrets as her eyes adjusted to it and retrieved new details. Abruptly the marble hallway was gone. Burned and jagged marble stone gave way to the bedrock from which the pit had been created. Leira could no longer maintain the effort to hold the large sack she still carried and contain the fear she felt for her son’s safety. The bag slipped from her grasp, dropping with a loud thump, and spilled much of its crystalline contents.
Leira was suddenly wracked with pain as a searing light flared to life before her. Out of the light stepped an older woman, wearing a sash of station Leira could not identify, who spoke with a familiar voice. You can save him for now, at a cost Leira, at a cost that you may find too expensive in the future. Or watch him crumble to pieces as his mentor bankrupts his soul and ruins his body leaving him to die as a free man.
Just as the light had burst quickly to life, the woman disappeared in a blinding flash. Following the flash the absence of light, as the darkness instantly flooded her vision, overwhelmed her ability to compensate. She was left kneeling at the edge of what appeared, to her adjusting eyes, to be complete ruination. The contents of the sack coated the knees of her clothing, though she did not bother to dust it off as she stood.
A loud croaking laugh further along the hall alerted her to the Fiend’s nearby presence. She could see, just at the edge of her sight, a dull blue glow roughly the shape of a man. Leira had just hopped down to the now much lower floor when a whistling, whining voice whispered in her ear, “I got yer back and two o’ my ‘Daughters’ still to go. Deal with Davien. I got some eaten to do.” Knowing better than to waste time looking for Jym, or considering the implications of his words, she quickly ran to her son’s side and gasped in shock at what she found.