Forbidden Tomboy 7 – Beyond this Kingdom.

John would have loved to be a fly on the wall during that meeting.

He had that option. He could have Possessed a small drone or sent one of Claire’s familiars to infiltrate the throne room. If anyone beside Lu Zhi found out, that would have been grounds for an incident of a scale that the Heavenly Jade Empress could not cover up. Therefore, he had to wait until she had time to talk to him again.

That was likely going to be dinner at the earliest.

John found their guest quarters essentially deserted. Ladies-in-waiting did not serve them, that was left to the servants that John had brought along. Delicia had gotten an invitation from the Fellowship of the Yellow Emperor and was thus out and about. Ehtra had also left, although in her case this was only because she wanted to take a walk. Far from unusual, unlike the fact that Claire had decided to be somewhere John wasn’t.

Nightingale, Undine, Rave and Nathalia had all found somewhere else to be. Lee was around, playing Kingdom Hearts 3 with a bit of a disappointed expression. Whatever she felt about the game, she was fully focused on it.

John was left in the rare situation that he was alone. He decided to make the most of it and went through the letters left behind for him at the table. There were official events to meet with him and that was not good enough for some. The ****, the powerful, and the entitled all asked him for personal meetings and John had to find out who was who.

The form of the letter was often good enough to get a basic idea. Powerful people did not send folded papers, they sent scrolls. Ironically, that made John more interested in the papers. Getting entangled in the power politics of the Mandate of Heaven without Lu Zhi’s knowledge could end poorly. He did not know what big schemes of hers he might get entangled with.

‘Same is true enough for everyone else though,’ John thought, while considering if he should answer any of these letters. It felt rude not to make at least a token gesture. He was there to deepen the friendship of the realms and make some business deals. The tributes were appreciated by the locals, but tributes were no mercantile relationships. Most people preferred paying for the materials they worked with. While truly just people were always in short supply, those that were purely narcissistic in their life decisions were equally as rare. Even corrupt people like a quid-pro-quo.

‘John. Get here. Now.’

Claire’s voice dragged at his mind with painful urgency. An image flowed into his brain that had him jump to his feet. His response was wordless, his hurry immediate. The connection between them let him sense the direction easily. Spiders skittering in the shadows of the buildings did the rest to guide him.

Swift steps saw him march down one of the many channels. A sealed gate, guarded by four terracotta servants, was opened for him. A flight of stairs brought him down into the western half of the Forbidden City. He took a sharp turn and followed another pathway.

He walked for five minutes, even at his pace. He suppressed the urge to run. He did not want people to follow him and frequently made sure there was no one. The Forbidden City was the size of Rome in diameter. Ten kilometres across, all of it plastered in bureaucratic complexes and gardens.

The walkway John followed eventually turned uneven. Weeds surfaced between stone tiles, widening gaps that had once been perfectly tight. The water channels that went through the Forbidden City had small fish and other animals living in everywhere. In these parts, John could not see the concrete bottom of the channels. All of it was covered in algae and seagrass. Lily pads swam at the edges.

The water curved into an opening in the wall, then rushed into an underground system. All water eventually ended up in the moat, or so John had thought. A naïve assumption, he now realized. In a city this ancient and layered, nothing was straightforward.

Claire waited for him in the shadow of a maintenance tunnel. Her red eyes glowed. The pupils were thin as needles, barely even visible. Wordlessly, she stepped into the shadow of the tunnel. John followed.

They entered a labyrinth. Had John still been mundane, he would have refused to continue past the third turn for fear of not finding his way out again. There was only sporadic light, entering the underground web through ventilation shafts. The air was heavy with moisture and the scent of moss, algae, and other such plants. They thrived down there despite the lack of sunlight. They were pale. They lived off something else.

A sickening cleanliness was in the air. It was the intersection between sterile and sickness usually only found in a hospital ward dedicated to the worst diseases. Yet, that wasn’t it either. It wasn’t the sickness that was invasive here, it was a fecundity that John disliked. The white moss, the white algae, they felt wrong and they only became denser as they continued.

They descended into lightless depths. Claire became a source of light. Her red eyes shone, as did the carapaces of the hundreds of spiders she surrounded them with. None were larger than John’s palm. They dotted the white walls with crimson and red. The web of arachnids formed a moving hint at the shape of the walls and steps of the staircase. They had been walking for ten minutes now. Downwards, sometimes through a corridor here or there, but always downwards. At their superhuman pace, they were deep underground.

A stream by them ran thick as tar, saturated so heavily with algae that it barely even contained water anymore. The walls were all fuzzy white moss. John felt it ever stronger, the horrid fecundity pulsing outwards.

Then, the moss suddenly stopped.

They turned one more corner and suddenly faced a lake, free of any algae. Pieces of metal, free of rust, protruding from the walls of the massive underground chamber. It was more than a hundred metres across, almost all of it filled with that body of water. Vibrations filled the air. They were caught in the metal. The metal sung like a low, synthetic choir. It was beautiful.

Waves originated from nowhere, idyllically swaying and breaking gently on shores of white sand. Crabs scurried about. Pale, metallic shells shimmered in the lights that danced under the ceiling. Like the aurora borealis, they moved, bright green and waving like satin in the breeze.

The water was clear, too clear. John felt an aversion to even touching it. Claire pointed to a bridge that spanned across the lake, connecting opposite shores. In the centre was a circular platform. The entire thing was made from bleached wood. John walked up and touched it. It was warm, hard, and smooth, like the exposed bone of a living creature.

As they followed the bridge, they stepped into the noise range of more and more of the vibrating rods. The overlap distorted the beautiful choir into an unnerving, low-volume cascade of ethereal lamentations. Powerful as he was, John’s hair stood on end. He had seen much and this was not entirely new. He had encountered this before. Then, it had been a lesser part of a greater threat, and still the question had been bouncing around in John’s head forever.

Where did IT come from?

What had IT been?

Crystal clear waters glowed from within. Bioluminescent plankton added white light to the aurora. Prismatic dots joined here and there, but they were all around overpowered. Corals carpeted the bottom of the lake in serpentine clusters. There were eight paths on one side of the lake and two on the other. They were interrupted by rocks and mussels.

They reached the centre. The platform there was held up only by the structure itself. There was no pillar underneath it. In fact, the middle of the platform was open. It was older than proper glass. A low railing was all the security John had as he bowed over the hole and peered down.

Schools of fish swam peacefully, white and metallic. Large fish, small fish, long fish, broad fish, with eyes as black as the void and teeth like barbed hairs. Lobsters and crabs crawled around, scouring the lakebed for something, small pincers pulling at strips on white foundations. Sea slugs wobbled their way about. Their intestines were visible through their flesh, pulsing a sickly green. Eels curled in the cover of holes in jagged shells. They chewed lazily on the marrow.

Wiggling, clustered, greedy, unsatisfied, a thousand pale worms swarmed around a hole. John could hear them move, impossibly, through metres of air and water. A wet, squirming sound, as they gnawed away. Their maws surrounded a black pit. A widened, empty eye socket, part of a skull buried under sediment and life feasting on it. Despite that, John could make out an elongated shape like a horrific fusion of a shark, an elf and a serpent.

Tracing the form outwards, John made sense of the whole picture. The corals and mussels covered its resting limbs. The stones in between were bones or flesh as of yet unclaimed. There were two arms, a torso of humanoid proportions, and eight tendrils of knotted muscle. It was almost as large as a football field.

“I remember this,” Claire hissed, her voice brimming with hate. “It hung over his head whenever he summoned us. It hung over all of us, like a token of his superiority. I hated it. I hate it now.”

John only shared a fragment of history with the thing and yet he shared the sentiment fully. It had hung above the throne of the tyrant of another world. It had been animated by the will of the ruler of the Iron Domain. It had been drawing the life from that world before Arkeidos took power. The Astrotium bone of that kraken horror had become the core piece of Inkaryl.

‘It can come here,’ John thought.

To this day he had no idea what the horrific creature had been. One he had found with Arkeidos and he had animated it to be his minion in the fight. Even as an undead, the monster had hated its master. A second one, much smaller, had been kept confined beneath the citadel, beneath Arkeidos’ phylactery. Even that small spawn had defied identification by him or the Horned Rat. All that John knew about it, from the lips of the tyrant himself, was that it had fed on life itself.

The one below them had grown to thrice the size the one John had fought before it had been vanquished. All of the energy it had pulled into itself, all the necromantic magic used, was bleeding back out into the lake. The sickening, disinfected fecundity was pure life mana seeping back out at a crawling pace. Was John’s aversion born from a misguided instinct or was something horrid to be born from this corpse?

‘They can come here,’ John thought and backed away from the hole.

Not knowing what it was had been horrid enough on its own. That was when he thought they were elsewhere. That was when he thought Earth was spared this invader. He knew little, so frighteningly little, about magic, and a creature like that fit an infinite amount of times in the gaps. Why was it here? How long had it been here? How much longer would it decay? Who knew of this?

John kept his breathing steady. Uncertainty clenched his heart. He hated the feeling. He had gotten used to understanding what was going on. There was nothing here he understood. He hated it. Could one of these things fall from the sky at any moment? Of course it could. John knew that. It was the Abyss. Even in the mundane, a freak asteroid could have entered a collision course with Earth at any moment. Why would there not be magical phenomena stirring under the veil of the perceivable?

“We need answers,” John said and turned away. Staying there would get them nothing.

‘Should I take samples?’ Delicia asked, swiftly. The mental network was pulling into the situation now, sharing in John’s memories as he made them available.

The Gamer rubbed the bottom incisor teeth against the upper ones as he considered the question. ‘We will not act until I have heard from Lu Zhi,’ he answered. ‘I want her explanation first.’ He stopped at the foot of the bridge and looked back. He was genuinely surprised when the vampire was still up there, staring with raw hatred into the lake. “Claire,” he called out to her.

The woman from another world looked over to him. She glanced back at the thing one more time before hurriedly following. Her gaze went through him the entire time. When she reached him, he suddenly pulled her into a hug. “John?!” she squeaked, surprised.

“You’re with me now, Claire,” he whispered into her ear. “I understand your hatred. I understand your rage. It’s fine for you to feel them. Just remember to come back to me, okay?”

The dark storm within Claire was swept aside by a hurricane of love every bit as dangerous. Obsession cut deep and her arms wrapped around him, squeezing him so tightly it hurt. It was the good kind of pain. To be there for her was what he needed. “I’ll always come back to you, Master,” she whispered, adoringly, then let go.

John loosened his own embrace a few seconds later. There was plenty to do and a long way back up. They began it together.

Not once during the trip did Claire’s eyes return to green.