Faces of the Past

Ghostlight was silent, eerily so, as she faced the direction that the pachys left. The mouth of the tunnel had swallowed them, a torrent of rushing water dividing their paths. She had no more concern for their future than she had for any other. They would have another guide to help them continue on her path. She… had her own lost soul to guide.

She waited a few beats longer, gazing towards the wall water and seeing no more than she ever had. Her lantern creaked quietly as it swung gently in her jaws with every step she took. Back and forth, back and forth. The sound was almost like a heartbeat, as regular as it was. She let her feet carry her in whatever direction the path flowed. Whatever direction she went would, ultimately, be the correct one.

Faintly glowing flora lit the tunnel, though she saw and needed no light. The gentle glow rippled off the narrow stream of water that trickled lazily over the cool, damp stone. It reflected off the old and tarnished glass of her lantern, giving it the illusion that there was a phantom flame inside, flickering with blue and green hues. The oil well was emptied long ago, of course. Even the lantern couldn’t remember the last time it had been lit.

The occasional creak and groan of the lantern’s handle squeaking against the metal cuffs which secured it to the top of the lantern itself was one of the only sounds that echoed against the tunnel halls now, outside of the faint trickle of the stream and the increasingly distant roar of the waterfall. It was soothing. Peaceful. She hoped that it would be enough to remind him of who he was.

Come back to me, love.

Tobias woke slowly, his thoughts unfocused and confused. He felt as though he was waking from a dream, or perhaps a nightmare, but the substance of the dream had long ago slipped between his claws. He had absolutely no concept of what his dreams had been composed of, and… no recollection of what he had been doing to come to this place.

The dark cryo glanced around the space he’d woken in. A cave or tunnel of some kind, though it wasn’t as dark as he would have thought a tunnel should be. Glowing moss and mushrooms grew dotted throughout the cave. The moss was a scraggly sort. It smelled - Tobias sniffed at it again, not believing his senses when they told him it reeked of blood. It must have been his imagination, for when he smelled it again, it smelled only of water and greenery.

It liked to grow along the ground more than the walls, and refused to grow from the ceiling which was oddly smooth. A thin stream of clean water trickled downhill, flowing past his feet.

Mushrooms grew further back, closer to the base of the walls and clinging to cracks and ledges too small for his eyes to see. Most of them were small, delicate. They grew in clusters.

Safety in numbers.

Tobias turned his gaze up towards where the water came from, listening to the voice with no origin. Yes… it wasn’t safe to travel alone, here. You could get caught by vines and consumed by vicious, voracious plants with appetites for flesh and bone, or get caught up in a violent clash between those who saw themselves as royalty and those that they had deemed unworthy, and unwelcome.

Whispers fluttered through the cave, like the wings of so many tiny bats rushing overhead. Tobias turned his muzzle to follow them, pale eyes flat and almost lifeless as he gazed into the dark. They were moving too quickly for him to keep up, ricocheting off the cool stone walls. Unseen, barely heard. A secret.

Few courtiers knew where this tunnel truly went. They rarely went further into the tunnel than this (for a tunnel was what it truly was), gathering mushrooms to calm toxins and upset stomachs and gathering moss to cure soured wounds and pack punctured flesh which refused to stop weeping. The islanders, the topsiders, that had been shown this place didn’t know more than that. The courtiers liked it that way, carefully guarding their secret.

He didn’t know how he had come to this place, but he knew… he had something more to do here. He wasn’t done, he couldn’t leave the dome just yet, yet when he tried to take a step forwards in the direction he knew that he had to travel, he took a step back instead. Another, then another. Something stronger was pulling him back. A heartbeat, almost. A pulse. Something alive and beautiful.

The paths were tangled together. They would lead in the same direction, eventually, so he gave in to the stronger draw. He turned, traveling alongside the creek towards its source.

It was a long walk. Almost silent, save for the whisper of voices that drifted through the tunnel. They were too quiet, too mixed together for Tobias to truly hear what it was they were saying. It was just a presence; water rippling over stone and casting gentle murmurs into the calm, humid air.

The pulse grew stronger the longer Tobias walked, and eventually, it wasn’t just the fungi and the mosses that lit the path ahead. A flickering green and blue flame, yet not a flame, danced ahead of him, held in the jaws of another cryo that was steadily walking towards him. She was everything, her visage unknowable and ethereal. She was the light in the dark, the source of all things, the beginning and the end. She was familiar to him in a way that no other possibly could be.

“I know your face,” he said quietly, breaking the gentle silence after they had come to a stop in front of one another. His voice was quiet and careful, hesitant yet almost reverential. He couldn’t think of why he knew her, yet was almost certain that he had heard her voice in a dream.

Ghostlight’s sightless eyes beheld Tobias, and were kind. He did know her. She would show him everything and more again, in time.

“You came back to me again,” she replied, her voice soft. She knew he would, but it was different every time. She would have walked across the Earth to find him again, but they were fortunate that this time. He had been near.

She tilted her muzzle slightly, bumping the tip just slightly against Tobias’s. There was more for them to do. She knew it as well as he did, and now, their paths were aligned rather than tangled. He could walk them down into the dark, following the thin trickle of water fed by the waterfall at the far mouth of the tunnel.

No other words needed to be shared as the pair walked through the faintly lit tunnel. They had fallen back into sync almost perfectly. Again, Ghostlight believed them to be fortunate in that regard.

The scent of blood filled Tobias’s nostrils again and for a moment, he was almost certain that it was his until the trace of it vanished again, replaced by the damp chill of the underground tunnel. Fear, horrific fear, scrambling and running and trying to get away, so many paths cut short by the vicious swing of a muscular forelimb and the cruel sting of unexpected betrayal. Bodies piled so high they would blot out the light of the sun-that-was-not, corpses rotting away and leaving behind naught but bloody bones and macabre trophies -

Tobias blinked, catching the faint sound of the swinging lantern. They were nearly there.

The narrow trickle of water gathered in a crystalline pool of unknowable depth in a space where the tunnel suddenly widened. Long-abandoned crates and containers lay about the room, precisely placed and yet forgotten by the humans who would never again return to claim their equipment. This was their place no longer. What busy little lives they had lead, preparing for everything yet unable still to see far enough into the future to know they were witnessing and participating in their own extinction. It was ironic, in a way.

When their claws clicked against carved paving stones, and not the smooth stone floor of the tunnel, Tobias blinked again and realised they had now left the tunnel. It was far brighter here, outside and in the heart of the Court once again. They approached an iguanodon with a dark feather coat, head and underbelly coloured with starkly contrasting splashes of white. He sported a feather crest, marked with clean black stripes similar to those on his face and neck. He was conversing with another, and did not at first notice their approach.

The feathers on Blackmist’s crest started to rise, unsettled, before he even turned to see who it was that dared to approach him. The scathing remark that he turned to deliver died in his throat as it was replaced by the cold, paralysing feeling of dread. Eyes devoid of life approached him on dead limbs. Every disjointed step this monster took was accompanied by a wheezing gasp that rattled in his chest. Blackmist opened his jaws to bellow a warning, reared up on his hind legs to again put an end to this foul creature, only to be abruptly cut off by Ghostlight’s calm voice.

“We seek an audience with the Queen.”

The twisted visage of the undying spawn of the dead had changed before Blacklight’s eyes to be nothing more than a pair of topsiders. Cryos that had delivered the fateful message, that he knew had stayed at the banquet until Queen Rhys’s signal to destroy the unfaithful and disloyal. One that he knew he had given a fatal wound, yet they were both here before him as though nothing had happened at all.

“What business do you have with Her?”

Though Tobias no longer appeared to be the mangled corpse that Blackmist had left behind, his voice was just as horrible and ragged when he spoke, like he was speaking through a punctured lung and was not long for this world. “We are here to swear fealty to Her Majesty Queen Rhys, Lady of the Sunken City. We will aid her in defense of Atlantis and help rebuild that which the ocean has threatened to reclaim.”