Chapter 19 – The Clocksmith and A New Discovery

“I thought you were supposed to be going first,” Tel said flatly as he peaked around a corner. More broken… stuff… scattered around the hall, but nothing that looked immediately dangerous, and a straight procession of pink butterflies.

He looked down at the watch in his pocket, the majority of the butterflies swirling around him like they were waiting for him to call on them for his magic. A few got sucked into the gathering ball at the barrel of his gun, though they weren’t really needed since the weapon produced its own chaos energy, and then most of the remaining randomly fluttered off.

Most.

The last few, just a few, all went in the same direction. Around the corner and then down the hall, like they were following a path. Chaos energy didn’t follow paths. Normally.

Except that was exactly what these butterflies seemed to be doing. Fascinating.

“I’m busy reading,” Shara said, like she was a five-year old telling a two-year old about something only she could do. “Besides, you have that… whatchamacallit thing on your hand. Pink death. Kaboom. You know the one I’m talking about?”

“You’re talking a lot for somebody busy reading,” Tel muttered, but rounded the corner with his weapon at the ready, and his eyes following the line of butterflies. Still, she did have a point though – with the weapon out, and his choice to use it, he was far from defenseless.

“Enough,” Tel hissed under his breath, pushing back at the door in his mind that wouldn’t quite close all the way. Just a crack, it sat open, memories and voices leaking through, polluting his mind. Too much stress… he needed time to center himself. To slam the door, lock it tight, and throw away the key. It was… affecting his personality. Making him talk… making him act.

Would he have ever pulled the gun out of his dimensional space if the door was closed like it should be?

“I think I’ve got it,” Shara said from behind him, taking his attention away from both the voice and the butterflies. “Might take some practice, but this thing is pretty… wow.”

“It something you can show…?” Tel started to ask as he turned around, but his eyes caught on something on the wall and the words trailed off. Now, just what was that doing here?

“Maybe, I think it should… something got your attention there?” she asked.

“Yes. That etching on the back of your stopwatch,” he said, pointing at an identical engraving in the wall. “What does it mean?”

“Mean?” she asked and came over to stand beside him, the cudgel in her hand seemingly forgotten. “It doesn’t mean anything, as far as I know. It was my mother’s watch. I thought she just liked butterflies. You know… chaos sorcerer and butterflies… it’s kind of our thing.”

Tel looked from the engraving to Shara. “Your mother was a sorcerer?”

“Yeah, didn’t I mention that?”

“And you said something about your aunt training you. She was a sorcerer too?”

“Yessssss…” Shara said, drawing out the word suspiciously. “So?”

Tel looked at the engraving on the wall again. No doubt about it, it was exactly the same as the one on the back of Shara’s watch. “Chaos magic isn’t hereditary,” he said. “I mean, it doesn’t run in families. It doesn’t pass from a parent to a child. It’s chaos. Random.

“People tried to breed sorcerers in the past, putting two powerful sorcerers together to try and get a strong child as a result, and it didn’t work. Other people tried to breed sorcery out, but that didn’t work either. Chaos and order are both part of nature, and they are constantly balancing each other out. Sorcerers will have normal children, and normal parents will have sorcerer children. There’s no way to predict it or make it happen.”

“Again, so?” Shara asked, but lifted her hand up to run her fingers along the engraving in the stone wall.

“If what you’re saying is true… and I totally believe you…” he added quickly when she scowled at him, “then it could be a coincidence, but it’s a very, very rare one. To have three sorcerers within one generation of each other, all of the same blood line, is very interesting.”

“It’s not… three…” Shara said slowly.

“Are you adopted?”

“What? No! Why would you go there first?” she said. “My mother had two other sisters; they were both sorcerers too.”

“Five of you?” Tel said, running the numbers in his head. “That’s way beyond coincidence and bordering on the realm of impossible. Was your father a sorcerer too? Your grandmothers?”

“Dunno,” Shara said, attention firmly on the engraving. “Never met my dad or my grandparents. Just me, my mom, and my aunt. We moved around a lot.”

“Ah,” Tel said. Didn’t seem like a topic she wanted to get into.

“Why do you think the same symbol is here?” Shara asked. “Do you think my mom could’ve been here?”

“It’s possible,” Tel said, but shook his head. “This symbol looks older, though. See how the scorch mark runs across it like this…here? Unless your mother is more than a hundred years old, which is how long I am guessing this place has been like this, this symbol wasn’t put here by her.”

“More than a hundred… how old is that?”

“She’d be very wrinkly and would probably have trouble walking on her own,” Tel said. “For reference, the Escalation Wars were about four-hundred years ago, and I’d guess you’re around twenty.”

“Those numbers don’t really mean much to me, but my mother definitely wasn’t wrinkly last time I saw her. And walking away is the one thing she’s always been good at.”

Walking away, not around. Definitely issues there.

“Though, one possibility is that she found the watch here, and brought it back to you. Maybe it’s not her symbol at all,” Tel said. That answer would make more sense.

“But, what was she doing here in the first place?” Shara asked the same question that popped into Tel’s head.

“I don’t have an answer yet, but do you feel that? We’re getting closer to whatever is making that… sound. I’m sure it’s keeping those monsters back now too. The… tone… of it is almost exactly opposite that of the chaos energy that carried their shouts. Maybe it will help explain things. Maybe it’s why she was here too.”

“Maybe it will help me figure out where she went. Why she left…” Shara whispered, then snapped her head in Tel’s direction, eyes narrowed.

“Sorry, did you say something?” Tel asked, pretending his attention was completely on listening to the strange tone.

“Nothing,” Shara said. “By the way, why are the butterflies doing that?”

Tel looked back to make sure she was talking about the line of butterflies moving in an orderly fashion down the hall and around the next corner. “I don’t know, but I’m hoping we are going to get a lot of answers wherever they’re going.”

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“I’ll go first,” Shara said, hefting her cudgel and moving around him to take the lead.

“About time,” he said, glancing back the way they’d come. The door was solid, but those strange monsters were strong. If they really wanted to get through, they would, in time. It had to be the tone keeping them at bay.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Shara said. “Reading takes time. You of all people should know that.”

“I guess. Especially if it’s your first time. You going to tell me what it said?” he asked.

“No,” she said, turning her head to give him a smirk. “Showing is more fun.”

“Fine, but when we’re somewhere safer, I’d like the opportunity to study you more closely.”

“I bet you say that to all the girls,” she said with another smirk, but most of her attention was back on the hallway ahead as they came to the next intersection. “Butterflies are going left.”

“Then so should we. What do you see?” Tel asked, and she peaked around the corner, the cudgel firmly in hand.

What could the artifact do? The desire to know was an itch on the back of his neck he couldn’t scratch. There had to be a reason part of it took on the shape of her fist. Some kind of connection to her or her magic?

“Uh,” Shara said. “I…uh…I don’t know what I’m seeing. You probably want to take a look at this.”

“Is it going to try to impale me?” Tel asked, but he moved up behind her and looked around the corner. If it – whatever it was – was dangerous, Shara would’ve said something. Then again…

“I’ve never seen, or read about, anything like that,” he said, lifting his weapon up and rounding the corner.

Ahead of them the hall ended at another doorway, this one with the stone door lying flat on the ground like it’d been ripped or blasted off its hinges. The line of butterflies proceeded past the fallen door and into the large room behind, and Tel’s curiosity couldn’t let him trail too far behind.

Beyond the doorway was a huge room, easily two-hundred feet across and forty-feet tall at the highest point of the domed ceiling. Butterflies popped to life around Tel as he muttered off the measurements, only to flutter off straight away along with the others that had flown in. Here, inside the room, the line of butterflies broke up in an ordered fashion, like they were being directed, into eight paths, each ending in what looked like a thin metal pylon.

Maybe fifteen feet tall each, the eight pylons were spaced equally in a circle around the true focal point of the room – and its most terrifying feature. Torn in the center of the room, like something had taken a paper bag and ripped it open, crackled some kind of tear in reality. No, not reality. Not exactly.

The feeling was the same as when Tel opened a portal to his pocket dimension. This tear hanging in the air in the center of the room, a dozen feet tall and three feet wide, was clearly a portal to… somewhere else.

“Any guesses what this all is?” Shara asked, then pointed below the floating portal. “Doesn’t look like we’ll be able to ask whoever that is. Was. Whatever.”

Tel tore his eyes away from the portal to where Shara pointed, finding a bloated and pallid corpse sprawled on the stone ground. “No, he won’t be much help,” Tel agreed. What was a corpse doing in here? Never mind that, the bigger question really was what this was in here at all.

“This is the domed ceiling we saw from outside, isn’t it?” Shara said. “And the butterflies are going to those metal spike things and… then disappearing?”

Tel watched as the butterflies orderly moved to the pylons, then eight at the same time, one each per pylon, landed and vanished.

“They’re producing that tone,” Tel said, the strange reverberation billowing out in an almost visible wave at the same time the butterflies vanished. “But why? Are they keeping the portal open?”

“Portal? That’s like what you do to carry meat pies around?” Shara asked, stepping out to the side and looking from the portal to the doorway where they’d come in.

“It’s not just for meat pies,” Tel mumbled. “But, yes, it’s the same thing. At least it feels the same.”

“Can I go through and find everything you’ve stashed away?”

“First off, I can’t send living things through the portal, so I wouldn’t suggest it. Second, I don’t think it goes to the same place. My portal is black, like a void. This one is… psychedelic?” he said, searching the constantly shifting colors between the boundary of dimensions for any sort of pattern.

There wasn’t one.

Wait, if something was forcing the butterflies to follow a pattern, to follow rules, that had to mean there was a tremendous amount of chaos to balance it out. Nothing else would explain why the embodiments of chaos would suddenly become structured. And those pylons, no, that wasn’t the right word for them – they were like tuning forks, but connected at the bottom and top – they were purposely attracting the butterflies.

But if the butterflies, and the power for the pylons, was coming from the watches Tel and Shara were carrying…did that mean they weren’t active before? That wouldn’t make sense…unless…

Tel looked away from the portal again, scanning the curved wall of the room. Just like out in the hallway, there were a number of empty indentations, places where grandfather clocks had once sat. Empty, except for one on the far side.

So, this room had had clocks producing chaos energy in vast amounts. Maybe not just this room, but the whole building too? Then, that chaos energy was somehow forced into an orderly fashion and pattern to fuel the rods in the middle. Metal that could absorb and order chaos? There was only one kind that fit the bill.

“Those pylons have to be chronosteel,” he said. “Like what the Tailcoat swords are made of. That explains how they are absorbing the chaos.”

“Great. That’s how, now how about why?” Shara asked. “This room is making my skin crawl, and I feel like the portal is…watching me.”

“Watching…?” Tel asked and looked back at the portal at the same time something came out. Like a spider’s leg, if the spider was as big as a house, dozens of joints rotated and bent the carapace-covered appendage as it stretched outward. As if tasting the air, it shifted left and right, then seemingly noticed the body at the base of the portal, and reached out to touch it with the tip of its leg.

The dead body lurched upward at the instant of contact, arms twisting around like they were caught in a corkscrew, something under the skin bulging and then contracting, blood vessels bursting to color the flesh a sickly blue, and the center of the chest ripped apart to run in a long mouth from naval to neck. Ears on the side of the head grew wide and large, like a bat’s, while the area around the eyes blackened, and the nose and normal mouth sealed over, leaving the face almost smooth.

Pulled up by the shoulders like a puppet on a string attached to the strange leg, the thing stood, shuddered once, then turned its head in Tel’s direction.

“That’s one of those things…” Shara said, voice low, and cocked her arm back like she was going to throw her cudgel.

“It is,” Tel agreed and took aim with his weapon, numbers flashing on the tube as dozens of measurements ran simultaneously. One number in particular drew his attention, climbing so fast it was a blur, until it dropped to zero at the same moment eight butterflies vanished within the pylons.

Eight pulses ballooned out from the strange metal tuning forks, little more than a ringing in Tel’s ear as one wave passed over him. The monster in the center of the ring, however, reacted very differently, literally popping like a pimple when the eight waves converged on it.

Gore and viscera shot straight up to paint the ceiling forty feet above, then rained down in a fine shower of crimson and white dust as Tel and Shara quick stepped away until their backs touched the wall.

“What the… what was that?!” Shara asked.

Before Tel could answer, dozens of small mouths opened across the carapace of the leg, needle like teeth extending and gnashing at the air, and the thing screamed. The high-pitched screech burst out on a wave of pure chaos, strong enough to press Tel against the wall and rattle his bones to the point of sharp pain filling him from head to toe. The agony grew and grew, like his bones were going to burst inside of him, and at the same point it seemed he would simply explode like the monster did, the next wave of butterflies landed on the pillars.

The billowing wave of energy from the pylons cancelled out the monstrous screech like it had never existed, and the strange leg shuddered in pain, but the mouths closed and vanished.

“You okay?” Shara asked, stumbling over beside him, face pale.

“I think so,” Tel said, fighting down the echo of pain through his body, and leaned against the wall. “And, more than that, I figured out what all of this is,” he added, pointing around the room with his free hand.

“Really? How about you explain it to me after we get out of here?” Shara said and took a step towards the door.

“Can’t,” Tel said, taking a deep breath and straightening up. “Those pylons aren’t keeping the portal open, they’re keeping whatever is on the other side contained. Our watches are powering the pylons now, but somebody else must’ve wandered in and gotten touched by that leg thing. It changed them into one of those monsters we fought in the woods, which in turn brought more bodies for it to change.

“If we leave things like they are, it’ll just keep creating more and more of those monsters.”

“And you suggest we do what, exactly? Stay here? Leave our watches behind? Neither of those things is happening,” Shara said, and there was a hard edge to her voice, like she dared him to challenge her on it.

“Don’t be silly,” Tel said. “I’ll fix the clock over there, and that should be more than enough. For now. We’ll have to figure out a longer-term fix later.”

Shara looked from the spider-like leg stretching out of the portal, but not moving, to the door again, like she was weighing her options. “How long will it take?” she finally asked.

“Depends what’s wrong with it, but I’m sure I can…”

WHAAAAM, and the building shook, like something had slammed against the solid stone walls.

Or the door.

WHAAAAM, again.

“That scream… the leg called those things. They’re coming in,” Shara said, turning to face the door. A flick of her wrist and the fist at the end of the cudgel dropped off to hang from two feet of silver chain. “Will the pylons make them explode?”

“Probably not. I bet that only worked because the monster was in the middle of all eight,” Tel explained.

“Great,” she said, then looked at him. “For both our sakes, I hope you’re as good at fixing those things as you say you are.”

WHAAAAM, CRAAAACK, the building shook again.

“Me too,” Tel said, running for the last standing clock.