PHANTASIA (10 page)

“Definitely not common knowledge,” Red laughed. “After we find Raven, how do you think we can get out of here? Will we have to scale the walls?”
 

“Yeah, or we can find a geyser. S and I saw one back where we first landed. They’re pockets of pressurized air. The currents are usually powerful enough to carry large amounts of weight. They’re sort of like reverse whirlpools. I doubt there are any that will take us directly to the surface from how deep we are, but we may be able to get to a much higher level of the caverns.”
 

“Alright then,” Red mumbled, but was halfway asleep between the words. He realized that over the last few minutes, the flazb had created a sturdy concave underneath him. The foam seemed to know his body intimately, creating a bed of hard mesh that perfectly catered to the curve of his back. It was the most comfortable thing he had ever tried sleeping on. His mind soon felt relaxed - at least as relaxed as he imagined it could be under their circumstances - and he drifted to sleep while listening to the thundering crash of the umbrielfalls all around them.
 

By the time Red awoke, he felt like days had passed, and worried that he may have overslept.
 
To his relief, he saw that S and Butz were still asleep, which meant that he was the first one up. He looked around and saw Magnus a short distance away, playing with Linx and his mallet. The cat seemed to be paying close attention to all of the human’s movements. If Red didn’t know any better, he would say that Magnus was teaching Linx how to use a mallet.
 

“How long was I out for?” Red asked, as he walked over with a yawn and stretched his arms out.

“About three hours or so,” Magnus replied.
 

“No way! That’s incredible… I feel like I’ve been asleep for more than a day. S was right; this stuff is amazing.”
 

“Yup… it costs a fortune to stay in a flazb chamber in Karth. I heard they want to build one right in Areopa.”
 

“Good call by the way, on resting. I felt like I was going to pass out before.”
 

“Thanks, I figured we couldn’t go on otherwise.”
 

“Raven would’ve forced us to go on,” Red smiled. “I wish she hadn’t overworked us the night before the field test. I feel like things may have gone differently… if I was up to par with my senses.” He looked at his right hand regrettingly but tried not to think about what
could’ve been.
It was always terrible to let one’s mind wander down that path. But it was true; if he had dodged that swipe just a second earlier, things might have turned out differently.
   

“She can be a tough leader…” was all Magnus replied. “Are you okay, after all that?”
 

“Yeah I guess. How come you never offered to be captain?” Red asked curiously.
 
The question seemed to come out of no where, catching Magnus off guard, but Red had wanted to ask it for a while now. “I remember you were captain of your team during our first year at Crest,” he added. “When professor Miles kept making us spar against each other for some reason.”
 

Magnus nodded distractedly. “Never wanted to do it to be honest. Plus I’m classified as a warrior, we typically don’t make good strategists.”
 

“But it comes naturally to you, doesn’t it? I mean, the Basil’s rule each of the two human cities in Areopa, don’t they?”
 

“Sure, but that doesn’t mean I want to do it. If we go to Raven now and find that…well…that something’s happened to her that we could’ve prevented if we had gotten there earlier, suddenly it won’t be so smart that I made us all take a rest.”
 

“Yeah, I guess,” Red related. He tried to block any negative thoughts about her circumstances. He glanced at his microAI -
still no movement at all
.
She definitely couldn’t have been asleep for this long.

“People think that it’s a great privilege to be a leader, but I always found it to be a burden,” Magnus continued.
 

“Maybe that’s what’ll make you a good leader one day.”
 

“What do you mean?”
 

“I always thought that only bad leaders would think of it as a privilege. It’s more of a duty. You’re a servant to those that serve you, not the other way around. Maybe it’s not a privilege that someone’s lucky to have, but a duty that someone’s unlucky enough to have to take on. And something you shouldn’t turn your back on if you have a gift for it. You’d be doing a great disservice to those around you.”
 

“Never thought of it like that,” Magnus smiled. His face beamed and Red had the sudden feeling that something had just clicked in his friend’s head. “For some reason, seeing it as a duty makes me feel better about it than seeing it as a privilege.”
 

“Makes sense, doesn’t it? Anyways, go to sleep, I’ll take next watch,” Red replied.
 

“Yeah… thanks,” Magnus said as he walked over to S and Butz and settled down right next to them.
 

The four of them rotated guard duty so that by the time everyone was ready, Red had two more chances to sleep. He found it impossible both times around — partially because his three hour nap in the flazb had left him so well rested, and partially because he felt too guilty about wasting any more time. Instead, he meditated while Butz kept watch, and then took over S’s turn to let her sleep longer. It wasn’t until they were all awake and preparing to head out that Red realized his hunger had gone. He wasn’t full, but his body felt restored, like all of its resources had secretly been replenished without him knowing. He mentioned it to S, who smiled in return and began a lecture on the rejuvenating properties of flazb.
   

When they finally returned on their quest towards Raven, they found out that taking a break was a much better idea than they had expected. They still had a while to go, but now that they were well rested, they were able to travel at a much faster pace. They went on for an entire day, traveling between chambers of different sizes, running through dark caves that seemed to have no end, and crawling by way of tunnels that were nearly too narrow for Magnus to pass through. When they arrived at a chamber the compass indicated was directly above Raven, they split into four directions to search for a chute wide enough to climb down. When they found one, they ascended to the lower level as quickly as possible. Linx seemed to have no trouble at all, flitting from rock to rock down the vertical tunnel as if the danger of falling was no more than an afterthought.
 

“Ow, sorry!” Red whispered when he accidentally stepped onto a hand.
 

“It’s okay,” S replied.
 

“What happened?” Butz asked from above both of them. “Why are we stopping?”
 

“There’s something down there,” Magnus called back from way below. Hold on, follow my lead.”
 

As Red went further down, he noticed what had caught Magnus’ attention. Down below at the end of the passageway was a bright blue light, too radiant to be the glow of Cron. When they got to the end of the chute, they each gripped unto the ceiling of the cavern the pathway opened up into, and then swung their bodies over to hang from the ceiling of the chamber below, like human spiders.
 

At first, Red was sure that his eyes were deceiving him. If he had thought any of the chambers they had crossed before were enormous, he wouldn’t know what word to use to describe this one. The place was big enough to house a city. Down below, as best as he could make out, were hundreds of thousands of creatures, or plants — he wasn’t sure which — that looked like giant toadstools and swam around the gulf of the cavern like busy colonies of fungus. Their movement wasn’t a walk, nor a glide as he may have expected, but an abrasive way of swimming through that flazb that soaked up the foam as they went. Floating eerily around the space of the cavern were lone brown clouds of umbriel, an effect that Red associated with the unique conditions of the chamber.
An internal atmosphere
. On the far opposite side of where they hung, he noticed a cluster of the clouds, raining umbriel down below like an isolated storm.
 

Spread around the cavern were wide spires that were so tall he was sure some of them could match the super structures of Echidna in height. He gasped sharply when he took a closer look at them, and after hearing everyone else do the same, he was sure that his eyes weren’t fooling him. The spires were littered with thousands of bodies, mostly critters of various sorts, but a few of them were human. They were all securely wrapped up in a mixture of flazb and other fungal substances. Some of the bodies were old, and had already lost their flesh, leaving only the skeleton of a corpse behind. Others looked fresh, recent even. He could feel the fear begin to pound in his chest —
Raven’s stuck somewhere here
. A few of the bodies even had academy uniforms on, and Red imagined that this was where most people ended up if they fell through one of the whirlpools on the surface like they had.
What is this place
?
 

At the center of the canyon was a single blue crystal that hung weightlessly like the clouds around it. Its radiance was blinding, but magnetic — a dazzling light that pulled Red’s attention away from the rest of the room. Just as he was about to stare into it, to get lost in its radiance for only a moment or two, he heard S shout a warning.
 

“DON’T STARE AT THE CRYSTAL!”

“What? Why not?” He was surprised at how disappointed his voice sounded. He didn’t realize how much he was tempted to do exactly that.
 

“I know what this is… I know what this place is supposed to be,” S replied hurriedly.
 

“That’s an ainmosni crystal.” Magnus said while gesturing to the center of the room.
 

“Yeah. That blue crystal in the middle, if you stare at it, it puts you into a trance-like deep sleep. Those things — the mushroom like things, I’ve heard of them, in a story about blood elves once. In their homeland in Karth, to ascend to their highest caste, certain members meditate in these caves with creatures that are supposed to make your nightmares come true. This must be a cave similar to the ones in the stories. Those toadstool things, they’re like parasites of your dreamscape. They feed on your imagination by circling you through your nightmares.”

Red stared at her wide-eyed, imagining that he knew exactly which nightmare he’d be stuck in if he gazed into the crystal. The thought made it easy for him to avoid its light, no matter how tempting the aura. S fixed her microAI over her eyes, and then shifted the device to its vizor mode. Red heard a click as the gadget strapped around her head, and then watched as she scanned the entire room, zooming in and out of different regions. Eventually, she motioned towards the second spire on their left. It took them several hours to climb across the ceiling, careful as they were not to accidentally pull a rock loose and drop to the bottom of the chamber. When they were directly above their target spire, they let go of the ceiling and used an air resistance cast to land softly at the cusp of the tower. Red calculated that he’d make it halfway to the floor of the chamber, if he dropped straight down from the top of the spire, before he ran out of energy (a bearing that can cause death on its own). Every second of an air resistance cast drained exponentially more energy to match the increasing velocity of a fall. A few minutes after climbing down from the top, S motioned towards a fresh looking gap in the spire, one that looked like it had recently been disturbed. Red held his breath as she clawed out its inhabitant.
 

Raven had her eyes marginally open, with a passive but slightly disturbed expression glued to her face. Her pupils looked cloudy and lost, like she had accidentally wandered too far into a daydream. Red immediately shook her, intending to pull her out of her sleep, but she remained unconscious.
 

“You can’t wake somebody out of the sleep of an ainmosni crystal. The only way out is if they escape their own nightmares,” S said bleakly.
 

“What does that mean?” Butz asked.
 

“I’m not sure, I think it depends on the nightmare, and the person having it,” S replied. “There’s a story about a blood elf that feared the stars, and to overcome his nightmare, he had to fly into the center of our galaxy with his eyes open. He awoke only after an entire month, and they say the experience had left him mad - always ranting about a place called star world,” she added grimly. “The crystal works by keeping you trapped within cycles of your own negative energy. If you can stop the flow of the energy, find another way to channel it, or eliminate the fear all together, you can free yourself from the nightmare.”
 

“What now then?” Red asked despondently. “Can we pull her out and bring her back to the surface? There must be a cure for this type of thing. I can carry her myself.”
 

“From what I know, there’s no way out —
 
besides getting over the induced nightmare. It’s an eternal sleep,” Magnus answered thickly. “Moreover, someone can
only
wake up while they’re exposed to the glow of the same ainmosni crystal that put them to sleep. We have to wait for her…there’s nothing else we can do.”
 

Red looked back and forth between Raven and his team, hoping that someone would come up with a solution.
The eye comes
a voice in his head said. The sound of umbriel dripping rhythmically unto the floor below suddenly reminded him of a ticking clock.
 

“I have an idea,” S began, as the other three jumped in unison with an excited “What!?”

“The mental connection healers share with their team members or those they’re close to, I’ve heard it being used to enter someone’s dreams as well. It’s a method of curing people of deeper mental complexes that manifest themselves as physical ailments. I’ve done something like it before… with Raven nonetheless —”