The Cloud Roost (Jekua Book 5), page 39
She leaned back around to face the group. “It’s there,” she beamed.
Balt shot up, his eyes practically popping out of their sockets. “For real?”
“For real.” She moved out of the way as he came barreling toward her, wanting to take a look for himself.
“Wow,” he breathed. “Holy shit. That’s really it. She really left us a map.” He was gripping the side of the tree with his hands and accidentally stripped it of some bark as he raced over to Wasaaru, shaking his cousin by the shoulders. “She left us a map!” he shouted triumphantly.
Wasaaru laughed, but shoved him away and said, “Don’t do that.”
The others approached the edge of the trail. Niona appeared impressed, while Aeiko wore an inquisitive expression. “How are we supposed to reach it without falling to our deaths?” they asked.
“That’s a great question,” said Balt, instantly deflating.
Alani was about to interject, but Wasaaru did it for her. “Don’t you remember?” he asked, striding past Balt. He came to a stop beside the tree and examined the Warp Point before further addressing the group. “Grandma said that when she reached for the Warp Point, it drew her into it.”
Without another word, he reached his hand out toward the back of the tree. Suddenly his body was lifted off the ground and he was whipped over the railing and around the tree trunk.
The rest of them let out gasps or shrieks of terror, and Alani half-expected to hear Wasaaru screaming as he plummeted to his death. No sound came, though.
He was gone.
They all looked at each other, silently questioning what to do next.
Aeiko said, “Should we not have, like…tested this thing first? Thrown a rock in, or something?”
“You mean Brine?” said Niona.
“No, a normal rock.”
“Wasaaru was our rock.”
“But how do we know it worked?”
“How would we know it worked if we tossed a rock in?” Balt asked.
Niona said, “Seems like it worked to me.”
That was true. Wasaaru had completely vanished, and he wasn’t careening over the side of the mountain. There was no telling where the Warp Point might’ve spit him out, but it had worked. It was too bad he couldn’t really come back through it to tell them he was safe, since doing so would cause him to go over the side. This was clearly intended to be a one-way path.
There was nothing else to do, and they all knew it. Niona said, “So, who’s next?”
Everyone else seemed trepidatious. “I’ll do it,” said Alani.
Balt looked at her with concern. “You sure?” he said. Then, “Nah, let me go.”
“No, I’m going,” she insisted, walking back to her previous position next to the tree.
She leaned over the railing again and picked out the ever-shifting oval on the tree. Then she looked back at the others, offering Aeiko a smile.
“See you on the other side,” she said.
Her hand reached out for the Warp Point. The closer it got, the more her fingertips began to extend, turning into long strands of noodles as they wiggled toward the magic portal. The abnormal sight made her breathing falter, but she did not pull away. She could feel herself floating off the ground, her entire body magnetically drawn to the portal. Once her noodle-fingers touched the Warp Point, they began spiraling inward and her arm followed suit, stretching out to be one foot long, then two, then three before it curled in on itself.
Then she was sucked into the portal in an instant.
Her skin roiled and her organs twisted around each other in her body as neon colors flashed erratically in her vision. Somehow, in spite of the bizarre sensation, she did not feel nauseous or disoriented.
The phenomenon only lasted a second before she found herself gazing out at nothing but blue sky, with no ground beneath her feet.
I’m falling again, I’m dying, she couldn’t stop herself from thinking.
But then she realized that she was on a shallow incline of rock, and she slid down it onto the trail below, where Wasaaru awaited her. It wasn’t the smoothest of landings, smacking her ass on the hard ground, but she was not dying.
Wasaaru reached out a hand to help her up. “Cool, huh?” he grinned.
“Yeah,” she said, laughing. It was like nothing she’d ever experienced before.
She glanced upward at the portal. Like the other one, it was in a spot where no random passersby stood even a remote chance of accidentally slipping into it. Remisti had known what she was doing.
“Are we near any other landmarks on your map?” she asked Wasaaru.
“I was already looking,” he said, flashing her the lyric card. He then pointed behind himself, at a distinctive rock formation that looked much like a mushroom. “I think that’s this thing,” he said, pointing out a similar icon on the card.
She nodded in agreement. It was somewhat hard to tell, since the icons were so tiny, but she could see the resemblance for sure. “I wonder how far the next Warp Point is,” she said.
“Hopefully not too far,” said Wasaaru. “But did you notice how big the jump was between here and there?”
He handed her the card again, and she examined the illustration. There was indeed a pretty sizeable gap between the tree icon and the mushroom-rock icon. The distance they’d traveled in a second would’ve likely taken them an entire day on foot.
Balt was the next to come tumbling out of the portal, screaming like a baby as he rolled down the incline. He came to a hard stop at the bottom, where Alani pulled him to his feet. “Bit of a dramatic entrance,” she said.
He gazed in wonderment at the greenery and rocks around them. “I can’t believe it worked,” he muttered.
“Check this out,” said Wasaaru, showing him all the same stuff he’d just shown Alani.
After Balt came Aeiko, and then Brine. Everyone had to scramble out of the golem’s way before he crashed into them like he was a bowling ball and they were the pins.
Aeiko appeared somewhat shaken by their journey through the portal. Alani gently touched their shoulder and whispered, “Are you okay?”
“Oh, yeah, totally,” they said, nodding. “That was just…”
“Unbelievable?” Alani finished for them, smiling.
They smiled too. “Exactly,” they said.
Niona was the last through the portal, screaming giddily as she slid down the rock like it was a rollercoaster. “Yo, that was wild,” she said as she came to a stop among the rest of them.
They took a beat so that everyone could get their bearings after the whirlwind leap through space. Aeiko was insistent that everybody make sure nothing seemed wrong with their bodies, internally or externally, but everything was perfectly fine, as far as any of them could tell. After everyone was finished with their self-inspections, Alani noticed something a short way up the incline. A piece of green fabric squished behind a pair of bulky rocks. “What’s that?” she asked, pointing, suspecting it had something to do with Remisti Vana.
Balt and Wasaaru had a short argument about which of them was the spryest before deciding Balt would be the one to scramble up the rock and retrieve whatever the thing was. “I don’t wanna risk slipping and breaking my leg,” Wasaaru huffed.
“Oh, so you admit that if you did it, you’d mess up?” said Balt.
Wasaaru had no retort, so Balt hurried up the rock, using different indentions in the rockface to secure his feet as he climbed. It seemed to take more effort out of him than expected, given the general shallowness of the incline. But soon he reached the pair of rocks, and after a minute of tugging at the fabric and trying to lift the rocks without losing his footing, he finally freed the item and held it up for them to see.
It was a small green sack, about half the size of any of their bags. He slid back down to rejoin them and anxiously unzipped the bag, shoving a greedy hand inside.
As it turned out, Remisti had left behind a small cache of preserved foods and containers of water. There was no note inside indicating that it was her who left it, but they all knew.
“Hell yeah,” said Balt, grinning from ear to ear. “Shout out to Grandma. Maybe we’re not gonna starve or die of dehydration up here after all.”
“You think she left these at every Warp Point?” Wasaaru asked.
“Probably not every Warp Point, but I’m sure there’s more than one,” said Balt.
“That’s cool and all,” said Niona, “but where’s the next portal at? I wanna do that shit again.”
With Wasaaru already holding his lyric card, Balt unslung his backpack to retrieve the bestiary so they could compare the two illustrations.
“Let’s find out,” he grinned.
41
Runaway Train
It was a mystery to Niona why she couldn’t quite grasp the Shadow Clutch yet a moron like Wasaaru could. She wasn’t wasting her mana having a Jekua walk beside her anymore, like the two Vanas were, so during every break they took from hiking she spent practicing the move. When she requested a target to practice on, both guys complained that they were trying to recharge, but one of them always relented in the end.
Still, she couldn’t figure it out. Every time Celeste latched on to Wasaaru’s Koutix or Balt’s Muckbang or whatever else, when Niona poured Radiant energy into her Jekua, she lit up in a blinding flash of light. It was a solid technique on its own, but not what she was hoping to accomplish. Balt explained to her (for what had to be the fifth or sixth time) his method of inverting the magical energy, which was not a new concept to her. She’d done it before with other Jekuas over the years, so she was stumped as to why it was giving her such trouble now.
It was starting to piss her off.
Her thoughts were occupied by nothing else as they marched from one Warp Point to the next. Balt had now taken over from Aeiko as their cartographer, much to everyone else’s horror. The map—if one could even call it that—left behind by Remisti Vana was pretty crude, with no real sense of scale at all nor a full depiction of the path ahead. When there were places that the trail forked in multiple directions, the illustration only showed the one they were meant to take. Niona was mentally prepared for them to wander down the wrong path for hours before realizing their error.
Despite all this, however, the map was apparently getting the job done, because they’d located the next portal and slipped through to a higher vantage point on the mountain. After emerging on the other side, half of them were immediately struck by dizziness and mild nausea due to the sudden change of altitude. It had taken them a few minutes to acclimate and get moving again. They were now heading for the next portal, and according to the map, it was set up near a bunch of squiggly lines that Balt swore up and down comprised an outpost of some sort.
“Why would there be an outpost way up here?” Niona had wanted to know. They were fairly high up the mountain now, higher than they’d been before the Rot-Wren debacle. Way out of Royal Ascension’s jurisdiction.
“How should I know?” said Balt. “I’m not a…whatever a person’s occupation would be who’d put an outpost on a mountain.”
“A mountaineer?” Alani offered.
“Sure. I’m no mountaineer.”
“I don’t think ‘mountaineer’ is a job title,” Wasaaru butted in.
“It’s not,” said Aeiko.
“I’m sure there are some professional mountaineers,” Balt grumbled.
“How would they make money by mountaineering?” Niona asked.
Balt took a second to formulate his response. “By taking photographs and selling them, maybe. Or getting sponsorships from companies that sell the mountaineering gear, like the sponsorships you’ll be getting soon.”
“So not by building outposts,” said Niona.
“I hate you.”
They were hiking up a wide trail with open sky on their right and a string of enormous, brown boulders on their left. At this height, the mountain’s greenery was thinning out, but they still passed by the occasional tree and there were a few patches of dry grass underfoot. Fall was already bringing them the gift of cooler air, and it grew starkly colder the higher they went. Niona’s lips were dry and cracked, so she wettened them with her saliva and took a swig of water.
Further down the trail, something seemed to be shifting. Niona squinted, stretching her neck forward as if the extra inch would help her see things clearer. “Yo,” she said, “is that rock moving?”
The rest of them stopped walking and stared ahead.
“Ahh, shit,” Wasaaru sighed.
The three Summoners immediately knew what was happening. Even Alani with her dearth of Jekua knowledge seemed to understand.
It was a Sedipede.
The boulders to their left rumbled and shook, tiny pebbles cascading down their sides as dust lifted off into dirty clouds. Thin spears of rock—the creature’s many legs—suddenly extruded from every boulder, piercing the earth. At the fore, the segment that was the Jekua’s head finished turning and eye-slits crackled open in the boulder’s façade while long, wiry antennae groped the air in front of it. It started to slink toward them.
Niona was channeling mana into her kayet with Celeste primed, since that was the last Jekua she’d used. But Balt turned to her and said, “Summon Pops. I know what to do here.”
She didn’t question how he knew what to do against a Sedipede, assuming it was some shit his grandma had written or something. Her fingers swept across her kayet, clicking over to Pops’s memory card. The mana she’d already expended dissolved into nothingness, but that was fine.
Luckily for them, the Sedipede wasn’t particularly fast. It was able to propel itself with Gravity magic, but it was still a slow-moving beast. The downside was how utterly huge the thing was.
“Guys?” Alani squeaked, pointing behind them.
They all turned on their heels and saw that the Sedipede’s rear-end was closing in on them as well, the Jekua curling into a C-shape with them in the middle. A collection of towering boulders now blocked the pathway on either side of them, and it was moving to constrict them.
Niona’s soulclay morphed into the form of Pops at her feet, while Wasaaru summoned his Koutix and Balt summoned his Mosstopus. “So, what’s the plan?” Niona asked as the Sedipede grew nearer on both sides. There was nowhere for Alani and Aeiko to run and hide this time around.
Balt faced his cousin and said, “You know the drill, right?”
Wasaaru nodded.
“Not helpful for me,” said Niona.
Balt said to Wasaaru, “Let me slow this thing down while you explain.”
And with that, Piss leapt into action. The Mosstopus scuttled to their left, clambering onto the Sedipede’s segmented body. There were a few natural footholds in the creature’s rocky body, but being able to alter both Jekuas with Friction magic probably helped Balt keep a firm grip as his summon climbed.
Atop the Sedipede, Piss’s enormous maw opened wide and the faintest fog drifted out, covering a large portion of the other Jekua. The effects were instantaneous as the Sedipede’s kinetic energy was drained and absorbed by the Mosstopus, decreasing and increasing their respective speeds.
“I’m gonna imbue it with a ton of Sonic magic, make its body vibrate at a super high frequency,” Wasaaru then said to Niona. “Once I do, you hit it with the strongest lightning bolt you’ve got.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
Not wasting another moment, Wasaaru sent his Koutix dashing toward the Sedipede’s center. The tri-horn on its head was already vibrating ferociously, blurring in Niona’s vision.
Meanwhile, up above, Piss was barreling toward the head of the Sedipede. Balt lobbed globs of slime from the creature’s mouth, many of which landed with a wet thwump! on the trail. A few hit their mark, though, splattering on the Sedipede’s head and obscuring its vision. Viscous green slime dribbled down the right side of the Sedipede’s face, completely covering one eye. As it continued its extremely slow forward assault, Balt hocked up more slimeballs in an attempt to blind it fully.
The Koutix weaved between two skittering ten-foot tall legs and touched its horn’s tip to one of the boulders. Instead of drilling into the other Jekua, he merely kept the horn pressed against its side, transferring that Sonic energy into it. There was a slight vibration visible on the surface of the Sedipede’s skin, but it disappeared almost instantly. Just because she couldn’t see it, Niona knew that didn’t mean it wasn’t working on the inside.
One of the legs reached inward and swatted at the Koutix, sending it fumbling backward, tripping over its own two feet. The blue beetle fell hard onto its back, its carapace smacking loudly against a nearby rock. At least it hadn’t stumbled over the edge of the trail.
“Alright, go for it,” said Wasaaru through gritted teeth.
“It’s good?” she wanted to clarify before wasting any mana.
“It’s good.”
She built up a massive amount of Electrical energy within Pops, then unleashed it all at once in the form of a giant lightning bolt. Nothing fancy. Who needed fancy when you had sheer power on your side?
Yellow and white energy crackled and spit in the air as it whizzed overhead, splitting through one of the Sedipede’s legs and impacting with the segment affected by Wasaaru’s Koutix. A spiderweb of cracks rippled across the boulder’s surface, then it shattered in an explosion of debris. The whole group had to duck and cover their heads, their arms scraped by flying shards of rock. A piece nicked Niona on the cheek, leaving a thin line of blood.
The Sedipede split in two, its back half coming to a gradual halt. The front half let out an angry roar, lifting its head high in the air, probably aided by its Gravity magic. It flung its head from side to side, dispelling the muck that covered its eye. Green, sticky residue spattered on the mountainside and slowly dripped down.
“Wait,” Balt muttered confusedly. “I thought that was supposed to kill it. Didn’t that kill it in Grandma’s story?”
“Technically, I think it accidentally throwing itself over the side of the mountain is what killed it,” said Wasaaru.
