The Creators Ch. 13

DIAMOND

I followed the dolphins deep into the abyss. Past the point of darkness, past the point where the sun's blue glow radiated in the waters above. I was surrounded by crushing blackness, the weight of the water atop me so oppressive that it was like swimming through molasses. As my motions became sluggish, my perception of the world around me became blurred. The medium with which I projected my mind was thick and heavy, and the signals that bounced back were muddled. The space was so vast and the weight was so great that I could barely sense the seafloor below me, and then everything suddenly came into crystal clarity. The spaces became small, and the water became thin, but though I could sense the world down to the slimmest of margins, I could not believe what my senses showed me.

We'd swum into an immense trench. Great underwater mountains towered on either side of me, each of them cut with such precision that they only could've been made by an Earth Former. The mountains were immense cubic blocks, but the sediment had filled in the sides around it so that only the channel between the blocks was passable. What had once stood as two monoliths of deific proportion, were now lost forever beneath the waves, and had become nothing but part of the oceanic basin. The enormity of what I witnessed did not awe me, but the great implication of time did. These cubic mountains were older than the ocean atop it.

The pod swam deeper into the trench, and I followed after until the tops of the cubic mountains formed a sliver high above me. The blackness that consumed us became claustrophobic and oppressive, but it was soon broken by an azure light far away. It was faint, like a blue candle flickering in the deep, but it grew until its luminance opened up the darkness, and I was swimming beside an enormous stone face. The stoic eyes of the statue were taller than I was, and her face was nearly thirty feet from brow to chin. As I swam down the statue, I realized that it was of a humanoid race I'd never seen before. A snakelike tail wrapped around the woman's shapely figure and disappeared behind her, and patterns of scales decorated her naked body, moving about her curves as though to accentuate them. When I looked back at her brow, I realized that what I had mistaken for the hair of her eyebrows were actually lines of reptilian scales, and the hair atop her head was composed of hundreds of reptilian tails all flowing and winding in a sinuous knotwork.

When I found the seafloor, I was surprised to see that it was flat and smooth. The woman's feet rested upon it, and when I looked up, I saw her immense profile fading into the perpetual night above. I turned around, and there was another statue just as immense. This was of a male, and he stood opposite the woman, his body carved from the side of the other cube. I looked down the trench, and my eyes widened. There were hundreds of statues—thousands of them—and they lined the great division of monoliths like silent guardians of the deep, protecting a large cylinder at their center that connected the two cubes. The cylinder was perhaps half as tall as the statues flanking it, and it glowed with the unmistakable white energy of a Life Giver.

"Voda," I whispered to myself. As if I needed more confirmation, the great luminance revealed hundreds of dolphin and mermaid profiles all swimming about the source. I swam after them, passing each immense statue until I was in the crowd of aquatic humanoids. Though many of them were shocked to see me dancing gayly through the water between them, none of them attempted to stop me as I advanced toward the light source. They just gawked at me, and I giggled back, and continued my journey unmolested.

The closer I got to the light, the more it revealed. The cylinder was not a hard structure, but a great hollow from which the light shone, and the light was not of single source, but of dozens of tubular veins that wreathed the insides of the cylinder. The immense hollow was like a vast atrium when I swam into it, towering above me and dropping far below me. The hundreds of mermaids became thousands, and they swam in traffic along the veins of light—no, they swam through them. I watched a young mermaid girl swim up to one of the tubes, and absorb through the membrane as though it were osmotic. She swam through the current of light, and as she did, her long fishtail faded away, and human legs and feet kicked behind her, propelling her along the vascular highway of Life Giver light. I watched her travel through the tube, which circumnavigated the cylinder before branching at the top into twelve different smaller veins. She took one of the smaller veins that led to a larger one, and she joined a great procession of mermaids toward a destination I could not see.

"Hmmm," I frowned, puzzling over the network of veins. It was like one of the large intersections in Drastin, but there was nowhere to go. The cylinder was self-enclosed as far as I could tell, and though it was massive, it was not nearly large enough to warrant this strange transportation system. I swam up to one of the tubes, and tested the surface with my hand. My hand passed through it without any noticeable sensation, and I examined it from the other side, turning it over this way and that to make sure nothing had changed. I recalled the way the mermaid's tail had seemingly dissolved from her body, and I dared to dip my head forward, and breach the membrane with the tips of my black antlers. They were unaffected. Satisfied that I would not lose my unique features in the strange highway, I floated through the membrane, and let the light wash over me.

The tube pulsed much like Passion's womb had, sounding a steady rhythm of life that pumped through the water like a low drum. I swam along the light-filled tube, each of my swimming kicks propelling me gently faster as though the water was assisting me in my transport. I passed confused mermaids and mermen, all of them now completely nude, even the gills upon their necks closed. Upon closer inspection, I realized that they weren't all human, but elves and nymphs as well, though these nymphs had fins instead of horns. I undoubtedly looked as perplexed as they did when our gazes met, but there was no fear in our exchange. When they looked into my black eyes, they didn't see the dreaded most ancient one, but just a strange brethren swimming in their midst. I supposed they must've thought I belonged there, for no astral incantation or wizard's spell could've brought a surface-dweller to such crushing oceanic depths.

When I got to the exchange atop the sphere, I took the vein the woman had before. I was propelled into the same large tube she had been shot into, and I was carried through it by a very strong current. The light grew brighter as I traveled, and my kicking feet propelled me to such speeds that my hair was plastered behind me. I didn't use my power here, but simply road the exhilarating highway toward the light until it was nearly blinding, and then... and then I gasped, and sucked in a great gulp of water.

I emerged from a great slide that slowed me down until I was resting on smooth stone, coughing and hacking, splattering the floor with water expunged from my lungs. Cool dry air caressed my body, whispering between my naked legs, brushing through my wet hair. I wiped the water from my mouth, and looked up.

It was strange how the sky never seemed grandly immense before. It occurred to me as I looked upon Voda, that the scale of the sky was infinite, and therefore it could never be construed as 'large.' But there was no sky in Voda. Voda was a room. The largest room in the world. The ceiling above me was an impossibility, a thing so high that it could not be an enclosure, and yet above the misty clouds of moisture, was a great expanse of rock that stretched for miles in every direction. The ceiling was held aloft by enormous statues of snake-people, their great stature making a mockery of those I'd been so awed by outside. They stood a mile high, their columns of limbs dotted with thousands of lights like the skyscrapers in Drastin, each of them opening to a room where the now-bipedal mermaids lived. There were four such statutes for each of the corners of this room, and the ones in the far end were hazy and lighter-hued with distance. All four of them held the ceiling up with one great stone hand, then extended the other toward the center, where their fingertips touched.

At the convergence of stone digits, all the veins of the city flowed into a ball of light so intense that it illuminated the entire room. Below it, the city of Voda sprawled out like a splendor of architecture. The buildings were so tall that they dwarfed the high rises of Drastin, and they were built with such precision and care that they formed waves of architecture from one end to the other, seeming to swell and ebb as I swept my eyes across them. They didn't stop when they reached the walls, but continued in perpendicularity, jutting from the walls to create towers that projected sideways out over those that reached toward the ceiling. When I squinted, I could see that the ceiling itself wasn't flat at all, but created a stalactite pattern of towers that pointed downward toward the floor.

I turned around, and saw that the tubular vein I had emerged from was just one of dozens that came from the massive hole in the wall, and that each one of the light-filled highways branched into hundreds of different directions, moving up the walls, along the floors and ceiling to deliver its passengers to various locations throughout the immense city. How many lived here? Millions at least. This was a city nearly as large as Drastin and Alkandra, and I had thought it was but a myth until I stepped into it.

"Excuse me!" I called a passing elf woman.

She turned, and puzzled over me. "Yes?"

I climbed to my feet, and pulled the strands of hair from my face. "What uh..." I searched around, wondering where to go from here, "...what's uh... what's there to do around here?"

She blinked at me. "Whatever do you mean?"

"Is there like a bowling alley, or... you know, something?"

She inspected me closer, assessing my horns, my black eyes, my sparkling freckles, and my flopping penis. "My dear girl, you are very, very confused, aren't you?"

"And lost too," I grinned.

The woman inspected me for a long moment, then her features softened into a smile. "Well," she said, "I suppose it's not every day that I get to chaperone an antlered hermaphrodite. Come," she extended her hand to me, "my name's Olivia."

"Diamond," I said, taking her hand.

"Indeed," she chuckled.

Twenty minutes later, I was seated on a bench outside—or rather simply on the patio—of a restaurant that served nothing but seafood. I didn't know why I expected something different. As Olivia delicately ate her trout, I chewed on some seaweed, and pondered if I should test my omnivore side.

"So," Olivia prompted, setting her chopsticks down, "how did a surface-dweller get all the way down here?"

"How do you know I'm a surface-dweller?"

"Because I was a surface-dweller," Olivia smirked crookedly.

I examined the woman carefully. Even through Corruption's eyes, she was impossible to read. Her hair was blonde and her eyes were pure blue in the high-elf fashion, but her skin was nearly a green hue. She looked steadily into my black eyes without even the hint of fear, and seemed to regard me as nothing more than a curiosity.

"How did you get down here?" I asked.

"You first."

I shrugged. "Magic."

She snorted. "Alright, be a smartass."

"I got here the same way that fish did."

"In a net?"

"I swam."

Olivia looked bemusedly at me, then shrugged. "Secrets are not kept for long in Voda, Diamond, but you keep yours, and I'll keep mine."

"Deal. So, what's with this place?"

"It's a city underwater."

"I guess I deserved that."

Olivia plucked the eyeball from the fish, and slurped it into her mouth. "The natives say that there were once two beings. One lived below the earth, the other—"

"Please don't tell me this is their rendition of the Maternal Path."

"It's not quite so preachy," Olivia gestured to the ceiling. "Basically, an Earth Former they called 'Vodianan' created Voda, and Anasia, a Life Giver, created the lifeforce of this place."

"Xaya?"

Olivia nodded, and gestured to the veins of light and water that crawled all over the city like blood vessels branching into the stone flesh. "Xaya was Anasia's daughter, and Anasia couldn't bear to let her daughter suffer death when it was within her power to preserve her life eternally, so she tethered her to the Eastern Sea, of which she had great affinity. Vodianan built this temple for her to reside in, and carved out the Drastinar Bay so that it would be surrounded by water. It was originally an island. Obviously that didn't last."

"The mermaids though; why do they transform?"

"Mermaids are a construct of Anasia," Olivia said, plucking the bones of her fish clean. "She took some elves, humans and nymphs, and decided to slap some gills and a fishtail on them, and viola; mermaids. It's Xaya who transforms them back before they enter Voda."

"Why?"

"For her own protection. Her affinity of the sea gives her power over it. If she deems someone a threat, she simply drowns them before they can enter Voda."

"Huh," I mused.

Olivia glanced at me. "What?"

"Nothing... I just thought..."

"Oh, you thought you were some kind of badass?" Olivia giggled. "Xaya is the god of this place; what are you to her?"

I glanced up at the convergence of light centered over the city. "Is that where Xaya is?"

"No, that's just the system interchange; terrible place for traffic."

"So where is Xaya then?"

Olivia gestured to the cube's entrance. "Voda is just the body. Xaya is the heart. Remember, Diamond, there is another cube. That is where Xaya is."

"She keeps the whole cube for herself?"

"And there's only one way to get in. All of the outflow veins converge at the gate, and the exiting citizens are ejected there before they can continue into Xaya. Only a select few are allowed into her, and any that try to force their way in are killed without pause. There is no way to see her if she doesn't want you to."

Is that so? I thought with a little self-satisfied smirk.

"Uh-oh," Olivia said.

"What?" I asked, looking back down at her.

She pointed her chopsticks at me, and aimed down their lengths as though aiming down the haft of a bow. "Did I just see a gleam in your evil black eyes, Diamond Gendian, Daughter of Passion, Daughter of the Destroyer, the Possessor of the Most Ancient One?"

I cocked my head, and examined the strange elf from a slightly different perspective. "When did I stop talking to Olivia, and start talking to Xaya?"

"When you're in here, you're always talking to me," Xaya smiled from Olivia's mouth, and sat back in her chair. The passing citizenry had stopped what they were doing, and were forming a perimeter around me and Olivia.

"I am everywhere and everyone in Voda," Xaya said. "Everyone who swims into my veins is co-opted into my consciousness. Everyone, except you. Possessors of the Most Ancient One have come here before—she comes from the water, after all—but she holds no sway over my kingdom in this realm of flesh. If it is not Petranumen that conceals your mind, then what is it?"

"Who?" I asked. She had said a name, but my mind couldn't hold it. It was like an unintelligible word from another language.

Xaya narrowed Olivia's eyes. "I am tethered, Diamond. I watched you walk into Corruption, and then I watched you drag Petranumen through the chaos between realms."

I knocked my head, and giggled. "That's news to me!"

"What did you do, little girl?" an old woman hissed in my ear, and drew her knobby fingers down my arm.

"Just what are you?" a man whispered, and pressed a blade against my throat.

A low groan emanated from all around Voda. Suddenly, the vast indoor city became deathly quiet. Another groan sounded, then came a rumble so deep and terrible that it seemed to shake the very stones. All the citizens of Voda stared up and around them, confusion writ across their faces. Olivia's eyes tracked the ceiling until a drop of water splashed her cheek. She touched a fingertip to the droplet, then looked at me, and I saw horror opening up her gaze.

"What?!" she hissed.

I took the droplet from her fingertip, and formed it into the shape of an arrow. "What am I, Xaya?"

"Impossible!"

"And yet, here we are," I giggled, and sent the arrow through Olivia's eye. Her brains blew out of the back of her head, and she dropped like a stone, but no one seemed to care. All of Voda's attention was fixed on me.

"What do you want?" a young girl said from across the street, her voice crystal clear in the pervading silence.

"Why are you here?" asked someone on the balcony above me.

"My mother—Passion—told me of this place," I said. "I didn't believe that it existed until I walked upon it, for even she thought it was a myth."

"Passion was a child to me; why would I ever let her know of my existence?" Xaya asked from an old man's mouth.

"I kind of thought tethered beings formed a club or something."

"You are too naïve to have so much power!" an old man yelled.

"Why are you here?" the voice from the balcony asked again.

"What do you want, Your Holiness?" the young girl repeated.

"I bet you wished you drowned me when you had the chance," I giggled. "It wouldn't have worked, but I'm insulted that you didn't try."

"Answer the question, Your Holiness," a man whispered in my ear.

"Why are you here?"

"What do you want?"

The entire city was staring at me. Millions of eyes from across the vast enclosure, staring from the rooftops of towers that stretched to the ceiling and pointed at the floor, that jutted from the walls in defiance of gravity. They stared from distances so great that I could not even discern the shape of the building they stared at me from, but I knew they still watched me. A threat had slipped past the gates of Voda, and now all arms were brought to bear against it. It was the greeting I was owed, and my smile curved horribly against my cheeks.

"Why are you here?"

"What do you want?"

"More," I whispered. In an instant, the Vodians surrounding me were turned into a red mist, the water from their bodies ripped right out of them. Arrows flew from the rooftops, crossbows were unleashed from the windows, and a great salvo of arcane attacks was launched from every point in the city, but it didn't matter. The immense volume of deadly iron and magic all died in my crimson shield of water, and the shield only grew as I walked through the crowd, leaving sleeves of dried flesh and bones in my wake as I sucked the liquid out of them. I stepped toward the tube I'd emerged from, and saw that the water within was still. When I entered the light-filled vessel, the crystal blue waters turned dark purple with blood for a second, then were washed away with the neck-breaking velocity of the current.

The flowrate within the vein became so strong that the vein quivered and pulsed violently, threatening to burst with the pressure. The broken bodies of its unfortunate travelers were sent flying at me with such speed that I couldn't even see their approach, but it didn't matter. I stood calmly still in my element, and let the bodies burst against the armor of water I made before me. The heart of Xaya pounded so rapidly and loudly that it would've ruptured my ears, the light of her vessels strobed so violently and brightly that it would've blinded me, but in the calmness of my aqueous armor, I only heard and saw the frenetic evidence of her terror, and I smiled against it.