Delving In
Cardonea Tower
A strangling, tense sensation struck Maanta’s body as he struggled to consciousness, finding that seaweed braced him to the walls of a spherical stone room.
Where am I? He found himself wondering, still groggy and half unconscious.
The last I remember before this, Zhar Nicholea was swimming with his family and strange men with fins for legs. Then Sift clasped onto my arm, dragging and pummeling me through a crowd.
“Ouch!” he murmured. A swollen bump on his head made him writhe with pain.
And then there was that white mass hurling towards me.
Maanta tugged with his wrists and ankles at his seaweed bonds until they wrested loose from the walls. His eyes began focusing upon illuminated bottles resting in and on the room's various nooks and shelving. A netting of pink and opal gems swayed gently along the room’s upper stones. He was in a potions room, one reminding him much of Amaranth’s own. He probably was being looked after for whatever had happened to him. But where was the healer? And then he realized the room’s walls were the silvery white shade of the pillaring Cardonea Tower. Their hue glistened like that of reflecting pearl. Something must have happened out there with Sift and he had been taken here to heal.
Swiveling in the waters and cupping them in his finger-webs, Maanta swam toward the room’s door. With a push it swung outwards, causing foul waters in the outer halls to rivet past his lips and froth about in the back of his throat. He gagged at the taste. A deep red hue massaged the waters, clotting in the stone floor’s crevices.
Maanta’s stomach turned as a gurgling sound belched from somewhere beyond his sight. He moved off in the direction of the noise, with swift scoops of his fingertips.
And then Cardonea Tower’s master healer was beneath him.
Blood rippled outwards in all directions from his slit throat, throbbing in the water, his two ghastly eyes glossed with red.
Maanta’s stomach churned. A foul taste rose in his throat.
Something was terribly wrong in this tower, whether it had anything to do with the visitors Nicholea greeted outside the East and West Shale Walls, Sift or something unknown to Maanta. He shivered as he swept through the halls, hugging the ceiling and alert with his eyes wide open, racing to warn Nicholea.
The walls narrowed and widened as Maanta’s fins pressed him forward, instincts of urgency searing through his tendons and mind as gutted, speared and headless bodies of fellow Meridians wallowed and spasmed beneath him in the malta-stone lit halls. Their eyes rolled over with white as they quivered in death below him. Diving down a jutting, downward pathway, darkness swelled in, swallowing Maanta’s sight.
A woman’s howl of anguish came from somewhere far off, muffled by the tower walls. It called to him for help.
Maanta felt with his fingertips against the wall from where the noise had come; the chilled, rough stone scratching his flesh.
No doorway or opening emerged as the howls died off abruptly. Then, down the hallway through the rippling waters, a light swiveled up, catching his eyes, fading away and dissipating back into darkness. A burnt scent wafting up through the waters, from where the light flickered moments earlier, rushed shivers up the boy’s spine.
Waters washed along Maanta’s eyes as he pushed farther through the darkness. The charred smell grew heavier, choking his throat. He wanted to stop, to find a hollow place in the pitch-black and curl up, outlasting whatever curse had befallen Cardonea Tower. But there would be no rest. The stench of bloody death had submerged itself in the liquid amongst these halls.
It’s as if this bloody, burnt stench is itself searching out Cardonea Tower’s life to wrench away from it, Maanta thought. Possibly the dark one from the tales mother used to tell has possessed these waters with his vacant soul. Gelu, help me know what to do.
It was in the darkness, a darkness which seemed like a deep chasm of dank eternity, that the words came to mind. Maanta’s mother had taught him them; how to speak to Gelu in a time of need.
“I will sing of your love and justice, to you, Gelu, I will sing praise,” Maanta whispered softly as if to someone close by and yet at the same moment somehow far away. “I will be careful to lead a blameless life. When will you come to me? I will swim in my home with blameless heart. I will set before my eyes no vile thing. Men of perverse heart shall be far from me. I will have nothing to do with evil. My eyes will be on the faithful, the good, that I may dwell in your love. Every morning I shall put to silence all the wicked in my soul. My love is yours, Gelu. In both the light and darkness you are by my side. Thank you, Gelu. Amen.”
Maybe it was just that the prayer brought him fond memories of his mother’s smiles and caring ways of life. Or maybe Gelu himself answered.
But all that mattered was that warmth flowed over him now. And it gave him the strength to press on through the tower in hopes of helping others who might be in need.
And so he swept, quickly swirling with his fins, down the weaving hall of darkness until it opened to a wide room where the burning stench smelled strongest. Maanta couldn’t see the room through the darkness, but as he swam he had hugged the walls, watching them expand upon reaching the vast, open space.
Here the waters were warm, almost boiling warm, and a glowing, crimson orb lit the room faintly from the floor deep below him. Maanta dove quickly toward the shimmering light, touching the orb upon reaching it. He recoiled in burning pain. The thing, the size of Maanta’s own head, bubbled with molten rock much like the malta stones he used to simmer fish over in his cove home, but with an intensity and heat far greater than he’d seen such a thing have before.
As the crimson sphere boiled below him, spitting out rank, gaseous fumes, Maanta noticed an age weathered plaque melting in on itself on the molten mass’s side.
“BE WARNED,” it read, “Molten Flare only for use in dire situations. Gases may be poisonous, but light and stench should attract attention and rescue efforts. Apply a stone mask to your face upon Molten Stone cracking.”
Well, this stench certainly isn’t ignorable, Maanta thought. I wonder who sent the signal.
A thought came over him. What if this is a trap to draw forth any survivors of the massacre? Will this poison kill me or is someone here, waiting in the darkness for the right moment to run me through with their trident?
A beastly fist, the size of the boy’s body if it was rolled into a ball, clenched around Maanta’s waist and slammed him against a massive, hard surface hovering in the water feet away.
Two massive, red eyes, encompassed by what appeared to be a giant’s head, slowly pressed in to vision before him, lit by the luminous malta light.
“Silence, boy,” it lowly whispered. “You’re the one they saved outside the tower today, aren’t you?”
Maanta nodded his head, assuming something like that had happened. His back ached from the collision with whatever the giant’s hand was pressing him against.
The giant’s eyes blinked slowly in the waters, and a look of sadness came over its features.
“Evanshade, and the other beings with a fin where their legs should be, swam to the tower’s meeting hall with Nicholea.” His voice deepened while telling his story. It was scratchy as if the tale pained him. “Nicholea had instructed me and the other guards to watch over the family as they spoke in case anything went wrong, and a feast of spiced whale was served. The Zhar and the royal family sat in their seaweed hammocks as they told tales of Meridia’s past to the foreigners.
“It was intriguing to watch the foreigners’ faces as they listened to the tales of our ancestry. While Nicholea told of Noa, the tale of how our people once lived in the world above the waters and about how and why we were punished and forced to live beneath the water’s beating waves, Evanshade’s eyes flickered with light and a convulsion of the mind could be seen in his features.”
The gargantuan sea guard’s adam’s apple gulped deeply in his throat. His eyelids shut as bloody bubbles gurgl
ed through his lips.
“And then we slaughtered them.”