Elysium: Book Six of The Liminality

Chapter 53 - Showdown

It doesn't even feel like I fall that far, but the transition is violent. I land hard, crunching down in what feels like a pile of loose cinders. Ashes fly up into my nostrils and I sink into the debris up to my knees. I'm pretty sure I had left my stomach behind back at the enclave.

Pinky somehow remains attached to me throughout the impact. Insect claws can be amazingly clingy . As soon as my body stops tumbling and settles into the cinders he detaches and darts off into the sky, leaving me squinting up at smoke and dust. My head proceeds  to spin.

Through gaps in the smoke, I notice a cobalt blue tinge to the sky that I've only seen on Root. Clearly my poking at the orb has opened a special hidden interface, an express route home. I imagine this feature allows overseers easy access to this place, not that it sounded like Eben had ever used it. How Pinky found out about it I'll never know. The Sing has many more eyes and brains at its disposal than is possible to imagine.

The terrain around here in flat in most directions. I most certainly am somewhere on the pitted plains but the foothills are nearby. Dang has the killfire done a job on the place. The land is way more rumpled, collapsed everywhere there had been tunnels below, remaining heaped up in spots that had been solid underneath. The damage looks way worse than anything the root quakes had done and not as easily healed. It sure looks like killfire has penetrated pretty far underground and incinerated a good deal of the roots that underlay everything here.

I rise up on my hands and knees, head hanging down, waiting for my head to clear. Killfire still burns to either side of me and lines of it range far up into the ridges and hills. There is something weird about it now. The flames look so tiny. I remember them reaching ten to twenty feet into the air in places but here they are closely hugging the ground.

There is a spot just ahead of me where the waves of killfire seem to be spontaneously propagating before they advance into the hills. Each wave seems to initiate from a pair of brilliant white points that explode from a central spot and go racing away in two directions, leaving a trail of killfire behind them that then spreads laterally. The chevrons of many prior waves all pointed back to that one spot.

There's a strange object there jutting a little ways above the terrain, too perfectly square to be a boulder. It's a little box or platform with the tiniest figure standing atop of it—a little figurine of a person. There's other stuff arrayed around its base but I can't really make out through the smoke what it's all about.

For now, all I can do is hunker down, barely able to lift my head, as I wait for my senses to catch up with my soul. It sure is taking a long time to get my equilibrium back. My gaze drifts towards the uplands. It's a familiar view as I should have expected since I probably came down in the very spot that Pinky made me touch on the globe.

But something about the perspective is very wrong. It feels like my head is elevated a hundred feet off the ground. Everything looks so small. The wreckage of a toppled svarog off to my left is no bigger than a dog.

"Fuck!"

I realize what's up. This is why the bugs are so big here. They came through the orb from the garden of the Enclave. Maybe flying along they land a little too hard and get sucked in, only to discover that the scaling factor is off and voila there are giant bugs. Perhaps it's convenient for an overseer to be way bigger than the souls he is supposed to be overseeing—makes him god-like. But I'm not happy at all about my new dimensions.

"Fuck!"

All my friends are now ankle height. Just like the helmeted people in chest plates and shin guards who I just now notice approaching me cautiously from the height of a rumple in the plains. They're yelling up at me and I can't hear a word. They're wearing armor that's just like that commando who found me in the void and had come to assassinate or arrest me before Zeke shipped him off to Elysium.