A Small World

  Dear Mother,

  This will be my final letter. I have so many things I want to tell you about, but unfortunately, I will not be able to tell you them in person. So I’d like you to meet your new daughter-in-law and grandchild, with whom I’ve sent this message: Lynchazel and . . . Lynchazel. I pray that their return to you is safe and swift. My wife does not yet know much of the Legaleian tongue, but I’m sure you will be a good teacher. I think that together you, she and Rhidea can come up with a plan to save two worlds. As for me . . . soon, I will sleep the sleep of death, here on Gaea. I love you.

  — Your son, Kallyn

  (Planet Mani—Nytaea

  Quoi 14, 997—Night Season)

  Archlord Domon strode along the wall of Nytaea, black cape cinched at his collar bone, displaying the blue flame of the Kystrean empire. His golden hair streamed freely in the wind; no crown. He was in the wall sector directly west of the Palace, right where he told Kymhar to lay the transport orb. Of course, he could have just come straight here at any point, but he had needed the group to make it all the way to the Tower of Mani in order to find it for him.

  Now the Gate was destroyed entirely. No more doorway to Gaea. A successful endeavor. Now to begin the next phase.

  Domon surveyed the city to his right. Light glowed in the darkness from a multitude of torches and lanterns, illuminating the alabaster buildings in all their glory. The starlight streaming down from the heavens blended with the torchlight, artificial mixing with the natural.

  He looked directly in front of him at the tall, white Nytaean Palace, lit even more brightly, flags streaming in the steady breeze atop lofty towers. Despite tighter-than-usual guard patrols and the remnants of the recent unrest here in Nytaea, the city looked almost peaceful. The Archlord sighed. Such a pity, but someone had to break that peace. Someone had to let them know that his little parley had reached its term . . . prematurely.

  Domon turned and leapt from the wall, landing on the Palace grounds directly outside the main gate. He glided to the ground softly right before his feet hit, creating a whoosh of wind. A couple of guards shouted, a torch waved upon the wall, and the two gate guards looked around frantically.

  The two men clapped the butt of their spears on the stones as he strode up briskly. “Halt there! Name yourself, stranger!”

  “I am the Archlord. I used to own this place.”

  The guards looked at him suspiciously, weapons held at the ready. Domon could see the fear in their eyes. In the background, horns were blowing. “The Palace is closed for the night, sir,” said the guard on the left.

  Domon shook his head as though in disappointment. “And I only wanted to pay a visit. Very well.” He put out his hands to either side and then thrust them forward. A wave of darkness, visible only as a shadow that blocked all light in its area, rose from the ground and took hold of the guards, squeezing them and slamming them into the pillars of the gate. They barely had a chance to cry out before their armor crumpled in from the impact, cracking the stone with the force.

  He let the men go, their corpses sliding down the pillars and leaving bloody smears. Domon pulled his shadowy hands from the ground once more and threw a fist. His corresponding shadow hand mimicked the motion, smashing the silver gate right in.

  Cries began to rise from all around:

  “Dark Magic!”

  “Monster!”

  “We’re under attack!”

  Domon simply dusted off his hands, shook his head as though in disappointment, and proceeded through the broken gateway. Bolts shot down at him, but they glanced off before they got within two feet of him, repelled by a shield of water and wind that he kept up at all times.

  Soldiers were beginning to surround him by the time he reached the Palace, both spearmen and silver-armored mage soldiers. He blasted a few more who blocked his way and entered into the Palace foyer. “Now, which way . . . ?” he muttered to himself. He didn’t have to wait long before Lanthar, Marshal of Nytaea, rushed in through the western doorway, bearing a ripple-bladed greatsword. He took in the scene in a second and then shouted, “Archlord Domon! What is going on here? What is the meaning of this?” Anger played on his hard face, accentuated by the torchlight.

  Domon stopped. “Ah, finally someone in charge. I suppose some of your important leaders are out, hmm . . . on a little journey about now? You see, we had a deal . . .”

  Marshal Lanthar stalked down the stairway into the room with his massive sword. Soldiers poured out behind him, taking up guarding stances. “Yes, I believe we did.”

  Domon smiled. “Well, you see, it’s off.”

  ??

  (Planet Mani—The Down Under

  Quoi 14, 997—???)

  Kaen awoke, dizzily shaking his head.

  “Where . . . am I?” he mumbled, then gasped, glancing around him. Lyn, Rhidea, where were they all? How had he survived? He vaguely remembered the giant explosion from the orb just after the Archlord vanished, and being blown right off the top of the tower along with everyone else. They must have all fallen in different directions, down and down through the storm clouds and then . . .

  He took in the strange scene about him. Sand. He lay in soft sand of the purest white color. The air itself glowed with a blue-green hue, which seemed to come from sparkling particles that drifted on the faint breeze. The light played on the sand in a surreal way. Had he seen it before?

  Am I dreaming?

  And then his eyes fell on the figure beside him. Kymhar, the assassin who had tried to kill him. Anger began to build within Kaen’s chest. If the fool was dead, then he had only gotten what he deserved. If not . . . ugh, he had to find out, didn't he?

  Groaning, Kaen lifted his arms from the sand and crawled to where his mentor lay, facedown. He was breathing. He rolled the man over, brushing sand off his face, and slapped his cheeks. It took a second, but then Kymhar’s eyes snapped open and he reached up quickly to catch Kaen’s arm. For a moment, Kaen felt a spike of panic, but he realized that it was just a reflex born of years of training. Kymhar was in no shape to fight.

  Kaen brushed off the man’s arm. “Enough of that. We came close enough to dying as it is.” He resented the words even as he said them, but they were true.

  Kymhar gave a groggy grunt. “Where are we, boy?” He sat up, spitting out sand and holding a hand to his side.

  “I have no idea. But I think we somehow fell through one of those big holes in the earth around the tower.”

  Kymhar nodded. “That would make sense. This light around us, I recognize it. But how did we not die from the fall . . . ?” After a pause, he asked, “What of the others? Have you checked for them, or was your first instinct to help the traitor who tried to kill you?”

  “I—well, you were the closest person I could see,” Kaen stammered. “I figured I should make sure you were alive. I don’t know about the others yet.”

  “Then . . . Lyn was blown through the Gate as it crumbled? So she’s gone. My master, too, is gone. The others were all knocked off the tower just as we were—it is possible they have fallen down here somewhere.”

  Kaen grunted assent. He didn’t understand why he was helping the assassin, but the situation compelled him to leave his anger in the back of his mind. He stood shakily and helped Kymhar to do the same. The odd-colored sand was awkward to get around in, yet he felt oddly light in this place deep beneath the world. The two of them, after stretching briefly, set about searching around for the others. They found Mydia and Oliver, hands still clasped together, splayed out in the sand. They looked a little beat-up from the explosion, but were otherwise all right. Kaen and Kymhar woke them up and then began to explain what little they knew about their situation.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  Once Mydia and the boy were up to speed, they all set about looking for the last remaining member of their team. She had better be all right. Whatever fluke of nature had landed them safely to the ground may not have been enough to keep Rhidea safe. She had looked pretty worse-for-wear from her frantic battle of Authority with the Archlord. Kaen had never seen such a display of Authority in his life. . . .

  “I found her!” Mydia shouted frantically from somewhere on Kaen’s left, voice even higher-pitched than usual. “And she’s hurt! Rhidea, Rhidea, can you hear me?”

  Kaen’s heart rate quickened. He rushed over to find Mydia kneeling over her teacher, tears streaming down her dimpled cheeks. “Oh, Rhidea . . .” Kaen took in the scene with horror. Their fearless leader lay sprawled in the white sand with one leg skewed outward at a horrible angle. Blood spattered the sand around her, staining it an unholy color.

  Kymhar approached from the right, crouching by Rhidea’s mangled body and taking in the scene. Mydia screamed at him hysterically, but Kaen pulled her back from the body and let Kymhar check her out.

  “She must have struck either the side of the tower or a stone spike on her way down,” the Dalim said. He inspected her body more closely, carefully feeling at her neck and putting an ear to her chest. “She is barely breathing, but she is alive. I’m shocked that this only happened to one of us, with all the stone bridges we could have hit.”

  “Oh, thank the heavens,” Mydia whispered, clinging to Kaen’s chest. He patted her on the back reassuringly, and Oliver took her hand.

  “Of all the ones to get injured . . .” Kaen muttered.

  “Is she gonna make it?” asked Oliver in a trembling voice.

  Kymhar carefully rolled Rhidea over, trying to move her fractured leg as little as possible. “Perhaps. She bled a lot. We will have to cut her leg and realign the bones, and then . . .” He looked up at Mydia. “It will depend on the queen’s healing magic. How good are you?”

  Kaen could not look away from the bone that jutted from Rhidea’s leg, now visible since Kymhar had rolled the woman over. Not because of how grisly it was, but because . . . “Bones aren’t supposed to look like that,” he murmured quietly.

  “I . . . I have not used my healing often, so I really don’t know . . .” Mydia said nervously in response to Kymhar. “But I don’t think I can handle helping with the . . . the . . .”

  Kaen shook himself, pushing Mydia gently aside. “I’ll help. Let’s be quick, before she wakes up. But . . . that bone.”

  Kymhar shook his head. “Doesn’t matter—just focus, boy. Bones are bones, we just need to set it.”

  A half hour later, Kaen and Kymhar had the mage’s leg back together and had persuaded the hemophobic princess to work her water magic on the wound, causing the bones and skin to stitch back together. Kaen held one hand over her eyes and guided her healing hand with his other.

  “There,” she said, rocking back on her rump and wiping her brow with the back of one hand. “That’s all I can do for now. What about her other injuries?”

  Silver bones . . .

  Kaen shook himself. “They’ll be fine as we’ve bound them,” he said. “They’re much more minor. What we need to do now is get her someplace to heal.” He looked around, peering into the distance. It was hard to see much more than a few hundred feet ahead due to the glimmery effect from the particles in the air. “Come on. Kymhar and I will carry her. And Kymhar . . . thank you.”

  The assassin grunted. They carried the woman carefully between them as the party of four set out to find a different location. The sands had been shifted from here to there, forming small hills and dunes where the wind swept it. There was a refreshing, near-constant breeze down here in the belly of the earth, like the breath of the planet itself.

  “So,” Mydia said with a cough at one point, voice still shaking. “It might sound stupid to ask this right now, but . . . where exactly are we?”

  Oliver perked up at the question, seeming as eager as the queen to get his mind off the situation with Rhidea. “Actually, I’ve been thinking ‘bout that for a while now. There’s no way to tell how far we fell, but I’d guess it was quite a ways since ya can’t see anything in the sky, or air . . . whatever it is . . . above. Everything’s so different down here. It’s like another world within the world. The heart of Mani.”

  “The heart of Mani,” Mydia mused.

  Oliver nodded excitedly. “And I was thinking . . . well, back on the Sky Islands, we always assumed that a fall into the chasm was a death sentence.”

  Kaen gasped. “You might be right. The chasm—it probably just leads down here, to this place.”

  “Right! So, so . . . all the folks I knew, the folks my uncle knew . . . maybe even my parents! They might be alive down here!”

  Kaen frowned as he carried half of Rhidea’s surprising weight. “Wow. What a thought. Don’t get your hopes up, kid, but . . . you might just be right. But how would anyone stay alive down here? How are we going to stay alive down here? I mean, there’s nothing here but sand.”

  “You never know,” Mydia pointed out. “We don’t know how big this underworld is, or if there are different regions—no, look, there’s grass up ahead!”

  Kaen looked up and saw that she was indeed right. They came into a region of water, with bright silver grass waving in the breeze and dotted with strange, twisted trees, their very bark streaked with silver. The land opened up into a valley of sorts that twisted down toward a foggy land lit by the same blue-green light—but brighter here.

  “Life,” breathed Mydia. “I told you. This is where all the water runs.”

  It wasn’t ten minutes before they ran across another person, a man bent over and harvesting some kind of fruit from one of the plants. He wore a wide-brimmed hat that revealed his face only as he looked up. The man appeared to be in his middle years, with bushy eyebrows and a scraggly, grey beard. “Look, more visitors,” he said brightly. “From the Sandlands! Now, that’s new. Nobody ever . . .” he squinted, seeing that we had a wounded companion. “Blimey!” He put down his basket and rushed over to us.

  “She’ll be all right for a while,” said Kaen. “She hit her leg on some rocks on the way down from the Tower.”

  “Tower? Youngster, where exactly were y’all up on the surface? You must be from that far continent, what’s it called again?”

  Mydia shook her head. “No, we traveled there from the Sky Islands on the east coast of Argent.”

  The man’s interest was piqued even more. “Say that again, young miss? You traveled there? That is most impressive.” He looked like he was going to say something else, but he stopped as he looked down at Oliver. “Now, ya look familiar, lad. Why is that . . . ?” He scratched his head, screwing up his face as though searching his memory. “Oh, I know! You remind me of those folks that crash-landed back in the woodlands two years ago. Heheh, that was a right mess, but they made it!”

  Oliver’s lip trembled as he asked, “What were their names?”

  “Um, let’s see . . . Lester and Marnie. Kinda young, kinda middle-aged fellas. A man and a lady. Why, ring a bell?”

  Oliver gasped. “T-that’s my mum and dad!”

  “Nah, for real? Heh, to think . . . well, that must be a shocker,” the man said. “Everyone always seems to think we just die when we fall. I mean, I suppose if you haven’t been here before, you’d think that because, you know . . . the big fall and the giant Sea of Emptiness. All that. I’m Barry, by the way!” Barry held out his hand to no one in particular, looking between the members of the group, who mostly stood awkwardly by.

  “Well, Barry,” Kaen said with a small grunt, taking his hand. “Where do you live down here? We need a place for our friend to heal up. It sounds like you’ve banded together with others who fell, is that right?”

  “Right, right. Just so. Everyone makes their way down to the Vale eventually after they fall. Not many do, mind you. A few every year. No one ever makes it back up because, well, there is no way up. Unless you can somehow climb the biggest waterfall in the world. We just make a new life down here amongst the other exiles.”

  “A giant waterfall?” Mydia asked curiously, but Kymhar cut her off.

  “Barry, we are in a hurry. Can you take us there? To your home?”

  “Oh, right! The wounded lady. Here, I’ll show ya. It’s just a mile away. Come with me.” He retrieved his fruit basket and led the travelers down a path through the valley, muttering to himself all the way. Kaen thought with some amusement that it would make sense for such a place as this to make a fellow a bit . . . strange in the head. But a village down here in the center of the world? At the heart of Mani?

  “Barry,” Mydia asked as they all followed. “What’s this subterranean world called? And how large is it?”

  “Oh, this place?” Barry said cheerfully. “We call it the Down Under. Creative, I know. Folks have spent their whole lives down here. Heh, I’ve been down here for almost twenty years, I think. Kind of hard to tell after a while. Not so bad, really. It’s a rich, fruitful land that no one knows about. Water comes down here and kind of . . . magically goes back up. Mist and cloudy . . . cloud things, that’s our best guess?” He said that last part almost as a question, making hand gestures as he talked.

  “We have the whole Down Under all mapped out by now,” he continued, leading them toward the village. “It’s only a few miles around. You can hike all the way around it in a day and arrive right where ya left! Heh, to think that some people up top think the world is flat . . . I mean, I guess since the two main continents up above are sort of . . . floating bread crusts, it’s almost true.”

  “Bread crusts?” Mydia said with a laugh.

  Kaen smiled despite himself as he listened to the banter. Barry was a little crazy, but at least he was entertaining. “How much farther to the village?” he asked.

  “The village? Why, that’s it just up ahead there.” The eccentric man stopped and pointed down the hill, past some trees.

  Through the mist, Kaen could make out light and chimney smoke. So it was a real village after all. He shook his head with amazement, still holding Rhidea’s limp form over his shoulder.

  Silver bones . . . could it really mean what he thought? His best friend was stranded on another planet, and he carried a woman with silver bones down to a hamlet beneath the earth.

  Beneath the entire earth. The center of Mani, an unseen world.

  “And here I thought our journey was almost at its end,” Kaen whispered. “But it’s only just beginning.”

  The End of Book One

  (To be continued)