On Lashing Out

Rina Cassius - The Streets of Seda / The Deep Cisterns

The city was not burning; it was dissolving.

Rina sprinted down the Avenue of Coins, her silk dress heavy with sweat and ash. The orderly capital she had known—the grid of white stone and commerce—was gone. In its place was a delirium of smoke and screaming.

She skidded to a halt near the intersection of the Merchant’s Plaza, pressing herself into the alcove of a shuttered bakery. The main thoroughfare was blocked. Not by rubble, but by people. A crush of refugees was pressing toward the distant Port Gate, a screaming, heaving mass of humanity.

But the horror wasn't the crowd; it was the yellow fog swirling around their ankles.

Rina watched, breathless, as a group of City Guards near the fountain didn't organize the evacuation—they attacked it. Their eyes glowed with a faint, jaundiced light as they swung their maces with mechanical, rhythmic brutality, chanting about "Order" while they crushed skulls.

This sickness, Rina thought, clutching the scroll in her sash. It’s in the air. It turns us into what we pretend to be.

She couldn't go through the plaza. She would be trampled or infected. She looked to her left, toward the narrow, winding alleys of the Tanner’s District. It was darker there, the shadows long and deep, but it led downhill toward the lower canals. If she could reach the water, she could commandeer a skiff.

Rina tightened her sash and bolted across the cobblestones, diving into the alley just as a bottle smashed where she had been standing.

The alley was quiet. Too quiet.

The air here smelled wrong. It didn't smell of smoke. It smelled of copper and wet earth. Rina slowed her pace, stepping carefully over a pile of discarded refuse. The ground beneath her boots felt... soft. Spongy.

She looked down. The cobblestones weren't sitting on dirt anymore. They were shifting, rippling like skin over a flexing muscle.

The ground is moving.

Rina took a step back, panic flaring. "No..."

A deep, wet tearing sound echoed from beneath the street. The cobblestones directly in front of her bulged upward, the mortar cracking. A thick, red-black vine—slick with oil and pulsating like an exposed artery—burst through the road.

It wasn't a plant. It was muscle.

It thrashed wildly, smashing into the brick wall of the tannery, shattering the masonry with the force of a siege engine. Rina spun to run back to the main street, but the vibration under her feet intensified. The entire alley floor groaned. It was no earthquake. The city was being pulled down.

CRACK.

The ground beneath her vanished.

Rina didn't have time to scream. She fell, surrounded by a cascade of bricks, mud, and shattered paving stones. She plummeted twenty feet, crashing through a rotting wooden support beam before slamming into deep, freezing water.

The impact knocked the breath from her lungs. She thrashed, disoriented, the foul taste of sewage and copper filling her mouth. She kicked upward, breaking the surface, gasping for air.

She was in a cavernous, brick-lined chamber—the Deep Cisterns. It was dark, lit only by the shaft of gray daylight falling from the hole she had just made in the roof.

Rina paddled toward the edge, dragging herself onto a slick, stone walkway. She coughed, wiping sludge from her eyes, checking her limbs. Bruised. Battered. But alive.

She reached for her sash. The scroll was wet, but still there.

"Okay," she wheezed, pushing wet hair from her face. "Okay. You're alive. Find a ladder. Climb out."

She stood up—and froze.

The water she had just crawled out of began to bubble. It wasn't boiling from heat. It was churning from movement.

Around the edges of the cistern, the shadows detached themselves from the walls. They weren't shadows. More roots. Arterial Lashers, the Sanguine reports had called them. Dozens of them, rising from the muck like cobras, drawn by the splash of her fall. They were thick, muscular, and weeping black fluid.

They circled her, cutting off the service ladder.

Rina backed up until her spine hit the cold wall. She looked around for a weapon. Her hand closed around a rusted iron torch sconce bolted to the brickwork. She ripped it free with a grunt of effort, rust flaking over her hands.

"Get back!" she screamed, her voice cracking not with fear, but with the sheer absurdity of it all. She hadn't survived the Senate collapse just to be eaten by the sewers.

A Lasher lunged.

Three of them shot across the water, moving faster than whips. Rina swung wildly, the iron bar connecting with a satisfying thud, severing the tip of the first one. But the second wrapped around her waist, squeezing the air from her lungs. The third seized her wrist, burning her skin with an acidic, coppery heat.

She was dragged forward, her boots sliding through the muck toward the deep water.

Then, the darkness to her left shattered.

A massive shape exploded from the drainage tunnel, displacing a wall of water. There was no shout of warning, just the guttural roar of exertion and the thrum of heavy steel cleaving air.

SCHLUK.

The tendril holding Rina’s waist was suddenly severed. It flailed wildly, spraying hot, black ichor across Rina’s face.

The water erupted as the other Lashers sensed the new biomass. They turned toward the intruder.

In the flickering light of the fallen torch, Rina saw him. A giant in furs, wielding a longsword with the brutal efficiency of a woodsman clearing brush. He didn't fence with the monster; he hacked it back.

"Burn the root!" a woman’s voice screamed from the tunnel.

A blinding beam of blue-white light erupted from the darkness, passing inches over Rina’s head.

THOOM.

The blast hit the central mass of the Lashers in the water. The heat was instantaneous. The blood-constructs didn't die; they boiled, exploding into clouds of foul-smelling steam and charred material.

Rina scrambled backward, crab-walking through the muck to get away from the heat.

More people spilled from the tunnel. It was a cavalcade of madness. A soldier with a shattered arm, slicing at a stray tendril with his dagger. A small, ragged man throwing rocks and cursing. And a tall, golden-masked figure stumbling forward, his chest glowing with a volatile blue light.

"Rina!"

The shout cut through the chaos.

Rina looked up, wiping sludge from her eyes. A pale man in torn scholar's robes was staring at her, his face a mask of horror.

"Faren?" Rina gasped, her voice raw. "Faren, watch out!"

A massive Lasher, thick as a tree trunk, surged from the water behind the scholar. Faren froze.

The giant—Aga—didn't. He didn't use his sword. He grabbed the tendril with his bare hand, his muscles straining as he physically wrestled the thrashing limb away from the scholar.

"Cut it!" Aga roared.

Gaidan lunged, driving his dagger into the thickest part of the vine. It convulsed and collapsed into liquid sludge.

Silence fell over the cistern, broken only by the bubbling of the boiling water and the heavy breathing of the group.

Aga stood in the center of the carnage, chest heaving. He flicked the black slime from his sword with a sharp snap of his wrist.

He turned slowly. His eyes—wolf-like, predatory—locked onto Rina. He stepped toward her, the sword rising slightly.

Rina scrambled to her feet, raising her iron bar defensively. "Stay back!"

Aga stopped. He tilted his head, sniffing the air. He looked at the dissolving sludge in the water, then at Rina.

"It isn’t her either," Aga grunted, his voice a low rumble. "She smells of old paper and fear."

"Excuse me?" Rina snapped, adrenaline overriding common sense.

"Rina..." Faren stepped forward, hands raised placatingly. "It's okay. He's... he's with us. Sort of."

"With us?" Rina looked at the motley crew. "Faren, you and your associate are supposed to be at the Institute. Who are these people? By the Tower, what is that?" She pointed the iron bar at Skooh, who was leaking starlight into the sewer water.

"Skooh Otaga," the construct synthesized, his voice echoing slightly. "Cascading failure: Multiple Systems. Transmit to Taba-Taba."

"He's a-a-just a patient," the ragged man added quickly, stepping in front of the robot. "And I'm his doctor! Agapititus. Nice iron. Very... rustic. Which is SO in style right now."

Elara, the woman with the cannon, ignored the introductions. She marched over to the edge of the water, staring at the dissolving tendrils.

"It's a vascular system," she muttered, terror in her voice. "This miasma... it's not just mutating people. It's metabolizing the city. The sewers act as veins. The refinery must be acting as the heart."

"Then the infection is moving," Gaidan rasped, clutching his arm.

Rina looked at the black water, her mind racing, connecting the dots. The Senate reports. The manifest. The explosion. "The Three-Bridges," she whispered.

Aga’s head snapped toward her. "What did you say?"

Rina looked at the woodsman. "The outpost. Three-Bridges Crossing. I found a manifest in the Archives. The Sanguine didn't just raid it. They used it as a staging ground. They've been feeding something there for weeks."

Aga sheathed his sword with a click. He closed the distance between them in two strides, towering over her.

"Feeding what?" he demanded.

Rina didn't flinch. She was a Senator's daughter, and she had just fought off a living sewer. "The manifest didn't say. It just listed 'livestock' and 'organic material'. And it was signed by a 'Root'."

"Root," Aga repeated the name. He didn't know it, but the way he said it sounded like a curse.

"We have to get out of here," Faren said, his voice trembling. "If the water itself is trying to kill us..."

"We go to the port," Gaidan said, straightening up. "We secure a vessel. We regroup."

"The port is blocked," Rina said. "The refugees clogged the main gate an hour ago. The crush killed more people than the fire."

"We aren't using the gate," Aga said. He pointed his chin toward the dark tunnel behind Rina—the direction the current was flowing. "We follow the scent. The thing that smells of the Abyss is moving toward the ocean. We follow it."

"Follow the monster?" Agapititus squeaked. "Is that the plan? Swim with the blood-worms?"

"It is the only path that isn't burning," Aga said. He looked at Rina. "Can you walk? Or do I carry you like the scholar?"

Rina straightened her spine. She wiped the muck from her cheek.

"I can walk," she said. She tightened her sash. "And I can fight. Just point me at the man named Root."

Aga grinned. It was nice, for a wolfish baring of teeth, Rina thought.

"Good," he said. He turned back to the dark. "Stay close. If you fall behind, I’ll not double back."