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"You alright?"
She leans across the mud, edging her body over the lip of the protrusion until she spots a head of raven hair flecked with dust. He coughs, and a plume of the particles form a cloud around his face, a copper halo.
"Fine," he wheezes. The air settles, and she extends her hand to help him over. They're silent as he scrabbles with the rock, his gloves rubbed raw, worn around the pads of his fingers and the heel of his hand. The distance is short; he could probably make it with a well-calculated jump, if he weren't who he was. But then, if that were the case, he wouldn't have the length of his life dependent on the grace of a rock face.
Grasping a suitably-hollowed notch, Artemis scours the cliff with his foot until it finds a matching recess. He doesn't look down. Even if his vision weren't blurred by a stinging cocktail of loose hair and sticky sweat, that way lies only a long, long drop. He allows himself a small smile at the irony, if that fall were to be his fate— the journey to salvation being the very thing to snatch it away.
Then he tucks his droll humour into another one of his brimming mental wallets, and grits his teeth against the burn in his muscles. This can only be immortalised in late night reminiscings if he is there to do the reminiscing.
Holly's fingers are small in his hand, but infinitely capable. She tugs on the moonbelt strapped to her waist, and with a scuffle punctuated by a joint groan, he is up, and he is over. Without preamble, he relaxes into the dirt and sighs into the claggy subterranean air. It is difficult to breathe, but the responsibility for that could lie equally with the high concentration of dust triggering his allergies or yet another dance with death. They have become quite familiar partners, over the years. Artemis would have thought he'd manage to keep up by this point.
He depresses a button near his throat and, with only a second's delay, his helmet rises to cushion his head and supply his lungs with cool, glorious oxygen. He doesn't have much left, an uncomfortable quantity hissing through the web of cracks disrupting the clarity of his visor. He'd been forbidden from using it after the first fall, Holly being happier to take her chances on the strength of his skull rather than a shard of broken acrylic in his throat, and he supposes his O₂ supply is better off for it, too.
He sets his hand against the sand to push himself up, wincing where the grains dig into the denuded flesh of his palm. Turning his back to hide a grimace of pain, he tugs at the remaining scraps of his gloves, easing the cotton mesh off the backs of his fingers. The faux-hide around the most critical areas has served its purpose, he supposes, else he'd be peeling ribbons of skin off his hand, too.
"Get away from the edge, Arty. It could give way any second. And," Holly curls backwards, her back popping, "I didn't set my body back three centuries so you could die on me now."
He sighs again, but hauls himself to a boulder jutting up from the ground, where Holly has dumped herself, eyes shut against the dark of the cavern. Her hair blends almost seamlessly with the dirt, and without the dual shock of hazel-blue to disrupt the monochrome, she could be carved from the rock herself.
She cracks an eye open to give him a quick once-over. Spying his hands, palms open to the closed-off sky, she slips her fingers into his and whispers, "Heal."
It does the job, and he watches with untiring, albeit exhausted, awe as the fleshy salmon of his exposed muscle melts into a canopy of knitted nude skin. When the final spark flits across his knuckle and pirouettes into his bone, he cranes his head back and allows himself to succumb to the familiar comfort of blank black under his lids.
He doesn't keep them closed long. As deadly in its monotony as this cave is, it is beautiful in its own way. It looms above, poorly lit and hiding— well, he doesn't really know what. It is much like space in that regard: expansive and breathtaking in its hidden wonder. Unlike that venture, this one was a hasty, quiet sort of thing, with no one but Butler knowing it wasn't the second honeymoon it was declared to be. Maybe it was pride that had kept Artemis quiet — unwilling to endure Foaly's cynical jabs, or wear down the Commander until it was sanctioned — or perhaps it was the way Holly had pursed her lips and nodded, all soldier briskness, nothing but a wet sparkle in her eye to betray her when he'd confessed the trials weren't going the way they were supposed to. The way they were hoped to.
He folds his fingers in his lap and probes the dark with his gaze. No, he doesn't know what's up there, what kind of hypogean creatures crawl, seeing yet remaining unseen.
Most of the time between the moment the map had materialised in a lost archive and the departure had been sunk into digging into the place it purportedly led, poring over all it revealed and scouring neglected LEP stores for what it didn't. He would have liked to be better primed, but a frenzied itch had overtaken Holly since the scroll had tumbled into their lives, and even keeping her away for nine weeks' time had wrung him of every drop of his persuasive ability.
There's a minute pressure on his hand; he turns from the subterrane to observe Holly, the slash of her brows and the slant of her lips belying the forced ease in the set of her shoulders. That tension has remained resolute since the first fall, and with every close call he sees her fray further.
"How much farther?" she asks, when she catches him looking.
"You're the one with the functioning headgear, love."
She squeezes his hand harder, with the grounding pressure of warm-blooded skin, then pulls up the map. It shimmers in the air, mist-blue against a curtain of ink.
He regards it briefly, then, with a hum, allows his eyelids to slip. "Not much. A few feet and a corner. We can rest… for a little… while…"
She disables his helmet with a flick of a finger, jolting him awake. "You need to conserve your oxygen, volst."
Holly rises, carefully, from her perch. "You rest, I'm going to have a look around." She dusts off her gear with a few cursory pats. It does more damage than good, really, the print of her hand newly pressed into the synthetic knit, stray dirt coating her uncovered fingers. She lifts her head from her soiled cavewear, eyes distant. "I'll rest if it's further away than it looks, like everything else in this place likes to be."
He entertains the thought for one indulgent second, but ultimately denies her offer with a jerk of his head. "I'll join you." He stumbles in the dust before crumpling back to the ground with a sigh. "It's hardly appropriate for you to see it first, seeing as I've made it this far."
She rolls her eyes and doesn't return his weary smile. "Yeah, and it's a real miracle you did. I still don't understand why you had to come." She breaks the gaze, hooking it to the closest thing of interest, and begins inspecting her instruments: the moonbelt has been overused and won't make it through a couple more tough hauls, their water supply is depleted and she's running frighteningly low on the hydro-capsules for only a destination trip, but her Neutrino is fully charged and emits a faint glow from within her pack. They only had to use that one twice. It turned out even trolls didn't like it this far underground.
She yanks at the loop of rope hooked to her waist (old-fashioned, but necessary) with too much force, irritation making her brutal, and shifts her scrutiny to Artemis, watching as he eyes her pack with a tight mouth, a twitch in his jaw.
He meets her eyes. "I couldn't let you do this alone. Not when we are here for me."
Holly shakes her head in violent denial. "Danu knows we're doing it for me as much as anyone else. It would've been less dangerous if I'd done it solo."
She doesn't know why she's fighting it, when the most trying tests of the journey have been met and conquered. All they need now is to get the damn water, pray they haven't carried some disease out of this godsforsaken place, and go home. Who knows, maybe they'll get lucky and there'll even be some stairs and a door on the other side.
But the balm of logic has no power to soothe her particular blend of anxiety, and this trip has made her even more fearful, if that were possible. It clamours under the surface of her skin when she sees him there, spilled across the dirt with soot rubbed into his modified shirt, limbs loose, the telltale slump of exhaustion marking the line of his body. And that fear, paired with the physical stress and the mental strain and the kulkekyod toil of this godsdamn quest has grated at every last nerve until she feels as raw as Artemis' exposed tissue.
Because, gods, he is fragile, and if she didn't know it before (which she bloody well did), she knows now. With the troll venom 'breakthrough' nothing more than a spectacular entry in the journal of failed things, she knows exactly why this expedition was so necessary. Why, really, she should have undertaken it alone.
It comes unbidden, then, screwed eyes an insufficient defence against a dogged smear of memory.
He's falling. Not out of the sky, but out of her grip, and she reaches for him but the air is empty, her nails catching on her palm instead of skin-warmed synthcot. There's a cry and a crack, and for one horrible moment where Holly stands on the threshold between knowing and not knowing, she almost can't bring herself to look.
But she braces herself, and she toes the edge, and she opens her eyes and she sees, and the tears come ugly and free. The salt of relief is bittersweet.
"Maybe. But we're here now." He's looking up at the ceiling, at the flaking sheets of mud and dirt caked into every crevice of the cave. She watches as he peels himself off the floor and makes his way over to her, picking his way through the dirt as if his boots aren't already indistinguishable from the burnt umber of the floor.
Holly looks away and tongues her teeth, a bloom of affection withering as her heart rate soars, ratcheting at the reminder of her surroundings. One fearful rush is replaced by another, and her stomach compresses, her blood vessels narrowing to prick-points. She feels phantom fat in her throat, the burn as it is forced down and carves a passage to her lungs. The busy pressure against her skull is mental, she knows it, but that doesn't help her believe it.
Her environment is relatively open and she understands the worst is far behind her, but even the memory of those cramped walkways and suffocating bottlenecks are enough to rattle her breathing into erraticism. She slaps at the key to deconstruct her helmet, sucking in great gulps of stale air.
Sensing a pressure against her back, a beacon against the balloon of panic inflating inside her, she hones her attention on it. The hand, warm and large, follows a slow, measured path along her spine. "In and out, Holly. In and out."
She nods, resting her head against his side as her senses expand from the point of contact. In and out. In… and out. Her breathing evens, the pace of her heartbeat drawing out into a more deliberate rhythm. He extends his hand and she takes it without hesitation, the cool, dry, familiar feel of his skin stifling a sliver of the dread that's been kicking at her chest since this all began. Instead, a nascent, burgeoning anticipation swirls within her ribs, sucking in all the half-gnawed hopes of the past few days into a hurricane of expectation.
"Are you alright?"
"We're here now," Holly breathes in response, the storm pressing against her pores seeping through in a smile.
"Yes," he confirms, with a small smile of his own. "Yes."
He adjusts her weight against his side and lifts his hand to the soft junction under her jaw. The beat is no longer a frenetic gallop, and he withdraws his hand, pleased. "We'll need to get you some better help for that when we get back."
"When?" she asks, looking back over the dead sands and the empty orifices pitting the walls around them, a nightmare awaiting their return.
He draws her gaze away with a tap of his fingertip against her cheek. "When."
Inclining her head, she gently breaks the contact. "Stay close," she says, and begins leading him down the final stretch, waving the torch on. It's as he said, a few feet and a corner, and before her thoughts even reach the point of doubt they're manoeuvring around an identical red clay wall, and there it is.
Her head falls into the dip of his waist in relief. The archway is large— far larger than any fairy could ever have need for, with three bands carved into the stone. She squints to read it, but the dust clings adamantly to the glyphs.
Artemis begins rooting through his pack. He extracts his telescope and draws it up to the ceiling in one fluid movement, and stares into the lens for what feels, to an impatient, tired Holly, like hours, but in actuality was likely little more than a handful of minutes.
"Centaurian," he mutters after an eternity of a moment, clicking a dial to scan the image into the system. "An archaic form of the language. The strokes are far harsher than the modern equivalent. And… Gnommish. Admittedly," he says, after an extended pause, as he lowers the telescope and points the eyepiece towards her, "I have no clue what the final one could be."
He turns to her, finds her eyes flitting over the whorls with her peculiar mix of obstinate determination. Reluctantly, she reactivates her helmet, leaving the window at her face open. The light is displaced as the torch slides along the top of her head, joining with the other segments to cushion the back of her skull. She pushes his 'scope away absent-mindedly, newly aided by her filters. "It looks familiar," she murmurs.
She tries to scan the script through her database, but the connection is poor, and her periphery is soon crowded with pop ups. Her fingers pattering against her hip, she puts her mind back to work instead.
The runes swoop into each other in one long, uninterrupted loop, like a ring of held hands on a playground. It tickles something in the far recesses of her mind, which, with a keen tug, unfurls into memory.
"No, wait! I remember this!" She comes alive, head whipping so her helmetlight arcs across the length of the band. "Yes, here! They're letters from the Minumitkenu alphabet."
He frowns, trying to place the name.
"You were right, Arty. A place where the tongues tie: where languages come together." She slots her fingers together in demonstration. "Minumitkenu is an old, old communal language, one that was shared between humans and fairies when we all lived together.
"It's long dead, of course," Holly says with a shrug. "But if this is at the entrance…"
She doesn't need to say any more. With her sharp inhale and a quick rove of his eyes, they step toward the opening, and there, past the lip, yawns the darkness.
The cavern swallows the light of her torch greedily, the glow fading into an inverted ocean of pitch above their heads. The silence of the space is loud, the naked expanse almost living in its grave quiet. As if in timid subservience, Holly's torch stutters. She disables it with a flurry of blinks, and for a moment the darkness engulfs them, too, and they stand still in its belly, but for an uneven hitch of breath from her human. Drawing her Neutrino from her side, she sets her fingers on the grip and takes a deep, measured breath. The cavern lights up on her exhale.
It is large, far larger than the reach of her weapon's torch. Past the radius of yellow radiance lies only the dark, black and wriggling in her sight as her vision adjusts once again. What is revealed of the recess looks to be natural, absent of the tell-tale geometry of fairy manufacture or human interference, but so vast her Neutrino's glare hardly skims the colossal form at its edge.
She advances, her light stripping the dye of the dark away to expose a blacker smudge, a thing cupped by its vestiges like fruit in the hands of the starved.
It sits proudly, like the vacant throne of some monstrous deity, its spines twisting towards the hidden heavens, its base scrawled with the abstract scars of a history long past. One straight, jutting column forms the main centrepole, a multitude of broken half-curves aimed at the heart of the monument curling inwards, like petals in the winter. Great spirals of abraded stone, all tinted the same dull crushed-berry that cakes the entire place, rise from the earth between them before diving back into the crimson sands, with the arcing motion of a dolphin pod. In spite of the clear regularities of construction, Holly can't help but feel how organic it is. There is something of aborted motion in its shape, like an animal caught in a tableau.
She can't help it, she falters. The Neutrino slips in her grasp. There is something haunting about the carcass of a civilisation, especially one shared both by her ancestors and those of the man beside her, lying bare for their view. There would have been humans coming here, and fairies, too. And, once, they would have lived together— mutually, if not in harmony. It is strange to visit this shrine to their shared history at the dawn of the new Cooperation Age.
Artemis resumes his approach, and with her fingers interlinked with his, Holly, too, is led closer. From where they approach, the idolesque tangle parts, like an invitation. The unornamented area is almost beckoning with its ease of access, the spires growing from the ground before folding away and back. Like Arty's hair, she thinks, the wry observation momentarily displacing her awe.
Her light wavers as she adjusts it, but a bright swathe soon bathes the piece in a warm yellow, the sunflower tint alighting on the most pronounced components, picking out an empty bracket here and a relieved mural there. The blur of red begins to coalesce into figures as she nears, offering paltry snippets of the lives led by those before them. There is a dance between a human and a centaur, a sky-borne sprite rushing the skies, and, separated from the hubbub of the rest of the piece, a fairy, and a human, who sit with their inner hands clasped and outer pressed to the smooth surface of the well. They lean back, their faces angled midway between the wall and the viewer. Imploring.
The message is clear: they are not the first to service the Fountain of Youth.
With a juddering breath that rattles her insides, Holly steels her nerves and, slipping her fingers from his, braves the final few strides to the rim. She can't see over the edge, the lip a few inches too high, and Artemis still stands a step away. Replacing her Neutrino to free her hands, she nods to herself. Her muscles ache, but some store of adrenalin bounds through her, and she hops onto the edge, balancing on the precipice. Her heart sinks and soars in time with the rhythm of her feet as she wobbles on the surface.
Regaining her balance, she braces herself. Her Neutrino is at her hip and her torch in her helmet, but she can't spare the seconds required to activate either and see it for herself.
Contaminating such sacred waters with her dirt-streaked hands would be sacrilege, but it can hardly be pure, she reasons, after millenia spent sequestered at the heart of the earth. Regardless, though her fingers are unchangeably stained, spiritual affinity spurs her to pluck off her left glove and tuck it into a pocket of her suit.
She swallows. Her tongue is dry. But her fingers, when she reaches down and presses them into the mouth of the pool, fervent and trembling with a tender gratitude for a primaeval fount's modern deliverance… her fingers are drier.
Her hand flies back. No. Her skin stings where it's scraped the rough rock, but she doesn't feel it. No. There's a rushing in her ears, a roar of something wild, and some part of her heart falls into itself and crumples, with all the ease of a paper boat in a tsunami.
No.
She fumbles with her Neutrino. "Holly?" she hears from somewhere far behind her. Has he retreated? He should. She can't let him see this. Not until— not until she's seen it for herself. Yes. It'll be there. The glittering, gossamer folds of glistening water. Her hands are simply chapped and bare from the journey. She has lost the ability to feel. Yes. She can't hear the gentle rush of live fluid, but why should that mean anything? Her eyes will not betray her as her other senses have.
"...Holly?"
Her quivering hands thrust the bulb at the wide opening of the fountain. She stares at the sea of yellow-tinged pebbles eyeing her from their bed. In the glow of the light, the cavity is sickly, worn, pocked with the shine of a thousand beady irises glaring from their single socket. The tracks in the surface only whisper of what once was, coursing aimless, with nowhere to go and nowhere to lead— the tetherless flop of severed nerves.
"Holly!" She's pried back into a corpse-cold grasp. She shivers at the prickling touch, the fingers of ice pressing into her suit conjuring up all the things she doesn't need to be reminded of. Limpness and a sparking left eye and the fracture of a man mountain. The time she had held him and he was just as cold.
This was supposed to make it different.
"It's dry." Her voice is empty, though he has already seen that it is. "It's dry!"
"I… I can see that." Holly can't tell what he's feeling, too focussed on the blistering pain stoking her insides. She could almost imagine this inanimate taunt had pierced her, drawn the acid from her belly and let it run its course along her skin. She finds herself disentangling her body from his, and treading back to the well.
Holly wonders, seized by a mania alien to her, if she pours her soul into this pool, if she empties herself and wets the dust with the newest gash tearing her open, will the basin be replenished with what she has offered? Was it the water that bore it its name, or was it the fountain itself?
She stares, unseeing, into the ink of the pit. The shadows shift and pool in a facsimile of liquid. She catches sight of a flash of white.
She grabs it immediately, her mind tumbling over itself in premature glee. Yesyesyes. Yesyesyesyesyes.
She yanks it out, but the 'it' is solid, and water is not so. A tiny, feeble femur pokes out from her fist, and she flings it away with a scream.
It lands with a hollow clatter, the hesitant hope for a splash instantly quashed.
She doesn't know how to respond, exactly, the dead weight of apathy settling heavy behind her teeth, so she turns to Artemis. Is this unexpected? Holly isn't sure. She had buried any and all doubts as quickly as they had come, clinging onto anything that would allow her to smother the pulses of misery that came with the worse nights.
He isn't looking at her, his gaze focussed wholly on the shadows crowded against the far side of the cave.
She shines the bulb of her Neutrino further into the darkness, and they slink back. She waits for the scuttling of rats or disturbed insects, but there is nothing. Only the bones. Heaps and heaps of bones.
"What is it?" he asks. "What are you seeing?"
She pushes the bulb deeper into the dark, until enough peels away that even his photopic sight can see what she sees: a mountain of stained white, like a half-built pyramid in the Eleven Wonders, trailing haphazardly into the blackness.
He immediately lurches into action, stalking towards the mound.
"What are you doing?" she hisses.
Holly remains rooted to the ground, her hands fixed, the squirm of her gut keeping her in place.
He crouches and raises an upturned skull into the air, angling the cranium so it tilts towards the shadows. Its teeth glint with unfettered malice.
"Young," he mutters, rubbing its lower jaw in thought. "Early thirties at the latest."
He sifts through the skeletons carefully, elevating every other one to catch the light for a crude inspection. The consensus is obvious, written in the sutures of the skulls and their dental state. He finds they are all young.
"The Fountain of Youth," Artemis begins, stepping back and tipping his head to soak in the entire magnificence of its body. Its spines gleam wickedly from their perches.
"Only the young come, to prolong their youth. And their wish is granted," he motions to the remains of what came before them, "they are prolonged."
He turns to her fully. "It has likely taken on a new... meaning, since it dried."
Holly swallows thickly, turning away to clamber onto the wall. The weight of aeons' heartache bears heavy on her back. She sets her Neutrino beside her, angling its glow towards Artemis, and as she pulls her hand away scrapes the device with the tip of her thumb, setting it spinning into the well.
Swearing under her breath, Holly grinds her fists into her thighs, blinking away a tide of frustrated tears. The pattern awakes the backup torch nestled in her helmet. She swears again, but rearranges herself so the beam beats down into her corner of the basin. A nebulous circle of light bleeds from where her Neutrino has buried itself.
She presses her palm into the bed, and a strange sucking sensation nips at her hand. She snatches it away with a yelp. "What the hell?"
With closer observation, the grains of sand clinging to the creases in her skin seem almost to be bubbling. It reminds her, oddly, of a lesson with the twins— the laving saliva in the mouth, the eager, inexorable takeover of digestion.
Wiping the hand on her side with a shudder, Holly eyes the basin, her attention hitching on the unusual pebbles inhabiting the interior. The femur pops into her thoughts, and she directs her torchlight towards them. They look… soft, almost, the typical smoothness of worn stone absent in the face of tiny clefts and surface irregularities.
She begins to brush the sand away with the side of her palm, dutifully ignoring its bizarre pull. She remembers her other glove and nimbly slips it on, extracting her weapon with a grimace. Its sides are streaked with dry red granules.
Her eyes fall on the layer uncovered by her Neutrino. "Artemis?"
"Yes?" calls his voice from beside the monument. His head pokes out from behind a network of spires.
"How was the Fountain supposed to be used?" she asks slowly, the words drawn out across the distance of his footfalls.
She flexes her fingers against the edge as Artemis leans over her, frowning, the 'scope around his neck bumping against his chest. He peers into the concavity, his nails scalloping the sand.
"Gradually. The water had to be taken often to maintain youth. Used in excess, however, it could have more swift, dire, effects." She knows the exact moment he sees them from the sudden stiffness in his spine. "Oh, Hell below. In that infantile state, I'm unsure how well-adapted one would be to… certain environments."
They stare at the tiny, curled-up skeletons, fist-sized skulls and drumstick bones.
Silence falls between them as Artemis raises his lens and takes a single still of the well's contents, lit up in strong contrast by Holly's torch.
Lowering his hands, he considers the snapshot. He pinches his nose and shakes his head, his thumb rubbing into the circle under his right eye. "I-I think I'm going to take a look around the rest of this place."
"Sure," Holly replies, her eyes fixed to the basin.
He stumbles away with one last glance at the wall's mouth, his mind tripping over itself to dislodge the image beating itself into his brain.
Artemis makes his way back to the spiculae pushing out of the ground on either side of the structure, and continues his tedious digital reconstruction. He tries to dislodge the vision before his eyes, of the brittle bones filling out to form two infants: one dark-haired, and another fair, unable to free themselves from waters desperate to drag them down below, thrashing and bubbling and screaming— until the bubbling is all that remains— until that is gone, too.
His hand quivers, but he continues his creeping trail around the fountain. Holly must have upped the intensity on her torch, he notes absently, as a cool luminescence now seeps through the meanderings of the frame where it didn't before.
He evades another searching spire — the last before he's reached the hind by his estimation — and ducks his head to avoid the next. Distracted, his shoe snags on a broad root, and he pitches forward.
Scrabbling at the air, he exhales happily when he catches himself on an extremity within his reach. He lifts his head, and the incipient smile on his face falters.
The spires that swung so gracefully from the collar of the fountain have split like untended fingernails, the deliberate crescents and helices unravelling into masses of stringy tubing, curling up and into and around each other like a rotting clump of matted hair. Some of the spines arc down towards the rear, like a pair of folded Hummingbirds, and where they end, the rabble begins.
It's a horizontal crowd, heaped disorderly with no clear intention, like the individual contributing to the whole had simply given in and piled on. It reminds him of deadfall— the sort of thing he would admire in a high-art gallery, ascribe meaning to if the mood suited him, of the collective nature of man, or, perhaps, how poverty stripped the individual of identity, reduced them to one corner of a faceless composition. The novelty of such a sculpture would no doubt have piqued his interest, and maybe he would have inquired about the artist and treated them to some pecuniary endorsement for engaging his mind.
But the view before him is real, not carved lovingly out of clay or stone, but spawned of gristle.
A handful of the ossified remains hang speared, what's left of bled bone grotesquely contorted around the protrusions as the terracotta arms of the spires punch through them and towards the others. The flesh has sloughed away, robbing them absolutely of expression, but there is a touch of horror in the snap of this wrist and dumb resignation in the sag of that spine.
The whirring of his mind, the frothing of questions aching to be answered, is quickly subsumed by the memory of death, and his imagination distends to supply what's lost to his present senses, the echo of the pop and the snap as ligaments tore and sockets split and cartilage was wrenched, unwilling, from flesh. The monotonous, recurring wail of expired ambition. His eyes dart between the bodies and the fount, and even his stomach flips, a degree of queasiness washing over him.
With no pilgrims in millenia, with nothing to sustain it— he closes his fist on thin air and beheads the thought.
Alarm ringing within, he wheels around and hurries to Holly.
"We should destroy it," he says as he approaches her.
She's still sitting with her shoulders drooped, but has now parked herself on the ground, with the well wall against her back. Her Neutrino sits in her lap, her fingers periodically stroking the exposed side.
"It's not our place," she replies, wooden, as if the thought had occurred to her already.
He stares in incredulity. "Poppy, couldn't you tell what it did to you? This place is sick. There is something wrong—"
"You can draw a more accurate map when we get back. Pepper it with all the warning signs you want. Make it so no one else ever finds it."
"I don't think," he says, slowly, as if probing the words on his tongue, "that it's quite possible."
Her hand on the gun pauses. She waits for elaboration. For once, he foregoes the theatrics.
"Pull up your map, please." He drops to the floor and primly crosses his legs, ignoring the grime. Very little of his outfit can be salvaged, anyhow. He shuffles across the sands until he is settled beside her, facing the suspended sketch.
"Now," he unscrews one end of his telescope and slips a sheet from a cavity on its side, unfolds it, and lays it smoothly against his knees, "compare."
He watches her face as it plays a picture of her thoughts: the bemusement, the disbelief, the burgeoning comprehension. She looks across to him, as if seeking confirmation that the conclusion she's drawn is fantastical and all the dust has got to her head.
With a lick of her lips, she motions to a path etched in the flourishes of the scanned map, then rests her finger against the flexin housing the original. "It changed," she whispers.
He nods, considering the ill match. The straight-cut route on the holograph, warped into a winding snake's coil under Holly's finger.
"But we got here," she starts, "we made it to the end. So, what—?" She thumbs an angry vein at her temple. "I don't understand."
"Yes, but consider how many dead ends we met along our way. Consider how the third intersection — remember that one? — took us three days instead of one. How many times did we consult our map and find it did not align with the passage before us? How many of my calculations were incorrect, by a factor far too large? I could never be so wrong."
"I figured it was rockfall. This place has been here so long, I assumed there'd been some changes to the land…"
"I thought the same."
"Oh gods," she slaps her hand against her visor, "and even when you said that it was funny, that there were so many branching routes when there'd been nothing shown on the map—"
"Holly, I'd only been musing aloud, it was never a serious thought—"
"—and I said you were overthinking things again and— oh, gods."
He snatches her hand from where it sits on her helmet, cradling her head through acrylic. "You're panicking."
She crushes his hand in hers for a moment, then breathes herself into a pocket of calm. "That's weird, too, isn't it? The panic. I feel like I'm going crazy."
"It must be something in the water."
She jabs an elbow in his side.
"Ow," he says with a strangled laugh, "that still hurts. I have yet to build any resistance to your blows."
"Good. You don't seem to be suffering any ill-effects, I thought I'd treat you to one." She pauses, then tilts her head in thought.
He answers the emerging question. "I'm not sure. It could be because you're a fairy, therefore more sensitive to magic. It could be that you're more emotionally inclined than I. It could be that I allowed myself to dwell on the possibility of there not being a Fountain at all, and so was better braced for disappointment."
He frowns, looking out into the Martian-red of the sands. "I'm inclined to think our dwindling supplies are the compounding factor. You wouldn't believe the chaos a frazzled, parched mind is vulnerable to."
She nods, her gaze returning to his lap with the dip of her chin. She straightens immediately.
Artemis follows her sightline, and they freeze as a bend on the paper displaces itself, jerking in jagged increments until it is a short, horizontal stroke on the page.
Holly is the first to speak, scrambling to a stand. "Vogtt," she swears.
"Of course we're running low," Artemis mutters to himself. "The map has disguised most of the long stretches as simple paths. We would never have thought to carry as much as would be required."
"Arty..." she warns, resting her hand on her pack.
"I know." He doesn't meet her eyes. "We'll have to make do with what we have."
She huffs, kicking at the sand. It sprays up in a cruel imitation of water before vanishing amongst the rest.
"I just want to grow old with you," she says, staring down into the dirt.
"I know," he says.
"Is that too much to ask for?" she disables her helmet to drag her hand across her face, uncaring of the disgusting paste of filth and tears she's concocted on her skin. She sinks back to the ground.
"Is that too much to ask?" she cries, seizing a handful of stones and hurling it at the centrepiece. It stands, impervious, as the pebble shower rains down and skids to a stop at its feet.
Artemis' hands turn white at the display, but he says nothing.
The anger recedes as abruptly as it arrived, and a cold pit opens wide as it goes. She shivers. The hope has been syphoned from this place. It is nothing now but a sepulchre of slain dreams.
"Let's go, Arty." She swipes at her tears. "There's nothing for us here. We've got a life to live." She swallows, hard, forcing all the dry bile and dust down. "Besides, this place is creeping me out."
She stands, seeing through clearer eyes the delirious desperation, the wide mouths and the sunken eyes and the distraught hunch of the dancers' spines as they scratch at the wall of the well. The entombed shrieks of the carved couples ring in her ears. What has been taken from them? What perfect future has been teased, then wrenched away?
Holly extends her hand to Artemis, and he takes it, although he relies on the wall to bear his weight.
Voice low, she asks, "Are you ready to go?"
"If you are," he replies, solemn.
Sparing one final glance at the centrepiece, she turns her back to the demented prance of the mouldings.
-
The walk out is sombre and uneventful. Having left such a thing, Artemis' senses are piqued for resistance of some sort. A resurrection, perhaps. Booby traps and another offer from death, at the very least.
It is rare that they find an adversary already felled, but Artemis cannot find in himself any fragment of triumph.
There has been so much lost here, and nothing gained, that even his curiosity's languid satiation dims against the roar of an all-encompassing despondency. And behind it all, a bobbing unease: they are not home yet.
He glances at the kingdom of open darkness directly below, the cliff they scaled mere hours ago looming with a whale's bulk to their left.
"'No light, but rather darkness visible/ Serv’d only to discover sights of woe,'" he murmurs.
"Huh?" Holly turns her head to him, her attention momentarily broken from the same view he observes. He understands. The darkness is enchanting.
"Milton." He catches her eye and smiles, wry. "Paradise Lost."
Holly sighs, crossing her arms. "Do you have a point? I don't remember everything you've read me."
"My point is," he says, drawing her away with a hand notched in her elbow, "look away before you are consumed."
She throws him an exasperated look, and takes the map from his hand as she follows him back from the ledge. Head bowed, she studies the two again, contrasting one against the other for a truer path. The only way back, that she can see, is how they came. She tucks the flexin case under her arm and replaces the hologram with a last-ditch SOS code to Foaly, but there must be something jamming the signal or maybe they're just too deep, because it refuses to go through. She throws her hands into the air. They climbed up several crags; it would be suicide to jump down.
The case slides from under her arm and she swipes it out of the air with a glare, driving all her frustrations into one scythed look. The path shifts again under her thumb and she snatches her hand away with a startled yelp, the sheet arcing down to bury itself in a mound of dirt.
Holly toes it with her boot. "You know, I'm half-tempted to leave it there," she says.
She clears a short track as she paces the clifftop. Hands threaded behind her neck, she makes another rotation, then spins with a groan to stare at the case. Darting over, she drags her hands through her hair and crouches low to study the parchment. "I still don't get it. Why? What does it achieve? Why is this happening?"
Artemis' mouth twists. "I don't know. I have…" he casts his eyes back to the hidden parts of the cave, glimpsing something she doesn't, "...my theories, but I'm not certain." He runs his hands down his face and sighs into his fingers. "Gods, I have never abused a term so thoroughly as I have that one, on this single expedition alone."
His gaze springs back to the ridge.
"What do we do now?" he asks, staring down into the chasm. She entertains it, briefly, how right it would feel to leave themselves here with the rest of the people like them, dreamers and hopefuls all.
The mud would welcome him, she would belong. The darkness seems to hear it in her, a favourable pliancy only needing to be coaxed, and calls to her, promising rest for her weary spirit. And isn't she tired? Does she not want anything more than to rest? This way, they would go together. There would be no parting— even her bones would mix with his, even their flesh would meld until Fowl could not be told from fairy. It would be so simple, only a few small steps…
She jerks her chin and wills herself back from the edge. Before it consumes you. She steps to face Artemis and tips his chin until his gaze breaks from the depths and rises higher. They stare mutedly at the long, desolate stretch awaiting them, before she draws his eyes away to meet hers. (And here is the only abyss worth succumbing to.) Her lips tighten with grim resolution, and she skims his cheek from temple to chin with the pad of her thumb.
"We do what we always do. We go on."