//------------------------------// // 726 - The Big Sleep // Story: Lateral Movement // by Alzrius //------------------------------// Solvei, the plan has changed! Killing Grisela and the others is no longer a priority! Instead, get Akna and the others to the Shrine immediately! Even before the winter wolf responded, Lex registered a sudden spike of anxiety from her. But Master, how- I don’t care how! JUST GET IT DONE!!! R-right! If not for the fact that he was incorporeal at the moment, Lex was sure he would have felt his blood pounding in his ears, speeding toward the snow-covered river without looking back. He had no idea if Solvei would be able to carry out his instructions, but right now there was no choice but to trust that she’d find a way to fulfill the task he’d given her. Otherwise, everyone they’d come there with would pay the price. With Sissel probably nearing the battlefield already, Lex knew that his leaving the scene meant that the fight would effectively be over the moment she arrived. No one else had the magical might necessary to stand up to the oversized humanoid’s spellcasting prowess, and right now he was needed elsewhere. That meant withdrawing to the Shrine – since there was no indication that Grisela or the other members of her monstrous clan knew how to bypass the place’s defenses – was the only way to avoid anyone dying. Though that was assuming Valor hadn’t already. Spotting the hole in the snow-covered ice that Nenet had seen, Lex didn’t bother heading toward it. Instead, he moved downward, his incorporeal form passing directly through the river’s frozen covering and into the water beneath. If not for his ability to enhance his senses with his dark magic – an ability Lex had refined by exploiting the fact that he could still see and hear in shadow-form, despite having no sensory organs with which to do so – he wouldn’t have been able to see anything. With the sun’s light already diffused by the persistent cloud cover overhead, the snow and ice that covered the river’s surface was sufficient to block out the ambient illumination. Even the light streaming in through the nearby hole in the ice was barely a distant flicker from his present location. As it was, his ability to see in the dark let Lex perceive the course of the rushing water, and he immediately moved in that direction, knowing that Valor and Vidrig would have been swept away by the current. Despite the thick ice overhead, the water was moving at a rapid clip, making it immediately evident why Valor – presuming that she was able to swim – hadn’t been able to make it back to the hole she’d fallen through. And while there was no danger that the mare had succumbed to hypothermia, since the protection that Solvei had given her against the cold would have insulated her against freezing water just as well as freezing air, she had no protection against drowning that he was aware of. If she remained calm, and managed to separate herself from Vidrig, then she might have been able to swim upward enough to take in a few breaths of air, Lex knew. There was a slight gap between the top of the water and the ice sheet above it, and there was likely a similar division between the river and the rock once the water moved underground. So there was a chance that Valor had managed to buy herself a little time even after falling through the ice. But that wouldn’t help her against the Shrine’s fortifications. Registering a sudden descent in the water’s direction, Lex’s sense of urgency only grew as he noted that the current had sped up considerably. That was no surprise; a glance on either side of him confirmed that the tunnel the river was flowing into was narrower than its aboveground pathway, increasing the hydrostatic pressure. Swimming against the current would have been difficult before; now, between how the water was practically spraying rather than flowing downward and having to fight against gravity, anyone caught in the flow would have had no chance of freeing themselves. The water continued to plunge into the earth, and although Lex knew that any sign of Valor or her enemy would have been swept away by the forceful rush of its passage, he continued to sweep his eyes back and forth as he flew along the tunnel. The odds that Valor had been snagged on an outcropping or clung to the side of the passage were all but nonexistent, but he stayed alert anyway, despite knowing that the closer they got to the Shrine, the more likely it was that she’d fallen victim to its safeguards. The first of which was just now coming into sight. Indeed, it was almost impossible not to see. Right where the flooded tunnel leveled off, there was a glyph carved into the bedrock, radiating a deep blue light that made it stand out sharply in the surrounding gloom. In the darkness, the glow seemed to take on an ethereal quality, making it hard to judge how distant it was; it was only due to his darkvision that Lex was able to judge his distance to it. But the illumination was less important to Lex than the design of the glyph itself. At a glance, its otherworldly glow contrasted with how crude the drawing seemed; a single vertical line marred by three perpendicular lines through its center, a circle around its lower end, and a shorter line converging with its upper end at an acute angle. But despite looking like something a child might have drawn, Lex immediately recognized it from his studies of Everglow’s magical traditions, and knew what it meant. Sleep. When Akna had told him about this particular trap, Lex hadn’t been able to help but find it fiendishly clever. It was only appropriate that the Night Mare would have a temple protected by a symbol that caused all who viewed it to fall asleep. But that it did so in an underwater tunnel was what made it so deadly. Whereas a forced nap would have been mildly inconvenient in most circumstances, here it was ploy of considerable lethality. Of course, there was an exception built into the glyph, since otherwise it would have made the Shrine virtually impossible for anyone to access. When Akna had come here, following what the spirits had apparently told her was a blind spot in their ability to sense the area, she’d unknowingly – but had later attributed to divine providence – gotten a tangle of brambles wrapped around one of her hind legs during her trip through the forest, the miniscule thorns unable to pierce her hide. Which was the secret of bypassing the glyph: it wouldn’t activate for anyone who prominently displayed the Night Mare’s holy symbol. While Lex’s first instinct had been to scoff at the idea that a few thorns wound around one’s leg could be compared to wrapping a limb in barbed wire, he hadn’t been able to completely dismiss the idea. While he didn’t know how long the ponies of Everglow had worshiped the Night Mare, he was aware that her faith predated the founding of the Pony Empire, as well as the tinier pony nations that it had absorbed. As such, it was entirely possible that she’d been known to ponies before metalworking had been common, in which case nettles, brambles, and other thorned vines would have been a reasonable facsimile of the barbed wire that was her current symbol. Of course, that was all an academic issue now. In terms of making sure the rest of his companions wouldn’t be affected by the glyph, there was a much easier way to go about it: Pausing just for a moment, Lex covered the glyph in black crystals, hiding it from view. That was risky, of course; he’d need to go back and remove them as soon as Solvei and the others arrived in order to make sure that Grisela and her siblings couldn’t easily follow them. But for now there were more immediate concerns that required his attention. The watery tunnel continued to level off past the symbol, but Lex was less concerned with that than he was with how he still hadn’t found Valor. Although it had been less than a minute since he’d entered the river, he knew that it was rapidly reaching the limit for how long someone could have held their breath...something she would have ceased to do once she’d lost consciousness. But that also meant that they were almost to the outer edge of the Shrine. Maybe she resisted the glyph, even without any protective magic of her own. It wasn’t completely impossible; theoretically, any sort of magic that overrode personal autonomy could be resisted by a sufficient act of will. If Valor had somehow managed to pull something like that off, she could have continued coming up to the surface of the water to take in air from the inch-thin gap between the river and the ceiling. But Lex knew that hope bordered on being unrealistic, which meant- Suddenly, he saw her. Up ahead, the tunnel was widening, allowing the current to slow down to the point where a swimmer would have found it navigable so long as they weren’t trying to go back the way they’d come. But the passage forward was by no means welcoming. Spread out across tunnel was a gigantic spiderweb. The thing existed in defiance of all common sense. The strands spread out beneath the water, undulating gently in the current without dissolving or being torn free from the edges of the tunnel. Only the bottom leftmost edge of the place was clear, where a dedicated swimmer could have managed to find their way through without getting tangled in the web. But someone caught by the sleeping glyph would have been bound up in the filaments and held fast beneath the water. Which was exactly what had happened to Valor and Vidrig. Both had their eyes closed, and were hanging limply in the webbing. Lex, however, couldn’t have cared less about the misshapen humanoid, immediately rushing over to Valor as he tried to grab her and drag her upward toward the ceiling of the tunnel with his telekinesis. But while the web had enough give that he was able to pull her a nearly a foot in that direction, the strands quickly went taut, their tensile strength exceeding the level of force that he was able to exert. Myriad options raced through Lex’s mind, knowing that if Valor hadn’t already drowned then she had to be on the verge of doing so. But although Akna had told him about this, she hadn’t gotten caught in the webbing herself, having avoided it on her initial foray down here. Nor did he have the luxury of experimenting or taking half-measures; a pony’s life was at stake. Which left Lex with just one option. Turning to look back the way he’d come, Lex called upon his dark magic, pouring as much power as he could into it. The effort sent a rush of pain through him, despite his bodiless state, and he knew that he was once again pushing himself too far; between the effort he’d spent enhancing his circlet in order to see through Sissel’s technique, and pushing as much power as he could into Solvei and Akna to save them from the giant’s spell, he was on the verge of overloading what his body could handle. Even so, he didn’t let up, fighting back a pained groan as he pushed his limits. A moment later, he completely sealed up the tunnel behind him with black crystals. Immediately, the water around him drained away, continuing down the remainder of the underground passageway. But Lex didn’t wait for it to finish, immediately turning back around and rattling off the words to a heat ray spell, aiming at the webbing. Despite the fact that it had been underwater until a second ago, it didn’t look at all waterlogged, likely because of the same properties that allowed it to maintain its cohesiveness underwater in the first place. Which hopefully meant it was vulnerable to burning. He was proven right as the webs caught fire, the strands turning to ash almost instantly, releasing their captives. Lex ignored Vidrig as the troll hit the ground with a dull thud, her axe landing beside her. Instead, he was already using his telekinesis to lay Valor down, turning back to corporeal form as he rushed to stand over her, putting a hoof on her neck to check for a pulse. ...only to feel none.