Where Gryphons Fear to Tread
The night still rang full dark when Jan woke up. For almost a minute, the chestnut-coated unicorn lay still in his bed of blankets and pillows, ears perked, trying to figure out what had woken him up. Out of the dreamy murk of sleep he remembered scream, but this must surely have only been a dream . . .
Another, more immediate problem made itself known to Jan as his senses were dragged struggling to full report. It was cold. Deathly cold. In the thin stream of silvery light slipping into his sleeping quarters through his cracked door, Jan could see his breath billowing at every exhale. A glance at the small square of window in the wall opposite the door revealed frost growing on the inside of the glass.
“Oh God,” said the unicorn, out loud, needing something to break the all-encompassing silence around him. “The generator.” And focusing again on listening to his surroundings, Jan realized with redoubled horror what had been missing since the moment he awoke, what had been there at the back of his hearing and the back of his thoughts since his first day at the remote northern outpost. The spell-charge generator devoted to keeping the stone corridors and metal shacks something close to a livable temperature sat silent.
“Cola?” called out Jan, at last working up the nerve to get up and out of bed. He glanced to the other nest of bedding on the opposite side of the crew quarters, but found it empty of his sparrow-gryphon companion. Jan frowned and used his magic to open the door the rest of the way. The corridor beyond ran long and uncomfortably narrow, bare and ugly stone broken at seemingly random intervals by equally bare doors to crew quarters and storage closets. The cold, harsh light of the spell crystals mounted in brackets into the ceiling left it even uglier, always on and casting everything in stark, unblemished white.
“Cola?” Jan called again, louder this time. He listened, looking left and right down the corridor, heard nothing but grumbling from one of the other crew quarters and, from farther away, from outside, the wail of the wind, heavy with snow.
For a moment, Jan almost went to one of the other members of the 10-strong crew, to wake them up and ask them what to do. But he discarded this idea almost as quickly as it came, deciding it was not worth the yelling over disrupted sleep it would get him. Instead he turned and went right down the corridor, following it along for several yards until it turned at a sharp left angle into a large box of an intersection. A corridor to the left led to the cafeteria and lounge, where Jan had spent far too many hours battling the gryphons on the crew at darts. To the right, a short corridor branching off into observation rooms and kennels, eventually ending in a ramp up to the command and communication centers on the base’s second floor. And straight ahead from where he stood, a ramp down into the outpost’s basement, to the power generators for the lights and heating. Though he stood at the wrong angle to see it clearly, he thought he saw the far door at the end of this ramp open, nearly torn off its—
“Jan?”
No scream left him at the sound of his name from behind him. He had never been much of a screamer, even in childhood. But he did jump, tripping over his own hooves as he spun around to an owl-gryphon staring at him with green eyes nearly impossibly wide. “Gah! Damn it, Goda. Don’t sneak up on people like that. You almost gave me a heart attack.”
“I am sorry for that,” said the owl-gryphon, stepping closer as he did so. He spun his head around to look back behind him, a physical feat only he could pull off and which made Jan shudder in disgust. When Goda looked back, his gaze dimmed to a less startling intensity. “I heard you calling for Cola and came out after you. What’s going on?”
“I don’t have a clue,” said Jan, relieved as the gryphon, the only person at the outpost who Jan managed to outrank in seniority, stopped looking at him as if he’d seen a ghost. He turned, happy to put the gryphon behind him as he walked until he reached the top of the ramp down to the outpost basement. “I woke up to . . . some sound or something, I don’t even remember anymore. But I noticed it was cold, too cold, and I couldn’t hear the heat generator anymore. Cola was gone, so . . .”
“Oh hey, your breath is puffing out,” said Goda, following after Jan despite what Jan had intended as a clear dismissal. “I didn’t notice the cold. Perk of being a gryphon, I guess. You’re saying we have to go down there?”
“The basement’s nothing to be scared of, first off,” said Jan, glancing aside at Goda. “Second, what we are you talking about? Pretty sure going down to give the rusting old thing a kick is a one-person job.”
“If it’s a one-person job,” said Goda, “why isn’t Cola back from it?”
Jan had no answer for this. Before he could halfway-think of one, the glow crystals in the ceiling flickered, then dimmed to half strength, filling in the corners of the intersection with shadows. Jan swore under his breath, then shared a look with Goda. The good-natured ribbing fell behind them as they moved at a careful trot down the ramp, Jan trying to think of what could be causing such power failures. He thought again of what woke him, trying to remember the half-heard noise which had left him to be the one dealing with this mess.
The basement for Outpost 13 was a large and dark and clustered mess. A long, wide, wet corridor surrounded three large rooms, one room storage at the center for all the broken or obsolete equipment the outpost crew no longer knew any use for, the other two rooms, one to the left from the ramp down and the other to the right, devoted to the various spell-operated power generators which kept the outpost operating and habitable. Lighting was scarce. The walls were slick, the floor grimy and cracked. The walls as well, for that matter. The ever-present stench of burnt ozone, or something alarmingly like it, burnt nostrils at every intake of breath. Jan, though as well-versed in its operations as any other crewmember, as regulations demanded, hated going down there with a passion.
“Alright,” he said, looking to the right as they reached the basement corridor, forcing cheer into his voice to stem the instinctive unicorn fear of the dark. “I’ll take the heat generator down that way, you see what’s troubling the lights. Probably no more than a cracked crystal or a bit of wiring come loose.”
“You think so?” asked Goda. The gryphon’s calm sounded leaps more genuine to Jan’s ever-swiveling ears. It was little wonder. He WAS an owl-gryphon. The dark meant far less to his sort.
“Of course I do,” said Jan, and it wasn’t a full lie. They were too remote, too unimportant for sabotage to be a likely possibility. Mechanical failure from age or lack of maintainence—though Jan would never admit his own guilt in slacking off of duties when possible—was the only explanation. The only reasonable explanation. But down there in the dark, with the air growing colder by the minute and the few light sources flickering, Jan found it too easy to begin thinking other, less reasonable thoughts . . . thoughts of things in the dark with them . . .
“On second thought, maybe we should stick—” Jan started, turning, but he saw he was already on his own at the foot of the ramp, Goda already several yards down his side of the corridor and humming something unintelligible to himself. Jan watched him along for several seconds, turned back the way he needed to go with a muttered “Well crap,” and then started along at as steady a pace as he could manage.
The corridor down to the heat generator room, seven yards down, a sharp left, another 10 feet, was a dank, poorly-lit travesty. The generator room itself, Jan found, even more so. It had been well-lit once upon a time, the wired spell batteries mounted to the high ceiling—high enough for a gryphon doing maintanence to take wing for a minute if they started feeling antsy—blazing with enough light to make even the idea of shadows a bad joke. But this was before Jan’s time at the outpost. In his days, fully half the crystals were burnt out and never been replaced, the remaining few ill-cleaned so that the fitful light they cast fell a sickly yellow rather than the sharp, relentless white of the above-ground portions of the base.
Jan paused a moment in the doorway to look up at these crystals, not sure what he watched—waited—for. Then he crossed the rag- and tool-strewn room to the generator in the far corner, a green light spell from his horn letting him see what he needed to see. The generator was a crude, rusted beast. A big beast, at that, rising as tall as his shoulder and running along the wall for twice the length of his body. Most of its bright red paint was worn away, revealing barren steel and brass pockmarked with the dents and scuffs of years. At the back of the generator’s top, three thick metal pipes curved up and into the wall. Inside the pipes, protected from the harsher elements, the copper and woven crystal wires which spread through the walls and ceilings of the base, dispersing heat where needed. In front of the wire pipes, six deep, copper-rimmed sockets ran the length of the generator at even intervals. Into these sockets went trigonal crystal batteries, each about the length of Jan’s horn, each charged with potent nature magic from the frequent storms in the area.
Three of the crystals were missing. No, Jan noticed, peering closer. Not missing, but shattered. He could only just make out the glittering remains inside their sockets.
For a moment, Jan stood at a loss for what could explain this. Intentional sabotage seemed to him completely out of the question. Possibly, the three crystals weren’t fully charged when plugged in, causing a malfunction where they drew in more magic rather than pour it into the generator until they overloaded and burst, but . . .
The moment passed as an especially hard shiver struck Jan, reminding him of more pressing matters. With his magic, he grabbed a semi-clean rag from the floor and began to carefully remove the shards of crystal still within the sockets, taking his time here, giving it more attention and care than he did his required sentry duty up in the guard tower, keeping an eye out for ice giants. Losing three crystals all at once was bad enough, the sort of bad which threatened somebody’s paycheck, but the sort of damage which might be done if anything remaining disrupted the integrity of the new, fully charged batteries—
Something clanked out in the basement corridor. Jan snapped his up from his work and to the door, ears perked, his heart beating rapid-fire in his barrel. He swallowed, his mouth dry, ears straining to catch a hint of anything else. “Goda?”
Seconds slunk past and there came no answer, or none which Jan could hear. He whinnied, low and to himself, tail flicking as he returned to his work. The three sockets were as clear as he could get them, which he hoped dearly was clear enough. He dropped the rag, forced his hooves to carry him at a relaxed, even leisurely pace to the steel supply lockers lining the far wall. He did not warp the metal latches with the force his magic used to tear the doors open, or so he told himself, instead thinking of the good, warm bed which would be waiting for him back up in his quarters when he finished with this abominable task. The bed, and the sweet sleep which would carry him safely to the light of morning, and the extra ration of honey he would take with his oats at breakfast, surely owed to him for this calm, professional resolving of an unexpected—
Another clank from somewhere out in the corridor, perhaps nearer. Jan, on the verge of a heart attack, grabbed through spare crystal batteries and all but galloped back to the generator, barely keeping the presence of mind not to ram them down into the sockets. He inserted the batteries one at a time, sliding each in and then turning each socket until the internal mechanisms caught. At the third, the generator gave a heaving start, groaning an interminable moment before settling back into the low hum with which Jan was familiar. He sighed out the breath he’d been holding, backed away from the machine, loosed a chuckle. “Oh, thank God, it’s actually working.”
The lights overhead flickered twice, then died. At the same moment, or near enough for Jan’s frazzled, frightened mind, a high shriek echoed from somewhere outside of the generator room and far down the access corridor.
In the dark, in his panic, Jan scrambled for the door out, slammed hard against the far wall of the corridor, the tip of his horn catching at the rough stone and nearly breaking his neck as he staggered back the way he came on mere, raw memory. His breathing rang harsh in his ears, the clop of his hooves on the wet stone echoing in the dark, came back to him as the magnified stride of something unseen but stalking him. He ran again into the wall as the corridor turned, felt the phantom dragging of broken talons down his flanks from behind, whinnied and surged back to all fours. He finally remembered he was a unicorn, he possessed magic, and summoned a fitful orb of dim green light from his horn. He turned until his rear pressed into the corridor corner and swung his gaze first down the way he came, then the way he needed to go, the light orb two head-lengths away.
Nothing but the wet stone and the dead, foggy crystals running in wide intervals along the ceiling, glinting uncertain reflections of Jan’s light.
The panic passed, though reluctantly. Jan breathed deep in and out, looked again the way he came before turning, more slowly, to peer down the long, long access corridor, the way he needed to go and, farther along, the way Goda had gone to check on the lights. The owl-gryphon’s voice, Jan knew for sure, made almost unfamiliar in the throes of horror and pain.
“Goda?” he called, though too softly for anyone to have heard without standing right beside him. Swallowing, he took one step forward, paused, listened, took another step forward, paused, heard only the fading echo of his hoofstep. He kept walking, his pace a forced and slow calm, his gaze trained straight ahead, into the dark. The light of his orb did not reach far. No more than a yard. Beyond this, darkness. As he walked, the light moving forward with him, it didn’t seem like the walls and floor and ceiling of the corridor came into view out of the dark. It felt instead as if they materialized out of the darkness whole cloth, as if the world did not exist beyond the too-small reach of Jan’s little light. It was not a pleasant thought.
He passed by the ramp up to the main floor of the base without a glance, so focused was his mind on the terror and the danger that he did not think of his own escape. He kept down along the basement access corridor, casting the light orb spell again as the first fizzled out, calling again with a voice barely louder than a whisper “Goda?”
Around the corner, the door to the light generator room stood open. From the room came the sound of something thick dripping with a soft, stony PLOP. And there was a smell as well, a hot and sweet stench which sent Jan’s stomach flipping within its fleshly confines.
He stopped in the doorway, expending a touch more magic to send the light orb farther ahead of him, to shine brighter. Half in his flickering green light, he saw Goda sprawled broken atop the light generator, two of its crystal batteries stabbing up through his back and out of his belly. One wing had been messily torn off, the jagged bone and ribbons of ripped muscle and flesh dripping bloodily to the stone floor.
“Oh God,” said Jan. They were his final words. At them, Goda’s head lifted from where it’d been hanging limp, turned 300 degrees with the horrid, grinding crunch of broken bones to stare balefully at Jan with one eye greyed with death, the other a ruined mess in its socket. The dead owl-gryphon opened its beak to screech, an as it did, Jan felt the warm touch of blood-soaked talons upon his neck.