Take a look now, what your boy has done!
This is the chapter where I reveal EVERYTHING AND NOTHING!!! And if I write another twenty five hundred words tonight I'll be caught up.
If you don't have enough information about something or if it just doesn't make sense, please let me know. I'm getting to the part that confuses me.
Aunfire entered the dark cavern between two pillars, and Devon followed, blinking. Both had been walking on two feet, but lowered into quadrupedal stance as soon as they’d cleared the doorway. It was still hard to see anything. It was definitely a colossal space, and there were definitely more pillars of a few sizes, but it felt empty aside from them. Devon wished he could sense walls, or a ceiling. He wasn’t accustomed to too much empty space, and the area probably wasn’t really meant to feel comfortable to anyone at all.
“I’m kind of nervous,” said Aunfire without looking at him. She was unconsciously demonstrating this statement, folding and unfolding her unique feather-and-scale wings.
“So am I, actually,” Devon answered. “He’s only done this once that I was around for, and you were a baby.”
“I know.” She pushed off the ground and flapped into the darkness, vanishing from sight in a startlingly short time. Devon followed, guided by his secondary senses and vague knowledge of where his destination was.
The ring of pillars wasn’t far from the door, but their height was such that to access their tops required flight. Six of them were arranged in a semi-circle around one more; Devon went to the second from the right. Aunfire was perched next to him already, grooming her forepaws. The light seemed better from this vantage point, and he didn’t think it was just because his eyes had adjusted.
They didn’t have much to chat about at the moment, having spent the last few hours together and both feeling antsy, so they waited on their respective pillars trying to relax. Devon noticed that they both soon ended up in the formal ‘crouch’ position before long anyway, probably because the pillars didn’t feel right while sitting in gargoyle form or in doing anything while in any other form.
Vistethi arrived next, flying up behind them and perching on the second pillar from the left. Devon hadn’t seen him in a long while and was happy to spend the next few minutes catching up and laughing about the spookiness of the chamber. He guessed that Aunfire hadn’t seen him in an even longer time, but they’d never gotten along so well and she was probably wary of being blamed for the recent problems with the Hart twins-the reason they were all there in the first place, of course, though when it came up formally it would be approached without bias or insensitivity.
From the opposite direction that the three had come in, Tesseract and Gojak appeared at the same time. Tesseract landed next to Devon and turned around on her pillar to face Gojak, who had occupied the central pillar. Everyone adjusted the stature of their crouches a little and looked expectantly at him as he stretched and then folded his wings.
“Welcome, true defenders,” he said mildly, his voice booming and carrying far although the timbre of it seemed just like a young human man. “The council begins.”
“Is this it?” Vistethi asked outright, surprise marked in his mismatched eyes.
“Mica regrets that she is unable to attend.” Gojak looked undisturbed about saying this, but then, he pretty much always looked calm unless he made a very deliberate choice not to.
“And Laughlin?” Devon couldn’t help looking at the last undesignated pillar as he said it, as if their father had forgotten that there was one more son.
“Laughlin does not regret that he is unable to attend.” That was it for that.
“Okay,” said Devon, hoping to get the real content of the meeting underway as soon as possible. “So, I’ve got this lizard in my backyard…”
Gojak nodded. “I think I may know how it got there, but first, has anyone come up with alternatives to Laverna?”
“Traps?” suggested Vistethi. He had missed most of the coversations Devon had been having with some of the others; it had already been brought up.
“It’s too smart,” said Aunfire, paraphrasing a lot of specific scenarios and special qualities of being a basilisk.
“Have you tried entering one of the statues of humans that it made? No way it can turn the same thing to stone twice. Then you could try to corner it.”
Devon thought about this. “No,” he admittted, “but it’s a good idea, if we can get close enough.” Vistethi nodded modestly, and he and the others looked back to Gojak for him to continue.
He looked at each of them once more, considering something, and then began, “The question isn’t in how it was created. What wasn’t? There was a lot of activity on all planes back then, before even you, Vistethi, were born. Corporeal creatures appearing on Earth, incorporeal ones at home, dying off in a day or a year or a millenium, and then of course some of them staying around. It wasn’t as chaotic as it looked, of course. The troublesome ones never overlapped or lasted long enough to ruin it for the rest of them.”
As interested as he was in finding out where the basilisk came from, the pace was getting to Devon. He wanted to come to an agreement about a solution and fly home to implement it, but issues of respect for Gojak’s authority aside, some of this might be important.
“There were two basilisks at first, which usually meant that the species was supposed to last through a few generations-which would be a long time for these, since they were immortal. Then one of them was killed, and the other one stopped showing up anywhere so everyone assumed it was dead too.”
Aunfire took advantage of Gojak’s pause to clarify: “So it just never died? It’s the same one?”
“Probably. The way Perpetua figured, it went underground one day, got lost in the caves down there where everything was already stone, and never came up. It has to eat unless it hibernates, but if it went to sleep, it could just stay in there indefinitely.”
Devon whistled. “That’s a long, long time. How’d he get out?”
“Someone probably let him out.”
“Oh dear.”
Aunfire jerked back, her scarlet mane tumbling around her face. “Then they’re going to try to control him!”
“Most likely.” Gojak’s face still hadn’t shown much expression. “But there’s more than that. If they manage to handle him up close, it’s conceivable that they could construct another. A female of the species.”
Devon suddenly noticed that they’d been using masculine pronouns for the creature, but didn’t care to spend time on asking his father how he knew that it was male. “Well, this is certainly more dire than I’d been led to believe.” He wasn’t trying to be sarcastic, but it just came out. “I think I’d like to not get called away from Europe anymore.”
Gojak raised a paw that looked like a hand, the only appendage on a gargoyle’s body that went through a clearly visible change when it shifted from quadruped to biped form. “It’s not quite so bad,” he said. “They’re currently going through the same difficulties that we are. They know where the basilisk is, but they can’t get close to it without turning to stone-which will, by the way, kill some of them the same way it does us.”
That’s no surprise, thought Devon, they are us. “We still have to make sure we get to it first, though,” he noted.
Tesseract spoke for the first time since she’d come. “Laverna is all we have for now.” Her voice was toneless with an underlying hiss. She sounded bored. She always did.
Aunfire brightened at this, but Gojak shot her a slightly reproachful look and said, “So it seems. Can we take this to mean that we should drop our old grievances?”
All four of his children made some kind of negative motion, and Vistethi and Devon simulataneously announced, “No.” Devon took it upon himself to elaborate on this point. “Just because nobody is trying to kill her anymore doesn’t mean that the entire circle of immortals has unanimously welcomed her back among us.”
“No,” agreed Gojak, “But there she is on our plane anyway. And with the freedom of not having anyone trying to kill her, she’s going to be basing her decisions on other kinds of self-interest. I’m not asking if it’s within our moral boundaries to strike a deal with Laverna. I’m asking if we can afford Laverna.”
“Why?” This was Aunfire, her crimson irises locked on her father. “What do you think her price is going to be?”
“Now, there’s a good question to ask before seeking her out in the first place,” said Gojak, and though he didn’t make it sound cynical or press the issue, privately Devon thought that Aunfire had been chastised enough. “It will probably involve something materialistic, but she may still have some of her old projects going, and as I recall, those were always paused while she was waiting for someone to put himself in mortal peril for her sake.”
“Impossible.” Tesseract’s spaded tail lashed once. “We will not put our charges in danger for the sake of self-protection.”
There could be little disagreement with that, Devon thought. Compromising the safety of humans was against every principle of being a gargoyle. There had been a few times that it confounded him in the past, though, while trying to decide how to take care of his own self-if he, or any of them, were to die, the safety of all the humans in their territories would be well and truly compromised. So were they to sacrifice humans to save gargoyles, so that the gargoyles could live to keep sacrificing themselves to save humans? It was nonsense. Surely the rest of his family was going through the same train of thought at that moment, though he wondered how they would each approach it.
“We will have to see if that even becomes an option,” said Gojak. Tesseract still looked bored, but furiously bored. “But I did want to point out some of the difficulties we may face if we do find Laverna. Which brings us to the next matter. Her children?”
“Colin is in Australia,” Aunfire offered. “I have Coral looking after him right now.”
Vistethi raised an eyebrow. “Colin?”
“Gold,” Aunfire corrected herself. “Sorry.” Devon grinned at her. It didn’t surprise him at all that she was on first-name basis with the guy.
Gojak nodded. “Good. And you believe he can help you locate his mother?”
“All I need is some help getting him to the other plane, and someone to take over from there.”
“Done. As for Silver, she is very clearly still at her home in Massachusetts, the northeastern United States, because Mica sent me a rather disheartening report today about unexpected demon activity in that area, and it wasn’t from a demon.”
Devon winced. He had a feeling he knew where this was going.
“Avector spoke to Perpetua and confirmed it: the girl performed some kind of spell that invoked demon energies, probably found through an occult source. Fortunately it resulted in nothing worse than a dead crow and a readable disruption in the atmosphere for a few miles around, but we can only assume that she’s going to try it again. Devon, your mother told me that she wants you to go put a stop to this.”
“Why me?” He had played Perpetua’s messenger many times before, and usually that kind of visit would have been an enjoyable assignment, but he had Poland to worry about.
“From what I gather, it has to be someone with the power to protect her if anything untoward should happen, and also to make the point very, very clear. Also, with Mica busy, you’re the closest of the six territories.” Gojak paused and then addressed Devon’s silence; “Don’t worry, we’ll all be taking special care with Europe. The basilisk probably isn’t going anywhere anyway, but we’ll all station extra guards in Poland.”
Devon shrugged and nodded. He wondered how long he was going to spend in America, pondering briefly the idea of keeping books and clothes in his callspace instead of weapons and tools. He looked around at his siblings to see if anyone else had anything to say.
They didn’t. The council ended quickly, and Devon lingered only long enough to see if Tesseract was still sane and ask Gojak to send Perpetua a hug for him. He and Aunfire left together, as Gojak departed and Tesseract and Vistethi stayed on their pillars, deep in conversation.
“I’m feeling a lot better, actually,” he said to her as they both alighted on the dark ground.
“I’m not,” she replied. “But I’m sure I’ll feel fine once I go hang out with Colin for a while.”
If you don't have enough information about something or if it just doesn't make sense, please let me know. I'm getting to the part that confuses me.
Aunfire entered the dark cavern between two pillars, and Devon followed, blinking. Both had been walking on two feet, but lowered into quadrupedal stance as soon as they’d cleared the doorway. It was still hard to see anything. It was definitely a colossal space, and there were definitely more pillars of a few sizes, but it felt empty aside from them. Devon wished he could sense walls, or a ceiling. He wasn’t accustomed to too much empty space, and the area probably wasn’t really meant to feel comfortable to anyone at all.
“I’m kind of nervous,” said Aunfire without looking at him. She was unconsciously demonstrating this statement, folding and unfolding her unique feather-and-scale wings.
“So am I, actually,” Devon answered. “He’s only done this once that I was around for, and you were a baby.”
“I know.” She pushed off the ground and flapped into the darkness, vanishing from sight in a startlingly short time. Devon followed, guided by his secondary senses and vague knowledge of where his destination was.
The ring of pillars wasn’t far from the door, but their height was such that to access their tops required flight. Six of them were arranged in a semi-circle around one more; Devon went to the second from the right. Aunfire was perched next to him already, grooming her forepaws. The light seemed better from this vantage point, and he didn’t think it was just because his eyes had adjusted.
They didn’t have much to chat about at the moment, having spent the last few hours together and both feeling antsy, so they waited on their respective pillars trying to relax. Devon noticed that they both soon ended up in the formal ‘crouch’ position before long anyway, probably because the pillars didn’t feel right while sitting in gargoyle form or in doing anything while in any other form.
Vistethi arrived next, flying up behind them and perching on the second pillar from the left. Devon hadn’t seen him in a long while and was happy to spend the next few minutes catching up and laughing about the spookiness of the chamber. He guessed that Aunfire hadn’t seen him in an even longer time, but they’d never gotten along so well and she was probably wary of being blamed for the recent problems with the Hart twins-the reason they were all there in the first place, of course, though when it came up formally it would be approached without bias or insensitivity.
From the opposite direction that the three had come in, Tesseract and Gojak appeared at the same time. Tesseract landed next to Devon and turned around on her pillar to face Gojak, who had occupied the central pillar. Everyone adjusted the stature of their crouches a little and looked expectantly at him as he stretched and then folded his wings.
“Welcome, true defenders,” he said mildly, his voice booming and carrying far although the timbre of it seemed just like a young human man. “The council begins.”
“Is this it?” Vistethi asked outright, surprise marked in his mismatched eyes.
“Mica regrets that she is unable to attend.” Gojak looked undisturbed about saying this, but then, he pretty much always looked calm unless he made a very deliberate choice not to.
“And Laughlin?” Devon couldn’t help looking at the last undesignated pillar as he said it, as if their father had forgotten that there was one more son.
“Laughlin does not regret that he is unable to attend.” That was it for that.
“Okay,” said Devon, hoping to get the real content of the meeting underway as soon as possible. “So, I’ve got this lizard in my backyard…”
Gojak nodded. “I think I may know how it got there, but first, has anyone come up with alternatives to Laverna?”
“Traps?” suggested Vistethi. He had missed most of the coversations Devon had been having with some of the others; it had already been brought up.
“It’s too smart,” said Aunfire, paraphrasing a lot of specific scenarios and special qualities of being a basilisk.
“Have you tried entering one of the statues of humans that it made? No way it can turn the same thing to stone twice. Then you could try to corner it.”
Devon thought about this. “No,” he admittted, “but it’s a good idea, if we can get close enough.” Vistethi nodded modestly, and he and the others looked back to Gojak for him to continue.
He looked at each of them once more, considering something, and then began, “The question isn’t in how it was created. What wasn’t? There was a lot of activity on all planes back then, before even you, Vistethi, were born. Corporeal creatures appearing on Earth, incorporeal ones at home, dying off in a day or a year or a millenium, and then of course some of them staying around. It wasn’t as chaotic as it looked, of course. The troublesome ones never overlapped or lasted long enough to ruin it for the rest of them.”
As interested as he was in finding out where the basilisk came from, the pace was getting to Devon. He wanted to come to an agreement about a solution and fly home to implement it, but issues of respect for Gojak’s authority aside, some of this might be important.
“There were two basilisks at first, which usually meant that the species was supposed to last through a few generations-which would be a long time for these, since they were immortal. Then one of them was killed, and the other one stopped showing up anywhere so everyone assumed it was dead too.”
Aunfire took advantage of Gojak’s pause to clarify: “So it just never died? It’s the same one?”
“Probably. The way Perpetua figured, it went underground one day, got lost in the caves down there where everything was already stone, and never came up. It has to eat unless it hibernates, but if it went to sleep, it could just stay in there indefinitely.”
Devon whistled. “That’s a long, long time. How’d he get out?”
“Someone probably let him out.”
“Oh dear.”
Aunfire jerked back, her scarlet mane tumbling around her face. “Then they’re going to try to control him!”
“Most likely.” Gojak’s face still hadn’t shown much expression. “But there’s more than that. If they manage to handle him up close, it’s conceivable that they could construct another. A female of the species.”
Devon suddenly noticed that they’d been using masculine pronouns for the creature, but didn’t care to spend time on asking his father how he knew that it was male. “Well, this is certainly more dire than I’d been led to believe.” He wasn’t trying to be sarcastic, but it just came out. “I think I’d like to not get called away from Europe anymore.”
Gojak raised a paw that looked like a hand, the only appendage on a gargoyle’s body that went through a clearly visible change when it shifted from quadruped to biped form. “It’s not quite so bad,” he said. “They’re currently going through the same difficulties that we are. They know where the basilisk is, but they can’t get close to it without turning to stone-which will, by the way, kill some of them the same way it does us.”
That’s no surprise, thought Devon, they are us. “We still have to make sure we get to it first, though,” he noted.
Tesseract spoke for the first time since she’d come. “Laverna is all we have for now.” Her voice was toneless with an underlying hiss. She sounded bored. She always did.
Aunfire brightened at this, but Gojak shot her a slightly reproachful look and said, “So it seems. Can we take this to mean that we should drop our old grievances?”
All four of his children made some kind of negative motion, and Vistethi and Devon simulataneously announced, “No.” Devon took it upon himself to elaborate on this point. “Just because nobody is trying to kill her anymore doesn’t mean that the entire circle of immortals has unanimously welcomed her back among us.”
“No,” agreed Gojak, “But there she is on our plane anyway. And with the freedom of not having anyone trying to kill her, she’s going to be basing her decisions on other kinds of self-interest. I’m not asking if it’s within our moral boundaries to strike a deal with Laverna. I’m asking if we can afford Laverna.”
“Why?” This was Aunfire, her crimson irises locked on her father. “What do you think her price is going to be?”
“Now, there’s a good question to ask before seeking her out in the first place,” said Gojak, and though he didn’t make it sound cynical or press the issue, privately Devon thought that Aunfire had been chastised enough. “It will probably involve something materialistic, but she may still have some of her old projects going, and as I recall, those were always paused while she was waiting for someone to put himself in mortal peril for her sake.”
“Impossible.” Tesseract’s spaded tail lashed once. “We will not put our charges in danger for the sake of self-protection.”
There could be little disagreement with that, Devon thought. Compromising the safety of humans was against every principle of being a gargoyle. There had been a few times that it confounded him in the past, though, while trying to decide how to take care of his own self-if he, or any of them, were to die, the safety of all the humans in their territories would be well and truly compromised. So were they to sacrifice humans to save gargoyles, so that the gargoyles could live to keep sacrificing themselves to save humans? It was nonsense. Surely the rest of his family was going through the same train of thought at that moment, though he wondered how they would each approach it.
“We will have to see if that even becomes an option,” said Gojak. Tesseract still looked bored, but furiously bored. “But I did want to point out some of the difficulties we may face if we do find Laverna. Which brings us to the next matter. Her children?”
“Colin is in Australia,” Aunfire offered. “I have Coral looking after him right now.”
Vistethi raised an eyebrow. “Colin?”
“Gold,” Aunfire corrected herself. “Sorry.” Devon grinned at her. It didn’t surprise him at all that she was on first-name basis with the guy.
Gojak nodded. “Good. And you believe he can help you locate his mother?”
“All I need is some help getting him to the other plane, and someone to take over from there.”
“Done. As for Silver, she is very clearly still at her home in Massachusetts, the northeastern United States, because Mica sent me a rather disheartening report today about unexpected demon activity in that area, and it wasn’t from a demon.”
Devon winced. He had a feeling he knew where this was going.
“Avector spoke to Perpetua and confirmed it: the girl performed some kind of spell that invoked demon energies, probably found through an occult source. Fortunately it resulted in nothing worse than a dead crow and a readable disruption in the atmosphere for a few miles around, but we can only assume that she’s going to try it again. Devon, your mother told me that she wants you to go put a stop to this.”
“Why me?” He had played Perpetua’s messenger many times before, and usually that kind of visit would have been an enjoyable assignment, but he had Poland to worry about.
“From what I gather, it has to be someone with the power to protect her if anything untoward should happen, and also to make the point very, very clear. Also, with Mica busy, you’re the closest of the six territories.” Gojak paused and then addressed Devon’s silence; “Don’t worry, we’ll all be taking special care with Europe. The basilisk probably isn’t going anywhere anyway, but we’ll all station extra guards in Poland.”
Devon shrugged and nodded. He wondered how long he was going to spend in America, pondering briefly the idea of keeping books and clothes in his callspace instead of weapons and tools. He looked around at his siblings to see if anyone else had anything to say.
They didn’t. The council ended quickly, and Devon lingered only long enough to see if Tesseract was still sane and ask Gojak to send Perpetua a hug for him. He and Aunfire left together, as Gojak departed and Tesseract and Vistethi stayed on their pillars, deep in conversation.
“I’m feeling a lot better, actually,” he said to her as they both alighted on the dark ground.
“I’m not,” she replied. “But I’m sure I’ll feel fine once I go hang out with Colin for a while.”