Kinvara Adjei-Levi descended the rope way she had always moved through the world -- without asking for anyone's permission.
She was not a small woman. She had her texts in a bag on her back and sixty years of being right in the set of her shoulders.
The particular quality of someone who had spent her working life being told a room was not meant for her and had walked into every one of those rooms anyway.
The rope did not give her trouble. The forty-three metres did not give her trouble. The ruins at Level 1, briefly lit by her torch as she passed them, she noted and filed with the brisk efficiency of someone who would return to examine them properly once she had dealt with the thing she had come forty-three metres for.
Yosef received her at the base, credentials, Amara's referral for verification. The flat professional acknowledgment of a man who trusted documentation first.
She stepped off the rope onto the grass, and stopped...
Amara watched her face do the thing. Sixty years of reading about a place -- sixty years of the specific faith that did not require miracles because the texts were miraculous enough, of the archived letters declined on standard grounds, of the scrolls taken twice and gotten back, of mornings at a kitchen table in Accra with the lamp in the corner and a granddaughter who was usually halfway out the door in a dash.
All of it arriving now, standing on the grass of Eden with the sourceless light finding her the way it found everyone.
Yes, you too....Welcome!
Her grandmother pressed the sole of her foot into the grass.
"Oh," she said softly.
To the garden, a private word between them.
Sixty years of just reading in texts now actualised infront of her.
Then she looked up.
The light illuminated her face... Amara saw the expression there and felt something pull in her chest -- not grief, not joy, both.
The same heaviness as gladness when it had been patient long enough to stop distinguishing itself from grief. She crossed the garden just as her grandmother opened her arms.
The ensuing hug filled the cavern with warmth which wasn't a bestowal from the garden for once.
. . .
Vothanael's head turned.
The movement was not the forty-five degrees.
It was something different then that -- prior to curiosity, prior to attention.
The movement of a thing that has classified as threat to someone special of someone important... Before the conscious mechanism caught up to the classification.
His gaze moved past Amara. Past Kinvara's face. Past the surface of her entirely...and found the thing on her back.
It had no consistent shape, a dark and dense core.
Translucent at the edges, the translucence of something that deliberately hid itself in the shadows -- the particular camouflage of things that survived by not being looked at directly.
It had its hands in her. Not violent, but it was siphoning something out of her he could see.
Vothanael looked at it.
Sensing the look, it turned to look back and started jerking.
It understood, in that instant, what it had been looked at by.
The vibrant grass beneath him flattened, like an omnidirectional pulse.
A circle pressed flat by something intangible!
The air where he had been folded inward...
The world slowed around them... the tapestry of time let out a shriek only heard by the non-mundane as it was brute forced into bending....and he was suddenly behind Kinvara.
His hand closed around it.
The thing writhed -- schrieking only audible in his ears as it tried to escape, he could see that with his grip on it that he already yanked half of it out of her.
His fingers tightened, effortlessly instinctual without hurting the fragile mortal just a few breaths away. With the same economy he brought to every physical act: the exact force required, not the slightest bit more or less than required.
The thing had no voice like a human. It made an attempt anyway -- old, ancient, an infinitesimal chord striking in the eldritch.
His fingers closed the rest of the way as he...squeezed.
With a last shriek, it exploded into wispy dust, producing a shockwave that pulsed outward.
The particles caught the sourceless light on the way down and time returned to normal.
He released Kinvara and stepped back, Brushed one hand against the other, once... before looking towards Yosef's bug eyed look and then at Amara.
Kinvara staggered a few steps forward both from the shockwave and sensing him suddenly behind her back when just a second ago she could see him in her sights.
Amara snapped her attention towards Vothanael as soon as she heard a sonic boom...looking at the wisps floating around where her grandma just stood, and then at Vothanael's face.
Seeing him glance at Yosef, she turned back to see a gobsmacked expression on the old man's face.
"What the hell just happened?!"
Yosef clicked his mouth shut as he took a deep breath and looked both at Kinvara and Amara before speaking.
"There was a spirit latched onto your grandmother. He just obliterated it....how, I don't know because it was too fast to even track."
Kinvara shuddered once and whispered,"So that's why I was feeling lethargic and why my energy was being sapped since the last few months..."
. . .
The shockwave blew into the far reaches of the cavern.
Shai was the first one who got hit with it, and he hit the cave wall shoulder first.
He pushed off, His eyes went to the spectral analyser, which was on the grass three feet from where it had been.
He picked it up and checked it.
Zero, max reading.... Simultaneously.
He stood between two explanations for that and could not, in the immediate moment, determine which one was more survivable.
He looked at the space in the garden where the wispy dust had settled before looking at the analyser.
"...I should file that," he said.
To himself, to nobody, the reflex arriving early, ahead of the understanding.
He stored it in his mind shakily as he wrote the report "spectre detected 15 seconds prior... Now presence null."
. . .
Rania was standing now.
She had been sitting, the bridge between those states was gone from her memory -- one moment the documentation table, the next her hands flat on its surface with the notebook on the grass and her eyes on the space where Vothanael had been.
And then on the space where the wisps were floating, then on Kinvara straightening her blouse with the faux composure of a woman who had been waiting for someone to deal with that for quite some time.
Her mouth opened and then closed...
The epigrapher in her reached for language the way it always reached for language -- as the most reliable net for catching impossible things, It came up empty though.
"Something was on her," she said. To the table, to herself. "Something was -- and then he -- before anyone--"
She sat down.
Placed both hands in her lap and Looked at them.
"I need a minute." A pause. "I am taking one now and you all better not disturb me while I try to make the world make some damn sense since the last 12 days!!"
. . .
Khalil had been crouched near the shaft, the crouch absorbed the shockwave the way twenty-two years of working around forces you hadn't designed gave you as a parting gift.
He straightened and brushed the slight cavern dust that drifted on him from the shockwave.
He looked at the spectral dust on the garden floor, then he looked at Yosef.
Yosef looked back at him.
A beat. Two men with two different sets of thirty-plus years behind them, standing briefly in the same knowledge.
No words were useful and neither of them reached for any.
Khalil returned to the shaft and Yosef returned to the wall.
. . .
Dawud had been watching the seventh tree.
He felt the shockwave in his chest with everyone else, he looked from the tree to the dust settling in the sourceless light, then back to the tree.
He took a sip of his coffee.
Cold, Had been cold a while.
He drank it anyway.
"Alright," he said.
To the tree, to the calculus he had been running since before the floor gave way, which had this morning returned one more confirmed result.
The seventh tree held its leaf.
Alright, it agreed, in its non verbal way.
. . .
The garden settled into its usual magical warmth.
Not into calm -- the garden had always been calm, the word was insufficient, it settled onto itself.
The way it always returned to itself after something moved through it. As though a shockwave were simply another thing that had lived here briefly and moved on.
Vothanael sat down in the grass where he had been originally standing.
The dust was still in the air, the last of it, the sourceless light found it on the way down.
He watched it go with the expression Amara had been building a word for since the second day -- the one that was not quite any word she had yet.
Kinvara watched him.
She was a woman who had spent sixty years developing the specific skill of looking at larger than life things without flinching, She used it now.
He looked back at her with the forty-five degrees and she received it with sixty years of having earned the right to receive it.
"...How long?" she asked.
His head tilted.
"On me," she said. "How long had it been there?"
Vothanael looked at the dust on the ground, at the residue of it, at the place the thing's hands had been in her, visible to him the way the warmth in the stone was visible, the way the blue beneath Amara's ochre was visible -- the frequencies underneath the surface, the world as it was before it had learned to present itself as something else.
"...Long," he said.
The word Amara had given him on day four, in a different context. He held it up to this moment and it fit.
Kinvara was quiet a moment.
"My body..." she said. "The doctors called it age."
Vothanael said nothing and turned his back to her...Amara shared a bemused look with her grandma at the childish expression of -- I can't reply to you right now cause you're asking too much...
To be continued...
(Author's Notes: Here we are ladies and gentlemen! The 35th Chapter and another act of Vothanael just being badass! I'll try to snap out the next chapter within day time tomorrow, I've been going through a constant cycle of illness these last couple of weeks... Anyhoo, See you guys on the flipside)