| |
Melvin was Zhufira. His blade danced.
He let out all his frustration. Anger at Mike, angst at Rich, and his body and the jumble of emotions, the conflicting confusions, wants and desires. There was no need to translate it here. His bastard sword understood all. It did the talking.
Just a few feet into the cave they met a pair of zombies. Melvin whirled between them and they were down in pieces before Rich and Jason could get in a sword swipe of their own.
Deeper in the tunnel, guided by Jason’s bones and shown the way with Rich’s fire-filled hand, they met another half dozen undead. Melvin wasn’t sure if Jason and Rich were able to help this time. All he knew was he took off two heads in one stroke, cut off countless arms that reached with futile earnest to grasp him, and danced with his blade until he was in the center of a ring of severed parts.
It felt good, being Zhufira. Not just for a second, not just for short moments of uncontrolled anger, but as a standing vehicle for his aggression. She didn’t keep anger and pain bottled up like Melvin. She was catharsis.
Well into the cavern now, the tunnels began to branch out in many different directions. Some ramped up, others down, and more went left and right. Melvin looked at Jason.
“We’ve got a problem,” Jason said. “The feeling, the Death Null’s presence, it’s all around me.”
“Maybe putting a bone in water will help,” Melvin said. “There are too many passages to guess at this.”
Keeping his magefire burning in one hand, Rich dropped the sword and conjured a water bowl that he held in his free hand. They all looked by flickering firelight at the suspended finger bone. It whirled in a circle ceaselessly, a magnet caught up in its own Bermuda Triangle.
Melvin felt the zombie before he heard the footstep shuffle up behind him. He whirled and his blade flowed like wind. Three passes, like an upward slanted Z, and the zombie was left with in as many parts: head, torso and a pair of disconnected legs. Jason ran over and cut arms so the torso section wouldn’t crawl around.
Melvin looked at Jason.
“The ‘always left’ approach to maze traversing?”
Jason nodded.
They got started.
*****
MIKE SAT IN HIS CHAIR, worried. Melvin and his friends had disappeared into the cave hours ago. His instincts told him to go in there after him. But combat survival training told him it was suicide to ignore your base when it’s being overrun.
If nothing else, the cult built sound defenses. This guardhouse was definitely made to keep people from breaching. The door was iron, hinged on the inside. The windows were small, making it difficult for a person to crawl inside. Mike turned difficult to damn near impossible by tossing the beds and wedging the bed frames against the windows. Now nothing got through the windows except arms begging to get chopped off.
But no structure is impenetrable, and the will of the cult was making a way.
Close to an hour now, chipped rock fragments had been flying into the entryway. The cultists were taking axe picks or shovels or something and attacking the walls around the iron door frame. They worked both sides, now the trails were nearly quarter way up the door. Mike could see the fading light of day streaming through the carved lines.
Eventually, sometime well into the night, the door would fall inward. Then it’d be the four of them against total bedlam.
Waiting was hard. Well, not for Runt, he was power napping on a tossed mattress. Guess a lack of bed frame and an angry horde outside the walls didn’t phase a half-weagr. He was a good dude to have with you in the foxhole.
Ruki came over to sit beside Mike. His initial panic from seeing the walking dead had subsided a couple of hours ago. At first, looking at a dismembered torso crawl around on its hands had turned him into a suburban housewife watching a mouse scamper across the linoleum. Luckily, Savashbahar was the man of their house, coming to the Ruki’s screaming rescue and carving the torso up like a Thanksgiving turkey.
Even now, Ruki gave an occasional eye to the undead chunks.
“So,” Ruki started, “uh, when you say that’s your brother, um, do you mean some sort of warrior-brother-in-arms kind of brother?”
“I mean brother.”
“I see,” Ruki said, grimacing as he nodded. “Um, how long has your brother been your brother?”
“Why you wanna know?”
“Well, your brother is a woman. And exceedingly comely.”
“Mel’s been my brother long enough for me to club you brain dead over,” he said. “That answer the question?”
Ruki nodded. “Yes, clears that matter up,” he said. “At least until I find a quality helmet.”
Mike looked at the spray of some more rock chips shooting from around the door. He looked back toward the massive hole of the cave.
What the hell, Melvin? Where you at?
*****
MELVIN WAS TIRED. THE “all lefts” approach was time-consuming. Chopping down zombies only added to the fatigue.
Fortunately, not too many remained. The big, roving zombie bands seemed to be all gone. Now they encountered a random one or two in the tunnels. It was a good thing too, as his romp through the tunnels as Zhufira had ended hours ago.
Rage, no matter how therapeutic, wasn’t something indefinitely sustainable. Luckily, the three of them proved more than capable of rendering a zombie. Unlike the undead residents of Fort Law, these zombies were weaponless. Most of them seemed more eager to announce one day left rather than lunge out and attack.
“I wonder how Mike’s doing?” Melvin asked. He led the way through this newest tunnel, guided by the light of a torch made from a stick, swaths of zombie shirt, and Rich’s magefire.
“Hopefully, better than we are,” Jason answered. “This maze sucks.”
He was right about that. Twice now “all lefts” had returned them to where they started, where the tunnels branched and their direction finding failed. Jason had the good sense to use coagulated zombie blood to mark the spot with an “X” on the wall. They even had to stop for rest and food, eating jerked meat and sharing silence. At least it had been silent until the roaming zombie had come upon them to remind them there was one day left. It felt like they had been down here all their lives.
“Look at it this way,” Rich said, fatigue wearing heavy on his face. “We’ve been down here so long that we’re bound to find it soon.”
A few footsteps later and the tunnel opened up. Melvin could no longer see the sides or ceiling. He was about to bear left until his torchlight illuminated the one wall until a light in the midst of the cavern made him stop.
Darkness pervaded everything, and the light seemed more of a silhouette. Just a thin line of white in the pitch black, showing the outline of a giant man-shaped creature. Two all white eyes of light looked out at him.
The Death Null.
They made their way to it without difficulty. There was no more zombie resistance. Melvin got close enough for the torchlight to illuminate its all black body. Still, the Death Null did nothing but look at them.
“Well...” Jason said, trailing off as if he was expecting the Death Null to roar or something. “... lack of endgame boss fight aside, guess it’s time for you to do your thing, Rich.”
Rich swallowed. “Ok, here goes.”
“Wait,” Melvin said. He looked at the others. “Does this feel right to you?”
“All the way,” Jason said. “It’s a death creature. It makes zombies.”
“Yeah, but still,” Melvin said. “Something’s off. I mean, it’s just sitting there. It’s not trying to kill us, run, nothing.”
“You killed all its zombies,” Rich said. “Makes sense to me.”
“Yeah,” Jason added. “I think you’re just girling out again. It’s not a lost puppy, it’s a zombie factory. Stop empathizing with it.”
“Look at it, you idiots,” Melvin said. “It can lash out at us but it doesn’t. It can punch out of here like it did at Fort Law but it stays put. Outside of controlling things that were dead anyway, what truly evil thing has it done?”
The Death Null’s mouth opened, a white light cutting through a sea of black. “One... day...” was all it said.
“See?” Jason asked. “What about the countdown? It’s probably got all its evil planned for tomorrow. We can’t risk it.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Melvin said. “I mean, at Fort Law it could have killed us but it just wanted us to free it. And once it got its freedom, it came here, where it wasn’t bothering anybody. The death cultists were the ones that came to it, feeding it bodies. It wasn’t like the Death Null was rampaging through cities, creating a corpse army.”
Jason nodded. “Girly sensibilities or not, you’ve got a point there.”
“All I’m saying is if it wanted wanton destruction or a zombie nation, it could’ve had that a long time ago,” Melvin said.
A flash of red pierced the cavern. Melvin’s eyes followed the light to the source. Rich’s ring glowed with a stabbing brilliance. Then the ring shattered.
Suddenly, the air rushed together and the blue and white blinding light of a portal swirled into existence. Melvin had to shield his eyes from the light. Once it died, his eyes adjusted to see a man in black.
Druze.
“Rich, I can’t believe I had to come here to urge this matter,” Druze said. “Cast the spell. Cage this fiend.”
“Dude, what gives?” Rich asked. “You told me that ring was supposed to mitigate cost. You had me wearing your portable portal?”
“It was a portal and scry,” Druze said. “You think I’d trust a matter so important to a bunch of pendulum rejects?”
Druze walked over to Rich and put a hand on his shoulder. “I followed your progress every step of the way, Rich, waiting to jump in and take over in the event you failed. But you haven’t failed. Don’t fail now. Cast the spell.”
Rich looked at Druze’s hand, then stepped away, out of his reach. “I don’t appreciate being lied to. And I’m with Melvin on this. She—I mean, he’s—had a great nose for keeping us out of trouble so far. If you want to cast Life Something Chain, go for it. I’m not.”
Druze’s look of friendly earnest disappeared. Rage took over his features. He spoke and his robes lashed out.
*****
MIKE SAT UNEASILY IN an off-balanced chair that he had placed outside of the guardhouse. The legs were on uneven ground where the slope of the cave hill was just starting. He looked back into the building, at a doorway that was almost totally chipped away.
The cult’s hours of labor at the door had given Mike and his team time to set up secondary defenses. Furniture framed the guardhouse exit and ran up the sides of the hill toward the cave mouth. Broken glass littered the ground around the furniture and extra swords and spears were entrenched in the ground at strategically deadly angles.
What he wanted was a bottleneck. With this setup, attackers had to take the hill one, two at a time tops. He hoped it was enough.
He made peace with Melvin’s fate. If he wasn’t dead in there, Mike couldn’t do squat to help him now. He had his own survival to worry about. A broke-down pitched battle was moments away.
He turned in his chair. Savashbahar was a little further uphill, sitting on the ground. Her head was down, apparently focused on sharpening her dagger. He went over to her.
“Hey,” he said.
She said nothing. The high-pitched twang of her knife scraping against the sharpening stone set the mood in the atmosphere.
“Look, Savvy, I can’t change how I got here and what that makes me. After we get out of this mess, if you want to blaze a trail as far away from me as you can, I’ll understand. I just want you to know that you good people and I always got your back.”
The knife stopped scraping against the stone. She looked up from her dagger, her face displaying utter disbelief.
“Stupid megrym,” she said. “The dogs of war claw at the door, and you talk of sentiments? Does my feeling toward you matter more than final battle preparation?”
“Damn,” Mike said, scratching his head, “I mean, when you put it that way...”
Savashbahar went back to sharpening her dagger. Mike turned to go, but she started speaking over the scrape of the knife.
“When I was a maiden, I made the choice to seek the way of Hexenarii. It was a choice forbidden to women by my clan. That choice made me outcast. But I was still the same woman, the same Savashbahar that was loved by all before my skin was marked. What kind of person would I be to spurn you for being something you had no choice in?”
She looked up from her task. A smile played on her lips.
“If I wanted nothing to do with you, I would not be here,” she said. “Still, you need to learn where your words belong. If you speak of sentiment now, does it mean we’ve prepared as much as possible?”
Mike with a broad grin. He looked back at the iron door, which shuddered as the rock chips at the top of the frame flew. “Savvy, we’re as ready as we’ll ever be.”
*****
“CAST THE SPELL!” DRUZE yelled. His robes shot out again, knocking Rich down. The blackness of the robe made it impossible to see.
Rich saw that blackness wrap around Melvin and Jason and toss them into the walls.
“Why?” Rich asked. “Why do you want me to cast it when you can cast it yourself?”
Rich stood up and called illusion fire into existence around him. The light flickered through the cavern, illuminating the farthest reaches along with the enraged mage before him. He wasn’t about to be sneak attacked again by hard to see robes.
“Life Ending Chain,” Druze said. “The spell you worked so hard to translate is called Life Ending Chain. And I’m not casting it because I know how it works. After all, I was right here when Kaftar used it.”
Rich couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Life Ending Chain. He had no doubt it worked as advertised. And the name Druze dropped—
“Kaftar?” Rich asked. “He was the first Hierophant. That had to be—”
“Five hundred years ago,” Druze filled in. “And back then, it took a lot to convince Kaftar to cast it. I had to make him believe this thing was the biggest threat imaginable. And then I had to convince him the death defying power of the monster would negate the spell cost.”
“Only it didn’t,” Rich guessed.
Druze smirked. “It did, if you count his lifeless corpse rising up and saying ‘free me’ over and over until I incinerated him on the spot.”
Druze called netherfire into existence. His hands glowed with the brilliant blue of it. Rich had seen the process for creating netherfire; he remembered marveling at the insane intricacy of it. Druze was showing off, giving Rich a display of the power he wielded.
“You must know, there’s no escape for you here,” Druze said. “But there’s hope for your pitiful friends. All it takes from you is a single spell. Cast it.”
“Hey, asshole!” a shout came from behind Druze.
Rich turned to see Melvin with his sword out, looking fierce. Zhufira fierce.
In another corner of the cave, Jason was nocking an arrowing.
“You messed with the wrong pendulum rejects,” Melvin said. He charged at Druze, yelling the same battle cry he had ages ago during akhta.
“Ildasleen!”
*****
MIKE AND RUKI PROVOS had turned the first two waves of angry humans into the crispy undead thanks to the lightning gloves. Now it was Fort Law all over again. Mike and Runt stood side by side, facing the unending undead horde rushing through the bottleneck.
These things were hard to put down, so the best option was to send them over the side of the hill. It would take them forever to get back around, if they could even make the return trip.
Unlike Fort Law, the undead had half a town of breathing accomplices helping them out. While the undead rushed to get up the hill to get to the cave, the ones still alive hung in the back, trying to destroy the barricades and open the bottleneck.
Ruki tried to keep the cultists off the barricades with diskblades. His shots were good at disruption, but the cultists didn’t stay away long. They saw how precarious it would be for the four defenders if the zombies were able to swarm. The cultists always came back, pushing and kicking and swinging at the barricades.
Runt swung his Z-blade, dropping another zombie down the side of the hill. Mike had his hands full with his own zombie. Another zombie rushed in and stabbed Runt in the side with a knife.
Runt roared with pain.
Savvy rushed in, her dagger lashing out in flashing blurs. The zombie’s knife hand came away severed. She grabbed the thing by its hair and as she serial stabbed it she dragged it up the hill, where she proceeded to carve it out of the fight permanently.
Runt laughed. Loudly, thoroughly, madly. It was the first time Mike ever heard him laugh. The sound boomed out over the battlefield. He followed it up with a yell as he broke his Z-blade into twin axes.
“Now! Now, it’s a fight!”
*****
DRUZE THREW HIS NETHERFIRE volley at Melvin. Melvin, in mid-sprint, dashed left past one fireball. Then he made a whirling jump over the second fireball. He came down and kept charging at Druze like lethal fire jumping was a rehearsed part of a show.
Jason let an arrow fly. He nocked another one and let it go in a blur of speed.
Druze aimed his arms at Jason and Melvin. His sleeves came alive. One swirled into a black whirlpool, catching Jason’s arrows. The other shot out at Melvin.
Melvin side-stepped the sleeve and closed the gap to the mage. His sword stabbed out at Druze.
Druze slid back like the wind pushed him. The sleeve Melvin dodge earlier came back around. It hit Melvin in the back and pushed him into the mage.
The black robes swallowed both Druze and Melvin. They became a black sphere that swirled like a storm. Then the sphere exploded.
With a piercing scream, Melvin shot out of the explosion to land in a heap. Druze stood, unscathed and unmoved by the blast.
Almost like he was swatting a fly, Druze batted at another arrow with a sleeve. He turned to face Jason, who was in the midst of aiming another arrow.
Druze took two steps toward Jason. Casting a spell with each step, he knelt and picked up giant scoops of cavern floor. He threw the massive boulders with blinding speed at Jason.
Jason hit the floor. As the boulders passed, Druze spoke another spell and pressed down with his palms.
The boulders shattered, raining rock shrapnel on Jason.
Both Jason and Melvin were on the ground, groaning in pain. Rich had to do something. He had no clue what.
He cast the only thing he could think of at the moment and sent a pair of fireballs at Druze.
Druze said something quick and blew. The fireballs went out, like he was making a wish on a birthday cake.
“This is novice magic, boy!” Druze yelled. “I’m a five-hundred-year-old spell crafter. If you want to duel me, you’re going to have to step into your gray robes. But you can’t, can you?”
Druze tapped his temple. “I know. I’ve been watching, listening. The only way you can access Magelord magic is if you’re in fear of your own life. But I’m not going to try driving an axe through your face. Or turn into a giant, venomous spider.”
Druze smiled. “I’m going to torture your friends while you watch. Their only mercy will be your Life Ending Chain.”
*****
MIKE STOOD SIDE BY side with his crew. They all swung clubs and swords at the zombies. One of the barricades had failed, opening up the bottleneck. It took all of them to keep the tide at bay.
The cultists below were going to town at the remaining barricade. Even if Ruki Provos didn’t have his hands full dealing with zombies, he was disk dry. It was only a matter of time before it came apart. Then the swarm would overrun them all.
Dawn was breaking over the horizon. Mike looked out at his high vantage point above the town, where the wan light revealed dark bodies moving rapidly through the foothills. A large force, an army, was heading towards the town.
“You guys seeing this?” Mike asked as he bashed another zombie off the hill.
“Maybe they’re peacekeepers coming to put an end to this blasted resurrection cult,” Ruki said.
The army was at the outskirts of town. Their individual shapes came into clear view.
“Not that lucky,” Mike said. “They’re nasran. They who I think they are, Savvy?”
“Yes,” she said, swiping her dagger back and forth at a zombie. “Maltep has found us.”
“Blessed Onesource!” Ruki cried. “How the hell did they find us?”
“My blood is their blood,” Savashbahar said. “If they wish to listen, it will whisper to them.”
Explosions started going off in the town. Yells, fire, smoke, all the signs of fighting hit Mike. Maltep was coming for them hard.
“Children! Children!” the voice of the clown dude could be heard over the noise of battle. “Leave the offerings to their work, our backs are exposed! We must last, grace is almost at hand!”
The cultists working apart the barricade left it and disappeared into the guardhouse. There was still a legion of zombies to deal with and a larger opening to the bottleneck. But at least now they didn’t have to worry about an all around swarming.
The Maltep nasrans had afforded them a temporary reprieve. A sick feeling washed over Mike, something that ran much deeper than the zombie gore he was covered in.
*****
“TIME GROWS SHORT, BOY,” Druze said. “Cast the spell.”
Druze had summoned magic chains that wrapped around the arms, legs, and necks of both Melvin and Jason. The chains kept them standing and rooted in place. Netherfire burned in front of Melvin, so close that the fire was slow roasting him. Druze was casually flicking razor sharp sleeves at Jason, cutting away the skin on his chest and flesh arm, one piece at a time.
“Ok,” Rich said as he looked at his screaming friends, their faces looking sickly under the pale blue light of the netherfire torturing Melvin. “Just let them go.”
The sleeves stopped flying. The netherfire winked out of existence, returning the cave to a dark calm. Jason and Melvin’s chains remained fast.
“Just tell me why,” Rich said. “Why is trapping the Death Null so important to you?”
“Haven’t you figured it out yet, boy?” Druze asked. “How else is a human able to live for centuries without tapping into this thing’s death negating abilities?”
“You... Rew!” He spat as the realization dawned on him. “You both feed off it?!”
“Exactly,” Druze said. “This thing sits in some forgotten corner of the world, silently keeping death at bay for us. That is, until you freed it. Now it’s time to set things right.”
“You think this is right?” Jason shouted. “Die already, like everyone else!”
Druze’s sleeves shot out. Jason yelped as the sleeves cut across his cheeks.
“Shut up, boy, robes are talking,” Druze said. He looked back at Rich, disgust in his eyes. “But I can scarcely call you a robe. Before Rew was born, before she devised her witchlock, I sent real mages to their death renewing Kaftar’s spell. Accomplished, powerful mages—some of them my own sons.”
He walked over to the Death Null, looking it up and down before he turned to face Rich again.
“The last thing I’ll let happen is watch their sacrifice go in vain, ruined by a child scared of magic.”
Druze walked back over to Rich, pointing at his bound friends. “Now cast. Or the fire gets hotter and the blades get sharper. If it’s any consolation, Rew was innocent in this.”
“Innocent?” Rich asked. “She’s feeding off an innocent creature and she’s the faultless one?”
“Look at it!” Druze yelled, pointing to the Death Null. “Does it look innocent? Rew went with the same assumption you made when you saw it, the same assumption everyone makes. Can you blame her?”
Rich looked at the Death Null. It was tremendous, dark, terrifying. They had trekked all over the world just based on how it looked. He couldn’t blame Rew for using it to extend her own life; he would’ve taken the same offer if he just had the visual to go by.
“We’ve wasted enough time here,” Druze said. “Rew truly doesn’t know the deadly consequence of the spell. That was before her time and her lock. In her eyes, you will have died a martyr, saving us all from evil. Now cast.”
*****
SAVASHBAHAR WAS PROUD of her companions. There had been no escape from death visible anywhere, yet they all continued to fight on bravely. Together, they had seen victory over one battle.
Runt and Mike sent the last two zombies over the hillside. It was quiet on the hill now. Most of the undying ones were either cut into pieces or over the side of the hill, unable to return to the fight. But the quiet was deceptive. The town below burned.
A familiar voice shouted at them from beyond the guardhouse.
“Savashbahar is with you. Send her down to us.”
“Go to hell!” Mike yelled.
“Wait!” Savashbahar yelled. “I am coming.”
She looked at Mike. “This is not your fight. Not this. If it was, I imagine you would fight bravely. And I would be at your side, fighting with you.”
Savashbahar put her hand over Mike’s mouth before he could protest. She exchanged nods with Ruki Provos and Runt. None of their blood would be on her hands.
She put her knife away and walked with deliberate care down the hill, past busted barricades and broken bodies. She kept her chin high. There was no manufactured fear in her heart to dishonor her. She would die proud.
*****
RICH TOOK OUT HIS SPELL book. He flipped pages slowly, trying to think of a way to save himself and his friends.
“Don’t think about casting something other than Kaftar’s spell, boy,” Druze said. “I recognize the difference between the old tongue and modern spellcraft. Remember, I used to be alive when people still spoke it.”
Rich got to Kaftar’s page. There was nothing else to do. Nowhere else to go. He swallowed, a dry, harsh feeling.
He was about to speak his own death.
Rich looked up at Druze and recited Kaftar’s words, loud and clear so the mage could hear they were from the old tongue.
*****
THE LAST TIME SAVASHBAHAR had seen Demirtash, he had been prepared to kill her. She had aided foreigners, stolen, even extinguished Maltep’s sacred fire. Now Maltep’s Chief Hexenarii stood in front of her, his face grim and taut.
Behind him, the faces of many warriors looked toward her.
“Kill me quickly, Demirtash, for it looks as if you’ve emptied half of Maltep to deliver your justice.”
Demirtash took a step toward Savashbahar. He stood for a moment, looking at her in silence.
Then he reached out fast.
Savashbahar did not feel the bite of his dagger.
Demirtash’s arms were around her. For the first time since she was a young girl, her older brother held her in his embrace.
“Sister, you were right,” he said, “To fight, to help those foreigners, to strike at the mage factory. A hundred Hollowers came to us, led by the mages. If we had listened to your call to arms we could have struck first. Now we are all that remains of sacred Maltep.”
Maltep was no more. It was news to make the ancestors weep. She returned his embrace.
“I am sorry, Demirtash.”
“We need to fight,” Demirtash said. “We need Hexenarii. All our Hexenarii. You are outcast no more, dear sister, but the bravest among our chosen warriors.”
The warriors shouted in unison, a cry a woman from Maltep had never heard.
“Hexenarii! Hexenarii! Hexenarii!”
*****
RICH FINISHED CASTING the spell. He closed the book and dropped it.
Druze looked at him, anger etched across in his features.
“Where’s the chain? You expect me to fall for your utterance of random words? I am out of patience! Now—”
A strangled sound came out of his throat. He reached for Rich. If he was trying to talk, nothing but choking came out.
“I wasn’t trying to fool you with random words,” Rich said. “This is one of Kaftar’s spells, the one called ‘Equal Hardship’. I couldn’t beat you, Druze, so I had to join you.”
Rich dropped to his knees, feeling heavy already from the weight of the spell. He looked over to his friends. The chains around Melvin and Jason dissolved, and they ran over to him.
“Dude, that was epic!” Jason said. “What’d you do?”
Rich pointed. Druze was frozen in his reach toward Rich, horror on his face. Gray stone grew, spreading upwards to his face, outwards to his hands and feet.
Rich looked down at his hands, white marble grew from his fingertips and spread up his hands.
“No!” Melvin cried. “God, Rich, you didn’t have to do this!”
“C’mon,” Rich said. “We’ve seen the movies. The bad guys aren’t exactly known for their big hearts. He was going to kill the both of you after he got what he wanted. Hell, he even sent his sons to die. I don’t think today was the day he learned charity.”
“Shit!” Jason swore. “Dude, is there a way to negate this?”
The white marble was up to Rich’s shoulders. His back felt solid, dense.
“If there is, I’m sure you’d be the one to find it,” Rich said.
Rich felt the marble spreading up to his neck. He couldn’t move, so he settled for a wink at Melvin.
“See ya around.”
He saw no more.