Glissa felt the levelers dying above her, both in the circular tunnel and on the rapidly receding surface. Surrounded by the greenish glow of intense mana residue, the experience made her feel more like a conduit than a destroyer. She felt as if all the magic in the Tangle flowed through a central point in her chest, filtering through her willpower to become ribbons of light that cut into wriggling segmented torsos and slashing, scythe-like blades. She struggled to maintain control.
Half a minute later, the last of the levelers burned out under Glissa’s withering assault. As the realization came, she felt the well of energy go dry, and she was once again just an elf falling to her doom. Only now she could expect to find herself under several tons of twisted metal, when she landed.
Wait. Where would they land?
“Hey!” Slobad cried through the storm, still clinging to her leg. “We slowing down, huh?”
“What?” Glissa shouted in reply, but realized the goblin was right. The downward pull of gravity wasn’t as strong, and their descent was slowing by the second. Fortunately, the ruined leveler army over their heads didn’t get any closer. “It must be something affecting everything in here,” Glissa said. “Look, the levelers are slowing down too.”
“Glissa?”
“Yeah?
“Why we slowing down when I still barely see end of tunnel, huh?”
Glissa craned her neck to look down to the other end of the lacuna, where they would emerge among the towering mycosynth spires in the light of the burning mana core. It was bigger than the pinpoint she’d seen before, but they were still easily as far from the center as they were from the surface.
“That’s it!” Glissa shouted. Though the wind whistling in her ears was no longer as loud, the clatter of construct parts tumbling down from above had become almost deafening. “We’re reaching the center!”
“No, that down there,” Slobad bellowed. “Big ball, remember?”
“I mean the center of the lacuna. It’s magic.”
“You think?” Slobad asked.
“I mean a big, big enchantment. Something that covers the whole world. Makes it so you can stand on the inside and fall ‘down’ toward the surface, or-”
“Stand on surface and fall just plain down, huh?” Slobad said. They were drifting like feathers now, almost floating. The wreckage above them had become a slow-moving chaotic swirl, like a handful of sand released underwater. But these grains of sand were jagged, twisted, and occasionally burning. Even if everything dropping down the lacuna came to a stop in midair, which was looking inevitable, it would still leave them floating in a deadly mess of metal with very sharp edges.
“Slobad, we have to get to the wall.”
“How?” Slobad asked. “Can’t swim through air, huh?”
“If we get there, we can stand. Remember the last lacuna?”
“Right, we run down inside. Been trying to forget that,” Slobad said.
“Well, if we can’t outrun that falling metal, you’re going to forget everything you ever knew, and so am I.” Glissa flapped her arms and kicked her legs, trying to get closer to the side of the tube. Slobad yelped and finally let go of her leg. Flare, why had she kicked out to the center in the first place?
Glissa’s efforts didn’t help much. She got a few inches closer, but it was slow going. She needed a push, but the far side of the lacuna had to be half a mile away.
“Hey, have idea, huh?” Slobad said, floating alongside. “Watch.” He reached up at the nearest hunk of shattered leveler, and pulled himself closer to the wall. Then he caught another piece, carefully, and pushed himself closer, repeating the process. Glissa thought he looked like a bottom-feeding scavenger fish pulling itself along a silvery river bottom. Glissa reached up and grabbed her own hunk of leveler, careful to avoid the sharpest parts, and pushed off, floating after her goblin friend.
“Slobad, your gift for finding obvious solutions is vastly underrated,” she said.
As soon as she made contact with the lacuna wall, Glissa felt gravity shift again, this time becoming stronger and pulling her upright-with her feet flat on the wall. A chunk of construct smacked her in the back of the head. “Ow!”
“Duck,” Slobad said, a little too late.
“Thanks.”
Slobad extended his hands. The left contained a small, sharp piece of metal that looked like a leveler mandible yanked out at the root. In his right he held, point down, a blade that Glissa knew had recently been attached to the forearm of one of the deadly constructs. “Which one you want?” Slobad asked, though Glissa could see his right arm was drooping under the weight of the severed scythe blade.
“The big one, I think.” Glissa said diplomatically, and took the proffered weapon. It was a little off balance, but felt surprisingly good in her hand. The blade had not broken off, but had been severed-by what, Glissa couldn’t say, but she suspected it had been a piece of fellow leveler-just below the joint of where it had been affixed to the construct’s limb, leaving just enough metal to form a hilt. Not perfect by any means, but better than nothing. It would go through Memnarch’s chest, and that was the important thing.
“Better do this if we’re gonna do it, huh?” Slobad said, tucking his improvised dagger into his belt and marching off toward the far end of the tunnel. The goblin was going to waste no time getting clear of the remaining leveler wreckage. Glissa set off after him before another of her fallen enemies could get posthumous revenge.
They made good time down the long, cavernous lacuna, though the walk was long. Unlike the older tunnel under Lumengrid, this one was fresh and free of moisture and muck. Glissa was surprised to see wiry mosses and flaky copper lichens growing bountifully on the lacuna walls, and patches of soft Tangle grass sprang up every few feet.
“Glissa?”
“Yeah?”
“How you going to kill Memnarch, huh?”
Such a simple question, and one she was going to have to answer soon. For now, she replied, “The way I’d kill anyone else that was trying to wipe out everything I know and love.”
“That not an answer,” Slobad said.
“All right. I don’t know. Is that what you want to hear?” Glissa said. “I can try magic, or this ‘sword.’ Maybe I’ll just talk him into taking a flying leap into the Great Furnace. But we’ve got to do something. I don’t know what doing that-” she jerked her thumb in the direction of the clattering wreckage that still unhung suspended in midair behind them-“takes out of me.”
“Slobad can see,” Slobad said. “You still on fire, huh?”
Glissa looked down at her clothes. A few wisps of persistent greenish smoke still clung to them, and she batted at it with one hand.
Glissa suddenly felt very weary. “I can’t keep doing this. I feel so drained,” she confessed. Her voice echoed down the tunnel, rebounding around the tube and coming back to her strange and altered. Drained. Drained. Drained …
That wasn’t her voice. The slippery tones rang ominously in her head, a stranger who hadn’t been invited. The words slithered through her consciousness, whispering, pleading, threatening and inviting. Drained …
Glissa shook her head, and the sound faded. Odd. She rubbed her ear with one thumb and jogged to catch up with the goblin.
“Did you hear something?” She asked.
“No, but echo crazy in here,” Slobad replied. “Hey, something making no sense, huh?”
“What’s that?”
“The levelers, the aerophins, all of it,” Slobad explained. “Why attack you on the surface, when this tunnel is wide open? Why not send levelers up the other way, too? Slobad no general, but even I can see that just bad strategy. No need to attack from so far away when good tunnel right here.”
“Flare, that hadn’t even occurred to me,” the elf said. She wished she had an answer.
“Hold up,” Glissa said, eyeing the distant end of the lacuna. She could see the swirling anti-color of the mana core crackling at the center of Mirrodin, but nothing else. She had no way of knowing what might be on the other side. The lacuna appeared empty, but Glissa was a hunter. Appearances could deceive.