The specks began to swirl. The light pulses within the Heart cycled faster, and the tiny motes twirled faster as well. The effect was dizzying. Glissa’s knees buckled beneath her, and she fell to the ground. She stared up at the Heart. The colored lights sped across the Heart so fast they became a blur. The cloud of white specks turned into maelstrom, twisting around and around above her like a tunnel to the Heart.
The Heart turned bright blue for a moment at the other end of the storm, then burst in a shower of color. A blue orb of energy hurtled down the twisting tunnel like a bolt of lightning. A huge thunderclap shook the ground and tossed Glissa into the air. When she landed, the elf glanced up and screamed just before the blue ball slammed into the surface of the inner world … and her.
* * * * *
Glissa awoke with a start. The Book of Krark clattered to the floor. The room was dark around her. A single fire tube burned in the far wall above the cultists. They were asleep on the floor. Glissa picked up the book and set it on the table.
She rose and walked around the room. Bosh sat in a corner, his red eyes glowing in the darkness. Glissa could see Slobad curled up on the golem’s legs. He was snoring again.
“Are you all right?” whispered Bosh.
“Yes,” she said, “but why do they always have to end with my death?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Nothing,” said Glissa. “Just had a bad dream.”
“You should sleep,” the golem said. “I will guard until the suns set.”
Glissa chuckled. “You’ve been listening to Slobad,” she said. “The elves call them moons.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “They just feel like moons to us. They never rise above the Tangle, and they give us precious little light. A sun should burn bright above you and warm your face when you look at it.”
“You should sleep,” said the golem again. “We leave after the … moons set.”
Glissa watched the cultists sleep. Her repaired boots stood on the floor near Dwugget. She picked them up and sat at the table to put them on. Glissa glanced down at the Book of Krark again, then at the remaining cultists. There weren’t many of them left, but they still clung to their beliefs-even though that belief had nearly cost all their lives. These goblins gave up their former homes, their former lives, and risked everything because they believed in something larger than themselves. Could she do no less?
Something bad was happening to their world. Chunth knew it. Ushanti dreamed it. Glissa had seen glimpses of it in her own flares. She was fighting for all of them now. Whether she wanted the mantle or not, she had become the champion for the goblins as well as the trolls and elves-perhaps even for the leonin, nim, and everyone else on this world. There was an inner world. She knew that now. Somehow she also knew that she had to reach it to face her destiny.
Bosh had been right. She needed Slobad and the golem in this battle. The stakes were too high. It wasn’t just her against some killer. It was her battling for the future of their world. Bosh had information locked in his head about the inner world and Memnarch. She needed it to make the right choices, to avoid Ushanti’s vision. Slobad knew how to survive. He had an instinct for living, an instinct she would need in the coming days. Bosh was right. She needed them. If not for her, then for the Krark cultists, for the leonin, the elves, and the trolls.
Glissa picked up the Book of Krark and carried it over toward Bosh. She lay down and curled up beside the metal man, holding the book to her chest. Bosh patted her head with his newly replaced arm. She fell asleep with the golem’s arm wrapped around her like a blanket.
* * * * *
They left after the red moon set behind the mountains. The terrain flattened somewhat as they made their way toward the Glimmervoid. Rust-colored outcroppings of metal still surrounded them, but the iron tubes no longer ran through the ground beneath their feet. Those had given way to flat metal slabs that seemed slammed together in a huge red tile mosaic. The slabs often shifted under their feet, making the descent slow and torturous. As they skirted between the rusty buttes, Glissa could see the rolling metal plains of the Glimmervoid glittering in the starlight in the distance.
Bosh and Slobad scouted ahead during the night and returned just as Glissa saw the top edge of the yellow moon between two outcroppings. The goblin and his golem led Glissa and the cultists to an abandoned cave they had found.
That night, Glissa read more of the Book of Krark. As a shaman who received visions from his deity, Krark set himself apart and made an enemy of the shaman elder, who seemed more concerned with his own power than imparting any sort of wisdom to the goblins. One passage stood out to her:
I have asked the shaman elder to let me enter Mother’s Womb. I told him of my visions and my desire to seek her Heart. He cursed me for spreading lies about the Mother and promised to send me to the furnace if I spoke such heresy again. He cannot see the glory of the Mother. I must make him see. I must see the Heart. She calls to me.
The next night, Glissa came to the passage Slobad had recited to her in the cult lair before the attack.
I stood in a sloping chamber with no roof, surrounded by ancient towers of coral. A giant sun hung above me, glowing like Sky Tyrant, and Bringer, and Ingle, and the Eye of Doom. I had found Mother’s Heart. The Heart beat in the sky, giving life to the world. The stars danced around the heart, happy to live in her divine glow. Her heat warmed my face and my heart. I was home.
On the next page was a sketch showing the scene Krark described. Glissa recognized it, both from Krark’s description and from her own flare two nights before.
“Look at this, Bosh,” she said. “It’s an image of the inner world. Dwugget must have copied this from the original journal. Do you see the specks rising up from those … towers? Krark says, ‘It rained upward toward the heart from them.’ I saw these in a dream the other night. Are they blinkmoths? Chunth told me that the rain comes from the blinkmoths-the stars we see above us.”
Bosh looked at the picture in the book. His eyes narrowed, and Glissa could tell he was trying to remember anything else about his life within the inner world. His eyes opened wide as if he’d had a disturbing vision.
“Myco … mycosynth. Those are mycosynth spores, not blinkmoths. The mycosynth crystals produce spores. Blinkmoths are eternal. Mycosynth arrived later.”
“What do you mean?” asked Glissa. “Memnarch created the mycosynth but not the blinkmoths? I thought you said he made everything.”
“Memnarch shaped the world to his desires. He did not create it,” said Bosh. “Blinkmoths predate even Memnarch. Mycosynth arrived later like a plague. I believe I may have been created to battle the mycosynth infestation, but I lost the battle. That is all I remember. Everything else is blank until you and Slobad found me in the Mephidross.”
Glissa left Bosh alone with his patchwork memory and returned to the book. They were less than a night’s travel from the leveler lair, and she was almost finished with the Book of Krark. It read like a flare. Krark had been drawn to the Womb and the Heart as if by destiny. He entered the massive hole and walked down its length into another world, a world inside the world, that curved up and away in all directions.
It is like being in a valley surrounded by hills that stretch up to the sky. In that sky, Mother’s Heart hangs like a single sun that never moves.