Warsinger James Baldwin (read this if TXT) 📖

“The hell is that?” I brought the Spear around, in case it started trying to hatch. Karalti held the torch up to it, but the creamy surface was opaque.

“It's warm,” she said. “But not very.”

Suri swallowed. “Yeah. You don't wanna touch that. I'm pretty sure it's worm shit. Let's just keep moving.”

“The worms reuse their tunnels?” I asked.

Suri nodded. “Yeah. They kind of patrol around the center of the ruins.”

It was a long hike - a hike with a disturbing lack of mobs. A few times, I thought I heard something behind us in the dark, but there was nothing but loose rocks, shifting sands, and air that was getting progressively warmer as we went deeper into the earth.

“How did you get out, anyway?” I asked Suri.

“I told you the gist of it already,” she replied. “Dug through the wall and got out. We followed old mineshafts down to that big chamber, and got slaughtered there by monsters we couldn’t see in the dark. I woke up back in my cell, wondering if it had been a bad dream. But the escape tunnel was still there, so I tried again, and again. Made it out on the sixth try by skirting around the ruins and climbing a lot of stairs. We’re talking like… fifty flights of stairs. And… oh wow. It’s still here.”

“What?” Karalti cocked her head, burbling quietly to herself.

“This.” Suri led us to a crack in the tunnel and stopped. It was a tight fit, barely wide enough to let her through. Karalti and I had an easier time of it. I could imagine how she'd found it: the giant worm barreling down the hall, her need to escape somewhere, anywhere, so she wasn't crushed. I could hear her breathing turn ragged as we squeezed through, leather and metal scraping against rock. After several minutes of crawling, climbing and contortion, we broke out into the ruins of what had to have once been a giant factory.

The city was lit by an artificial sun, a sphere of plasma surrounded by slowly rotating rings of soot-blackened aurum. The town was more open plan and better preserved than the city buried under the swamps of Ilia. There was a block of housing that took up perhaps a third of the complex that sprawled out beneath us. The rest of the buildings were clearly industrial: warehouses, pump stations, turbines, refineries connected to huge copper-toned pipes and tanks that might have been used to store mana or oil. Now, after thousands of years, every join, seam, and rivet were streaked and ringed with thick, bright green rust. The remains of huge stone scaffolds lay around this underground village, some of them reaching all the way up to the cavern ceiling. All were surprisingly integral, though the buildings leaned against one another like tired concert goers, some half sunk into the ground as if crumpling to their knees. At the very end of the complex, just visible through the wreckage of a collapsed crane, was the pillared face of a temple carved right into the red desert stone.

“Oh wow! Wow wow wow!” Rin squealed over the vidlink as I showed her the feed. “Look at all that! Guys! This could have been a Warsinger construction site!”

“Why would it be underground?” Karalti leaned out over the ledge. “It’s not big enough. How would they get the Warsinger out of here?”

“In pieces!” Rin replied. “It’s like how they assemble spacecraft. Some parts are made in one location that specializes in, say, heat-resistant alloys. They ship their parts to another factory that specializes in composite bonding, and so on and so forth… they probably manufactured key components down here in secret. Mercurions build underground, and we use artificial suns like that, so…”

“This was a Mercurion settlement?” I eyed the ruins with interest.

“The architecture isn’t very, umm, Mercurion-esque. Those buildings look kind of human to me, but like barracks, almost.”

“That’d make sense if they were a military engineering corps of some kind,” Suri replied. “I didn’t think of any of this stuff when I was passing through here. All I wanted to do was get out. I climbed down the wall, jumped down onto the ground, and… shit.”

I sidled up to her. “Probably better to shit on the ground than while cliffhanging, yeah.”

“No, you arse. Look at the fuckin’ ground.” She pointed down toward one of the ‘streets’ between buildings.

I frowned, not seeing anything out of the ordinary... until the sand rippled, and a small, white-carapaced [Sandworm Larva] arced out of the earth like a playful dolphin. As soon as I noticed the first one, I began to see them all. Hundreds, if not thousands of baby sandworms writhed just below the surface of the sand, so well camouflaged in the eerie overhead light that it had tricked my eyes.

“Oof.” I winced. “That's not good.”

“Fuck! These weren’t here when I passed through.” Suri squeezed a handful of her hair, then pointed to a hillside of collapsed rubble against one of the cavern walls. There was a worm shaft right in front of it. “There was a big tunnel over there that led up to a second city level. That’s where the stairs start. They fed out into some buried surface ruins beside an oasis. Some Huura - nomads – were staying there on their western passage. That's how I got out of the desert: the Huura took me on as a caravan guard, and I travelled with them to Dalim.”

“We’re not getting out that way.” I frowned. “It's not a big deal. We can get back out through the sinkhole with Karalti's help, but how the hell are we going to get inside that temple?”

“Well, I don't hear any of the big bastards,” Suri said. “But if there's eggs and babies, the Sandworm Queen has to be around somewhere.”

Ah yes: the Sandworm Queen. The Level 100 Sandworm Queen. I made a face.

“Vash says most insects don't take care of their hatchlings,” Karalti