Author's Notes:
Each episode in the "An Inhuman Love" series will be a stand-alone novelette, meant to be read and enjoyed in a single sitting. Expect a monster/human pairing in each episode, with all the juicy details included.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Tumbles fell.
As sand and rock and a desert night sky taunted him, insulted him, pointed out the predictability of his current circumstances, he closed his eyes. This fall would be the fall that killed him. All his journeys, all his discoveries, his bag full of old scrolls and his head full of old knowledge, gone. And of course, his life would be gone too, but no loss there.
This life was a waste. Dirty. Broken. Bent! Such a bad break. His friends had had solid, sturdy, stable lives. Good lives. His? Quicksand. No foundation. Just loose sand that sent him tumbling all the time. The fact he earned the name Tumbles was, as Wordy told him, deliciously perfect.
Well Wordy, he was about to join you in the land of blue sands.
Except, not. As the blackness of the pit cave swallowed him, he felt a slope of rock catch him. There was only blackness now, the cave devouring him like one of the sand worms, but a sand worm's insides were probably soft and acidic, and his head, arms, and legs kept slamming into more and more hard, dry things as he rolled. The softness of a sand worm's insides would have been a much more pleasant death, he figured.
Eventually the rocks were like a dune of large of grains of sand, enough that he slid down them instead of bouncing down them. They still cut him, and tore through his white, loose, thin clothing; a must for the desert, but horrible for blocking the nasty bites of sharp stone. They greeted him with as much malice as the dune gnats, and he winced and groaned and yelped with each cut and bruise. But, soon, he was still, no longer tumbling, no longer sliding, and staring up at a cave ceiling.
Alive! He got up, regretted it, and tried getting up more slowly the second time. All his bones worked, but they ached, and demanded he sit back down in the darkness on the cave floor. Well, he wasn't going to do that, and he forced himself up onto wobbly knees. There was light, a little, managing to break through the hole above him. Way, way, way above him. He groaned all the more as he looked up, hand to his head to keep his loosened white turban secure. A tiny hole poked in through the mouth of the cave above. Enough light to see by, just.
"... it's supposed to be here." The old scroll had said the strange doors were here. Course, the scroll was generations old, and the dunes did not hold still. Maybe if the dunes did not move with time, this wouldn't have been a hole instead of doors, waiting to swallow him? How did you manage to deal with the flow of time, Wordy?
With another groan, he walked back to the slope of rocks. A big hole in the ground, and it was a very big hole, easily a hundred feet. He wouldn't be scaling that in sandals.
"By the sands! Dead, I'm dead. Dead!" He pulled his foot back, and took a kick at a rock. At the last moment, he remembered the sandals, and raised his foot high enough to miss the rock, only for the momentum to knock him back on his ass.
Tumbles you moron, you're going to get yourself killed, after surviving a cave in! Calm down, calm down and breathe.
He forced himself to standing, and looked around as best he could. Darkness, rocks, a strip of light. Anything good? It was much cooler underground than the desert sands of the day, that was true. But all he saw was rocks. The scroll had said—bag! Where was his bag? Where was... Groaning, he walked over to some large rocks, massive rocks, and looked down at the tiny bit of his bag's strap sticking out from thousands of pounds of rock.
Dead, so dead. Dead and now he couldn't even check the scroll. And his sand rider was above on the desert sands, sitting there, waiting to be taken. He backed away, head hanging, and kept walking backward until he put his back to the metal of the cave wall behind him. Metal?
He screamed and jumped away as the metal began to grind, immense moans shaking the cave as it tried to move itself, slide itself upward. Metal, up? It was trying to go up! Like a war machine garage! Except, not curving upward with sections, this metal door was sliding straight up. And it was a metal door underground! Why was there a metal door underground? The scroll had said there'd be ruins here, but this made no sense. And why was it moving!?
He stared at the old metal, eyes wide, gaze scanning across the wide surface looking for some sort of identifying mark. But the sands and the rolling rocks of centuries were not kind to anything, and even underground metal would suffer as the sand worms upturned the earth over the years. Bunkers and other hideaways or storage places from the ancient times were nothing but metal boxes now, and they had to be broken into. This metal door had to be from the ancient times, but it was moving on its own; they never did that. Or at least it was trying to move on its own, but grinding sounds vibrated inside his grave, and he raised his hands to cover his ears as it grew to a crushing scream.
Was someone on the other side trying to lift the door? No, couldn't be, that wouldn't explain the noises. Unless a hundred men were pulling on enormous chains like in the South Machine Pits. Or maybe a grand engine, drinking deep of Earth blood, like the great lifts of the Repair City Omata? No, none of that or anything like that would be here, many miles from any village. This metal door shouldn't be moving.
But it was, and did. As if lifting a mountain, as if lifting all of the sands of the world with it, the strange, flat, smooth, metal door, began to slide up into rock. He could see curves of metal, some sort of door frame, maybe ten feet high and ten feet wide that the door slid up into. Dust and dirt and hundreds of years of rock were snug to the metal frame, burying it, and the whole building beneath stone. But still the door managed to start lifting, and Tumbles winced all the more as he pressed his palms tight to his ears to try and block out the thundering rumbles and ear-splitting screech of metal grinding metal.
Silence greeted him, and so too did a hallway of darkness. Might as well have said 'Tumbles come in here and die' written in Earth blood lit on fire.
Behind him, was a cave wall he could not climb, and likely to bury him the moment he tried. Before him, was a large hallway, dark, details lost to shadow. What would Wordy do? He'd say something smart, something catchy, like 'go forward when you can, unless it's a sand worm, then go around.' He only had the one choice anyway.
He dragged himself past the doorway, and sucked in his breath with a loud gasp as his eyes betrayed him. The walls were smooth! Smooth smooth, actual smooth. And... they had lights! Lights were coming on, just like at the camp! Except these weren't hooked up to any old energy machines, running on Earth blood with a grumble and groan. These lights were slick, silent, tall and thin, and they glowed a pure white as they overflowed the room. More, and more, some flickering, but most turning on gently, like the rising sun.
The floor was flat, and the color of a war machine, almost black but not quite. The ceiling too. No dust, despite how stale the air tasted, and he knew for sure no one had been in this room since... since... since the Reckoning! He started to tremble as he continued forward, lights continuing to light up as he moved along, and exposing more of the room. Another door, with a symbol carved into the metal surface. An animal? Some sort of bird, but it looked nothing like the dead-eaters he knew of, the only birds he'd ever seen. One of the birds of myth, then?
As he approached, a loud, machine groan surrounded him, and he fell onto his very bruised ass. Yelping, he stared on as steam started to drip out of vent holes above him.
"Decontamination in process."
What in the sands? He forced himself back to his feet, shaking and wobbling, but standing, and stared up at the vents as the cool mist fell upon him.
The door closed behind him. He gulped, and turned to look at it, his entryway gone, his exit gone. Oh no, he was going to have an early reckoning at this rate. Wordy always said he'd tumble into a death hole. He didn't mean literally!
"Facility damage critical. Back up systems damaged. Main power offline. Failsafe date passed as per Historics Act VI. Initiating emergency state 1-3-2-9. Beta clearance now provided to all access grades. Please contact engineering lead Doctor Fraam Dovnitz."
"Um... o-ok?" Talking. The walls were talking to him. Crazy gas? No, no it couldn't have been crazy gas. This steam felt like water and it smelled like water, sort of. But none of the words made any sense. And he didn't recognize the walls' accent either... and why did the walls sound like a woman? Why did the walls talk at all?
"Decontamination failure. Contamination levels grade B. State 1-3-2-9: acceptable contamination level. Please report emergency situation to Commander Joshua Vernimer."
