Broken Lands

Chapter 321 – Flying Fish

The platform was less fluffy than the “cloud” they’d been walking on before, but it still gave a little under Sophia’s feet. It wasn’t the most reassuring feeling, even though she could fly. There were no landmarks once the cloud road behind them disappeared in the darkness; they were surrounded by darkness. Sophia couldn’t even tell if they were moving. “I expected something to happen by now.”

Meadow chuckled. “I’m glad it hasn’t. Zones like this can get really strange, and the longer we go without seeing anything, the more likely we are to find something special. Odds are about even that every group will see something different; that’s another reason for the wait. It doesn’t do much good to separate everyone if we’re close enough to help each other.”

“Or close enough to learn something,” Jace contributed. “If it is the same. Did I ever tell you about the time I-”

“Yes, Jace, you did.” Rockfist interrupted his teammate.

“You don’t even know what I was going to ask!” Jace pouted, but something about the way he held himself told Sophia that he was performing rather than seriously upset. 

Rockfist grunted. “Alligator skiing.” 

Jace’s head dropped forward in an overacted pose of sadness. “Am I so predictable?”

“Yes.” Both Rockfist and Meadow said the word at the same time. 

Sophia giggled. 

“What’s that, in the distance? It looks like a flying fish?” Ci’an sent the image to her teammates, but Sophia couldn’t make out much more than what Ci’an said; it looked like a colorful fish with sharp teeth and feathered wings. It shone in the darkness, like there was a light somewhere directed on it. Its eyes glowed an unsettling yellow that seemed to twist and spin as Sophia watched.

The fish floated forward, gliding without moving its wings. The fins and tail moved as if they were providing the movement, but it still moved far faster than it should, even if it were actually swimming. Even stranger, the mouth never closed fully, almost as though the teeth were there to rend rather than to chew. 

Meadow had to wait until it was closer to identify it. Once it was close enough, she nodded with a frown. “That’s a flying toothfish, but something’s off about it. I’m not sure what.”

Rockfist made a noise low in his throat. “Distraction. Look.” 

It took Sophia a moment to realize that he was telling them to look and see if it was a distraction, not that he’d found what the flying fish was a distraction from. She looked as best she could, but she couldn’t see anything. Her vision wasn’t the best, unless whatever she was looking for used mana. She tried to push her aura as far from herself as she could, but it wasn’t far enough. She couldn’t even reach the still-distant flying fish. “I can’t find anything. Not sure I’d be able to see it if it was out there.”

“I can light up the darkness. You’ll want to face away from me and it will take up a lot of my mana, but I can do it,” Jax offered.

“Oh, that would help.” Meadow sounded pleased. “You really are light-based, aren’t you?”

“Yeah,” Jax agreed, then began to glow. At first, it was dim, but it wasn’t long before Sophia had to turn away from him. “This is actually pretty difficult to maintain, so please look quickly.”

As far as Sophia could tell, all Jax’s light did was make it hard to look towards him, set everyone else into stark relief as they were illuminated far more on one side than the other, make the platform glow brightly, and light the fish as if it were targeted by a spotlight. The blackness was just as dark as before, as if there was nothing there. She even tried checking over the edge, but she couldn’t see anything below them, either.

Sophia was convinced she couldn’t see anything, no matter where she looked, long before Meadow and Ci’an gave up. They had everyone move around the platform so that they weren’t blocking Jax’s light until he began to dim as he ran low on mana. It took a while.

“Nothing,” Meadow concluded. “Not unless it’s below the platform, and if it was they wouldn’t need a distraction.”

“Then what is the fish for?” Sophia looked back towards the fish. It seemed to glow slightly, which was good; after Jax’s light show, Sophia wasn’t sure she’d see anything that wasn’t glowing. “One fish can’t be intended to fight all of us, right?”

“Scout?” Rockfist sounded a lot less confident in that suggestion than he was about calling it a distraction.

“It’s not acting like one,” Sophia countered as she looked towards the fish. “It’s moving slowly and headed sort of towards us, but … off to the side? Like it’s trying to keep us in view and it can’t see straight ahead so it’s weaving back and forth?”

“Fish don’t do that,” Dav objected.

Sophia waved at the flying fish in front of them. As she watched, it seemed to turn an eighth of a circle, switching which eye faced towards them.

“Wait and see,” Rockfist concluded with a nod.

That seemed to be enough for his team. After a quick consultation with the rest of her team, Sophia settled in to wait. Jax was meditating or possibly sleeping in the middle of the platform, but Ci’an, Xin’ri, Jace, and Meadow all moved a little ways away from the center to watch the directions away from the fish, on the theory that Rockfist’s initial idea might still be correct. 

The fish came closer and closer, but it didn’t change anything until it was about thirty feet from them, where it stopped in place just as suddenly as it had been moving. Weirdly, the swimming motion continued; it was only its movement that stopped.

“Okay, that’s just freaky. Is it an illusion? Taika?” It was also close enough that Sophia could theoretically reach it with her aura if she focused it in that direction, so she did. It would have been easier if she brought out feathers to strengthen her domain, but she decided not to. She didn’t have to, and she couldn’t immediately think of a reason it would stop if it wanted to attack.

The rodent stuck his head out of Dav’s pack, then clearly realized that he had no idea what Sophia was talking about. “Is what an illusion?”

“Talking … rat?” Rockfist sounded confused.

“Chinchilla,” Taika said, offended. “Are you a talking monkey?”

Rockfist chuckled. “Yes.”

Taika blinked at Rockfist, clearly bewildered by the man’s agreement. 

Sophia’s aura reached the fish then. She examined what she felt; that was far more relevant than dealing with Taika’s introduction. “It’s magical. I can’t tell if it’s an illusion or not. Wait, it’s turning?”

The fish wasn’t just magical; it felt like two different magical signatures. Sophia couldn’t entirely decipher either of them, but they were different enough that she could tell there were two. She just didn’t know what it meant. 

Xin’ri picked up Taika and held him out towards the fish as it started to swim away from the platform. Like before, it didn’t look like it was moving; it simply swam in place.

“Not an illusion,” Taika reported after staring at it for a long moment. “It’s controlled by something outside itself. I can’t tell what or where, but it’s definitely being controlled.”

“A summoner,” Meadow whispered. “That’s either a good thing or a very, very bad thing.”

“Both.” Rockfist grinned at Meadow as she glowered at him, then he unbent enough to explain what he was thinking. “It’s leading us somewhere. Want to bet what happens if you kill it?”

“Not really,” Sophia answered before Meadow could. “Do you think it’s leading us somewhere we want to be?”

“The Maze has secrets. Not all require killing.” Rockfist shrugged.

“I’m still watching for the ambush.” Ci’an sounded dubious. “Are you sure we’re even moving?”

Rockfist didn’t answer, so Sophia tried to work out what he meant. Dav got there first. “We could be. The fish is still swimming; what if it never stopped moving forward, but we started moving with it once it got close enough?”

“It turned around when I touched it with my aura,” Sophia said out loud. “Maybe it was pushing us somewhere and now it’s pulling?”

No one seemed to have a better idea, or at least no one said they did. They speculated about everything from how far it would be to what the apparent two options would be to what would happen if they’d killed the flying fish instead of getting it to turn around, but no one had any answers. 

Meadow was completely convinced that one of the answers had to be a fight with the rest of the summoner’s monsters, which seemed likely to Sophia as well, but she didn’t think it was where they were headed now. It seemed far more likely that that was what would happen if they killed the fish.

No one could agree what would happen for the other two paths, though, or even if there were only two paths. Maybe there were a lot of different things they could have done to get the fish’s attention other than having Sophia touch it with her aura.

Jace thought the fish was leading them towards treasure, or at least that was what he said he thought. He seemed to think that it would be fishy, or at least related to water. The fact that the fish was flying instead of swimming and controlled by something else didn’t seem to faze him.

Meadow thought they’d find a puzzle of some sort that hid the treasure, but that only made her anticipate what it might be even more. She went back and forth between anticipation of a prize that grew greater with every guess and death by summoned fish.

Rockfist didn’t comment at all; he just grinned and watched the others enjoy guessing.

Sophia couldn’t stop wondering exactly what the fish’s feathers would do if she used them to form her plumed domain. Were they really associated with the water, or did they just let the fish float in the air? That seemed pretty likely when she thought about it, so she suggested that what they were looking for might be something floating, a floating island or something. She could imagine it; it would have a waterfall that fell from the island to whatever was below, filled with flying fish. It seemed unlikely, but no more so than anyone else’s ideas.

Eventually, light appeared in the distance. That brought the speculation to an end as they became able to tell that they were definitely moving, even though there was no wind. The lights moved towards them at about two-thirds the speed as the fish originally moved, which was when it clicked in Sophia’s mind: part of the reason the fish originally seemed to be moving too quickly was because they were moving towards the fish. 

Before long, it became obvious that they were flying above a city. They were closer than an airplane, but still a long ways up when the lights became obvious. They flew over what felt like miles of colorful, well-lit skyscrapers interspersed with low patches, most of which were completely dark. The platform they were on descended slowly and it became obvious that they were headed for one of the lower spots. They slid between a pair of towers, then sank lower and lower until they hovered in place above a brick plaza filled with stalls displaying goods. Weirdly, the place was empty, even though it looked like people were there no more than a moment earlier.