Ivy League Illusion, Part 7
Into the Tunnels
Need an earlier part?
Fjalar started trying to stand up. As he strained against the power of Thurisaz, I could already see the rune growing fainter. Suffering from the affects of blood loss and simple fatigue, shackled with unbreakable chains, and uncertain how to use my own magic, I couldn’t see a way to save myself. Nidhoggson lay uncharacteristically silent within me. Was even he stumped?
The only advantage I had left was that my right hand was still on the staff. I had seen it glow with life, and I could still feel its power warming my hand. The magic felt similar to the runes, but not identical.
“Lend me your strength,” I thought, pushing the idea into the staff as I had earlier pushed the runes.
To my surprise, bark-brown power flowed out of the staff and into me. I felt myself getting stronger by the second as the magic spread through me, regenerating my blood supply and focusing my mind.
I channeled some of my newfound strength into Thurisaz, which glowed more brightly. Fjalar slumped onto the floor as his strength drained out of him.
“You should have told me that the staff could do that,” I said to Nidhoggson.
The voice that replied was little more than the quietest whisper imaginable. “It is…the power of Ior. I am barely able to remain conscious.”
But was that really the answer? Ior had been on the walls all along, and Nidhoggson had felt weak, but not this weak.
The only thing that had changed was the infusion of power from Yggdrasil. Was that just a coincidence?
On the Norse plane, Nidhogg chewed on the roots of Yggdrasil, trying to destroy it. Did the staff somehow recognize the enemy of its mother tree in Nidhoggson and weaken him on purpose? Or were their two kinds of energy naturally hostile to each other? Without my memories, I had no way of knowing if either of these theories was correct. I had seen that the vampires needed special gloves to touch the staff, an indication that its wood was hostile to the energy that animated them.
Part of me wanted to test my theory by trying to use the force of the staff to put Nidhoggson back to sleep, but I couldn’t do that right now. He knew far more about magic than I did—assuming that I could trust what he said.
“You will pay for this!” muttered Fjalar, but since he was still unable to get off the floor, he didn’t seem all that threatening.
“How can I sustain two different runes at the same time?”
“You…you have to…keep visualizing both—a little like what you would call a split screen. But the more runes you do that with, the harder it will be to keep them all going.” If Nidhoggson got much weaker, I would lose contact with him completely.
Getting myself in the right headspace took me a minute, but I managed to keep Thurisaz going and invoked Ior, making it brighter and brighter until the merkstave versions on the wall began to fade. Much as I hated to waste power on that, I had to make Nidhoggson stronger so that he could tell me more about the runes.
“Ah, that is better,” he said after a minute.
“How long before reinforcements arrive?” I asked.
“I can sense vampires nearby. Probably, they have not entered because they fear your sunlight. But they know of the death of their comrades. Of that, I am certain. I am almost as certain that they have summoned other, non-vampiric allies—assuming Fjalar wasn’t bluffing about who is on this plane. How soon such reinforcements may arrive, I cannot say. But I do not think we will have very long before they do.”
“Then we must find a way to get out of the chains.”
Despite being stronger now, Nidhoggson took a long pause. “Even with the staff, you don’t have enough power to break them. But there might be another way, involving faerie magic rather than the runes. The faeries are shapeshifters, and while your body is not as flexible as theirs, you might manage a simple shift to free us.”
That seemed like a kind of magic that could go wrong easily. “I don’t know if I can do that.”
“Focus on making your hands and feet small enough to slip through the manacles. You will easily be able to reverse the change once you are free.”
If I had my memories, I was sure I could. I wasn’t so sure now, but I had to try. The process was made more difficult by my need to keep concentrating on Thurisaz. Fjalar appeared to be unconscious, but that could just be a trick to lull me into a false sense of security. I let Ior go to free up some headspace. The runes and the walls blazed back to full power, and Nidhoggson slumped within me, though he didn’t try to complain. Perhaps he knew what I was up to.
I thought it might be easier to visualize my whole body smaller rather than trying to shrink individual parts, but at first, my attempts to shrink had no effect. I’d already learned that trying to multitask with magic was difficult. Perhaps it was more difficult if the magic was of two different types. I had no clue, and I wasn’t sure even Nidhoggson would be much help with that.
I heard voices nearby, but I couldn’t tell what they were saying. I had little doubt they were discussing the best way to attack me. That meant I couldn’t possibly have more than a few minutes left, maybe less—certainly not enough time to learn a whole new type of magic. Since shapeshifting wasn’t coming to me as naturally as the runes, I had to assume that I hadn’t had that much practice with it.
Dropping my attempts to shrink myself, I restored Ior to counteract Ior merkstave on the walls.
“You haven’t much time,” said Nidhoggson. Stating the obvious wasn’t what I needed from him.
“Are the chains attached to the slab I’m lying on or to the floor?” I asked.
“The floor,” he replied.
“What’s it made of?”
“Some kind of stone.”
I wondered if he was trying to withhold information on purpose. “I know we can’t break the shackles—but what about weakening the floor enough to pull the shackles out of it?”
“Faerie earth magic might do that. But as I’ve said, the stone on this plane is not like what you know. It might be resistant to such tampering.”
“Could Thurisaz be redirected to weaken stone?”
“In theory.”
The voices outside became more hushed, as if the speakers realized I might be able to hear them.
“Explain. I need to understand to make the magic work, right?”
“Thurisaz has many meanings. It represents strength, as you know. It is the hammer and its wielder—Mjolnir and Thor. It is the giants who fight against order, and Thor who maintains it. When its normal form and merkstave form are joined, it can represent the hammer and the anvil, the source of duergar crafting and magic. It also the thorn that may defend or wound.”
“I didn’t ask for an epic poem about it.” I let my irritation come through in my thoughts. “How do I focus it on the stone floor?”
“Just invoke Thurisaz merkstave and concentrate on the floor,” replied Nidhoggson as if the question was a stupid one. If I could remember everything, I would certainly have known the answer.
Keeping my previous rune work in mind so that Fjalar would stay down, I let Ior go again and invoked a second instance of Thurisaz merkstave, this one focused on the stone, which I imagined crumbling and releasing the shackles.
The effect was more spectacular than I anticipated. I was stronger now, marginally more experienced—and the staff amplified the effect. Instead of the floor crumbling only at the points where it held the chains, it crumbled enough to let me and stone slab I was lying on fall through it with a teeth-shaking jolt.
I found myself in a dark tunnel with murals painted on its walls. That made sense because fake Harvard had a lot of underground tunnels as well, and students had painted murals on many of them. The walls down here had murals as well, though they were depictions of vampires savagely attacking people. Black and red predominated in what looked a mural predicting a vampiric apocalypse in some bloody future I hoped would never come to pass.
I also noticed something odd that I’d have to work out later. The hole I’d fallen through looked perfectly rectangular. That could only mean it was a preexisting entrance to the tunnels that my captors had covered up. The shattered remnants of what might have been a stairway confirmed that guess.
Could there be a way off this plane somewhere down here? Maybe, but I had other, more immediate worries.
Fjalar had come down with us, though he still seemed to be unconscious. I heard an uproar above. It was hard to imagine that the duergar’s allies had missed the loud crash. They would be on us in seconds, but now at least, My arms and legs were free.
Well, sort of. The chains were no longer attached to the floor—but they were still attached to me, and I’d forgotten that my real body was much less muscular than my illusionary one. I wasn’t going anywhere particularly fast if I had to drag that amount of chain behind me.
I spun the Thurisaz that had just collapsed the floor so that it was no longer merkstave, and I focused it inward so that it made me stronger. I could now make better time with the chains, which I’d still have to drag with me.
I had just barely gotten off the slab when people started jumping down through the hole above. Even by the light of my runes—all the light I had down here—they were strange. Their skin was dark, but unlike Fjalar’s, it seemed to be carved from shadow rather than from dark soil. Their eyes gleamed but were somehow equally dark.
“Dokkalfar—dark elves!” yelled Nidhoggson. “They can’t stand light. Hit them with Sowilo!”
The dark alfar felt the effects of the remaining instance of Thurisaz merkstave, but their numbers—not to mention Fjalar’s presence—diluted the effect, so that they didn’t immediately collapse.
Before I could invoke Sowilo or even pump more power into either instance of Thurisaz, one of dark alfar shot an arrow at me. He was firing at such close range that he couldn’t help hitting me. The arrow buried itself in my left shoulder, and blood flowed fast from the wound.
Above us, I could the cries of vampires intoxicated by the smell of blood.
I knew one thing—I couldn’t be taken prisoner again. I dropped Thurisaz and put everything I had into Sowilo. The dark alfar, apparently unable to function in sunlight, fell to the ground with loud thuds. Whatever additional alfar and vampires happened to be above stayed put for the moment.
I tried drawing on the staff for more energy, but this time, the effect was less than before, and blood continued to flow from my wound. Sowilo was already flickering. Without using Thurisaz, I couldn’t retreat because of the weight of my chains, but if I even tried to invoke another rune now, I’d lose Sowilo.
I staggered as blood loss made me dizzy.
“Give me control, and I’ll be able to heal you,” said Nidhoggson, his words having more appeal than I cared to admit. I knew getting control back would be hard, if not impossible. Would being trapped inside him be better than death?
As I came close to blacking out, Sowilo faded into nothingness. Above me, it sounded as if vampires were clawing at each other in their eagerness to get at me.
Ivy League Illusion is related to the Different Dragons series. (The action falls after the end of the third book.)
Everywhere and Nowhere: Explore Fantastic Worlds is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
(Subscribers receive a certain number of free ebooks, depending on which tier they select. See https://billhiatt.substack.com/about for details.)