Chapter 11

Ambition is the last refuge of failure.

Oscar Wilde

Frostblight Mill

Arane looked over the control panel of his mighty clanking behemoth in panic, the screech of metal against ice whining over the drumming of the generators behind him. "What in blazes are you doing, Olus?" he bellowed over the noises, to his companion a few paces away.

Wielding a mighty handle and turning furiously, Olus lifted his dripping brow, his face contorted with effort. "We've hit ice, man! We've gotta bring her back down."

"Ah, where's your ambition, bro?" Arane shifted a lever down, the gargantuan gear high above them noticeably shifting downwards and slowing.

"I got paid to do a job, Arane. I plan to cash in without damaging Ol' Faithful here."

Their bickering was interrupted when the entire gear wheel halted with a sickening thud, the generator whiring with the excessive effort. Arane stifled a sigh. She was jamming more and more lately. The ice was worse than it had ever been, hardening over the years, which made their excavations through the ice caves almost unviable. But expansion was a must. They were told this in their briefing.

He kicked a red button at his feet, the generator cutting out with the emergency failsafe engaged. "It's your turn to clear the bulkhead, Ol."

Olus wiped his forehead with a oily rag, leaving more grime upon his face than he had there before. "You sure? I'm pretty sure I removed that crystal a few hours ago."

"Bullshit, that took me two days to mine out that hunk of shit out. You even knocked me about it. Ice King, you said."

"I meant it in a purely regal way, your Majesty." Olus muttered with a snicker.

"Yeah, yeah, get in there, smartass. Time's ticki—what in the hell was that?"

There was the sound of a solid impact against the ice guard surrounding the main drill bit. The object had weight, reverberating around the narrow cavern. Arane and Olus traded hesitant looks as the impact turning into several lighter impacts, getting closer to the main control panels.

Olus was in the middle of commenting on the contrast between the sound of ice falling upon the guard and the sound of a Wraithe falling upon it when a golden blur pounced from on high, snatching his words in midsentence with a blow to the gut. The intruder pinned Olus to the wall faster than the eye could comprehend, but Arane was just as fast, retrieving an archaic-looking firearm from his belt and pressing it against the intruder's spiky blue head.

There was a slience when Vexx looked between the two brothers. Olus looked down at the massive clawed hand that gripped him, and in a moment of clarity, stared incredulously into the eyes of Vexx. "Son of a bitch…it's you. The carrier of the talons!"

"Looks like we've got rep." Sonnellion muttered in Vexx's ear, not without a hint of disdain. Vexx's grip tightened, ignoring the recognition from his victim.

"Who are you and why did you just try to kill me with that…thing?"

Arane cocked his gun. "I don't care who the hell you are. Let my brother down."

With movements like water, Vexx swatted the firearm across the gangway, grabbing the Astarian's arm in the process and swinging him around alongside his brother, pinning them side by side.

"I'm not asking twice." Vexx snarled, and for a moment, the two brothers thought they saw a hint of yellow in the sea of blue that stared at them with menace. And in that moment, they were paralysed by an innate fear they hadn't felt for centuries. The blue wisps floating around their midsections, running their caress along the steel talons, didn't exactly put their minds at ease either.

"Look, we didn't mean to attack you, kid." Arane stammered. "We were just excavating down here. Drilling deeper into the caverns for metal. I swear, we didn't mean anything by it."

"Strange place to be mining for metals." Sonnellion invaded Vexx's tongue for a moment, perfectly mimicking his host's tones and nuances – which put Vexx ill at ease somewhat.

Olus piped up. "We screwed up our vectors, the drill was hitting hard ice instead of rock! Please don't melt us, Mr. Talon Claw Badass…sir."

Sonnellion twitched Vexx's hands as a non-verbal consent, but Vexx ignored the urge to cleave the pair in two. Vexx dropped them, picking up the firearm and throwing it back to its owner.

"So, what is this place?" Vexx muttered. It was at this point he noticed that these characters were not Astarians – at least, no Astarians he had ever seen. Their ears were flatter and shorter, pointing out further from their skull. They were also shorter than Vexx by a few inches, stockier and more thick-set, though not extraordinarily so.

Arane puffed out his chest, gesturing to the gratuitous space of ice, stretching into the darkness beyond the control platform and halting in a jagged hole where the mighty drill had halted. "My name is Arane Vunderboor, and you're standing in the Vunderboor Cavern, the premier mining section of the Undermill."

"The Undermill?" Vexx exclaimed in puzzlement. "I had no idea there was a community under the mill."

Arane tapped his forehead. "What did you think it was for, genius? Decoration? That windmill powers everything we do down here. That crank shaft stretches down for miles underneath the ice, to our village."

Vexx paused. Village. The term reminded him of the Gorge, merely days ago. There was a settlement at the cusp of the energy flair – they had used it to sustain their living, where they thrived until the wraithes had taken everything from them. That was what had caused such calamity, this rent in reality…and it seemed Sonnellion was thinking along the same vein, materialising before them. "Then how, pray tell, did these squinty runts survive our coming?"

"Can you take me to your village?" Vexx asked, folding his arms. "I have a mission to complete, and need to speak to your leader."

Olus stepped forward, rubbing his hands together nervously. "I can lead him there, Arane, if you want to continue drilling. We can't keep Solus waiting much longer."

Arane was about to complain, when Vexx's raised eyebrow paused him. "Fine." He grumbled. "Take him to Solus, get this shit sorted. And while you're there, tell him we'll hit the next ore vein in about eight hours. That should keep him happy."

Olus nodded briefly, gesturing to Vexx and sliding down a ladder to ground level. Vexx looked over to his apparition, who shrugged dismissively in approval. With that, Olus lead Vexx into the depths of the tunnel, where the echoes of the mechanical whines bounced around the tunnel, slowly fading into a dull whine on the edge of their senses.

It was when this whine had faded when Olus looked over at Vexx, his squinty eyes winking at him from the gloom like a cat. "It's such an honour to have you in our midst, sir. We've all heard stories from the few travellers that dare to venture to these parts…but they have fallen quiet over the past years."

Vexx was unsettled with the title, but pressed on regardless. "How do you survive down here? It's pitch black, and everything is iced over."

Olus had a bounce in his step when he gave his answer. "We live off the world. When we build something, we use the ice as a energy source. Ever since Solus found out that the ice held some sort of latent energy, the sky was the limit. Well, not really. If the sky were really the limit, we'd already be…"

Olus had begun to ramble as Sonnellion strttued alongside Vexx, his snide voice reverberating in his head without his mouth ever forming sentences. "Crystals containing energy, huh? Sounds like the hallmarks of what we're after."

Vexx was forced to reply in kind; the overzealous Olus didn't seem to want to be interrupted. "Yeah, but we still have no idea where to look. The energy could be coming from any of these tunnels. There's thousands of miles of them."

"Well, all we need to do is start by talking to this Solus fogey. He's head technonut, he can point us towards what we need to."

Vexx was silent for a second, and Olus had changed subjects, muttering things about particle physics and defense mechanisms. "Do they even know what they're doing? With the Rift energies."

Sonnellion tutted in his ear. "The rift isn't all bad, kid. Just because us wraithes popped out of it, suddenly it's a bitch? You were quite fond of it on our last adventure if I recall."

Our last adventure? Vexx almost tripped over a crack in the ice at the utterance of those last words. Was that a slip of the tongue, or a deliberate jibe at Vexx's past? He could never tell with the wraithe.

"…and I was working on one of those drills up in Alpha-2 Tunnel when…" Olus had finally decided to look up at Vexx who, because of Sonnellion, looked slightly confused. "Oh, I'm rambling. We're almost at the village now, sir."

Sonnellion was uttering something about his feet when there was what sounded like a mighty hammer being struck across the ice, a sonic boom vibrating along the tunnels as small fragments of ice fell from the precarious roof.

"I've had to ask this too many times in the last few hours," Sonnellion invaded Vexx's thoughts and spoke awkwardly. "But what the hell was that?"

Olus had begun a sprint. "That was the town signal! Come, come! This is an emergency!"  Before too long, his voice had echoed into nothing, and he had disappeared into the darkness. Vexx, with no other direction to take, sprinted after him to match Olus's frantic scurry.