Lucian: Dark God's Homecoming by Van Allen Plexico Read Free Book Online Page B

launched your insurrection. I saw wisdom then in preparing closer ties to you as well as to Baranak and his clique. Just as I do now.”
    Wisdom. Yes. I nodded slowly, then smiled at him.
    “Thanks. Your kindnesses will not be forgotten.”
    “Good luck,” he replied, as I raced through the breach, the humans close behind.
    The light from Malachek’s castle winked out as he sealed the portal behind us. Blindly we raced into the darkness.

 
    CHAPTER THREE
     
    Blackness surrounded us, wreathed all in echoes and drenched in claustrophobia. Some of my contemporaries doubtlessly would have maintained that such an environment suited me perfectly, but I begged to disagree. At the moment, I would have given quite a lot for a simple night light—along with a hot bath, a soft bed, and a week or two of uninterrupted sleep. Not to mention that case of whiskey.
    Circumstances being what they were, though, I forced such thoughts from my mind and ran on into the night. Were the three humans still behind me? I would find out in due time, and felt no particular compunction to check before then.
    Part of the way along, I had risked the expenditure of a small portion of my reserves to generate a tiny ball of lightning—no great shakes, and about the best I could do at short notice on that score—and, sending it on ahead, I had managed to determine that we were in a straight, narrow, earthen tunnel that ran in an extremely straight line. After some distance, the ground beneath my feet angled up, and a short while later a faint glow appeared ahead, growing as I continued on. Soon it became obvious that the tunnel was opening out into a somewhat illuminated area. Emerging from the tunnel, I saw that I stood on a natural rise at one end of a vast, subterranean lake. The walls of the chamber that housed this lake, a weak glow radiating from them in patches, reached several hundred feet high and ran on for an indeterminate distance around the periphery and into the darkness. Waves gently lapped at the shore below me, their soft, rhythmic sounds a noticeable counterpoint to the more rapid beating of my heart. Looking around, I could not immediately determine whether this cave represented a natural or man-made feature, but I knew I had not encountered it before. Malachek may have known about my refuge, but he had found his own pathway there.
    Footsteps sounded behind me as the three humans emerged from the tunnel. Pointedly ignoring them, I made my way down closer to the shore and peered out across the placid waters. I could barely make out a concentration of the greenish light emanating from a single point and radiating up from the depths, about a hundred yards out. Something about that light tugged at an old memory, albeit one that refused to dislodge from the depths of my mind and reveal itself.
    As I continued to study the odd radiance, footsteps crunched behind me. Moments later, Cassidy stood to my right.
    “So—where are you leading us?” he asked, almost casually.
    I did not turn, preferring to continue my visual inspection of the lake.
    “I don’t think he knows, himself,” Kim said, as he walked up on my left.
    The captain, if she was even back there, remained silent.
    “I think he’s as lost as we are,” Kim went on.
    I continued to ignore them. The green glow in the water was starting to concern me. I knew now that I had encountered it before, somewhere, a long time ago.
    “He’s no god, he’s just an Outie,” Kim snorted. “This is just some kind of trick. Everything we've seen so far—somebody’s screwing with us. It’s an Outie trick—they’ve set us up.”
    “You are a fool,” I told him, before stepping into the water up to my knees. Bending, I ran my right hand across the surface. Cool but not cold. Not entirely unpleasant.
    “Maybe we’ve all been drugged,” Kim went on. “Maybe we’re all in some Outie military prison, hooked into a brain jack and being fed all this crap.”
    “An interesting