“There is the Font.” Romelda pointed across the cavern to the enormous stone hand that held the construct of the Firstborn.
It was older than I had imagined it would be. Most of the Firstborn complexes I had found were alive with light and colour. But here it was as though the very essence that made the Firstborns machinery what it was, had been leached out of it, leaving only the base minerals behind.
“Well?”
I turned at the impatience in Romelda’s voice. The portal we had stepped through glowed in the air behind her and I could tell she wanted to be gone from here.
“Well what?” I asked although I knew what she wanted. None of the Keepers, the pathetic wretches the Firstborn had left as stewards of the worlds and peoples they had brought into being, ever wanted to linger in the places they were supposed to rule.
“You… ” she swallowed and I had to bit my tongue to keep form laughing. “You said you’d pay me…”
“Oh, you mean this?” From a pocket I withdrew a somast crystal. It sparkled in the light of the portal. The somast had once been powerful relics, but they’d offer little of what she imagined in this world.
I tossed the crystalline sphere to her and she caught it eagerly, wrapping her hands around it as she stared into its depths. And stopped moving. She breathed still but she was effectively trapped. There she would stay until I released her.
It wouldn’t do to have the only person able to port in and out of a Firstborn facility to leave me stranded here, would it?
What if my Master could not be released from this location? I would be trapped as irrevocably as he.
I turned back to the construct. The avatars of the Six Sisters – the Six Bitches – stood around the upper ring, each with one hand raised as though giving permission for the power of the Font to rise. Well, rise it shall.
And when I finally free my Master from the prison in which they had placed him, they would rue the day they abandoned us, their children, to live or die without them.
