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OFFICIAL NOVELIZATION OF YS IX: MONSTRUM NOX

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CHAPTER 4: APRILIS

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Adol waited for the sounds of the guards’ footsteps to quiet down as he listened to the gentle snoring that carried through the crack from the other side of the wall. He reached into his cot and retrieved the fork. Its metal was soft, bent slightly out of shape. Perfect for molding into any form he wanted. He pressed one prong against the floor until it bent, then tweaked the others, shaping out a generic lockpick the way he remembered it from Dogi’s tool kit. Not his proudest skill, but handy in situations like this.

The lock gave in easily after only a few twists. Adol slid out of the cell and closed the grate behind him. With the cell locked and his blanket hunched up over his cot all the way in the back, the guards shouldn’t discover his absence until morning. That gave him a few hours head start.

He paused by the cell next door, looking at the frail man curled under the blanket. It felt wrong to leave him here, but Adol could understand the older inmate’s reluctance to traverse a maze of underground passages, facing unknown dangers and risking getting caught by the guards. Thinking back, it seemed remarkable how calm this man was, as if not all that bothered by his imprisonment. My time will come, he’d said. Adol hoped it would come soon.

As he hurried down the hallway to the stairwell at the end, he heard a distant bell ring through the night. Alarm. Had they already learned of his escape? It seemed too soon, but he couldn’t take any chances. He dashed down the spiral staircase into the gloom until he reached a wooden trapdoor. Unlocked. Good. A long wooden ladder descended from here, with faint light flickering down below. Was someone down there? There was no time to wonder. Adol lowered himself through the hatch and pulled the trapdoor shut behind him.

The room at the bottom of the ladder was empty, but a few lit lanterns hanging along the walls suggested that this place was frequently visited. Adol paused, running his eyes down the rows of shelves that lined the walls from floor to ceiling. A storage room? He noticed a glint of metal on one of the shelves and pulled out a saber, the kind that looked to be standard issue for the prison guards. Good enough for now, at least. He tucked it into his belt, then picked up a lantern and sped down the passage leading out of the storage room to another locked grate.

This one had a sign posted on it in large letters:

DANGER. RESTRICTED AREA. NO ENTRY.

The passage ran away into the gloom on the other side of the grate. This had to be the place mentioned by his inmate neighbor, the place off limits even to the prison guards. Adol tested the lock. Rusted and rotten, it gave his improvised lockpick extra work, but it eventually gave in. He opened the grate and stepped through.

The passage ran onward from here. At first it was relatively narrow, with walls closed in on each side, but after a few turns, Adol sensed a change. The walls parted and receded into the shadows, too deep for his lantern to penetrate. Sounds of dripping water broke up in echoes that traveled far away into the gloom.

Adol paused, peering ahead. The chamber in front of him looked partially flooded. A sewage reservoir? Unlikely. The water smelled clean and fresh, and Adol could clearly detect a faint current flowing forward.

His heart quivered with hope. The presence of a current suggested that somewhere ahead this waterway must connect to another body of water, maybe one of the rivers or canals the City of Balduq was famous for. He waded ahead, knee deep, cautious to keep his footing on the wet slippery stones.

With his vision limited by the dim lantern light, he didn’t immediately realize that the passage he was following had come to a dead end. He jarred to a halt next to a blind wall that ascended smoothly toward the distant ceiling. The water on each side ran through shallow grates, much too narrow for a person to fit through.

Adol paused, straining his eyes to make out details. He refused to think he’d come this far for nothing. There had to be a way forward from here.

He froze as he heard the echo of footsteps behind him. Pursuit? It didn’t sound like it. The approaching person was walking in measured steps, not running or hurrying in any way. He turned to watch a spot of greenish light approach from the passage behind him, throwing eerie shadows over the stone walls.

A lone figure took shape against the gloom. A tall woman, wearing a hooded cloak, holding a lantern in her hand. For a moment its bright light drowned out all the other details. Then she brought the lantern closer to her face and flicked off her hood, as if deliberately letting Adol take a good look at her.

She looked slim, but her muscular grace and the quiet power she emanated instantly identified her as a warrior and a person used to command. Her pale face, partially concealed by a curtain of dark hair falling over her eyes, was carved in bold strokes—ageless, classical features, as if she had just stepped out of an ancient work of art. Her smooth, unblemished skin made her look young—about Adol’s age, early twenties or so—but the weary set of her shoulders and the grim line of her full mouth betrayed experience far beyond those years.

She wore a dark, form-fitting outfit, her hooded cloak covered by a peculiar, feathered mantle that swept down one shoulder with a mysterious textured gleam, like a raven’s wing. Her upper arm, bare above the elbow, was covered in straps that looked a bit like braces. The skin underneath seemed unnaturally smooth. Wait. Was it a prosthetic? Not a kind Adol had ever seen. He forced his eyes back to her face. His skin prickled as he met her gaze.

“It seems I've arrived too late,” the woman said.

Her voice matched her appearance, low and deep, ringing with authority. It was easy to imagine this voice raised in command, ordering troops on a battlefield. Only now did Adol notice a strange weapon she held in her lowered hand. A pistol with a long barrel that looked wider than any he’d ever seen, as if designed to shoot objects much larger than a bullet.

“Too late for what?” he asked.

She looked at him calmly. “Your questions must wait. As well as the introductions. If you succeed, there will be time for all that later on. For now…” Her eyes flickered with sadness. “You must forgive me for what I’m about to do.”

Before Adol could react, she raised her pistol and fired at him, point blank.

The blow shook Adol’s entire body, surging through with excruciating pain. As he collapsed at her feet, clutching his chest in what he believed was his final agony, a red glow flared from the wound. For a moment a blinding red flash filled the entire chamber. Then it receded, until the only light source was the flickering lantern glow.

The woman looked at Adol with appraisal. “Impressive. You've assimilated the curse without so much as a squeal.”

“The curse?” Adol heaved a few labored breaths, amazed that he was still able to speak. Now that the shock was over, he realized that the pain was receding. Even more amazingly, when he touched his chest, he could feel no wound, not even a tear in his clothes.

“You’ll understand,” the woman promised. “In time. For now, you must calm yourself and fully embrace your change of form.”

Adol had no idea what she meant, but he didn’t feel like asking just yet. He felt content with the fact that he was still breathing, and, as far as he could tell, every part of his body still worked as expected.

No. Wait. As he flexed his muscles, he realized that something was different. He felt… powerful. Light. The pain and exhaustion from moments ago were gone without a trace. New energy coursed through his body, as if, instead of running along dark passages and being shot with an oversized bullet, he had been resting all this time.

His outfit changed too. The baggy prison overalls were replaced with a dashing gothic style costume, complete with a fancy collared shirt, an elaborate armored doublet, form-fitting pants and tall stylish boots. Gauntlets clad his hands, flexible and perfect for combat. He extended his arm, enjoying the feeling of power that seemed almost supernatural.

“Perfect.” The woman looked at him with satisfaction. “I didn’t expect you’d fit your new form so well.”

Adol looked himself over again. Impossible as this was, he did feel great. If he had no other choice but to embrace this new form, whatever that meant, he had to admit it was better than many other possibilities.

“And now,” she went on, “we must give you a proper name. How about… Crimson King?”

“I assume,” Adol said carefully, “you’re planning to tell me what this is all about?”

“Like I said. In time. First, you should use your power to escape this place.” She pointed up the wall marking the dead end. “Hurry. The pursuit is close by. We’ll meet again, once you are on the other side. When we do, you may call me Aprilis.”

Before Adol could respond, she flicked her hand over her lantern to extinguish it. A whoosh of air swept past. And just like that, Aprilis was gone.

For a moment, Adol just stood there, staring at the spot she’d just occupied. What in the world had she done to him? What did she mean when she mentioned embracing his change of form? Questions crowded in his head, but none of them seemed as important as the power coursing through him. He could certainly get used to the feeling.

It took him another moment to realize that he could now see in the dark. The lantern he’d brought from the prison storage room lay extinguished in shallow water, but he could still see perfectly fine. In fact, without the bright spot of the lantern light that cast shadows over the rest of the space, he could now see the entire chamber—sadly, not as big as he originally thought, with no obvious path to escape.

With his newly heightened senses, he easily caught the echo of distant footsteps and voices coming from deep in the passage behind.

“Hey, we're not supposed to be down here!”

“Who cares? We have to find the prisoner.”

“How do you know he’s even here?”

“There’s nowhere else for him to go. Keep moving, dimwit.”

Adol glanced around. Besides the passage he’d come from—now filled with approaching guards—and the blind wall behind him, there seemed to be no other way out of here. His newly acquired night vision told him that up in the darkness above, the passage continued onward. If he could find a way to scale this vertical wall…

Wait. As he squinted his eyes just right, he noticed a spot of red glow up there. It looked a bit like the red flash he saw when Aprilis shot him, but smaller, more focused. A lantern? A candle? No. He wasn’t sure what it was, but as he peered at it, it seemed to reach out to him, beckoning.

Adol didn’t have time to realize what happened next. One moment he was standing at the bottom of the wall, peering up. The next moment he was all the way at the top, his feet planted firmly on the stone ledge where he saw the crimson spot before.

Crimson King, eh? Was this what Aprilis meant when she mentioned his new power?

He hurried along the passage.

A deep trench filled with water crossed his path, but before Adol could even stop to contemplate the obstacle, he saw another crimson spot in the gloom ahead. This time he had a chance to discern its shape, a ball of dark mist swirling with a crimson glow at its core that flashed like a bright star in the darkness of the passage.

Suddenly, Adol knew exactly how this worked. In his mind’s eye, he formed a line that connected his core to the crimson glow, let it pull at him, zipping him all the way across the distance.

Wow. Maybe this curse Aprilis shot him with wasn’t really all that bad.

Adol ran on, looking for more crimson spots to zip to. Using them made his progress so fast. So much power. He never felt this much energy in his life.

And then, just as suddenly as it came, the feeling was gone, giving way to overwhelming fatigue. Adol paused to catch his breath, leaning against the wall. Without the power, he could barely stay on his feet. Did Aprilis’s transformation come with a price? Or was it the limitation of his body, still adapting to the ability to wield so much strength?

His limbs felt heavy, slow. His body ached from all the running and climbing. Wet clothes clung to his skin, icy cold in the chill of the passage. He gathered his entire strength and stumbled onward into the next chamber, where the floor ended in an abrupt drop, down to a flowing body of water below. An underground canal?

Struggling with exhaustion, he peered down into the gloom. He was so close. That waterway down there had to lead to the outside. But the drop was too high to attempt without knowing what waited below. If the water wasn’t deep enough, the fall would surely kill him.

Despair seized him. After everything he’d gone though, was his flight from the prison going to be cut short by this one last obstacle?

Footsteps pounded behind him and two Romun soldiers emerged from a side passage, followed by an important-looking older man wearing the red-studded cloak of a Hieroglyph Senechal. All three jarred to a halt when they saw Adol.

Adol reached for his saber. One against three were the odds he was willing to try, considering alternatives. But the guards looked so energetic and eager, while he… Dear gods, he could barely keep on his feet. His saber, as he tried to pull it out, felt too heavy to hold. The mere idea of wielding it right now echoed through his body with pain. Was this the aftereffect of the strange magical power he’d just experienced?

He looked around desperately. Besides the passage he came through, now blocked by his pursuers, the only way out of here was the sheer drop ahead. He edged away from the advancing soldiers, searching around in a desperate attempt to spot the crimson glow signaling the return of his power, but the only light he could see came from the moons, shining through the distant stone slits overhead.

More voices echoed from the passage and Adol saw a flicker of torches, scaring the shadows away. Reinforcements. No hope in hell that in his exhausted state he could handle this many.

He felt so weak.

He was out of time.

It was now or never.

He turned and jumped off the edge, straight into the canal.