Trapped!
The word was a heavy stone in my gut. The basement door at the far wall of the Istoki Mysli basement exploded inward, splinters of ancient oak showering the damp stone floor. Hidden behind the ruins of a conduit, I watched the armed Okhrana agents pour into the space—their dark uniforms a stark, violent contrast to the diffused glow of my aetherium sphere—which I quickly hid inside my coat pocket so they could avoid attention. My heart hammered against my ribs, a frantic drumbeat against a wall of inevitable defeat. I was a ghost cornered in a tomb.
But it wasn’t the armed men who drew my full attention. A figure followed them in, moving with a silent, terrible grace that set him apart. He was taller than the rest, his uniform meticulously clean and free of the mud that coated his men’s boots. His face was a chiseled mask, hardened by a singular purpose, and his eyes were a cold, pale blue, sweeping the room with an unnerving precision. He didn’t shout orders or brandish his weapon. Instead, he simply raised a hand, and the room went silent, every man freezing in place, awaiting his command. “Status!” he commanded, his voice a low, chilling rumble. The response, muffled by distance and the chaos of the entry, sounded like a single, chilling word: “Volkov.” My heart seized in my chest.
Volkov? The sound was impossible. I told myself I must have misheard, that my mind was playing tricks on me in a moment of panic. My paranoia, a lifelong companion, had finally manifested into reality. Distracted, I stared at the strangely smiling young woman beside me, then back at the advancing line of soldiers—their faces grim and unyielding in the dim light. I gripped the aetherium sphere tighter in my pocket. Even if they get me, they’ll never get this! This was my final, pathetic defiance. My death would be a small price to pay for the preservation of a single, glowing piece of the past.
But Anya, although still dazed, wasn’t confused. Her eyes, blazing with a fierce, untamed intelligence, darted around the cavernous basement. Her experimental steam engine lay smoldering, a testament to her failure, but also to her raw, untamed scientific ideas. She saw the Okhrana agents fanning out, their focus primarily on the wreckage and the general area of the explosion. They were looking for a large, visible threat and had no idea about us. They were so focused on the evidence of brute force that they had no room in their limited minds for the quiet threat of a ghost.
I watched as a flicker of movement caught Anya’s eye—a smaller, ancillary aetheric conduit, almost hidden behind a stack of rotting crates, was in the corner behind us. I knew it was a secondary line, designed for local communication, easily overlooked by the new regime’s crude understanding of the grid. “We don’t have time for this,” I hissed, trying to pull her backwards. “Let’s go. We can still make it to the main tunnel.”
But Anya resisted, and pulling on my wrist like a vise, she forced me to scamper quietly with her to the corner. “Hurry, fool!” she hissed, her voice a low, furious growl, entirely devoid of the weakness that should have followed her recent concussion. “Unless you want to spend the rest of your life staring at their prison walls!”
She pulled me towards the obscure conduit and out of sight. Meanwhile, the Okhrana agents, momentarily distracted by the clatter of their entry, were beginning to look for intruders, their rifle muzzles sweeping the room.
Hidden near the secondary conduit, Anya studied it for only a moment before aggressively pushing her open palm against a complex Tartarian symbol etched into its ancient casing. I didn’t have time to recognize the symbol and was aghast to see Anya’s violent interaction with a sacred glyph—it was entirely lacking the reverence I had been taught.
“Be careful!” I flinched, expecting another explosion because of Anya’s inexperience. But my fear was for the aetherium, not for my own life.
With a jarring <CRACKLE>, the conduit overloaded, yet to my surprise it wasn’t with a destructive blast, but instead with a localized flash of blue-white aetheric energy that surged outwards towards the middle of the room. That flash was accompanied by a deafening, high-pitched hum that resonated through the entire basement.
The Okhrana agents cried out, momentarily disoriented, their hands instinctively flying up to shield their eyes as their organized formation shattered into a chaos of shouts and curses. Their rifles, moments ago pointed with deadly precision, now swung wildly, firing off a few sporadic, panicked shots into the stone walls. In the confusion, I heard a sharp, clear command echo from the leader. “Find them!” And when the guards replied, I was sure I heard the word “Volkov” in their replies.
How did they discover my identity already? I had no answers, yet there was no mistaking the word. It was my name. They said it repeatedly. The cold certainty of it was more terrifying than the gunfire. They know who I am.
“Now!” Anya snarled, pulling me back to reality and down towards a narrow opening behind the conduit. I realized it was a maintenance access tunnel, barely wide enough for one person, probably choked with centuries of dust and cobwebs. Still stunned by Anya’s sheer audacity and the effectiveness of her crude maneuver, I stumbled after the strange girl. As before she hauled me after her with surprising strength.
We quickly squeezed through the tight opening and into…darkness.
The Tunnel
Anya’s passageway was tight and suffocating, and the sounds of the disoriented Okhrana agents could still be heard at a distance behind us.
We’d escaped. But for how long?
“Give me your orb!” Anya commanded.
“What? Why?” I was shocked.
“So we can see, stupid!”
“Sorry. No.” I resisted, but I did pull out the sphere and held it up myself. “It’s mine and I will hold it.”
“Fine. Let’s move!” Anya growled, accepting the fact that the sphere’s light had sufficed to show us the way. Together we could see that the passage was a long, narrow throat of packed earth and stone. It was not a grand, Tartarian-built tunnel, but a rough, utilitarian space, its walls slick with a cold, perpetual moisture. The air was stale and smelled like wet soil.
We raced forward through the space. Soon enough the only sounds were the hollow, rhythmic echoes of our hurried footsteps and the frantic pounding of my heart. The fear was a living thing, breathing down my neck.
Anya, despite her recent concussion, seemed to navigate the gloom by instinct. She didn’t have my intimate, remembered knowledge of the buried city’s passages, but she clearly had a primal, intuitive sense of direction, a way of feeling her way through the darkness that left me disoriented and bewildered. To my surprise I realized I was lost myself and therefore had no choice but to follow her—a man who had spent his life as a self-proclaimed guardian of this silent world, now being led by a woman who seemed to know it through a more primal kind of science. The humiliation was a bitter taste in my mouth. My knowledge, my careful, meticulous understanding of the past, was useless here.
I stumbled on a loose piece of stone, and the aetherium sphere in my hand flickered, its light dimming for a moment. I clutched it tighter. It was my only constant in a world that had just been turned upside down. I looked at Anya’s retreating back—a small, defiant silhouette in the dark—and the anger flared within me. She had just gotten us both into an impossible situation, and now she was leading me into a part of the underworld I didn’t recognize, a place that felt wrong, somehow.
After what felt like an eternity, the passage widened into a small, buried square. It had once been a small park or plaza, its benches and lampposts now half-submerged in a deep layer of hardened mud. The silence was absolute, save for the faint, steady drip… drip… drip… of water somewhere in the darkness.
Are we safe? I wondered. Just who is this crazy woman I’ve gotten myself mixed up with? The questions were a desperate search for order in a world of chaos.
The silence was a physical force, heavier than the centuries of mud and stone that lay above us. It felt like a deep, consuming blanket, muffling not just sound but thought. We stood in the center of the buried square, its lampposts half-swallowed by the earth, monuments to a sun they could not see. The only sounds were the slow, rhythmic drip of water somewhere in the oppressive blackness and the frantic drumbeat of my own heart. Anya, her face a pale smear in the gloom, was already a few feet away, her head cocked, listening.
“Quiet,” she hissed, a single word that carried more command than an entire battalion’s worth of orders. “Do you hear it?”
I strained my ears, listening past the ringing in them from the explosion. At first, there was nothing. The sound of the Okhrana’s boots had faded slightly since our escape, but it was now replaced by something else – a high-pitched, metallic whine that vibrated through the stone.
“That’s a steam powered drill!” Anya said.
“They know we’re down here. But how?”
“They’re following the aetheric trail from my experiment. It must have left a faint echo in the stones.”
“They’re tracking us like bloodhounds!”
My mind raced. This was more than just a hunt. It was a calculated, methodical pursuit. My grandfather’s journal had warned of this possibility, of the usurpers learning to read the faint aetheric signatures of Tartarian technology. Anya, in her recklessness, had not only endangered us but had given them a new weapon. I could not help but feel a flicker of rage, a cold, bitter certainty that this was all her fault, yet Anya wasn’t about to sit still.
“Let’s move!” She commanded.
For how long we ran through the underworld I don’t remember, but eventually we reached another large chamber – a forgotten storage room with shelves filled with long-ago spoiled rations. Anya stopped, her chest heaving, and for the first time, she looked genuinely scared. “We can’t outrun a drill,” she gasped, rubbing the gash on her temple. “Where do we go?”
“We hide,” I said, my voice low and urgent. My mind, now that we had a moment to breathe, was already scanning the room for possibilities. “Over there. A broken aetheric radiator.”
“Perfect. It will mask our scent!”
We scrambled behind the massive, cylindrical device, its bronze plating pitted with age. The space was cramped and suffocating. I held my breath, clutching my aetherium sphere, its soft light a beacon I desperately wished I could extinguish.
“Give me that,” she whispered, her hand moving to grab the sphere.
Again I resisted. “I already told you ‘No!” It my family’s and tt’s too valuable to lose.”
“Valuable? Maybe.” she scoffed, a dark laugh escaping her lips. “But don’t you see – it’s beacon for them to follow. The closer we are, the more they will hear its hum. You are just broadcasting our location to them!”
Her words were like a physical blow. The thought had not occurred to me. I had held the sphere as a symbol of my mission, a piece of the past I had sworn to protect. I had never considered it as a liability, a piece of a technology that could be used against me. She, with her new-world pragmatism, saw it instantly. Her brutal honesty was a slap in the face. My beautiful, sacred relic was a tracking device. My hope was a weakness.
“What do we do?” I asked, my voice barely a whisper, the question a humiliation in itself. I turned off the sphere’s power and sulked. I was supposed to be the master of this world, and yet I was a helpless child, following a woman who was a stranger to me and my people.
“We go silent,” she said, her voice filled with a cold, ruthless resolve. “We find a place with no aetheric signatures, not a single drop of the old world. We go to a dead zone and wait them out.”
The idea was utterly alien to me. The Tartarian underworld was filled with dormant aetheric technology, humming with the faint echoes of the past. To seek out a “dead zone” was to seek a place of utter void, of no connection to my history. It was a terrifying prospect, a final, ultimate surrender of everything I held dear.
But her plan was simple, and it was logical.
We lay there in the dark, the faint hum of the Okhrana’s drill growing louder, closer, until it was directly above us, a violent, grinding thrum that shook the very foundations of the buried city. I felt a wave of nausea. We were trapped. There was no way out.
I looked at Anya, her face illuminated by the faint glow of my sphere. Her eyes met mine. They were not filled with fear, but with a hard, uncompromising confidence. For the first time, I felt a strange and unsettling sense of relief. Maybe I’m alone in this world? I wondered. Even still, I don’t know if this woman is an ally or an enemy. All I do know is that she’s got a kind of power I don’t understand. And I’m completely at her mercy
Meanwhile the drill hummed on, a terrifying song of the Okhrana, and a silent voice in my head repeated the one word that now haunted my soul: Volkov, Volkov, Volkov. They knew. They had always known. Did Anya know as well?
The Apocrypha of Azazel 