Golm

Golm - Chapter 8

Chapter 8

I was asleep. Some one was walking to my cell. When the person got to the cell, I was woken up by, “Psssst. Herridan, wake up.” I heard the voice in my dream, but I didn’t wake up. It called again, “You mustn’t sleep Herridan, you must get up.” I finally opened my eyes. I sat up, the room was very dark and I couldn’t see a thing.
I pleaded, “No don’t take me! I’m innocent. Don’t cut off my head.”
The whisper became angry, “I’m not here to kill you. I’m here to save you.”
I got out of bed and raised my voice, “Who are you? What do you want?”
The voice hushed me, “You mustn’t yell. It is still night and if you are loud, we will awaken the guards.”
I whispered back to the voice, “Who are you?”
The voice told my in a cocky way, “I can’t believe you don’t recognize me. Come to the window of your door.”
I walked to the door window. I saw faintly who it was. My heart almost stopped; it was Maurna! I choked, “You!? How did you survive? I killed you, didn’t I?”
She hushed me again, “Be quiet! I’ll explain to you everything, but for now you must trust me. You have to escape or else they’ll kill you.”
I backed away, the told her, “You were an assassin, sent to kill me. How can I trust you?”
She grew impatient, “I’ll explain later! We must leave now! Even if I was to kill you, if you stay here you’ll die any way!”
She had a point. I thought for a second, then I agreed. I asked, “How are you going to get me out of this cell?”
She replied, “I stole the keys, but they won’t fit in the hole.”
I explained to her, “They lock it from the inside. Pass them over here.” She slipped the keys through the window. I picked them up and unlocked the door. I stepped outside quietly with Maurna.
With a dim light from some torches, I saw that it was Maurna, looking just as fishy as before. She looked at me and then my cut. She was half proud of herself. Then she waved me forward and wrapped a grip around my hand. She pulled me down the hall and out the door. I had some problems seeing in the dark, but Maurna obviously didn’t. We were in the main corridor and we dashed behind a pillar. Maurna quickly noticed that there were guards patrolling the halls before I did. Unfortunately, Maurna’s feet/flippers made a small slapping noise when she walked. So if we were to make any move, the guard would have to either be distracted or really far away.
We waited behind that pillar for at least five minutes waiting for the right move. We both knew that the guard’s patrol length was short, so he would have to be distracted. Then I got an idea. I reached into the pockets of my jeans and pulled out a nickel that was still left over from when I was in my land. Exposing my arm was bad, because it was bright, so I wrapped a grip on it with my tail and I hurled it back up the hall. Obviously every guard, who was patrolling, went to see what it was. We took advantage of the moment and Maurna dragged me into another room.
The room wasn’t the exit, but a kitchen. We dove underneath a table. There was a maid in the room cleaning the floors. Maurna asked me quietly, “Can you distract her for 10 seconds?”
I nodded, then asked, “Why are we in the kitchen?”
She waved me forward and said, “It’s in the next room.”
I tiptoed over to the maid and jumped in front of her. She was very startled. She began to ask, “Who are you?”
But I interrupted her and told her in a low rapper’s voice, “Betcha deys didn’t teacha dis in high school.” I began to do the robot. She didn’t know what in God’s name I was doing. I saw Maurna sneaking up to the back of the maid very slowly. She still needed time. So I went down to my knees and pleaded, “Wait! Wait! I got something to say! Come to my shop, I do birthdays. Oh yeeeeaaahh.” The maid’s attention on me was diverting away and Maurna still needed a few more seconds. I grabbed two of her four arms, I rolled my eyes back and talked in a squeaky voice, “Yes I feel great power from you young Jedi, but great fear and darkness is in your brain. Let me eat it for you!” I moved my head to her’s, but I stopped when Maurna wrapped her arms around her neck and choked her unconscious. I looked down to her, crossed my arms and talked in Darth Vader’s voice, “Miscellaneous maid. Coo Shkee. I wasn’t your father. Coo Shkee.” Maurna looked at me like I was insane; I shrugged. She led me to another door in the kitchen, past the door was a food storage area. The storage room was cold and had a very big well in the center. Maurna released my hand told me, “We’re here.”
I looked around again and mentioned, “Yes, I could hide here, but as soon as someone gets hungry, I’ll get captured again.”
Maurna put her hands on her head and grunted. She pointed to the well, “There it is. We can go down there and we’ll be free at my home land.” I walked over to the well and looked down it. It was full of water.
“So we’re hiding in a well?”
Maurna explained, “No! That well is a giant aquifer. We will swim to my homeland, The Under Water Pyramid of Solwashi. That place is sacred and hidden, so you can relax and heal your wounds and not have to worry about the Empire.”
I looked down the well again, “How long is the swim?”
She estimated, “Oh about three hours.”
I sarcastically pondered, “Yeah that might work, but one thing. I’ll kind of like drown!”
Maurna hit her head. “How could I be such a fool? The whole reason I was sent to save you. Here I’ll help you.” She looked at me, then her left arm. She wrapped a grip on her left shoulder with her right arm. Then she pulled and ripped her left arm right off! I was almost sick. She handed her arm to me, I didn’t accept. She looked at where her left arm was and then something I’ll remember for a long time happened.
A thick bluish liquid oozed from her shoulder. It continued to fall, then it stopped falling. It started to thicken and shape something. It soon came to me that, Maurna’s liquid like body had just regenerated her left arm! Her arm was fully regenerated and she gave her arm a quick curl and handed her original left arm to me. I took it this time. She ordered me, “Well put it on!” I didn’t know what she meant. She explained, “Slip my arm on your left arm like a glove.” I didn’t know what this would accomplish, but I did it anyway.
Inside was gooey and liquidy. My arm was in all the way and I still didn’t know what the point was. Then something I’d remember even more happened. My hand and wrist inside disintegrated and the rest of Maurna’s arm seemed to merge with my existing arm. My flesh, bones and blood disappeared into nowhere. Soon I could feel through my new arm. I then could move it like it was mine. Basically, my arm was now like Maurna’s. The arm was like the tail of an eel and a tentacle at the same time. I didn’t quite get what Maurna had planned.
She then took off her other arm and it regenerated too. I took it and put it on my right arm; the same effect. She also took off her feet and I put them on too. My feet had turned into living scuba fins. The thing that took the getting used to was moving your three toes that were three times the length of your fingers. Then finally Maurna took off the fin off the end of her tail. I put it on mine. There was a mirror nearby, so I looked at myself. The change in my appearance was drastic. My arms were white and light blue eel tails, my feet were long, three toed, webbed flippers and my tail was edged with a beautiful whitish blue fin. I would have liked the look, but half my body was now whitish blue scales, instead of skin and light hair. So I looked like a science fiction experiment gone wrong.
Maurna yelled at me, “Stop observing yourself. We must hurry. They might find us and the attachment will only last eight hours.”
I nodded. Maurna waved me down the well. I jumped in; she followed. I could feel the difference of my swimming capabilities just by treading the water. Maurna started to dive, but I stopped her. “Yes I can swim more efficiently now, but what about air? I can’t breathe water like you.”
Maurna remembered, “Ah, yes. I forgot.” She grabbed one of the short tentacles on her head, took it off, regenerated it and gave it to me. “Put it in you mouth and breathe through it. Those tentacles are like my gills compared to fish.” She told me.
So I popped it in my mouth and dove under. It worked! I breathed water just like air. Maurna waited for me, so I could figure out how to swim with my new appendages. It took me at least 15 minutes to start to get the hang of swimming with my new attachments, but I figured it out and was off. I was following Maurna down a pitch black aquifer.
The way you swim like that isn’t all that complicated. The thing that stops you from swimming well is figuring out how to control your new body parts in general. The way you swam was to put you arms by your side and make a ripple or wave like motion in them over and over again. The arms provided some acceleration, but mostly it kept you balanced and steady. You obviously kicked with your feet and that provided lots of acceleration, but mostly for steering. The tail was all for the push. So Maurna swam much faster than I did, because her tail was a million times stronger than mine was, her tail came out between her shoulder blades, creating less drag and of course, she knew how to swim.
There was some light under the water, but I had no idea where it came from or if it was possible for light to even get in here. Maurna could talk to me, because she breathed through her tentacles on her head. Though it didn’t really matter; I couldn’t understand a word she bubbled. She stopped for me occasionally; I was very slow compared to her. We swam and swam for a long time. A normal man would have run out of gas, but I wasn’t feeling any exhaustion. Maurna stopped at one point and swam over to me. I treaded the water to stay in place.
Maurna got close and tried to talk. All I heard was muffles and bubbles. I pointed to my ear, shook my head and then shrugged. Maurna knew that I didn’t understand her speech, so she moved her head closer and closer. I thought she was going to kiss me, but she just moved her lips in front of my eyes. She spoke again, this time not letting out any air. I realized she wanted me to lip read her. She repeated herself three times. From what I gathered, it was either yellow paper’s revenge, or almost there. I figured it to be the second one. Maurna nodded and I nodded back. She began to swim and I followed.
The dim light was getting brighter, so we must have been getting closer. I noticed the walls were becoming smoother and more circular. The walls then became bluish in colour and some designs and hieroglyphics appeared also. They seemed to tell a story like all hieroglyphics did. I didn’t get to see them closely though; I had to keep up with Maurna. They looked beautiful and mysterious. I had to see them some time when I had time. The walls still continued to become even more smooth, round, bluish and beautifully designed. The light was almost as bright as day now, even though it just turned to dawn.
Maurna waved me forward and she quickened her pace. She must had been excited, that we almost there. Her pace was too fast and the more I struggled to go faster, the more I messed up my swimming. So I just decided to swim the way I had been the whole time and I’d catch up with her later. She disappeared from sight and I was alone. But I pressed on forward, then up?
I didn’t know if I was scared, or something, but our straight path, had turned to a 45 degree slope upwards. I saw light up at the top; it was very, very bright. I had to squint while I swam upwards. I was approaching the top. I could see the walls ended where the light shown through.
When I got there, however, the unimaginable happened. I was out of the cave and I was still in water and I was floating in the air. The tube of water magically floated in the air, with nothing holding it up, but some invisible force. I looked down and all I could see was the land, but at 1000 meters above it. I looked forward; the path was long and continued upwards, through the clouds. I looked up, and I would have dropped my mouth, but I didn’t want to drop the tentacle and drown. Just above some thin clouds, I saw what the paths of floating water lead to... a gigantic sphere of water! Inside the sphere was a pyramid, obviously the one that Maurna was talking about. So the path of floating water was like a bridge to the floating, underwater pyramid.
The bridge to the sphere was long, very long. It was also a bit scary, because if you didn’t have these attachments, you would probably fall right through the path and to the ground. I was getting a little tired, but if I slowed down, I would fall and die. The climb was long, but it was very scenic, unlike the aquifer. Though the higher I swam, the bigger the sphere became. It was massive! I could now see the end of the bridge and the size of the sphere was as big as a small town!
At the connection, there were to people guarding the entrance. They were both holding some sort of spear. I swam closer and then they pointed their spears at my neck. I began to think that the Aquasians had their own language that they spoke underwater, because they both yelled something to me that I couldn’t understand. Their spears went closer and started poking my neck. They yelled something to me again. I was guessing they we’re about to stab me when Maurna tapped one of their shoulders. They turned around and Maurna said something to them. They looked at me, up and down and then they let me pass. I swam through the huge sphere towards the pyramid. The pyramid rotated very slowly in the mysterious blue giant and the few other Aquasians swam gracefully around with some schools of fish. There was a hole in the bottom of the pyramid for us to surface.
Inside the pyramid was normal air to breathe and hard floor to walk on. I crawled out of the water and on to the floor, while Maurna was waiting for me. I finally took the tentacle out of my mouth and breathed some true air. I asked, “So this is the Solwashi Pyramid, eh?”
She answered, “Yes. It is.” She saw me look around for a towel, so I could dry myself. She asked, “What are you looking for?”
I answered, “A towel. I’m all wet and I want to be dry.”
Maurna looked puzzled, but soon realized, “We don’t have anything to dry you with. Our skin doesn’t get wet, so I’m dry right now. I guess you’ll have to wait for yourself to dry.” I sarcastically thanked her.
I asked her, “Do I really have to wait five more hours for this stuff to come off?” I was meaning my new attachments.
She looked at me and told me, “Just concentrate really hard on your old appendages and slowly take off your new ones.” It made sense, so I thought about my left arm and pulled my left arm. I didn’t want to pull too hard and rip it off, because my arms don’t grow back. Slowly, but surely as I pulled the arm off, I felt my real arm and hand growing back, (It felt like a wart growing way too fast.) Then I also pulled off all my other extras and soon enough, I was back to my old self.
I had a sigh of relief. Maurna said, “You certainly look much different when it is light out. Now come, let me show you your sleeping room.”
I followed her out of the small room, through a door and into a huge, huge room. The room must have been the main lobby. Though it was the size of a small theme park. The floor shaped a square, but the ceiling was at least 100 meters high and made a point at the top! A pyramid! Solwashi had no halls or walls, just one big room, with thousands of bedrooms and other rooms along the many stories that it had, and along the perimeter of the inside of the pyramid. All the floors in front of the rooms were balconies, suspended by pillars at the ground floor. The only thing that confused me though was that there were no stairs to get up the balconies.
The massive ground floor had a throne at one end, a huge dining table in the center, a huge shrine at the other end and the sides had some chairs and tables surrounding a desk and the other side was a library. The number of stories and bedrooms around the sides was crazy. If Maurna told me which one was mine, how would I even remember which floor it was on rather than the secret to getting up there in the first place? I also noticed the bright yellow all the pyramid walls were. A torch was lit every three bedrooms and rare gems were placed in every pillar. Maurna waited for me to finish gazing around.
I wanted to ask how the inside of this pyramid was even possible, but she waved me forward and told me, “I’ll explain everything later. You must get rest. That long swim, lack of rest last night and the long night we have ahead of us, is why you must sleep now.”
I stuttered out, “How are we supposed to get up there?”
She shook her head and smiled, “I’m going to have to ask you some things tonight. I don’t know why you are so lacking of knowledge of our magic. You are completely different in anatomy and knowledge.” She walked to where the circles on the floor were then said, “Stand over here.”
I walked over to a circle and stood in one. She nodded and complimented, “At least you know that you have to stand in the circle.” She looked around at the rooms for a while, thinking. Then she pointed out, “Ah, there’s an isolated one.” She pointed to one, which I was guessing to be, around the 20th floor.
I said, “I see it, but I’m still waiting for the elevator.”
She told me, “Just concentrate on that door.”
So I looked at the door and thought, that is the door that has my bed in it, I must go there! I stood there for a while and nothing happened. I turned to Maurna, who was waiting for me. I asked her, “So how again am I supposed to get to my room?”
As soon as I said “my room”, something happened. The ground shook for a split second, and then water shot up through the hole! I was then blasted upwards like the water, but I was still standing. The water’s flow began to arch and slow down. I was only about ten meters up standing on the arch of water. The water continued to flow until it got to my room, then the water started to get a little more solid and began to make waves or ripples towards my room. I realized now that the water made some sort of an escalator to my room and I started moving. The water’s steps/waves pushed me gently, but quickly to my room. Before I knew it I was standing in front of my door. Maurna followed up the stairs and joined me. Then the water went back down in to the hole in reverse.
I looked at Maurna and told her a very large understatement, “Water over here, is freaking me out.” I turned back to the door and noticed the door wasn’t made of water. It was a normal door with a doorknob. So I grabbed it, turned it and opened the door. I stepped inside and the room was small, cold and had no bed. All that was in there was a chest to hold some belongings and a small empty tank. I stepped inside and shivered.
Maurna pointed to the tank and began to say, “There’s your tank and…” She paused, then looked at me. She looked at the tank again and then remembered, “I must be very forgetful today. I completely forgot you can’t turn to liquid and sleep in a tank.” She looked at me and explained, “Our kind uses about 60% of the energy we create from food, to keep us in a solid-like form, of course we can change back and forth, but our relaxed form would be a thin puddle. That’s why we rest in tanks.”
I turned to her and explained, “We use about 70% creating heat. So I kind of have to sleep in an insulating, warm and very soft bed.” I gave her a dopey look and said, “I also need the temperature in this room to be at least as warm as that really big room downstairs.”
Maurna pondered for a while, then asked me, “We can change this room to a room for your kind, incase we ever get any other guests like you. So could you help me?”
I asked, “With what?”
“I do not anything about sleeping habits of any other specie, but mine. So let me ask you a few questions.”
After about 15 minutes of explaining every little detail, even the things that you wouldn’t think you’d have to mention like, “We sleep with our eyes closed.” When Maurna thought she knew everything, she heated the room to a normal temperature, by either asking the pyramid or using magic. Then I guess she did some other things in her head, which changed the room. A huge blob of water came up through the ground, big enough to be a king sized bed. The blob thickened and grew some sort of skin. It basically turned into a waterbed, a luxury I had never experienced. Then a very, very thin line of water came out of the bed and wove itself into a blanket. The blanket positioned itself on my bed some how.
After the fear of my bed went away, I turned to Maurna and asked, “Looks perfect, but before I test it, how did the blanket move on its own?”
Maurna smiled and explained, “You told me that on a slippery bed and with a slippery blanket, it’s very hard to sleep, because the blanket will always fall off. So the blanket will not only stay on, but stay or move around anyway you command it.”
I asked, “Command it?”
Maurna nodded and explained, “Just think your command and your whole bed will listen, if its positions aren’t comfortable enough.”
My face went pale. I gulped and asked, “So my bed is a living thing? It has thoughts and feelings?”
Maurna gave me that funny puzzled look and asked, “You mean your beds aren’t alive?” I shook my head. Maurna sighed and said, “I’m sorry, about the drastic changes you had to experience today. If you need any questions answered, we will gladly do so at our feast” I asked why, but she told me she’d explain everything later.
She wished me a good rest and would see me in ten hours. She left. I didn’t know what to think about my bed, or what it thought about me. I was a little nervous and I tried to sleep on the floor, but my clothes were wet and the floor was hard and cold. So I sucked it up and sat on my bed.
I almost fell in love. The bed was so soft and so warm. After I sat, I laid down. I completely sank into the softness, but I stayed on top. The watery interior molded my body figure perfectly and if I changed position, the molding of my body would change. I slipped off my shoes and socks, then my shirt. I pulled the blanket on and it was as wonderful as the bed. The warmth and softness was perfect. Not too hot or cold. It was like one of those dreams that you would never want to wake up from. A pillow was with the bed and I got snug and cozy. I would had fallen asleep right away, but so many questions filled my head and I had to wait ten hours for some food and some answered questions.
Though the amazing comfort of the bed and blanket and/or maybe the bed had subconsciously calmed me enough to fall asleep. So much had happened in the past few days, so much energy, emotion and fear. I really needed a good… day’s sleep.