This Isn't About Reya

Chapter Forty-One

As Azrael withdrew his consciousness from the mind of the Nephilim on Cor Obscurum, he sunk back into his physical surroundings, his essence seeping back throughout his caverns and his forest.

Immediately, he could tell that something was wrong.

He stood perfectly still, his body tense, his eyes darting around the control room. The room itself was nominal; the newborns continued, unperturbed, cycling into and out of the room; the ten new bodies floating naked in the pool, flooding the pods with genetic information. 

Reya noticed his shift in behavior immediately. "What's wrong?" she asked him, but he did not hear her. All of his consciousness was straining to locate the source of the disturbance. 

His essence slithered throughout the entire complex of underground tunnels, finding nothing. Azrael stood, transfixed, in the center of the room, his mind reaching, his instincts screaming. His ink surfaced and soaked into the forest, still searching.

And then, suddenly, his essence slammed into a wall of searing heat. 

His consciousness snapped back into his physical body with full force. He stumble backwards in the control room and looked at Reya.

"She betrayed us," he growled.

"What?" Reya said.

But he ignored her, instead turning to the newborns in the room. The last group had just finished awakening; they stood, bathing in the translucent skins of their new bodies.

"We've been discovered," he told them. His essence pricked the minds of all the rest of the newborns in the caverns simultaneously, relaying his message. "Retreat below the floors and shield yourselves. Protect the newborns in the pods, and do not surface until I tell you to do so."

The newborns leaped into action without question or argument, evacuating the room. Reya stood amidst the organized chaos, close to Azrael, watching the newborns while Azrael's nerve tendrils sank back into the controls on the wall. The ten bodies in the room sank deep blow the surface, obscured by the milky liquid, and then the floor around it shifted. The black, voidmetal slabs at the edges elongated and turned, meeting above the center of the pool in a titanic, obsidian shield. 

Azrael's mind flitted throughout the caverns while his neurons relayed commands into the wall. The pods, exposed and vulnerable against the walls, were suddenly enclosed by the voidmetal around them, the walls sealing shut around them like massive clamshells. They sunk backwards, into the safety of the tunnel structure. The rest of the newborns found openings in the floors, settling into them and being similarly enclosed and shielded. 

Slowly, the tunnels settled into silence. The Nephilim hunkered down, surrounded and protected by the voidmetal of their caverns. Only Reya and Azrael stood, exposed, in the middle of the now pool-less control room.

"Azrael!" Reya screamed, pounding on his tree trunk of a thigh. "What's going on?"

His mind was still elsewhere, however, racing through the entirety of the tunnel system, doing one last check to make sure that everything was protected. 

Reya began to feel a new, uncomfortable heat spreading throughout the room. She looked up towards the ceiling and saw smoke trickling down through the gaps in the metal. She stared at it, unsure, until she felt a rumble from far off in the tunnel system.

Her head snapped towards the direction of the sound. Suddenly, Azrael came back into his body and exploded into action. His nerves retracted from the wall and his hand reformed; he scooped Reya up in one arm and strode quickly over to the divot in the floor where Svetlana had sat only hours earlier. He dropped her into it and continued on his mission as the walls began to seal shut around her.