Time: 01.01.17 — 11:38:00 UTC-5
Setting: Eugene in meditation inside the crystal chamber
I was inside the crystal chamber. A sense of unease and discouragement settled over me. The soldiers stood in silence, watching. They were monitoring me. Days had passed without any sign of progress.
The orichalc wall — whatever alloy it was made of, and whatever it concealed — remained sealed, impenetrable. There was no access of any kind. I stood there, lost in thought, my gaze fixed on the carved rock wall that closed off three-quarters of the chamber, when I noticed something new.
A small section of the wall itself was moving.
Several blocks, perfectly interlocked with the impossible precision of the ancient Inca walls of Sacsayhuamán, began to shift. They detached slowly from the surface: each stone moved inward, then split at the center — first by a few millimeters, then gradually by several centimeters — guided by a mechanism that had lain dormant for millennia.
Inside, there was absolute darkness.
I was completely overtaken by what happened next.
The opening reached the height of a man and kept expanding. And there I saw her for the first time — a young girl, panting and terrified, struggling to pass through the slit, still too narrow and too low for her.
It seemed she was looking straight at me with those wide blue eyes, as surprised as I was — our encounter a lightning strike in the dark. Time seemed to stop; every instant dilated into eternity. I looked at her, and she looked at me. She took two steps forward, her legs strikingly long.
I thought, surprised: She’s taller than me!
I had never seen a woman taller than me. She half-closed her eyelids against the intense light; perhaps she couldn’t see well, yet she had seen me.
She cried out, “Help! Help me!” — a sound that pierced me like an arrow through the heart, resonant and pure, as if the chamber itself had become a single, trembling string.
With one last effort she managed to squeeze through the narrow opening and moved toward me — one, two, three steps. In that instant, two soldiers in white suits and black helmets emerged from the shadow she had come from, stepping easily through the gap, now wide enough for more than one man to pass. Two sharp cracks split the air inside the chamber.
A red burst sprang from her chest — near her heart — and she fell toward me, gasping for breath. I stood stunned, holding that beautiful being, wounded and dying, in my arms. Inside the dome, everything fell silent. Blood flooded the rocky floor, spreading quickly. The sounds of agony echoed off the vault’s walls. Life was slipping away.
A pale blue feather with white highlights slipped from her black hair, level with his cheekbones. It floated for a moment in the air, then shot toward the central crystal and sank into it like an arrow.
From that moment on, I was no longer certain what truly happened.
The crystal began to move — growing taller, wider. Gravity inside the chamber reversed, hurling the soldiers against the dome’s ceiling where they clung like iron filings to a magnet, barely able to breathe. Only I remained on the floor, close to her, relatively free to move, though I dared not take a single step.
The crystal looked alive. Across the floor, a mycelium spread outward, branching like a network of neurons, its dichotomic pattern resembling a slime mold — only much faster. In a few seconds it reached Niajin’s dying body, and I felt her being torn from my arms. The crystalline hyphae turned red on contact with her blood, absorbing it, then turned white again near the body. They coiled around her but kept a constant distance, as if a silkworm were spinning its cocoon.
The first areas to be sealed were the wounds. The filaments thickened into a firm, compact parenchyma that closed the lesions completely, halting the blood flow. What had spilled on the floor now returned through the network of mycelium, purified of dust and impurities, re-entering the girl’s vessels through countless external capillaries that pierced the skin through haustoria.
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Soon I could no longer see her. She had vanished inside a white cocoon that looked as if woven from pure silk. The bleeding body was enclosed within a smooth, ellipsoidal shell — at once hemostatic chamber, amniotic sac, and placenta. The filaments connected to the main crystal retracted slowly, dragging the structure toward the core. It absorbed her completely.
From that moment on, everything remained still for a time I could not measure. A frozen instant of indefinite duration. Only an occasional muffled groan from the soldiers — suspended and nearly immobile — marked the slow passing of seconds, minutes, hours.
The elements of the central crystal became a metallic source of light, perfectly smooth and gleaming. Then gravity increased again; none of us could move. We were pinned to the floor. With the corner of my eye, I watched as part of the mycelium — once entirely white — turned gray, then black. It moved toward the opening where the girl had entered, where the two assassins were now pressed against the rock wall, trapped even more tightly and painfully than the others.
Soon the black mycelium surrounded them completely, producing hundreds of sharp spines, hard as steel, much like the scorpion’s stinger at the cave’s entrance. In a single instant the soldiers were pierced from every side by hundreds of stabs; I heard their cries of pain — then nothing — while the black mycelium, using the spikes as suction syringes, drained every drop of blood from their bodies.
They fell to the ground. Their suits tightened, as if everything inside had almost dissolved. They became slack, revealing beneath them the rigid frames — like bones in relief. The crystal shone more intensely; the vital force of the two soldiers had been transferred inside it.
The two soldiers were dead.
The luminous structure of the crystal became liquid in appearance, its color shifting gradually from bright gray to turquoise — like the pure, crystalline water of a tropical island. An ellipsoidal globe of water took shape, crossed by the mycelium’s hyphae that were condensing around the cocoon. Then I saw a slit opening in the middle of the ellipse, a wide aperture where the water withdrew and vanished, forming a foam that spread across the entire surface.
Through that fissure, the girl reappeared. She fell onto me like a lifeless body, wrapped in water and foam. She was in my arms again, yet she was no longer the dying girl I had held before. I had no idea how much time had gone by. She was like an eel bursting with life, breathing hard, but fully alive, drawing oxygen and strength from the air.
The crystal of light, motionless at the center of the dome, quickly returned to its original form and size. I could hear my breath and hers, almost in unison. I looked at her body, covered only by white foam. No blood flowed anymore; no open wounds remained. Blue eyes, beautiful and radiant, fixed on me. And I heard a melodious, anguished voice whisper:
“Help.”
As if time itself had not passed for her.
I answered softly: “They’ve already helped you. You’re… you’re whole. Calm down. You’re safe now.”
A small white feather floated in the air, drifted toward her hair, and sank into it, disappearing. The foam that covered her began to thin, solidifying into fabric, then into a dress — a simple, luminous white tunic. Across her shoulders appeared a white bow, shining with the same light.
Looking down at herself, astonished in her new attire, she understood she was perfectly healed, perfectly alive, perfectly herself.
She smiled at me, and a tear of salt water fell to the floor. Then another, and another. She was crying with joy, seeing herself restored from two mortal wounds. She placed a hand over her heart and chest, as if searching for something, and I saw the happiness in her eyes: there was no mark, no scar to mar her beautiful body.
Then her gaze suddenly grew cold, distant. As if a different light passed through her, the girl took hold of her new bow. A shaft of light formed instantly on the string, glowing. She drew it back and slowly shifted her aim — first toward the soldiers still pinned against the rock walls, then toward the rocks themselves.
Then she spoke. And her voice was that of a queen, echoing harmonically through the chamber, as if she were casting a spell.
“Now listen carefully,” she said. “Never come near me. Keep a distance of at least five meters. Do not speak to me — I won’t listen. Do not restrain my movements. Do not give me orders — I won’t obey. Now you have water, a gift you don’t deserve. Use it with respect, even though I know you won’t. Still, since you have it in abundance, do me a favor: wash yourselves.”
With that, she drew the white bow and released the arrow. It struck the rocks like a blade of light and vanished within them. Gravity in the chamber returned abruptly to normal; the bodies dropped heavily to the ground, some hitting hard, others less so. A few cries of pain echoed, but soon everyone rose again. They were alive. She had chosen that they should live.
She turned and leapt. Like a black panther, she hung suspended in the air, and two arrows, one after the other, shot from her bow. They struck the black helmets of the dead soldiers, splitting them open like watermelons. The skull bones shattered; the arrows met only bone and dust. Niajin exulted — her bow was more powerful than the weapons of the WO, able to pierce any defensive layer. A warning to every soldier who had witnessed her strike.
Meanwhile, the water released from the white diamond crystal was flowing through the chamber. A small stream had formed, heading toward the black diamond. It circled it, then passed beyond, channeling itself toward the orichalc wall. The water reached the wall and kept flowing, simply passing through it. The orichalc metal retracted, and the wall opened, forming a wide doorway at whose base the water streamed.
Beyond the new opening, the sound of a waterfall could be clearly heard.
She looked at me and said,