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DB Extracurricular - Smoke over Grimsvotn - Teaser

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It was spring, but it was hard to tell that from the temperature. Nine degrees Celsius and that was the high end of what could be expected here during May. Especially out over the glacier, where starting a fire for warmth wasn't exactly the most advisable of activities. The centuries worth of ice covering the stone of Iceland pulled all the heat out of the air, making it hard for the sun to warm the surroundings. Especially since it was already at a disadvantage given where on the globe the island sat.

Over time, pockets of the glacier had been opened up by various means and across the vast flat expanses of ice meaning there were places that the top ice was thin. A traveler or researcher could think they were treading upon solid ice when suddenly it would shatter under their feet and send them falling into a labyrinth of mirrored caves. People had been lost due to such accidents in the past.

The windswept loneliness was soon broken as four bursts of smoke appeared out of nowhere atop the ice. The smoke itself swiftly dissipated and was carried off by the wind leaving behind four people standing on the scene with jackets and bags mostly appropriate to an Icelandic expedition.

At the head of the group was a woman in a thick, hooded winter coat considered the flat, bleak landscape as they slowly twisted on their heels to take in everything around them. Eventually, the watcher began sliding gloves off to reveal a pair of slender and beautiful feminine hands. The right hand reached into a pocket to pull out a lighter and a package of cigarettes as the left stuffed her gloves into another pocket. A minute later, one of those cigarettes was in her mouth lit and releasing a faint, steady stream of smoke into the air. The woman finally reached up toward her hood and pulled it down to review beautiful blond hair and intricate red facial marks.

One her shoulder was an animal that looked like a cat on first glance, but which there was something odd and out of place about when you looked at it longer. The cat shivered and curled in on itself, pressing against the woman's face as it did. The blond woman acknowledged the cat with a calm stoke of the head and scratch behind the ears.

The smoke from her cigarette floated out into the air, drifting through and about it with what seemed to be a discernible purpose until clouds began to settle in a large lazy circle that spread out around her and the people with her. She grinned, biting down on the end of her lit cigarette before turning behind her to address the people behind her, all three shivering except for one.

"First thing you should know for these jobs," she said, her grin taking on something of a smug appearance so that the sharpened canines were revealed. "Humans make better winter clothes than we do. Yomi not really having seasons and all. Anyway, here we are."

She swept out one arm to take in the thickening ring of smoke that they stood in.

The other three people with her all had similar red facial marks, not tattoos but rather a coloring of the skin itself. Each of the three were dressed in similar clothes formed of an unusual sort of cloth. It was something between a cotton and a silk, and it didn't appear to be as warm as the thick, stuffed winter coat worn by the blonde woman at the head. The only exception was the young woman, about college aged, with ashy grey hair and heavily freckled pale skin. That girl was wearing a red t-shirt under an open leather jacket and jeans. The jacket mostly seemed to be there for its pockets rather than any warmth.

"And where is the volcano, Geisthexe?" one of the colder individuals behind her asked.

"It's under the glacier," was the immediate answer coming out of the mouth of the young woman who seemed the least appropriately dressed. "Am I right, Lady Lilitu Geisthexe?"

"Lilitu is fine, but score one for ice girl," Geisthexe said as she tapped out her cigarette. "Holle's right, Grímsvötn is somewhere below us, getting ready to erupt in the next couple of days."

"And we're here to stop it?" one of the two men asked, holding his arms together and shivering. "This doesn't seem like a duty for Rakshasha and Shadows."

"This is a duty for Immortals in general," Lilitu corrected him quickly. "The Gods have Yellowstone, and Japan, we have Hawaii and Iceland…so on and so forth. Everybody wants a livable planet so we leave these teams alone. Anyway, we only get involved if it looks like the eruption is going to hit one of the towns around here, or if it's going to blow the island off the map."

Lilitu watched the spreading ring of smoke sinking down to the ice and then turned back toward the three with her again. She pointed out Holle and then the other two quickly enough. "Holle has done this sort of thing before; chronologically she's older than I am. You two…I believe Erick that you were human ten years ago, and Venz was born in…"

"1951," one of the two men responded as Lilitu paused and looked at him expectantly.

"Right," the blond Demoness drawled. That was older than her incarnation, he might be a problem. "Holle, you hit your incarnation majority a month ago, have you got any memories of this job?"

"I remember the 1873 eruption," she said. "I think I lead that team."

"Then I want you and Erick to start working around the edge counter-clockwise," Lilitu said. "Venz and I will go clockwise and we'll meet on the other side. If you need anything, we're all in Orochi." The blond woman tapped her head as she said the last, reminding them all of the mindscape that all Demons shared with each other and the great serpent, Orochi. "We're just wanting to get an idea of the size and direction of this eruption, don't do anything you don't have to. There are a few humans on the island that will react to 'black magic' and such going on over here so try to keep to your realm and leave the spellcasting to a minimum. We've got Smoke, Ice, Flame and Walls here; we should be able to get a feel for what's going on easily enough."

The four nodded and started to walk in their separate assigned paths, looking down toward the glacial ice as they did. Lilitu spared one glance for Holle and Erick walking away, Holle's attention on the ice and where it most likely would give way first while Erick's attention was more on Holle's jeans. With a grimace, Lilitu exhaled a ring of smoke which twisted its way through the air before pushing itself in his nose and mouth, sending him coughing. The annoyed look on Erick's face as both Lilitu pointed at him and Holle looked back a bit confused.

The attention issue taken care of, Lilitu turned her attention instead toward the pockets of smoke she could feel building in the ground beneath her. There wasn't much that she could feel, the magma was filling the chambers below and that was leaving precious little room for any smoke. The more the pressure underneath built up, the less room there would be until the eruption.

"Aren't you first tier, Geisthexe?" Venz inquired almost an hour later. "What are you doing babysitting a volcano."

"This is what first tier is for," Lilitu responded distractedly. "Holle is second tier; she should be able to handle most of the big problems that could happen. The two of you third tiers should be able to shut down or at least divert the immediate local problems if there's something we have to watch, but stuff like this is complex and widely connected. You've got to let the pressure ease out gently and gradually and that's manipulating magma out over hundreds of miles outward and below."

"So we handle the local stuff and you deal with minimizing the global impact?" the other Demon asked curiously.

"That's the gist of…" Lilitu paused and frowned as she turned about to look at, possibly through the glacier. "There's an interesting cavity here, the way the smoke's filling it, it feels almost like its carved out." That hadn't been there for the last eruption in 2004. "See if you can feel it."

Venz nodded and searched out with his senses for anything that could be construed as a wall. To his surprise, he found what Lilitu was talking about almost immediately. More than a figurative or natural wall, there was indeed a room cut out of the rock below.

"I feel it," he informed her with an enthusiastic tone to his voice. "I'll see what it is, you stay here."

Lilitu was about to correct him on his assumption, but he'd already burst into smoke and presumably teleported down into the cavity below. Grimacing and biting back a curse, Lilitu tapped out her cigarette before pulling off her bag and reaching in to pull out an organic sort of polyp that looked like some sort of greenish alien starfish. She held it up to her face, stroking down the center line. Immediately the tendrils of the thing lashed around her neck and face, pulling tight against her nose.

"Stay here, Lizbet," she told the cat as it jumped off her shoulder and nodded at her. Her voice sounded as if her nose was stuffed up due to the alien thing wrapped around her face.

After that, she picked up her bag and burst into smoke. The Demoness pierced the barriers of Earth's primary dimension into the cosmological ether surrounding it. Normally, she would have burst directly into Yomi, but that was not her final destination. Instead, she ricocheted off the edges of the Demon-home and arrived back in Earth, several hundred feet below the top of the glacier she'd left from. It took a very small fraction of a second.

Arriving, she found herself in a sulfurous, smoke filled room and saw Venz coughing and gasping a few feet away. She shook her head as she grabbed him and opened his bag to remove another of the starfish things and held it up to his face. As the starfish wrapped around his face, the hacking and gasping slowed and then stopped.

"Another thing you should know from the original briefing," she snapped. "There's the pleasant, soothing presence of brimstone in the air like Yomi…and then there are full on volcanic gasses. We brought the filters for a reason."

"I hate wearing familiars," the other Demon complained. "Damn blood-sucking things."

"Get used to it," Lilitu lectured him as she started walking around with her eyes narrowed. "Remember to breathe in through the nose and out through your mouth. Don't want to poison the filter, that'll get bad real fast."

The temperature was warm and Lilitu realized that they had to be close to a magma chamber. It wasn't really unbearable yet, but it was certainly getting into something warmer than preferable. Especially dressed for the Icelandic glacial plain. The smoke and gasses in the air were thick and stung at the eyes so that Lilitu extended a little effort toward shaping the smoke in mixed clouds to form a vaporous shell around herself and Venz and keep the more painful gasses away.

"What is this place?" Venz asked quietly.

As he spoke, Lilitu found a wall and hissed as she pulled her hand back from the hot stone. Calmly, she let the smoke push aside some of the cloud so that she could better see the carvings she'd briefly felt.

"It used to be a sealed room," she told him as she took in the circular cuttings in the wall.

"Of course its sealed, it's buried under a glacier and a lot of rock," Venz scoffed.

"Not sealed off, sealed," the Demoness explained. "As in taken off Earth and placed into Earth's cosmology instead. Sometimes people seal away real physical places rather than trying build an entire shard from scratch. When the gate breaks, the sealed room returns to the place on Earth where it was taken from. More than likely, this was some Icelandic sorcerer's laboratory room."

"Humans made this?"

"Hard to say, there's a mix of different kinds of circles and there isn't any life force activating any of them. Could be any of the races."
Lilitu shrugged thoughtfully.

"Whoever made the seal must be either dead or they've abandoned this sanctuary. I'd say abandoned the way there's no furniture in here. Once the seal stopped being maintained, anything could have broken the gate. The 2004 eruption would have been more than enough."

"There's a table or altar over here," Venz said. "Looks like it's part of the floor, think there are some gems or something in the center of it. Most of them are broken"

"Don't touch it if you don't want to get burned," Lilitu warned. "The gloves aren't as good as our boots about keeping the heat out." Not that she was actually wearing gloves at the moment, those made it hard to hold her cigarette, after all.

Still, the discovery of a feature in the room drew the Demoness of Smoke towards Venz's side where she could see what he was talking about. The table was made out of stone and covered in the same sort of empty carvings as were around the wall. Through the center of it were several shaped and carved pieces of obsidian. All of them save the one at the center were splintered. That center one had only a tiny fracture in the center.

"Stone, not a gem, but close enough. Those are probably power keystones," Lilitu said casually as she took in the carvings about the item. "The central power of this room. I don't know what race uses obsidi…wait, none of these carvings connect with the floor, there's no way these stones could have powered anyth…"

"It looks a damaged," Venz noted, pointing to the minimal fracture.
The tiny crack spread as both Lilitu and Venz were looking at it.

"That's not a keystone," Lilitu quickly instructed. "That's a gate. This is a double seal." She glanced at the stones on the table. "Make that a nine-fold seal."

"A what?" Venz asked.

"A seal placed inside another seal to make absolutely sure that something is kept closed," Lilitu said.

"You mean like the Abyss and the cells in it?" Venz asked.

"I mean exactly like the Abyss," she said. "As in a prison. We're going back up top. Now."

She grabbed Venz's shoulder and both disappeared into a burst of smoke only to reappear next to Lizbet and Lilitu's bag. The cat-like creature hopped up onto Lilitu's back as she leaned down for her bag and padded up toward her shoulder as the Demoness straightened and pointed across the glacier.

"Get to the others," she ordered, "now."

"What's going on?" Venz asked.

"Something is coming," Lilitu said. "I don't know what it is, but it can't be good. Now go! I don't want to have to drag you around everywhere."

Venz hesitated only a moment before bursting into smoke after which Lilitu did herself and both reappeared near Holle and Erick, who looked worried and surprised at the sudden appearance.

"Gah!" Erick gasped, as he looked at the familiar masks over Lilitu and Venz's faces. "Those things always creep me out."

"Is something wrong?" Holle asked. "I don't feel enough pressure on the ice for an eruption yet."

"There's a seal, it's about to break," Lilitu said. "Holle, you come with me. The two of you, back to Yomi, get reinforcements. As quickly as you can."

"Can't you just ask for help through Oro…"

"Yes, Erick, I can sink into the mindscape and telepathically ask for help," Lilitu said. "But that will leave me defenseless and I'm sending you two out of the area anyway. Holle is going to be following you, but I need something from her first. This is no longer a training mission. Understand?" She watched them nod. "Then go."

Reluctantly, the two males burst away from the scene and Lilitu turned toward Holle, crooking her finger into a follow-me gesture. When the blond teleported away into smoke, the ashy-haired girl immediately followed. They appeared at the spot where Lilitu had found the room, Lizbet remained on her shoulder and bristled nervously.

"What do you want from me Lady Geisthexe?" the girl requested.

"I need a circle in the ice with this place at the center," Lilitu said.

"Wouldn't Ericks flames have been better…"

"At least a mile radius, Holle, with a second circle in here, around me," Lilitu interrupted, backing off slightly as the girl paled slightly. "You're not going to fuel it; it'll just take me too long to cut one with a spell or smoke."

"I…I understand," Holle responded, nodding as she took a deep breath and started focusing.

"Oh, and make both circles three points," Lilitu said. "Not four."

"But that's a God circle…" Holle protested.

"I know what it is," Lilitu assured her with an air of confidence and planning. "I need stability more than power right now."

The Demoness of Smoke started to take off her coat and pull up the right sleeve, Lizbet dancing around the shifting clothes. The cat moved toward Lilitu's back as the woman bent over her bag again and pulled out another organic seem object and started to wrap it around her bare arm with a grimace. The creature tightened around her arm and dug in, releasing a slight tinge of blood scent into the air around the two women. The rest of the length continued wrapping itself around the arm, funneling under her clothes as it did, like a large brown-green leech.

The sound of cracking ice split the silence of the air around them and Lilitu looked up as she saw rising clouds of shattered ice in the distance where Holle was slicing the lines for the circle into the glacier. Below her, the smoke in the cavity was still idly filling the room. Nothing yet had stirred from the broken seal, so there was still time. If they were lucky, the last seal would be empty, whatever had been placed within having long died. Or it could be a Demon or a God in there. In which case they were likely frothing at the mouth insane given that Lilitu was absolutely sure that the sealed room was probably older than her, much less older than 400 years.

Lilitu turned around and looked toward Holle who was breathing heavily and bleeding from splits in the skin about her lips and hands. Encouragingly, the blond Demoness placed her hand on the other's shoulder.

"You can do this, just calm down and use what the Creator gave you," she whispered. "Lord, help her finish in time."

The prayer caught the other Demoness off guard momentarily and she glanced back toward the blond in confusion before returning her attention to the task at hand and finishing the final cuts in both the circle and the inscribed triangle. As she was finished, Holle leaned down and gripped her knees taking in several breaths.

"You did good, you did good," Lilitu said. "Now head home...get help. I've got it from here."

"Are you sure about me leaving?" Holle gasped, still trying to recover.

"You've already helped, if it is something you can deal with," Lilitu said. "I won't need any more. Go on back to Yomi, I've got things here for now."

"I didn't know… I forgot you were Christian," Holle said finally before bursting into a puff of smoke, leaving Lilitu alone on the glacier with Lizbet.

Down below her, the smoke was starting to move about in the buried room as she moved toward the central point of the circle and concentrated. A flash of brilliant red flowed out of her body in wild waves, which funneled out her right arm into the circle, the organic leech-like familiar around her arm leashing the power so that it all flowed the way Lilitu wanted and little to none was wasted.

Lizbet watched the surroundings around Lilitu, a soft red glow from her adding to, or even magnifying the power flowing out of her mistress. Demonic Vitae added to and enhanced by the Vitae of the familiar companion on the Demoness' shoulder and focused and tamed by the focus familiar wrapped around her arm.

She prayed under her breath, as another light, bluish in color, filled one eye and started to filter out of her in regulating bands around the red. Both filled the huge circle around her, resulting in a soft blue and red glow as if thousands of the modern police cars had pulled up to surround the circle with Lilitu at its center where Lilitu stamped out the old cigarette and lit a new one.

"Let's keep this private," she said to Lizbet on her shoulder.
For the rest of this story PDF or kindle copies may be purchased at the links below.

Lilitu Geisthexe's normal tasks are usually a bit more hair-raising than this was supposed to be. Grímsvötn volcano in Iceland was getting ready to erupt. This happened every so often, just like most active volcanoes. Most of the time it happened, it was over and everything was done, no harm done. But then there were things like Krakatoa. And that's where the group from Yomi figured in. Just in case it was a major eruption, they were supposed to do what they could to prevent it from making the Earth a little less liveable. Preferably without anyone noticing who wasn't supposed to notice.

But there is a ripple this time around that no one is expecting. Something potentially worse than even the concept of a volcano ripping Iceland off the map and putting the world through a year long winter.

These events take place roughly the same time as the events in the Deployment chapter of the Divine Blood novel already available here:

Index of Other Divine Blood Stories and Art in my gallery

Divine Blood Index**************************
Divine Blood stories available on DA:
Novel Sample Chapters:
This Looks Like a Safe Neighborhood... : http://fav.me/d42d6br
Deployment: http://fav.me/d42d9cq
Just a Girl: http://fav.me/d42dado
Creepy Cute: http://fav.me/d42dbfa
In Motion: http://fav.me/d42ddgt
Center of It: http://fav.me/d42dfjf
Unique Perspective: http://fav.me/d53r3zz
Extracurriculars listed chronologically to the Divine Blood Timeline (focus character in parantheses):
Regarding the Proper Use of Force (Gaetana Trolleti): http://fav.me/d5vpbpa
Following Dernhelm (Eowyn Desai): http://fav.me/d5bh3hn
Can't Go Home (Whelan Connor): http://fav.me/d5nw5qc
Smoke Over Grimsvotn (Lilitu Geisthexe): http://fav.me/d5bh2wj
Serious Matter (Sherissie Minaba): http://fav.me/d5bh3zv
A Day in the Life of a Busy Woman (Mao Semezou): http://fav.me/d5c0o5b
High School Hel (Hel Logesdottir): http://fav.me/d5j1hg7
Pop Quiz (Naiki Semezou): http://fav.me/d62tdla
Magnets: http://fav.me/d6eju4e
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