Cradle: Foundation (Cradle Collected Book 1)

by Will Wight

  Except that a conflict like that would have destroyed this shelter and most everyone else in Limit.

  She couldn’t see much in the room past the nest of hissing cracks in reality, but half of a desk remained in the center. A fist-sized ball glowed blue on that table: a beacon, though all the chaos in here must have degraded it. And on the far wall, a spray of ancient blood and flesh, as though a man had exploded right before the door was sealed for a century.

  [Impossible to identify remains,] her Presence reported. [Chaos and time have destroyed them beyond the point of analysis.]

  The beacon was still resonating with her Razor, indicating that it held a message. She reached out to accept it, but hesitated.

  Not out of reason, or to buy herself a moment to think. She was scared.

  Ozriel had come here to prepare for Limit’s death. He had left this message here for her after a battle…or had he prepared the message before the battle began, stretching out past the planet?

  Either way, it wasn’t good news. This message was not about to tell her that Ozriel was safe, happy, and ready to return to work.

  She was afraid for herself, afraid for the Abidan, and afraid for the man she’d known even before she’d joined the Abidan Court. He had always been Ozriel to her, but there had been a time before she was Suriel, the Phoenix. They had been friends.

  She accepted the message, and her senses were consumed in endless white.

  This was a perfectly ordinary way to send a message in Sanctum, headquarters of the Abidan. Sharing senses and experiences was common, and crafting an experience like this would have taken Ozriel seconds. But the world of this message crackled, tarnished by damage and chaos. The world of white was speckled with imperfection, as though she watched it through grainy film, and interference was a constant hiss in her ears.

  At least she wasn’t alone.

  Ozriel stood before her in his polished black armor, the Mantle of Ozriel streaming behind him like a boiling cape of shadow, and the white hair running down his back. But it was all fuzzy, like a half-forgotten dream. His face blurred, though she could fill in the gaps from memory: cold and distant and grim.

  In person, he had more of a sense of humor than any other Abidan she’d ever met, but he always wore an expression like a man bracing himself for terrible news.

  “Sur…looking lovely…get to the point, because…murdered.” He was speaking, speaking to her, because he’d known she would find this. Of course he had. But whatever he’d predicted, it hadn’t included a battle in this room ruining his message.

  The scene congealed for a moment, until she could almost believe he was really standing in front of her. “…didn’t abandon you. I’ve identified the sixteen worlds…a facility like this one…” She could make out his lips moving now, but it was as though she’d gone deaf.

  “…sure you’ll…quarantine. I sh—…actually kills me.”

  His expression darkened, and he looked over her shoulder. The Scythe appeared in his hand: a long, curved blade like an obsidian scimitar. At least, that was how it presented itself.

  She was sure this was the heart of the message, but she heard nothing but a whisper of static. Finally, his voice faded back in, just on the edge of her hearing.

  “…if I didn’t act, it would all stay the same. I don’t—“

  The dream world squealed with feedback, and colors twisted in her eyes as the message’s recording was violently cut off.

  That wasn’t interference. He’d been attacked while speaking, ending the message.

  So the battle had started here, but continued off into the world. Or had he recorded it elsewhere and the beacon survived the battle?

  …survived a battle that he, perhaps, had not.

  “Presence,” Suriel ordered verbally. “Reconstruct the probable content of Ozriel’s message. Authorization Suriel zero-zero-six.” The Presence was more than capable of simple predictions, but interactions between Judges usually required verbal confirmation. Sanctum wanted any jurisdictional overlap to be well documented.

  [Incomplete information supplemented with standard Ozriel prediction model. Best recreation follows.]

  The message was audio-only, but it was as though Ozriel was speaking right into her ear. The voice of her friend, full of weary humor.

  “Suriel. You’re looking lovely today, I’m sure. I’ll get to the point, because I have an unexpected visitor who needs murdered: I did not abandon you. I have identified the sixteen worlds that will be corrupted while I’m gone, and I’ve prepared a facility like this one in each. I’m sure Makiel will send Gadrael, and then you’ll volunteer. If I’m still gone, chaotic interference makes it impossible to predict beyond sixteen, so go ahead and initiate quarantine. I shouldn’t take much longer, unless this actually kills me.”

  His voice turned serious. “We have to change, Suriel. If I didn’t act, it would all stay the same. I don’t—”

  The sound cut off.

  Of their own accord, her eyes slid back to the blood on the walls. He’d seen her standing here. From hundreds of years ago, he’d seen her.

  He was still watching out for her, if not for himself.

  Her heart hammered in her ears, her respiration sped up a fraction, and her adrenal glands squeezed hormones into her bloodstream. She chose not to cut off the physical responses.

  Let her feel fear for her friend.

  Chapter 14

  On the fourth morning since starting the Trials, Lindon slid the Sylvan Riverseed’s case out of his pack, holding out a pair of freshly Forged scales.

  The Sylvan waved at him, smiling cheerily.

  He stared back.

  Someone had replaced his tiny, faceless spirit with a miniature woman Forged out of water madra. Until she opened her mouth at the sight of Lindon’s scales, waiting to be fed, he suspected it was a different creature entirely.

  Where once she had been a translucent bright blue doll, now she was a deep azure woman with long, flowing hair, a dress that swirled around hidden feet, teeth that showed clearly when she smiled, and curious eyes.

  Those eyes were now scrunched closed as she held open her mouth, waiting for her meal. Lindon thought he could see her tongue.

  She had a tongue now. And eyelids.

  Dazed, he ran his eyes along the edges of the case, looking for changes. He found one immediately: a spot in the corner where the scripted glass didn’t fit perfectly together.

  That was certainly a change. He’d spent hours searching the tank for any imperfections, trying to figure out a way to open it without breaking the glass. He ran his thumb along the flaw, and that corner of the case popped open. He repeated the process on the other side, and the lid of the case rose.

  The Sylvan was still begging for food, so he slipped the madra coins inside without taking his eyes from the case itself. They dissolved as soon as they reached the Sylvan, flowing down her throat in streams of light.

  Eithan. Eithan did this.

  Either he had to accept that the Sylvan had drastically changed her form in the week since he’d fed her—and that someone else had figured out how to open her case and then closed it again—or the Underlord had done something. But what? And why?

  He was itching to investigate, but he wasn’t even sure what questions to ask. If he had a drudge, he could examine the composition of her madra and see what had changed. Fisher Gesha could tell him, but if he left the mountain, he was considered to have given up.

  In the absence of any clear answers, he placed her back into his pack. He’d inspect her more closely later, to see if Eithan had left any obvious hints for him.

  Putting the Sylvan out of his mind, he and Yerin challenged the Enforcer Trial a second time.

  Lindon cradled the red-and-black crystal in his arms, dashing through the stone forest with Burning Cloak active. Every second sizzled as his muscles burned from the Blackflame madra, every step sent dirt flying behind him and drove splinters of pain through his knees, and every b
reath came slow and heavy, as though he were trying to suck air through a wet blanket.

  It was like running through a nightmare: gray shapes chased him from every direction as pain wracked his body. Though he knew he was moving faster than he ever had before, he still felt as though he were slogging through mud.

  Finally he dropped the breathing technique, heaving a deep breath of pure air that sent sweet life flowing through his veins, but then his madra channels couldn’t handle the burden of the Burning Cloak. It flickered and died, the seal dimmed, and a soldier’s blade knocked the crystal from his hands.

  A silver blade of madra blasted from the woods, slashing the soldier in half, but the gong had already sounded: failure.

  ***

  The soldiers changed.

  They always carried stone weapons, but sometimes those weapons blazed with sword aura until they could take a slice out of the surrounding pillars.

  Not all the soldiers ever carried the gleaming silver weapons, but Yerin preferred the ones that did. She could sense them coming thanks to the aura gathering around their weapons, and the Endless Sword technique would mince them. When those showed up, she could eliminate them in a blink, and she and Lindon could make it deep into the columns before a living statue slipped past her and caught him.

  But they never made it any further.

  The frustration grew until she wanted to take a sword and carve her way out of this valley by pure fury. She could do so much better than this. If she could use her true ability, she would split every single sword-carrying soldier open on their own aura and then carry Lindon through to the end like a baby.

  Not that Lindon was a burden anymore, which was enough shock for a lifetime in itself. He had surprised and impressed her in the days since they’d started the Trial. The Burning Cloak fit him like a good sheath, giving him everything he’d lacked before: explosive speed, bursts of strength, and enough confidence to stand against his enemies fist-to-fist.

  Truth was, fighting next to him was a treat, now that he could keep up with her. They could only challenge the Trials every three or four days, when they were in their best condition: his spirit didn’t recover as fast as hers, and her injuries stuck around longer than his did. She looked forward to the Trial days, because that meant fighting together, as a pair.

  If she could have used her full skills, fighting next to Lindon as they learned to train and grow as a team, she’d have been on holiday. It would have been the best time in her life since the Sword Sage plucked her out of the ashes of her childhood home.

  But she was hobbled. Weighted down.

  Her uninvited guest strained against its seal, gaining on her day after day as she remained stuck at the barrier to Highgold. She had to dedicate half her attention to keeping it under control, so it didn’t squirm further into her core. Every night she tied the bow tighter around her waist, trying to reinforce the Sword Sage’s seal, feeling the bloodthirst of the red rope seeping into her.

  On its own, that wouldn’t be enough to cripple her—she’d dealt with this parasite most of her life. But now even her own madra was fighting her.

  Her Goldsign still slipped through her control sometimes, lunging against enemies when she wanted it to pull back. If anything, it was getting worse; now her own techniques were also trying to defy her. Her master’s instincts, buried inside her along with his Remnant, would tell her to Enforce herself and run into battle. Madra she’d been preparing to hurl at her enemies would flow into her sword instead, sharpening her weapon. She had to switch tactics, adapting to her master’s lesson and costing precious seconds in battle.

  Together, it was like trying to fight with someone else’s hands. Some days it felt like she couldn’t take two steps without her own body betraying her.

  She could tap into the silver Remnant in her core, and sometimes she was tempted. But even when he was stealing her madra, ruining her chance at passing the Trial, it was still another chance at hearing his voice.

  She couldn’t give that up. And any insight into the Path of the Endless Sword was rarer than diamonds for her; without her master’s voice, she would be the only expert remaining on her Path.

  She’d cross over to Highgold eventually, even without silencing her master again, she was sure of it.

  Every day, the gong seemed to grow louder.

  ***

  Lindon knelt, driving an Empty Palm deep into the ground. He’d raised his pure core to Jade, and the technique penetrated deeper than he’d dared to hope, almost disrupting the script that powered the Trial. If he could break it, that would disrupt the function of the Trial long enough for them to pass through.

  But it wasn’t enough. The soldiers swarmed him, beating him until he dropped the crystal. He screamed as the gong sounded.

  The cool winter breeze that had once flowed into the valley had long since grown hot. Lindon and Yerin gathered food with wordless efficiency now, choking down the oily, gritty crab meat and retiring to their own caves to cycle.

  Lindon cycled Blackflame for two hours every night, drawing aura of heat and destruction into his endlessly grinding stone wheel.

  It would burn everything, that aura. Lindon came to think of it as a hungry power: the blazing drive for more, more, more. It filled him as he cycled, until he wanted to tear the Enforcer Trial apart with his teeth.

  The dragon advances. That was what the Enforcer tablet had said, and those seemed like the words of the Blackflame madra itself. It wanted to advance like a furious dragon, tearing apart everything before it.

  If only he could.

  The parasite ring weighed down his spirit. He knew that in the long run it would help his training, but every day he almost threw it into the pool.

  The Heaven and Earth Purification Wheel made his breath so heavy and long that it burned his lungs, every cycle of madra so torturously slow that his spirit ached like muscles cramped and trapped. Whenever he caught a normal breath, free of the technique, he almost sobbed with relief.

  His own Blackflame madra ate away at his madra channels, leaving black residue like soot in his spirit. If he didn’t cleanse it, he’d be leaving injuries and blockages in his soul, harming his future development. After using Blackflame too much, he had to spend several hours cycling pure madra to clean out his madra channels. It was hard to sit there all afternoon, cleaning his spirit, and not feel like he was wasting time.

  Real Blackflames probably had a method to deal with that problem, but he had no one to ask. Orthos had kept his distance, circling through the mountain but never intruding on their Trial grounds. Sometimes Lindon felt him in the distance, his spirit burning with madness, and other times he was calm as a dying fire. In both states, he stayed away.

  The Sylvan Riverseed’s appetite had increased since her transformation. She begged him for pure madra even when he was exhausted and could barely push his spirit through a single cycle.

  The Burning Cloak had cost him weeks of training before he could use it naturally. The explosive bursts of strength and speed it provided meant he had to learn to do everything over again: run without hurling himself into a tree, throw a punch without breaking his own elbow, cut food without slicing off his own fingers. Yerin had even set him up with a juggling routine until he could keep three stones in the air without losing the Burning Cloak, dropping a stone, or hurling one of the pebbles out of the valley. Every day they spent perfecting his precision felt like a day lost; a day when he could have been challenging the Trial.

  Even his body betrayed him, leeching his core every time he was wounded, draining him dry and leaving him limp and powerless on the ground. The Bloodforged Iron body was the only reason they could challenge the course as often as they did, but it also crippled him after every failure.

  Over it all, Jai Long loomed like a specter. This Trial was supposed to be the first step to defeating him, but Lindon had tripped and fallen at the first stair.

  …though as painful as each day was, as miserable as he felt in th
ose nights when he wept alone in his damp cave, he couldn’t deny the results.

  After months of work, his Burning Cloak covered him in a thick blaze of red and black. He could keep it active for twenty minutes, so long as nothing cut him and activated his Iron body, and he could drive his fist straight through a Forged soldier.

  His cores felt like a pair of lakes now, where they’d once been buckets. They didn’t look any larger than before, but they felt deeper, like the Heaven and Earth Purification Wheel had drilled down to profound depths. He spent more madra in a single Trial attempt now than his entire spirit could have contained only months before.

  The improvement kept him going, got him out of his cave in the morning, kept him from abandoning his breathing technique as a trap, made him pick up the Trial’s activation crystal again and again even though he’d sooner embrace a venomous snake.

  Continuing meant taking another step forward. Giving up meant accepting death at Jai Long’s spear.

  Between them, he and Yerin were now destroying fifteen or sixteen soldiers every run, getting closer and closer to the end of the Trial.

  But they never made it.

  He’d tried every answer he could think of: hurling the crystal, digging to break the script, building a simple construct out of half-formed soldier parts, running straight through the columns without stopping, altering the script that ran the Trial. Nothing worked. It seemed the Soulsmiths who built this course had thought of everything.

  Time blurred and faded away. Only the endless cycle of day and night mattered, because the Trial only worked during the day.

  He stopped hearing the gong. When the soldiers caught him or his Burning Cloak flagged, he simply walked away.

  ***

  It had been four months since Eithan had first opened the temple at the top of the mountain, and Cassias had grown used to his duties.

  Since Yerin and Lindon usually needed two or three days of rest between attempts, he could bring his work with him. He’d moved a table up to this peak, writing letters and reading reports while keeping half of his detection web on the children. After sixteen weeks, this hidden temple looked more like an office than his actual office did.