Skysworn (Cradle Book 4)

by Will Wight

  And the alternative was to focus on the fact that he was missing a limb. He preferred daydreaming.

  Their preparation seemed to stretch on and on, but finally Fisher Gesha levered herself out of her cycling position—moving stiffly—and started to limber up her shoulders. “Well, it's not naptime. Let's get moving.”

  She sounded nervous, eyeing her chest which sat in the corner. Lindon knew why: even through the restrictive scripts on the box, he could sense the power of the white binding. It felt like intense hunger.

  The more they prepared it for use, strengthening it with pure madra as though watering a flower while attuning it to Lindon's soul, the stronger it felt. Now it shone with power, which even the chest couldn't contain.

  Using a set of halfsilver tongs, which would disperse any stray madra, she withdrew the small book-sized box that contained the binding itself. Then she shut the large chest, placing the small box on top. Reaching into her robes, she pulled out the notes that they had taken from the Transcendent Ruins along with the binding.

  She and Lindon had both practically memorized those notes in preparation for today. They tended to be very technical, though they referred back to a “Subject One” as the source of the hunger madra. Lindon very much wanted to know about Subject One, as it seemed the entire purpose of their research in the labyrinth was to duplicate Subject One's unique madra.

  “Soulsmithing is blending three elements,” she said. She had given him this lecture before, but he still focused on every word. A mistake here might mean weeks of going without an arm. “You have the binding, the material of the construct itself, and the Soulsmith's madra, hm? But unlike blending physical materials, you are working with the stuff of souls. Madra lives. It changes. Even the same Path, taken from two different people, can have subtly different properties.”

  She traded her halfsilver tongs out for her goldsteel set. These could seize immaterial madra without damaging the subject. She opened the small box, which let a feeling of ravenous hunger wash over the both of them.

  Then she withdrew a finger-sized shard from within. It was one of the pieces left over from the Ancestor's Spear.

  “A Soulsmith must learn to predict those changes, hm? It's no good making a weapon that will turn on its owner. But even with the best drudge in the world and years of experience, we are working with living components. No two constructs are exactly the same.”

  Gingerly, she placed the shard of white within the bubble at the center of the room. The transparent arm and the shard of bright white orbited one another, though the smaller piece seemed to be squirming through the air toward the larger.

  Gesha crossed her arms. “Now,” she commanded.

  Lindon reached out with his perception, sensing both the arm and the piece of hunger madra. They gave him very different impressions, but he didn't focus on that, instead pouring pure madra into combining them.

  They drifted together faster than he'd expected, and he focused on Forging them like he would a scale. He held the shape in his mind, pushing it together with his will.

  The shard entered the clear-as-glass surface of the arm, staining six inches of the forearm white. Pale strands ran through the limb like veins, and the sharp fingers shuddered.

  Fisher Gesha gestured, and her spider scurried up beneath the floating boundary field. It lifted two legs, poking at the substance of the construct, spinning it around as though spinning a web.

  After a moment, it hissed in three sharp patterns and withdrew its legs.

  “Unstable,” Gesha reported. “Keep holding it.” She produced another shard of the Ancestor's Spear, and Lindon repeated the process.

  The stress of holding onto the construct felt like cycling the Heaven and Earth Purification Wheel for too long: his soul was under pressure, every breath was heavy, and he was having trouble holding onto the appropriate breathing pattern. Sweat had begun to bead on his face.

  But there was a distinct difference. The presence of the arm had begun to change, as the Shifting Skies madra in the original limb was suffused with the power of the hungry white madra. Instead of tapping, the fingers now flexed, grasping, and he sensed...

  Well, he wasn't sure what he was picking up on. Maybe Fisher Gesha could tell him, if he could spare the attention to ask. It felt as though the arm wanted something, and it twisted in the floating bubble like a hunting snake.

  It must have been an effect of the hunger madra, as she added more samples inside and Lindon used his pure madra to Forge them together into one. With every piece, it seemed to become more aware, like they were building a Remnant instead of a Remnant arm.

  This time, when Fisher Gesha's drudge tested the limb, it gave a high whistle. Immediately, she withdrew a shiny, twisted form of pure white light with a corkscrew pattern. The binding.

  A crystallized technique, the binding was the heart of any construct. Without it, a construct would only have the properties of its material and whatever scripts they added on top. That would make it no better than any scripted object.

  Ideally, this binding would allow him to feed on someone else's madra, though Fisher Gesha insisted that it would only allow him to pull another's power into his arm and then vent it elsewhere.

  Either way. Both ideas intrigued him.

  As the binding approached, the arm squirmed toward it, fighting against the hold of his spirit. He tried to ask her to wait, but the word came out as a croak.

  Then the binding slid into the arm, and he had to absorb it.

  The actual process of completing the arm was simple. He worked it into the Forging, and the arm flared with a brilliant white. Now it was all spotless and pale, and the claws had smoothed out into fingertips—Lindon didn't want to use an arm with needle-sharp fingers. It looked almost skeletal in shape, though it was thick enough to fit on his arm.

  Fisher Gesha let out a breath. “Good. Now, normally we would add scripts at this point, but it will be attached to your body. Your own spirit will do the maintenance, protecting it from decay. It seems stable, but for a while you'll have to...prepare for...”

  Her words drifted off as she watched the arm.

  Lindon was staring at it too.

  It had gone wild, twisting and writhing as it pushed its hand at the edge of the boundary field. He could almost hear a snarling in his head, as it sought to devour...something.

  An instant later, the boundary field vanished.

  The hand lunged for Lindon's head. No...not for his head. The link he shared with the arm gave him an instinctive understanding, and rather than ducking, he threw himself to the side.

  It wasn't after him. It was after the Sylvan Riverseed.

  Little Blue scurried down the side of his head, hiding in his robe, peeking her sapphire head out of his collar and trembling. Lindon reached out with his power again, but the arm wouldn't respond to him anymore. All he could sense from it was a boundless hunger.

  “What now?” he asked, his voice creaking from disuse.

  “It's out of control,” Gesha said sourly, pulling the goldsteel hook from her back. Sharp on the inside and as big as her torso, it was more of a sickle than a hook, and it gleamed white in the light of the room. “This is why you don't use unique parts, hm? Something goes wrong, and you can't learn from it and try again. You have to give up all your wasted time.”

  She stepped forward, preparing to swing her weapon, but the arm was still scurrying across the floor on its fingertips. Toward Lindon.

  Lindon kept his attention on the limb. There had to be something he could do to salvage this—it would be a waste of not only irreplaceable materials, but also far too much time. And a unique opportunity.

  He held out a hand to Fisher Gesha, begging for restraint, even as he studied the arm. What he called hunger wasn't just that. It felt similar to hunger, but it was more textured, with deeper layers. He felt ambition, greed, gluttony, an endless desire to reach for more and more.

  The hand lunged at him, but he caught it by the
wrist. It burned his palm, as though he'd grabbed onto solid ice, but he kept his attention on it.

  Without context, the arm was out of control. It needed a mind to control it. A will to keep it in check.

  And it fit him. There was a little of this hunger in him already.

  He focused on that, stoking his desire for power, the feelings of envy and awe he'd felt when Suriel had demonstrated absolute authority, the aching helplessness of living as Unsouled and his desire to get stronger. As strong as he could.

  The arm stiffened, like a dog catching a new scent.

  Lindon threw more at it. His feelings as he looked over the Heaven's Glory School's treasures: he wanted it all, but even that wouldn't be enough. He remembered the sensation of Blackflame, the desire of a dragon to conquer and to destroy.

  Then he shoved the end of the arm onto his stump.

  The construct didn't resist him, but pain blacked out his memory for a moment. When he came back to himself, he was on the floor, his back propped up against a cool wall. Fisher Gesha was muttering, her hook on the ground next to her, holding her wrinkled hands over his elbow.

  Where flesh met pure white madra.

  “Dangerous,” she muttered. “Too dangerous. Could have devoured you, you know that? Hm? And you made me Forge it on, so that will hurt your compatibility. An impulsive Soulsmith is a dead Soulsmith, I can say that much for certain.”

  He forced a smile. “Forgiveness, and thank you. I can only tell you that I thought it would work. I felt...like it would,” he finished, though it sounded limp when he put it that way.

  She grunted and thwacked him on the forehead with her knuckles. “You have to stay open to your instincts when you're Forging a construct. That's important. But don't go sticking things on your body just because you feel like it, hm?”

  Full of expectation, Lindon flexed his new white arm.

  It twisted backwards, fingers twitching, reaching for Fisher Gesha's face.

  She stepped back, sighing. “It will take you some time to adjust so that you can control it naturally. Scripts could speed the process up, but they would eventually restrict you, so it's better to adapt over time.”

  Lindon nodded, focusing on his spirit. The arm's madra wasn't flowing into his body, but his power was flowing into it, and it was quite a burden. It took more madra to maintain his arm than to Enforce the rest of his body together.

  “Don't try to use the binding yet,” she warned him, sticking a finger in his face. “Lindon? I could not be more serious. Your madra channels are having enough trouble with the load of a Remnant's arm. If you try to use the binding, your spirit might tear itself apart. You have to get used to your new arm, and preferably strengthen your channels, yes? You should really wait as long as possible before you try to use the technique. At least four to six weeks.”

  Lindon nodded attentively, but his mind was focused on controlling his new arm. Finally, he got it to run its white fingers over the floor.

  Sensation was...odd, through the new limb...as though the arm were talking directly to his brain and spirit instead of his body. Like he knew the floor was rough and cold, rather than feeling it as he would through a hand of flesh and blood.

  But at least he could tell if something was hot or cold, smooth or rough. He would take it.

  Forcing the arm to move as he wanted it to was stressing his spirit, and Little Blue seemed to react to that. She reached up from his collar, slapping her tiny hand on his chin. A cold spark traveled through him, soothing his channels and giving relief to his spirit. When the spark reached his arm, it shuddered and stilled for a moment.

  “That's better, thank you,” he said, smiling down at little blue. She dipped her head in respect and then gave him a broad grin. Where had she learned that?

  No matter how much trouble it caused him, he had an arm. He could be careful for a few weeks if it meant having two hands again.

  He leaned his head back against the wall, exhausted, and met Fisher Gesha's face. She seemed concerned.

  “Gratitude, Fisher Gesha. I'm excited to see what I can do with this.”

  Gesha watched him quietly for a few seconds before folding her arms and addressing him with the look of a strict grandmother. “What is wrong with you, boy?”

  That wasn't the first thing he had expected her to say. “Honored Fisher, I humbly apologize for anything that I—”

  “You've been running at a full sprint for more than a year. Well, I guess I can understand it at first, considering your fight with the Jai boy. Afterwards, I thought you'd settle into a routine, hm? No, it's adventure after adventure with you. You're going to burn yourself down to ash if you keep this up.”

  Lindon held his hands out in a pacifying gesture, trying to reassure her. Well, he held one hand out. The other squeezed into a fist and shook itself aggressively.

  “I have a lot farther to go,” Lindon said reasonably. “If my goal was only Jai Long, then certainly, I could have given up and gone home by now.”

  “You think you hike up a mountain by sprinting all the way, do you?” she snapped. “You need a place to rest as much as anyone, if you don't want to crack like bad steel.”

  “I can't afford a break yet. I started too late; only last year, I was still Copper. If I don't try as hard as I can, I can't catch up.”

  She threw her hands in the air. “Catch up? Who exactly are you trying to catch up to, hm?”

  Only two names flashed through his mind, but he was embarrassed to say them out loud.

  “They call you the twenty-fourth ranked Lowgold on the combat charts,” she said. “You know what that means?”

  “That there are twenty-three Lowgolds stronger than I am,” he said immediately.

  “That you're ranked higher than three quarters of the Empire! If you settled down and lived in the Arelius family, you'd be Highgold by twenty-five. Considering it's you, probably Truegold ten years later. You could be an Underlord in your fifties. And that's living peacefully! You could settle down, rest, find a nice young lady, raise a family. You don't have to live every day like you're looking to die!”

  She was shouting by the end, and Lindon winced as every word landed.

  Because they hit him too close to home.

  Since leaving Sacred Valley, he had risked his life almost daily. He'd given everything to move forward. He didn't regret it—if anything, his only regret was that he'd advanced too slowly.

  But it was scraping him raw.

  He felt like a man who had started to run down a hill, going faster and faster until he couldn't stop. Now he had to keep accelerating or stumble and fall.

  The problem was, he really couldn't stop. As enticing as that vision was, he could never return to his homeland as an Underlord. Not if it took him more than thirty more years.

  His home would be gone by then.

  Lindon started to speak, and was surprised to find his voice rough. His vision had blurred—were those tears? Fisher Gesha looked down on him sympathetically.

  There came a single knock at the door, and then Yerin pushed her way in. “They said you'd be fussing around with constructs in here,” she said, glancing around the room. “Didn't want to bump your sword-hand, so I knocked.” She saw the white arm and brightened.

  “Skeleton arm! Scarier than a tiger's teeth, I love it. With your black eyes, that'll have them messing themselves before you ever throw a punch.”

  That hadn't been Lindon's actual goal, but he was glad she was pleased. And it did remind him of another issue: he had to test the arm with Blackflame. All of the tests performed on samples by Fisher Gesha's drudge had suggested the two types of madra wouldn't interfere with each other, certainly not after his soul acclimated to the limb, but there was no way to be sure without testing.

  “I'll take any advantage I can get, in a fight,” Lindon said, surreptitiously swiping at his eyes and rising to his feet.

  Yerin straightened her back, the silver Goldsigns over her shoulders rising. “That wasn
't why I came. I have news for you, and the sand's running down.” She met his eyes with a firm gaze. “Skysworn are going sword-to-sword with Redmoon Hall. I'm joining them.”

  Lindon's new arm twitched as he lost control of his breathing technique. He had known she’d spoken with the Skysworn, but not how it had turned out. She hadn’t told him, and he’d been afraid to ask.

  But now...Yerin was going. And he wasn't.

  “Already?” he asked, and he sounded like he’d swallowed sand.

  “Told you I wasn’t burning time,” she said, meeting his eyes. “They’ve got some test or something coming up. Could be my last chance, and I’m not planning to miss it.”

  He wanted to say he was going to join her, wanted to leave Fisher Gesha and walk out alongside Yerin. They’d traveled together for so long, it felt wrong to be parting ways now.

  But she was still rushing, he wasn’t wrong about that. The smart thing to do was wait.

  If only it didn’t feel like slicing into his own chest.

  “There will be another test, though? Perhaps I can join then.”

  “Could be,” she said, with half a smile. “Couldn’t tell you when it is, though.”

  Then, at least for now, he needed to say good-bye. He bowed at the waist, as deeply as he could. “This one thanks you for your long guidance. He could never have made it without you.”

  She scratched the back of her neck with one hand. “Yeah, well...wouldn't have made it out of the Valley without you, would I? And having you around kept me busy.”

  Lindon straightened and looked into her eyes. “Thank you, Yerin. I can't...ah, thank you.” It wasn't adequate, but he was afraid that if he said any more, he would embarrass himself.

  She nodded, shifting her gaze. They stood in silence for a few moments before Yerin finally waved and turned on her heel. “Don’t need to make this any fancier than it has to be,” she said as she walked out. “I’ll see you soon, won’t I? Not gone forever.”

  “I'll see you then!” he called after her, even as the door shut.