by Trey Myr
Chapter 3 - Arachnophobia
I left town with enough rations for two weeks, a large stock of torches and a pouch full of blast crystal. The five Hounds fanned out in front of me under the leadership of my remaining experienced Shape. I stopped under a tree a few hundred meters from the gate and began to load my arquebus, but I made sure not to rush and kept an eye on the road. Now that I’ve returned from the ruins with a decent haul, there was a chance that other opportunistic scavengers would try to follow me. I didn’t think that Darren or Owen would tell anyone about my finds, but it was always possible that someone overheard me talking to Darren in the Boar and Barrel.
However, after five minutes of watching I only saw one person leaving town, and he turned to the road leading away from the frontier and back into the settled lands. I ordered the Hounds to scout ahead and started the long walk back to what I had already began to think of as ‘my’ ruins. Five Hounds made for a very efficient hunting team, and I didn’t even open my package of jerky by the time I reached the hill hiding the entrance.
It still amazed me that I managed to stumble into the entrance. The raspberry bush completely hid the entrance, and it was only the fact that my original pair of Hounds chased a fox that ran into the bramble that made me even look behind it. I checked again that nobody had followed me from the town, and made my way carefully around the raspberry bush and into the entrance to the ruins. I passed next to the rusted hinges of the door that must have closed off the entrance when the old-world was still alive, and the ground under my feet changed from grass into grey stone, the dark grey walls around me covered with dust and cobwebs.
A few meters into the ruins, the corridor split to the left and right. On my previous exploration I took the right path, and I knew that the stash of whitesteel was waiting for me there, but I took the left turn instead. I had ten days’ worth of supplies with me, and I wanted to explore more of the ruins before heading back. The whitesteel will wait for me, and I was hoping to find something with a better price to weight ratio to take back this time. The light from the entrance fell off quickly once I turned, and I stopped to light my torch before heading deeper into the ruins.
The giant spiders I met on my last trip were very much still in residence, and it wasn’t long before the lead Hound yelped to inform me that it smelled an enemy. I continued to approach cautiously, and it wasn’t long before a stream of venom shot from a hidden alcove and hit one of my new Hounds, covering its legs and causing it to stumble. In my previous delve into the ruins, an incapacitated Hound meant that I’d have to use my arquebus to finish of the spider, since the single remaining Hound wasn’t enough to defeat it. Now that I had five Hounds, however, the loss of one wasn’t even a little problematic.
The lead Hound barked at the spider to get its attention, and while the arachnid was focused on its enemy, the remaining three darted in to attack. The fight was over in seconds, and the Hound that dealt the final blow approached the dead spider and placed its front paw on the body. A small stream of blue light flowed from the arachnid to the Hound as it syphoned off its prey’s vim.
From what I’ve seen when my original pair of Hounds fed, the spiders had somewhere between one and two vim, and it would take about a hundred of them to max all four of the new Hounds. After which I planned to Unshape two of them and rank up my original Hound into a Wolf, which would leave me with enough vim to Shape two new Hounds when I got back to town.
The next spider was even easier to fight than the first. The Hounds learned a lot faster with the experienced pack leader commanding them, and were already using tactics that took my original pair a dozen of battles to master. As I walked deeper into the ruins, I allowed myself to hope that I wouldn’t have to use up any of my expensive ammunition on this trip.
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Two days later, my arquebus hadn’t left my shoulder. The Hounds were growing more and more deadly to the giant spiders, and for the past couple of fights the arachnids were discovered and dispatched before they even managed their customary surprise venom stream. Which naturally meant that it was time for the spiders to start attacking in pairs.
My Hounds were arrayed around a spider and preparing to dart in for a crippling attack when a stream of venom shot from behind one of them and covered him in sticky and poisonous liquid. A pair of the remaining Hounds immediately left their target to focus on the new threat, leaving the other two behind.
Two against one were still favorable odds for the Hounds, and they quickly settled into their familiar bait and bite routine that left the two spiders dead on the ground a few minutes later. The fifth Hound had succumbed to the venom by then, and I decided to take a break while I waited for it to reform. There was an opening in the corridor’s wall a few meters ahead of me, and I cautiously moved forward and entered another empty room.
Whatever happened to this place when the old-world was destroyed, it gave whoever was here sufficient time to pack up their valuables and leave. After two days of exploration, all I had to show for my efforts was a small metal figurine of a woman dressed in a long coat that reached almost down to her feet and wearing a large three cornered hat. It would probably fetch a good price from Darren, but I was really hoping for more.
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After two more days, I was beginning to think that I’d have to go back and take back another load of whitesteel. The spiders were coming in pairs more often than not, but my Hounds were adapting and it was a rare occasion that I lost even one of them in a fight. I figured that another day of exploration would max them out, and decided to go back as soon as I had my first Wolf.
This was when I started to notice that the ruins were changing. In the previous parts of the ruins, it looked like whoever lived there just packed up and went away. But now I was starting to see what looked like signs of a battle. At first, it was sporadic. A scorch mark on a wall here, and a hole where something with a lot more power than my arquebus hit the ceiling there. Then they started to be more and more frequent, until the extremely well preserved ruins were replaced with actual, well, ruins.
Surprisingly, though the signs around me all pointed at a huge battle that took place all over the ruins, there weren’t any bodies. Even considering the time since the old-world was destroyed and the giant spiders and rats, I’d have expected to at least find the occasional bone. But the corridors and rooms were completely cleared.
I didn’t have a way to tell the time except for the lifespans of my torches, but I think it was towards the end of the fifth day that I reached a doorway that looked to be three times as big as the regular ones.
I still hadn’t found enough goods to fill my backpack, and I figured I’d give myself one more shot at finding something worthwhile before heading back to the broken whitesteel machinery and then back to town, and the large doorway looked promising.
The room beyond the doorway must have been as large as the entire Forrester mansion. The ceiling was at least forty meters high, and the walls stretched far beyond the range of my torch. I entered the room cautiously, but as soon as my Hounds passed through the doorway they began to yelp like crazy. I could see the movement of something very large deeper in the room, and I had just enough light to realize that I’d just discovered where all of the bodies were.
Bones and bone fragments were scattered all over the floor of the large room, but by far the largest amount was concentrated into a huge mound in the middle of the room. A mound that was visibly moving as something climbed on top of it.
I had just enough time to duck back into the corridor and order my Hounds to scatter before a veritable river of spider venom splattered the floor. Knowing that the spider would need a while to recharge its venom, I took my arquebus off my shoulder and jumped back in. None of my Hounds were hit, and the five had already started their well-rehearsed bait and bite routine. Unfortunately, the Hounds were far less effective against what I now saw to be a horse-sized spider than they were against its smaller, dog-sized brethren.
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I could see one of my Hounds dart in and bite the spider’s leg, but the thick chitin was too strong, and the spider kicked the offending Shape away, spitting another stream of venom on the pack mate currently holding its attention. The agile Hound leaped safely away from the venom, but I knew that it was only a matter of time before the spider managed to hit one of them.
I spent the next few minutes crouched quietly near the entrance to the room, studying the spider’s movements. Eventually, I felt confident that I could anticipate its movements, and silently ordered my Hounds to change their tactics. The next time one of them had the spider’s attention, its mate leaped up onto the spider’s back instead of down towards its legs, and started savaging the vulnerable spot between the arachnid’s abdomen and head.
The spider, feeling danger and pain for what was probably the first time since the fall of the old-world, started spinning around madly to try and throw off its tormentor. Meanwhile, I placed the long barrel of my arquebus on a fork-rest, aiming carefully at where I expected the spider to be. When I felt that everything was ready, I ordered the Hound to let go, and the spider’s frantic motions threw it away. Suddenly free, the arachnid stopped in place and spat a massive stream of venom at the Hound, catching it before it could get back to its feet after being thrown.
I had timed the Hound’s throw precisely, and the spider was standing in front of me facing towards the fallen Hound on my left. And leaving the thinnest part of its body, the bridge connecting its head to its abdomen, as a perfect target. I fired the arquebus as soon as the spider started spitting, and the lead ball smashed into the spider, tearing a hole through one of the only unarmored spots on its body. At the same time, the remaining four Hounds jumped back into the battle, striking at its eyes and the already wounded pedicel.
As soon as I fired the arquebus, I ran out of the room and started to reload it, but I needn’t have worried. By the time I stepped back into the large room, the spider was dead and my Hounds were syphoning away its large amount of vim. When the Shapes were done feeding, I sent them to check the rest of the room for more spiders, but could find nothing more that might have proven dangerous. Unwilling to postpone the gruesome task any further, I started to dig into the pile of bones for anything that might prove valuable.
This was the first time I'd run into such a large number of bodies, and as soon as I started to search the large pile, I started to feel that I should stop. That between the battle that took place here and the spiders, these people’s bodies had been through enough. I knew that rationally these people were long dead, and far beyond caring what happened to their bodies. But the more I dug through that pile, the worse my feeling got, and a few minutes after starting the search, I had to give up. I’d already found old-world coins worth more than my entire haul of whitesteel, and I knew that there was more. But I just couldn’t make myself continue.
Having given up on the bodies, I turned to searching the rest of the room. I had no idea what this place was used for, and between the damage from a large battle, the ravages of time and the corrosive nature of the spider venom, there was very little left intact. It was only towards the back of the room that I finally ran into something that wasn’t burned, broken, decomposed or corroded.
The first hint that I was getting close to something important was the signs of battle vanishing. The walls of the room were as scorched and shattered as the corridor leading to it, but the far wall was almost completely whole. It was as if whoever it was who'd fought here, both sides went to extreme measures to ensure that this one part of the room remained unharmed. Time and the spiders were less delicate, of course, and I could see their signs on the wall, but the battle seemed to have passed it by.
In the center of the intact part of the wall was standing a single wooden cabinet, which looked familiar in a way I couldn’t immediately place. As I got closer, I could see that the cabinet was virtually identical to the one holding the Hound Pattern in the Forrester mansion. Except that it must have been twice as tall, and three times as wide. Excitement quickened my heartbeat as I approached what might just be the greatest jackpot I would ever hit, and I carefully raised my hand to open the wooden doors.
As soon as I touched the knob, the entire wooden structure started to crumble. It had survived undisturbed for hundreds of years, but the ravages of time had rotted it to the point where a mere touch was enough to bring it down. I closed my eyes against the dust and the disappointment, and backed away coughing. When the dust settled down a few minutes later, I opened my eyes and looked at the devastation of my momentary hope, and my breath caught in my throat.
A large tapestry was still hanging on a metal frame where the cabinet once stood. The bright white cloth was covered by abstract, dark blue shapes, all expanding from two circles that stood at the perfect height for me to reach out and touch.
This was the largest Pattern I’d ever seen. Which admittedly wasn’t saying much, since the only ones I’d seen where in the Forrester mansion, and while the Forresters were the richest family around, they really weren’t that important in terms of the older, more established parts of the kingdom. Nevertheless, I’d done enough reading to know that most Patterns were about two meters tall and half a meter wide. Some, like the Horse or the Ox Patterns, were a meter wide. But nothing even close to what I saw before me.
There was no way to know what this Pattern would Shape, of course. Nobody had ever been able to guess at a Pattern’s purpose. It was generally accepted that bigger Patterns required more vim to Shape and gave rise to stronger Shapes, but the only way to know for precisely what Shape a Pattern held was to infuse it.
Not that it really mattered, of course. A Pattern, any Pattern, is the doorway to incredible riches. The Forresters went from minor merchants to a minor noble family when they found the Guard Pattern Darren’s Sentinels were based off. It was also the doorway to incredible danger, since people have been known to go to war over Patterns. And I was not even close to being in a position to protect myself against the kinds of enemies I’d make once it became known I had this.
In the end, I had two options. I could leave the Pattern here and forget about it until I became a much stronger and more established Shaper. It might take me years, but I was determined to become prominent enough to own and be able to protect my own Patterns. Of course, the longer the Pattern remained here, the higher the chance that someone else will find it. People were bound to notice that I came back from these ruins with good hauls, and would eventually follow me here.
The other option was to sell it. This one find would net me enough gold to buy access to , if not hundreds of Shapings, saving me years of scavenging. It might even be enough to buy me a marriage into a Shaper family. But just the thought of giving it away twisted my stomach with intense distaste.
I couldn’t decide what course to take. Thinking that knowing what Pattern this was would help me make up my mind, I reached up and placed my hands on the circles. I had no vim, of course, but I could feel the pull as soon as I touched the Pattern. And it was a lot stronger than the pull from the Hound Pattern. I reached towards one of my Hounds and Unshaped it. The vim inside the Hounds would give me an indication of how much I’d need to fully activate it, and if I end up deciding to abort it, I’d still be able to Unshape a second Hound and rank up a Wolf.
The vim flowed into the Pattern, lighting it up with a pale blue light. The maxed out Hound, which held forty vim, was enough to light up a fifth of the large tapestry, leaving me with an even bigger dilemma. If I Unshaped all of my Hounds, I’d be able to activate whatever this was. On the other hand, it’d leave me with nothing except whatever this was. A Pattern that required two hundred vim for its first rank was bound to be huge and powerful, but with no other Shape left, I won’t be able to keep it if I wanted to keep advancing.
Except, I still had that skystone. I could Unshape my Hounds, add in the vim from the skystone, and keep twenty vim for myself, which I’d be able to use for my next s
tep. And I wouldn’t even be wasting the ‘stone, since whatever this was, it was bound to benefit from the elemental alignment. And it was likely to be the strongest Shape I’d ever have anyway.
Mind made up, I drew the vim back into myself and raised my hands from the Pattern. Searching quickly through my backpack I took out the skystone and held it in my right hand. I reached out and placed my left hand and the skystone on the Pattern, and the stone immediately started to crumble as the vim was sucked inside. I added the Hound’s vim and reached out to Unshape the rest of the pack one by one. When the last Hound was gone, I finally felt that the Pattern was fully activated, and the remaining vim stayed within me.
Blue fog started to creep out of the Pattern. It continued to flow for long minutes, far more of it than I’d seen when I used the Hound pattern. My arms were starting to ache from being held against the Pattern for so long when, eventually, the pattern went dark and the fog started coalescing. This, too, took a lot longer than it took for the Hounds to manifest, but eventually I started to see a large dark Shape in the middle of the fog. The fog itself was finally starting to thin, and finally, what must have been half an hour since I started to activate the Pattern, my new Shape became visible.
Chapter 4 – Cerulean Swift
It was light blue, with light grey highlights, and was, without doubt, the biggest Shape I’d ever heard of. Ten meters long, a meter and a half wide and eleven meters tall. Bigger than even the Elephant Shapes from a Pattern that was discovered in the southern parts of the world.
It was also a boat. I wasn’t an expert on boats, but from what little time I spent near the river, it seemed to be a cutter. Specifically, a strange hybrid between a rowing and a sailing cutter. It had a shallow V-shaped hull, and a square stern, tapering towards a pointed bow. A small cabin, perhaps two meters long and as wide across as the hull, stood near the stern of the boat, and a single mast rose halfway towards the bow. It had three different sails, all rolled and tied up. I knew that each one had its own name and purpose, but I had no idea which was which. At the bow of the boat I could see a large wooden steering wheel, along with what looked like a large lever that the pilot could reach easily without leaving their position. In front of the wheel was what looked like a large arbalest on a swivel mount, and though I could see no ammunition for it on the deck, I could guess that it would use temporary Shapings called Ephemera to generate bolts.