by Will Wight
All sound cut off.
He turned back to the tunnel, with the only light coming from the dim red glow of Orthos' shell. He fell to the ground, catching his breath, letting the box slide down the slanting floor until it came to a rest against Orthos' side.
He crawled over to it, leaning against Orthos' leg. If he touched the wrong part of the sacred beast's shell, his hair might catch on fire. Orthos could control that while he was awake, but not sleeping.
Propped against the turtle's leathery skin, he looked into Little Blue's face. She seemed concerned, reaching for his forehead.
“Just need a minute,” he said. “Just a minute.” He leaned back, breathing heavily, trying to soothe his spirit.
He didn’t notice when he slipped into sleep.
Chapter 5
Lindon woke some time later to a bright light glaring into his eyes.
He shot up, sending shocks of pain shooting through his joints. His breath came in uneven, painful gasps, but he pushed it into rhythm so his madra would move.
They’re coming for me, he thought. I can’t be here. I have to run. He felt another spike of panic. Where’s Yerin?
He spun, an Empty Palm gathering in his left hand. Over Orthos' bulk, he could see nothing but a sloping hallway lit in blue, long scratches leading down the wall. He turned back the other way: an empty stone wall. His ragged breathing echoed in the tight hallway.
When his mind woke up, he remembered where he was. Alone, trapped in a Monarch’s pocket world.
Slowly, he let the aches in his body drag him back down. His throat was dry and painful, his ribs bruised, his back aching. He covered his eyes with trembling fingers and looked between them at the ceiling.
The circle of runes glowed blue, bathing them in a watery light. He should stand up and check out his surroundings. He could sense that Orthos was still alive, but still unconscious and weak. They could all still be in danger.
Breathe. He had to keep his madra under control.
As a matter of habit, he focused on the Heaven and Earth Purification Wheel cycling technique. It dug at his spirit like he was trying to drill a hole in his own heart, and it felt like metal bands were tightening around his lungs, but it gave him something steady to focus on.
He inhaled and exhaled in revolution after revolution until he could make himself believe that the fight was over. The enemies were gone.
Now that he had a moment to think, the memories closed over him like the icy cold ocean of Ghostwater.
Yerin's scarred face as she tried to reach the portal to save him.
Renfei, poised to speak, as a red line grew down from the top of her head.
His Thousand-Mile Cloud dissipating to mist.
The two halves of Little Blue's habitat lying in the sand.
Renfei's death hit him harder than he'd expected. He hadn't known her well, trusted her, or particularly liked her. But seeing her killed in front of him, so casually...so easily...
She was a Truegold in full armor, and she went from alive to dead in a moment. She didn't deserve that.
And that could have been him, just as easily. More so.
Then there was Yerin.
What was happening to her on the outside? It couldn't be worse than what was happening in here, so at least she'd been spared that, but he couldn't help but run through the possibilities. Without Renfei, Bai Rou could have decided he'd be better off without his apprentices. Mercy and Yerin wouldn't be a match for him, even together; Mercy was only a Lowgold. He could kill them both and say they'd all died with Renfei, and Eithan was the only one who would ask any questions.
Ever since losing his arm, he would sometimes wake up and forget. He'd try to reach for something and see the skeletal stretch of white madra and the sight would strike him as wrong. That wasn't his arm. It would take his brain a moment to piece together the truth.
Separating from Yerin felt the same. Looking down the hallway without seeing her was like glancing down and seeing his arm missing.
A worried chirp shook him out of his cycling trance, and he pulled his hand away from his face. He was surprised to discover his fingers were damp, and hurriedly swiped at his eyes. His father would have given him a lecture for crying in public. There was no one here to see, but it was hard to shake the old fear that he'd be caught in a shameful position.
Little Blue was barely visible against the ground, looking up at him in the azure light. She was pale and thinly spread; he could see right through her.
Only then did he realize that his soul felt much better. He still had almost nothing in either core, but his channels had been scrubbed and cleansed. While he wouldn't want to fight, at least he wouldn't risk permanent spiritual injury with a single Empty Palm.
Carefully, Lindon lowered himself back down to the floor and held out his palm to Little Blue. “Gratitude,” he said, as she clambered up to his wrist.
She'd done what she could for him. And Orthos would not recover on his own.
Yerin might not be with him, but he wasn't alone. These two needed his help.
“Are you hungry?” he asked softly. The Sylvan Riverseed let out a long, slow tone that sounded like a flute.
“I'll find us something,” Lindon said, glancing over at Orthos. “This place was built by a Monarch. There are treasures in here we can't imagine.”
His voice echoed back to him in the corridor.
He picked up the Eye, but pouring madra into it didn't do anything useful. It only pointed him to distant locations; too far away to be any help. Still, he carried it with him just in case. The rest of his belongings stayed with Orthos.
He felt naked without the pack on his back, but the almost imperceptible weight of Little Blue on his shoulder gave him comfort.
Together, they walked down the sloping hallway.
Very quickly, he discovered that the corridor was not empty. There were keyholes like the one at the entrance every few yards. His first few discoveries were causes for excitement; if these were all exits, then he would be able to leave without risking an encounter with the dragon-girl or the fanged fish.
Excitement gave way to disappointment every time. The first time the wall melted away around his gemstone, it revealed a closet packed with buckets. Many of the metal buckets were rusted through, the wooden ones rotted away. There was a puddle of something that smelled metallic in one corner.
The next door was empty except for a pile of shredded and half-burned paper.
The next was a broad storage room with hooks dangling from the ceiling. That was all; just empty hooks.
The fourth contained bedframes. No beds, only frames.
He found a food closet with all the packages torn open, their contents devoured. There was a massive, empty warehouse that looked like it was sized to hold whole ships. But no matter how he explored it, he found no other exit.
He'd been exploring for what he guessed to be an hour by the time he spotted the end of the hall. It had stopped sloping downward long before, so now it was just a straight hallway with a flat wall at the end.
It was distant enough that he guessed there were sixteen more doors between him and the end. He had been trying to visit every door in order, so that he could easily keep track of which ones he'd checked and hadn't, but so far he'd found only garbage and rot.
By this point, his thirst weighed on every thought, his stomach growled, and even this short walk had left his legs soft and trembling. If he couldn't find anything in these rooms, he'd have to return to Orthos and go out the front door. If the gold dragon-girl was still waiting for them...well, he'd have to risk that.
With time pressing on him, he skipped the last rows of doors and moved right to the one at the end of the hall. If there was any one door that might have something in it, this would be the one.
He opened the door, and purple light radiated out, clashing with the endless blue.
The light in the room came from a knee-high well of worked stone, which overflowed with some
glowing purple liquid. It spilled over the edges, pooling on the floor, trickling away into grates. As Lindon watched, a single drop of the purple liquid fell from overhead and landed in the pool with an audible plop.
The room wasn't large, perhaps ten paces to a side, with floor-to-ceiling shelves against each of the three walls. All of the shelves were packed with piles of...junk.
There was a chaos in the air that he felt in his spirit, a mix of brief impressions with conflicting purposes. Random light flashed from one junk-pile or another, giving off colored sparks.
As he moved closer, he saw that some of the piles were metal, others wood. Still others were smooth and thin, as though made out of eggshell. Most of the surfaces had script-circles inscribed in them: mostly to contain madra, but others for a dozen other functions. Only when he turned one over and exposed a last trickle of madra fading to essence did he realize what he was looking at.
Constructs. This was the storage room for constructs.
Their spirits had all faded away over the years since Ghostwater had been closed, except for a few bits of madra preserved by scripts. The fully spiritual constructs would have vanished entirely, leaving only the physical vessels of those bound to some material.
Excitement warred with disappointment. He felt like he should be looking at shelves of treasure, the key to his escape from Ghostwater...but realistically, it had been too long. Some functions of these constructs might be intact, but they wouldn't last long and probably would accomplish nothing like their intended function.
As though to prove it to himself, he flipped over one of the most complete constructs, in which he could sense flickers of madra that reminded him of the Path of the White Fox. With a tendril of pure madra, he activated its script.
“...first success of its kind,” a cold, flat voice emerged from the construct. “There were thirty-one other elixirs refined in the Life Well habitat. Which one would you like to see?”
A beam of light emerged as though to project an illusion in light, but it showed only a meaningless jumble of images.
Lindon grabbed the somewhat functioning construct—if nothing else, he could perhaps learn from its construction—and turned instead to the well.
The liquid inside, which he was careful to avoid with his shoes, was not opaque, as he had first imagined. It was clear water, tinted purple, and it radiated a spiritual sense of focus and determination. Every minute or so, another droplet fell from the ceiling into the pool, which had overflowed over the years and ran down the sides, draining into grates in the floor.
A few dark blobs at the bottom of the pool told him that some pieces of a construct must have fallen from the high shelf overhead. Bracing himself, he opened his Copper sight. The well was a dense concentration of shifting violet images that he associated with dream aura, though it had an equal concentration of blue-green water aura. The two powers flowed harmoniously, and from what he could tell, the water aura might even be stronger.
He closed his sight, thinking. Was this involved in the Soulsmithing process for these constructs, somehow? The one he had examined definitely had a dream aspect to it.
“Oh, don't worry about the water,” a bright male voice echoed through the room. “It's just water.” Lindon wasn't startled by the sudden noise—one of the constructs must have activated because of his presence.
“At least, chemically,” the voice went on. “I know it's glowing and purple, and it would be very reasonable to think 'I will not drink this, because it will melt my insides,' but I promise you, it will not melt your insides. Not quickly, at any rate. Technically, everything erodes your insides slowly, doesn't it? Worth thinking about.”
None of the constructs on the shelves were giving off any lights, so Lindon examined the one in his hand. Still dark.
The voice piped up again. “You should give it a drink. The master used to reward workers with a sip from the Dream Well when they had pleased him. Or when they, uh, needed to complete a project and didn't have time for sleep. Or when they had angered him, and he wanted them to be fully aware of the punishment. Total focus, that's what it gives you.”
Lindon turned his attention to the well.
A cracked and rusted metal ball sat at the bottom of the liquid, in the middle of the other garbage he had dismissed earlier. With every word, light flashed from the cracks in the iron.
Lindon rummaged on a nearby shelf until he came up with a couple of arm-length rods that had once been part of a mechanical construct.
“You're ignoring me, that's what you're doing. A bit rude, isn't it? I mean, don't you think? First person I've spoken to in...however long I've been down here, and I was hoping for a better conversationalist. How long have I been down here, do you think?”
Using the two rods, Lindon seized the metal ball and carefully raised it out of the pool.
“Oh! Wait, what are you doing! Careful, there! Careful! If you drop me, I will take...revenge...on you. Such sweet revenge, like...hitting all your...toenails.”
Lindon lowered the flashing ball to the ground. Now that it was out of the well, he could see that the light coming from the construct was the same purple shade. Now, had the liquid taken on that color because of the construct, or vice-versa?
“Oh wow, I can see so much more from out here. Thank you, giant stranger. Giant...glaring stranger. Are you angry at me, or do you scowl at everyone you meet?”
Lindon almost dropped the ball. “...are you talking to me?”
Everything else had sounded like a conversation, sure. But constructs only said what you told them to say. All of those responses had been recorded illusions, scripted to be played under the proper conditions.
The ball shifted in his hands, as though looking around for other people. “Nobody else in here has much to say, really. Although I suppose I was like that before, too, wasn't I? That's embarrassing.”
Lindon had to ask something that couldn't possibly be a predetermined response. “What is your favorite flavor of pie?”
“...I'm not a pie-construct, am I? What I know about pie could fill a...a little...the tiny scoop you use to eat soup.”
“A spoon?”
“No, that can't be right. That's ridiculous. Spoon. Get out of here with your nonsense words.”
Lindon knelt down next to the construct on the ground, staring intently through the cracks in the metal, aching to pick it up but still afraid of touching the purple liquid. “Are you a Remnant that they bound like a construct?”
“I am the Keeper of the Dream Well!” the construct intoned from within its rusty shell. “I was built right here. Well, not right here in this room, obviously, but down the hall a little. A guide-construct, that was me, made to give people the rules of the Dream Well. 'Congratulations, favored servant! You have been chosen to drink from the Dream Well, so that your labor might serve the great work!' That sort of thing. That's why I have such a pleasant voice.”
“But you're...thinking,” Lindon said, still peering into the construct. In the purple sparks making up the construct's true body, he saw what looked like the spokes of a slowly turning wheel.
“That's a relatively new development. Some time after I fell in the well, I realized I could put words together in new combinations. Then I realized I'd realized it, and that was the beginning for me, wasn't it? The 'realization cascade,' that's what I call it! I don't call it that.”
Incredible. Was it only long exposure to this Dream Well that brought the construct to life, or did this reflect the advanced craft of a Soulsmith skilled beyond his imagination?
“Do you have a name?” Lindon braced himself and seized the rusted construct, cycling madra to resist the effects of whatever the dream-water did.
Nothing. It felt like ordinary wet metal against his fingertips.
“Before landing in the well, I was basically a big ball of memories with the ability to produce sound, so I didn't have much in the way of casual conversation. But they did call me things, let me see if I can reme
mber...garbage, that was a common one. Defect. Junk. Chaff. Waste. By-product of a failed experiment. Failure, that was another favorite. Dregs. Slag. Scum. Refuse. Dross. These aren't very flattering, are they?”
“Pleased to meet you, Dross,” Lindon said, dipping his head slightly to the construct. “I am Wei Shi Lindon.”
“Oh, you have a name too! That's exciting. This is the first real conversation I've ever had. And I am loving it, by the way. Less...intellectually stimulating than I had imagined. I was picturing myself debating with great minds, you know, but this is still exciting! I'm still excited to be talking with...you.”
“Forgiveness, but a minute ago you didn’t know what a spoon was.”
“Yes, but I know how to say 'intellectually stimulating' and 'refuse.' Let’s call it a tie.”
Lindon nodded to the glowing purple water. “You changed after falling in the well?”
“It's designed to boost focus and eliminate mental fatigue in humans,” Dross said. “One sip, and you'll be able to work all night at peak efficiency! That was part of my pitch for the water, back in my prime.”
Lindon moved a little closer to the pool. “Well then, I think I might try a taste.” There were elixirs that refined the mind, and they were expensive.
“If anything, it will make you more alert and focused. Might even make you smarter, which ah...no offense, but...I mean, you should just take a drink. Let's leave it at that. Vials are over there on the shelf to your right.”
Lindon found a rack of thumb-sized metal vials, capped in a substance that felt like wax. He pulled off the cap and dipped it into the well; a small amount splashed on his thumb, but it still felt like normal water.
He still had his misgivings about drinking a strange purple liquid, but he felt nothing sinister from the well. And it was obviously here for a reason; to water the workers made sense. If others had drunk from this, he could as well.
Also, the thirst was starting to get painful.
He tipped his head back and swallowed the mouthful of water from the flask. He expected a stronger flavor, somehow, or some rush of power, but it was just water. It had the mineral taste of spring-water.