Senkovar rubbed his head. Serenity doubted it did much. At least, it wasn’t doing much for Serenity. Senkovar seemed to come to the same conclusion, because he still had a pained look on his face when he lowered his hand to his side. “Despite the screaming, I was able to uncover one thing: this is a Near Point, a point where the World allows easier access to the World Core. They’re almost impossible to find from the surface, but at the same time they’re the best places to talk to the World Spirit if you can find them.”
Serenity frowned. He’d never heard of a Near Point, yet the description was clear enough that he was fairly confident he’d been to one on Lyka. It explained why the Eternal Church was able to mine greenstone from the World Core without being nearly as deep as the center of the planet had to be. That one even had a similar sort of space warping; it was provided by greenstone-powered enchantments. Serenity had the sneaking suspicion that they were based on the natural space warping he saw here.
Worse, he was fairly certain that the presence of a Near Point explained how Stojan Aith was able to steal a part of Tzintkra’s core. “That seems like a huge vulnerability.”
The World Shaman nodded with a frown. “It can be. I’ve seen things you wouldn’t believe. I don’t know why they exist, but every World has several, if you can find them. World Spirits tend to hide them well.”
Serenity shook his head. He doubted Senkovar had seen anything he wouldn’t believe. “Both times I’ve seen something like that, it was used to attack the World Core and break bits off it. It can’t have been hidden that well.”
“And I’ll bet it was found by people who lived on the planet both times,” Senkovar countered. “There’s only so well anything can be hidden. People stumble across things they shouldn’t all the time. Here, though … how did the World Eaters find the Near Point?”
Serenity shook his head again. He had no idea.
Senkovar nodded slowly, then sighed. “We’ll need to find that out. At least there’s one thing we can be sure of: the tunnel should be relatively safe. It’s not exactly dug through the ground, after all.”
Serenity didn’t know enough to say either way about that. Natural magic often wasn’t safe, but when it was safe it tended to be extremely safe. It all depended on how it was created. “Are you saying that Near Points are literally created to help people approach the physical World Core?”
“Maybe?” The World Shaman didn’t sound entirely confident. “That’s how they behave. It’s hard to hurt anyone at a Near Point. They’re almost impossible to damage.”
Serenity looked at the ground and saw exactly what he’d expected: the same thing as at the surface. “Then why are there small scratches and holes in the floor?”
Senkovar gave a large, expressive shrug. It was clear that he didn’t have an answer for Serenity. “If I knew that, I’d know what the World Eaters are.”
With that thoroughly unsatisfying answer, they moved on. Serenity asked more questions, but he didn’t get any more useful answers. The entire time they walked, the tunnel was completely stable with no cracks or even any shaking or shifting. There was a slight breeze that headed upwards; it didn’t seem to have an origin. It was reassuring but at the same time a little concerning.
The tunnel continued downwards for several more hours. It felt like they’d gone down farther than they had in Lyka to reach the core, but Serenity couldn’t be certain they had. He had no practical way to measure distance, not when the two situations both had effects that changed distances in nonlinear ways. All he could be certain of was that they were at least a mile down and that they didn’t seem to be likely to emerge from the far side of the planet any time soon.
Eventually, a glow appeared in the distance. It flickered almost like firelight, but it was a bit too yellow. Soon after that, they emerged from the tunnel into a larger open area that held a huge yellow-orange crystal. Serenity had to brace himself against the World Spirit’s pain as he felt the mana wash over him. It was a disgusting experience, rich mana and essence filled with sheer agony.
When he finally managed to pay attention to anything outside himself, the first thing Serenity noticed was that Blaze had a hand on his shoulder and was casting some sort of spell. It was probably the reason he’d recovered as well as he had; Blaze was protecting him or soothing the pain.
The way he’d simply locked up brought a possibility to mind. “Is the pain why you’ve never managed to get more from a World under attack by World Eaters?”
Senkovar shook his head. “For some, yes, but many others are able to speak in the early stages. They don’t know what’s wrong or where.”
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That seemed strange to Serenity; he’d tracked down the location in only a few days by following the pain. Of course, Serenity wasn’t a World. He wasn’t the one in pain and he hadn’t felt it slowly build from an itch into agony. Perhaps more importantly, he had experience with pain. He could withstand it better and he also expected to be able to localize it. Perhaps a World simply didn’t know how?
Maybe it did make sense.
“One of us is going to have to go in there,” the World Shaman continued. “Normally, I’d say that was my job, but you’re the one that located it; you should have the choice of which of us goes inside first.”
In there? Serenity followed Senkovar’s vague hand gesture towards the crystal and immediately wondered how he’d missed it.
There was a small tunnel that led into the crystal. Unlike the tunnel through the rock, the tunnel into the crystal was not smooth; instead, it was wavy and even jagged in places. It was a little taller than it was wide, instead of the opposite, and all of the walls were only sort of flat, covered with indents that looked almost like scrapes more than anything else. The floor was similarly rough. Whatever tool was used to remove the World Core to make the tunnel seemed to be small and inefficient.
That was probably part of why it hurt the World Core so much. The mining of Lyka hurt Lyka’s World Core significantly, but it wasn’t the same level of pain. The other possibility was that the pain was more severe the closer to the middle of the World Core the damage was; that would explain a lot. Serenity wouldn’t be surprised if both were factors.
The tunnel in the World Core was also much, much smaller. At a little less than five feet in height, it was too short for any of them to walk through without bending over; fighting was not going to be easy either. Serenity hoped to avoid fighting, but he had no confidence it wouldn’t be necessary.
Of course, neither he nor Senkovar had to fight physically. They were both mages.
Serenity stared at the tunnel for a long moment before he made his decision. “I’ll go in.” He was too curious to pass up the chance and with his shield Skill there wasn’t much that could hurt him physically; he was a better choice than almost any mage.
“If the pain gets too bad, come back out,” Blaze ordered before he took his hand off Serenity’s shoulder. “I don’t want to have to drag you out. I’ve done what I can to protect you, but it will only last so long.”
That gave Serenity all the excuse he needed to move quickly as he headed for the glowing crystal tunnel. He had to duck to enter, then move forward in an awkward crouch. It was just tall enough that walking hunched over and in a slight crouch made more sense than crawling, but it was just as uncomfortable as that sounded as the tunnel continued.
Oddly, the pain from Themrys faded once he was a few feet into the crystal, even though the mana and essence density increased. Serenity wasn’t certain why; was it possible the this was why other Worlds weren’t able to pinpoint the location?
If Senkovar didn’t know, Serenity didn’t know who to ask. Senkovar was a World Shaman and on the Order’s Council; those were the only sources Serenity knew of for this sort of information. If the Voice knew, it wasn’t saying anything.
The tunnel wasn’t even close to a constant width, but fortunately it never narrowed to less than three and a half feet wide and the height stayed above four and a half feet. In one of those places, Serenity gave up and shifted to a crawl; it was faster. In fact, while traveling at a crawl was slower than walking, it wasn’t that much slower.
The tunnel curved as he proceeded inwards. It wasn’t quite trying to be a spiral; in fact, it seemed to be trying to stay more or less straight, but it wavered back and forth like it wasn’t sure where it was going. It reminded Serenity of trying to walk in a straight line in a forest; without a fixed reference or enough practice, it was easy to get turned around.
If Serenity had to guess, whatever made the tunnel didn’t think about looking back to be certain they kept it straight until the exit was already out of sight. That meant that they could only guess which way was forward. Of course, it was also possible that they didn’t care about a particular direction, but in that case why was it a tunnel?
Serenity’s claws clicked against the crystal. The noise drew Serenity’s gaze downwards and he noticed that each click also resulted in a slight dimple in the crystal.
The dimples looked a lot like the ones from the floor of the larger tunnel, so he took a close look at the floor of the crystal tunnel. There were far fewer dimples than there had been, but they were there. They weren’t exactly like the ones he left; if he had to guess, whatever he was following had claws that always peeked out a bit behind its paws, while Serenity’s claws only hit the crystal when he crawled with his hands open instead of fisting them and supporting himself on his knuckles.
The marks also weren’t in the same places. His first thought was that it might be a dragon, but the shape made by the dimples was wrong for that as well. Whatever he was following was not a dragon but had claws that could cut the same way a dragon’s claws could. For now, that didn’t tell him anything other than that he shouldn’t expect to face a human or anything else that depended heavily on equipment. He couldn’t immediately think of another species that would fill those criteria, but maybe a demon of some sort might?
The claw pattern bothered Serenity; it looked familiar, though entirely too large. He just couldn’t say why.
It was only another few minutes before Serenity started hearing a periodic screeching noise from ahead. It was loud enough that Serenity was certain he would have heard it earlier if it had been happening; something must have changed.
Serenity kept going until he came around a gentle curve and saw something ahead of him that made him freeze in place.
White fur with black stripes.