“Hwa!” I blinked as the vision broke, Kris having tugged the Sword back out of my hand, staring at me oddly. I blinked at the Sword rather foolishly for a moment. “Give it back again.”

She carefully held it back out, and I carefully grasped it... but the vision was no longer there.

What was there was Elemental Fire and Radiant energy, basically a sleeping sun in the heart of this Sword, waiting to be lit and re-ignited. The swirling helix of energies winding around the blade pulsed and grew, meshing with something deep inside of me.

Above, the dawn crested, and the light of Natural Renewal streamed across the world.

“Truth.

“Hope.

“Valor.”

They would not win, the Light would not stay Lost. The Swords would live on, and someday, a true soul would come to free The Light..

Hope never dies, and there will always be a Light in the darkness...

I blinked again at the feeling of that last thought fading away, finding Kris there holding her forehead, a little blood coming out of her nose.

“Ouch,” she said, opening one violet eye to fix me crossly. “And here I thought I was Gold...”

I inhaled softly, shaking my head. Today’s Feat had auto-Invested, as the call of a bright and shining soul whose faith and belief had never wavered Called across the centuries with Truth, carried on a tide of Hope and Valor, and I had no choice but to respond to it.

One doesn’t learn the Words of Creation on a whim, and despite everything, I had inherited too much from Aelryinth to endorse new ones.

Kris reached out and scooped away the tear that fell from my eye as I stared at the Sword that was alive in my hand. “What did you see?” she asked, both soft and dangerous in that moment.

“I saw that we are their Hope, and that is Truth.”

She blinked once, and only once... and then she smiled.

Oh, what a fucking divine, glorious, bloodthirsty smile she had, all eight canines agleam and ready to bite and tear, a living picture of defiance of the darkest kind, of a Hagchild who had beat their Curse and was ready to rip out the throat of any other great Evil she ran into as a result.

An incarnation of Valor.

“A Quest! A godsblessed overarching grand QUEST! HAHAHAHAHAHAHA...!” she shrieked in total glee, and if the Hag’s edge to it really set the stones to protesting, I wasn’t denying her that laugh at all.

“I think... if Quaver Consumes this Sword, you’ll be able to feel the energies inside, and hear that vision, a connection to those who once bore Weapons like it.”

To my utter lack of surprise, Quaver poked itself out from behind Kris’ waist, and the metal of its pommel seemed to flicker.

I passed the Sword back to Kris, who watched the Lights on it slowly die, saying nothing. She was a Null, and this was not a Weapon made for a Null, so naturally it could not respond to her the same way, even if she was a Natural Swordswoman and a Mastersmith.

But if it was a part of Quaver, that would not be a problem at all.

I held out my hand for the other Sword, my eyes instantly drawn to the three jewels on it. I didn’t care about what it was made of, or the techniques involved, but those jewels were not made by those who made that Sword. There were both darker and brighter things about them.

I set the Sword across my thighs, Kris watching me closely, and I put my hand on that burned-out jewel there.

Fire. Always, there is Fire. The cold things tap the Fire when it rises to the surface, think to tap the pure essence as they build great machines to slave it, and condense it down in the Earth.

But the power of the Fire is greater than they know...

I jerked as that vision sparked by an instant surge from Identify and my Bloodline vanished as well, the roaring of Elemental power and fury that had become a mere whisper still sharp and clear in its alien power... and spoken in true Pyrrhic, as only a Fire Elemental could.

At the same time, the Sword itself had resonated with far more than just Fire. This stone was a condensed form of Elemental Fire, and basically bestowed Firephasing onto the Weapon!

There were three other similar Stones, bestowing Lightningphasing, Coldphasing, and Acidphasing in turn, one for each Elemental power, condensing in places for each of them, Vaults made to gather and congeal the power for use in Weapons like this.

And there was a fifth Stone. One that gave the Sword power over all Elementals, woven of all of them and beyond them as a result.

I could picture all the Stones, as all of them had been embedded into this Blade at one time or another.

“We are going to have to stay here another day, unless...”

I reached down to the burned-out Fire Stone, Elemental power overloaded by arcane energy, and tweaked the Force Structure that held it in place as an Argent Savant. There was a pop, and it came free of the Sword.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

I held it out to her. “The others have similar cuts, but that’s pure Elemental energy, not arcane. It won’t pop for me without Locate Object, which I won’t have until I meditate. Or, you could go searching and finding. I imagine if they had them, they’ll be in that mess there.” I pointed to the room with all the valuables in it as I handed the crystal to her.

She took it, then watched as I moved my hand to the two dark, diamond-like jewels in the Blade there.

Work. Toil. Rivers of Elemental Fire, bound and chained and straining to be freed. The great passage of time, the great machines age and begin to fail, the fire sputters free.

Control circuits at the heart of fire, controlling the flames, Source, Maker, and Slave Stones ever-ready to replicate their unending commands to serve...

I blinked away the vision of fiery golums forever tasked and slaving away at the running and maintenance of arcane machines that themselves were aging badly, with no sign of repair or upgrades from their very, very absent masters.

“These are Blackfire Diamonds, basically control devices for arcane energies. This is a Slave Stone, and this is a Maker Stone the Slave stones are replicated from. There is a Source Stone embedded in the Master Control Golum of the Great Machine in the core of some volcano, and if taken it will end the workings of the Great Machine.

“Embedded in the Blade, they enhance its power perceptibly, making it hit harder, move faster, and bite deeper.”

I presented the Sword back to her, which she weighed, and then looked about for something to set it on.

I reflected that we were going to need more Disks, so I whipped up another one for her, and she set both across its concave setting.

“We may be here a couple of days,” she admitted.

“It is a good place to take a break,” I agreed.

Then she was off into the water to see what she could find down there, and I closed my eyes as a bunch of levers started ticking over.

My Feat for the Level was taken, but the Mastery was still open. Lightning Meta/2, Crackling Spell: +1/die of damage to all spells with the Lightning Descriptor.

Which applied to Healing spells and how much they cured when Born of Two Thunders applied, which meant Boost Mana was affected, drawing more pure mana out of the power of Lightning.

Mystic Theurge/1! +1 Faux Level to Ur-Priest, bringing it to (5) and Valence III’s. meshing Divine and Arcane Magic, Cast Divine spells out of Primary Matrix instead of just Wisdom bonus spells, even select them as Sorcerer Spells Known if I so chose.

And, of course, Write them to my Ringbook for instant recall in emergencies.

Advance Zeks. Advance Crown. Advance Mark, raised to +2 (3)! Work on the multi-Element Protection Necklace for Kris. Flip all them Isparian skill bars, let the new understandings and knowledge percolate, laugh at Alchemy and Magic Tinkering hitting Rank 2, basics that fed into my Alchemy on the other side of the wall, mostly concerned with making spell components and rigid discipline in doing so, rather than depth of facts and lore.

I was done with Sacred Protection +I (II!), working on normal Protection +I now on Zeks.

I treated the painting on the wall with Make Whole and Mending, restoring it to pristine condition before we liberated it, frame and all, from where it hung. While we definitely had it up in our Visual Files to cross-reference, the fact was we now had an idea of where we were in relation to other places, and could fill the details in.

Kris did her refinement work on Crown, and slowly and carefully fed the Sword of Lost Light to Quaver, keeping hold of both Weapons the whole time as the magical Blade Burned down in the Investing Formation, and her own self-forged Blade took it in.

The way her eyes blazed at several points, it was plain she was seeing things that I had not, the power and history of the Weapon transferred right into intimate contact with her Soulbound Blade and the Named Weapon of a Natural Swordsman.

It did not surprise me at all when Quaver’s black and gold theme lightened up with traces of azure, and her Blade began to gleam with internal Lights of its own that had nothing to do with Soul Energy. Even the guard and pommel changed shape, reflecting the make and style of the ancient Order’s Weapon that she was both Consuming and emulating.

I wasn’t the one going to be bearing their Sword, after all. Although if Kris could emulate the same thing with a Staff, Crown was more than willing to hold some Lost Light itself and do so...

In between that, Kris dove for loot, while I both whipped up Disks to stack the stuff up on, and practiced a lot of energetic Rep Counts. My primary focus this time was on No Sound, although that was only partially true, as including the power of the Words of Creation meant there was going to be a psychic chime, even if there was no verbal one, as Sacred power was added to a Good spell.

I wanted it to be applicable to my Valence II’s, which meant a thousand rep counts of some II’s with it attached. Likewise, I wanted Banespell to apply to my II’s, another thousand reps.

I wanted Split Ray reduced from +2 to +1 for my I’s, and I wanted my new Crackling Spell Meta reduced from +1 to 0 for my I’s, both of them taking five hundred Castings.

Needless to say, I also got in all the Rep Counts I might have wished for using Boost Mana Lead through Copper, as all of these Rep Counts took II and III Valence Slots to Cast.

The atmosphere in the dark and gloomy flooded basement cleared up enormously as I sent energies through the air, spells both Matrix and Isparian flying around getting rid of a lot of the moss and charging up the atmosphere with new motion. I had a ton of spells to go fetch, but at least I had a course, now.