The gathering was more subdued than the nights spent in first haven, so many weeks ago.
It wasn’t so much an excess of caution that tempered the crew’s sensibilities, nor was it any kind of moral debt towards those who had died on the way. The walls erected by the mage-commandrum were known to be reliable, and Talia had already seen how delvers mourned: with loud acclaim and open grief, all poured into a mug full of drink.
If one thing had thus far been made clear on the perilous journey, it was that the men and women of the Delver’s Guild were hardy folk, somewhat prone to superstition, but able to bounce back from nearly anything.
That knowledge only made the lack of open revelry more glaringly apparent.
Talia sat on the sidelines, an observer, content in her satisfaction to nurse a mug of ale and simmer in her thoughts.
The expedition so far hadn’t gone as she’d expected.
For one, she had expected to keep her secret to herself— no. She had expected to keep to herself, period. She’d do her job, fix up runework damaged in battles or from wear and tear, and hopefully, once they’d gotten to their destination, she would have been able to slip off on her own, to seek out some ideal trove of old, buried books that would solve all her problems.
I tend to rely on that idea—books— for a lot of my issues, don’t I?
She rolled her eyes and hid a bitter smile with a sip.
Of course, she realized now that her original goal was somewhat naïve. Luckily, the Weave-Fragment and the encounter with the Matriarch had presented alternatives. She didn’t want to get her hopes up, but some of what she’d glimpsed in the unconventional library seemed…promising. As for the rest, well, reality had already subverted her expectations— as it usually did.
Not two weeks in, the young woman had found herself fighting for her life, then forced to do so again barely a few days after. She’d been claimed as a hero, given titles and respect, despite her inexperience, and though they didn’t know her personally, wherever she went, the crew generally had respect for her, or at the very least her position.
When her Gift had come to light, the knowledge hadn’t turned any of the officers against her, though she still harboured a tiny fear of what would happen if it became more widely known.
Mages were, as a whole, misunderstood.
Even Zaric, while respected, was often given a wide berth, as if the crew was all too aware of the danger that he presented. And though Talia could understand a healthy regard for an individual that was, in effect, a living weapon, she couldn’t help but wonder how they would react were he traipsing around collarless.
How they would react to her, if they knew. Would their friendliness and mild awe melt away to irrational fear?
It was rare, but every so often, the rumour mill of Karzgorad churned out a story of poor, newly awakened mages being stoned to death, pushed into the Maw, or meeting some other lethal end of varying brutality.
Talia shook her head and took another sip of her lukewarm ale, chasing the morbid thoughts from her mind.
Today has been a good day. No need to ruin it.
More than her own personal goals, however, the young woman realized that she’d had this idealized version of what delvers did living in her mind, wrought from tall tales that abounded in the ranks of the schoolmates of her childhood.
Even ostracized as she had been, the stories had been unavoidable.
Some girlish part of her had entertained the idea of a group of proud and powerful glory seekers, plundering the depths for riches and lost artefacts. A band of skillful warriors banishing the darkness by force of arms and strength of spirit.
Instead of militarized glory-seeking, instead of larger-than-life warriors, she had found something more mundane: people, and all the ambitions and aspirations that accompanied them. Warriors, yes, fighters, yes, but also scholars, engineers, wagon drivers, cooks and labourers. Sapient beings, with dreams and fears and families. With lives desperately lived to their fullest, and sad, sometimes tragic, sometimes raging ends at the hands of uncaring darkness.
She shook her head again, this time to clear away the faces of the dead.
Damn, guess the moroseness is contagious.
Looking up from her mug, Talia’s eyes roved the circle of stone benches from her vantage point in the outer layer of seats and saw the subdued nature of the gathering for what it was: a splash of cold realization.
They had all been pushed to the brink in the past few weeks. In more ways than one.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
Now, they had time to think, to gather their thoughts. To allow the weight of the burden to settle on their shoulders like the sole remaining structural beam in a collapsing mineshaft.
The arcanist had heard enough mutterings from the crew and enough inferences from her fellow officers to know that by now, the expedition would already have been declared a failure. The risk had become too great, and their losses had been too heavy, too early.
In a real sense, the Delver’s Guild was an important part of keeping Karzgorad running. But at its core, down to the individual level, the organization was there to provide for those who had the will to risk their lives to better their lot. Her fellow expedition members weren’t here to save a city, or escape persecution at the hands of the state, or for some other grand, desperate purpose.
Apart from a few green recruits still clinging to vague fantasies, they weren’t there for glory.
They were there to make a living. To provide for their families or dig their way out of the slums through the strength of their sword arms. To ply their trade or simply gamble their lives on the eventual payout, secure in the knowledge that either way, their loved ones would be cared for by the Guild.
The words constantly uttered at every hardship were a reminder of that.
“They knew the risks.”
The very embodiment of what it meant to be a delver.
And now, that sentiment had been upturned. Flipped head over heels over arse twice, and then once more for good measure.
The risks no longer mattered.
It was do or die, and fuck the risks.
The moment of calm, much as it had been necessary, was only serving to ram that point home, and the worry was palpable, a near-tangible veil over what should have been a lively wake. Especially now that they were within spitting distance of their goal.
Talia could only hope that the delvers’ mettle was all she’d believed it to be as a child, and that Torval and his officers could maintain the course.
With a sigh, Talia set her mug down and picked up one of the books that had been nagging at her thoughts ever since it’d been handed to her. By Torval and Calisto’s estimates, they were only a few scant weeks away from Karzurkul. It was past time that she stopped putting off her reading of An Exploration on the Mechanics of Arcano-Suns.
As Lazarus had said in one of their meetings, sometimes a problem had to feel real before you could truly tackle it.
With a sigh of apprehension and a forlorn glance at her abandoned mug, Talia flipped the book open to the first page.
Just a first reading for tonight. I’ll go through it and take notes tomorrow.
----------------------------------------
Talia frustratedly slammed the book shut, grabbing her mug and downing the pitiful remaining half of her drink in one swig.
Mechanics of Arcano-Suns my ass, all you did was speculate wildly, you trumped-up excuse for a scholar.
The young woman had gotten about a quarter of the way through the thick tome before giving up and skipping ahead, hopeful that the author would eventually reach some form of evidence-based research. Unfortunately, it seemed that the universe had decreed that Talia was owed no such luck.
Most of what the volume contained was theories on how the ancient artefact functioned, accompanied by faithful recreations of what the author, one Emile Iricos, claimed to be the integral parts of its runic assembly.
All of which were in Ancient Runic.
Which meant that all the infuriatingly bland man was doing was postulating, based on…a hunch? Some kind of divinely granted knowledge? At this point, it was anyone’s guess, which seemed to be what Iricos was playing on.
Ugh. At least it details the parts that we do understand.
The basics were incredibly well explained, to the point where Talia was surprised that it wasn’t more common knowledge.
Apparently, arcano-suns functioned by separating a harmless gas out of the air, then heating and pressurizing it to extreme temperatures, until it reached a stage of almost pure energy. Once the reaction began, it was all a case of feeding the containment field and providing more mana for the gas-separating function.
Which is where thousands upon thousands of mages come in.
The containment field seemed to function a lot like Talia’s shield did, a translucent wall—or in this case orb— of force that held in matter but allowed light and to a limited degree, heat to pass through it. It was the third most mana-consuming part of the whole operation, the second being the separator, and the first being the subject of her search: the matrix core.
Iricos’ speculation on the matrix core’s functions was…extravagant. If even a third of what he postulated was true, then it was no wonder that Karzgorad’s sun was failing. According to the scholar, it did everything, with the rest of the untold amount of indecipherable runescript that coated the gargantuan artefact serving as nothing more than information relays and mana distributors.
If he was right—a big if— the matrix core managed all of the tiny minutiae of keeping the arcano-sun functioning and semi-self-sufficient. More than that, the logorrhea-prone scholar postulated that it was self-correcting in some fashion, able to make tweaks to its own structure through a medium that the author…did not describe.
And gives no evidence of whatsoever.
Which, to be fair, was probably because the core was entirely enclosed behind several security precautions, safeguards and layer upon layer of scriptwards.
Unfortunately, the whole reason Talia needed Emile Iricos’ book was the very reason it was useless to her, and probably the reason arcanists back home were struggling to repair the archaic arcanistry.
Talia sighed, setting the book down and praying that a second run-through would reveal something useful.
Who am I kidding? I’ll probably pore over this thing half a dozen times without ever finding anything I can use.
Talia sighed and glanced down at her empty mug, then over to where the casks sat, surrounded by a halo of the now marginally rowdier delvers.
Shows what I get for relying on books for everything…
There wasn’t even anyone to damn for the lack of information. Who did you blame for knowledge lost to time?
With another heavy sigh, the young woman stood, stretching her stiff limbs and making her way over to get a refill.
If it works for them, who’s to say it won’t work for me? If I’m lucky the answers will come to me in a drink-fuelled stupor.
Tomorrow, she’d pore through the book in detail, and then see if the Weave-Fragment held anything of use. She also had a number of smaller tasks to accomplish: a few trinkets that she’d thought might come in handy, a discussion with Zaric about cycling exercises, and some mundane repair work, among other things.
Best to just enjoy the downtime, instead of torturing myself.
Her dreams of quiet contemplation in solitude were shattered when she spotted a tired-looking Zaric angling towards her, a jovial smile on his lips and a pair of foamy tankards in hand.