Cycling after her encounter with the Matriarch was…different. Talia had gotten used to the pain of the exercise. For the least painful of the techniques, it was a grating, repetitive ache that faded into the background. Like the rasp of a smooth stone against the inside of her bones. For the most painful, it was a sharp, raspy, burn. It tore at the flesh of her muscles like tiny shards of splintered obsidian. It left her breathless and panting at the end of each cycle, with sharp stabbing blades poking at her sternum.
Whatever the Matriarch had done to heal her hadn’t quite reduced the sensation, but it had made it easier to bear. Talia’s mana felt smoother. As if her channels had been greased. The ache of light cycling was an afterthought compared to the mental gymnastics of imagery she had to maintain. The burn of heavy cycling was still agonizing, sending jitters down her nerves and lances of hot acid through her bone marrow. Her Core still felt as if it might tear at any second.
But it was easier to…compartmentalize, and the exercises seemed to run their course just a smidge faster than she expected them to. Talia wasn’t even sure she would’ve noticed if she hadn’t been tracking her progress, per Zaric’s recommendation. The improvement was in the range of scant minutes, but it was nonetheless a noticeable improvement, with no real reason for it.
The development was both heartening and worrisome. On one hand, anything that made the already agonizing activity more bearable was a welcome change. On the other hand, if repairing the damage that led to mage madness had an impact on her channels… Didn’t that imply that the channels themselves were the cause of the madness?
Talia tried her best not to think about that.
The Matriarch gave me time. That’s it. We’ll just leave it at that, implications be damned.
She sighed in relief as the capacity exercise ended, taking a deep breath to dispel lingering phantom knives from her nerves. She winced. The air in her lungs felt heavy and tasted of copper. Slowly, she released her grasp on her empty Core. Her channels ached. The mana that gushed back into her was like a cooling balm spread across a third-degree burn with gentle fingers.
Mreow?
Opening her eyes, Talia reached out to run a hand through Menace’s fur. She felt him tense slightly at her touch, but he allowed it without flinching or scratching, unlike the first time she’d tried petting him.
“I’m alright, buddy, don’t worry,” she whispered.
She frowned as a stray paw began to dig under her leg towards the bag of jerky she’d decided to sit on while she cycled. Talia glared.
“Annnd you don’t actually care,” she muttered, fishing out a piece of dried meat to toss onto the corner of the bed. She rolled her eyes as the lynx bolted after it.
At least he pretends to care.
The past two days had been both productive and quiet. The company had chosen the leftmost tunnel to leave the cavern from, as the other seemed to narrow too much for the wagons to pass through. The path wasn’t exactly a straight shot, but it seemed to converge back onto the Ways through a side tunnel about a day out of Karzurkul.
There had been some debate about the stability of the large gallery that the map table reported further down, but in the end, their current route had been the only real choice, unless they wanted to backtrack. They’d know if the gallery was a problem when they passed through it the next day.
The young woman glanced over at her inner wrist where a band of leather attached a simple metal medallion to her arm. She’d gone with a fairly standard design for her timekeeper: one large, central circle—for the hours and minutes—and another two set diagonally on either side—for the days and seconds. Having it glow consistently was obviously a problem, so Talia had included a tiny array that was coded to make the whole thing light up at the touch of an activator.
Osra had dropped by the day before to deliver it, as well as gingerly hand her a little sack of caltrops. Talia had pored over each of the hundred-or-so little spikes to ensure that the capacitors on them were correctly inscribed.
They were, thankfully, as any issues with the barebones array meant that the bits of iron might explode into shrapnel in her hands. An eventuality that Talia very much wanted to avoid.
Checking her timepiece reminded her that it was time to return to her study of Iricos’ book. Talia repressed the urge to shred the damnable tome, clenching her fists and reminding herself that any information was better than no information.
She sighed, stretching languidly, and leaving her bunk to make a trip to the water closet before submitting herself to voluntary torture.
Immediately, she froze. Her eyebrows knit themselves into a frown.
She’d had her mindsense spread out over the wagon train since they’d left the rest stop. It was as passive as she could get it while increasing its range. The point wasn’t to connect to anything’s thoughts, simply to act as an early warning system of sorts.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
So far, it had been mostly quiescent, with no sign of anything living anywhere near them. It had…fuzzed oddly a few times, returning more minds than could possibly be near them, but Talia had brushed it off as a trick of her imagination. It had made sense. The episodes were so brief that she wasn’t even sure they had happened in the first place.
That had changed.
The wagon had come to a halt without her noticing, and at the edge of her range, towards the head of the train, countless tiny sparks flittered and hovered.
Shit! Are we under attack?! Why didn’t anyone tell me?!
Talia rushed back over to her bunk, strapped on her sword and bracer, stuck her clicker in her mouth, and tied the bag of caltrops to her belt. A mental jerk of thought patterns told Menace to—
Hide-patience-danger hide-quiet-hide
She stuck the silverite circlet over her scaled cowl to hold it in place and bolted out of the wagon.
Immediately, she was assaulted by a buzzing sound. Like a sheaf of paper slapped against a leather screen. The sound waves and disturbance in the air were almost palpable. The situation was made all the eerier by the silence of the delvers. The fighters clutched wands, weapons and shields, hustling with quiet efficiency toward the front of the train, summoned by clicker calls and orders to erect a defensive line.
Talia let out a relieved sigh once she realized that there was no sound other than footfalls and the whisper of fabric against leather, muffled by the buzzing drone.
No fight. Yet.
She fell in with a group of ranged fighters navigating their way through the tight confines of the tunnel. Fighting in these conditions would be a challenge. The delvers were used to the relative spaciousness of the Ways, and though the environment was similar, the natural cave systems of the Deep were tighter and less uniform.
Talia could only hope that the added benefit of not having to defend the wagons behind them would even out the scales.
Moving forward, she spotted Darkclaw, Torval and Zaric crouched on the roof of wagon one before she saw what the problem was. The crew she’d been following set themselves along the narrow gap between the wagons and the cave walls.
Better join Darkclaw and the Delvemaster. If anyone knows what’s going on, it’s them.
The young woman climbed up the ladder to the roof, taking care that her sword sheath didn’t bang against the wood as she went. The trio of officers turned to face her.
‘Situation?’ she clicked.
‘Tunnel blockage, organic; Interloper, unknown,’ came the reply from the battlemaster.
Torval shot her a glance, looking conflicted for a moment. He tapped his fingers on his belt for a few seconds, before calling another question on his clicker, with a narrow focus. Unfortunately, the look of confusion on Darkclaw’s face implied he’d also received it, but that would be dealt with once the situation was over.
‘Enemies forward; question’
The delvemaster’s meaning was clear. Talia focused her mindsense, pushing the net of her senses on the gallery beyond. Apparently, the caravan had exceeded the estimate for how fast they’d be able to traverse the tunnels. That or the map table’s assessment of the path was inaccurate. The way forward was overgrown by the long brown stems of creatively named brownshoot. The species was abundant, edible, and quick to grow. It wasn’t uncommon to find it as a main crop on one of Karzgorad’s many mushroom farms. The only oddity was just how large these had gotten.
The whole situation was eerily similar to the moment in the Chasm of the Lost, when she’d ended up manaburning herself to kill Blight Devils. Talia thanked her ancestors that at the very least, this time there wasn’t any toxic fog to complicate things.
Instead, we have a potential horde of foes waiting on the other side.
Talia’s face screwed up in concentration, then slackened.
The minds on the other side of the blockage were numerous, sure, but they were faint. Incredibly faint. Smaller even than Menace when he’d been nothing but a kit. Their lights in her mindsense were…strange. The fact that they existed implied that they were in some way sentient, but they…flickered.
Almost as if they were somehow falling asleep and then waking up in rapid succession.
What in the…?
Talia realized that it had been a few minutes since she’d been asked to report, so engrossed was she in the mystery.
‘Wait; Standby,’ she clicked.
‘Acknowledged.’
The psion took a deep breath before drawing a telepathic link between her and one of the minds behind the brownshoot barrier. She tensed as she felt the connection draw taught, and her thoughts were projected into the mind of another being.
The world spun around her in a dizzying array of perspectives. Diaphonous wings beat a frantic tattoo. Colour leeched from life. Oily black dripped silver from crackling wounds. Chitinous legs skittered and—
Silence.
Sustenancesustenancesustenancesustenance
The instinct was so strong that it almost overwhelmed her. Whatever creature was on the other side of the connection was ravenous. Not for itself, but for another, larger entity. A—
What the fuck does that even mean?
Before she could rationalize the strange urge, a tinny voice blared in her head, tantalizingly familiar, yet alien at the same time. It ripped into her thoughts with clear distress, making her recoil from her telepathic link—more out of shock than anything else.
Faster than she could comprehend, Talia found herself back in her own head, alone. The tinny voice blipped out as if it hadn’t even existed in the first place. Shaking the dizziness away, Talia reeled, noting absently that she’d fallen and was laying on her back on the roof.
Zaric’s form hovered over her in his cloak, his face a blank void of darkness in the obscuring enchantment. Before she could stop it, her psionics latched on to his mind, feeding her his concern and bewilderment, his relief at the pulse under his fingers—
Talia reigned the rogue sense in angrily, tugging it away from the mage’s mind.
Gods DAMMIT, that isn’t supposed to happen anymore!
But there wasn’t time to be mad, nor was she afforded the luxury of shutting down the sense.
I have to warn them. But first—
Talia gingerly extended her mindsense back into the gallery beyond the brownshoots, bracing herself to find an angry swarm of—
Some kind of insect? Not just, though. There was something larger behind the mass, a guiding will. But it wasn’t quite alive, it was—
She froze.
Where once thousands of microscopic minds had flickered provocatively, there was…nothing. Not just the extreme dimness of sleep, just…nothing.
The insectile organisms were gone as if they hadn’t been there in the first place. Almost as if she’d imagined them, like she’d thought in the beginning. Or maybe... they'd gone dark, like she'd noticed before, but this time permanently.
What the fuck just happened?