Corvayne pulled a tooth out and threw it aside onto the dusty platform. Around him, scorched stones and packed dirt showed signs of him and Rio's fight against a set of elite Daoboys and a few Red-Line Sect goons mixed in. Corvayne took a stave and a better gun off their adversaries.
He was glad he had asked everyone else to stay home. If not for Rio being there he would have lost, but he was tough enough to keep plugging away with shadow abilities while she showed off her prowess in martial arts, gun-play, an enchanted lasso, and the ability to instantly switch to riding a flying sword both as defensive and offensive measures.
She had switched back to her main persona, the black-eyed and dark robed former leader of the sect, hair now the color of dried blood. She had pulled her punches with the Daoboys but not the Red-Line Sect members, their already crimson robes even darker where she had punched them full of holes.
She had taken some damage, and Corvayne had used 'Back Mend' to help fix her up, then followed her into the huge stone door, shaped like a guitar and showing signs of being forced open.
“If either of those two Red-Line sect members we ran into are in there, we are in for a fight.”
Corvanye nodded. [[Unity]] let him feel a Gylwin-worm thing latch onto his boot. If they needed backup, she'd be there. But he was more concerned with the agitation his [[Unity]] link was feeding him from his friends and family at the academy.
Someone sent him that they were on the move and to stop worrying, so he focused on entering the structure. The stone he had assumed the door had been made of was actually petrified wood, shaped into what was likely a functional giant guitar.
“Everyone knows the song to enter, but it's beyond here that the dangers of this hermitage become clear. We must get to Master Dusty if we are to have any chance of salvaging our Sect.”
Corvayne adjusted his latest cowboy hat. “I'm still a prisoner of the Sect.”
“Don't be silly. At this point I'd put you in charge of training our initiates. I've heard how well your disciple Bell fights.”
“Girlfriend.” He corrected, getting a knot in his guts despite assurances that everything would be fine. Cool air rushed out of the doorway as they finally strolled through the threshold, quickly plunging into a blue glowing corridor that reminded him of the Magus's prison. In fact, the carvings looked suspiciously like the ones he had seen before, something like a king asking his minions to seek a warrior above warriors.
Rio ran a finger along the mural. “The goal of the sect was to train or find the 'chosen one'. Dusky copied much of this from memories of the lost village, where he and his master hailed from.”
Corvayne nodded, and caught what looked like a carving of Spears-Like-Water and Diamonds-in-Passing, in their 'real' forms of water and diamond centaur.
“Likely my village, given I'm seeing people I know in these things.”
Rio stopped. “Another sign fate brought you here.”
They walked down a broad set of steps into what looked like a large circular arena. Dozens of floors connected by a few steps formed rings, forming a depressed 'bullseye' shape. Each ring had dark stone passages leading down, and before each was a model of a town carved from stone.
“Only Master knows the true way here.”
Corvayne frowned at that. “He didn't trust you?”
Rio looked bitter. “Not enough to walk into his inner sanctum unless he invited me in.” She gestured to a door where signs of impotent violence had been waged. Corvayne saw piles of bullets, broken drills, and a few broken weapons. Looking at essence flowing through the room wasn't as much of a cheat as he hoped. The door had a complex and well layered pattern.
Corvayne looked at the models. They were unfamiliar, cities and camps that varied from clifftop fortress towns, to shantytowns built around a harbor to a megacity with arcing bridge like buildings that erupted from the stone like a thousand needles. Each one was placed in front of a doorway, and Corvayne could see the hallways did something, though any given one looked identical.
“I take it the wrong path chops you into cubes?”
Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.
“The wrong paths are all different fake hermitages, full of traps and danger.” Rio added, rubbing her nose. Corvayne almost instantly got the sense she had tried more than a few times to sneak in. He moved from city to city, just trying to see if there was a pattern.
“With fifty doors, there's probably a right answer...”
Corvayne stopped as he recognized his village, the oasis and Magus's prison catching his eye. “If I'm meant to go in here, this is the right one for me. This is where I'm from.”
He moved to the archway it was placed before and stepped down a few steps, air becoming colder. He heard Rio's footsteps following him and then there was a weird sucking sensation before he popped into place in what looked like a moss floored sauna. A moment later Rio appeared, bumping into him and pushing him towards the only visible door.
Corvayne's time raiding dungeons had made him wary of just one exit to a space. He looked around the room and saw the door was practically glowing. He let his shadow hands out, gently running his fingers along the wood walls and benches that encircled the room, checking the stone ceiling which looked like it was, indeed, enchanted with what he recognized from the Juggernaut as hot and cold water. There was something off about the light, even though it had a simple loop that would give off radiance.
He gently put a hand on Rio to stop her from opening the door, then with a shadow hand reached up and screwed the light firmly into place. With a click the door shut and the mossy floor started to grind its way downwards.
“How did you know?”
“Lucky guess.” Corvayne admitted. The elevator stopped at a wood door that opened on its own. Corvayne lead the way into a softly lit two story chamber, resembling an atrium. Water mixed with natural light from the ceiling, falling on a garden with a curling tree at the center. Vibrant moss formed the carpet and clung to bright red wood posts. It looked peaceful, but Corvayne could see once again many doors, all lined with essence hinting at trouble once they had to start searching for the way forward.
Wordlessly, Rio lead the way, padding across the mossy floor and looking at each door, marked with a simple number. Up the stairs, they continued into the teens with 19 doors in all. Corvayne went back down the stairs and didn't see anything that triggered [[Understanding]] or any other sort of senses. His compass spun, the 'right path' to the Sect Leader too difficult for it to assess.
“I don't see an obvious path.”
Rio rubbed her forehead. “Let me think.”
“What do you know about the Sect Leader that might help you guess? Number of disciples? Siblings?”
Rio moved through a gap in the water to sit on the lip of the tree's planter. Corvayne had a brief irrational fear of a steel-whip tree coming to life before he relaxed. [[Unity]] gave him a sense that aside from Rio, there was nobody around. From her, conflicting emotions. Pain, regret, joy, humiliation, pride, love, and terrible loneliness.
“He found me at my lowest, took me in, made something of me, and never let me cross the line of disciple and master. Then he left me to try to carry on his work while he went in here.”
Corvayne waited for her to elaborate, to maybe tell him a secret code he always used for everything else, but she just looked down at her black robes and boots. He took a deep breath and felt the emotions drifting from her. Frustration and shame and embarrassment. Probably for the state of the sect and that she couldn't pull a number out.
He did a lap of the doors again, tapping his spear as he walked and looked at the doors and walls and carvings. No clues, as they looked identical to his eyes. Just the numbers. No hints of essence through the walls, making him suspect the entire mountain was dotted with thousands and thousands of chambers. He circled back to where Rio was sitting and sat near her.
With [[Unity]] he prodded Gylwin's worm. It teleported onto his shoulder with no noise or disturbance of air.
He thought about the doors, then asked if she had any ideas through the link.
She suggested the door directly opposite where the elevator took them. In this case, door 6. No reason, just that when one was designing a space they'd have to go into and out of, it made sense to have a straight path.
Corvayne disagreed, because there was a path, which was the door that had been heavily blasted... No he didn't have any better ideas.
He stood up, did a few more laps and spent some time looking at six. Like all the others, a simple wood door, no difference in the enchantments around it. [[Understanding]] didn't trigger any warnings or urge him to go in. He tried to ask Compass for wrong doors and got the spinning.
“Rio, let's start trying these doors. They clearly are also going to try to brute force it. If it recognizes you, it might ease up to let you protect your master.”
She stood and came up next to him. “Fine.”
He opened door six, and stepped through...
Into a huge wood and stone hall. The design was striped, as if there were two rooms and someone took slices of the wood room and mixed it with stone. Corvayne stopped Rio by holding an arm out, and ended up feeling her chest a moment before she took a half step back.
The entire place was glowing with energy that screamed 'traps' to Corvayne. He could see a path through to the other side. Annoyingly, there was essence strings in the air that would trigger whatever the rooms traps were if someone just flew to the other end.
“Walk where I walk. Everything else is glowing with danger.”
He paced along the stone end of the room, opposite the wood on the other side. Stepping onto the first wood segment, he felt it wobble. Looking at the path, he realized it had spots on the walls and ceiling. He stepped back. The segments of the room spun, which would be difficult to navigate alone, let alone leading Rio blind.
“I'm going to pick you up.”
Much like a cat dumped in water, this sent off alarm in her, so Corvayne lowered her gravity and swept her off her feet. She wrapped her arms around him, which seemed odd because her agitation made him think of a boar about to charge or something. Maybe this place messed with people's heads.
Using gravity he lowered their weight to almost nothing, then with his spear guided them onto the wood segment and started drifting them to the wall, staying under strings set up to prevent him from flying to the ceiling. He used Gravity to move the next segment 90 degrees, the stone floor pivoting through the essence without setting it off.
The path required them to backtrack sometimes. Corvayne wondered how someone was supposed to do this without seeing flat out it was a trap. He wasn't interested in finding out what it did.
At the end of the room, the doorway was at the center of a wood wall, four ladders built in to let someone who made it past crawl into a square center hole. Inside, there was a room with potions that screamed danger. All of them were locked with chains wrapped around crystal containers attached to the wall. The lighting reminded Corvayne of department store displays.
“I would not take any of those.” Rio said, and Corvayne was inclined to agree. One of them clearly had three burning eyes in it, and [[Unity]] made him aware most of the potions had feelings that were a mix of anger, madness, hunger, and darker mixes of them.
Instead of going anywhere near the crystal prisons, they stepped on a mossy platform and were back to the atrium.
Corvayne sighed. “One down, eighteen to go.”