The week after Tarren’s and Albon’s enlistment passed in a blur. His family home, once so warm and inviting, was a cold, empty place, thick with preemptive grief. His mining sessions with Rhys were strained; his friend tried to hold a brave face, but he couldn’t hide the betrayal lurking beneath as they continued to farm out the rest of the Shard they had discovered. At least the deposit had persisted; every day, Tarren met his quota with more besides, dumping his excess mana beyond the limits of his strained core into their family’s storage repository. And just so, one day bled into the next until, suddenly, Tarren found himself standing in the plaza, looking around at the milling crowd of conscripts, still wondering how it had all gone so wrong.
His family and Rhys all stood with him. His parents' faces were silent, eyes lost; only Rhys tried to maintain any semblance of life. Albon had already assembled with the other Junior officers, a strained goodbye at their home this morning marking his last interaction with their parents.
“I still think you should let me transfer my [Stone Sight] skill to you.” Rhys complained, not for the first time, breaking the awkward silence.
“Thanks, Rhys... but no. You earned that, and you should keep it. Keep building on our success with the Shard.” Tarren replied, reiterating their old argument.
“It could help keep you alive!” Rhys hissed, offering a wary, sideways glance at Tarren’s parents. “I get why you’re doing this, but to do it without taking advantage of every opportunity you can...” He said, shaking his head.
“Rhys, we’ve been over this.” Tarren said, tiredly. “I’m not taking your skill. And besides, what are you going to do, run off to find a skill-transfer crystal in the 5 minutes before I ship out? And on top of that, who knows if it would even help me. If I end up in an engineering unit, that kind of skill will be way less useful to me.”
Rhys glowered at him for a moment, but then his shoulders drooped. “Fine.” He breathed. “Just... stay alive, ok? Come back.” He hesitated a moment, then abruptly pulled Tarren into a tight embrace.
Tarren, surprised, reciprocated, patting his friend on the back. “I will.” He said. Rhys held on longer than he had expected, but finally released him, pushing him away roughly, eyes hard and brittle. “Come back,” he repeated.
Tarren turned to his parents, next, giving them both one more embrace. His mother clucked over him, adjusting the strap on his pack unnecessarily. “Do you have everything you need?” She asked. Her normally brusque tone warbled, now, an undercurrent of fear seconds from breaking through. “I do.” Tarren said, playing along. “I’ll be back. Both of us will. I’ll keep him alive, and make him resign after his commission ends. You two just focus on meeting your quotas until then, ok?”
His father opened his mouth as if to speak, but then closed it again. His eyes were unfocused, even as he tried to meet Tarren’s gaze. “I’ll be back.” Tarren said again, more quietly, pulling his father into a one-sided hug as well. And then, before he could say anything more, a strict voice boomed through the plaza.
“Recruits!” The man bellowed. “Assemble! Families, step aside!” Tarren glanced around, wondering just where he was supposed to assemble, before a large blue rectangle appeared over the rough stone ground of the square. He began towards the area, pit in his stomach growing only larger, but before he was halfway there, the man bellowed again, “Recruits, I said [Assemble]!”
This time, the word resounded oddly in the space, Tarren feeling like he had heard it from every direction at once. Suddenly his feet picked up, his attention narrowing. He was a soldier, now. A sapper. And soldiers; soldiers followed orders. He began a quick, precise march, immediately noting with pride that the other soldiers in his unit were moving with the same intensity and grace. He didn’t know what formation he was to assemble into, and this troubled him, but a pattern began emerging as the other recruits formed ranks within the square, and some order was always better than none, so he hurried towards his proper place in the form.
Behind him, his mother let out an audible sob, the harsh sound choking off at the end as she tried to strangle it. Tarren’s newfound desire for obedience warred with his desire to turn, to comfort his mother. A voice in his mind told him that it would be better this way, that his discipline in the ranks would soothe her hurts and fill her with pride, but another voice, his real voice, immediately recognized this false line of thinking. And then, just as suddenly as it had begun, the illusion in his thoughts shattered. Order? Discipline? His mother was crying! His precise steps faltered, a recruit following behind him bumping into him as he disrupted their formation. Tarren turned, trying to catch another glimpse of his parents, to offer more words of comfort. He caught a glimpse of an officer shepherding his family back, away from the center of the plaza; his father’s steps deadened, his mothers face buried in his father’s chest. Then, even as the other recruits pushed and jostled him as they formed ranks, the blue rectangle surrounding them all flashed, and suddenly the caverns surrounding him vanished in a pulse of white light.
When Tarren re-appeared, he immediately fell to his hands and knees, spewing his wan breakfast over the stone floor. When his head stopped spinning, he noticed that many of the other recruits were doing the same, though some were staunchly refusing to bend from their regimented position, however green their faces might be. So this is teleportation sickness... Tarren thought. Shaking his head and trying to settle his stomach, he shakily got back to his feet. The world around him was... different. Different than anything he had ever known before. Rather than the slate gray caverns he was used to, here, Tarren was surrounded by a dark, black-red rock that was porous and sharp. Large, cylindrical tunnels wormed out before them, one main passage branching off into innumerable side passages before all faded into blackness in the distance. Their immediate surroundings were only illuminated by four powerful glowing bulbs mounted on metal frames surrounding the teleportation anchor they stood on.
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“Recruits!” The same booming voice echoed out among the new sappers, who were still by and large retching on the floor. “I have not dismissed you from formation!” The man ordered. Tarren saw many of the young men and women on the floor straighten with raw groans. Bitterly, Tarren himself stepped into an open spot in the rough ranks, though he no longer felt the same compulsion he first had.
“Better!” The man called out. “Though far from good enough! We will have to work on that with you over the coming weeks of training and transit.”
The man paced in silence for a few moments, up and down the ranks of recruits. Only then did Tarren realize that the small band of recruits from his neighborhood, all of whom had been directed to the same plaza, had now been joined by a number of other sets of recruits, each from other areas of the city. Their new numbers were staggering; more people than Tarren had ever seen in the largest of mining companies or work groups. And all of them, now, stood in some semblance of order across a set of identical teleportation anchor pads throughout this cavern.
“Many of you may be wondering where we are.” The officer at the head of their company announced, finally resuming speaking. “To answer that question, we are now standing in what is known as the Rocienne’s Pass. More colloquially, you may have heard of it as the Abyssal Labyrinth.”
A murmur cut through the waiting recruits at the name. Everyone had heard of the Abyssal Labyrinth; an enormous warren of tunnels carved by great rockworms throughout another dead world in their system. What was most notable about the area, however, wasn’t the constant danger of getting lost or being attacked by the near undetectable worms, but rather that the Alteriad had one of the few permanent long-distance teleportation anchors in their sector embedded in its central caverns. Unlike more established sectors, where many neighboring planets or satellites would have their own functioning teleportation linkages, the system housing Miner’s Rest lay nestled deep in a dense nebula which blocked most long range signals from propagating through. Somehow, though, the Alteriad had managed to establish one permanent anchor in the system, smack in the middle of the Labyrinth. Tarren had heard many theories as to why only the one anchor had ever been made---some said the bones of the planet housing the Abyssal Labyrinth acted as a natural beacon, enabling robust signal despite the network’s interference; others claimed that the Labyrinth itself wasn’t a planet at all, but an isolated plane in its own right, bordering their dimension throughout the settled worlds---but he had no idea what the truth of it was. All he knew was that it worked. The rare traders who visited Miner’s Rest, and the much more common tax and ore collectors, would teleport in through the anchor point, and then would need to bear the danger of more mundane travel through the winding tunnels of the Labyrinth until they were far enough away from the long-distance anchor to perform a safer, short-range teleport to their final destination Now, Tarren inferred, they were making the same journey in reverse.
“Did I say you could speak freely! [Instant Discipline]” The officer bellowed, instantly cutting off the low murmur of conversation as a number of recruits yelped in pain, rubbing at the backs of their heads. The officer laughed as the yelps of pain died away, a cruel smile creasing his face. “A useful skill, that! And one I daresay you’ll be getting quite used to over the coming days.”
“You see, whatever else you’ve heard about this place, what is most relevant to you is that this will be your home and training center for the next 30 days as we march through the warren and towards our forward staging point. By the time we reach that point and can teleport the rest of the way to the front, I expect all of you to be in top shape, and top recruits! Am I understood?”
A scattered set of “yes”es and “yes sir”s filled the air, before the officer scowled.
“I said, am I understood!” He bellowed. “[Instant Salute]!”
Abruptly, Tarren felt again a foreign influence fill his mind, telling him to snap his right hand up to his breast and belt out a crisp “yes, sir!” but with some effort he shrugged off the strange compulsion, offering only a tepid cry even as the recruits around him snapped through a set of perfect salutes.
“To detail your training and camp assignments, I now turn you over to Officer Boyle. Officer Boyle!”
As the next Legion officer stepped up to the podium and began speaking, Tarren scanned the crowd before him to find Albon. He stood at the front of their block of recruits, in line with a set of other youths standing in sharp attention. Tarren didn’t know what he felt, staring at Albon, as he listened to Officer Boyle detail camp chores and training regimens. Grief, anger, resentment, love? All boiled together into an unrecognizable mass that sat heavy in his heart. As the officer continued speaking, Tarren’s fists clenched subconsciously, his fear and anger flaring as the reality of the situation began to sink in. Scowling, he tried to stuff his hands into his pockets, to force himself to calm down and think clearly. Halfway through the motion, however, he stopped, and slowly fished his left hand free, extracting the small, hard object he had found nestled unexpectedly in his pocket. It was a rectangular crystal of some kind, affixed to a small chain, with a small strip of paper wrapped hastily around the clasp holding the accessory together. Glancing around surreptitiously, Tarren extracted the paper and opened it, immediately recognizing the words within as being written in Rhys’ messy scrawl.
Tarren, the note read, I knew you weren’t going to let me do this if you had your way, so naturally I did it anyways. The skill won’t do me much good without you, and maybe in your hands you’ll be able to get back to us all a bit faster. It barely cost me anything to have it extracted, and they say the process of absorbing a skill crystal isn’t too bad. I’d say I’m sorry... but, honestly, I’m not.
--Rhys
P.S. You really need to watch your pockets better. In this neighborhood? For shame, Tarren. For shame.
Despite everything, Tarren couldn’t help but smile at the note. It was just like Rhys, to be arrogant enough to write the damn note, then bold enough to actually pull off dropping it in his pocket unawares. “For shame indeed.” Tarren whispered, the words bittersweet.
With a sigh, he let his hands clench after all, his left hand now clutching his new perception skill, a gift given freely of just about everything Rhys had to his name. He would find a way out of this, for him and Albon both. There was always a way, if you just look hard enough. And he would never stop looking.