Chapter 8
The Fortress
Lumen hadn’t been lying when he spoke of the marvel of the Wind Fortress. That was something evident from the first step inside. The lights powered by the Fortress guided their way downward, with Lumen taking the front, and the second their party was inside, the door sealed itself shut.
“They tend to not allow visitors, but make exceptions for we Dimidians,” Lumen explained with a laugh. He looked in good spirits, though his eyes spoke to the loneliness of his journey. That had to be the reason he was so joyful now. “It took me a while to convince them to let me out and help when you were clashing with Charles. Though, I’m not sure if it was their choice.”
“Charles…” Walter grumbled, neither impressed with the new locale, nor joyous. His mind was still back on the battle, or whatever piece of his past was keeping him locked in hatred.
Terrill decided that Krysta seemed capable enough to walk on her own the further they descended, entering the domain of the Lifeblood, and he let her go so that he could round upon Walter. “I’m guessing you have a problem with him disappearing, is that it?”
“I had him…” was the follow-up. Terrill’s eyes twitched, and he slapped the older man about the face. Walter responded only by turning to look at him.
“We’re on a tight schedule here. I don’t know and don’t care about why you were hunting Charles, but we repeatedly told you to cut it out and you nearly got yourself killed. I thought we all learned that lesson back in Invaria.”
“What happened in Invaria?” Lumen whispered to Krysta, the boy already taking a shine to her. She wasn’t as forthcoming as he would have liked, folding her arms at the confrontation. Walter looked away from Terrill. He was wearing shame or annoyance, or just a mixture of both. Terrill didn’t care.
“Walter, right now, your vendetta almost got you killed and made more work for the rest of us. Is taking one man’s life really so important with an entire continent or world at stake?”
“You couldn’t understand,” he said, brushing Terrill aside to follow the stairs, but Terrill yanked him back. “That man. That knight took everything from me. He burned my town, killed my family and countless others, leaving it a complete wreck. I won’t rest until he feels that same pain.”
“Charles did all of that?!” Lumen said, shocked to hear his Guardian spoken about in such a way. “That’s not possible! Charles isn’t that kind of man!”
“You saw the proof with your own eyes. He wouldn’t hesitate to kill a single one of you.”
“That wasn’t him! Charles is a good, kind man, and Atrum could not have been controlling him whenever you say this happened. He isn’t like that!” Lumen was desperate to believe it, and Terrill believed it, too. Charles may have been brusque, but certainly not murderous. Though that moment in Golbrucht’s castle might have spelled otherwise, it was easily waved aside.
“Lumen, let that go. And Walter, I need to know if I can trust you. People die all the time, but you don’t see us flying into a rage every time.”
“No, you just would throw yourself into attack after attack. You’re hardly one to lecture me, Terrill.” Walter broke free. “You can trust me to get this done. I’ve come this far. But if there’s ever an opportunity afforded to me, I will strike him down, and I will use anything I can to do so. When that time comes, don’t stand in my way.”
He was done, and he made that clear by proceeding down the stairs. Terrill wanted to shout after him, but knew it would do little good. Lumen, on the other hand, was downcast, and Terrill sought to cheer the boy up after having heard his friend being slandered. “I wouldn’t worry, Lumen. You know Charles wouldn’t do that.”
“Mm,” he vocalized, his earlier high spirits now vanished. Krysta looked between the two, omnipresent worry on her face until Lumen lifted his head to afford a smile. “You’ve certainly surrounded yourself with different people, Terrill.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” Terrill said with a groan. Lumen started moving once again, beckoning the others to follow him. “Two of our companions are on Niveus right now, and they’re as colorful as can be. Who’d have thought when I decided to be your Guardian we’d be in this kind of situation? Ah, which reminds me, Lumen, this is Krysta.”
“A pleasure, milady,” Lumen spoke with all the airs of formality. He even bowed a bit to take her hand, though she was bemused by the action. “How did you and Terrill meet?”
“Long story,” both replied. Lumen found the humor in that, while they found naught but embarrassment. Krysta picked up the slack in conversation. “So, er, Lumen, tell us about this place?”
“Ah, right, the Wind Fortress!” Like the building sensed his words, they reached the bottom of the stairs and everything opened up to them. Terrill found the lights blinding when he stepped in after the comparative darkness, but when they receded, he found they had stepped into an atrium of mechanical whirs and floating people. Walter had stopped there, as well, staring with dead eyes. “A mechanical marvel of ancient devices. Any other place in the world pales in comparison to this! This is just the observation room, where it would seem wind users can sense the going-on within Gladius. They were even able to sense your arrival, along with the armies clashing on the Valordan Plains.”
That sucked the joy right out of the visit, turning it from sightseeing to one with a purpose. Terrill’s eyes sharpened and Lumen appeared to get the message, ushering them out of the room with speed. He led them into another corridor, this one brighter than the entranceway, which fanned out to a larger section with various halls and rooms down each end. The labyrinthine structure didn’t surprise Terrill, but the amount of people in all of those halls did. Not to mention, it reminded him of a bizarre fusion between Serotin and the Turtle Stone Resort, with the energy similar to that of the Academy students, each person dressed in robes of green.
Lumen had no explanation on this, and Terrill began to guess he only knew the scantest of details about the daily operations inside the Fortress. Terrill wrote the corridors off as dormitories and followed Lumen to a less populous hall. There were still more than enough people, but each of them was less relaxed and more goal-oriented, which became more obvious when the group needed to squeeze against a wall to let one of them hurry through. Their reasons were made plain when they emerged outside of the hall and into what could only be the very center of the fortress.
It was a cavernous hall that took up most of the space, lined with catwalks that people marched across loudly as they did their work. Pulleys and chains existed, with large bridges spanning the length of the hall to allow easy access to cross. Lifts went up and down, working far smoother than the rather rudimentary ones inside the Luster Mines. Terrill found himself fascinated, running to the edge of one of the catwalks and looking down.
That revealed a design yet more complex than anything he had seen in the fortress thus far, with things that pumped steam and tunnels that filtered out the air with pulses of wind sent down them. In other places there were giant fans that cooled the air and provided the wind necessary for the place to obtain its name. Many more people were working down there, and Terrill suspected that each person worked in service of keeping this monstrous machine alive, if grounded.
Soon as he had wondered that, Terrill managed to peer into the very depths of the fortress, all the way to the lowest level, where a green, sickly glow was given off. It was too far down, but the glow looked cordoned off with very few people approaching it. If he squinted, Terrill thought he saw the same metallic substance that made the passages for the Lifeblood.
“Lean over any more and you’ll fall, young man.” Terrill jerked back to see they had been joined by an older, bald man with bushy eyebrows. His foot almost slipped, but Krysta propped him up, patting his shoulder.
“Terrill, Krysta, this is Elder Titus.”
“Chief engineer of the Wind Fortress, as it were,” the elder said, offering his hands to shake both of theirs. “I apologize for our brusque treatment of you in the passages, but we must always protect this fortress until the day it flies again. Though you are as crafty as your companion, Dimidian.”
“Dimi…” Terrill stumbled forward, rocked by the title he was bestowed. “You know about Dimidia and Adversa? Are you allies of Alexander?”
“That’s not possible,” Krysta said, looking away and down. Her eyes were drawn to the Lifeblood, which made Lumen adopt a curious expression. “They’re not Priscan.”
“Indeed, I’ve no idea who Alexander is, and I’m not from Priscus. I, as are all of us here, am a descendant of the Wind Tribe. Come.” Terrill was still reeling from the older man’s words, but a thump on his back started him moving again, nearly bumping into Walter as he did so. When he managed to get his head on straight, he walked around his irritable companion to approach the engineer with many questions on his tongue.
“I don’t understand. Wind Tribe? And your knowledge of the two worlds? And how do you know I’m Dimidian?”
“The wind’s whispers. Though you can’t expect me to answer every question of yours when you ask them so quickly, hoh hoh.” Titus was enjoying his needless ribbing of Terrill, but the Guardian’s curiosity was too large to be contained. None of his companions looked quite so interested, though Lumen kept close, enjoying the companionship. Krysta’s eyes never left the Lifeblood. “As descendants of the Wind Tribe, we read the winds in both worlds, though it is far easier in Adversa, I am sure. Granting, we just have knowledge, and not the will to act on. Our winds could tell you were of a different matter than the ether of souls.”
“Does this mean you’re Blessed?” Walter grunted, taking his only interest.
“No, no. Merely informed. When the world was created and each of the Lifebloods given a purpose, six tribes were created to watch over each,” Titus explained. He paused a moment to usher them onto an elevator, pressing a few buttons before resuming. Everyone but him jerked as they felt the platform descend, floundering for something to hold to while the engineer laughed. “Each was given a specific task at the splitting of the worlds. Most of it was to watch over the region and its Lifeblood, though the tasks changed slightly. The Earth Tribe cultivated the lands, while the Fire Tribe looked after natural occurrences. The Dark Tribe kept a close watch on the backend of the flow, while those of the Light Tribe, or Priscans you could say, kept an eye on the flow of souls.”
“And…your role?”
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“To protect the skies and quell conflict, and to bear the knowledge of both worlds in order to see to this task. All tribes were given this knowledge, though in modern times, I’m afraid most tribes have either died out or forgotten their knowledge altogether. Worship of the goddess has replaced mandates for protection.” Titus wasn’t concerned by this belief, but for Terrill, it made more than a few things slot into place.
His face creased with thought, recalling the stringent religious bent of the Turtle Stone Resort, and the belief in the Tarkinder Volcano being an act of the goddess. If the Fire Tribe had been one to oversee the natural order, then it was entirely possible that Micah and his resort had been born out of that. The truth had been twisted over time until nothing remained but a shadow of the purpose once given. Had that been coincidental? A mere victim of time? Or was it more purposeful?
His ruminations didn’t go unnoticed, as the others stared at him. When he realized they were, his first thoughts were that he began to mumble aloud. Then he realized he hadn’t said anything as their lift completed its journey, shuddering to a stop. Terrill didn’t leave at once, his mind continuing to race with the possibilities of what this new information meant, and how it connected back to the Fiends, if it did at all.
No, it has to…otherwise there’d be no reason to be here, Terrill concluded, smacking his palm with a fist. The loss of the tribes may have been coincidental, but the ones who kept the peace being grounded and unable to do anything but conceal themselves? There was something fishy about that.
“This place is well-constructed,” Walter said coolly, a question which drew Terrill back to the reality of where they stood, in the belly of the mechanical beast. “It reminds me of some of the things they’ve tinkered with in Rotarin.”
“That is no surprise,” Titus said, nodding his head and causing each bushy eyebrow to bounce. “When our fortress landed, some parts broke away and likely washed ashore elsewhere. Although, even before that, the ancient devices were always of great interest to that city. It’s no surprise when each of them are as old, if not older, than the Lifebloods. Despite living in one every day of my life, I still could not tell you how they work, even a skyship as magnificent as this one. Are you interested in the engineering, my good sir?”
“I’ve dabbled.” His curt response cut off Titus’s enthusiasm, leaving Terrill an opening to interject once more.
“Chief Engineer-”
“Titus is fine! I don’t like formalities when I’m working with grease and gears.” He jerked his head to lead them towards said grease and gears, and Terrill continued on.
“Titus, you mentioned you were grounded, which means this fortress really does fly, right?”
“It did, in my youth. I was very young when we landed, but that was long enough ago that we’ve faded to legend for all but the elderly, I’d imagine.” Titus’s sigh was followed with him rubbing his hairless head. He looked saddened, and Terrill was torn between consoling him and pressing his issue. Titus made the decision for him. “How I’d long to see her fly again and fulfill her duty.”
“When did it happen exactly? If not that, then how? Is it the Lifeblood?”
“That is exactly the problem we are dealing with right now. Come closer.” Close wasn’t that much closer, and the five present stepped onto another lift that powered up and brought them down to the sickly green glow. There were a dozen workers down here, each with different instruments. Tubes and cables all attached to a singular object that hung suspended over a pit in the middle of air.
“Is that a crystal of some sort?” Lumen asked, but no one else needed his question to ascertain what it was. Nor did they need it to see the swirl of shadows around the crystal structure, thicker than those in Sheeris. Strands ran downwards, but drew no attention.
Being in its presence was enough to make Terrill hurl, and he wondered how Krysta was doing with that latest development. To expectation, she looked sick, her entire body trembling. “What are you doing to it? What are you doing to the Lifeblood?!”
“Don’t be alarmed. This was all part of the plan,” Titus assured her. She wasn’t assuaged. Her hands snapped out to grab the man by his robe, her eyes wild with fear and loathing of the cables that were attached. Terrill examined them in quick regard, finding they ran upwards, fueling power to the entire base, or rather they used to. There was no indication they were working at all.
“Part of the plan? You cannot use the Lifeblood’s energy so carelessly! You cannot siphon off something that holds up the entire world this way!”
“We haven’t siphoned anything of late, though,” Titus admitted, continuing to rub his head. Krysta relented, taking her hands off the man and staring up at the Lifeblood. She was sickened by the shadows, and her fingers twitched, hoping to purify it the same way she had in Sheeris. Or that was Terrill’s observation. “As you can see, the shadows have garroted the source of wind. So long as it’s been held in thrall, we cannot fly, and nothing can happen to the Lifeblood.”
“Atrum’s shadow,” Terrill said with a growl. It didn’t sit right with him.
Nor did it sit right with Lumen, who folded his arms at the boy’s name. “I knew he was busy, but involved with things like this? How is this possible? What are these Lifebloods?”
“You know about Adversa, but not that?” Terrill said, his choked laughter making evident how distressing he found the current state of affairs. Hoping to resolve them, Terrill chose to stop beating around the bush with Titus. “Titus, I have to ask you again, when did the Fortress fall out of the sky exactly?”
The engineer tapped his chin, moving aside to let another engineer through as they read something off a measuring device. It took him time to get to the result, but he managed to. “Oh, about sixty years ago, give or take. I was but a boy when it fell.”
“Sixty?! None of us were even alive then!” Walter said, his eye popping at the revelation.
To Terrill, it was the furthest thing from, however. Hearing the length of time it had been made too much sense, but that didn’t make him feel any better. “Why?”
“The Lifeblood weakened, or that was our best guess.” Titus approached the hanging Lifeblood, and Terrill went with him, staring down into the metallic chasm that bored deep into the earth. The engineer reached up, but didn’t touch the Lifeblood. He watched the shadows flit between his fingers with another sigh. “I was too young then, but the elders of that day would often say it was inevitable fate, an end result of the Lifeblood being used too much. Not by us, though, miss. No, the idea of a flying fortress to protect the Lifeblood was its idea, and its soul would often commune with us, and continued to do so even when we were grounded, ensuring us of the prophecy to come to pass.”
Terrill flinched. A prophecy. There it was again, and this time he wasn’t alone, with Lumen flinching just the same at the thought of it. Krysta, too, was disturbed by the mention of it, facing away.
“Then the war came.”
“The one fifteen years ago?” Terrill questioned. “How does that change things?”
“That was when the shadow came to rest. By then, I was already Chief Engineer, and the wind that day was something out of a nightmare…” Titus shivered at the memory. He wasn’t alone, some of the other engineers hearing his story and reacting just the same. “All these years, we kept the mechanics up and running in hopes the prophecy we’d heard fragments of would become reality: that in the war that consumed Gladius, a Chosen One from across the sea would restore flight. Never did we imagine that the canyon would crack and break that day, a cataclysm of horrific proportions that rent the space between Dimidia and Adversa. We didn’t dare approach it, but not long after we were visited by a veiled woman. Soon after, the shadow began to hang.”
“What did she look like? Was she blonde? Long hair?”
“Yes.”
“So, it was Winifred who brought the shadow…” Terrill muttered. He paced away from the Lifeblood, his brain working into overdrive when Walter pointed out the obvious contradiction.
“But the shadow isn’t hers,” he said. Terrill swallowed. “I thought the shadow was Atrum’s.”
His pacing came to a halt, his eyes torn upwards in horror. Atrum had only been three years old when the war had happened. There was no way he could have put the shadow upon the Lifebloods. Terrill’s mouth fell open, his hand covering it before he started to bite his lip.
How was it possible? Was it even possible? The only answer could have been no, and that made Terrill’s breath shorten with an even worse possibility. One he had never considered no matter how many times they had clashed, yet now was making more and more sense the longer he thought about it.
Was Atrum…even Atrum at all?
“That doesn’t matter. Shadow or no, we know that we need to cut it out,” Krysta said. She was done with worrying over it, and her confidence put Terrill back to the immediate situation.
“How do you plan to do that?” Walter questioned with a scoff. “Even in Sheeris, Warren needed to be wounded. What do you think can be accomplished here without killing Winifred?”
“Who said we need to kill her?” Terrill said, shoving Walter in the shoulder. “Is that the only recourse you can think of? Killing people. Isn’t cutting their puppet strings enough?”
“You’re soft.”
“And you just want to kill people, Walter. That’s what you are, isn’t it? A hunter?” Walter didn’t deny it, glaring at Terrill as neither refused to budge in their stances. His eyes would occasionally flick to the sickly green crystal, but he remained adamant otherwise. “We won’t kill anyone.”
“Even if means the difference between freeing the Lifeblood and letting Gladius slaughter itself through war? I thought you were better than that, Terrill. Or is it that you’ve come to care for that Fiend after all your clashes?” Walter shoved Terrill back, necessitating Krysta to stand between the two to prevent an outbreak of fists. He reached up to his scarred eye, wincing when he touched it. “It’s soft of you, Terrill, to expect you can save her. Sometimes you need to kill the blight before it spreads. I’ve learned that the hard way.”
Terrill couldn’t formulate his response. He hated to admit it, but Walter had a point. It was possible killing Winifred was the only option, and his mind turned to the battlefield, where she would be waiting. Lumen cleared his throat to clear the terse confrontation.
“Titus, you mentioned a…prophecy of sorts?”
“Ah, mere fragments, really. Nothing concrete. Like I said, it just spoke to how the Fortress could get running again. I never put much stock in it until now.”
“But what if it’s true?” Lumen asked, his soft voice trembling. Terrill broke away from Walter to his first companion, the boy’s eyes reflecting the crystal as they appeared to accept some notion they had resisted. “What if it’s all true…? You can’t change fate. You can’t change the flow… Then it would mean…Sayn’s prophecy would be true after all.”
“Sayn’s prophecy? What does that mean, Lumen? What are you talking about?” He would have grabbed the boy, demanded to know more. After all this talk of prophecies and fate and the flow of souls throughout the world, knowing one of his friends actually had some idea of what it meant made him too eager. Krysta pulled him back, though, her face burying itself in his back as she spoke with a muffled voice. Titus watched it all with bemusement.
“It means he thinks you can’t change fate… In time…the course will correct itself. It’ll eliminate and keep right what was meant to be. Which means we…” She shuddered as she held on to him, and Terrill felt the back of his jerkin moisten. He didn’t know how to handle it, but he remembered her tears in Pravado and wanted to wrap his arms around her, telling her that didn’t matter. The words wouldn’t come, however.
You’re not supposed to be here.
Winifred’s taunts were ever-haunting, like a reminder of what he’d wrought by running around Adversa. Now, Lumen and Krysta were trying to tell him that his unforetold actions may have been fate all along. Or was it that he just didn’t matter? Terrill couldn’t make sense of it, and with everything surrounding the reason they were there, he wanted to shut down and find a place to think, work it all out until this bizarre world and all of its mysteries finally made a modicum of sense.
Of course, he knew he wouldn’t ever be afforded even that, and was proven right in mere seconds.
The Lifeblood pulsed, and wind rose within the base of the Fortress, a deathly black. Titus stumbled back, his eyes glinting with recognition. He had seen that kind of wind once before, and Terrill had a feeling he knew where. A clanging of footsteps echoed, and a quivering voice called down to the engineers working below.
“Elder Titus, the armies are clashing. The shadow is rising over Fort Tierial!”
“There was black wind,” the elder called upwards, projecting his voice to echo. All workers in the vicinity paused in their works, fixated with horror at the man’s words. “That means a change of horrific proportions. What’s happened up north at the battlesite?”
“The Shadow is beginning to form. It’s taking a corporeal nature and…eating away the land. Invarian ships from the north will arrive soon and…Fort Tierial will be in cannon range.”
“Eating away the land? How is that possible?” Lumen screeched, his hands flying to his chest. He clearly wanted to say a prayer of some sort, and was only further convinced to do so by Terrill’s answer.
“Because this is a world of souls. The Shadow’s easier to form here, and the damage it does would be…”
“Irrevocable.” Titus straightened his back, though it did not stop the black wind from continuing to race through the air, joining near the entrapped Lifeblood. “There is no time remaining. Now that you’re here, I ask but one favor: free the Lifeblood and return us to the skies!”
As he finished asking, all present gave a nod. A relieved expression passed over Titus, but Terrill became more tense as his ears started to ring. So, too, did Krysta and all the others close by. It built faster than before, and then cut out.
The Lifeblood erupted with shadows.