Soon enough they were all down in the bottom most room of the temple, though they were not alone. Several researchers were poring over the carvings on the wall and taking rubbing of the more interesting sections. The mercenaries ignored them and headed straight towards the altar. Xander took some rubble from the boulder that had crashed into the doorway, and spread it out over the alter, using it to fill in the last few imperfections in its surface. Xander leaned over the altar carefully etching the repaired, but still blank patches. Then, he connected those patches to the array as a whole. He immediately felt the tug on his status as soon as he finished the last connection and opened it.
---[Quest] task successfully completed---
---Reward from Yrrilm dispensing---
A pressure fell upon the room, and the lights seemed to dim. The ceiling felt lower than it had before, and the walls closer. And it wasn’t just Xander who experienced it. His teammates, and the researchers looked about, disturbed and frightened.
A whisper reached Xander’s ears. You have restored my altar according to my wishes. You have my thanks, mercenary and [Godsmarked]. Before I bestow upon you your gift, I would request that you have the room emptied.
“Hey guys,” Xander called to his teammates, who were still looking around, trying to find the source of the presence that was weighing down the room. “I need everyone out. Now, preferably,” he added, anxiously.
His teammates began to herd the researchers out of the room and up the stairs. They were all too eager to have any excuse to leave the heavy feeling room. It was only a short time until the room was empty except for Xander, standing a short distance away from the altar.
Excellent, the whisper returned. Now, you shall be granted a small piece of knowledge, seen through a sight that only my most devoted have witnessed. Perhaps one day they shall return to this temple of mine. Observe the altar.
Xander watched the alter, confused and a little bit frightened. The channels of the rune began to slowly fill with a deep violet glow, creeping towards the center of the altar and the array. The room filled with the glow, and he heard questioning voices from outside the doorway. “Stay out!” he called to his team and the researchers, unwilling to look away from the altar, stricken with a feeling of morbid fascination.
As the purple reached the light runes, there was a flash of more purple light, and there, in the air above the storage runes, a rune which he’d never seen before was somehow projected by the light runes. It… hurt to look at. It really hurt. Xander tried to look away, and found that he couldn’t. The pain increased, and he realized belatedly that he had begun to scream. He felt… something inside of him tearing.
Suddenly, it was over. He collapsed to his knees as the purple glow disappeared, leaving only the torches that had been set up in the room to illuminate the room once again. He teammates had rushed into the room as soon as the glow had faded. They were circled around him, but he was having trouble hearing them through the sound of blood rushing in his ears. He felt dizzy. Finally, the spell passed, and his hearing slowly shook his head, staggering back up to his feet.
“Xander? Xander, are you okay?” Gabrelle’s voice faded back into his hearing. His teammates were all looking at him, worried.
“I… yeah. Yeah I think I’m okay.” He answered after taking a moment to collect himself.
“What happened?” Frazay asked, insistently.
“I’m, I’m not sure… Yrrilm spoke to me, said that she’d show me something. Then, the array began to glow purple… and a rune appeared.”
Thinking back to the rune, Xander somehow instinctively knew exactly what it meant. It was the rune for soul. Which meant… the array designed to attract, the movement runes, the storage arrays. The altar was designed to literally rip the soul from someone, and somehow, it was stored and then channeled back to the goddess. He skittered backwards, further away from the altar. “Get the hell away from that thing,” he urged his team. “It’s dangerous! I know what it does now, that was the final piece she showed me… that thing, the altar, it’s capable of taking your soul!” He’d continued backing away from the stone altar, fearing that it might activate again. His teammates followed him, needing no more urging after they’d felt the presence in the room of the goddess to leave.
Xander caught his breath outside the room, leaning his back against the stone wall as the researchers and his teammates looked at him, concerned. He’d begun to hyperventilate, and he took some time to force himself to breathe deeply. He had broken into a cold sweat, and he was still shivering slightly from the mixture of fear, panic, and adrenaline that had coursed through him.
“The soul?” Atrax asked, gently. “Are you sure? That is… extremely powerful, and extremely dangerous magic.”
“Absolutely,” Xander answered. “I’m absolutely certain that that is what the altar is designed for. To what purpose, I don’t know. But… I felt it almost take my own before it stopped. And that rune I saw, hanging above the altar. Somehow, it projected the rune when it was activated. It was the rune for ‘soul,’ and combined with the rest of the array, when it’s active, it’s designed to… attract the soul, and then store it at the altar. Presumably for the Goddess to use, somehow? I don’t, I don’t know. I just know that that room is a death trap. If it ever activates again, it will probably kill anyone who’s in there. I think the only reason I didn’t die is because Yrrilm deactivated the runes before it could finish killing me. I could feel it, straining and almost ripping out of my body.”
Gabrelle put her hands to her mouth horrified, and the rest of his teammates looked grim.
“Well, we’re done here,” Atrax said, gently, “so there’s no need for us to ever go back in there… alright Xander?”
“Yeah. Yeah, okay. Let’s uh, let’s get out of here.” He looked at the researchers, some of whom were looking back into the room quizzically. “If you want to go back in there, I can’t stop you. Well, I could. But I won’t. But just know… you’ll never get me in the same room as that thing ever again.”
Most of the researchers opted to return to the surface with the mercenaries. Two, however, had decided that they would continue investigating the altar. Xander hoped they would be okay. He had no idea how the array would normally be activated without the intervention of a Goddess. They quickly gathered their things, packed up their tents, and informed the lead researcher of Xander’s discovery. Much to his frustration, the woman was more interested than horrified. She was quite miffed that Xander refused to divulge the soul rune to her. He’d point blank refused, stating that attempting to artificially add the rune to the array, even while it was not active, could easily kill everyone in the room, or possibly even further in distance than that.
They quickly left the area, all the mercenaries eager to put distance between the place and them. Somehow, the spider infested jungle they’d have to camp in that night felt more welcoming than the temple did. Throughout the next week of travel, Xander would wake up in a cold sweat, panicked, the vision of the rune hanging over the altar lingering in his mind’s eye even after he’d awoken. The frequency of the nightmares lessened after that first week, but during their travels, as they began sailing back towards the Kingdom of Dardin and Anlet, he would still occasionally wake to the same dream. When Xander next checked his status, he saw that he had obtained a new title.
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---You have seen something of the beyond and learned from it. Title granted: [Edge Watcher]---
On their third week of sailing, Xander realized that he had, one, become somewhat obsessed with the soul rune, constantly turning it over in his head, and two, his greatest fear had become having his soul ripped out of his body and stored somewhere to be used as someone, or something, else’s leisure. He needed to conquer both issues, or he knew they’d eat away at him, and he’d never stop having the nightmares. Even if he did, he thought that he still might awake some nights with that scene replaying in his head.
He got to work immediately, falling back into his coping mechanism of distracting himself with creation. He pondered what exactly it was that he wanted to do with the rune, but in the back of his head, he already knew. He wanted an array that would bind to his own self, keep his soul tethered to his proximity, so that it could never be ripped away from him like that ever again. The next problem was where the array should go. Xander decided on his mask, for two reasons. One, it was the only portion of his armor that he had not made with [Improved Creation], meaning it would persist even when away from him, and two, he wanted to replace his steel armor with carbon fiber anyways, and he didn’t want to have any kind of transition period where he’d be without his new soul safety tether.
Gabrelle had been frequently visiting Xander throughout the trip, taking any opportunity to speak with him. Often, she visited him in his room as he planned out his sequences of runes that would go onto the mask. He was actually beginning to worry that she had developed a crush on him, until one day she confided in him her reason for visiting so often.
“Xander, I was really worried about you… I’ve never seen you like that. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone so frightened of something before. To be honest, I’m still a little worried about you. Are you sure you’re okay?”
Xander repaid her honesty in kind. “I’m not sure I really am, Gabrelle. I almost had my soul ripped out of my body. How do you even begin to cope with that? I’m trying though. I’m terrified of it happening again, I never want to feel anything pulling at me like that ever again. That’s actually what I’m working on now… a way to use the soul rune to anchor my soul to myself so that nothing can ever do that to me again.”
Gabrelle nodded. “I understand, I think. Well, I don’t, of course. I’ve never experienced something so awful. But I understand feeling the need for protection from something before you can begin to really process things. I uh, I felt a bit like that on the night that you stopped that intruder at the Huraven estate. I’d never, and I mean never seen a wound so fresh and so… grisly. And I remember thinking to myself, ‘If this is the kind of thing that people with combat skills and classes can do, what hope do I ever have in a fight? How can I be a mercenary?’” She paused, taking a breath. “It’s the real reason I wanted to take lessons from Graffus. I wanted to have some kind of assurance, anything at all, that if I ever ended up against someone with skills like that, that I wouldn’t just die. Like, immediately die. That’s what I felt like, like if I were to ever face off with someone who had a combat class with my [Medic] and [Herbalist] skills, I would be snuffed out like a candle.”
Xander nodded. It was probably true. The difference of scale between what someone with damage related skills and what someone without them could do to each other was massive.
“But, now that I have my [Follower of the Hammer] class, I just, I feel so relieved. It might still only be at level one since we haven’t had to opportunity to fight anything, but just knowing that I have some level of protection now with my own combat class… it’s let me sleep a lot better. So if that array helps you start to not feel afraid, I think you should do it.”
Xander nodded again. He understood completely what she meant. In this line of work, he would be more surprised if not having a combat class didn’t elicit a sense of existential dread. And it lined up very similarly to how he felt. Once he finished this soul protection circuit of runes, he too would, hopefully, be able to sleep better.
“Thanks Gabrelle,” Xander offered sincerely. “I really mean it. Being able to talk it out like this has helped me more than I thought it would. Oh, and, since you have your combat class now… let me know if you ever want a new weapon.”
“You’re welcome, Xander. I’m just glad to know that you’re working through things in your own way. As for my mace, well… it’s a bit of a sentimental piece,” she said with a grin. “After all, it was made by my favorite [Artificer].”
Just before they reached the port in the Kingdom of Dardin where they would swap to a caravan that would be headed upriver, Xander decided he was ready to implement his plan to protect his soul. He’d also begin replacing his armor. He’d managed to save up quite a stockpile of carbon fiber while he was researching the best way to lay out his newest runic protection.
He decided that it would be carved on the inside of the mask, as he had not engraved the inside of any of his armor yet. The main array would take up the entirety of the forehead area, while the rest of the inside of the skull mask out contain gathering arrays to provide as much power as possible to the circuit. He’d spent so much time researching and thinking over it, that etching the runes came easily to him. He opted to use the gold he’d taken what felt so long ago from the bandits outside of Anlet to fill these runes with. That way, not even the inlay would degrade on the mask. The final touch to the array was something to represent himself, connected directly to the soul rune. He carefully etched the X that he had chosen as his maker’s mark and connected it to the soul rune. He didn’t see anything happen, he didn’t feel any different. But he could feel the mana flowing through the array, just like all of his arrays when he focused on them. That alone was enough for him. He felt confident that it would work. He breathed a sigh of relief, and tension that he hadn’t even realized he was carrying slowly fell away from his neck, chest, and shoulders.
Xander spent the next five days of travel, of which there would be roughly twenty-five more, creating his new carbon fiber armor. The layers would each include different functions, though some ended up being duplicates to make it a little thicker. He decided that the extra space afforded by the layered construction would give him the opportunity to incorporate the elemental resistance arrays that he’d toyed with before. Each piece of armor would include three sheets of strengthening runes, two sheets of momentum reduction arrays, and a sheet each of personal gathering runes and frost, fire, lightning, and earth protection arrays. The final outside layer would be composed of silencing runes, making the armor completely silent. Xander tried to speak out of his new helm the first day he’d finished it and found that it also completely silenced his voice. He’d had to go back and remove a small portion of the runes around his mouth area so that he could speak.
All in all, he was quite proud of the armor. It was jet black, with silver engraving, just like his wings. Even the brass mask had had layers of carbon fiber molded over it, keeping the original shape of the skull, but providing additional protection. As a set, especially with the wings, he felt the armor looked quite intimidating. And the completely silent nature of it had led him to startling people more than once when he was wearing it, coming up behind them and trying to get their attention, and forgetting that he made no noise doing so. Frazay had tried to elbow him one time when he’d startled her from behind, and Gabrelle had to heal the bruise it left, she hit him so hard. He’d hardly even felt the impact, though. Encased in his suit of carbon fiber, able to fly, and with his soul firmly anchored in place, he felt safer than he had in a long while.
He took to flying again, though not to scout. He simply enjoyed the activity. It felt so freeing to not have to walk, to be able to soar above everyone. The drain it caused on his mana was completely offset by the additional regeneration provided to him by his personal gathering arrays. At this point, between his levels and stats increasing his total mana, and his regeneration being off the roof, he was able to create ammunition easily, even on the fly, as the spent mana refilled quite quickly.
Xander was lazily drifting through the sky above the caravan, pondering other ways he could use the soul rune, what contract they’d be taking next, just letting his mind wander, enjoying the sound of the wind as it rushed over him, when his thoughts were interrupted by an arrow slamming into his torso. The impact was reduced by his arrays, and the rest was absorbed by the foam padding lining the armor, but it was still enough to throw him off course. He’d never been struck by anything while he was flying, and he found himself struggling to regain control, finally doing so significantly closer to the ground. When his wings finally unfurled and he caught himself in the air, he was greeted by the sight of the caravan being raided. A few of the wagons had caught fire, possibly from Atrax, who was throwing fireballs as highwaymen vainly fired arrows at the fire mage. Occupied as he was with the bandit archers, who were taking cover behind an embankment that lined the road on the side of the river, he was unable to stop the rush of men, and dwarves, that was flowing towards the caravan from the other side of the road, from a copse of trees.