No one stopped Pirin when he started spending the nights in the cell where Alyus and Brealtod had settled. Their cell was only a few over, and Pirin was hoping it wouldn’t be too far away from his first cell—that way, Myraden could still slip notes to him if she needed.
The next evening, after Pirin spent one more day training, and the two smugglers had returned from their duties in the labyrinth, Pirin tried to pick Brealtod’s mind.
“If I form a foundation Timber without Gray, will she still form anything?”
Brealtod hissed a couple times, and Alyus translated: “He says he doesn’t know, but he’d assume that Gray wouldn’t form her Timber until you reactivate the Reyad between yourselves.”
Brealtod hissed a few more times.
“He also says he never knew any Embercores, and even if he had, it wouldn’t matter—this is the furthest he’s ever heard of an Embercore getting,” Alyus said.
Pirin breathed out a little puff of air. There was no point in sitting around and not trying, though. But first, he asked, “Brealtod, how well did you know the wizard in your hometown? Where…wherever you came from.”
“Hey, you can still look at him when you ask it,” Alyus grumbled. “He understands us, just doesn’t exactly have vocal cords tuned to our types of speech.” Then, he held up his hands, and said, “I’m just a translator…”
“Sorry,” Pirin whispered, then shifted back to Brealtod.
The dragonfolk hissed a few times, then added a few clicks and rattles.
“He was decent friends with this wizard,” said Alyus. “They went hunting together, though he knew that the wizard would soon get powerful enough and leave the village behind.”
“Where…would you have been from?” Pirin asked. He wanted to know what sources the Brealtod’s knowledge had come from, but he was also curious if there were any translation oddities that he should know of.
Besides, not every land had the same recipe for advancement. Myraden’s silk necklaces had something to do with her magical advancement, and though he figured it was purely symbolic, she had to have had different training than him.
Brealtod let off a few short choppy hisses, then stood up and walked back to the barred walls of the cell.
“He was from a patch of land just on our side of the Stormwall,” Alyus said. “You’re right, though, that dragonfolk like him aren’t exactly common.”
“Stormwall?” Pirin asked.
“Oh, boy…you’ve never even heard of the Stormwall, elfy?” Alyus rubbed his forehead with his knuckles and groaned.
Pirin shrugged. “I might have heard of it, but I certainly don’t remember it. Nor anything about it. Memory malfunctions and all that…”
“Stormwall, then,” Alyus said. He pointed his thumb over his shoulder in a general southward direction, then explained: “Exactly as it sounds. A massive wall of cloud, writhing wind, lightning, hail, and rain runs around the equator in a thick band. You can’t cross it, save for one isthmus firmly in Dominion land. Been raging for ages, and it doesn’t show signs of stopping.”
“How’s it maintained?” Pirin asked.
“No clue,” said Alyus. “But the settlements close by it are tough as nails, as are the wizards that come from them.”
Brealtod hissed another few times without turning to face them.
“Yeah, yeah,” Alyus motioned with his hand. “Brealtod wants you to focus, and he’s right.”
“I was working on trying to make my next foundation Timber,” Pirin explained to them. The longer I wait, the harder it’ll be, and the more likely I’ll be to advance without having a solid foundation—which is the last thing I need.”
After a few seconds, though, Pirin added, “One last question. If I have pure, non-Familiar-bent Essence, will I still be able to make it into a Timber?” Over the past few days, he’d spent all the gnatsnapper Essence in his core, and he’d only been able to replace it with pure Essence.
Brealtod said something—long hiss then two short hisses—and Alyus held himself for a second. “He doesn’t see why not, but it…might just take a little longer? That part doesn’t translate so well.”
Brealtod shrugged, then motioned with his hand as if to say ‘good enough’.
“How will I know how long I have until I advance?” Pirin asked. “If it’s not based on how many Timbers I have…”
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
Brealtod spoke for a few seconds, then Alyus picked it up: “As you cycle and use Essence, some of it gets incorporated into your central…Essence sea? Was that what you said?”
When Alyus said that, Brealtod shrugged again. He gave a half-nod, then let out a few more airy, droning tones.
“Well, the Essence sticks in your core when you truly incorporate it. Eventually, there’ll be too much, and it’ll try to advance on its own. You’re in a race to form your foundation Timbers before the core has to advance, locking you in with what you have.”
“Can you go back and make more once you advance?” Pirin asked.
Brealtod hissed only once.
“That’d be a good, solid, ‘I don’t know’,” Alyus translated.
“I’ll get to work, then. I won’t take any risks.”
image [https://static.wixstatic.com/media/f3a882_5e221995337243e6a7d4250b55d3aeea~mv2.png/v1/fill/w_280,h_232,al_c,lg_1,q_85,enc_auto/embercore%20sigil.png]
The next day, while Pirin took breaks between his Shattered Palm practice, he worked on forging and forming his next Timber. He repeated the same process as before, but instead of forming the Timbers with gnatsnapper Essence, he formed them with pure Essence.
Simple enough; he just had to visualize it as pale blue. Shaping it into the feathery layers was harder, but he proceeded almost the same as he had the few days before. He didn’t have the nature of the Essence itself to rely on; he had to shape it with his mind.
When he locked the Timber in place, a wave of force blasted away from him, clearing the sand off the pit floor in a little divot where he had been sitting.
He exhaled and examined the Timber. Once formed, it took on the same smokey, barely-burning appearance as his Embercore and first timber—at least, inside his mind it did. When he compared it to the first Timber, he decided it was middle-grade. He’d have to consult with the Path manual to be sure, though.
Two down. He was halfway to being an average, normal wizard. He just needed to figure out how close his core was to advancing—he had no way to know if he needed to pick up the pace or not.
Well, that wasn’t true. He could always go faster, and someone like him, a wizard-king, should have been through this stage only years ago.
Just as he was about to make up for lost time and prepare another core Timber, the sand shifted in front of him.
A cat-sized stone wraith rose up out of it and tried to pounce towards him, but he blasted it out of existence with a Shattered Palm.
After each Shattered Palm lately, he did a status check of himself, as best as he could—almost like he would do with one of Mr. Regos’ patients.
Spiritual pain: minimal, or blocked out.
Spiritual damage: nothing, as far as he could see.
Physical damage: none. In fact, his wounds were healing nicely. The gashes on his chest didn’t hurt when he moved, and there was no sign of infection anymore. They had mostly sealed, but he still kept a bandage on just in case.
Lastly, a diagnosis of the technique’s effectiveness: using the Memory Chain to start the Shattered Palm was almost as powerful as when he used the Whisper Hitch to start it, but there still wasn’t as much of a satisfying crack-boom yet. He still needed a bit more of an abrupt, spectacular failure.
Still, the Shattered Palm dispersed the stone wraith with ease—and, since he was sitting down, it also pushed aside a large swath of sand on the pit’s floor.
The wave of force that the Timber forming had exerted had already pushed away a patch of sand, and now, his technique had pushed away more. A swath of pale sandstone bricks were visible on the floor just ahead of him.
At first, he didn’t think much of it. There had to be a solid floor beneath here somewhere. But the midday light seeping through the doorway high above was just enough to make a few flecks of silver-gold in the floor glitter.
He stepped away from the light so he didn’t block any of it with his body, but he couldn’t get a good idea of the light’s pathway until he took a handful of sand and tossed it up, letting the light filter through it like it was dust in an old attic. It gave him an idea where the beam of direct light was shining—so he didn’t block it, but also so he could see exactly where it landed and where it would be most effective.
Where the beam landed, only a few feet to the left, he cleared the sandy pit floor away with a few Shattered Palms.
This seemed to get the guards’ attention. They marched over, holding their spears towards him suspiciously. “He can’t dig a tunnel out, can he?” one guards asked the other, keeping his voice low.
But here, it was so quiet that Pirin couldn’t not hear their whispers.
“If he can get through the floor, colour me surprised,” the other guard muttered. They stopped about ten paces away, watching curiously. Pirin did his best to tune them out.
Pirin reached down and scraped his fingers across the exposed floor. The glistening specks gathered under his fingernails. They were droplets of liquid, seeping through the surface of the stone.
He was pretty sure he knew what the liquid was, but just to be safe, he licked the droplets off his fingers. Sickeningly sweet, with a consistency like heavy cream? It made his tongue tingle faintly. Ichor.
He tried to pretend that this wasn’t anything to be interested in—the mortal guards probably wouldn’t understand what it was if he didn’t tell them—and leaned back, going about his business.
He went back to a cycling position and continued to gather Essence, and soon, the guards marched off.
Once Pirin was certain the guards were gone, he inched back to the hold he had dug, then scraped up Ichor droplets with his fingernails. He filled the palm of his hand with the sandy Ichor, trying to gather as much as he could.
This place was like the temples on the Elven Continent—at least, it seemed like it, and Myraden had implied something like that before. Maybe, after ingesting enough Ichor, he could summon a vision of Hir Venias again. If he had managed it in the elven shrine, where an Ichor spring had also risen to the surface, here should have been just as effective. The Eane fields were strong enough.
He could ask for information about the Memory Chain. And, if he was lucky, maybe the old apparition could help him find the secret tunnel…
And if Hir Venias didn’t know where the secret tunnel was, then he could tell Pirin how to find it.