Zoe put off probing inside her Skein and hurried to the top of the cliff. The rocky ground grew slick, and her feet dug down for grip. Bella followed in Zoe’s footsteps. Her blade rippled like a desert highway, and though sweat dripped down her face, she seemed oblivious to the heat.
“Can you see them?” Bella called. “Can you see anything?”
Zoe leaned on her attributes and felt the world beyond the steam. Willpower pushed it out as Dexterity felt the world. The surroundings were a static of bald rock and glass structures like saguaro cacti. [Our Hearts Toll as One] showed her allies lay close by… but the steam blurred precision…as though their heartbeats leaked into the air. There was something wrong with Oriz. Her heartbeat was fine — too fine — a hypnotically regular rhythm — Zoe slipped on the moist rock. Her knee drove down into the ground and shattered a hole to keep her in place. Scree ran down the hill behind her.
“You alright?” Bella called up.
“Fine.”
Ignore that heartbeat for now, Zoe thought, but should I tell Bella?
ding!
No, Oriz might be fine and then you would have worried her for nothing.
“I was distracted… There’s something up with Oriz’s heartbeat.”
Bella continued climbing.
“What does that mean?” Her voice was strained.
“It’s not irregular. I think she’s in a trance.”
“Let’s hurry then.”
ding!
See? She’s worried.
###
The top of the hill took longer than Zoe expected. She felt it in her body, though she was recovering faster than Bella, despite the difference in their levels. Anton and Skidmark stood near the lip peering over.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“Oriz has been down there a while,” Anton said before turning around. “You’re awake!”
Zoe grinned.
“I’m awake,” she said. “I heard it was hell getting us here.”
He shrugged.
“I slept through it.”
Bella pushed past them.
“What’s happened to Oriz?”
“Nothing, mate,” said Skidmark. “She’s fine, she’s fine, she just hasn’t moved in a little while.”
“How long’s ‘a little while’?”
“Seventeen minutes,” answered Anton.
“That’s not ‘fine’!”
“Isn’t she a plant or something?” Skidmark argued. “It’s fine. It’s nothing to worry about.”
Bella’s eyes paled.
“Shut your mouth before I cut out your tongue.”
“Oh, do you have a taste for it now?”
Bella hissed. Her knuckles whitened around her sword’s handle. Zoe’s chains wrapped around them both. She weighed the chains and brought them to their knees.
“Not now.”
Zoe kept them down as she strode to the edge. Down below she felt Oriz’s heartbeat, but the rising steam obscured her. The heat dripped from Zoe’s skin. Sweat stung her eye. She reached into her Skein for a sheathe of Mirror.
[Empress In Time]
The Mirror slipped over her skin like fingers stretching into gloves. Where before it had slipped over her like paint, now it clasped, wrapped around — she felt it — her — Moth. Not armor, but an embrace, and she could feel it willing and ready to step out in front of an attack for her.
Weakness overcame her, and she stumbled, but her Mirrored skin — reflecting only steam — held her up. Zoe’s heart rate rose as she gazed through the Mirrored eyes.
STATUS
Name: Zoe Chambers
Level: 31
Body: The Bell At The Center Of The World (Rank 3, Progress 1/10)
ATTRIBUTES
Might: 44 (-37)
Vitality: 20 (-20)
Dexterity: 25 (-24)
Willpower: 43 (-43)
Insight: 18 (-17)
Chains: 20
Free Points: 0
Titles: Intrepid, Lodestone, Quest Breaker, Glutton, True Believer, The Magnifying Glass, Mayor of Unnamed Town
Techniques: Our Hearts Toll As One, Empress In Time, Mind’s Eye Incision
What?
Where was [Self Reflects the World]? And… [Fools Rush In]? Steeling herself, Zoe examined her Skein. She gasped at the damage. The technique she built was horribly inefficient. After burning up all of Anton’s Time essence it had tapped into hers. It must have burned so hot through her Skein that it collapsed in place. No wonder she went comatose. [Empress in Time] had fused with [Self Reflects the World].
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
Her attributes were cut in half. The same as when Moth had come into the world.
“I’m here for you,” Moth whispered in her ear.
Zoe trembled, a strange emotion rolling over her as an ache spread through her core. With Moth around her, she could fight at 100%, but numbers were one thing and her feelings another.
This wasn’t the time to worry. She gently squeezed her fingers and felt the mirror interlocking in return.
“I’m going down to look,” Zoe said.
“I’m coming with,” Bella said.
“I don’t want to carry you.”
“You won’t have to.”
Bella placed the tip of her sword against the stone. Black energy, like liquid shadows deep beneath the sunlit waves. It pressed against the rock with leaden heaviness. Bella held onto the handle as she walked off the edge and dragged the sword behind her. It continued to drag along, and she held onto it as she walked.
With the damp water beading on her Mirrored skin, Zoe dug her chains into the grassy rock and lowered herself beside her determined friend.
“Is that a new technique?”
“Runeblade is using my body path,” Bella said through gritted teeth.
“How does that —”
The Angel appeared through the mist. Skin like sunlight in intensity, but not brightness. The smooth surface suggested more, a surface beneath a surface, beneath a — Zoe averted her eyes. In silence, they followed the zig-zagging trail of a grassy rope until they reached Oriz.
The alien woman stood rooted to the Angel’s shoulder. Her eyes were locked upon the Angel’s face. The divine being hung its head forward. Tousled hair like bleached starlight draped across eyes taller than any human. Steam rippled the air and blew at Zoe’s clothes.
Oriz’s hands gripped an invisible blade. There was no sign in the flesh that she had cut at all.
Zoe wrapped a chain around Oriz’s waist. She tugged, but it was as though Oriz remained as rooted as the island. Zoe strained, but nothing happened, and she released the chain lest she hurt her friend.
Movement —
ding!
Don’t look!
Zoe averted her gaze, but the image of the corner of an eye pulsed in her mind. A watchful orb turned toward her. Abyssal pupil beckoning like a twelfth-story balcony on a horrible day.
“Don’t look, Bella,” she said.
Bella closed her eyes.
“Can you free Oriz?”
Zoe inched her way closer until she stood within reach of Oriz. After a moment of controlling her breathing, she reached out a chain toward Oriz’s heart. A similar chain hovered over her chest as she peeled away the Mirrored skin. She reached for her body path as she touched them at the same time.
[Empress In Time]
A hand of pure mirror pressed upon each of their chests. Zoe sighed as her assessment of the damage increased: [Sympathetic Resonance] was another ability melted by the overload of Time.
The pulse of Zoe’s pattern — her joy at being awake — traveled down the chain toward Oriz’s heart. The impression sloshed against Oriz’s heartbeat like a wave against a rocky cliff.
Though her eyes were closed, she felt the Angel’s attention upon her as she tested its hold on Oriz.
“I can’t break the Angel’s trance,” Zoe said.
“Then I’ll cut off its head.”
Bella stepped past Zoe and Oriz and braced herself upon the Angel’s neck. She raised her runeblade. Her eyes squeezed tight as a blistering howl prowled through the steam. A fourth rune blazed along the blade and a cyclone twisted around the blade. Steam blasted away, and they stood in a cloudless dome upon the Angel’s shoulder. In the exposed air, Zoe saw the blood dripping from where the chains cut into the Angel’s wrist.
ding!
This is one of mine.
“Bella, wait!”
Bella held her sword at the ready, the wind whipping at the steam, and veins bulging along her arms as she resisted the pale-eyed urge to cut.
“What?” she said through gritted teeth.
“The Angel belongs to the Black Star!”
“What?”
ding!
No, silly. Not the big stupid Angel. The chain!
“Oh, of course…”
It was as though Zoe saw the chains for the first time. She could fit a fist between the heavy links of dark red metal. They wrapped around the Angel’s bright flesh and dug in so ruthlessly that one would think the marble was as soft as butter.
But they had been cutting that flesh for thousands of years and the Angel had not fallen. The Angel did not struggle. It merely hung limp.
Like an anchor.
The chains were taut, as though they pulled and pulled but could never free themselves of the Angel’s ponderous weight.
Zoe understood now: the Angel was the prison, not the prisoner.
ding!
We need to free the chain. It is a part of me.
“What part of you?”
I lost it too long ago to remember.
“Zoe!” Bella shouted over the howling of the sword. “It’s getting too hard to hold. What am I cutting?”
“Cut off its head.”
“No…” Oriz groaned.
Bella stumbled in her swing. A last-minute twist of her wrists sent the slash away from the flesh and into the stone behind them. The cyclonic funnel of blistering wind struck the cliff. Dust and stone chips exploded out. Bella’s back bulged under her shirt, arms popping, as she ripped the blade free and swung again.
The extra rune in her blade pumped her with strength as she wrestled her furious blade.
“Oriz?” she said. “Speak to me.”
“Oriz floats content in the darkness.”
Zoe flinched at the groaned words. It was hard to take them lightly when her eyes were squeezed shut against the sight of the Angel.
“Who are you?” Bella shouted.
“I am Sorrow.”
“The Angel…” Zoe turned her Skein sense toward the monolithic creature. “Let our friend go.”
“She compromised my containment ability.”
Zoe leaned on her Willpower, but the Angel rebuffed her efforts utterly.
“What do you want?”
“Confusion must end. Why did she attack me?”
“We need your flesh to complete an Epiphany.”
The Angel shuddered.
“Understood,” Oriz coughed as the Angel used her mouth. “Take as much flesh as you want but leave the chain imprisoned.”
“You don’t want us to free you?”
“I am free to serve.”
“Who are you serving? You’re in Hell!”
“I serve the Smith. The chain resists me, as it always has, and so I hold it, as I always will.”
“Do you… do you want this?”
“I am free to serve. This conversation is done.”
Oriz coughed as her voice returned to normalcy. “What just happened? The Angel!”
Zoe cracked her eyes to see the Angel’s skin dimming. She blinked. The sight no longer burned her mind. Its head hung low against its chest like a prisoner awaiting lashes. Bella wrapped her arms around Oriz.
“What happened?”
“I thought I could resist the Angel… it’s really going to let us take as much as we want?”
Zoe nodded, staring up at the shackles.
“So long as we don’t remove the chains.”
What are the chains? She asked inside her mind.
ding!
I’m trying to remember, but I’m so small and that part of my brain is so fragmented…
Just do your best, alright?
Of course!
“Zoe?” Bella asked.
“Go ahead,” Zoe said. “Butcher us up a feast.”
Bella nodded. She bowed toward the Angel.
“Thank you.”
Zoe felt an odd tightening of her throat as Oriz joined in the bow. After a moment, she joined as well. The Angel remained unresponsive.
Bella hefted her blade.
“Do you want to stand clear?” she asked.
Zoe flexed her chains.
“I’ll hold the meat.”
Bella and Oriz extended their blades and started cutting. Both of them stood upon the shoulder. Bella sliced down into the biceps, peeling away strips of bloody meat as long as broken tires. Steam erupted from the open wounds. Zoe’s chains plucked the meat as boiling blood dripped away. Oriz’s grass blades hacked away at the meat of the shoulder. She chopped quicker than Bella’s steady cuts since her grass blades kept burning up.
The three women worked in silence as they gathered the meat. Zoe felt the weight in her chains. More than the physical material, there was the weight of responsibility. This flesh was given. Blood ran in rivers from the wounds down toward the water. None of the flesh regrew. The wounds gave no sign of healing.
“Why isn’t it…”
“Healing?” Oriz asked as she sliced. “Because it is a gift.”
Zoe felt a sense of mounting horror — of sacrilege. She was so used to things healing almost instantly that to see a wound on such scale and growing larger slice by slice… the wet sound of blades upon flesh… she thought it no longer haunted her nightmares, but here it was, once more, viscerally dull and endless.
Bile rose for the first time since she graduated.
At last, they had enough meat, and with the new silence filling them, they climbed up through the steam to rejoin their companions. The shroud of hot vapor concealed the Angel as they ascended the cliff. A couple of stones slid loose, but there was no real danger of any falling.
Zoe passed the end of the chain where it was fixed into the cliff side. The metal strained at the rock. There was a hole carved and the chain ran through it. It must be a single chain running through the cliff.
ding!
Will you free my chain, Zoe?
The massive ruddy links trembled.
Zoe kept climbing.
We need to complete the Epiphany. Then I’ll free your chain.
Even though the Angel said not to?
Yes.
Do you promise?
I promise.
ding!
ding!
ding!
I love you, Zoe!