Enclave's Origin (III)

Past the neolithic door with its strange aura was a well-appointed reading room. Two small desks nestled between shelves, with three more comfy chairs scattered about on a thick rug woven in an archaic pattern. Spirit filled the air with omnipresent silver light. Sometimes, it formed shapes and then dispersed like clouds. Other times, it rippled along the floor or walls.

"Sway," said Milo, slipping into the young vernacular. He probably picked it up from Gonzo. "It's like you got angry and couldn't stop." It was true. Taylor tended to leak when he was emotional, throwing silver fire onto everything around him. He hadn't had the problem recently, but only because he had so many demands on his spirit. Although, he'd had a few close calls since his last summoning.

"Where are all the books?" asked Mila. There were shelves, but no books. Most of one side was given over to a workbench, but the expected tools were missing.

"Katerina," guessed Taylor, "or Pinegar, ages ago. Or anyone in between." A spiral staircase descended from the far side of the room. "We have to go down."

The stairwell was smooth-bored but the treads were solid blocks, quarried from the same mountain as the entrance. The silver light was down there, too, and they had to climb down through the airborne humors. Otavio was in the lead, shield forward, sword in hand. Taylor was relegated to the back. The steps didn't go as far as he expected, only ten meters or so, ending in a rectangular room with a vaulted ceiling, all carved from bedrock.

At the far end of the room, alone and unadorned, sat a perfect cube of black rock about a meter and a half to a side. The cube sat square with the other end of the room, and Taylor observed the chamber's length and width. "Would you say the length of this room is about two-thirds greater than the width?"

"About," said Mila. "Why?"

"Golden Ratio. Somebody liked their maths." He approached the featureless block with caution, side-stepping gradually, waving his bulwark back. He thought the pull on his spirit would increase, but it didn't. There was the same strange fire, only more of it. Experimentally, and because he had used a fair amount of spirit while attempting to heal Inez (best not to think about it), he pulled on the rich ambient spirit and drew it in. It didn't change anything, or seem at all strange, except how quickly he filled his reserves. It was like having a liquified meal poured down his throat until he was past full.

"Does anybody feel anything?"

"A little queasy," said Alice, and the other bulwarks nodded their agreement.

"Stay back. I need to look at this."

The cube was ominous, and Taylor didn't know why at first. But when he came closer, he could see the surface was polished, and golden flecks winked at him like the dimmest stars of the Milky Way, as seen from the farthest outposts circling the last suns of its longest arm. The black expanse of stone reflected no light. He might as well have been staring into space. If he fell forward, he might go tumbling on forever. He felt himself falling and falling.

Taylor wheeled away from the cube and stumbled back to his bulwark, who grabbed him with concerned arms, held him up, and asked him if he was all right.

"I'm fine. It's just … of all the reckless things to do. He must not have known." Stupid Bahram. Reckless Bahram. Building with materials he didn't understand. That's what happened to Enclave.

"You're not making sense," Mila told him.

"I know. I'll explain it, but I have to be sure first. I need a memory. Something we share but that's innocuous. One that won't be missed."

Mila was displeased, and it showed in her suspicious older-sister tone of voice. "What do you mean, won't be missed?"

"Breakfast this morning," Milo offered. "The whole cadre was there, but we didn't talk much. Remember? The gurantor was trying to sneak food from the cooking pot, and she kept burning her trunk? She wouldn't stop until Darius gave her a melon."

Taylor chuckled. That would do. Sacrificing anything serious was a bad idea, but a mildly annoying or comical memory was ideal. "I'm going to touch the cube, but only for a second. Any longer, and you have to pull me away. And no skin-to-skin contact! If it gets ahold of my mind, I don't want you getting dragged in after me. Just pull me away, and everything will be fine."

"And why do you need to do this?" Alice was struggling to not sound like his mother (Olyon knew she'd adopt him if he let her!) with only partial success.

"Because this thing might be a lot harder to destroy than I expected. I have to be sure."

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"I've got him," Otavio assured the group. He was the strongest and had the longest reach. "Let's go."

Taylor stood by the night-dark cube with a billion stars scattered along its surface, surrounded by silver fire. Otavio held him by the collar of his armor. He prepared his mental defenses, but not as he would against a human opponent. There were many techniques to defend the mind, but he chose to use the simplest: a solid wall around his mind, except for the chosen memory. Their gurantor, stealing food. It was the only thought in his mind.

He reached out and touched the stone. The stone accepted his offering. As it took, it also gave. Enclave's full canon of prayer was revealed to him, even the forgotten Arts past Hierarchs had seen fit to burn, lest they pollute the souls of the faithful.

Otavio pulled him back and half-carried him to where the bulwarks stood. Their stances were tense, their arms either crossed or touching weapons. It took him a few seconds to remember why he was there.

"What did I give it? What did I lose?"

"The gurantor stealing food this morning," Milo tried to remind him, "she kept burning her trunk and … "

Taylor cut him off. "I don't remember." He recalled breakfast, but nothing about the gurantor. He glared at the cube. He never thought to see the damned substance again. "Let's get out of here, so I can think."

They made themselves as comfortable as they could in the scriptorium, given the two corpses present and the hastily-shaped box containing one of their heads. None of them were hungry but tried to eat anyway by nibbling at Calique rations. Taylor's was mainly coconut and dried yam pressed together with dried vegetables. It was better when it was made into soup, but that wouldn't make him hungrier. Inez's cold body kept drawing his attention. If he let it, the cube downstairs would take all his memories of her, and it wouldn't hurt anymore. He could also become a monster, devoid of empathy or ethical restraint.

"It's called wizard stone. It's rare, difficult to refine, and nearly impossible to work. It can store several times the amount of spirit as our best stones. To fill the thing downstairs would require," he did some very rough math, "a few thousand of my emerald rods.

"I saw a city once, built by dragons, where all the buildings were made of wizard stone. I never got closer than a scenic overlook, for obvious reasons."

"What's a dragon?" asked Milo.

"Something you don't have in this world," chuckled Taylor. They didn't have them in his 'homeworld' of Emristar, either. Nobody knew where their homeworld was, but they liked to show up in different worlds for reasons known only to themselves.

"The stone eats memories," prompted Mila.

"It does when it's mostly empty. A block that size could absorb the minds of everyone in Enclave with room for a few thousand more to spare. And you do not want to meet someone who has given all the worst moments of their life to a wizard stone. They can't feel other people's pain because they don't remember any of their own.

"Sometimes they're used as keepsakes. If you take a small piece of wizard stone, like the size of my pinky nail, give it a memory, and then completely fill it with spirit until it can't take any more, you lock the contents in place. Anyone who touches it can experience the memory that's stored inside.

"As long as you can fill it completely with spirit then it's safe. It becomes changeless: immune to wear or reshaping. It's safe to use like that, and it'll last forever. That's probably why Bahram used it. He thought that, over time, Enclave would fill it with spirit and the stone would become eternal. But mere mortals never make such massive chunks of wizard stone because it's impossible to fill, so it's forever dangerous to have around."

Taylor took another bite of dry ration, added a sip of water, and chewed while thinking.

"Bahram's decline," exclaimed Mila. "He went down to make changes to the origin, like you do for Nexus, but he got his memories," she made a long, long, sucking sound, "instead."

"Pinegar would have been a young student then," added Otavio. "Maybe he knew what happened, and that's why he hated everything from the ancients."

"He wanted to avoid his mentor's mistakes," Alice said, "and he ended up making new ones."

"That's very speculative," Taylor said while making a face, "and I don't normally go in for this kind of thing, but the scene practically writes itself, doesn't it? Young Pinegar is a promising student, tapped early on for high office, so one of his duties is attending the Hierarch. One day, a group of them go downstairs, something goes horribly wrong, and the saint is never the same. When Pinagar gets his turn to be Hierarch, he declines. Or, maybe the third Hierarch was also here the day Bahram slipped, and he and Pinagar worked together to 'fix' what they thought was wrong with Enclave."

"But he added prayers, didn't he?" Milo reminded them. "If he hated the origin so much, why would he mess with it?"

"Maybe Emory got it wrong, and the so-called 'new' prayers already existed but weren't widely known. Maybe they were added by Bahram on the day he lost it. He was having trouble controlling his disciples, so adding Vow of Obedience would make sense to him right then."

Milo grinned. "Did we just solve the mysteries of Enclave?"

"A good story isn't proof," admonished Alice.

"I know that. But it's a pretty good story."

Taylor ate his meal in small bites. His biggest problem was the preternatural toughness of an origin made from wizard stone. It would be difficult to manage even if it wasn't an origin. Add a few hundred years and thousands of disciples reciting its prayers, and its existence acquired the weight of divine mountains or elder dragons. If he tried to attack it with his sword, the stone would suck the enhancements out of it and probably not take any damage. Instead of breaking it, he would end up making it that much stronger.

He only needed to break it into a few pieces, but the first break would be the hardest. Origins had to be whole or else they were nothing. If he chopped it into several pieces, he would be dealing with regular wizard stone: just an abnormally hard substance that he couldn't risk touching. He needed to put in a form that prevented anyone from using it in the future. He could handle that much.

It was a good plan, but he needed the right weapon for the first break. Something that didn't mind cutting through magic. His eyes flicked to Inez's shrouded form and the Warden's blade lying next to her.

"Pinegar, you bastard," Taylor groaned. "You set the Warden here to keep anyone from discovering the origin. So why did you give her a weapon that could destroy it?"

Taylor loved getting answers, and it frustrated him to know that, in this case, they were all burned to ash or buried in an anonymous heap somewhere.