Suggested Listening

Morning, such as it was in this cave, came with numerous aches for Elruin. She sat up, gave Mister Squishybones a hug for being such a good pillow, then set to work putting her bedroll back into the pack. She spotted Calenda, standing at the altar.

"Oww," Lemia muttered, having woken up by Elruin moving. "I discovered the downside of a shard that lets you pull all-nighters without getting tired. Do it too long, and your body forgets how to sleep for real."

"Will you be okay?" Elruin got to her feet, still holding her doll. Nearby, the zombified mork also began to stir. She wrinkled her nose at the smell. Soon Scratch's doll would begin to rot as well.

"I'm fine, nothing a warm bath won't fix. Not that we'll be getting one of those any time soon." Lemia began packing up her supplies as well.

Elruin left Lemia to her work, and approached Cali. "Are you okay?"

"Huh?" Cali looked away from the temple. "Is it morning, already? At least I had too much on my mind to get bored."

"Maybe." Elruin didn't know what time of day it was, considering they were underground. "But we're awake, now. Are you feeling better?" She gave Cali a hug, noting the coolness of her skin. She was in better condition than the dollies, and Elruin would put lots of time and effort into making certain she remained that way. She didn't want her big sister to become nothing more than a skeleton.

"I'm fine, still getting used to." Cali used one hand to gesture across her whole body, the other to hold Elruin. "Everything. The good news is, I don't think I'll be asking you to exorcise me the moment we get to safety. The bad news is that means I'll have to grow accustomed to never sleeping, and healing myself through parasitism."

"The better news, Sis, is that you'll have plenty of acceptable targets," Scratch said from his minion. "Now that our mistress is awake, we should get moving. Speaking of, you can hold my ride while I'm scouting the surface, right?"

Elruin considered the strain, then decided she could maintain the monster. "I believe so." She sang to the corpse, unwrapping it from Scratch, so that now it belonged to her. "I've got it." She would have to consider whether it was smarter to keep Scratch as a ghost, or have him pilot dollies, in the future.

"What are you doing?" Calenda said. It took Elruin a moment to realize she was talking to Lemia. "Are you looting corpses in a church?"

Lemia was currently standing over one of the centaurs that Elruin guessed was once a woman, holding a long chain. "What? Not like they have any use for this stuff. Besides, have you seen the quality of this jewelry, and how different is to our designs? If I can get a decent outfit, I could claim I'm foreign royalty and people would believe it. Or if not royalty, then at least a traveling foreign merchant."

"That's not the problem!" Cali insisted. "This is a church of Enge, and his worshipers."

"Yeah, well, go tell that to the inquisitors," Lemia said. She moved on to another ashen, mummified body. "We've got two abominations and a girl that apparently Enge Itself has demanded sacrificed. Looting church corpses is the least objectionable thing we've done since yesterday. Then there's these slaver-demons. I'd be having a real crisis of faith right now if I cared about Enge or the church in the first place. As I see it, they and theirs have done nothing for me, so I owe them nothing."

Elruin found herself agreeing with Lemia. "Sorry, Cali, but I don't think Enge is on our side. And if he is, he'd want us to do whatever we could to succeed."

"Just... fine," Cali muttered. "If you need me, I'll be outside getting some fresh air." She stopped at the entrance to the church. "Leave the holy symbols behind. If not in the name of decency, then pragmatism. They look too much like ours, would attract the wrong sorts of attention."

Elruin watched Cali go.

"She'll be fine," Lemia said. "What matters right now is survival, and she knows that."

Elruin sighed, then began to sing, reaching out with her Voice of the Dead magic, she spoke to the echoes of what were once ghosts, or fragments of memories, or whatever it was that she was tapping into with her magic. "There's a cellar that way, it's where they kept donations."

"Think they've got any wine? If it's been down here the last thousand years or so, it'll have to be the best booze on the planet." Regardless of answer, Lemia was happier with the idea of taking directly from the coffers, than poking her gloves around in the ashen remains of these mummies.

Elruin let them to the side passage, then took point while allowing Lemia to generate light behind them. The passage was a sloped ramp, rather than stairs. A portion of that floor had a large, living tree root which stuck through it, then back into the ground. It felt magical, and familiar. "That explains why there are still corpses down here," she said more to herself than anything as she ducked under the root.

"I don't get it, what's a root have to do with anything?"

"It's one of Lyra's," she said. "When she created that giant tree, she had to take the material from somewhere. I'm sure there were pockets of caves down here before, but she's the one who turned it into a labyrinth of tunnels."

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"If that's the case, I'd hate to see what happens next rainy season," Lemia said. "The whole countryside will be nothing more than sinkholes."

Elruin considered that possibility. "I don't know, I think Lyra's too smart for that."

"Either way, we'll be long gone by then." Lemia stopped, her eyes widening as she looked into the abandoned cellar. There were armfuls of coins that looked like they must have been stacked neat in the corner, but had fallen over in what must have been the same cataclysm that buried the city underground, and a tapestry that held shimmering threads of blue, green and gold.

"Is that a map?" Elruin asked. The shape of the empire maps matched, even the rivers were in the same place.

"If it is, it's the most magnificent map I've ever seen." Lemia stepped closer to the wall hanging. "Magical cleaning, magical repair, still working after all these centuries. I think this is the swamp, and these are the plains, and that means these brown dots would be cities, and these are roads. They had so many, even the Senol desert is covered in cities."

"They're like stars in the sky," Elruin agreed. "We have to take it with us."

"Yes, we do," Lemia agreed. "There's more historical knowledge here than in half the library's books combined. Look, if this is true, the Lenal Islands are bigger than Engeval, and there's even an end to the supposedly endless Senol desert." She was already starting to take the tapestry off the wall. "Even if you didn't have monsters and oceans in the way, it could take a year to walk from one end of this map to the other."

Elruin started helping Lemia lower and roll up the map, which was the bulk of their work. Without extra bags, they couldn't carry much more than some pocketfuls of gold coins, so they left behind the less valuable silver and billon. Without tools, it would be struggle enough to take the map up to the surface with them.

They returned to the top floor, the rug-sized map carried between them.

"We found a map of the whole world!" Elruin declared when she returned to the surface level. "We have to show it to the library."

"It's not the whole world," Lemia corrected. "But I wouldn't be surprised to learn it's at half of the world. I'm sure we can find a library somewhere to preserve it. Better than leaving it here to rot when the protective magic finally wears thin."

"I guess that's not too sacrilegious." Calenda uncrossed her arms. "If we can restore lost knowledge, I'm sure Enge will forgive us."

Scratch, too, had returned from his adventure before them. "So, we can get through here. It'll take a bit of work, and I'll need to take my puppet back for a few to do the digging. Gonna have to abandon the mork, though. No way to get it out unless we wanna spend another day wandering around down here looking for a bigger hole."

"Then we exorcise the mork and head up," Calenda said. "We're operating on a time limit before there's nowhere left to run from Claron. I, for one, don't want to spend the rest of Ell's life hiding in these tunnels. We will run out of food sooner rather than later."

Elruin didn't like the sound of that, either. "Alright, I'll exorcise the mork. Will the hand monster fit through the tunnel?"

"Yeah, these things are made for contorting their way through tight places." Scratch took his reclaimed puppet up into the church tower, and soon there was the sound of earth and stone collapsing to the floor, then down the stairs.

Suggested Listening

Soon they, sans one now-regular-dead mork, were pushing things into the tunnel for Scratch to pull to the surface. At the end, they climbed up the cramped tunnel with Calenda taking up the rear.

They were dirty, sweaty, and the sun was well into the sky before they found themselves on the surface. At least Elruin's training outfit was still in one piece, requiring only a thorough scrubbing to be presentable again.

"Now we need to determine where to go." Calenda used a combination of her sarite and natural magic to scale one of the trees. "We're west of Arila, which means a direct march to Engewal takes us right back into Claron's territory, so that's out. So's west, that takes us into the mountains the wrong way. We could go north, that takes us into Dwarven territory. There, we can hire messengers that won't be traced back to us. Problem is, it means days of marching in open wilderness, without any farmsteads to take refuge. Or south, where I'm most familiar, but also the places Claron's most likely to conquer next if he hasn't already."

"I'm guessing trying to go straight through to Engewal is a bad plan," Lemia said.

"It's... an option. The fastest option, but the one with the most risk. We'll have to kill people, some bandits, some soldiers who may be doing nothing more than their jobs, if we take that path. Also, the chance of running face first into Claron or his elite forces."

"Speaking of strong, did one of you do something to me?" Lemia looked at the rest of the group. "Climbing up that hole was more exercise than I've ever done in my life, but I don't feel that tired."

"Oh, that's an interesting one," Scratch said. "Let me ask a question: what do you think happens to life energy, when a monster or powerful mage dies?"

"Some of the energy becomes sarite, the rest dissipates into the environment, unless something stops it form doing so. Or so everything I've been taught claims, and all my magical training confirms. You're going to have to come up with a lot of evidence to convince me otherwise." Lemia watched the ghost, daring him to throw yet another of her once-held truths in to question.

"Don't worry, Spook, that part's all true." Scratch loved the smug satisfaction of messing with the woman. "But it's more complex than that. Some of that energy doesn't break down, it remains 'solid' for a time. It can become the spark that creates undeath, but it can also seek out new living hosts. The closest animal, usually that means whatever killed it. Those monsters you helped kill had a decent amount of power that's now yours."

"Mine?" Lemia couldn't deny that she felt far stronger than she had yesterday. "What about the rest of you?"

"Well, I get nothing, consequence of what I am," Scratch said. "Elruin picked up some, too, but at her strength, she'd need to kill a couple dozen of those things to notice the difference. You're weaker, so it's more obvious. That's why the wilderness grows ever more dangerous. Kill or be killed is all that nature knows, so as the beasts hunt each other, they gain strength, they breed, every cycle a little stronger than the last."

Calenda asked the next question. "Wait, how come I've never heard about any of this before?"

"Oh, I don't know, why wouldn't the rulers of the world want it known that all someone has to do to become powerful is slit their throats while they sleep? Why wouldn't the churches want to broadcast the knowledge that you can become a god, just by murdering a city or two? If any of them realized the truth, they'd never breathe it to another living soul. Besides, there's diminishing returns. After a certain point of power, you'd have to hunt things like Lyra and Claron to get any stronger. Doesn't save you from the reaper in the end, anyway. Life of war, godly power, age takes you anyway."

"That makes more sense than I care to admit. But it doesn't change our immediate situation." Calenda looked to the east, in the general direction of Arila. "For now, we must find a way to warn Engewal and stop Claron."