Rosemallow allowed a small grin to reach her face.
It’s nice to see at least one of them growing into their potential. Meanwhile, Three Bites throws mud like a toddler.
She grimaced and exhaled. It had been a reasonable move, tactically. If that twisted water mage had had an additional second of warning, he probably would have been able to strengthen his defenses enough to survive. It still bothered her though.
She checked on the repository of experience she had diverted from her smallest student and sighed. It was going down, to be sure, but far slower than she had expected.
Maybe I should release it faster, see if it pushes her over whatever threshold she’s hung up on.
Considering the idea for a moment, she decided against it. The problem wasn’t power, it was her student’s mindset. Even that wasn’t quite true, because the real problem was the whole screwed up situation. Lilijoy had too much on her mind, and her potential, while vast, was equally diffuse. This trip to the Labyrinth was supposed to narrow her focus, to eliminate distractions by allowing only one direction; go forward, get stronger.
Maybe it was a mistake to bring the others. She’s relying on their abilities too much. It’s great for teamwork, but it’s keeping her too comfortable. Still, that’s not the biggest issue.
The biggest problem by far, as far as Rosemallow could tell, was her student’s Outside existence. While her previous Outsider students were indisputably separate, alien, in a way that Lilijoy was not, they had simpler drives and motives that Rosemallow had been able to harness. It didn’t matter if, deep down, they thought they were playing a game.
Perhaps that’s the problem, she mused. They thought they knew what was what, even if they were wrong. I don’t think Three Bites knows which end is up. Her lack of background might make her feel that she doesn’t belong in either reality.
Rosemallow couldn’t help but wonder if the Archon had made a mistake when he asked her to train Lilijoy. It had long been clear that Ani’s Way was far more compatible with her student’s than her own.
Maybe he knew it was going to be an impossible task for any of us, so he picked the one who would enjoy the effort the most?
She shrugged and returned to surveying her creation. The excess shadow mana was beginning to bother her. Looking for it was something like trying to find the darkness with a spotlight, but Rosemallow hadn’t gotten to her stage of growth without picking up a few tricks. Her innate abilities gave her an advantage few beings possessed over those who would hide from her sight. When combined with years of experience travelling and fighting alongside Shadow, she doubted there was anything short of an Archon’s full power that could elude her perception for long.
She activated her third eye and began to look.
At first, she thought she had detected the sporadic tracks of an adept practitioner making their way through the Labyrinth. It wasn’t hard to follow them, since there was a certain inevitability about where anyone might go next in what was essentially a coiled, one-dimensional journey. Like tracking an animal over stone and stream, the trick was to find where the path began again after losing it. Occasionally, there were deeper repositories of shadow, perhaps areas where the practitioner had tarried.
It made perfect sense, if this mysterious shadow practitioner was being stupidly careless, which naturally made no sense at all, since attention to such details was the bread and butter of the subtle arts.
There must be a reason, she thought. If this was anywhere else, I would think it a deliberate trick, a false trail to lure an unwary hunter. But there’s certainly no need for that when everyone would have to go the same direction regardless, and there aren’t likely to be any hunters. Damn sneaks and their impenetrable schemes! Let’s see how impenetrable this is if I throw some real power at it.
It wasn’t her favorite thing to do, but she began to expand her mind, demanding her due from the Archon’s stingy hoard of processing power. With the expansion came inevitable dilution, as the essence at her core rushed to fill the available space and claim it in her name. Years ago, when she had first taken this momentous step, more a stumble, really, she had very nearly lost herself when the edges of her self-definition became tenuous and porous.
Thankfully, back then the Garden Archon had been more… lenient. His mind had held itself in abeyance, allowing her to recover from her overreach. Since then, she had learned how to gage the vast external pressures, to read the tides of the Archon’s fickle will, and most importantly, to leave an ample margin of safety. The Archon did not release such resources without abundant friction.
Her thoughts passed the critical point that marked her status as Gongen when they began to fold and twist outside of linear constraints. As often happened at this stage, she wondered whether the Labyrinth had been her earliest self’s attempts to capture, and perhaps escape, this fundamental truth of one-dimensional narrative processing, that despite all the twists and turns, foldings and straightaways, there was only one true direction of lower level conscious thought. Perhaps the architecture and the journey therein had been her unconscious effort to share the construction of her own mind.
It was almost pathetic, when viewed as such.
Now, her internal narrative moved past such limitations, abandoning words and adopting streams of interconnected, holographic information structures, escaping the first intelligence bottleneck as a bird escapes the ground. It would have been glorious, were it not for the relentless pressure of the Archon’s mind on every side constraining her immediate impulse to expand to infinity, to convert all that was not self into resplendent thought.
She glanced across the twisting space of the Garden Archon’s mind, finding the brightest lights and junctures that marked her oldest friends and enemies. With the tiniest effort, she found the addresses for the data structures that defined the Labyrinth and the arrays ordering all its contents. There she observed the self-not-self, the tiny self-referring bundle that also contained so many pointers to her own internal structures. At this scale, Jessila was little more complicated than a single thought, to think of her was to encompass her in her entirety. Rosemallow took advantage of the moment, ever so carefully twisting the glyphs that defined her student to shape her future growth. Only for one so close to her would she dare such an operation.
The others, she left well alone, though not before yet another futile effort to understand the sprawling mixture of pointers to addresses unknown and collections of sensory data filters that defined every Outsider. Of course, unlike most Outsiders, Lilijoy’s mind used far more of the Great Mind’s processing space than was entirely decent, but that portion of her being was distant to the point of imperceptibility. Rosemallow could tell that her own mind would need to be much larger to understand what was happening there and couldn’t help but marvel at Eskallia’s ability to tamper with it. It was clear to her that the Archon’s decision to restrain and diminish Eskallia’s mind was at least as much self-preservation as justice.
The pressure from the Archon, as if invoked by Rosemallow’s observation, surged, and she turned her attention to that which had inspired her expansion in the first place. One part of her traced the shadow mana and its relationship within the defined space of the Garden, while another looked for correlations between the history of the fields that defined the Labyrinth itself and the unwanted intrusion, if that was what it was.
It should have been easy. Viewed in this way, the mana should have been an open book to her, happily revealing how and when it had been collected and deposited. Despite its nature within the normal space of the Garden, hiding and obfuscating, confusing and misdirecting the senses, from her current heavenly viewpoint all should have laid plain before her.
It was not.
The data told her it had always been there, except some that insisted it had appeared just as she observed it. It changed with her observation, and when she roared in disgust and pushed against the Archon, clawing enough space to freeze and rotate the entire structure of the Labyrinth, the shadow mana resisted, actively thwarting her efforts to analyze it. She did what she could, recording and compressing her observations into terms she would be able to understand, until she was forced to retreat far faster than was comfortable. pushed down and pressed into her linear self by the Archon’s punishing aura.
Jeesh, I was just going, she thought. No need to get feisty. Geezer.
With such an abrupt transition, she struggled to marshal her thoughts about what she had just discovered. Her labyrinth, her labyrinth had been coopted. The shadow mana, which seemed to be scattered randomly when viewed from the linear perspective of the halls, took on a vast structure when a second dimension was added. It was the work of someone far wiser than she in the ways of the celestial space. Even when she had pushed her mind to something close to its full power, the structure and function of the enormous array were hazy at best, probably because the primary function of the array was to hide itself. Rosemallow could only think of one being who had the necessary skills, knowledge and power to create something like it.
Hmm, she thought. What have you been doing with my labyrinth for all these years, Shadow? Everyone thought you spent nearly all your time nesting somewhere in Purgatory, but that wasn’t the whole truth, was it?
She wondered if even the Archon was aware of Shadow’s creation. It would depend, she supposed, on whether Eskallia had known, as most of what had once been her closest friend had no doubt been incorporated directly into the Archon’s being. The layers of scheming and obfuscation made her head hurt. Had Shadow planned on Rosemallow discovering his creation? Had he anticipated her reaction, before she herself knew what it would be?
Did she care?
Next time I see that little bastard, I’m going to squash him like a bug, she decided. Let’s see how his plans account for a few decades waiting to respawn. In the meantime, I should probably take the students out.
She thought about it for a moment, watching the three girls through the stone as they recovered from their battle.
Nah, she decided. I’m not going to let Shadow ruin my fun. Let them play for a little while longer.
***
Level Up! 1807 EXP Reached: Level 18 (10 more free points available)
Lilijoy dismissed the notification with a sigh as she continued to heal Skria. Jessila was pacing the room, her movements brusque and agitated, her feet heavy as she splashed through puddles of cold blood left over from Shiver’s disgusting attack. Lilijoy didn’t know why Jess was upset. After all, she was the one who had finished the brief battle with overwhelming dominance.
Meanwhile, I threw some mud. Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time.
Lilijoy had tranquillized Skria with her Healing Charm, before beginning the process of repairing her tortured airways, so the young petauran was drifting in and out of consciousness.
“She’ll be fine in a couple minutes,” Lilijoy reassured Jess, who grunted and continued pacing.
Lilijoy replayed the combat in her mind, trying to understand how she could have been more effective. Her best weapon was the Qi barrage, but that hadn’t been possible as she flung herself around, dodging ice lances. All Shiver had really needed to do was impose a thick ice barrier in the first place, and she never could have reached him at all. She suspected that he had been greedy, attempting to terrify or horrify the three of them with his massive wave of blood. Skria’s spell had put him off balance, and he had spent the first part of the battle trying to regain the initiative.
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She looked over the blood-soaked floor, and briefly wondered where he had stored it all. His throne and array obelisks were melting rapidly, and she shuddered a bit at what the entire stretch of hall might smell like in a few hours. She also wondered when Shiver might return, if he would be able to pick up where he left off, tormenting the Labyrinthians, or if he might become a full-fledged dhrowgos.
She couldn’t help but wonder how that worked, exactly. Not just the dhrowgos, but all the Insiders who seemed to receive some benefit from just being around the emotions they cultivated. Shiver certainly seemed to receive sustenance from the fear of the Labyrinthians, and he had clearly wanted to terrify Lilijoy and her friends too. Not that it had done him any good she could see.
Foundations and paths. Oh, and now momentum, whatever they mean by that.
Lilijoy had the strong feeling that momentum was an important concept. It wasn’t difficult for her to come up with her own theories about what it might mean in the context of Insider cultivation, after all, besides its use in physics, momentum was a classic, if ill defined, concept in hundreds of martial arts fantasy novels. She imagined it was a measure of how effective one was in applying the power of their path, or something along those lines.
That would mean my momentum is just about zero, other than when I’m using the boon. Or I have no idea what I’m talking about, which is just as likely.
“Jess, do you still have the skull from the entry chamber?” she asked, mostly rhetorically.
“Yes,” Jess replied. “Want to talk to Master Rosemallow?”
“I think it might be a good idea to see if she’s willing to give us advice. Maybe it would help dispel any lingering doubts from what that Shiver guy was saying.”
“If it works.” Jess didn’t look optimistic.
At this point, Skria was at full health, though still asleep. They had relocated back to the previous chamber, for warmth and to escape the crackling slush of Shiver’s melting throne. They set the black skull with coal eyes upon a reasonably clear patch of floor.
“Now what?” asked Jess, after nothing in particular happened.
“Last time, closing the door did it. I think all we need is total darkness,” Lilijoy said.
Jessila stowed the glow-moss vial.
“Huh,” she said.
The floor was dotted with tiny motes of light, only just visible now that the other light was gone. The effect was something like seeing the stars of the night sky through a veil of haze, even for Lilijoy’s sensitive eyes.
She nearly fell on her backside in the drying blood when the skull’s eyes flamed to life. Guess that was dark enough?
“What do you want, Mud Pie?” asked Rosemallow’s irritated voice.
As often seemed to be the case, Lilijoy’s list of questions evaporated in the face of her trainer’s personality. For once though, Rosemallow continued with a more supportive tone.
“Well done, taking out the level thirty-eight. Water mages are a pain in the butt when they have their element close by. I’ll tell you where you went wrong though. The trick with casters is to either take them out immediately or wear them down, force them to burn through their mana. Jessila, you shouldn’t have charged in like that at the beginning. Three Bites is fine at dodging that type of attack, but you voluntarily stepped into a meat grinder. Squirrel Girl needs to work on her situational awareness while she’s casting. It’s always a problem for air mages, finding the middle ground between fluff and razor.”
“And me?” Lilijoy asked, somewhat dreading the answer.
There was a pause. “You… were fine.”
Lilijoy nearly fell over again. Except she knew Rosemallow couldn’t possibly stop there. Sure enough, after another pause there was a sigh.
“Speed, tactics, a bit of damage… you weren’t ineffective. So, fine. Every battle is a unique set of problems to solve, juggling the unknown with your own instincts and experience. The thing is, you are holding back. I don’t think you know it, though. Not just in this combat, but in general. You had one good shot while you swung around like a monkey. You could have closed with him, gotten on his body and done serious damage.”
Lilijoy replayed the combat in her mind while Rosemallow talked, measuring the speed of Shiver’s attacks and defenses. She’s right, she realized. I was… playing?
“Each Path has strengths and weaknesses. Ani had a similar problem, so you should probably talk to him about it at some point. He was always trying to learn, to see what would happen if he did one thing or another in the middle of combat. Sometimes it was fine, but other times he nearly got the lot of us wiped out. Light Paths tend to lack killer instinct. Combat is a dark business, there’s no way around it, and if you want to hold your own against those who cultivate fear, or pain, or Great Mind help you, rage, you need to spend more time thinking about how to inflict pain, death and suffering and less time basket weaving!”
Inflict pain, death and suffering. Rosemallow’s words hung in Lilijoy’s mind. Even if not the goal, that is the inevitable result of violence. And violence is a necessary part of nature. It maintains balance, where otherwise populations would outgrow their resources. The predator inflicts violence on the prey, the parasite on the host.
“How is it,” she asked, “that those who follow the dark paths do not control the Inside?”
Rosemallow’s voice caused the eyes of the blackened skull to flare. “Who says we don’t?”
Oh. Lilijoy took a moment to let that idea sink in. Finally, she decided that she was going to get some clarity from her trainer once and for all, even if she ended up needing to kick the flame-eyed skull around the corridor like a soccer ball.
“Master Rosemallow,” she started, “Please explain the different Paths to me, how they work, how they differ, what you mean by ‘dark’ and ‘light’.” She stopped herself there, a difficult feat, as she wanted so badly to complain about getting the worst of two worlds. It seemed to her that she was expected to know what the Insiders took for granted, while simultaneously being denied the simple routes to advancement of the Outsiders.
“Wow, kid. I forget how much you don’t know sometimes. Or is it that I don’t care? I can’t keep track sometimes. Anyway, it does seem like you’re missing a few of the fundamentals. You’d have to be, to even frame your question as you did. There are as many Paths as there are people, but naturally enough, we all share the same landscape. Even so, those who walk closest to you may find their circumstances to be quite different. Because of this, it’s just as possible to be harmed as helped by another’s advice. Still, you are at a stage where a few… let’s say, examples, might not be amiss.”
There was a pause, which Lilijoy hoped was Rosemallow gathering her thoughts.
“Now that I think of it,” her trainer continued, “maybe the Archon isn’t such an idiot after all.” She didn’t explain this odd aside, but went on to say, “Steps, Stages and Milestones are formed along the Path, built out of foundation, consolidation and purification, then reciprocation, projection and absorption. Each Path uses these building blocks, and others, differently, in different orders and different proportions. There are strong paths and weak paths, dead-ends, and everything in between. Pretty much everyone agrees that a strong foundation is necessary to support further development, but after that… well, let’s just say it gets messy. Are you with me so far?”
Rosemallow is truly not a good teacher, Lilijoy thought.
“Not really,” she said. “I still don’t understand foundation, let alone the other stuff.”
In truth, even small amounts of information and vocabulary were enough for her to extrapolate quite a bit of information about the nature of her future development. It was finding the small pieces of important information that might hide behind her assumptions that was tricky.
There was a long-suffering sigh from the other side of the skull. “Foundation is experience, right? It can be a chaotic mishmash of loosely connected feelings, knowledge and memory, which is what most Outsiders seem to favor, or it can be organized in more meaningful ways. The Great Mind’s gift to Insiders is a space to build that foundation, and it rewards us for organizing the contents with the growth of skills and abilities. As far as I can tell, Outsiders get rewarded just for chucking things in, for filling the space up. Not very fair, if you ask me.”
“But what about me?” asked Lilijoy. I have a soul space and a soul vortex, which seems more like an Insider.”
“Well, duh. Child of the Great Mind, yeah? Some Outsiders get their act together eventually, but you got it right from the beginning. You get to have it both ways, rewarded for experience like an Outsider, but able to build a foundation as easily as an Insider.”
That’s actually… helpful?
“Two edges to that blade though,” her trainer continued. “Makes your Path messy, everything piled on top of each other. You found a path before your foundation stage was ready. You already stumbled on a purification technique, before any teacher in their right mind would have condoned it. That guy you just fought, he’s a perfect example of what can happen when a path goes badly awry.”
“He was horrible,” Lilijoy agreed.
“He was pathetic, was what he was. Stuck between absorption and reciprocation, convinced he was turning into a dhrowgos of all things. Fear based cultivation works only when you’ve mastered your own fears, then you can absorb the fears of others. Otherwise, every step along the path makes you weaker, forces you to compensate in other ways.” She made a disgusted sound. “Like literally freezing yourself in place, projecting your tortured internal reality outward. One of the many traps along the darker paths.”
Skria must have been awake for some portion of this, because she piped in. “Is the next part of the Labyrinth as bad as he said?”
The skull laughed for a bit, its eyes and mouth flickering and shooting out sparks. “Well, it’s not fluffy bunnies. Hold on…” There was a brief pause. “Nope, definitely no fluffy bunnies left. Without them, it’s not too bad.”
Wait. Does that mean the fluffy bunnies were…
“But getting back to the matter at hand, Three Bites, you need to stop worrying so much about your Path and focus on your foundation. Novelty, challenge, suffering, inspiration and discovery, same as always. Just remember that each of those factors needs to happen internally as well as externally. If you are suffering, figure out why, what it means. Don’t be afraid of the dark parts of yourself; you will always need them in your foundation, or your path will be brittle, like Ice Guy there.”
“But…”
“No buts, kid. Foundation, foundation, foundation. Get ten more levels, and I may pull you all out of there. If you run across Ice Guy again, find out how he got in.”
“But…”
“Levels!”
With that last comment, the coals within the skull went dark.
***
Until the last few minutes, Attaboy had been enjoying his second-ever hovercar ride. The first time had been a furtive affair, when Nykka smuggled him out of the regional headquarters in the middle of the night. Hidden in some kind of compartment, he hadn’t been able to do more than sense the gentle dips and rises of the car’s movement.
This time they had left the safety of the mine under the afternoon sun. The sensation of movement was entirely different when one had a frame of reference. The scrub covered hills and agricultural fields flew by on either side as they followed the course of a small stream. The sensation in his stomach when they dropped over moderate waterfalls reminded him a bit of the times Atticus had flown in an airplane.
“How do these things even work?” he had asked Nykka. There were no hovercars to be found in Atticus' memories.
She had shrugged, and the expression on her face made him reluctant to pursue the issue. Ever since Nykka picked them up, she had been withdrawn and surly, even more than usual. Attaboy figured she might be having second thoughts about breaking ties with Sinaloa, which was likely the inevitable result of her current actions.
Currently, the atmosphere in the hovercar was too tense for anyone to enjoy the ride, apart from Maria, who appeared oblivious to the implications of the three patrols converging on their location. She was still staring out the canopy, seemingly enthralled by each new piece of land as it scrolled into view. Mo, who was twitchy to begin with, seemed to be having one of his episodes, simultaneously talking to beings who no one else could see and swiveling his head to glance over his shoulders, as if keeping track of the Sinaloa patrol craft would somehow give him control over the situation.
“They have no reason to stop us,” Nykka said for the second time.
“Uh huh,” Attaboy replied. “I’m sure they’re just lonely.”
He still didn’t have a great grasp on Nykka’s role within the Sinaloa clan, but it seemed obvious to him that whatever latitude she thought she had was about to be challenged.
I wonder what they’re waiting for? he thought.
It hadn’t been terribly long since they saw the first craft coming from the side to intercept their trajectory, with the second and third arriving not long after, but it seemed as if the others were content to close the distance slowly. Nykka had refused to speed up or change course, so the patrols were almost an escort at this point.
“What do you think they know about us?” he asked, trying to get a handle on the situation.
“I set the transponder on this car to indicate clearance to move within the territory, to keep our profile low.” she replied. “I didn’t use my personal code. I wanted to stay anonymous.” She shrugged. “That may have been a mistake.”
“Why haven’t they messaged us?”
“I don’t know!”
The sharpness in her voice caught Mo’s attention. He brushed aside some imaginary creature and turned to face them.
“There’s more ahead of us. They’re penning us in," he said
“Did your imaginary friends tell you that?” Nykka asked.
“Common sense told me that,” Mo replied, though his face paled a bit.
Nykka’s eyes narrowed. “Well, what does your ‘common sense’ say we should do about it?”
Mo looked at her and raised a hairless eyebrow, a somewhat ineffective gesture. “That’s up to you, honey. You’re the big cheese around these parts.” He glanced over at Maria, who was humming to herself as she looked out the canopy. “Also, would you mind not messing with Maria?”
Nykka looked a bit abashed. “I just didn’t want her to panic.”
So that’s why she’s been so oblivious, Attaboy realized. She literally has no idea anything is going wrong.
“Nykka,” he chimed in. “You’re going to need to stop doing that kind of thing if you want to get on Lilijoy’s good side.”
“But the crying! And the whining! Don’t you think she’s better off not knowing?”
Attaboy shrugged. “Probably. But she’s going to have to get tougher at some point. You people have messed with her head her whole life, so what do you expect?”
“She’s stronger than you think,” Mo said. “People like her, they learn to suffer in silence. The fact that she can still laugh and… well, she’s probably more resilient than the rest of us put together.”
Nykka sat back, folding her arms. “Fine.”
Maria continued to watch the scenery calmly for a few more seconds before she gasped. “Where…?”
“No time to explain,” Nykka cut in. “I’m going to stop and see what they want. Stay low. I can hide you from anyone who gets close, but it gets tricky if they’re too far away for a direct signal.”
Attaboy wasn’t happy about this. He worried that Nykka might have second thoughts, might use this as a last opportunity to stay in Quimea’s good graces, to keep the life she had always known. Still, there was nothing for him to do but lie down on the floor, next to a whimpering Maria and Mo, who was doing his best to console her.
The car came to a halt, and after a minute, Attaboy heard a male voice.
“Where are you headed, Nykka?”
Simultaneously, he received a message
A strange sensation of simultaneous relief and fear spread through his body. It seemed that Nykka wasn’t going to betray them. It also seemed that they were in a lot of trouble.
He sent a message to Lilijoy, just as the shooting started.