”Day forty-eight: We are still stuck in an elevator. I am beginning to forget faces of people I once held dear. Despite our best efforts, out rations have finally dried out completely, and I live in constant fear of my only living companion turning on me – I can see it in her eyes. Perhaps I should be the one to take action first…” Anastacia monologued from the floor of the elevator they had boarded inside the machine fortress.
Emilia sighed. “Anna, it has been maybe two hours, I promise I won’t even consider eating you for at least three more.”
“She herself has admitted that my time is running out, but I do not know it if I have it in me to do what needs to be done.” The necromancer continued, slowly dying of boredom.
“First of all, if I had to consider cannibalism, I’d know to do it way before you’d suspect anything. Secondly, you’re still, miraculously I might add, all skin and bones, it’s not worth it to kill you for food.” Emilia pointed out and squeezed Anastacia’s arm to make her point.
The necromancer let out a whiny yelp and rolled further away from her friend, towards the small pedestal in the middle of the lift, apparently containing its controls. She had at one point taken a brief look at it but didn’t see anything obvious to interact with and had quickly given up as she hadn’t yet known that she had all the time in the world before they would reach their destination.
Lazily running her finger along the slight grooves the patterns of light were embedded in, she tried to look for anything that would allow the elevator to speed up – or failing that, make it spin or anything else to break the monotony.
As usual, she found the smoot stone surface pleasant to touch and almost immediately lost sight of her original goal, instead beginning to simply caress it with a pleased smirk on her face.
Suddenly one of her nails caught on an almost undetectable seam that ran all the way around the cylindrical pedestal. With the limited light provided by the ancient technology around them, the seam was completely invisible to the eye, and even running one’s fingertip across it, it couldn’t be felt. The only way to know of its presence was to run something sharp and pointy along the side and have it briefly catch on the almost microscopic gap.
Anastacia stood up, grasped on to the pedestal and hugged it tightly to try and either spin or lift it, and to her surprise, it actually nudged clockwise slightly. However, the effort it had taken wasn’t particularly comfortable to her injured shoulder, so the necromancer hailed King for help.
The simulacra grasped on to the top of the post with one hand and began spinning it like it was nothing. With each turn, the flow of light along the patterns changed as old connections broke and new ones were made. After the fifth full rotation, the pedestal made a slight hissing sound as air escaped from the seam Anastacia had found.
Once King took his hand off it, the cylindrical stone post slowly lifted up and revealed itself to be nothing but a cover for a smaller metal pole that had several dozen identical milky white crystals halfway slotted into it, in neat rows around the pillar.
Only two of them appeared to be of any importance at the time however, one was brightly lit up and had one of the lines of light running to its slot and the one left from it was oddly colored with a dark purple or violet stain on it.
Just as Anastacia was about to arbitrarily pull out one of the crystals, Emilia voiced her concern. “Are you sure you should be tampering with that? What if it just deactivates the platform and drops us down at full speed?” She asked worriedly.
“I’m sure it’s fine, King would stop me if this broke anything. Besides, I think I know what these are.” The necromancer assured her friend and plucked one of the white crystals from the pedestal.
While she didn’t know for sure, the appearance of the crystals matched the ones the baron of iron had used to record his musings on, and since his keep laid on top of a machine fortress, it was fair to assume he had found the crystals there and figured out their purpose.
Anastacia cleared her throat and tried to sing the tune she had used to activate the crystals in the baron’s keep, and to everyone’s surprise, it came out clearer than even she herself could have ever imagined.
The crystal in her hand lit up brightly and matched the note she sang before beginning to repeat the sound imbued to it; the exact same sound of the elevator scraping against the walls periodically, in the same, possibly intentional rhythm.
The necromancer disappointedly turned to King. “Do you dumbasses seriously keep voice recordings of mute simulacra going up and down on this lift? Why?” She sighed.
King put out his hand to ask for the crystal and waited for Anastacia to give it to him. He then slotted the still glowing crystal in the place the necromancer had taken it from and took a step back.
The pedestal responded by directing a line of light to the crystal across its surface and suddenly the patterns on the elevator’s floor became exponentially brighter, until faint figures could be seen in the light hitting the dust particles in the air. Over the next few moments, the image became clearer and revealed itself to be three knights of stone, standing motionlessly side by side next to the pedestal.
The leftmost of the three had an armor identical to King, but in immaculate condition. In its hand, it held an absolutely monstrous bow that was taller than the simulacrum itself. The handheld ballista must have weighed as much as a person and even the string was as thick as a finger. There was no way anyone weaker than King could have even used it.
The rightmost of the three knights appeared otherwise similar to King but was missing some of the heavier pieces of armor on its chest and legs. Fixed to its right wrist was a long metal claw that looked like a scythe blade, its tip almost reached the ground by the knight’s feet. Attached to the simulacrum’s other hand was a sharp hook, that looked like it could have been a weapon on its own, but its sturdiness suggested that it might have been there more for utility than anything.
The knight in the middle was a downright terrifying sight, while built on the same frame as King and the two by its side, its armor of stone gave it the size and aura of a mountain in roughly human form. Every joint and weak spot was covered with mail and plate armor that could have probably taken a cannonball and have it merely bounce off like a slight nuisance. Resting the tip of its Anastacia-sized sword on the floor, it quietly waited for the ride to end.
While Anastacia was being utterly enamored by the visage of the simulacra in front of her, Emilia whistled in awe.
“What were these guys out to kill? An entire castle?” She joked and stood up to inspect the crystals. “So these are recordings of what happened in the elevator? Can I pick one?”
King nodded and twisted the one he had previously slotted back in, causing the glowing images to flicker and die.
Anastacia swiped the air where they had been and moaned disappointedly, she hadn’t been nearly done checking out the three warriors from the previous recording. She would have said something but instead was distracted by leggy patting her on the head.
The priestess ignored her friend’s annoyed look and browsed the selection of identical crystals. “So I take it that this glowing one is the one currently recording us?” She pondered and slid her finger over to the strangely stained one next to it. “Assuming these go in order, this must be whatever is causing the problem we’re here to solve. Is it supposed to look like this?”
plucking the tainted crystal from the pedestal and rolling it between her fingers, she took a better look at it under her lantern.
Stemming from a dark spot on one of the sides, tentacle-like violet strands of smoke lingered within the cloudy white crystal. As she stared at it for a while, the corruption appeared to be slowly moving around the stationary white twirls of regular impurities that gave the stone its color.
Simply looking at the stain was enough to send chills down Emilia’s spine, almost like there was something unsettling about the deep violet color itself – something utterly vile. Like it was some otherworldly shade that was somehow more than a simple color, much more. Whatever it was, it made the priestess’ mind yearn for the feeling of safety Sylvia’s songs usually brought to it and intensified the quietness she was enduring thanks to the fort’s defenses.
“Em?” Anastacia suddenly asked and tried to take the crystal for herself to look at it but was stopped by the priestess clenching it in her fist.
Something about it made it feel like giving it to Anastacia would have been risky. She didn’t want to hold on to it at all either but letting the necromancer have it simply felt like a mistake she shouldn’t make.
“I was just thinking we should try this one to see what we might be dealing with.” Emilia explained her quietness.
Anastacia shrugged. “Yeah, that seems like something Gilbert would do. Always assess the situation the best you can before charging in and all that. What’s the worst that can happen anyway? It’s just a recording.”
“Right… right! Get all the information you can first.” The priestess agreed a bit hesitantly but held out the crystal so Anastacia could activate it.
As the stone reacted to the note it was lit by, instead of responding to it normally, it let out a discordant screech before playing out the same elevator noise the last one had.
Emilia warily placed it back into its slot and waited for the pedestal to recognize it and direct its recording to whatever mechanics and magic caused the lights to flare up and replay the rest of the scene.
Suddenly the trails of light on the elevator floor changed their hue to match the violet inside the crystal and gave life a distorted and malfunctioning human form standing by the pedestal.
Not much taller than Emilia and most definitely not as sturdily built, the person was wearing a large, long tailcoat that it failed to fill at all, leaving its tails and sleeves trailing on the floor. Under the unbuttoned coat, the person was wearing a set of shiny metal armor that seemed somehow familiar. On their head, they wore a helmet made from the same incredibly shiny metal, with a visor shaped much like the face of a skull, though with a hole for a third eye on its forehead. From the helmet’s sides, sprouted a pair of horns that appeared more like branches than anything, and flowing from under it, was a long veil that hid any signs of the person’s identity the helmet itself didn’t.
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Unlike the previous ones, the violet apparition flickered and twisted constantly as the elevator struggled to depict it.
“Oh, great general Erratic Judgement, are you perchance listening to us through this machine of yours?” The person asked with voice so distorted that it took effort for the adventurers to understand the words at all. “If that is the case, I must say that I am severely disappointed. Our approach was met with no resistance; where are your fabled knights? Though the Aureun empire is long gone, its children should surely still persist, or has the unstopping march of time gained purchase on your mind already? Are we too late? Our sadness and disappointment know no end if that is the case – well, not quite, all things have an end waiting for them, trust me, we would know. But still, we have worked hard to arrange this meeting and now that the red line is finally broken, we are held back no more, so it would be quite a crushing setback if it happened too late.”
Seeming slightly frustrated, the person turned away from the pedestal and paced right through Emilia while incoherently mumbling to themselves. Despite the speech being muddled to uselessness, the sound of the person’s metal heels rang through the recording clear as day on every step.
“As it appears this ride will continue for a while longer, perhaps I owe you the favor of introducing ourselves.” They suddenly spoke out again and returned to the middle of the elevator to make a grand gesture towards themselves. “The one who has come to test you, goes by the name of Eminence, The Grand Sage of Entropy – and its unwilful messenger. With me is Trauma, an… assistant – their physical form was temporarily disturbed by the little lightshow you had arranged for us outside, but rest assured, they will solidify again sooner or later. Having a light shine through one’s soul is a bit much for someone in their condition, after all. I will expand upon our purposes here more once we meet face to face, if there is enough of you left to meet…”
The person calling themselves ‘Eminence’ stood away from the pedestal once more and walked around seemingly aimlessly for a couple of minutes, every now and then waving around their hands and muttering to themselves.
Though the brief monologue appeared to be over, the adventurers and simulacra onboard kept watching, partly for further hints and partly because they were stunned in their place by the lingering presence brought forth by the recording.
Once or twice every minute, the apparition stopped to inspect the floor or walls of the chasm that slowly slid by, but every moment Eminence’s image was visible, the world itself, not just the elevator, felt darker and for the lack of a better word, deader; like whatever end there was reserved for the entire world, closed in just a tiny bit faster than it should have.
Emilia started to debate with herself whether she should just take out the crystal again and maybe crush it with her mace before whatever corruption that had been sealed in it would further seep into the machinery of the fortress, but if the person from the recordings was still somewhere inside, corrupting the world with their presence, there really wasn’t much of a point to do so – especially if there was more to learn about their possible opponent.
“Any idea what’s up?” She whispered to Anastacia as if the recording could hear her.
The necromancer frowned and looked slightly sickly. “The lights are making me feel… wrong.” She whispered back and leaned against Leggy for support.
The priestess knew exactly what she meant; with every pulse of the violet light, her skin crawled, and everything seemed bleaker. Her emotions were dulled, sounds weren’t as clear, her body was slightly weaker and fatigued – simply put, everything was ever so slightly worse, and something was most definitely wrong.
Suddenly the recorded image of Eminence stopped on their tracks. “Fascinating… The aureun never disappoint when it comes to architecture. It is truly a shame we are only here to see the ruins of what once was, isn’t it, Anastacia? Or should I say ‘The White One’” They asked and turned directly towards the necromancer, as if they somehow had known she was there. Unlike the necromancers of Mournvalley, who used the title of The White One as the absolute highest honor one could have, the way Eminence said it, felt like it was nothing but mockery.
Before anyone else had time to react, King snatched the tainted crystal and accompanied by the distorted mocking laughter of Eminence, crushed it with his fist.
Almost immediately after the crystal was removed, the usual light blue color coursed into the patterns and the twisted projection disappeared.
“That’s probably not good. Usually it’s not good when people know my name.” Anastacia said and hid behind Leggy’s cloak.
“Looks like they know we’re here then.” Emilia sighed and gave King a pat on the back for his quick acting. “Eminence and Trauma, was it? I didn’t see anyone else in the recording, so at least we’re only dealing with two people. Only two people that are capable of bringing down an entire machine fortress. Just two folks whose sheer presence appears to corrupt the world around them… No that still seems like we’re a bit screwed.”
As they recovered from the experience, the elevator began slowing down and eventually came to a halt with a quiet hissing noise. Their hours long descend had finally come to an end and the relief was almost enough to erase the anxiety caused by the recording – at least temporarily.
The stone door sealing the elevator shaft at the bottom slid open without making a sound, and let in the scent of millennia old dust, which wasn’t particularly unpleasant, but still noticeable to the adventurers.
On the other side of the door appeared to be nothing more than a void of endless darkness, with only trace lighting from the floor in front of them, and from the darkness, echoed the mechanical heartbeat of the fortress, now louder but still obviously not caused by anything nearby. Interestingly, more echoing sounds had joined it after the door had opened. Instead of mechanical thumps, the new ones sounded like air escaping from machinery somewhere, or almost like singing.
A quick wordless debate about who would be the first one to enter took place between the adventurers, but it was interrupted by King casually taking the first step into the darkness, just like he had no doubt done thousands of times before.
As soon as his foot touched the ancient stone under it, a pulse of energy was sent out into the dark and the whole room awoke from its slumber at once. The thin lines of light spread across the floor and the distant walls in an instant, revealing that the room was in fact much, much larger than any building Anastacia had ever seen. Most of the area in Valor she was familiar with could have fit into the room, both in width and height, as it spanned for at least a couple of kilometers from wall to wall, and hundreds of meters in height – in fact, it was hard to tell where the ceiling was, as a thick layer of clouds covered it entirely.
Both the floor and the walls were covered by large square tiles that were a bit under a meter wide and slightly reacted to being touched with either a hum or a vibration.
Emilia took off her hood to gaze into the distance of the empty room as she followed Anastacia into it. “Why?” She asked confusedly and threw her arms up. “Why would you have an empty room this big, with an entrance you couldn’t fit anything larger than a person through!? And a single elevator!”
Lacking the priestess’ healthy amount of skepticism, Anastacia was completely taken in by the seemingly functional machine fortress – but more than anything, there was something she wanted to see.
“King! Where’s your room? I need to see your wardrobe!” She exclaimed happily and started to drag the knight of stone into a random direction towards one of the walls in the distance.
Emilia rushed in front of them and grasped the necromancer by the collar. “Oh no you don’t. You’re going to walk no more than two meters in front of me at all times and stay put if I say so – I really can’t afford losing you here, we only have one guide and no map or anything. Make a single mistake and I’ll get the rope out.”
Anastacia hissed in response and tried to slap Emilia’s hand off herself. “Don’t embarrass me in front of King’s folks, I need to make a good first impression and can’t do that on a leash.” She whispered and nervously straightened her outfit a bit.
The priestess sighed and let go. “Not what we’re here for. Did you already forget what we saw in the lift? We need to deal with that, and unless Leggy knows the layout as well, we need to stick together at any cost.” She explained and glanced at the cloaked simulacra, who had only just stepped into the room after a good bit of hesitation and immediately walked over to the necromancer to stand as close to her as possible.
As the two adventurers bickered over their vastly differing priorities, King quietly took a few steps away from them and pressed his hand on one of the floor tiles, causing the patterns on it to light up brightly. As he lifted up his hand, an almost undetectable pulse of energy spread into the nearby ones and then continued along the lit seams of the floor.
He then moved to another nearby tile and did the same, but instead of causing a pulse, the tile rose up along with his hand and formed a short pillar with several extremely finely made patterns on its sides. A few seconds later a melodic hum emanated from it, interrupting the adventurers.
Suddenly an entire line of tiles in front of him shot up and rose all the way into the cloudy ceiling of the room. As they stopped, the lights on their sides slowly faded and were replaced by countless little dots of light, arranged neatly in groups and with thin lines joining some of them together.
King walked over to the newly made wall and pointed at one of the dots with one hand and at the floor with the other.
“That’s this room? Is that supposed to be a map?” Anastacia guessed.
King nodded.
As far as maps went, the simulacrum one was downright bad, there was absolutely no way to tell any of the dots apart, no names for anything in any language, and either the layout of the fortress was extremely weird, none of the locations made any sense.
Emilia stepped closer to the map and put a finger one her lips as she tried to figure out the ancient diagram. After a while of squinting and head tilting, her eyes lit up. “Ah! I get it. Each group of dots is a floor or a wing, and the lines are just connections between them, whether they’re just doors or corridors, the length of the line doesn’t actually mean anything in the real world.” She theorized.
King nodded again and pointed at a lone dot at the top of the map.
“And that’s where we’re going.” The necromancer muttered to herself and started to look for a pattern of lines that would connect the two, but the number of the dots and lines joining them was easily in the thousands, and even if the diagram wasn’t to scale, it quickly became apparent that they were dealing with an entire buried city. “Unless most of these are closets, this is going to take a while…”
Emilia was having a bit more success in keeping track of the possible routes and how many rooms they would need to pass on the way, but in many ways, knowing the number was worse than giving up, and she started to worry that the supposedly plentiful food they had carried along might not have been enough, especially water might have been a bigger problem than she had anticipated.
A sudden hiss of steam escaping from the seams if the first tile King had touched startled the adventurers and interrupted their worries. Both instinctively grasped the handles of their weapons before seeing something they hadn’t expected at all.
As the tile slowly rose up, it revealed a small cylindrical lift beneath it, inside of which stood a guild official, or at least a member of the same artificial species. However, instead of the usual uniform, the female official was waring a stone and metal armor more akin to the simulacra, and the color of the crystalline horn on her forehead was bright orange instead of the reddish hue the officials in Valor had. Other than that, the size and facial features appeared exactly identical to the ones the adventurers knew.
“They’ve got their own nerds!” Anastacia gasped rather rudely.
The official stepped off the small lift that had brought her into the room from who knows where and stretched her shoulders. “Unit twelve of the Wrath core reporting for getting her fucking time wasted. In case you don’t remember, we’re at war and I do not have the ti-“ She grumbled resentfully before noticing King.
The sight of the apex pattern simulacra froze her and the horn on her forehead started to blink and flicker furiously. “You… you’re one of the two who… and unarmed. Does that mean the time has come?! You’ve found what we’re looking for?!” The official exclaimed and marched over to King, completely ignoring everyone else in the room. “Why is your armor so tattered? Where’s your weapon?” She asked and leaned in very close to check the simulacrum’s condition.
Emilia was going to make a joke about the clearly intimate relationship between the fortress’ residents, but very quickly abandoned the idea when she saw the slight twitch on Anastacia’s eye and the crystal dagger the necromancer was slowly drawing.
“Nooooope.” The priestess whispered and pushed her friend’s hand back down.