Immediately, I was greeted by a grating noise.
Though its dimensions remained unchanged, the once-silent expanse of white and waves was no longer so. Now a constant buzz, an angry, electric hum penetrated the peace and quiet of the thoroughly unnatural locale. And its source, much to my concern, couldn’t have been more obvious.
Suspended in thin, clear lines dotting the breadth of the corridor’s expanse hung a dense network of lasers.
They shined with an intense green color, the same as the lights above, but with just a hint of black buried beneath their inert luminescence. Their beams crisscrossed the room’s width, continuing onwards as far as the eye could see, but with a generous enough space in between each single one, none closer together than perhaps the length of two men stacked on top of one another.
They were placed sporadically, though all above the water, and nonuniformly, some parallel to the ceiling, whilst others cut eccentric angles from the hallway’s top to where it met the waves. Their hum set my teeth on edge, and their light reflected off the now much larger crests of surf to cast unsettling shadows upon the confines of the machined corridor.
One was so close to the hallway’s beginning that I could approach it without having to hover above the waves, and so slowly, cautiously, I drifted towards it.
From a mere hand’s span away the weapon looked no different visually but cast a good deal more heat, such that, had I lingered here for long without Draconic Blood to aid me, I’d no doubt cook from within. Most curiously of all, I detected absolutely nothing of it in the song. Strangely, the device didn’t seem to be powered by Entropy.
What exactly was fueling it, then?
Frowning hesitantly, I extended a hand towards the thing and, bracing myself, swiped it swiftly through the beam. Even with Draconic Blood empowering my skin as much as possible, the mechanical laser carved through my flesh without a hint of trouble, separating my palm from the rest of me and simultaneously cauterizing the fresh wound.
The pain cut through me, a sharp shock to my senses, but it was nothing compared to the soul-rending agony I’d experienced attempting to wield multiple Blessings at the same time. So, with little more than a grunt and a curse, I stumbled back, the flesh of my freshly-made stump rippling and swelling, and in the span of but a few seconds, a novel appendage had taken its place.
“Priest, I’ll never get used to that,” I muttered, anxiously flexing virgin fingers in an effort to drive the sudden sensation of something missing from my mind.
But my test was a success.
I rose into the air once more with a thought, surveying what this third room had in store whilst continuing to distractedly massage my palm. Surprisingly, doing so revealed to me another change in my environs. Where there had once merely been a vast expanse of blue, now evenly spaced pillars rose up from the deep. Though quite large, grand enough to harbor the entire party prior to our untimely separation, they were spaced equally far apart. There had to be at least a full hundred feet in between each one, if not more.
“So, the last test would force most to swim, or fly,” I murmured to myself, thinking. “Swimming’s probably more likely. It’s only a couple hours across, after all. A Blessed could make it with little enough difficulty. This one removes the one, flying, but…not the other? Why the platforms, then?”
That said, the lasers wouldn’t impede my flight all that much, infrequent as they were. I could just navigate around them. But then, I enjoyed a great deal of control over my own locomotion. For aerial Movers with more constrained Blessings, or those flying through some other means, perhaps by the grace of enchanted gear, I didn’t doubt the beams would do well to dissuade them.
Still, why were the pillars necessary?
Drifting downwards, the bizarre indoor ocean had become a good deal more choppy. The calm, relaxing waters now churned angrily, crashing against each side of the corridor as if raging against their constraints, and occasionally drenching the sporadic pillars that emerged a scarce few feet out of them. One crest broke high enough to wash across my foot, and I recoiled higher into the air, gasping as I did so.
It was colder than ice.
Even that brief brush was enough to trigger Draconic Blood, the Shard surging into action, flushing warmth and vitality directly into my numbed, frostbitten limb. Swimming through it suddenly seemed a much less attractive prospect.
I narrowed my eyes, and everything clicked into place. The pillars were meant to serve as bastions, safe spots for delvers to recover from the freezing surf below and the deadly traps above.
Travelers would be forced either to jump from platform to platform, risking laser dismemberment, or brave the subzero surf, growing weaker and weaker with every swim, unable to even fully warm themselve upon the occasionally-immersed pillars.
What a fucking joke.
Even for a trap room, this was ridiculous. There was no test here, no way to better one’s chances of survival. It wasn’t even close to fair. And if this was merely the third room in a string of nine, and each represented a greater challenge than the last, then any Blessed below the Core stage didn’t stand a chance of survival. Amongst all my companions, only Glare could have managed to cross it, and the High Inquisitor was far from ordinary.
A big, broad smile crossed my face.
Well, how unfortunate for the World Titan. If I’d only possessed a single Blessing, then this room truly might have given me pause. But I didn’t. It was, in a sense, deeply satisfying. After all, I wasn’t holding back anymore and so, just as the exotic floors cheated, so too could I.
I took to the sky with a chuckle on my lips, effortlessly swerving between and around motionless lasers towards my destination. Just as before, there were no unwelcome surprises in store for me and, just as before, I cleared the third room in less than an hour. Still grinning as I dropped down in front of the hallway’s terminating wall and illuminated symbol, I placed my splayed palm upon it, and was teleported to the next.
And my smile immediately vanished.
The lasers had started to move.
Unlike they had been in the third room before, the long lines of green-black obliteration were no longer stationary. Instead, they drifted lazily up and down, or back and forth. And there were more of them than before. Not by much, but there were. I was sure of it.
And…had the platforms gotten smaller?
I swallowed. The beams shifted and contorted unhurriedly, forming a massive screen of morphing death. Their ominous, omnipresent drone made my head pound. We’re only getting stronger, they seemed to whisper from the back of my mind. Smarter. More dangerous. Just like you.
Are you ready, Hero?
My eyes swept across them carefully, watching for changes in pattern or velocity. But there weren’t any. The lasers moved at a constant, steady pace, never speeding up, slowing down, or changing direction. Enough to worry anyone jumping from platform to platform, but insufficient to give a proper flyer pause.
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I wouldn’t even need to use Bullet Time to evade them.
Ultimately, they were slow, and I was anything but. This marginal challenge was all the fourth room seemed to add, and I navigated it with more or less the same ease as before, making it to the end after little more than an hour and a half.
But even after clearing it, my smile had not returned.
The corners of my lips tugged nervously downwards, a sudden wave of anxiety coursing through me as I beheld the softly blinking sigil that would bear me forth towards my next test. I’d no idea what to expect of it, no idea at all. The next danger could be a marginal one, or a paradigm-shifter. There was simply no way to know. I didn’t have Quarrel’s experience to fall back on, not this time, nor companions to offer support.
I was on my own, in a strange world entirely outside of my control.
Are you ready, Hero?
A metallic but somehow soft, and slightly damp nose nudged me immaterially from behind. The ghost of a smile returned, and I chuckled faintly.
“That’s right,” I chuckled, stroking the offending snout by way of apology. “Not alone, eh, Fang? Not quite.” My gaze hardened, and I looked about my inanimate surroundings, trying to imagine where Cirque might be watching from, if the thing was watching, at all.
“You won’t break me,” I swore.
Having said so, I placed a palm upon Rubik’s sigil, and was torn from one reality, to be materialized in the next. Whisked away into the infinite void, deposited into the fifth room.
Sweltering heat hit me like the physical force it was.
A massive intangible wave of immolation and death, of blistering energy and combustive might, making me cringe away reflexively, shielding my face desperately with both arms. Draconic Blood immediately responded, flowing to repair scorched hairs and ruined epidermis, whilst providing what bulwark it could against the suffocating heat.
The ocean was gone. A sea of lava had taken its place.
It was bright, bright red, so bright it hurt my eyes to behold it until my Brute Blessing protected them, too. The impossible liquid shone almost the color of a cherry, reminding me of the molten metal I’d seen Ewan smelt once or twice at the now extinct town forge. It popped and bubbled angrily, a giant cauldron ever-burning within the exotic depths of the World Titan.
Squinting my eyes amidst the stinging sweat that now ran in rivers down my skin, I tried to survey my new surroundings.
In a some small measure of perverse mercy, it appeared as if the lava was the only change. The room’s dimensions were just the same as they’d ever been, the lasers still moved slowly, and at the same plurality as before. The pillars’ sizes had not decreased.
“Priest abo–ACKKGHH!!”
I choked, bent double, racked by coughs. The lava was so hot it had turned the air to poison–cooking me from within, impossible to breathe. Draconic Blood buckled under the strain. It couldn’t handle this alone.
So I turned to the song.
Amidst the rippling, scorching, all-encompassing heat, concentration was a ridiculous prospect. Nevertheless, I strove to reign my thoughts together, focusing on the picture in mind, the song of Fire.
Painfully slowly, as I asphyxiated whilst bent double on the ground, the image began to form.
The small cabin. The cold outside. Bundled in blankets, warmed only by the light of a glowing hearth.
A snap of logs. A shower of sparks. The gentle beating of my mother’s heart.
The song enveloped me in its soothing embrace, and breathing became bearable once more.
I stood, shakily, taking deep, greedy gulps of life-giving air. It was still uncomfortably warm, the heat having not retreated entirely, merely reduced to a soft throbbing at the recesses of my mind. My brow furrowing, I carefully examined the song’s movements, watching closely for any hint of disobedience.
It flowed placidly through my veins and arteries, bridging the gap between my soul and the swirling shield around me.
Safe. For now, at least.
Wincing, I rose into the air once more. Flying was no longer such a carefree exercise, now that I was controlling Fire as well.
Manipulating Entropy manually with the song was no small task, even in such minor ways as this. Much like exercising my Blessings, it wasn’t as simple as flipping a switch. It was trying, taxing, even this small measure of proficiency I’d gained only at great cost. The fruits of months of failure and suffering on the road to Talos.
Come to think of it, I was beginning to suspect there was something unique about the way I used powers.
I mean, obviously. There wasn’t a thing about ADMINISTRATION not unique, after all. But, in Gerbold’s Grimoires, the eccentric author had claimed that for normal Blessed, exercising their powers felt…
Well, good.
Natural. Normal. The knowledge came to them as easily as breathing, or walking, or knowing when to eat and sleep. It was something hard-wired into them, an occult serum flowing thickly through their blood, a runic script that scarred their flesh and bones. Gifts required effort, and practice, and experimentation, but Blessings, themselves? They were as easy as breathing.
Not so, for me.
I enjoyed them, of course. They were a rush like nothing else, a power beyond what mundane humanity could imagine. But I didn’t gain full knowledge of them, like a normal Blessed. Not when I slotted them. Only a morsel–the bare minimum.
In fact, without the descriptions granted to me by my Grimoire, I might have struggled to make progress with my Shards, at all. Each was a near incomprehensible problem, a feat of eldritch engineering that made my head spin and my eyes weep blood, and understanding their arcane architecture was a trial in patience and pain.
Take Draconic Blood, for example.
The first couple of times I’d used the Blessing, back during my pyrrhic victory at Burrick, had been because of Flange. The monstrous Striker almost ended my life in a single swing, braining me with one move, and, without a hint of direction, Draconic Blood had saved my life.
But it’d nearly killed me, too.
Acting without my explicit direction or control, my trusty Brute servant floundered. It’d wiped out near enough the sum total of my Entropy stores in an instant. It’d healed me, true, but crippled me in the same breath, leaving me helpless and defenseless. And whilst I hadn’t the time to consider it in the moment, I’d soon come to understand why.
To a normal Blessed, their power was a part of them. An organ, inseparable and inexorably linked to everything that they were. It didn’t just exist in their soul, like mine. It was their soul.
But mine were just Shards.
Separated from my mind, they weren’t inherently a part of me–not in the same way. They were tools. They were, in a sense, as they imagined themselves. Knights. Lords. Servants. Incredibly, impossibly, overwhelmingly advanced Golems.
And, like all Golems, they required direction. Instruction.
With me unconscious, and not connected to my person in any meaningful way, Draconic Blood was effectively blind, deaf, and dumb. So, with no other options, it had just regenerated everything. Grown my entire body back, from the ground up.
Draining every last drop of Entropy from my sea.
It wasn’t like I blamed the thing. It, quite literally, didn’t know any better. But it made me realize that, if I wanted to stand any chance of using the thing with more than a puddle of Entropy left over, I’d have to tell it what to do.
I’d have to tell it exactly what to do.
And not just temporarily, either. After all, what if I was incapacitated again? What if I suffered another grievous injury? Would I be forever hamstrung against fellow Brutes, who could regenerate in their sleep and have Entropy to spare?
No, I couldn’t just tell it what to do. I needed to teach it.
I needed to teach it my body. Teach it what went where, precisely. How to mold flesh and shape muscle, how to warp skin and bone. The more specific my instructions, the more efficiently Draconic Blood worked. And to do that, I needed to understand how my body worked. Not in an abstract sense. Not like mom had taught me. I needed to know up close. I needed specifics.
So, over those two months, I’d cut myself apart.
I’d carved flesh. I’d cracked bone. I’d peeled back muscle, to examine nerve endings. I’d done it again, and again and again, until the pain of dismemberment and mutilation was a distant memory.
Until I got it right.