The sea was blue, and blinking, and beautiful.
It spread out before me, an aqueous patient etherized upon a continental table, an endless expanse of purest sapphire, of winking waves and twinkling bits of refracted sunlight.
It lapped gently, and roughly, nonuniformly, against the hardwood barrier that kept us afloat, that separated this great galleon, the Pewter Gauntess, borne for Old Europe, from the depths of the ever-present briny mire below.
We’d been at sea for nearly a month now, and almost three had passed us by, since we’d faced down DRAGON in her lair.
Three months, and spring had swiftly given way to summer.
It was June of 747 AC, and one felt it true, here. Particularly upon this eastern passage, this intercontinental jaunt from one Aristocracy to the next. The sun beat down heartily from up above, with little care and scant mercy for those poor mortals it irradiated, and its harsh, high-frequency digits left behind bright, pulsing pink pockmarks streaked across the noses, and necks, and exposed nooks and crannies of those mundanes what staffed and serviced the Gauntess. The air was hot, and dry, and salty, the ship’s rigging bleaching ever further by the day, its wooden bones baked stiff and creaking, its precious guts turned to stinking sauna.
Of course, the heat didn’t bother me overmuch.
Fire was an old friend, by now.
I took a breath, deep and slow and satiated, allowing the sun’s rays to soothe my spirit and warm my soul. I inhaled the salt and seaweed, that scent of parched wood, old leather, and burnt linen. I breathed in the brine, and the sweat, and the surf, and I let it out.
Three months.
Three months, since we’d left that wretched Maw behind.
Since we’d been so callously, so disrespectfully debriefed by an uncaring Coterie, since we’d elected to undertake this journey to Old Europe, together. Since we’d decided to join the Institute.
Caleb, and Alyss, and I.
We’d made our way back with the Delvers’ train. Pylon, unsurprisingly perhaps, had not seen fit to teleport us all the way to Europe. Perhaps, such a distance would have stretched the limits of his ability.
Or, perhaps he was simply too busy. No doubt a Hand’s time was precious, indeed.
Long-distance teleportation was exceedingly rare, according to Alyss. The many portals that dotted the surface of Bet in Europe and, to a lesser extent, the Cells, served only the transport of non-living organisms. Goods and luxuries. Something to do with their internal mechanics, the traumatic re-arrangement of molecules being unsuited for conscious creatures. Whatever the case may have been, even for Cell Heads, translocation was a rare enough thing to see.
And yet, as I’d seen neither hide nor hair of the surly Romulus on our journey Talos-ward, I could only assume Pylon had transported him, too, or that he’d had some other manner of moving great distances in a stride.
Oh, well.
It didn’t matter, ultimately. The truth was, even had the Hand offered to take us, we’d have refused. None of us were eager to lay our fates at his proverbial feet for a second time, given recent circumstances and, in any case, we each had certain affairs to set in order prior our eastern odyssey.
I would’ve been glad, nevertheless, if spared our company.
Travel with the Delvers’ lot proved slow. Slow, uncomfortable, and awkward. Our fellow Blessed were loath to make anything in the way of conversation with us, and neither were we particularly inclined towards them. We kept to ourselves, and they to them, and that was fine enough–but it made for a stiff, unpleasant journey.
Thankfully, though, after little more than a month and a half of that unpleasantness, and little either in the way of pomp, or ceremony, we reached Talos, and parted grateful ways with them.
We didn’t dally overlong in Uther’s capital city, this time. Alyss was, for obvious reasons, especially eager to be on her way. We all took the time to re-supply, re-provision, and re-prepare, but that was it. No more. A couple of days, and no more.
I made sure to pay two people a visit, especially.
Hadrid, the gruff yet good-natured broker hadn’t changed a whit over the temporally-dilated months of my absence, and produced a rather heart-warming joy at my reappearance from the Agoge. Though he inquired, and though I did trust him to an extent, I didn’t share much as to the unnerving circumstances of our delve.
I did, however, take the opportunity to offer him something in return for all the help he’d given me once before, and a considerable recompense, at that. A king’s bounty, from what Alyss suggested. One of the two Grade-fifteen Entropy crystals.
Yet, to my shock, he’d declined.
Apparently, as kind as he insisted the offer was, he simply had no use for such a thing. He didn’t have the capital on hand to pay me for it, and even when I then suggested he accept it free of charge, he’d still refused, explaining that no one would ever purchase such a thing from a Mundane. Attempting to move anything above Grade seven, he proclaimed, would get him little more than a beating for his trouble.
In lieu of this, he suggested (with a mildness that positively stank of great, desperate underlying emotion), that I, instead, simply keep in mind what he’d done for me. That I remember it. That I remember my roots. That I remember just how little it was that truly separated the Blessed from their Mundane serfs.
He needn’t have asked. No matter the power, or the wealth, I’d never be an Aristocrat.
So I left him with nothing but well-wishes, and a somewhat downtrodden demeanor, to meet my next, and final, friend.
Mentat.
The lean, lanky Chronicler was similarly unchanged by my temporary leave of absence, no matter how tumultuous that period had proven for my own psyche, and demonstrated an equally heartwarming delight upon my arrival.
Said joy, however, I noticed almost immediately sour.
Apparently, news of our exploits preceded us.
It had already spread.
The Agoge, as it turned out, was quite the topic of hot gossip across the civilized world entire, and the roughshod ranks of Delvers who’d received us proved as unfamiliar with the concept of operational security as they did the nuances of a rigorous hygiene routine.
According to Mentat, our tribulations were swiftly gaining traction amongst the upper echelons of both the Cells and Old Europe, itself. Each passing cadre of Agogians had bestowed upon them an informal moniker by the Blessed world, and, in response to our sporting the second-highest fatality rate since the event’s inception centuries ago, we’d been christened with a particularly grisly one.
The Katakh.
An old omen, Mentat informed me, of bad luck. Derived from the name of an ancient Delver, an Immortal monk who’d disappeared into the Wound many hundreds of years gone, never to return.
A portent of misfortune. A premonition of death. A prelude of dark things to come.
But for the young and chafing nobility of Europe, it would only embolden them to seek our challenge. Our infamy would follow us there, Mentat forewarned, growing all the while. Glare was already popular enough, and Alyss besides, but soon many would know my name, too. Ridiculous as it was.
Many there are, Mentat claimed, who wish to test their mettle against a survivor of the deadliest Agoge in decades. You’ll need not search for them. They’ll come to you.
As if the omen, alone, wasn’t bad enough.
All the same, and despite everything, Mentat congratulated me for my efforts even more than Hadrid had, and offered a piece of singularly valuable advice. Much like the grizzled shopkeeper, I’d been sparing with the precise details of our delve, but had hinted that we were looking for someone well-versed in Ancient history.
And immediately, he’d delivered.
He was, or had been, good friends with the Institute’s Loremaster, prior his assignment to the Cells. They were close. Mentat once boasted the position of his foremost graduate student. The Loremaster remained uniquely above the rather unsightly politics plaguing both Institute and city proper, Mentat explained, and would surely serve as an invaluable resource to me, provided I pique his interest.
To that effect, Mentat provided me with a letter.
It was a token missive, stating nothing of particular import, other than the fact that I was ‘a trustworthy young man,’ and my words to be ‘lent due consideration.’ A touching gesture, addressed to one Faisal Nasir.
I thanked him profusely for his help.
And then we were off.
Off, without any further delay. Off, to the land of Magic and Marvels, the heart of the civilized world. We boarded the first Europe-bound trader we could find, and began the long voyage across the great eastern sea.
Now, after just under a month of travel, we were almost here. Almost at our destination. Barely three months, all told, and less than a week left, surely.
Yet much had changed since the Frontier Maw.
Much had changed, in me.
I looked out over that briny, twinkling blue, that endless expanse of glittering, glimmering, sunstruck jewelry, and took one last, deep, deep, breath. And held it. And stilled the distant murmurs of my song. And closed my eyes.
And sighed.
And was elsewhere.
When I opened my eyes an altogether different ocean rose to greet them.
This one was not quite as vast, or deep, or mighty, though it grew more so with each passing day. It was greener, too, more cerulean than sapphire, a captivating expanse of aquamarine, drenched in energy and thick with life. Other than that, though, it remained much the same.
Countless schools of darting minnows and ravenous hellfish still darkened my waters, swimming in the shadow of massive snake-like solar sailfish and mammoth four-flippered whales. The far, far grander sea-drakes populated my seas more sparsely, and, though it might have merely been my imagination, I thought I could just make out them acknowledging me from deep below, squinting their eyes and bowing their heads in my direction.
Curious.
My attire hardly varied, either. I remained clothed in a tight, smooth, luxuriantly comfortable and surely Entropically-enhanced set of loose, lavish robes, black as midnight with sea-green patterning, inlaid all up and down with squirming glyphs of runic gold, that same mind-numbing writ that Sovereign had made brutal use of during its sham Trial.
Except…
Except, they were not quite so mind-numbing as before. Not anymore.
In fact, of late, I was just beginning to be able to make them out.
The runes and glyphs and exotic symbols fought squirmingly, valiantly, arduously against me, even as I struggled to comprehend their nature, slithering up and down, back and forth, ever-shifting from one meaning, one tense, one quasi-structure to the next. Though bearing an outward familiarity to the Runic cipher employed by Tinkers the world across, the two were otherwise completely different. The cipher was static, concrete, safe. A language with one meaning, one alphabet, one temporal direction.
This was anything but.
And yet, nevertheless, I was coming to understand it all the same, coming to parse some scant form of meaning from the madness carved senseless upon my robes. I saw strength, and courage, and king. I saw blood, and violence, and war.
Most of all, though, I saw one thing.
One phrase, one central band, thick and broad and boldened, wrapped neatly about the fabric that secured my chest and harboring but a single discernable passage.
It said, Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin.
Not that I had any idea what that meant.
And indeed, as I could hardly divine some correlation between the words scrawled upon my habit and an explicit change in my material or ethereal strength, agility, or disposition, this, too, remained effectively unchanged.
Leaving the most dramatic change, by far, being that brought about to Draconic Blood.
Or, more specifically, to the ecosystem that surrounded it.
Its orbiting archipelago, composed from well over one hundred sandy islands of myriad size, fauna, and foliage, dotted by strangely-looping trees and peaked in the occasional white-tipped mountain, was no longer quite so devoid of life.
No, far from it.
Before, the islands’ biospheres had been sparse, freshly formed, populated by naught but the odd multicolored bird and scraggly, strangely charcoal-orange swine. Now, they’d been joined by another manner of creature, one distinctly…familiar to me.
A tribe of Kobolds.
Granted, these creatures were quite distinct from those I’d beheld in the depths of that first Maw, colored a robust rust-ruby rather than ruddy blue-brown and appearing moreover burlier, broader, and more imposing than their forebears, perhaps due to a rather more calorie-rich diet.
They’d begun small at first, in number at least, a group of scarcely nine individuals, but bred fast, unimaginably so. So much so, in fact, that they were now hundreds, if not thousands strong, claiming territory on nearly each and every isle, a veritable fiefdom possessed of not one, but tens of the stronger, bulkier variants like that Brymir I’d faced down as a mere Grain-stage Blessed.
They farmed and gathered brightly-colored fruit, husbanded volcanic swine, forged crude-edged arrows and makeshift spears from razor-sharp obsidian with which to plumb the waters all about, and chittered at one another in a queer, high-pitched, slithering tongue. They built huts by the hundreds, formed of mud and rough-cut stone, their primal technology progressing at an admittedly impressive pace.
And yet, regardless of creed, or culture, or physical peculiarities, these were, clearly, plainly, and absolutely unmistakably…Kobolds.
This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.
But, how could that be possible? Was it perhaps, due to the fact one of my Blessings was stolen from the Kobold Champion? Did it carry with it some manner of memetic signature?
Did I need fear uprisal? Some final vengeance from the one I’d killed?
To be honest, I doubted it.
In fact, to the contrary, they seemed to, well…
Worship me.
Not that I’d actually made my appearance amidst them, of course, but my sight was nigh-panoptic here, and so I had little difficulty peering through the sleek, sharp, volcanic-glass walls of the single grandest temple they’d managed to create.
It was huge and sharp, shaped like a great-dragon’s incisor, and sprouted proud from the highest peak of the largest mountain in all the archipelago, save, of course, for Draconic Blood, itself. The Kobolds made their way here, each of them, at least once in their meager lives, a pilgrimage of sorts.
They brought blood and salt and heat, burning their offerings in a broad and blackstone bonfire that rested in the temple’s central dias, overseen by the largest member of their species, a Kobold of relatively titanic proportions, whom I took to be their head priest.
And on the walls of the temple were murals and tableaus, scrawled in ichor both their own and of the things they ate, the grandest of them all depicting, in no uncertain terms…
Me.
It was a violent thing.
Much like their worship, and apparent culture, it was an art of war. Combat. Battle to the death, trial by fire and blood. At the mural’s very center, two godlike figures faced off one another.
On the right-hand side flickered the form of a crimson man, sleight and lithe and antlered, formed of pure lightning, vents of incandescent energy ionizing the air on his every side, forming around him a glowing halo of sanguine electricity that served as cape and crown. On the left rose wrothful an equally deific figure, a truly gargantuan serpent, a great-wyrm with ten roaring heads and eight arching wings, each of a different color and composition.
At the mural’s apex, observing this divine duel with a face obscured and what I might most aptly describe as a tacitly, savagely pleased disposition, reclined a lone humanoid upon a gaudy, gilded throne. Except, this humanoid could not truly be human, for it rose so monumentally mighty in stature as to tower over even the gargantuan snake below.
This figure, who I could only take to be myself, was largely devoid trappings of divinity, save of course for size and a single circlet that spiked cruelly upwards in the shape of an insect’s mandibles. At the foot of the throne, and veritably dwarfed by it, an entrancingly well-represented, silver-coated wolf with fangs positively drenched in rust-colored blood, slumbered comfortably.
There was no mistaking it.
This was an expression of faith.
The Kobolds had created some manner of religion, primitive though it might be, and it revolved around me. My Blessings, and me. I wasn’t sure how to feel about that. I wasn’t sure whether or not to encourage it. Frankly, I wasn’t sure what to do, at all.
And so I’d simply pushed the problem to the side. Figured that I’d engage with the Kobolds someday, but not today.
So I sighed, grimaced once more at the gaudy, gory thing, and stepped through space and time with ease to reach a point below the shaly surface of my vast volcanic mountain. The place where my Soulbound Weapon’s home had once been.
It, too, had considerably changed.
I emerged hundreds of feet below the sleek, obsidian surface, and looked around.
What I saw was a precise, flawless, hollow rectangle, devoid any and all manner of imperfection, crafted from meters upon meters of igneous basalt to form shining, shimmering, sheer walls of black glass close to fifty feet in the air.
This was no longer a mere storage chamber. Fang’s evolution had well seen to that.
It was merely one part of a massive underground complex.
Peering through the dense, midnight-onyx rock, I could make out all manner of facilities and comforts. Bedrooms, kitchens, banquet halls, grand larders, hot springs, saunas, and spa areas. Storage vaults and great-armories, steaming forges and sweltering smithies, everything under the sun that one could possibly require to house, feed, equip, and train a veritable army.
Not that I had an army spare.
I didn’t even have servants. Not a one. No one cooked in the kitchens. No one waited the banquet halls. The larders were stocked full only of a disheveled pile of time-locked provisions, sumptuous, pre-made bounty I’d acquired after frequenting near enough half the restaurants in Talos, and the forges and smithies were empty save my first few pitiful, bent, crooked attempts at metallurgy.
A sovereign’s redoubt, a stronghold fit for a king, and I used effectively only one part of it. The part in which I currently stood. The largest, most spacious, and most imposing part.
The training grounds.
The floor here was flat, and bare, and perfectly level. The grounds were cleanly separated into a number of distinct arenas, each intended to test a different genre of ability. There were forests of pillar-like pedestals, fields of static statuesque adversaries, racks filled to the brim with weapons of all make and manner. There were dueling circles, marksman ranges, even a semi-submerged obstacle course.
Indeed, here, there was everything one could possibly imagine for training.
Because one had imagined it.
I had.
Its design was no accident. I’d created this place, this not-so-modest agoge. Most of the complex I’d left alone, left in its natural state, but these grounds I’d carved from top to bottom. Perfected for my own means.
And, most importantly by far, the entire chamber was equipped with a variable damping field.
Damping fields were common enough in the Blessed world, common enough near every major city had one somewhere, so common that even I’d heard of them secondhand. Used to suppress a myriad of physical, or, more rarely, even mental characteristics, they represented the hallmark, the backbone of a budding mercenary troupe, or High Lord’s barrack, or branch of the Delver’s Guild.
The Attunement benefits such training empowered were considerable, yet few fields boasted potency enough to suppress Blessed above the Marble stage, let alone Immortals. In the material world, the raw Entropy required to impose such restrictions upon an area wholesale would have simply been staggering.
But this was not the material world.
This was my soul.
There were no such requirements, here.
Thus, this field quite happily and easily stripped me, albeit partially, of the nigh-omnipotence I habitually enjoyed here. It made this place, this sole room, temporarily at least–no different from the outside world.
Which meant I could use it to advance in Attunement.
I could train with any Shard, at any time, and not a soul outside would know.
And I had.
I’d had a productive three months.
Master.
A voice emerged from high above me, far up in the tips of the towering forest of pillars. It was brutal, vicious, a grating growl, a keening whine of borne bare steel-on-steel. It was a ululation that preceded only bloodshed, a snarl that set spines straight, and sent ice-cold fingers rippling over exposed skin.
Or, at least, it should have been.
To others.
I, myself, heard only the adorable yelp of an overeager puppy.
A thundering impact shook the flat, smooth floor of this unnatural arena, sending minute shivers scattering below the polished obsidian. As the voice’s owner touched down, I turned to observe it with a broad, delighted grin, beaming at the evolved form of my Soulbound Weapon.
My brother.
My partner.
My Fang.
He stood humanoid, now, on digitigrade hindlimbs, tall and broad and powerful. In the outside world he’d quite comfortably dwarf my own height whilst remaining lithe and wiry. Silver fur as tough as steel, or tougher still, rippled under the micro-contortions of muscles he didn’t truly possess.
He resembled Romulus, in a distant manner, with a similarly metallic coat, but where the former’s was ruddy-grey and sat quite plainly atop his skin, Fang’s was magnificently sleek and just as eccentric as it had ever been. Little shards of shimmering silver detached effervescently to float about him, distorting the image of his glory, orbiting about the canid creature like miniature moons.
Every now and again, I watched his form flicker, snap, or sparkle with exotic motifs; a blistering crack of ruby-red lightning, or a searing flare of rich-orange fire, or diffuse shimmer of blood I knew did not run through its veins.
Courtesy of my ever-growing list of Words.
Greeting, my Soulbound Weapon’s shearing voice scraped out at me.
His speech wasn’t like Acceleration’s.
For reasons I didn’t fully understand, Fang’s vernacular, and likely his mind, too, were considerably more…simple. Severe. His diction was short and coarse and callous, bereft refinement, intended only to prelude attack. It was appropriate, in a way. Fang was neither lapdog nor scholar. He was a weapon, built and bred for war.
Though his profusely-wagging tail did detract somewhat from this ruthless image.
“Fang, my friend,” I grinned, “good to see yo–”
Without a further moment’s delay, he lept at me.
He shifted seamlessly even as he did so, dissolving midair into a glorious whirl of sharp shards and silver splinters, transforming back into his fully-canine form to bowl me over, whereupon he promptly laid into my cheeks, and nose, and forehead, layering the poor, vulnerable, exposed flesh with a series of merciless licks from a sandpaper tongue.
“Stop!” I cackled, breathlessly. “STO-GRCCK!”
But Fang showed no mercy. He gave no quarter. This was, after all, a war.
“UnHAND me, fiend!” I cried, raising a palm and blasting him up and off my now-soaked robes, sending him flying back.
In a typically-ostentatious display of practiced agility, my Boneblade somersaulted as he flew, a sea of sharpened knives re-orienting themselves into humanoid form to strike ground with another bone-shuddering SLAM.
The arms of my brother-in-arms shivered and trembled for a moment, before devolving from palms and fingers into a pair of wickedly-whetted twin axes. Fang clicked the weapons now sprouting from his either elbow together dexterously, producing a shower of sparks as he stared me down from afar.
Sharpen claws? He crowed, eagerly.
His ears perked up, straight as twin arrows.
His thick, bushy tail fluttered at breakneck speed.
My smile dimmed, and my enthusiasm was swiftly replaced by guilt.
“I’m sorry, buddy,” I replied, painfully, trying not to wince at the way his ears sagged, and silver fur drooped in misery.
“Later, ok?” I tried, in a poor attempt at reconciliation, only to receive a downtrodden nod and grossly-disappointed, full-bodied exhale. My Soulbound Weapon plodded woefully away, back to test himself against the many insufficient challenges of the manufactured grounds, and I watched him go with a heavy heart.
Poor Fang.
I trained with him most every night, but it wasn’t enough. He was getting bored. He’d been cooped up in here, in my soul, for far too long, now. And while this place seemed to suit my other Blessings just fine, Fang wasn’t like that. Ever since his evolution, my silver sword had gained the capability to assume his physical, lupine form in the outside world.
And all-too-quickly, he’d become addicted to it.
He loved it more than anything else. Anything else he knew, at least. Open space, to run, to stretch his limbs, to sharpen his claws. Training was no longer enough. He wanted something to fight.
But I couldn’t let him.
The Frontier’s forests were one thing, but Talos’s dense urbs and the Gauntess’s cramped quarters were quite another.
It was too risky, I felt. We’d gone from one heavily-populated area to another. I already had plenty enough rumors surrounding me, apparently, I didn’t need the Master accusations a summoned servant would add to them.
All the more shame Fang wasn’t satisfied in here.
It was fine enough when the two of us sparred, but only then. Most of this place’s other denizens just weren’t enough to test him. When the Kobolds first appeared, he’d taken great pleasure in toying with them, but tired of them just as quickly.
He couldn’t spar with Acceleration or Draconic Blood; the former cared little for such things and the latter didn’t even have physical form, so far as I knew. The only beings even close to them in strength were the sea-drakes, and the lightning elementals, and they didn’t hold a candle to Fang.
Maybe in the future that would change, but as it was, his disposition was clear. This new home, grand as it was, was barely enough to satiate him.
Of course, I didn’t have to let him out.
If I’d so desired, I could’ve simply ordered him to remain. To waste his immortal life in the confines of my soul. Fang adored me even more than my other Blessings; he’d never disobey. And besides–why should the needs and wants of a Blessing concern me? Sovereign paid them no heed. The Warrior, I could only imagine, was no different.
Like the both of them, I was King.
Fang was my servant.
My Shard.
My slave.
And this, all of this, all of these reasons were why.
They were why, precisely. Why I’d never disregard a Shard’s desires. Why I’d always, always strive to fulfill their dreams. After all, in the end…
In the end, dreams were all a Shard could ever have.
Dreams of freedom.
Perhaps, one day, I could change that, too.
“Soon, my friend,” I whispered, as I watched Fang dance between onyx spires and obsidian pines.
He could not hear me. I spoke for myself alone.
“Soon,” I promised. “We’ll be there, soon.”
I rose, lifting myself up from the hard, basalt ground and spoke the magic words.
“Summon Grimoire.”
~~~
Hero
Attunement: ADMINISTRATION//THE SOVEREIGN(Ne) 14.
Grain: Shard Broadcast Attunement. The Host is able to comprehend the Shardsong, the language of Shards and Entities.
Marble: Shard Gestalt Attunement. The Host is able to combine and evolve copied Shards according to Affinity and understanding, creating proto-gestalts in the same manner as the Entities. Currently, the Host is limited to copying, manipulating and evolving only Minor and Major Shards.
Active Slots:
* Draconic Blood(Mi) 9. The Host’s blood takes on the properties of an ancient dragon, granting increased strength, resilience, and greatly increased healing.
Crystallize your knowledge of ten Minor Blessings and merge into this Shard to evolve.
Merged Blessings:
Prestidigitation(Mi).
Lesser Levitation//NULL.
Sensory Projection//NULL.
Haemokinetic Enhancement(Mi).
Domain Telekinesis(Mi).
Blood is the font of life. The root of soma. Your blood thickens, Host. It deepens. It darkens. Scent your blood, taint your blood, Shape your blood.
Soon there will be nothing you cannot touch.
* Acceleration(Ma) 13. This Major Shard allows the Host to accelerate their locomotion at will. Whilst this Shard does not bestow upon the Host any manner of Chronokinesis, the acceleration it grants is metaphysical; when active, everything connected to the Host’s soul is affected by it accordingly. Entropic draw is dependent upon acceleration factor and duration.
Due to the unique evolutionary process of this Blessing, the Host gains the following ancillary effects: The ability to travel any distance in a single step at miniscule cost, and full Affinity-commensurate command of Lightning.
* Pneumatic Vault (Mi) 12. The Host is granted a personalized armory, sequestered within their soul. The location, arrangement, and interior details of this space may be altered at the Host’s discretion, so long as they do not exceed an internal volume of 400x400x400 feet. Any training performed within the Host’s vault may carry over to the material world, including increases in Attunement to all Shards.
Objects of any size or weight may be stored within this area upon manual contact, so long as they can physically fit inside it. These objects may be retrieved at any point in time provided manual contact with a suitable empty space outside of the vault for them to occupy. Retrieval/storage duration and Entropy cost for a given object scales along with corresponding size, weight, and complexity. All stored objects may be temporally locked until retrieval, if the Host so desires it. This Shard may affect living creatures, so long as the Host bests them in a contest of wills.
The Host’s vault is home to Fang, the Boneblade. Its nurture has seen it grow stalwart and strong. It can operate entirely autonomously, may be recalled regardless of location, dismissed and summoned at will, and regenerated at negligible Entropic cost. It may assume any form the Host desires, and exhibit the esoteric effects of any crystallized Words. It coats the Host’s flesh in plate of silvered steel.
Your Pattern hardens, Host. Your pneuma ripples. Your will bores ever-deeper down. Your final shape will soon be clear. Know yourself.
And know the world.
* Empty.
* Empty.
Save Slots:
* Replicant(Ma).
* Synaptic Protocols(Mi).
* Remote-Localized Biokinesis(Mi).
* Somatic Perception(Mi).
* Materio-Entropic Micro-Reactor(Mi).
Words:
* Lightning 13.
* Fire 6.
* Blood 4.
* Pain 1.
//ERR494e464f//:
* Empty.
Good luck, Hero. The survival of both our races depends on you.
~~~