Myrrir toured around the Halmine sector for a few days, hunting for any sign of the Harmony. He interrogated bluecoats and Elderworld naval officers, and for those who didn’t see who he was and respect his authority, he…made them.
Mainly, he implored them to remember that he was a still God-heir, and that in the Elderworld, all that mattered was strength, and he had more than enough to push around a local bluecoat captain who didn’t have even a glimmer of magical power.
By the time he heard anything, he’d poked three hornet’s nests—Elderworld forts. At the fourth fort, he heard that ships were going missing on Muspellar. Plucked off one-by-one by an expert, whose targets seemed not to be merchants, but rather, military.
It was privateering, Myrrir knew. A bastardization of piracy.
But he also had his suspicions of who was responsible. None of the pirate clans would have dared to be so bold, to engage the Elderworlds openly. But he had read about the Mediator’s current crew.
Muspellar it was, then.
He set his hands down on the railing in front of him, and the wood shuddered under the new strength of his Commodore-stage grip. He released his grip, then pulled off his right glove. Pale beech wood clacked, and starsteel wires groaned.
Instead of flesh, his fingers were made from wooden segments and bound together by hinges. Starsteel wires crept through holes in their center and wound around them, conducting Arcara through his hand like the wires were the channels in his body. His palm was a set of linkages and wooden panels, as well as a few starsteel coils that contracted when he fed them Arcara. The artificial hand crept all the way up his wrist, and only ended just below his elbow.
Maybe one day, when he advanced to Godhood, he’d replace his hands. Until now, he’d have to be content with the best prosthetics that money—or the status of being Nilsenir’s favoured son—could buy.
And he needed to regain that status. He tugged his glove back on, then slapped his hand down on the railing. He was hesitant to say he had a plan, because that rarely worked out. But a picture of the situation was forming in his mind, and that was enough for him. If he could picture the situation, he could picture the solution.
Tye might encourage more discretion, but Tye wasn’t inside his mind to tell him no.
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Vayra pushed herself away from the wall with a shudder. She’d had a few hours of rest, really and though that wasn’t enough to repair her body, she couldn’t stay still. Her Arcara channels felt clogged and burnt from the Bracing technique, and she imagined black char filling them. But, on top of that, her chest really ached.
She missed Mr. Spawlding’s infirmary, and his concoctions, and—
‘Vayra, you are not without solutions,’ Phasoné reminded her. ‘Your elixirs.’
Vayra pulled open her haversack, then drew the case of elixirs out. The healing elixir, a vial of green liquid, would be just what she needed. “How much?” she asked. “How much do I need?”
‘For this? The whole vial.’
Vayra pulled the stopper out with her teeth then dumped the vial in her mouth. It tasted bitter, with a faint sweet undertone. But what else did she expect out of a healing elixir?
She felt it dribble down her throat and into her stomach, and she let it filter out into her Arcara channels, just like the concentration-enhancing elixir.
When it entered her veins, she cycled her Arcara through her body for a few breaths. As it travelled through her channels, the elixir began to reach out and soak into her limbs and bones all on its own, stimulating their repair. When it left her body, she tried to chase it with her own Arcara, to make it leak outwards the same way.
Nothing.
‘Well, it was worth a try,’ Phasoné said.
“We should keep moving,” Vayra told her. The healing elixir didn’t make the ache in her chest go away, but it did give her confidence that, in a few hours, she wouldn’t feel as much discomfort.
‘Do we…have to? I’d rather not have to feel us walk like that again…’
“Unless you want more magmaspawn to catch up…”
‘I imagine we’ll encounter some no matter which direction we head.’
“I’ll need more than just your imagination, Glitter Princess.”
‘Yes, yes…’
Vayra walked down the hall as far as she could. She needed to conserve her strength and keep herself from putting too much strain on her body. When she reached a vent, she reformed her seer-core with the last morning stars she could see. It would have to last her the whole day.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
With the seer-core, she checked her mana. Bracing her limbs had cost a significant chunk, and she had about three-quarters left.
‘We should encounter branches of the Rallemflow at some point,’ Phasoné reminded her.
“The river?”
‘How would the dragon Gods have built this place if they didn’t have a source of mana flowing through the entire building?’
“Fair point, I suppose,” Vayra said. “But I haven’t seen any.”
‘We’ll find it eventually. They built entire canals around this place. I can…sense it flowing. Well, I can sense it’s life energy flowing.’
For the rest of the day, they walked south—as best as they could manage. Often, when she reached an intersection, the only option was to head downwards. She hadn’t yet encountered any tunnels to bring her back up to the surface, and the air…kept getting hotter and hotter.
Sweat glistened on her arms and forehead, and Phasoné spoke less and less. Vayra’s mouth felt completely parched, and a headache built in the back of her mind. Excessive mana use would cause dehydration, she knew, but she could also get dehydrated like a normal half-phoenix could.
‘If only you were a full-blood…’ Phasoné lamented.
“Alas, mom had the hots for a human, it seems,” Vayra replied. She didn’t ever know her parents, but that was her best conjecture.
‘Your mother would’ve been the phoenix, if you were hatched from an egg.’
About halfway through the day, just when she was about to stop to eat, another magmaspawn found them. It carried obsidian daggers, and its horns glowed brighter than the others. Every time it exhaled, sparks flew out of its mouth.
Vayra sprinted away, leading it to a patch of the hallway where there were no nearby vents. It swung its daggers wildly, trying to hack her to bits, but she dodged most of the blows—except when one of the absurdly sharp stone daggers left a shallow slash across her gut.
She fed a starlight shield into her left bracer to strengthen it, and used it to deflect the beast’s daggers. One shattered, and the other glanced off to the side. Before the creature could recover, she blasted in the side of the head with a Starlight Palm, flinging it into the wall. She took her time to feed starlight Arcara into her veins. As soon as she felt the burning sensation in her wrist again, she grabbed the magmaspawn’s rocky, tarry neck and crushed it. This creature’s body didn’t crumble as easily as the other’s, and it still took all of her effort just to crack the creature’s neck. But it just cracked; it didn’t shatter.
Before it could climb up, she blasted its weakened neck with a Starlight Palm, severing it completely. The orange glow in its horns dimmed.
Again, Vayra fell back against the wall, panting. She didn’t want to waste any more healing elixir on a relatively shallow cut, no matter how much it stung, so she settled for wrapping a bandage around her gut and moving on.
By the time evening came again, she found one of the channels Phasoné had mentioned. At an intersection between a few tunnels (all of them except the one she’d come from lead downwards) a rigid, non-natural canal ran along the floor. It was thin enough that she could cross over it in a single hop, but she couldn’t tell how deep it was.
The water steamed as it poured through a hole in the wall on the opposite side of the room. It wasn’t boiling yet. And, it looked like much of the regular water had already evaporated by the time it reached this chamber, leaving a much higher concentration of Stream water than she would find in the river.
She dipped her hands in it carefully, just to make sure it wasn’t hot enough to hurt Phasoné. When the Goddess didn’t protest, Vayra submerged her arms, washing off as much grime and sweat as she could while refilling her mana.
“Do we have any way we can bring some of this stuff with us?” she asked. “If we don’t have any mana, we’ll be pretty screwed.”
‘Unless you brought a jug,’ Phasoné said.
Vayra looked down. She just had her cartridge pouch and haversack. The haversack was pretty good at keeping water out (so it’d probably be just as good for holding water), but she needed it to carry her supplies. The cartridge pouch was much the same, but she needed to keep her cartridges dry.
Instead, she used the empty vial of the healing elixir, and dipped it gently in the river. It wouldn’t hold much, but it was better than nothing.
For the night, she figured she would camp here while she could. She didn’t hear any magmaspawn nearby.
As quickly as she could, she chose a meal for the night—a strip of venison and a puck of hardtack, which she softened by dipping in the channel. To keep herself from getting any more dehydrated, she drank from the river, trying only to catch wisps of normal water.
Once she’d eaten, she did her best to sleep, but it was hard to calm her mind after what had happened last night. Worse, when she stopped moving and tried to sleep, she noticed a faint buzz in the back of her neck. It was the same buzz she felt around God-heirs, but it was firmer and more cohesive, despite how faint it was. Whoever it belonged to must have been incredibly powerful…
“You feel it too, right, Phasoné?”
‘I feel it,’ the Goddess replied. ‘But there is very little we can do about it.’
“Myrrir?” she asked.
‘Unless he made it through all of the steps of Commodore, and broke through to Admiral…in about a month.’
“You can tell it’s an admiral?”
‘With how faint it is?’ Phasoné asked. ‘It’s a God-heir of some sort, and someone choosing not to hide their spirit. I know it’s incredibly distant, and the only way we’d feel it was if the God-heir was around the Admiral stage. Maybe higher.’
Vayra pursed her lips and exhaled. “Nathariel?”
‘Could be. Otherwise, we’ll have an unpleasant surprise to deal with.’
“I figure it’ll be a surprise either way…” she muttered.
For a few more hours, she tried sleeping. She passed in and out of consciousness a few times, and finally, for a few hours, fell asleep. Her dreams were foggy and disconnected, and they left her feeling light-headed even while she slept. In the end, it just felt…a little unsettling, and nothing more.
She woke up about halfway through the night, ready to roll over and try sleeping again, but in the distance, she heard heavy footsteps and a growl, and she decided that it was best to keep moving. She gathered up her bags and set off. Phasoné made no comment, so she assumed the Goddess was still asleep.
So she didn’t wake Phasoné, she tried to keep her thoughts quiet, though it was hard to restrict her own mind, especially when distant booms and bangs kept putting her on edge.
For the rest of the night, she crept through the tunnels. There was no choice but to head deeper and deeper, until she no longer saw any vents to the surface. Or, if they were present, they were too winding to let in any proper starlight.
The single seer-core she had was all the starlight she would get.
When Phasoné woke up—she yawned audibly, then complained about their ribs again—Vayra asked, “How far will it be?”
‘Looking at that map, and considering our pace…my guess is that it will be another two weeks.’
It would be a long two weeks…