When Vayra reached the center wall of the facility, her legs ached. She needed to take a break before she climbed to the upper control dome.

At the very center of the greenhouse’s dividing wall, a cord of the thick roots—ten paces wide each—ran up along the wall, stretching all the way up to the control room. Conks had formed around them in clusters, feeding off the pumping elixirs.

A stack of housing hovels rested against the base of the root cord, stacked up against the wall and growing upward like a stalagmite. They were simple wooden hovels with sloped, thatched roofs. A few of the windows were intact, but even in the early morning, no light seeped out of them. Abandoned.

Vayra found a door near the bottom and pushed it open, then crept into the complex. Larra might have been following, but it had been a long run to the housing complex, and Vayra had pushed her First Lieutenant limits just to maintain the Astral Shroud; the God-heir would have to be a few hours behind, at least.

Everything ached. When Vayra climbed up rickety stairways or passed over crumbling wooden walkways between houses, her legs just wanted her to stop moving.

Finally, when she neared the top of the hovel complex, she sat down on a crunchy, dusty cot and leaned back against the wall. A window let in the orange light of the sunrise, as did a hole in the roof. There wasn’t much in the room, but the drawers caught her attention.

A spiritual weight bled out of it, beckoning her closer.

‘This would have been a shift manager’s house,’ Phasoné said inside Vayra’s head.

“What makes that special?”

‘The shift managers would have all been God-heirs, and decently powerful ones at that.’

Curious, Vayra pushed herself off the bed one last time and hobbled over to the drawers along the opposite wall. She pulled them open one-by-one and rummaged around inside them. Most of them just held dust, rusty trinkets, and books about farming. Nothing helpful.

When she was halfway through the drawers, she unveiled a map of the greenhouse.

It wasn’t terribly useful, and the parchment was crumbling and old (it was too fragile to roll up and bring with her), but it laid out a schematic for the central column of the facility. The control dome was supposed to be accessible by a staircase, but that had long since crumbled away, leaving the root cord as the only way up.

“Those little red dots on the map,” Vayra said, “what are they?”

‘They probably mark storerooms and elixir vaults. You will find some decent loot up there.’

“Loot?”

‘Maybe some nice weapons. I seem to recall them having wraith-swords and Arcara-Moulded muskets.’

But Vayra kept searching the drawers for now. There was still something in there that weighed on her spirit.

When she reached the bottom drawer, a red glitter drew her eyes. She pulled the wooden drawer open all the way, revealing a handful of small stones at the back of the drawer. She pulled them out and set them into the light.

Each was a different shade of opaque ruby—red jade. They had once been polished, but now, most of them were scuffed and scratched. They were about the size of her thumbnail. Only two were perfectly hexagonal; the others were chipped or cracked. The perfectly hexagonal gemstones were the only ones that glowed.

‘Runestones…’ Phasoné said.

Vayra picked up the two faintly glowing stones and brushed the dust off them, revealing a pattern in their center. It looked almost like some of the calligraphy she’d seen, though more rigid and utilitarian. “What do they do? Do you recognize the runes?”

‘This first one is a Khatrul rune,’ Phasoné said. She didn’t need to specify which one she was talking about—Vayra subconsciously knew she meant the one on the left. ‘That means “disrupt” in ancient dwarven.’

“And the other?”

‘Nhassa,’ Phasoné said. ‘Regenerate.’

Vayra pressed her flesh-and-blood hand against the ‘disrupt’ rune. She ran her finger along the rune’s surface, scraping out more dust and revealing starsteel flecks. When she fed it mana and Arcara, it lit up for a second—before sending out a pulse of invisible force. A spiritual wind blasted away from the stone in a foot’s radius. When it hit Vayra’s Arcara, the Arcara stalled, disrupting any flow. The disruption pulse even repelled the flakes of ambient mana in the greenhouse air.

She raised her eyebrows and shook her hand out, trying to dispel the uncomfortable tingling sensation the disruption field had left. “Phas, how’d that work?”

‘Moulded Arcara cannot cut through gemstones. You recall this one restriction, correct?’ Phasoné asked.

“Yeah.”

‘Gemstones are the scattered remnants of the Streamfather’s skeleton. They contain a great deal of power in them, though it’s difficult to tap.’

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

“You keep mentioning the Streamfather…”

Phasoné chuckled softly. ‘The Discarded wasn’t taught much, was she?’

“It wasn’t exactly easy to find in the books I read.” Despite living her first nineteen years as a street urchin, she had found a great deal of books in Old Uckoe’s library. “They mentioned the Streamfather a lot, as if they already expected me to know what he was.”

‘Long ago, a demonic fiend from realms high above descended to the mortal realm. The Streamfather, the first Immortal Emissary of the first High Pantheon, descended and fought the Foe off. They destroyed each other in the battle, and the weakened remains of their bodies scattered across the galaxy—gemstones for the Streamfather, and shadowthorns for the Foe.’

Vayra gulped. Just the thought of the shadowthorns brought back memories of her earlier encounters with Myrrir. She rubbed her eyes, trying to purge the memories. A shadowthorn might not have much effect on her now, but once, it had nearly destroyed her…

…A few months ago. Not even a year.

‘It felt like longer, didn’t it?’

Vayra nodded. She picked up the gemstone. “So…when I use this, the gemstone amplifies the power through the bones of an ancient heavenly being?”

‘Exactly. It resonates with your mana. That being said, the gemstones on their own aren’t incredibly powerful. It requires a continued connection to the user to direct its power.’

“Just like the ignimaids,” Vayra breathed. On Muspellar, she’d seen mermaids playing in the lava flows—they protected themselves from the immense heat with runestones.

‘Precisely.’

Vayra turned the stone over, then set it onto her mechanical hand. The plate on the back of her hand had three empty sockets, each specifically designed for runestones. She set the disruption stone onto the panel of dark wood, then tugged a coiled starsteel wire up from the socket and wedged it into the engraved tips of the rune—where she would fuel it with mana.

Once the rune had been bound and attached, she held her hand out. She fuelled the rune through the starsteel wires like she was pumping mana through her channels, trying to use the disruption pulse, but it let out such a small wave and immediately halted the flow of the mana for a few seconds.

‘The runestone is a part of your arm,’ Phasoné said. ‘It’s a part of you now. You control the wave of resonance. Push it away from you. Concentrate your willpower and activate the rune.’

Vayra pulled her arm back like she was about to punch something, then conjured her seer-core in her other hand. She held the core in front of the runestone.

She fed the stone mana once more, and a wave of invisible resonance blasted away from her mechanical hand. She guided it with an exertion of willpower—telling the stone what she wanted it to do, and how exactly to do it. It was almost like cupping an invisible hand around the back of the stone and telling it to “send your effort the other way”.

The stone obeyed. This time, only an arc of invisible disruption blasted away from the stone. It cleaved through the seer-core and dispersed it, then carried on to the following wall. The wave cut through the air with a ringing tone until it hit the opposite wall of the room—hard enough to shake loose a shower of dust.

“Nice…” she whispered.

‘Now, don’t use it too often.’

Vayra looked down at the back of her prosthetic hand. The runestone was glowing a lot brighter than before, and veins of power passed through it, threatening to shatter it into smaller pieces—like the other, useless runestones.

“Should…I be worried that other God-heirs might be carrying runestones, though?”

‘Unless they have obvious bodily modifications, no. They wouldn’t be able to control the stones like you could.’

Vayra nodded, then picked up the regeneration runestone.

‘We can take that one, though I don’t suppose it will be too helpful for us specifically,’ Phasoné said. ‘Not with my Emissary-level healing and your bodily enhancements. Better to destroy it than let someone else take it.’

Vayra delivered a short nod, then stomped her foot down on the gem until one of the corners broke off. She had to Brace her leg with her basic technique to output enough strength. When the stone chipped, it stopped glowing.

She walked back to the cot and sat down. She fiddled with her single disruption runestone for a few moments before she was confident that it wouldn’t fall off the back of her hand, then practiced a few more waves of cleansing disruption.

To keep practicing, she summoned Adair out of the corespace and allowed him to drink some more elixir, but to keep it from frying his little mind as he slurped it up, she pushed gentle disruption waves through him. It halted the half-purified Arcara and dispersed it before it could do any harm.

When Adair finished drinking, he curled up in her lap and let off a noise that sounded halfway between a purr and a mumbling child. She ran her hand down his back. Now, he was big enough to cover both of her hands if she held him up.

“Wasn’t thinking that raising kittens would be part of my Mediator duties,” Vayra muttered, leaning back on the old cot. Her eyelids were heavy, and once she settled into a regular, calming cycling pattern, darkness fell—whether she wanted it to or not.

When she closed her eyes, visions of Myrrir washed through her mind. First, of him wielding the shadowthorn, then of him slicing her arm off in a single powerful blow. The nightmare shifted, and her mind replayed the visions that Nathariel’s Arcara well had shown her—serving at Karmion’s side willingly.

Then…her mind filled in the gaps of what would happen if she didn’t go along willingly with Karmion’s plan. An unstoppable force lifted her off her feet and her back into the tangled trunk of the Namola tree, and Karmion bent its roots around her limbs, forever imprisoning her. Either way, the galaxy burned.

She sprang upright in the cot, panting and sweating.

She hadn’t even meant to drift off, but she was exhausted.

Adair clung to her shoulder, mewling in fright, and she grabbed him so he wouldn’t fall off. After a few seconds, his purrs resumed. She pulled him closer to her chest, and with every purr, a touch of anxiety fled her body.

‘Vayra, we have time,’ Phasoné said. ‘I will keep watch for Larra while you sleep.’

“That’s…not what’s keeping me up.” She laid down, but her mind wouldn’t settle.

Then, a faint heat emerged behind her. Phasoné’s ghostly form appeared, sitting cross-legged on the cot, just behind the small of her back. “It’s alright, Vayra,” she whispered. “I’m keeping watch now. You’ll be alright.” She set a shimmering white hand on Vayra’s shoulder.

The weight made Vayra’s breathing slow down again. She settled back into a regular cycling pattern, continuing to integrate elixir and push herself closer to Captain.

“Rest, Vayra,” Phasoné said gently. “When you wake up, we can scale the central column.”