Vayra wound her way up through the dark control dome, jumping over arcane tripwires or avoiding some hallways altogether—if they had too many traps, she skipped them. Whenever she found a staircase, she used it to ascend higher up the dome.
“Where exactly are we aiming for?” she asked Phasoné as they ran.
‘There should be a control room at the very top,’ Phasoné said. ‘If we can make it there, we can cross over.’
So she climbed as high as she could, searching the winding halls for any stairways they could use. The hallways themselves were easily twice her height, made entirely out of woven branches and tacked-on planks of wood. Normal-sized conks grew on some corners, and vines dangled from the ceiling.
With each breath, she sucked in musty air. It didn’t smell as rotten up here (except when she passed a puddle of freshwater that had been fermenting for who-knew-how-long), but the air tasted different. Ambient mana had accumulated high up, trapped by the dome, and flecks of iridescent dust absorbed into her skin. Her mana well refilled, and the higher she climbed, the faster it absorbed.
‘The control room we need should be on the other side of a guardsman’s post,’ Phasoné said. ‘Don’t know where it is, but you’ll know it when you see it. The post will have weapons and such in it; it’ll be hard to miss.’
As she ran through the hallways, a set of crashes rang out deeper within the dome, then a few splashes of water. “Sounds like Larra made it up.”
‘Be careful,’ Phasoné warned. ‘There are multiple routes through this place. We can’t come face-to-face with her before we’re ready.’
They arrived in a storeroom room with a few glass decanters of refined elixirs that shone even brighter than the raw material from the ground. There was an entire rainbow’s worth of colours. When she picked one bottle up, the liquid sloshed with a ringing tone, like hundreds of tiny bells chiming. When she plucked the cork off, a fruity odor seeped out.
‘Using fruits from the other side of the facility, they probably enhanced the efficiency. Less energy gets wasted, and it’ll cost less mana to integrate it.’
Vayra, though, was already at the peak of First Lieutenant. More Arcara wouldn’t help, now—it was only her Path revelation—but she kept the decanter and drew it into her corespace. It’d be helpful later. She couldn’t pass it up.
For good measure, she grabbed all the decanters off the shelves of the storeroom and pulled them into her corespace. A few of them glowed purple, and there was one turquoise one, but none of them would help her at this point. They were physically lighter than the barrels, and certainly took up less volume, but the spiritual weight of so much condensed energy weighed down on her core. When she was half full, and the weight was interfering with her ability to fight, she left a few behind.
Reluctantly.
Maybe Nathariel had underestimated how much power this place had.
‘If he has never been to a God’s greenhouse before, there is a good chance he underestimated the stored-up value here,’ Phasoné said.
After that, they kept moving. They passed another storeroom filled with barrels of long-rotten food, then through a minor control room with roots and thick starsteel wires winding all around the walls. The roots were all spirit-water-accepting ends, though, and the wires were inactive—save for a few loose Arcara sparks from unwanted conducting.
Vayra climbed four more sets of stairs before she arrived at the top of the dome. There was nothing to block the outer glass, and the sloping exterior glass of the main greenhouse dome was the only ceiling. A few fan-plants would have kept it ventilated, but their leaves had withered, and the tight enclosed space on the exterior of the dome had turned into an oven. All the vines inside it had withered away.
She had drifted away from the central wall significantly, though, so she ran back toward the wall, trying to get out of the exposed room as fast as she could. When she reached another hallway with significantly more vine coverage, she stopped and leaned against the wall.
Her mana had refilled entirely, and although she had been moving quickly—and sometimes running—it was nowhere near as exhausting as the climb up the main root cord.
She pushed off the wall and continued down the hallway. At the end, a set of massive doors awaited her. They were wooden, but when she pushed on them, they didn’t budge. The sideways brass handles suggested they would slide apart, but with her spiritual sight, she noticed a pattern of runes around them.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
‘Arcara locks,’ Phasoné said. ‘Good thing I know the combinations.’
“What is it?”
‘Can I have your left hand?’
Vayra gave up control right away, then turned her shoulder forward so the hand could reach the lock. Phasoné, using Vayra’s hand, tapped a pattern into the rune circle. Different tones chimed out as she flooded different runes with Arcara, and when tapped out quickly, it had the exact same melody as the song Phasoné had sung for Vayra during the advancement from Master to Third Lieutenant.
With a rumble, the lock acquiesced. Vayra took back control of her hand and pushed on the handle as hard as she could. At first, it didn’t move. It was too heavy and dusty and old.
After a few seconds of Vayra scrambling against the ground to no effect, Phasoné’s white ghost appeared—and Vayra knew exactly what she wanted. She stepped away from the handle and placed her hand on Phasoné’s shoulder, giving the Goddess a little extra mana.
With a single grunt, Phasoné heaved the doors open.
“Thanks,” Vayra whispered, then stepped through. Phasoné dematerialized in a flash, and the strands of light flooded back into Vayra’s chest.
On the other side of the doors was a small room with a complete ceiling of rough wooden boards to block out the outside light. It smelled of pipe-smoke and gunpowder—a bit charred and a bit sulphuric. She blinked, recoiling from the scent for a second, before looking around.
The little room had a table in the center, and a skeleton still sat at one chair with playing cards in its hand. Its flesh had rotted away long ago. Along the edges of the room were racks of weapons. There were a few silver swords and few scythes and spears, and along the opposite wall, she noted muskets and casks of gunpowder.
“This is the guardsmen’s room, isn’t it?” she whispered.
‘Correct.’
“Then…the main control room should be exactly on the other side of that door.” Vayra held her hand out to the light of the seer-core illuminated the other side of the room as well. Another doorway awaited, this time with only a simple swinging panel and no locks—and no magical traps, as far as her spiritual sight could tell.
She walked over, about to push on the door, when Phasoné said, ‘Wait!’
“What?” Vayra lifted her hands, as if she was about to set off a trap.
‘Look in that chest over in the corner,’ Phasoné instructed. ‘Some of the guardsmen would have been God-heirs, and you don’t know what kind of equipment they might have had. I sense something in the chest…’
Vayra turned in a circle, looking for any sort of chest. A glimmer of brass caught her eye beside the musket rack, and she approached it. It belonged to a small wood-and-brass box that had been carefully tucked into the corner.
“I don’t need special senses to tell you that a chest like that is good to open.” Vayra knelt in front of it. The closer she got, the more she sensed an arcane weight emanating from the box and pulling on her core.
But this time, she approached with her spiritual sight active. There were no tripwires, but a set of roots conducted Arcara in a loop, and they wrapped around the outside of the chest. She’d have to break at least one to open it.
‘If we break the roots, chances are we’ll activate some sort of trap.’
Vayra followed the roots over to the wall, then pulled a panel of wood aside. An inactive root-and-mud golem waited behind it, with a rigid and firm face—exactly like the Commodore-grade golems Vayra had unleashed on Larra earlier. It wasn’t active, and it didn’t exert any spiritual power or pressure, but she figured it’d awaken if she broke the loop of spirit water inside the roots.
‘Break the root,’ Phasoné suggested, ‘then pour a trickle of one of those elixirs down the opening. It’ll simulate Arcara flow and to keep the golems pacified for long enough to open the chest, and when it wears off, we’ll be long gone.’
Vayra called up a decanter from her corespace and unplugged it. The moment she pulled open the chest, she poured a dribble of the glowing golden liquid on the torn root. The wall shifted and the panel shook, and for a single second, the golem shuddered. Vayra jumped to her feet, ready to run, but there was only one rumble. The dribble of elixir was holding. She poured a little more for good measure, then knelt down to examine the contents of the chest.
A silver pistol rested on a bed of paper gunpowder-and-shot cartridges. Vayra gingerly picked the weapon up. Its handle was a pale wood, and a Moulded Arcara filigree covered it. The Arcara was solid blue, and it had the texture of amber. When she tapped it with her fingers, the Arcara let off a few sparks of energy, just like starsteel would. This Arcara had been Moulded by a proper smith, though, and it would last for centuries before decaying.
She picked it up and ran her hand down the barrel. An ornate pattern of starsteel carvings swirled along the side of the barrel, and at the tip, a ring of swirling, calligraphy-like runes rimmed the muzzle.
‘Those are amplification runes,’ Phasoné said. ‘When something passes through the barrel and fuels them, they’ll make the shot more powerful. Or…in your case, they’ll make the beam of starlight you fling out a little stronger.’
Vayra grabbed it by the handle, feeling the Moulded Arcara tingle against her skin. The firing mechanism looked normal—this pistol could still use normal shots—but she could also funnel her power through it.
“Well, I’m keeping this,” Vayra whispered. “Sounds like an upgrade.” She pulled her old pistol out of her belt and set it back down in the chest. “Sorry, old guy, but I need to stay as light as possible.”
She tucked the new pistol into her belt, then stood up and turned back to the next door. Judging by how much their added elixir had dimmed in the trap, Vayra figured they had about a half-hour before the golems activated.
Half-hour to get the central wall down? That didn’t seem so bad.
She pushed the door open and stepped into the next room—the control room.