Bremi had expected to get caught at any moment. He almost did a few times. The first time he reached around the outside of the cell, fitting the keys into the makeshift cell’s lock, a pirate had stepped into the hallway. He had withdrawn his hand as quickly as he could.
He hadn’t been sure if the pirate noticed, and doubly, he hadn’t completely trusted the worker who the keys had come from.
So they had waited for a few days. When nothing came of it, Bremi tried again. First, he had unlocked his cell, then he had run down the hallway, unlocking all the other cells as quickly as he could.
He kept his finger over his mouth, urging silence from the others, then he pointed down the hallway, where there was a grate in the floor. They pried it open, then climbed down a rusty old ladder, to the bottom of a shadowy underground chamber.
The bowels of the facility was a maze of sprawling caverns and lava tubes, and if Bremi wasn’t careful, they’d all end up incinerated. The walls were smooth but naturally curved, and it was nearly pitch-black—aside from the light filtering in from the grate above and little flecks of still-molten stone clinging to the floor. They couldn’t linger long.
But if magma could pour in from outside, that meant there was an entrance—and an exit.
He followed the trail of sparks and glowing stone. The brighter they were, the closer they had to be to the surface. He followed the trail. The ground began to slope upwards, and the entire crew—nearly a hundred sailors, officers, and marines—had all ran into the tunnel behind him.
“Wait a moment, boy,” Pels said, rushing to grab Bremi’s shoulder. “They’ll have guards posted, and there’s no way they won’t see us emerging.”
“They’ll send someone behind us, too,” Bremi whispered. In the distance, he heard a bell tolling, and he figured that was their alarm. Someone had noticed they were gone. “I’d bet they took a glance outside and saw nothing. So all their sentries’re looking inside the facility, now.”
“You’d bet?”
“Not looking this far out onto the lava plains, until they get wise of the grates in that hallway’s floor and think to follow us down here.”
The ground rumbled, and Bremi fell to a crouch. The stone felt warm on his skin, so it was probably unbearably hot to the rest of the crew.
“What was that?” a sailor asked.
“More lava’s coming!” Pels said urgently. “Move! Go, now! Get out!”
They broke into a sprint, following the dimming trail of stone as best as they could. A few officers were faster than Bremi, and they didn’t hold back. They were the first ones to spot the open air and smokey sky, and they yelled back into the cavern.
When Bremi arrived at the opening, he understood why the sailors were yelling. The tunnel emerged at the edge of the lava channel. At the moment, the previous glug of lava had faded, leaving it empty, but the break wouldn’t last long.
Bremi hopped up onto the shore as high as he could, then looked out into the distance. A surge of glowing, liquid stone roiled towards them like an orange thunderhead.
“Run!” Bremi yelled, backing away from the hole’s entrance. “Run! There’s another flow coming!”
The crew was already running. They charged out of the hole and sprinted up onto the shore. Bremi looked for the officers and seamen he knew—Mr. Fress, Mr. Larson, Mr. Nudd, the list went on and on—he even spotted the two Redmarines, the dwarf and the elf, who were always bickering. But not Pels.
More and more sailors scrambled up onto the shore. The lava flow drew closer. It bubbled, but it didn’t yet surge. It was slower than a gush of water, but faster than a human could have run.
“Get up onto the shore!” Bremi yelled. He glanced back at the mining facility, now a distant, angular lump. The miners were marching out onto the spindles, ready to harvest the incoming lava flow.
Finally, Pels pushed a young sailor out of the tunnel, then sprinted out himself. He was the last. His boots slipped on the gravel shore, and he tumbled down into the center of the riverbed.
Bremi could feel the wave of heat approaching from the lava flow now. All the crew around him were drenched in sweat, their faces red. “Captain!” Bremi yelled. “Pels!”
Pels scrambled to his feet and crawled up the slope. Bremi dropped to his stomach, unperturbed by the hot stones, and reached a hand out. The man clutched his wrist, and Bremi hauled back as hard as he could.
He was just as skinny as his sister, and the best he could do was give Pels an extra boost. The lava drew closer, and everyone else had to leap back. A cloud of black dust and ash washed over them, and suddenly, Bremi could only see a few feet in front of his face.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
He gave one last burst of strength, and Pels pushed against the slippery stones. He climbed just high enough to avoid the flow of molten rock, then, with a few more seconds of pushing, climbed all the way up to the steep shore.
They both ran away from the edge of the riverbed, towards the rest of the crew. Bremi tried not to breathe too deeply, to avoid sucking too much debris into his lungs, but he also needed to catch his breath.
He’d heard stories of volcanoes that let off poisonous gasses, but in those stories the victims always dropped dead in a few seconds. No one looked like they were affected by it, other than limiting their sight.
But if they couldn’t see far, that meant the ash hid them from Myrrir’s sight as well.
Pels stumbled to the center of the crowd, nursing his blistering forearms. His face was red, as if he had a really bad sunburn. “We need to get moving,” he said, “before this cloud blows off.”
“Where?” one of the sailors asked (by his voice, Bremi guessed it was Mr. Illis), before a marine shushed him.
“We need to get back to the shore and get the Harmony ready to sail,” Pels said. “If we’re not here—if we’re safe—Vayra should have no reason to come here. We’ll get out of the star system, lie low for a little, and come back when everything has settled down.” He pointed to the north. “That way. It’s our best shot to get back to the coast.”
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Nathariel made his preparations as best as he could. First, he set a pot above his campfire and tasked Glade with maintaining the blaze. He wasn’t an alchemist by any stretch, but he figured he would need a rapid Acara-channel-sealing elixir soon. Even a weak one would do the trick.
No matter what happened to Vayra, he didn’t need her taking unnecessary spiritual damage.
Elixirs were not his specialty, but he could make something serviceable. First, he would need a base, which was always, always distilled, thickened Stream water. With his limited resources, it would take three days to boil down.
But there were other preparations. He wasn’t sure how much longer he would be staying on this planet—there was a high chance he might have to leave with the Mediator—and he didn’t want to leave anything too important behind.
Nathariel made Glade continue practicing while he prepared, so he could get the most, best use out of them before he left. But he raided the storage shed, placing the rarest of his trinkets into his void horn. Alchemy tools, books, manuals, and just mementos that might be important.
Once he was satisfied with his collection, he marched to his horse corral and set the youngest of the three stallions free. The other two, he and Glade would need. He filled their saddlebags as well, and equipped them for a long journey—with the lightest bridles and saddles he had.
The training dummies, of course, had to stay. There just wasn’t enough room for them to come with him. But they were made of valuable materials, and he didn’t just want to leave starsteel wires rotting in the elements.
So, aside from the five dummies that Glade trained with, Nathariel ran through the training course and deconstructed them. He wasn’t an engineer either, not by any stretch, but he knew what a starsteel wire was.
He pulled them out of the dummies and wound them in a tight coil around a spool, until he held a glistening silver rod as thick as his arm.
It took him a day to gather up the starsteel. At worst, he could sell it for a pretty penny. But he suspected he would have a use for a large amount of starsteel wire before long. He patted his own grafted, repaired flesh. His fingernails glinted off the starsteel netting.
When he returned to the hovel—at the end of the day; even an Admiral took time to manage menial tasks—he found Glade focussing on hand-to-hand combat with the five remaining training dummies.
Nathariel spent the next two days cutting a nearby owlwood tree and chopping it into small segments. As he watched Glade train, he sorted them. He wouldn’t have time (nor the skill) to complete the device alone, but he could find the best branches to serve as whichever…bones he desired. When he was satisfied that he had a skeleton’s worth of wooden chunks, he shoved them into his void horn as well. After that, the horn began to feel incredibly heavy, and there wasn’t much room for anything else.
After a little sorting, he made room for his pending vial of elixir by removing a larger chunk of wood.
His hands began to shake as he whittled away at it, forming a semi-circle plate with a slight curve on it—large enough to cover the back of Vayra’s hand. To take his mind off the impending fate of one of his disciples—
No, a maybe disciple.
—he watched Glade practice. By now, the boy had grown proficient at working around the training dummies’ patterns, learning them, and striking back with his bare hands.
A life in the dreary temples of the Order of Balance could not be underestimated, Nathariel figured, but it wouldn’t push Glade past the limits of his mediocre Spirit Potential. Every so often, Nathariel urged the boy to use his Arcara. He may not be able to strike with it, or use it for magic (not yet), but feeling it flowing through his body would help him tune his body. In other words, it would help him concentrate.
On the second day, he stirred korrin-starch into the elixir base, helping it thicken faster.
On the third day, he had finished the wooden plate. Wooden shavings sat around his feet. As carefully as he could, he guided flame-soaked Arcara and burned three pebble-sized sockets into the plate’s top. He guided the flame with his mind, ensuring that it didn’t burn any further than desired.
On the fourth morning, he gathered the starsteel wires from the five remaining dummies, then packed the spool into one of the horses’ saddlebags. As soon as Glade woke up, he guided the two remaining horses to the front of the hovel.
“Sir,” Glade said. “I think you are forgetting something.”
Nathariel raised his eyebrows. “Forgetting?”
Glade tilted his head towards the shed, where, just visible through the crack between the doors, Nathariel’s spear rested.
Nathariel sighed. “I suppose I might need that, huh. It’s been a while…”