The hot tea poured out in each of our small cups to half full. Each of us thanked the servant as she dutifully did the work and left the kettle on the table. Bowing deep, she slid the door closed behind her.

It was only the three of us left in the room. Kidra and I on one side of the table. And Clan Lord Atius on the other, looming above the table even while sitting. He'd come with his two bodyguards in a surprise visit to discuss business, at least that was the official reason he'd told us at the gate.

He took one of the small cups, swirling the tea absentmindedly in a hand that looked all too large for the tiny thing. “Quite the industry, lass. Imagine my surprise when I start hearing from everyone that Winterscar of all Houses is on the rise. You must have been planning all this for some time. I recognize a well coordinated plan when I see one.”

Kidra sat on the opposite side, wearing her usual kimono. Prim and regal as usual, with sharp eyes that always gave an impression she was seeing far more into the conversation. I’d asked her about it once and she’d told me that yes, she practices on the mirror until it was her default look. I can't tell if that was a joke or if she's serious.

This had been the first time since the last couple of days that I’d seen her. Most of her orders were now sent through runners to me, since she was busy being in a dozen different places for different reasons. If it was anything sensitive, she'd send it written out on a letter. Despite all the work she'd been doing, fatigue was well hidden even from me. In all likelihood that fatigue didn't exist at all. Kidra wasn't stupid. She was probably putting an effort in keeping herself well rested rather than putting that effort into acting. She never believed in short term gain strategies, and staying awake to deal with issues would fall squarely in a short term gain situation.

A small cube of sugar was picked up in tongs and dropped it into her tea, after which she reached out again for another two cubes of sugar in quick succession. "I have indeed, my lord. There is a plan I kept for the eventuality in which Father stepped down as the head of House. Each month I made sure it was updated and ready."

Atius nodded, looking pleased. "Tenisent was an excellent fighter and I could trust the lad with my life. I've done so plenty of times already, in fact. Offered him a hand in managing his House multiple times in the past. I suppose he didn't want to see it restored for personal reasons. Your predecessors were a…" he waved a hand around, as if trying to come up with a good word for it.

“A bunch of backstabbing bastards?” I supplemented in from the side.

Both Kidra and Atius gave knowing smiles at that. “That’d be a word for some of it.” He said, a small chuckle passing through his voice. “I always had to handle Winterscars with a different set of gloves compared to the other Houses. But not all people are bad from all angles, lad. There were plenty of times they’d shown great honor and cooperation. When the metal is brought down, I could trust Winterscar would be there to stand with all the other houses.”

“Suppose at the very end, that’s what they did, sir.” I said politely.

Atius eyed my armor from the side as he took a sip of the tea. “Was I interrupting your sparring session?”

“Nothing I can’t do another time. I discovered a lot of... interesting topics. Was in the middle of testing one such thing.” I turned to Kidra, “I think you’ll have a day in the snow with this one.”

The iron-body technique was something veterans would slowly develop over time. Having Kidra go from novice to master would turn her into the hard carry for our little group. She already had the skills to tackle on the elites in the clan. If she suddenly had the speed as well, she’d be a threat to contend against. All I had to do was figure out enough tricks and feed them to her.

“Is this room secure?” Atius asked, eyeing the surroundings.

Kidra nodded. “I’ve already assumed you wanted to speak of sensitive subjects. The servant that offered tea is a Chenobi, one specialized in security. This room is isolated and has already been vetted by her.”

I nearly spat out my own tea. Chenobi were the specters in the night. A small caste of the most dedicated in the clan. People who would train for years in order to take a binding oath of fealty to a master and would carry that to their grave, serving for ten years before being given the option to retire. Normally kept as bodyguards. I suppose Kidra saw a different use for them.

The clan lord nodded. “She’s given you her vow?”

“She has, within the second day I took command of Winterscar.” Kidra took a sip of her own heavily sweetened tea. “I have been planning all of this for some time after all. I had prior contacts.”

“Excellent. The most pressing issue to discuss will be the raiders approaching, but I’ll admit I’m far more curious about what your brother has been up to with Talen’s book.” He turned to me, eyes twinkling. “He certainly looks like he’s had a few breakthroughs, call it a hunch.”

I had two options, either I start by explaining everything from the start like a normal person, or I silently bring out my hand and light it on fire like a dramatic idiot.

Of course I picked option two.

“That is… quite something.” Kidra said, watching the flame dance across my palm. Somehow, despite it being literal magic, she still kept a straight face as if she'd just seen someone light a candle instead.

Atius, on the other hand, was peering into the flame with intensity. “What fuel does it consume?” He asked after a short pause.

“None from this world as far as I could tell.” I shrugged. With my practice in the soul fractal, it was easy enough to reach a small soul-root to the fractal of heat. It began to wiggle around, circling around like a dragon floating across. “It’s taking energy from somewhere, just nowhere I can understand. Like it’s being sucked out from between the cracks of the world. Otherwise I have an electric current flowing in between the inscribed fractal here. That’s basically the whole secret to the Occult. The right fractals are inscribed in metal with voltage going through.”

They’d better be impressed with the circling dragon technique. The concept of a moving source of heat was not something easy to keep in mind. Took me a long while to get that going right, though I hesitate to say it was the wisest choice of time spent.

I gave them a quick rundown of my experiments. Of the soul fractal. Kidra corroborated my theory, explaining what she saw when opening Winterscar. I took off my helmet and showed the small glowing soul fractal inside.

Kidra initially couldn't feel any pull until she touched the fractal itself. Atius and I both could once it was close enough to our skin, likely because we'd been exposed to the soul-pulse previously. Him from his fight with To'Aacar, and me... well, old history I don't want to think on. We didn't continue with any experiments until Kidra was caught up with us.

It didn't take long, since attunement turned out to be as simple as touching the fractal directly. "That was most peculiar. I hadn't felt that at all from Winterscar." Kidra said, pulling her hand back from the glowing rune.

"You also didn't touch Winterscar's soul fractal when we were dismantling it." I noted.

She nodded, moving her hand close again to the soul fractal in the helmet. "I feel it now when I bring my hand close. Interesting. Does this sense fade away after some time?"

"Can't tell for sure, it's been a few weeks but I could still feel the sense the moment my hand was close enough."

Atius reached a hand for the helmet, and Kidra passed it to him without issue. He looked oddly at the small fractal within. "Aye, certainly looks familiar. The pillars where Deathless gain and trade their powers do have inscriptions that look as odd as this." He drew a hand closer, touching the soul fractal for the first time. His eyes went wide at that. "Novel. Very novel. I believe I felt some of your armor's soul even." He touched the armor again, a grin on his face. "It's not quite happy with the prodding. Perhaps I should quit while I'm ahead. Forgive me, great armor." He chuckled, passing the helmet back to me. "You say you enter a trance of sorts once you dive into this fractal?"

Nodding, I slipped the helmet back on. It was hard to describe the soul sight I had. I could see concepts - but it was hazy and blurry in a way. I had to be paying attention in order to start seeing details. Though I could pay attention in ways my eyes wouldn't have been able to focus on, say into the room across or the items behind my back.

Oddly enough Cathida hadn't said a word yet. In fact, HUD readings had basically stopped completely, only performing the minimum. Either absolutely nothing was going on anywhere, or Journey was barely paying attention to the happenings. That was strange.

“How strong is the current to activate the fire?” Atius asked, motioning me to reignite the fire.

“Low. It’s also easily reproducible. All that needs to be engraved is this symbol into a flat metal surface, and then a current is passed through. I think even a hand crank could keep this lit.”

Kidra’s eyes never left the floating flame, watching it intently. Atius leaned back in his chair, scratching his beard in deep thought.

“A hand crank, and yet you generate that much heat?” He asked, a sense of calculation deeper in the tone. “That’s the start of a perpetual energy machine. Something must be off.”

He’d read my mind on that one. I’d been thinking a rudimentary steam machine of some kind could easily self-supply itself and generate unlimited heating. I’d already had the rough designs in my head. “What’s off is the law of conservation of energy.” I said. “Have you heard of it?”

“Yes, I have heard of it.” He waved away the concern. “I’ve only dabbled in engineering over my years, enough to know a screwdriver from a welding torch at least, lad. I’ll admit it’s been years since I last sat down and studied the mathematics of physics so I could use a brush up, the base concepts stay in my mind. That law roughly states that energy cannot be generated from thin air in a closed system.” He pointed at the fire in my hand. I’d stopped having it dance because keeping focus on the concepts was getting difficult and fogging up my mind. “That,” he said. “Can be abused.”

“Exactly! It’s gods-damned amazing is what it is. Free energy - well, not perfectly free. I can feel the energy coming from somewhere, so the system isn’t completely closed.”

Atius remained in deep thought, leaning back and... frowning. I took the silence as a go-ahead to bring out my plans.

“See, first we can create Occult heaters.” I said, getting animated. “We can easily disguise it, but once we get those heaters and start spreading it out in the clan home, we’ll free up all the power cells taken for that task. We can then shift those over to def-”

“No.” Atius said softly. His eyes turned to me and I saw an echo of eternity there. Gone was the warmth, instead only the centuries. Cold calculation. “No.” He said again, now with the full voice and authority of the clan lord. “Keith, this book is not unique, is it?”

I shook my head, a little bewildered. “N-no. Talen said it was one of many.”

He nodded his head at that. “And already you’ve discovered a possible secret to perpetual energy and heating, within scant days of opening it. A simple, easy to implement solution no less.” He tapped the sigil in my palm. “You are not the first to hold this book. Likely, there were hundreds before you that stood in the very same spot you do now.”

I didn’t quite understand what he meant, until Kidra voiced the question Atius was really asking. “Then, where are they now?"

The clan lord nodded at her with a smile. "Imagine Keith created this heater. It would spread out in the clan and then traded out over time. Every clan would eventually own these heaters like we own the Occult blades. And yet, we don't have these heaters. So every person in Keith's boots either failed to create the heaters... or was eliminated in between the creation and their complete spread.”

My mind jumped to the cycles of destruction Talen spoke about. The shamans, the wizards, and likely other long dead cultures and civilizations that had taken up the Occult so long ago their names don’t appear anywhere in the world.

“Either this perpetual energy of yours is not feasible due to logistics issues we can't yet see. Or…” Kidra said, trailing the question.

“Or the machines have some way of tracking the Occult and are making sure anything that could be a threat is destroyed before it spreads too far.” Atius finished. “The warlocks don’t create perpetual energy machines, I know their ilk. The tools and items are simple. Straightforward. I don't believe this could be just coincidence. They may be aware of the enemy in the dark and are being deliberate in how advanced the spells they use are. Machines have never been spotted on the surface, however there's a hole in this. Survivorship bias. We've never heard of machines on the surface, because they've never let anyone live to tell the tale.”

Atius drank more of the tea, clearing his throat with it. “I’ve been mulling over one additional issue I’ve had with Talen’s book. The armors are purposefully blocking the sight and mention of the book. Yet the rest of the Occult itself is perfectly visible, am I correct on that assumption?”

I nodded, looking down on my palm where the fractal of heat was clearly visible. Journey wasn’t making any effort to hide that. In fact, it was being incredibly idle right now, almost as if dozing off. “It is.”

“Why try to hide the book itself? It made no sense in a way I'm familiar with - there was more to this than I could see. Now, I find out that this book also contains free heating with next to no drawbacks, within the hour of reading it? I don’t like this.” He set his fingers on the ground, folding them together. “I don’t like this at all. There are no free meals. This reeks of a ploy.”

“What do you mean?”

“In the old books, they spoke about icebergs - giant mountains of ice that floated within a large body of water. Often the surface seemed small, but it hid a mass under it that was deceptive.” He undid a few buttons on his tunic, easily stripping them off. “The same happens over time when studying history. Quirks that make little sense. Traditions that seem silly on the surface, only because the context behind them isn’t exposed. The world doesn't make sense, simple solutions seem evident and yet haven't been implemented. Often it's what you don't see that's the more important lesson. The dark spots in history.”

He placed the first button on the table. “Imagine a game with two players. This is the player’s first move.” He set down another button. “Imagine the two players took turns countering the other’s moves.” More and more, he placed the buttons on the table until he no longer had any more buttons to put down. “Each time they played, the board was changed. Say a third person walks into the game just now. If he sees the board, can he understand at a glance? Likely not. Some pieces may have ended up in situations that seem outright improbable, or make little sense. The third person can’t understand why the pieces are where they are because the history and context is missing.”

Kidra took a sip of her tea. “Then, in this metaphor, we’re the third player. And the book is the last move played by Tsuya?”

“Correct, except we’re not a player at all. We’re a game piece.” He sighed, looking deep into his cup. “I don’t trust that Tsuya has our survival in mind. I trust she has humanity as a whole in mind. She had no hesitation in sacrificing you during the destruction of the site all those weeks ago, right?"

I gulped, nodding. In hindsight, the goddess had indeed left me to die once with only three short farewell messages. Kidra, on the other hand, being more religious, was having a hard time swallowing this. Her eyebrows were knitted in focus, a slight frown breaking through the ice.

"Often in games, you send the pawns to test the line of defense expecting they will die in exchange for information on how the enemy reacts." Atius continued. "What I fear is that we’re not the finishing move, Keith. We could be the pawns sent to die in exchange for that information. If it's important enough, it's possible the whole clan can be seen as expendable.”

“What about the seeker?” Kidra said to the side. “If Tsuya is betraying us, why did she grant a second artifact? And the sphere. This doesn’t make sense.”

“That’s exactly the point, lass. It doesn’t make sense because we don’t have the full picture. We're missing pieces. She could be playing multiple plays all at the same time. Playing the odds, maybe. Or she’s placed these as red herrings, either for us to doubt our own guesses or setup for her enemy to find. The problem is that we don’t know her plans, we don't know what tools she gave us that are truely for us. We don't know if this seeker is a decoy or the true item. We don’t know Relinquished or how she fights Tsuya. What I suspect that this book is meant as a trap for Relinquished.”

“So. We’re the bait.” I concluded. “Tiny footnotes. Why hide the book from the armor but not us?"

Atius nodded. "If I'm right, it’s likely to give the book itself a better chance of surviving past our deaths. Reuse possibly? A weak version even, something that'll work only once every ten tries, though that's better odds than none. If she's playing at the scale I think she might be.”

There was a heavy weight in the air, the thought that I was being betrayed by the goddess. That she'd have the armors hardcoded to scrub all mention of the book so that if the enemy stepped on our dead bodies, they'd have a slightly harder time finding out where we got the ideas from.

“This is all just hypothetical, we could be jumping to the wrong conclusions.” Kidra said. "Tsuya is a goddess guiding humanity for centuries. The thought that she'd view us as expendable soldiers in her grand war rankles me."

“Lass, it's because she's spent centuries that I worry the most. Time strips away humanity, if one isn't careful to keep hold of it.” Atius said, almost with an edge of pity to it. “It only costs us a pound of snow to assume the book is a trap and act accordingly from that angle. At that price, I’d be a fool to pass on it. There is no possible reasoning not to proceed with extreme caution."

"Are we too late though? I mean, I did open it up and start experimenting."

Atius shook his head. "I think we've caught this early enough we haven't tripped past the point of no return or triggered whatever method the machines use to track down and wipe out Occult wielders.” He downed the last of the tea in his cup, before refilling it from the hot kettle. “For now, halt all Occult related activity. We can't trust any of the fractals in Talen's book are safe to use. I don’t want you to be using the occult in any manner until we’re sure. Instead, I want you to create an untested occult heater - a simple one - and have it sent directly to me. I’ll have it carried off somewhere far where I’ll turn it on and leave it for a few months as bait. If there are no signs of anything sniffing the heater out, then we can start small tasks. And always as far as possible from the clan.”

While I felt sad about being forced to abort my progress, I knew it was the right call in the end. Besides, there would still be some progress on this, only slowed down to a crawl in the name of safety.

He watched his cup intently again, eyebrows furrowed in thought. "I'm finding myself having a hard time making this call. This kind of power could be the difference between life or death against the coming raiders. Immediate survival might be a play we're forced to make if things become dire."

The old Deathless remained deep in thought, mulling over options, calculating lives and their weight. Neither Kidra nor I dared to interrupt.

"There is an alternative." He said simply, looking up. "Armor runs on the Occult. We know those runes are likely safe given that it's been used for centuries without issue. Those we can study in relative safty."

"The issue with that," I interjected, "Is that I don't know what those fractals do, and even if I did, I can't modify them in any way since I can't reverse engineer the fractal equation from an image. I don't have that kind of software. Their use might be really limited."

Not to mention the Armors were more than just the occult. They were paired with software and a soul fractal of its own. Those could end up being required to use the rest of the suit's fractals.

"Fortunately, that's not the end of our options, lad. There are two more set of fractals we can draw from." Atius said, waving my concern away. "The first set won't need to be modified, and we'll know what they do already. That should help with your situation."

"We have that?"

"Yes. Mine." He lifted a hand out, occult blue flared to life there, crackling like lightning. Two pairs of ghost hands extended out before fading off. "As I've told you before, Deathless gain powers by attuning to pillars underground. The pillars underground pre-date us Deathless. I know from folklore that the fractal symbols inscribed on their sides didn't appear until we appeared some five hundred years ago. Given how the pillars pair with us, I suspect it might have been a patch job of some kind. The goddess using already existing resources to help power us further. I strongly believe they're far more safe to work with given their goal was to be used in combat."

I remembered talking to Tsuya, she mentioned Relinquished had appeared seven thousand years ago, and that was when the world ended. It was silly to think about, but the ancient Deathless might actually be a new thing to the world, at least on the scales that the gods played on.

Atius paused to take a sip, swirling the tea in his cup. "In my travels, I had my armor take pictures of each pillar I came across underground. I felt it would be important someday, though I didn't know what any of it meant at the time." He patted his tunic, "The armor didn't survive my last death, but the data has been stored away a long time ago." He fixed me with a look, the cold calculations once again alive within the recesses of his eyes. "You and Kidra will work on reverse engineering the fractals I use. See if it's possible to use them either as a bluff or in actual combat. If the raiders believe we have three Deathless ready to fight, they might simply break before even attacking. Given what you've told me about the soul fractal's use, you have my permission to use the soul fractal to pair with the pillar fractals. It'll likely be required, if my hunch is correct. The soul fractal has already been touched upon, no sense in backing out now. I'll take that chance given the possible payoff."

He drew out his sword next, laying on the table. "The second source of fractals are the Occult weapons. If you succeed in discovering how these weapons function, I'll have you forge as many as you can make. Whatever the secrets that allow the sword to cut more than reality, I want it. That kind of power in a fight could easily cause a route in their forces."

I gulped, thinking back at the rip in reality swords like his could produce. That sort of strike, done in the middle of knight battle, could easily cause the enemy knights to panic and run.

“Information is dangerous in this world. All things and knowledge travel physically, given that the mythical internet is long dead. And that means it can be contained. Possible treasures like software or weapons are likely found all the time by chance, and when they failed to keep it a secret... We need to stay still and stay quiet, least we join the dark holes. I'm trusting only the two of you with this. The more people are involved, the more danger of a leak appears."

If a ceiling plank falls in the frozen wastes miles away from anyone, does it make a sound when it hits the ground?

I think I know what happened to the wizards.

Eventually, they must have made too much light in that dark forest.

Next chapter - Trial of the Occult blade