Time Since Reckless Self-Endangerment: 4 Days 9 Hours

Goal: Save Tarquin

Nic mixed the ink for a new beast tattoo as the little lizard struggled in his scarf, peeping frantically.

“Hey, hey little guy. Easy.” He knew the lizard wouldn’t understand him, but Nic’s tone of voice was soothing and he petted the fiery little bastard on the head, stroking his fingertip across the little spines extending from its eyebrows.

Digging out his knife, he slowly dripped a bit of blood from his own fingertips into the mixing bowl where he’d prepared the ink. Then he slipped the point slowly across the lizard’s back, trying to hurt it as little as possible, and got a single drop of blood.

The two mingled together as he stirred with the point of the tattooing needle. “One second, and we’ll be able to talk…”

He stabbed it into his right arm. The ink spread out, becoming a black cloud under his skin.

And his mind opened to feel the lizard’s thought and emotion.

For a moment he was lost in the lizard’s mental space, overwhelmed by the tide of dull alien thought, the lizard’s beast-like mind filled mostly with fear and confusion.

As he poured through the beast’s memories he saw a world with five suns in orbit, forming a blazing ring of blue fire in the sky. A desert of salt instead of sand, made uninhabitable by sulfuric gasses seeping up from hidden caves. Most of the world’s life was contained in underground oceans hidden beneath the upper layers of salt and stone.

For a moment he almost sunk into the beast’s mind entirely, losing himself to the flood of memories that came from bonding with another mind.

Then a voice spoke.

“Who is this? What are you doing?”

“I’m Nic. Nicolas Winterhome. I come from another world, just like you did. You had no father and no mother, right?” He thought back, making his thoughts calm and trying to soothe the panic of the little beast.

“Yes. Small. Runt of the litter. Soon to be eaten by bigger hatchlings.”

“Yeah. I was the same way once. I got lucky. Some of the bigger hatchlings took care of me instead.” Before Tawley there was Huck. Huck had been like a big brother, but he’d also been a thief. Always showing up with fresh fruit and bits of sweets he’d pocketed on the way back to the orphanage.

Right up until they hung him.

“I want to help you.” Nic whispered. “And you can help me.”

“Why. Why would you help the runt of the litter?”

Nic paused. There was no trust in that tiny, angry mind. Only the pain of being an outcast and suspicion of the world. “Because you can make explosives, and I can’t.” He answered honestly. “I need you as much as you need me.”

“Ah, you are also… defective. No fire to defend you. Only soft skin.”

“Yeah, sure. And if you come with me, you don’t have to stay down here forever. You can come up and see the sun again.”

“Just one sun? Why only one.”

“Tell you what. You come with me, I’ll try to find you four more.”

“Yes. Five suns, the heat of them on my skin. Yes. I will go.”

The connection sank away, becoming less all-consuming and more of a thin thread at the back of Nic’s mind. The ink on his skin spread out and took the form of a ring of five suns with a lizard curled in the middle.

The little Pyrwarden ceased to struggle, and Nic let it out of the scarf, feelings it claws prick his skin as it climbed up his arm and sank into the tattoo.

“Right.” It was time to deal with the guardian of the fountain.

The ring on his finger blazed as he put his hand to the nearest pillar of stone that extended down from the ceiling.

His adhesive aura was definitely stronger now. With the ring burning through his aura to advance his Shards, he could easily suspend his whole body weight on just a few fingers and toes, allowing him to move quicker than ever up the walls. Which was good.

There was a long journey ahead.

The cavern was the size of a castle, and Nic spent a good five minutes just to clamber up one of the tall pillars to the ceiling. From there his journey was upside-down and across the rough stone of the walls.

But slowly, slowly, he closed in on the faintly glowing target of the bismuth golem.

Until he was directly overhead, gazing upside-down at his foe. Nic reached into his mystic bag and grunted as a huge stone slipped into his hands. In an instant, it went from weighing nothing inside the bag to weighing a good hundred pounds outside, and the sudden change yanked Nic downwards until he was barely clinging on to the ceiling by his adhesive-covered feet. His whole body ached as he carefully swung the payload into position-

And dropped it like a descending bombshell.

It hurtled past the python-headed face of the goddess statue. It tumbled through the dark. And it crashed directly into the bismuth golem’s skull with a huge, shattering crash.

Shards of stone and metal flew in all directions as the decapitated body of the golem tumbled over.

Nic pumped his fist as hung from the ceiling like a bat.

Dropping down, he landed atop the goddess statue’s head and slid down, using just enough adhesive aura on his fingertips to glide rather than stick. Seconds later he was on the floor besides the golem’s body.

It was still twitching. The broken shards of bismuth were slowly melting and beginning to crawl back towards the headless stump, flowing like quicksilver rivers along the ground. Nic grimaced. Not the easy kill he’d imagined.

On the other hand…

Pulling a flask from Lavhin’s laboratory out of his bag, Nic scooped a stream of living metal inside. Just enough to fill the bottom of the glass with swirling metallic rainbows.

Corking it and dropping it back in the bag, he turned his attention to the sword at the statue’s feet. It was time to get this done.

He grasped the hilt and ripped upwards. The blade fragmented, and water began to flow upwards from the wound it left in the earth. For a moment, nothing happened...

Then there was a grating, rumbling sound.

Nic backed up nervously.

Then the earth began to shake.

Nic began to run.

When he was halfway across the cavern floor, the ground burst open and a wave of water poured in. He was swept off his feet in a surge of frothing, white-foam waters, carried up in swirling spirals and thrown against the ground by the savage currents. His gills flicked open and he swam upwards, avoiding being crushed against the cavern floor as the water poured in, a seemingly endless tide filling up the cavern and carrying him towards the roof.

Just as he was about to brace for impact, Nic spotted sunlight. It was a thin crack in the ceiling above, light shining through, getting pulled open wider as the entire cavern shook. He reached down into his bag and took out a fistful of explosive crystals to jam into the gap.

As the cavern filled there was still a thin layer of air at the top. Nic summoned forth the little lizard, its claws digging into his arm as it scrambled atop his head. Panic and confusion filled its mind as it saw the ocean of dark water beneath them.

“Don’t worry!” Nic gasped out. Here at the edge of the waters, his body kept subconsciously flicking between his gills and his throat each time he went under, creating an effect that was oddly like drowning. “Just blow it open!”

The lizard snapped its long claws together, making sparks. One little orange ember after another fluttered down into the waters, until one finally caught against the shards of explosive jammed into the breach.

There was a pounding burst of force and sunlight poured into the world through drifting smoke. The explosion threw Nic back down into the water, drowning out the sound of the blast. The little lizard was thrown free of his shoulders, and Nic felt an instant of pure panic as he saw it drifting down, limbs thrashing in raw fear.

Nic dove downwards, catching the tiny beast and letting it cling onto his back. Its claws cut into his skin but Nic didn’t care. He kicked up, swimming towards the light that fell like a shining spear into the underground lake, and together they burst through into the brightness of day.

Nic gasped as his lungs opened properly, and his gills snapped shut.

On his back the lizard kicked its head back and forth, shaking water off the crested frills on its neck. It scrambled off his back and up a nearby rock to stare upwards at the sun hanging over the valley.

“Yeah. Yeah I imagine you probably missed that.” Nic rolled onto his feet and surveilled their surroundings. They’d come up in the middle of a series of red rock towers, where even now empty little oasis pools were beginning to fill with water.

The small creatures inhabiting the area seemed more fearful than overjoyed. It was possible they’d never even seen a standing pool of water bigger than a few drops in a rocky basin.

Nic looked forward to coming back here, weeks from now, and seeing how the area flourished. If green grass came up from below. As a parting gift he laid more explosive crystals by the breach, taking the time to lay out a ‘fuse’ of small crystals leading up to the main payload so he wouldn’t get caught in the blast.

Striking stones together - the little lizard looked at him like he was a sad, crippled creature, unable to even make his own fire - Nic watched in satisfaction as the fire raced along the fuse and a huge plume of dust blew up into the air.

When it cleared there was a deep well cut into the stone, leading to the drowned chamber below. Water spilled up and began to fill the surrounding area, leeching down where it overflowed the stones and the sand drank it up.

The lizard just basked in the bliss of the sun, and Nic took a moment as well, settling back onto his rear and enjoying a moment of calm.

He considered the surroundings for a moment more, and blinked. There were letters embedded into the stone pillars. Climbing to his feet, Nic circled around until the letters on one pillar lined up with the next. As he moved and shifted his perspective, one tower of red rock after the next lined up, until a soft golden light started to saturate the writing.

As the last of them lined up a voice spoke into his mind-

Long Ago, This Land Was Rich With Water…

“No, no. Sophia?” Nic spoke through the mental flood of information, refusing to listen as the System tried to feed him whatever story it had constructed.

“Yes?”

“I want the actual story. Do your thing- the trick where you make it show me something real.”

“I can try…” There was a ringing in his ears. The voice shifted.

Logos came in the seven hundredth and thirteenth year,

And we were unprepared.

Our gods betrayed us. They accepted Logos’ offer of true strength amongst the cosmos, in exchange for abandoning us to the System. Logos wished to study the immortal arts of our world, our rites of ascension that led mortals onto the path of godhood.

In order to find which of us had the godly spark, Logos forced us to fight.