Interlude: Miguel

Sweat dripped down Miguel’s brow as he dragged Sadie’s body into the wastes. He did his best to ignore the feeling of her cold ankles against his palms, to look away from her still features. Long hair and arms fanned around her head, brushing away his footprints on the dusty earth.

Teacher had said she was too weak for the second stage. He said that her soul was in a better place now. The coldness in Teacher’s voice had made it hard to take any comfort from that, though. Miguel resolved that he would be strong when his turn came, just like he was being strong now, dragging her unreasonably heavy body over rocks and scrub. She was so small, but it seemed that death had added weight.

He left her at the base of a sad little tree and walked back to Night’s Safety. He wasn’t sure why it was called that, since it seemed like Teacher and the dogs were more than enough to keep their little band safe at night, or any other time. For weeks, one of his chores had been to haul loads of dirt and rubbish from the nasty place. It smelled of mold, musk and rot, and when the weather permitted, Miguel preferred to sleep under the clouds.

Sadie was the second of the initiates to die. He could still remember her last, sad, smile, her face tinged with fear and hope. She had arrived before him, had helped him to understand the rules of this strange, new, life he found himself living. Now she was gone.

The others were just finishing a run when he returned, hands braced on knees and panting with exertion. Brother Pinton watched them with narrowed eyes, hands clasped behind his back, ready to pounce if any tried to sit or lie down.

“Walk it off!” he bellowed as Miguel eased into the group, trying to remain unnoticed. Pinton had an obsessive focus on their physical training, and wouldn’t forgive his absence, though Miguel was only doing Teacher’s bidding. Thankfully, the horribly scarred man only had one working eye, and was oddly unobservant at times, as if he could only focus on what was directly in front of him. Every morning without fail the initiates were roused, quite forcefully if necessary, and forced to perform all manner of exercises. It was not Miguel’s favorite time of the day, though he had certainly gained strength and stamina under the harsh regime.

Next was a hurried meal of food bars, and then his favorite part of the day. Teacher had some kind of arrangement with the odd mining platform that lit the far horizon at night and filled the air with a low rumble all the time. Miguel hadn’t seen it yet, but some of the other initiates had made the trek to retrieve food, clothing, and other necessities, and told the rest of them about the massive vehicle crouched upon the land.

He was still cramming the food bar when Teacher appeared, followed by his two disciples. Sadie would have been the third, Miguel thought. All the initiates bowed respectfully, one of the first things Sadie had taught him to do.

“You are being given a great gift,” said Teacher to those assembled before him as the disciples went from initiate to initiate, distributing the Teacher’s blessing. “But you do not yet have the wisdom to use it. Today, you will meditate upon your senses...”

He went on, talking about the nature of reality and how the senses presented a mirror of the self rather than truth. Normally, Miguel would have at least tried to follow along, but images of Sadie kept intruding, her quiet smile, the way her head bounced against the rocks as he dragged her. He heard the disciple sniff in disdain at the tears running down his face as he received the blessing. Still, he pulled up his system status as the blessing reached his bloodstream and then his brain, watching as the nanobody count increased.

He, Miguel, scavenger from the outskirts of Vista, had a system now. He was part of a clan. True, it was small and strange, unlike the powerful Lone Star Clan that ruled his home, but it was growing as Teacher brought in more strays like himself. Teacher said that they would usher in a new golden age for the world, that they would rid society of corruption and bring it into alignment with the heavens.

Soon, he would undergo his first trial, and either achieve the second stage, like the two disciples, or die, like Sadie. Either way, paradise beckoned.

Chapter 4: Myriad

Beyond the door was a passage of rough stone, a gray, rectangular tunnel that sloped downward to the edge of Lilijoy’s senses.

“Well..” she started to say as she turned to Lowly, only to stop as he surged past her. “… I guess we’re going in,” she finished. She couldn’t blame him; the small passage probably reminded him of home. They could go over some ground rules for exploring unfamiliar passages in a moment, she decided.

“Slow down,” she called softly. “There could be danger.”

Lowly froze, and let her take the lead. They made their way carefully down the long hall, and soon Lilijoy was fighting the urge to move faster too. The featureless stone stretched on and on, offering nothing beyond echoes. It was only after several minutes of travel that there was a small change; some kind of faceted inclusions began to appear in the wall. Lilijoy suspected they were gems or crystals of some kind, and wished she had a light source to see if they would glimmer and shine. As it was, she could see them with her mana sense, somewhat, as concentrations of earth that stood out from the background, small blotches high on the walls and ceiling scattered at random every twenty feet or so.

“Can you see that?” she asked Lowly in a whisper, gesturing toward one of the crystals that was on the wall, well out of her reach.

He followed her motion with his eyes, but shook his head. “More wall,” he replied.

She shrugged, and they continued onward, and downward. The passage seemed to be curving slightly to the right as well now, though they were already well past the Academy walls, if her internal reckoning was to be trusted. After another minute, she saw a crystal ahead a bit lower in the wall, almost at her eye level, and she stopped to investigate. She reached out with her fingers to feel the facets her echolocation was perceiving, but the object disappeared before she could touch it, the wall sealing over it as it retreated.

It was disconcertingly like an eye closing.

She watched for some time after explaining the event as best she could to Lowly, but the crystal did not reemerge before he became impatient and began tugging on her arm. They began to move again, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that they were being watched by the gems as they passed under them.

More walking, and still more, followed. It came as a relief when they finally saw a chamber of some kind ahead of them. If not a chamber, it was at least a change. The walls bowed away on either side, a swelling within the passage of sorts, though she could see they reconverged not far ahead. What was more interesting was the floor, where a significantly larger crystal pushed forth from the floor like a buried obelisk, the top foot of a canted pillar with seven, rough facets.

“I see that.” Lowly announced.

Earth mana extended from the corners of the formation, caught in still vortexes. Lilijoy had noticed that the more pure such mana was, the slower it moved, and this mana seemed almost frozen to her sight. She knew instinctively that this would be a fantastic setting to work on her Earth magic, though she highly doubted that was why they had been summoned.

She exchanged a glance with Lowly, hoping he might have some idea of what to do next. Evidently he was hoping the same, for he answered her look with an expression of confusion.

“When I tried to touch the one on the wall, it went away,” she relayed in a hushed voice. “Maybe you should try touching this one?”

She was a bit worried to put him in danger, but she was also concerned that her presence might be a problem. If there was some opportunity here for Lowly, she didn’t want to ruin it through her own ignorance.

After a few false starts and hesitations, Lowly summoned up the courage to poke the crystal lightly with one clawed finger. When nothing overtly ominous occurred, he looked back at Lilijoy, and she encouraged him with a nod. He gathered his courage and placed his hand lightly on the blunt, faceted end.

“Ouch,” he said and then stumbled back, as the crystal began to move. Concerned, Lilijoy looked over to see him licking his palm. She could only spare a brief glance, for the crystalline extrusion on the floor required her attention. It was… blooming, was her first impression, rods of crystal unfurling from the center, bending outward from newly angled joints and extending.

It was only when the rods had bent over themselves enough to reach the floor that she realized what was about to happen.

“Those are legs!”

With a heave, the crystal pushed its central core from the floor, resembling an oddly symmetrical, seven-legged spider crossed with a stump. Lilijoy hated to assume that every creature she ran across was aggressive, but she summoned forth her ironwood club as the creature began to step in a rotational pattern, its central pillar swiveling back and forth, crystal feet clacking on the stone floor.

A voice intruded into her thoughts.

The voice carried with it a weighty presence and conviction that froze her in place, locking her joints. She could only watch as Lowly took one look at the whirl of segmented crystal appendages and then turned and ran as fast as he could back down the hall, arms pumping and bare feet slapping. She couldn’t even turn to see what would happen as the creature followed in pursuit.

“Who are you?” she managed to call out as the sounds of Lowly and the creature faded into the distance. There was no reply, just a feeling of watchful presence hovering over her, ready to exert the same pressure as before if she took as much as a step. She wasn’t sure if it was real or imaginary, but decided to go with her instincts and stayed put. She sent her best wishes to Lowly and sat down on the floor to meditate on Earth Magic.

***

A long time later, or a short time, depending on one’s scale, she heard a dragging sound coming down the hall. She roused herself and looked down the hall, to see Lowly painfully pulling himself along the floor towards her, some distance away. She ran to him and immediately began to heal his numerous wounds, mostly punctures to his legs and arms.

A normal being would have long since perished from blood loss, but given Lowly’s ability to move his blood, or himself, whichever it was, he was mostly contending with structural damage. Even so, his health was down to a sliver, though she had to wonder if she was seeing his true health, or that of his body alone.

“Did you win?” she asked.

He nodded, already responding to her healing. “Smashed moving rock-spider.”

He’s going to end up with a real complex about spiders at this rate, she thought. “How?”

Lowly shrugged, a fairly typical response when she asked him, well, anything.

It didn’t take her too long to heal Lowly completely, though she was still stuck at the Journeyman level in the skill. Arpentra, the enormous sky-jelly and Dean of the Second Cohort, had offered to personally train Lilijoy when she reached the Master level, but between one distraction and another, Lilijoy hadn’t made nearly as much progress as she had hoped. She did notice, now, how her relative lack of familiarity with the specifics of Lowly’s species kept her rate of healing lower than when she was healing herself or another human, and resolved to investigate further when she had the chance, hoping it might provide further insight into the hidden subdivisions of the Medical/Healing skill.

Soon, they were on the move again. The crystals in the walls and ceiling became more common, and Lilijoy caught them moving from time to time, scuttling along whichever surface they happened to be on, miniature versions of their larger cousin, before sinking back into the solid stone. Any time she and Lowly stopped walking, they could hear the light clicking of tiny crystal feet off in the distance. It was nerve wracking, and it certainly didn’t help that Lilijoy didn’t know what she was allowed to do if they were attacked again.

It wasn’t much longer before they saw a light ahead. Shining down the long corridor, it caught on the facets of dozens of crystals, then hundreds as they proceeded, until there was more crystal than stone and they entered into a large chamber that took Lilijoy’s breath away, a room full of towering crystal pillars canted at every conceivable angle, emerging from wall, floor and ceiling, clear and gleaming with internal illumination.

“I hope they don’t all turn into spiders,” said Lowly.

The air was full of clicking as smaller crystals darted here and there, merging and separating from the larger columns, scuttling and spinning around on their long, segmented legs. Even so, Lilijoy didn’t feel any particular threat, whether due to the beauty of the setting, or the overwhelming magnitude of the forces they would face if the crystals were truly hostile, she couldn’t say. If there was a battle to be fought, it would be short and ridiculous, so why worry?

A true crystal cave, she thought. I wonder if Merlin is in there somewhere?

They stood for a while, unsure what to do, as there was no obvious path before them. Eventually Lilijoy turned to Lowly.

“Do you think..?”

He was shaking his head. “Last time it bit me and turned to spider.”

“Maybe it’s a test of courage or something?”

He looked at her with a confused expression. She wasn’t sure whether she had lost him at ‘test’ or ‘courage’, or possibly both, so she explained the concepts involved.

He shook his head when she finished. “Test of stupid.”

“I guess brave and stupid do overlap,” she agreed. “But do you have a better idea? At least we’ll respawn if the worst happens. If we’re still in the Academy, there isn’t even a penalty.”

She was a bit concerned about where Lowly might respawn, but the Inside wouldn’t put him anywhere immediately dangerous, if it came to that.

Lowly sighed, and began to sidle skittishly to the nearest glowing pillar. After flinching away at the last moment several times, he finally mustered up enough courage, or stupidity, to put his palm flat on the smooth surface.

Unlike before, the pillar itself did not unfold legs and begin chasing them. Instead, as soon as Lowly removed his palm with an expression of pain, smaller crystal entities began to converge from every part of the room. Thankfully, they were not attacking, not yet anyway. Instead, they converged on a relatively open spot on the floor and began to merge like some three-dimensional tangram, building… well, it was hard to say.

Starting as an undefined mound of facets and edges, what took shape before them passed through several stages. At first, Lilijoy thought it might be something like a crab, but then it began to look like a rocket ship, crouched on four unevenly spaced landing legs. This image was shattered, when two appendages began to project from the… torso?

Finally, the being seemed satisfied with its form, four stout legs with sharply angled joints supported a central mass with two arms. There was even something like a face, seven-sided cavities placed in a rough simulation of eyes and mouth. It looked like an attempt to replicate a roughly humanoid form, burdened by seven-sided symmetry.

The voice from before echoed in Lilijoy’s head, hollow and deep.

It took Lilijoy a moment to get her bearings. “Head, as in Head of School?” she asked after a moment.

This answered a number of questions Lilijoy had pondered in idle moments. “If I may ask,” she began as respectfully as she could, “why did you bring us here?”

The crystal being appeared to scrutinize her, rotating its central mass slightly to bring its face analog into alignment with where she stood. She couldn’t tell if this was necessary, or if the being was just being polite.

She wasn’t sure what to say to that, so she changed topics, for the moment. “Are you the one rearranging the Academy?”

Something clicked for her then. “The Mystic Library! That’s how you know me.”

Lilijoy wasn’t sure she liked the sound of that. She felt bad that she was monopolizing the conversation, but given that Lowly had frozen in place with his eyes closed, she figured he would need some time to adapt anyway.

“Will you… be putting it back?”

Well, that’s sure to be inconvenient, she thought. She could appreciate the reasoning, but now she was kicking herself for not taking better advantage of the resource when it was easily available.

“I apologize if this is improper to ask, Head Myriad, but what manner of being are you?”

Her Scan had yet to trigger on any of the crystal beings, and it would be impolite to use now.

She considered for a moment. “My first guess was some type of collective entity, but from the little I know, they tend to be composed of units of identical size, while you don’t seem to have that limitation. Maybe some kind of earth elemental?”

The being’s physical manifestation regarded her passively, but the voice in her head chortled.

Crystal entity with the ability to reshape its environment, likes challenges. Bigger and a little more… spidery than I would have thought, but still…

“You’re a dungeon core,” she proclaimed.

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