The room where Darro found his wife after naming their son was as he’d always found it. It was small and cozy, intended perhaps as a sewing room or an office before his wife turned it into her reading room. There was a couch against one wall and shelves along the rest, a small table in the center of the room. Every surface was filled with books, and they filled the air with the smell of dust, paper, and glue. Light filled the room, in the only departure from its usual state he’d ever seen. Candles burned on top of stacks of books and chemical lanterns and even the bright magnetic lights he’d purchased for her when she first complained about the dark. Four familiars in lantern mode hung in the air above his wife’s head. They made the room hot and stuffy and still failed to match the light they’d seen in their visit to the surface.

She was asleep when he came in, curled up under a blanket with a book drooping from her hand while the lights stared at her. For a moment he thought about turning and leaving, but she stirred, and he shifted the blanket to cover one of her shoulders. He wanted to smile when she opened her eyes but felt as though the muscles for that particular expression had atrophied and died somewhere amidst the blood and killing beyond these walls.

She looked at him for a moment, her hair in a mess above her head, then she rolled to turn her back to him and pressed her face to the back of the couch.

There was no response when he told her he’d named their son.

He put a hand on her back and just sat with her for a moment while his spirit touched the spiritual residue that clung to the books around them, to the walls, that hung in the air around them like a projection of his wife’s unhappines.

“Are we leaving?” She asked the back of the couch.

He stood.

“Soon.” He replied.

“You promised you would take me back.” She said, so quietly it would have been difficult to hear without his cultivation.

“I will.” He told her. “I promise. Soon. I have duties to finish before we can go, but soon.”

“You promised.” She said again and curled herself tighter into a ball. “You promised me.”

A runner found Darro deep within the tunnels shortly after he’d gone through the Dawood headquarters like a hammer through a bucket of eggs. The fighting was mostly done by then, if Darro’s slaughter of the defenders had qualified as fighting, but he’d followed the spiritual signatures of a few dozen men who’d retreated down the top of the pipe deep into the black to take refuge in a bolthole that looked like a back up control center for the water-pipe’s outflow. He’d “Cleared it out”, but it would have to be cleared out again if it was ever going to be used, this time with a bucket of water and a mop, and maybe a shovel, instead of the sword he’d brought.

He sat on the pipe doing his breathing exercises when the runner found him, bloody sword across his legs while the pipe thundered beneath his leg. It shook his brain in his skull making conscious thought difficult while he fought his spirit through meridians that would be strengthened by the exercise here in ways combat never could. He felt the runner coming long before he arrived. The lantern he flicked to life over one shouldered quivered with the beat of the pipe.

The boy’s eyes widened when he found the bloody adept waiting for him in the quaking pool of light. He didn’t say anything, but gestured for Darro to follow, then led him back up the pipe to the Dawood headquarters still wreathed in smoke and twilight.

“Have you seen this?” Veshtu asked him as he pushed open a double set of doors on the second floor of the old sect-headquarters. Veshtu’d given Darro time to shower before leading him to the room he wanted to show him, so Darro didn’t leave bloody footprints as he stepped into the low ceilinged gym lit by floodlights with their lenses directed towards mirrors along the walls. The room was bright and spacious, with woven pads across the floor and posts hanging from chains along one wall. A small glass fronted cabinet held a dozen swords of different configurations and there was a shelf stacked with books in one corner opposite the hanging posts.

Darro looked around. “Swords are an interesting choice.” Darro remarked.

“Yes.” Veshtu said as he stepped into the room and grinned. “That’s what I thought too.”

Darro opened the cabinet and pulled out one of the swords. The Icon buried in his spirit barely clung to the steel and when he touched his thumb to its edge he found it blunted, presumably for practice of some kind.

“The books on the shelves are all cultivation manuals.” Veshtu said with a gesture towards the books. “My guess, is that they knew you’d be coming, and they tried to raise up an adept of their own.” He snorted in derision. “They obviously had no idea how long it would take.”

Darro replaced the dummy sword and surveyed the room.

“Anyways,” Veshtu said with a small cough, “This, space, is yours. You won it, so it seems a little ridiculous to give it to you, but you’re really the only one its suited to, and I thought you might be able to put it to good use.”

Darro raised one hand towards the striking posts hanging across the room from him and sent his spirit towards one of them in a strike. The post exploded and Darro very nearly drove his spirit through the wall behind it before pulling back to dissipate the breath.

Veshtu raised his own hand and Darro felt his spirit writhe within his single open meridian. When he shoved his hand forward towards the posts the projected breath blew out of him in an uncontrolled wave that merely set the post he’d aimed for waving on its chain.

“I always forget how damn impressive you are.” Veshtu said with a shake of his head.

Darro kicked a scrap of the shattered striking post back into the pile of splinters. “I’m not sure I have much use for this place.” He said.

Veshtu crossed his arms over his chest and cleared his throat. “We will be moving into a period of peace for a bit.” He said. “There will still be skirmishes with what’s left of the Dawoods, and probably with a few of the neighboring sects who will see our takeover as their opportunity to take these pipes from us, but otherwise, I expect there will be less fighting, overall, than there has been for most of our lives. With what the surface sects are going to be paying for the outflow, we’re going to be richer than we’ve ever been, and we’ll spend that money consolidating what we’ve taken here and building up something to pass on to our next generation.”

Veshtu looked at Darro. “I thought you might use this place for training up that generation. Something like the schools they have on the surface, only here, underground. There are enough hungry children in these pipes. With the right teacher, it shouldn’t be hard to turn them into something the heavens would be willing to pay us for, perhaps even more than we’ll be getting for the outflow.”

Darro looked around at the room without saying anything, imagining it filled with students training with the sword as he’d once done with chunks of scrap steel in dark tunnels after opening his first meridian.

“I had a, more personal gift, I wanted to give you as well.” Veshtu added. “Something I’ve had for a long time.” He waved for Darro to follow and led him to a small office behind a door in the back of the brightly lit gym. A window occupied one wall of the office which allowed a bit of the twilight filtering through scaffolding around the pipe to light the corners of the room not touched by the lamp that sat on the office desk. Veshtu went to a shelf along one wall and pulled down a box tied with string which he set on the desk in front of Darro.

“Open it.” He said with a malicious grin. “You’ll never guess what’s inside.”

Darro could guess what was inside, or he could usually have done so. He could feel its contents resonating through the box with a spiritual touch he’d never seen before. A bit of his own spirit split the string holding the box shut and he opened it to remove a spherical black stone.

“It’s a spirit stone.” Veshto told him as Darro lifted it out of the box. The stone burned in Darro’s palms as though knives were being shoved down every channel in his hand. He lifted it to study his own reflection in the glossy surface, then looked to Veshtu.

“What’s it supposed to do?” He asked.

“You should be able to feel it.” Veshtu replied. “I got it from one of the schools on the surface, at a ridiculous price I’ll add. The man that sold it to me said it would harden your channels and help you keep your meridians clear. He said they use it for helping students close to opening a meridian break through to the next stage of their training.”

Darro could feel the spirit in the stone fighting with his own breath where they met around his meridians and he wrestled with it for control of his spirit.

“I got you some manuals as well.” Veshtu said, gesturing to a small stack of books on the shelf next to where the stone had sat. “They’re supposed to be written for adepts, although they’re far too advanced for me to understand. I read somewhere that even adepts need to continue advancing, and I figured, couldn’t be easy finding new ways to practice. Maybe these would help.”

Darro carefully replaced the stone in its box and let his spirit settle. He could feel the after effects in the channels the stone had touched as though the breath that passed through them had been injected with new energy.

“Thank you, Veshtu.” Darro said as he closed the lid over the spirit stone. “I can use this.” He looked at the books. “And I’ll take a look through those.”

“Yes, well.” Veshtu smiled and studied his fingernails as though disinterested. “I meant to give them to you when your son was born. I just never got around to it, and we’ve both been, busy, lately.” He slapped one hand on Darro’s shoulder. “Just open a few meridians in a couple of kids and you’ll have more than paid me back.” He said. “You can’t imagine the kind of pay that comes with shipping them off to the heavens.”

Darro shook his head and looked at the stone in his hands. “I can’t.” He replied.

Veshtu’s smile turned stiff. “Why not?”

Darro looked out the window at the narrow beams of corelight that spilled across the ceiling of this cavern. “My wife wants to move to the surface.” He said. “And I made her a promise.”

“Well, we’ve just captured a piece of the surface.” Veshtu replied. “No reason you can’t live up there and still spend time down here.” He gestured out the window to the pipe. “We could build you a house right outside the gate.”

Darro shook his head. “A chemical marsh is no place to live.” He said. “Sikhaya would kill me if I told her we would be living there.”

“The marsh is mostly covered.” Veshtu replied.

“By the industrial sites creating it.” Darro snorted. “No, Veshtu, we’re leaving.”

He looked up at Veshtu and Veshtu ran a hand through his widow’s peak before he turned away to pace to the nearby wall. The office was small so there wasn’t far to go before he turned back to face Darro. “So you’re going to leave us?” He asked. “Just like that?”

Darro pressed his hand to the box in front of him. “Yes.” He replied.

“And it doesn’t matter to you, that the sect needs you? That we depend upon you to make this whole operation run?”

“You said yourself that there would be less fighting now.” Darro replied.

“Yes, but now, now…” Veshtu put a hand to his forehead and jerked away with a scowl.

“You said, if I ever wanted anything…” Darro said into the silence.

“Yes, but I meant, as a Hair-Viper. As part of the sect.” Veshtu said. He turned to glare at Darro. “As one of us.”

Darro looked down at the box in his hand. “You can’t stop me.” He replied.

“No.” Veshtu looked away again. “No, but I can try.” He pressed his temples. “Stop, just, just let me think for amoment.”

Darro let him think.

“How long have I known you, Darro?” Veshtu asked at last. When Darro looked up, the surprise and anger that had colored Veshtu’s face were gone.

Darro shrugged. “Since the tunnels.” He replied.

“Since we were kids.” Veshtu said.

Darro nodded.

“And that doesn’t matter to you?”

Darro scowled. “I came back.” He told Veshtu. “If it was up to Sikhaya we would never have come back after our trip, but I came back. I brought her back. I won you your outflow.”

Veshtu looked away, out the window at the pipe that thundered in the distance.

“You did.” He said, and looked down at his hands. “I hate to lose you.”