“Who’s Gaia?” Tirmanak’s question made Serenity realize he’d said everything out loud. It wasn’t really much of a surprise; he often thought better when he spoke.

“Earth.” Serenity didn’t see any reason not to tell Tirmanak; in fact, the information might be useful. This was apparently at least part of the reason for the kidnappings. “The intelligence in Earth’s Core, at least.”

Had it reacted when he recognized the outside whispers or when he pushed them away? The two were so close in time that Serenity couldn’t be certain, but the difference was important. It was either looking for people who could feel the whispers or for people who could reject them.

“Earth? Isn’t that the planet you’re from?” Tirmanak sounded confused, then shocked. “You know what your World Spirit sounds like when it talks to you?”

Was World Spirit the correct term for Gaia and Tzintkra? Serenity had been calling them World Cores, but he liked the term World Spirit. It got the idea across without limiting them to the core itself.

“Yes. The thing is, I don’t expect a lot of other people to. Gaia doesn’t talk to many. At least, I don’t think she does.” Serenity’s mind flashed to the moment she’d talked to him in a vision, when she helped him create his soulblade. “Or maybe she talks to more than I think, and it’s just not obvious who?”

Tirmanak shook his head. “World Spirits are all different, but the one thing they have in common is that they don’t talk to very many people. If that’s what they’re looking for, I can think of several reasons to want people who can talk to a World Spirit. None of them are good, but most of them don’t break the Order’s rules, except for the obvious that they were stolen from a Tutorial.” He paused and his frown deepened. “If they’re looking for people who have specifically talked to your world’s World Spirit, that’s even worse.”

“Why?” Serenity couldn’t think of any way that would be a good thing, but he wasn’t really sure what it meant to be able to communicate with Gaia. “What might they be trying to do to Gaia? Control her like a Dungeon?”

“That would probably be permitted,” Tirmanak indirectly confirmed Serenity’s suspicion. “Stripping her of power wouldn’t be. That sort of thing is exactly what Hands are for. The problem is finding out what they plan. It could also be something with their own planet’s World Core, or trying to create a new one. Dangerous territory, but not forbidden.”

Serenity shook his head. “I don’t care why unless it changes where they’ll be. I care about getting my people back and preventing this from happening again.” He headed over to the shelves of records and started shoving them through his Rift. He could pull them back out when they got back to the Lowpeak house; he’d have time to look over them there, and they’d be fine until then. There was no point in hiding the fact that they’d been here, not when they’d left Djen alive.

Tirmanak watched. Serenity had the feeling his gaze was approving, which was annoying; couldn’t he do something helpful while Serenity dealt with the records?

The moment Serenity tucked the last record book away, Tirmanak was leading the way out of the room and towards the fire. Serenity admitted to himself that he was curious, but he decided that curiosity probably wasn’t the only reason Tirmanak was headed that way. “Why are we headed towards the fire? Shouldn’t we be trying to get out?”

“The Eternal Church isn’t from Zon,” Tirmanak stated slowly. “I didn’t even know they had a presence here. They’re from Aeon. I’m hoping to find a portal here or evidence that there was one.”

Strangely, the fire didn’t seem to be getting any larger; at least, the volume of smoke stayed the same. Serenity was fairly confident it had been about the same when they entered the building as well.

As they got closer to the source, the hallway filled up with a smoky haze. Serenity could see Tirmanak’s shield; inside the shield, there was no smoke, which made it quite obvious. Serenity was impressed by the shield; Vengeance hadn’t had one good enough to filter particulates out of the air until quite a bit later than Tier Six.

“You should stay back,” Tirmanak stated calmly. “This kind of smoke isn’t good for your breathing.”

Serenity shook his head. “It’s not bothering me.”

Serenity paused and blinked. This was the first time he’d realized that it should be bothering him. His eyes should be watering and he should be coughing at the dense smoke, but he wasn’t. It simply didn’t bother him, even though he didn’t know of a Resistance that directly targeted that sort of thing. Was his healing that good or was it something else?

“If it starts to bother you, get out immediately," Tirmanak ordered. He then proceeded to undercut his own severity by glancing at Serenity with a grin on his face and in his voice. “I don’t want to be carrying your unconscious body out of here. It’d make carrying the actual useful stuff harder.”

Serenity laughed. It wasn’t really that funny, but the snark and the situation somehow added together to make it funnier.

They continued down the hallway, passing several rooms that weren’t the source of the fire, before they followed the smoke through a doorway and into what seemed to be another records room. Unlike the other one, it was only a room where records were kept. It was a surprisingly large room, with several desks, each with their own chair and small bookcases. Larger bookcases lined the wall.

All of the furniture had been pushed against the walls; the open area created by moving the furniture was filled with a bonfire of paper and books. All of the bookcases seemed to have been pillaged; their contents, or at least most of their contents, were probably what was burning. Serenity doubted it would all burn; that took effort or magic, when you tried to burn a bunch of books. An accelerant would help, and Serenity didn’t smell anything like gasoline; it simply smelled like a paper fire. Even so, they’d likely all be damaged and that was probably the point.

“They really wanted to ruin him.” Serenity knew he was leaping to conclusions, but that seemed like the most likely reason to burn all of Djen’s records. “Do you think everything he had on his legal slaves was here?”

“I’d bet on it,” Tirmanak agreed. “Unfortunately. This isn’t where the Church people came in. I’d bet they did this on the way out; I don’t know why they didn’t also get the illegal records.”

“It was already burning when we arrived, but it wasn’t for long, we’d have noticed the smoke.” Serenity frowned as he looked at the fire. “They weren’t interrupted; they did exactly what they wanted to then left. Unless. Do you think they didn’t believe the secret records?”

“How could they?” Tirmanak said the ridiculous words completely seriously. “They were here to find slaves they knew had to be here that they couldn’t find. The fact that the records didn’t show them just meant the records weren’t real. So the real records must be somewhere else. Probably with the missing slaves. You’re right; it hangs together. More than that, it says that they might still be here, looking.”

Tirmanak paused and looked around the room. There was another door, but when he opened it it simply led to stairs going up. The smoke seemed thicker in the stairwell. “This probably leads to the main room, but it’s a route we haven’t checked.”

Serenity followed Tirmanak up the stairs. The ceiling of the stairwell was already clearly smoke-stained and the entire thing smelled like burning paper, but there was clearly enough oxygen present; neither of them were having any issues. Heading up would probably help with that too, since they were going to reach areas that hadn’t been inundated with smoke soon.

“This is different.” Tirmanak held the door open at the first landing they came to.

Serenity looked in. “This is the place I arrived at, the one with the sleep runes and inactive barrier runes.”

“Inactive barrier runes? What are you talking about?” Tirmanak frowned at Serenity.

Hadn’t he mentioned them? Well, maybe not. “Each cell had a magical barrier, once upon a time. As far as I can tell, they’re all damaged now.”

As Serenity looked at the only cell he could see from his current vantage point, he started to nod. “If I were looking for missing slaves, this would be the sort of place I’d look. A set of cages that aren’t the normal ones, cages that Djen probably didn’t show them since he didn’t have anyone in them.”

The two of them headed into the prison area and started to look through the cells. They found a group of four people doing the same thing at the other end of a row, all dressed in essentially the same outfit: a sort of loose robe tied at the waist that reminded Serenity of one of the Tutorial clothing options. These were all colored a rich burgundy with black accents, however, which was nothing like the Tutorial clothing.

The clothing design was completely unlike anything he’d seen in Zenith. While there was a sort of a family resemblance to the Court robes, the cut was different in a way Serenity didn’t have the knowledge to explain; he simply knew they were different.

All four of them seemed to have nearly identical equipment, as well: a sword set up for a right-handed draw and a small round shield strapped to the left arm. Serenity had seen uniformity like that many times, but usually not in groups this small. Groups of four were usually delving groups, and dungeons rewarded having a mix of skills. Identical equipment rewarded identical training, and that was more useful in larger forces; it was usually the product of organizations that were at a minimum city-wide. Even mercenary groups normally had more variety than that, unless they all came from the same origin.

“Who are you?” The strangers’ hands went to their weapons, but they didn’t immediately draw them.

Serenity was watching the strangers, not Tirmanak, but he could hear the smile in the Guildmaster’s voice as he answered. “Tirmanak Oathbinder is my name. Who are you?”

The speaker didn’t seem happy with Tirmanak’s answer. More likely, it was his comfort that made the stranger unhappy. “We are Eternal, our names are not important. Why are you here?”

“And what are Eternals doing on Zon?” Tirmanak let the question hang in the air for a moment. “What we are doing here is none of your business, unless you want to make yourselves our business.”

Serenity wasn’t certain which Eternal moved first; they all seemed to move as one. It was almost creepy how they pulled their swords in unison. He knew he didn’t have much time, but there was still plenty of time to pull his ax through his Rift and prepare to fight.

“Are you certain you wish to do this?” Tirmanak started to glow; Serenity wasn’t looking at him, but the glow was clearly visible out of the corner of his eye. “Four of you might be a challenge for my student, but none of you are over Tier Four, and I’m not going to let you fight him alone.”

Serenity spared a moment to be irritated at Tirmanak for calling him “his student”. They definitely didn’t have a teacher-student relationship; it was merely a taunt. Surely Tirmanak could have found a better one!