Amdirlain’s PoV - Culerzic

In the months spent working with the Lómë, Amdirlain had created nearly two million crystal rods, needles, and other objects for the combined projects. Yet, despite that progress, the first test batch of the damned was still an irritating burr for Amdirlain. Countless attempts hadn’t progressed the corruption purification beyond the point of leaving them ashen grey despite all the emotions and memories extracted from them.

Amdirlain had been staring at the cylinder containing the damned for hours when Sarah huffed in her ear for what seemed like the hundredth time today. “Something to say?”

Sarah huffed again. “Aren’t you tired of staring at that ash fall yet?”

“There has to be a way,” insisted Amdirlain.

“Take a break; all you've been doing is combat practice, singing crystals, and scratching at this itch,” suggested Sarah before immediately changing the subject. “Are you going to tell Gail how many layers are in that crystal you gave her?”

The question broke Amdirlain’s mood with a snort of laughter. “Why would I want to do that?“

“It reminds me of that old joke about parents giving their children mental blocks for Christmas,” said Sarah.

“She’s ancient for her age but also pretty wild. A little hard work will hopefully let her know things aren’t always easy,” said Amdirlain, flowing upright from where she’d been leaning against Sarah and stretched her arms out behind her back.

“She should be a toddler, not the hyperactive teenager she comes across as,” Sarah observed. “How far through True Song Composition will the crystal get her?”

“Close to Master rank, but I’ve started planning her next crystal; that will be far worse,” replied Amdirlain gleefully.

“Oh? What diabolic scheme do you have in mind for it?”

“I’ll set it up so the lessons will evolve her Skill, but True Song Architecture isn’t the first Composition evolution, so that will take a bit of planning.”

“Did you leave mistakes in the songs you gave to Roher?”

“No, my approach to setting up the songs differs from theirs, and I restricted it to what I could handle,” Amdirlain explained and spread her arms helplessly. “But what I can handle now is vastly different given the progress I’ve made. How are the psi-crystal arrays going?”

Sarah snorted. “They’re fine. The one I’m growing will handle far more complexity in information.”

“That’s good. I’m going to go get some foul air, and sell some weapons,” announced Amdirlain. “I had originally planned to slip them into training armouries, but this might get them more widely dispersed.”

“I came to watch your back,” reminded Sarah.

“You being here to talk to has helped ground my emotions. I can’t rescue him if I’m destroyed,” admitted Amdirlain. “I think I can avoid doing crazy things now. Well, at least things that aren’t worse than anything else I’ve gotten up to.”

Sarah shifted uncomfortably before speaking. “Would you sing a crystal that links to your Soul?”

Amdirlain looked at her in surprise. “Why would I do something so risky?”

Sarah’s wings rustled, and she shifted position again, coming around to face Amdirlain properly. “I don’t want it lost in the Abyss for eternity if you are in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“It being my Soul?” enquired Amdirlain.

At first, Amdirlain thought Sarah’s nod would be the only response, but she interrupted before Amdirlain could ask further questions.

“Every time you go near their population centres is a risk. Even if you’re not planning anything risky, it doesn’t mean another Demon isn’t targeting your location, going after someone else. I’d like you to set up a safety rail for your Soul. You dying from being in the wrong place at the wrong time would be bad enough. Your Soul would end up within demonic flesh like the Nox; eventually, with only memories of the Abyss to guide it, corruption would find purchase.”

“A crystal linked to my Soul, strong enough to find it when it's not Hidden but rather trapped in the Abyss or demonic flesh,” murmured Amdirlain. “Would that be sufficient? I’d pushed that worry aside when Torm…”

Amdirlain stopped and exhaled slowly.

“How long have you been thinking about this?”

“I thought about it every time I saw you moving the damned between crystals and working at erasing their memories,” admitted Sarah, and her internal illumination dimmed.

“Why did you wait so long to say anything?”

There was a slight crystalline slithering sound as Sarah flexed her claws momentarily. “I wasn’t going to, but with you going out again, I have to admit that I’d hoped you’d let Celestial cells distribute the weapons.”

“Are you happy to risk them?”

“They don’t have to take any additional risk. But I’d risk a stranger with a safety net over you with none,” replied Sarah. “Especially since what you’ve set up will make their ongoing work easier and thus reduce their risk.”

“You know, I could say the same thing about your Soul being here,” critiqued Amdirlain.

“I know, and I’m not asking you to change your plan, just taking an extra precaution,” explained Sarah, and she shrugged.

Giving a thoughtful nod, Amdirlain drew out sheets of paper and set to work on the tracing composition. It took Amdirlain some time to listen to the barrier within her form and develop tweaks to the song’s specifics. In the end, the composition was straightforward but her Hidden state offered an obstacle that needed to be bypassed.

Amdirlain drew out a rod from Inventory and mentally crossed her fingers that the chamber’s layered concealments wouldn’t fail. As the golden Ki shone from her hand, shielding crystals resonated in sympathy, but there was no hint of dissonance from them. Within the rod, specks of light roamed the crystal and stayed in place when she’d finished.

With that complete, she walked through the storage chambers to collect an arsenal of swords and assorted polearms. She double-checked each to ensure the finished crystal was in place before securing it in a newly created storage device.

“How long do you expect selling them to take?” asked Sarah as Amdirlain returned.

Amdirlain offered Sarah the storage device and the crystal rod, causing her to rear up slightly in surprise.

“I’d been planning to try that city near the other Gate, put detection crystals in place permanently, and then sell this lot,” replied Amdirlain, and she bounced the ring created to hold the tonnes of weaponry. “The crystal is for you alone—I know it’s safe in your Inventory. The storage device is for whatever Celestial group you can get to sell them off.”

“I didn’t ask you not to go,” whispered Sarah.

“I didn’t have to ask you to be here or have my back. I’ll limit my risk-taking to things I alone can handle until I get free of Culerzic. With the randomness of the Abyss, that could be dangerous enough all on its own,” admitted Amdirlain, and she dropped the items on Sarah’s palm and patted it. “You should have a break yourself, take in a non-abyssal environment for a change. I’ll go out and scout a few locations that I have some ideas for and then return. I’ll be a week at most.”

“Alright, don’t wait up if you get home first,” quipped Sarah. “Hopefully you get a burst of inspiration.”

“Going to Vehtë?” asked Amdirlain innocently.

Sarah gave a suspicious glare. “No, why?”

“Thought you might have some people to track down,” said Amdirlain, ensuring she kept her tone matter-of-fact.

“No. Even if he’s still alive, I doubt he’d want to see me,” snapped Sarah.

“He?” queried Amdirlain. “I said nothing about a man.”

“I shouldn’t have told you about Gaius at all,” grumbled Sarah, and she gave Amdirlain a tail flip before she disappeared, leaving the Planar Shift’s energies in her wake.

“I’ll get her to look one day,” Amdirlain promised herself.

Before she questioned the sanity that she felt long lost, she dispatched a message to Roher to let him know they’d be absent a while.

Using the map orb, Amdirlain zoomed out and traced her gaze across the ugly discoloured landscape. Far from any settlements, a prominent feature drew her gaze, and she focused the orb on the closest edge of Mount Suntsipena. Thousands of tributaries ran down the mountain's slopes into Ravager’s River. She checked the start of each until she’d found a series of suitable locations.

Teleport placed her where a large watercourse emerged from the mountain through a cavernous maw. Just before the maw’s lip was a waterfall that plunged into a canyon, running hundreds of kilometres down the mountain before any other waterways spilled into the river.

Standing clear of the water, Amdirlain took in the churning mist at the waterfall’s base. A nexus point at the maw’s lip intermingled the natural corrosive nature of water with raw Mana. The water's continual erosion of the stone focused the nexus’ Mana towards the destructive nature that gave the river its name. The energy-infused water carried that power onward down the mountain.

“I used to love the sight of waterfalls,” murmured Amdirlain. The waterfall’s roar, its sheer ferocity, constantly slapped against her skin and drowned out her voice.

Peering into the depths beyond the waterfall’s turbulence, she found none of the chained damned that were near the city. With no way to determine why they were absent, Amdirlain continued her plan and flew into the mountain.

The fast-flowing waters within the cavern grew steadily clearer of abyssal corruption. The level of corruption continued to reduce as she flew through kilometres of winding tunnel, even the air grew noticeably cleaner. As the cavern narrowed, the water churned beneath her, filling the air with a billowing mist. Despite the natural darkness, the place smelled like a summer’s rain instead of dank and horrid. Amdirlain was hoping to reach the water's source, but the roof slowly lowered towards the waterline until further travel was impossible without submerging.

Rather than dig a landing out with Inventory, Amdirlain disintegrated a half-dome of stone a metre above the cavern’s waterline. Before the mist could turn the resulting dust into sludge, Amdirlain used multiple spells to sweep the platform clear. Once settled on the stone, she focused on the river’s song.

It took her an hour to isolate the source, which wasn’t an artesian well-spring, but the mere possibility that water could exist. The weight of that possibility had coalesced until it had created a primordial focal point, as once the water existed, it fed possibility with reality in a perpetual feedback loop.

Amdirlain set a sound barrier before she moved to the next step—avoiding the cavern becoming a megaphone. After a moment’s consideration, another barrier formed to protect the platform from the mist and spraying fluids, though if all went to plan, they wouldn’t be dangerous to her.

After thousands of hours of singing crystals with so many partners, the melody had become ingrained; however, the scale of the construction was entirely new. Amdirlain didn’t sing the four paired melodies usually involved in creating a single crystal, but stretched Symphonic to support her current expanded maximum reach of 480 songs. The pounding beat she’d felt more frequently in her flesh grew and thumped along her nerves.

The glow flowed her intent and rapidly stretched across the cavern’s ceiling, turning it into a blazing canopy. Its creation strained Symphonic and True Song’s limits, not because of the music’s complexity, but the scale. The pressure within her scrambled to get loose, but Amdirlain’s will contained it until the pressure relaxed. After singing for hours, the pressure had eased off several times, signalling the familiar increases in the powers. When the illumination of creation began to alleviate, it allowed Amdirlain to examine the regular lines of the meshwork that reached the entire width of the cavern’s 200-odd metre arch.

Before the glow faded completely, Amdirlain had started on another song. This one she set linked to a detection condition that checked for the river’s presence beneath it. The essence of the Maze’s poisoned fruit had inspired a new composition to erase memories and cause one’s awareness to slip away. The experience notification didn’t appear until that song was complete and purple droplets began to cascade into the river from the meshwork’s junctions.

[Crafting Summary (Category: Mammoth Exotic Relic)

Grand Master: 10,175,000 = 10,000,000 (category outcome) + (350 (exotic material) x 500 (material volume))

Total experience gained: 10,175,000

Ostimë +5,087,500

Ontãlin +5,087,500

True Song [S] (56->59)

Symphonic [S] (38->41)

Note: Were you looking for an upgrade over the River of Lethe? Guess you can’t remember its music. ]

Wiping the blood from her mouth, Amdirlain focused on her creation.

Analysis

[Arch of memory’s bane

Creator: {unclaimed}

Expected Life Span: ~1,900,000,000 years

Details: Releases a spiritual toxin that will purge memories from damned that come in contact with it and place them in a permanent unfeeling stupor. Failure to resist the creator’s Willpower rating determines the speed at which it purges memories.

Note: That’s you, but your Hidden state blocks you from registering as the creator of anything. And congratulations, the relative parts per trillion won’t matter against that toxin.]

The river’s flow quickly diluted the essence's colouration, but the arch’s deluge was fast enough that it caused thinning streamers to ripple through the water. Refreshing the wind barrier that kept the mist from touching her, Amdirlain targeted the cavern’s roof. Changing the roof’s curvature was easy compared to the crystal, and only a few minutes later—downriver from the arch—the cavern’s ceiling lowered towards the waterline.

Despite the legendary indestructibility of the crystal, Amdirlain felt happier with its presence concealed from casual investigation.

One by one, she checked the other tributaries that started from within the mountain and set more arches in place. The effort of the second didn’t see the same rate of improvement, and with the third, she felt the pressure of the song ease only a score of notes before the creation solidified.

[Crafting Summary (Category: Mammoth Exotic Relic)

Grand Master: 10,175,000 = 10,000,000 (category outcome) + (350 (exotic material) x 500 (material volume))

Total experience gained: 10,175,000

Ostimë +5,087,500

Ostime Levelled Up!

Ontãlin +5,087,500

Ontãlin Levelled Up!

True Song [S] (60->61)

Symphonic [S] (42->43)]

Teleport placed her back in her practice chamber, and Amdirlain cursed under her breath at the sight that awaited her. Though she’d only barely been absent a day, Sarah had already returned.

“Did you get done whatever you wanted to hide?” asked Sarah.

Amdirlain blew a raspberry. “Yes, I did; thanks for asking. Was I that obvious?”

“So you were out to get up to something special,” Sarah stated, and she nodded when Amdirlain smiled sheepishly. “I figured you planned to do something that would push you. I’m glad it went well.”

“Sorry.”

“Nothing to be sorry about. Will you enlighten me about what secret squirrel business you have going on?”

“Want me to share the memory?” offers Amdirlain.

“Only if you’re okay with me knowing precisely what you did or are doing,” replied Sarah.

When Amdirlain offered the mental thread to Sarah, she didn't hesitate to take it. Amdirlain didn’t provide merely a cognitive summary of the situation, but her entire experience with the river and the crafting in fast forward.

Sarah absorbed the recollection and sat quietly for a time before she spoke. “Isa could provide you the details of Lethe’s song.”

“She’s been avoiding me since I threatened to maim her,” observed Amdirlain

“From what she’s said, you threatened to maim the next person who attempted emotional manipulation. I’d have done worse. She drew the short straw, bringing you the news, but what she said was wrong,” disagreed Sarah. “She’s been worried that she needs healing of her own, the way she, and I quote, 'keeps fucking things up with you'.”

“Now I can see she was desperate to keep me safe, but then I wanted to rip off her wings,” admitted Amdirlain. “Roher sometimes mentions her projects with the Lómë, and I’ve not wanted to disturb her."

“It says something that I seem to be the most normal of the three of us now,” said Sarah, and she loudly ruffled her wings. “What do you need?”

“My improvement in True Song has plateaued with creating rods and needles. I either need to make much bigger crystals, or use it for other things.”

“I’d suggest other things, even if it's more effects embedded into crystals,” offered Sarah.

“Like creating stars solo?”

The off-the-cuff comment had Sarah laughing. “Well, this Plane is infinite, but that might be beyond your ability to control right now.”

“So much comes down to exercising control,” agreed Amdirlain, and she started to pace.

“What are you thinking about?”

“Control.”

The new composition rapidly came together, formed from pieces of other works. Amdirlain withdrew a crystal rod and spun it idly as she worked. When the first notes growled and snapped in the air, Sarah drew upright and watched the crystal drink in the unpleasant melody. Once the song was complete, Amdirlain set the crystal between the two green test cylinders and stepped back. Contact with the stone caused the energy within to release, and a midnight-hued cylinder surrounded the rod’s resting place. With Sarah watching, Amdirlain kept singing and hooked the familiar links into the damned.

When the Energy Drain pulled the first damned through the black cylinder, they emerged stripped of the ashen colouration. Finally washed of the emotions, memories, and corruption, the flaws and scars caused by the lives the souls had gone through showed clearly.

“What did you do?” murmured Sarah.

“I’ve been treating the corruption like scrubbing dirty clothing and avoiding further damage to the flawed Soul. This cylinder ignores the Soul, but the corruption is its bread and butter.”

“What are you doing with the corruption?” asked Sarah.

“For now, it spits it out into dimensional storage. Since the Abyss uses that corruption to form demons and materials, I can’t just let it loose. I can control where the corruption sits and keep it away from the Abyss until I figure out how to destroy it.”

Pulling the souls back to the original cylinder, Amdirlain nodded when none displayed changes despite having passed back through the corruption containment.

Sarah moved to peer inside. “Now you just have to determine how to repair them. Got any thoughts on that?”

“You look like a cat examining fish in a tank,” teased Amdirlain, and she laughed when Sarah extended a middle claw and flipped her off. “No eating my test subjects, pussycat.”

“The Gold Elf farce shows the damage flawed souls can inflict on a place,” cautioned Sarah, ignoring Amdirlain’s joke. “Be glad there isn’t an ethics committee overseeing things.”

“Oh, but there is; I don’t know what the Redemption Path will make of this,” Amdirlain countered, waving at the translucent souls. “I’ve stripped them of every scrap of emotion, pearl of wisdom, and memory—good and bad alike.”

“I doubt that path’s assessment will hold this against you. My perspective is that if you’d come up with this after starting it, it would be in your plus column,” remarked Sarah as she idly doodled on the floor. Both of them ignored the ease with which the claw slid through the stone.

“No, it doesn’t directly help any Mortal,” reminded Amdirlain.

“What are your thoughts on taking this approach?” asked Sarah, her annoyance with the restriction adding an edge to her tone.

“The Abyss would eventually destroy them. If I succeed, the Soul’s essence gets a fresh start, reducing the generation of new demons.”

“I don’t hear any enjoyment about this,” noted Sarah.

Amdirlain shot her a sour look. “I could hear the horrors they’ve inflicted on others. I’d prefer to leave them to the Abyss. When I figure out how to heal the Soul’s wounds, it’ll be as if they’ve freshly emerged from the Soul Font for their first life.”

Sarah smirked. “Finally remembered it?”

“Only its appearance, nothing about its song, so I hadn’t mentioned it,” groused Amdirlain.

“With what you’ve done already, is there a need to heal the souls' scars?” asked Sarah.

The question caught Amdirlain off-guard. “I don’t know, but it could stop them from reacting to things properly, and I don’t like handling things in a half-arsed fashion. With all the effort I put into getting myself healed from others' torments, why would I let an innocent Soul suffer?”

“What makes it innocent?” challenged Sarah.

Amdirlain shrugged. “It knows nothing of what it had done in any past lives, nor is there anything left to recover if it found a path to immortality.”

“Maybe you should see if you can burn the corruption with it now free from the soul,” suggested Sarah.

“I had some thoughts about that earlier, but it was too risky to try while it was still close to the Soul,” admitted Amdirlain, and she paused. “I’d like to make a request.”

“What do you need?”

“I’d like you to take time away from here regularly to recover at least what you lost through shedding the Mantle,” Amdirlain said, raising her hands to hold off Sarah’s immediate objections. “It's a request, that’s all. The various psi-crystals and weapons have helped you gain some experience, but it's still nothing serious.”

A snick sounded as Sarah’s teeth clicked together. “You are more stable than you were last time we spoke about me getting away. If you’re planning to go hunting, I’d rather do that with you.”

“At least two-thirds of each day, I’ll make crystals or work on other projects here—I’ve got a few relics in mind. During that time, how about you level outside the Abyss? That way, you get experience and take a regular break from the miasma here,” proposed Amdirlain. “If I go hunting, it will be when you’re here.”

“I’ll consider it, but I admit it is tempting,” conceded Sarah.

“It was only a request. I won’t sneak off when you’re not looking,” Amdirlain said, and she extended her right hand, wiggling her pinkie.

“What, are you eight again?” asked Sarah.

Giving an eye-roll, Amdirlain lowered her hand. “Pinkie promises are serious things.”

“Your word is good enough for me. Alright, agreed, I'll start levelling again while you're creating,” declared Sarah, and she twitched a wingtip towards the empty storage room. “The celestials I offloaded the weapons to were more impressed with the storage item than the weapons.”

Though she started to shrug dismissively, Amdirlain froze and looked at Sarah suspiciously. “Did you bill them for it?”

“Too right I did. Don’t want them taking you for granted,” Sarah smugly declared, and she gave Amdirlain a wink. “I’ll keep it as a down payment on my bed.”

Amdirlain laughed. “Whatever! I’ll be right back; I need to pick up more souls.”

Multiple teleportation hops saw her under the mangrove canopy, far from the location she’d emptied previously. Looting a few hundred souls from the trees' clutches, Amdirlain returned to the chamber.

Once Amdirlain had released them into the empty cylinder, Sarah chuffed. “Scientific process?”

“Indeed, run the test, record the results, and then ensure it's repeatable,” confirmed Amdirlain.

The link formed between the crystal in the cylinder with the clean souls and a single contaminated sample, and Amdirlain reeled it in. It took far longer than the other souls to transverse the containment area, and when it did, Amdirlain ground her teeth. The blackened Soul she’d tested with showed no hint of lessened corruption.

Dragging the soul repeatedly through the containment area didn’t make a difference. When Amdirlain set the link for the umpteenth time, she first pulled the emotions and memories from the soul into a metal block. This time, the Soul practically raced through the containment field and emerged scarred but completely clean on the other side.

“Fuck.”

“You can clean the damned, but it's useless as far as stripping corruption from Torm goes,” growled Sarah.

Amdirlain raked her fingers through her hair. “The memories and emotions must bind the corruption to the souls.”

“Which makes sense, but doesn’t help," said Sarah.

“All knowledge is useful, even if it's just learning an approach that doesn’t work,” mused Amdirlain.

“Says the woman that was getting frustrated earlier.”

Dropping to the ground beside Sarah, Amdirlain reclined against her side. The casual use of her side as a backrest earned a snort from Sarah before she stretched out herself. With her fingers interlaced behind her head, Amdirlain looked over the engraving she’d set across the wall and distracted herself by planning additions. Hours later, Sarah’s breathing had long settled into an even rhythm, and Amdirlain jerked up.

“I had a thought about the souls.”

“Congratulations, that and a coupon will get you a coffee,” quipped Sarah.

“Coffee, where?”

“I can have you coughing up a lung,” quipped Sarah. “Spill.”

Amdirlain pretended to squirm excitedly against her. “Oh, yes!”

“Faker,” grunted Sarah, and she flexed her body to push Amdirlain away.

Pouting, Amdirlain let a few crocodile tears appear. “You’re so mean.”

Sarah huffed and snaked her head around to face Amdirlain. “If you’re not ready to talk about your idea, just say so.”

“Nah, I’m just goofing off. Souls keep pearls of wisdom from past lives,” Amdirlain stated, and she paused dramatically, giving Sarah an expectant look.

“Not biting; that would cost you extra,” joked Sarah.

“How about we let the souls earn some before we send them on?”

“Alright, what did you have in mind?”

“That’s the part I’m still working on, and I’ll need your help with it,” admitted Amdirlain before she smiled wickedly. “They don’t look like batteries.”

“Batteries?” muttered Sarah.

“It occurred to me that your normal psi-crystal isn’t truly intelligent; it’s only a logic machine with a complex decision matrix.”

Sarah closed her eyes with a pained expression. “You’re terrible.”

“I know, but it does compute.”

When Amdirlain started giggling, Sarah’s playful shove sent her sprawling to the ground, but Amdirlain only laughed harder. As she continued for longer than the joke deserved, relief added a vibrance to Sarah’s smile. “Matrix indeed.”