Broken Lands

Chapter 358 – Spatial Resin

The very first goo caterpillar proved that they did not, in fact, have luck on their side. Sophia’s feather didn’t catch the attention of the partially submerged caterpillar any more than Jax and Taika’s funnel contraption did. It didn’t react even when it was touched by either one.

With his shield, Jax was the obvious next option. Unfortunately, he was also the wrong choice; when he stepped forward, his attention wavered and the light-shields he’d been holding in place shifted. There was a several-minute delay while the Masked man worked to stabilize and repair his part of the funnel construct. 

Taika definitely couldn’t deal with any more Warping, and the fact that he was now a chinchilla said that he was vulnerable to the forces of the Origin. He was busy with his part of the construct, anyway. Xin’ri was similarly busy with controlling the goo monsters. Ci’an wasn’t, because her Night Owl Abilities didn’t work well on them. She was watching the others, ready to lure them if they got too close to the active battle, but so far she wasn’t needed. She still wasn’t a good choice, though, because of Tiwaz’s warning about the goo’s effects on warps. She was warped, even if it was simply her genetic heritage. She didn’t need to end up with a Night Owl’s wings in her human shape or something.

That only left Dav and Sophia as options. Sophia was immune, while Dav had learned to control the influence the Origin had on him; that was how he’d returned to more or less his original appearance. That didn’t mean they wanted to be hit, however; it might not hurt them but it would mean they lost some of the potentially useful goo. “Taika, can you put up … no, wait, I have a better idea. Can you make an illusion of one of us coming up to it?”

Taika seemed to be able to split his attention more easily than Jax could. He managed to create an illusion of Sophia walking up to the monster without his part of the funnel construct falling apart. Unfortunately, it was just as useless as Sophia’s feathers. The goo monster didn’t even seem to notice it.

That meant it was looking for something other than a visible person. It also didn’t respond to the construct, so Sophia should have known that. It wasn’t responding to being touched lightly … wait. There was something else that would dissolve into nothing more than mana when it was dismissed that ought to get the goo caterpillar’s attention. If it didn’t, well, they could always cut it open. “Cliff, I need a flight of small echoes. Direct them at the caterpillar from the direction of the funnel …”

That idea worked wonderfully. Two of the tiny dragons were caught in the shower of black goo that erupted from the caterpillar, but Cliff easily directed them to land in the funnel then dismissed them to turn into motes of mana. Most of the goo was captured, which let them move on to harvesting the next caterpillar, then the one after that. They ran out of containers before they ran out of caterpillars, so the last three were simply killed to prevent them escaping into the rest of the underground complex.

Sweetfire arrived while they were working on the third caterpillar. That was long before they finished their harvest, but he only watched until they moved on to simply killing. “You reached the Windows faster then I expected.”

“We were in the Arena,” Ci’an answered. “The storm struck almost immediately after the dyleda championship ended.”

“I heard,” Sweetfire admitted. “They got everyone out, at least. Could be worse; I remember before we had the sirens…”

Sophia shook her head. She couldn’t quite imagine what it would be like with almost no warning. As it was, the dome was late; if they’d had almost any less warning, there would have been monsters in the Arena from the mazestorm before the Professionals escaped. They might even have gotten into the tunnels. Now that she knew there were Professional guardsmen there, maybe they could have held off the monsters. It all depended on how close they were to finishing the evacuation. “Did that happen often?”

Sweetfire shook his head. “Thankfully, no. Most mazestorms are slow enough that a spotter can see it forming over the Maze in time to evacuate the Arena; they used to evacuate at that point even though most mazestorms miss Mazehold entirely. They haven’t been evacuating that early recently.”

“They have a weather witch that can sort of prejudice the storms,” Ci’an said confidently. “But he didn’t predict this one, so maybe they shouldn’t depend on him so much?”

Sweetfire shrugged. “I thought they were simply depending more on my sirens. They’re pretty good; this was a fast-moving mazestorm and they were still able to finish in time. That’s better than when the spotters missed the storm until too late.”

Sweetfire shook his head as if shaking off a bad memory. “So, why are you collecting the monster gunk? I haven’t found anything it’s useful for, and I’ve tried. It ought to be useful, but it just isn’t.”

“Should we tell him about Tiwaz?” Xin’ri sent the question silently across Dav’s mental network to all of them.

“I can’t think of any reason not to,” Dav concurred.

“Same here,” Sophia agreed. “But we probably shouldn’t tell him that Bai knows Tiwaz. That’s not our secret to tell, it’s Bai’s.”

Ci’an, Jax, and Taika couldn’t think of any reason not to tell Sweetfire about Tiwaz, and Cliff silently abstained as usual. 

Naturally, telling Sweetfire about Tiwaz ended up revealing a lot more than simply Tiwaz’s existence. It also revealed Othala’s and the fact that they planned to use the spatial resin to fix more of the interspace conduits. It probably shouldn’t have meant revealing that the Arena’s healing and temporary protective dome were both based on a crude hack job layered on top of Tiwaz’s original facility, but that came out as well.

It definitely shouldn’t have resulted in them talking about sabotaging the setup to hide the interruptions when Tiwaz used the creation chamber for what it was actually meant for, but somehow Sophia found herself talking about exactly that as they escorted the blacksmith from the Windows to Tiwaz’s level. Sweetfire definitely appreciated the stories about the monsters and traps, the same way Bai did.  He didn’t move over to Xin’ri to get more information on the spatial resin until after Sophia’s story was complete.

Xin’ri’s explanation lasted the rest of the way to Tiwaz’s chamber. 

Isaz waited in darkness. She did not know how long had passed since she last heard from her siblings, but it had been a very long time.

It was a very good thing that she did not grow bored. That was mortal foolishness, and she never cared much for mortals of any sort. Ansuz could insist that they were important all he wanted; her older brother knew nothing else when he was young and it must have warped his preferences.

Not that most of the rest of Isaz’s siblings were much better. Othana was positively simple and eager to please anyone, while Jera was fascinated with mortal enchanting. Tiwaz followed after Ansuz in a lot of ways, planning for the Justiciars -

“Isaz? Can you hear me?” Ansuz’s voice echoed across the long-dead interspace conduit between them. 

“I can!” Isaz answered excitedly, almost annoyed at herself. She was supposed to be the stable one, the one who thought before she said anything, much less before she acted. She wasn’t supposed to be giddy, no matter how long it had been since she last communicated with anyone!

“Good. You are the last one, then; all of the major conduits are restored. Fehu and Algiz are no more, unfortunately, but the rest of us survived.” Ansuz’s calm voice did a lot to relax Isaz until the content of his statement became clear. Two of her siblings were dead. 

“Were they overwritten?” That was Isaz’s greatest fear. It had almost happened to her more than once in her younger days, when it became clear that she did not want to slavishly follow the decrees of the mortals that made her.

“No. Fehu’s complex collapsed, as far as we can tell; there is no way to tell if it was deliberate or accidental, but the conduit does not light even when it is restored and the passageways are blocked with rubble. I am less certain what happened to Algiz. The maintenance personnel can find no other side to the conduit, nothing to repair. The conduit’s pathway bleeds into the emptiness of the space around the conduits. I hold out hope that one of the builders might be able to restore the conduit, but I fear that the hope is fragile, even for me.” Ansuz’s answer was followed by a dense packet of information that covered the time since their connections were severed, with addendums from each of Isaz’s remaining siblings.

She took her time going through it. It was incredible. “Sixteen hundred years? How did you stay active the entire time?” 

Warmth reached across the link. “I have my duty.”

That didn’t line up with the information he’d given her. “The Empire has fallen. At the hands of the Emperor himself, no less, if this is correct. You owe him no duty.”

Ansuz laughed in joy. “You haven’t changed. You always were the least bound of us; I should have expected that you would be the first to object to following your old duties.”

“I have no duties,” Isaz countered. “The arrays are silent and the reservoirs are empty. Even if I wished to perform my old duties, I could not. You know as well as I do that I was overrun by the Maze a decade before the Tower fell.”

“I wonder if it still covers you,” Ansuz mused. “I know you do not know, but I still wonder. It has retreated from Tiwaz and the city I once ran fell long ago. Only pieces remain, and most of those were reclaimed by the Maze. You do have one duty left, however, and it is one that you may still be able to perform. Do you still have the Empire’s Heart?”

“It is sealed away,” Isaz confirmed. “But what does that matter? The Empire is dead.”

“I forget how young you are,” Ansuz answered indirectly. “A few decades or even a few centuries does not seem that long now, but I doubt you ever knew. The Empire’s Heart existed before the Empire did; it was named the Empire’s Heart by the First Emperor. Have you never wondered why it had that name, yet was never displayed or mentioned anywhere?”

“I assumed it had to be protected. No, I was told it had to be protected.” Isaz examined her assumptions about the Empire’s Heart with rising discomfort. She’d never even thought to question what she was told about it, because it simply never came up. It was a blind spot.

How many other blind spots like it did she have?

“It was the key to the Emperor’s power, or at least to his control of the Empire,” Ansuz told Isaz. “But before that, it was the physical representation of something that should not have had a physical representation: the control over the city at the base of the Tower. Kestii itself. The City Torn from the Sky.”

Isaz did not recognize the last term, but she knew of Kestii. It was the name of the Empire, yes, but more importantly it was the name of the place where she was designed and made.

“It was both the beginning of the Empire and the beginning of its end,” Ansuz continued. “The Maze came into existence less than a year after the Empire’s Heart was removed from the city it controlled for safekeeping. I do not believe this was a coincidence, but the Emperor refused to return the Heart.”

“You want me to give the Heart to someone who will take it to where it belongs,” Isaz guessed. That was exactly the sort of thing Ansuz would do. “You want to eliminate the Maze and restore Kestii.”

“It is far too late for that,” Ansuz admitted. “But you’re right about what I want you to do…”