Broken Lands

Chapter 387 – Truly a Broken Lord

As Sophia watched the glass jar turn into a puddle of molted glass, one question repeated in her mind: Why didn’t the trio of the Broken Lord and his two supporters leave the mansion? Why were they widely separated in the atrium?

Once Ysalix’s final resting place was destroyed, Sophia turned towards Ansuz with exactly that set of questions.

Ansuz answered hesitantly. “I do not know exactly how long it was from when the Tower was broken to when they arrived in the manor. I remember the conduits breaking; the next thing I remember is the door opening. The other two nearly carried Ysalix in; his sword was broken and he was injured. He never moved around the room without one of the others helping. They never spoke to me, but I doubt they could leave.”

Ansuz paused, then seemed to sigh. “I could hear them, so I know they tried many different alchemical treatments, but none worked. They did not have a healer, but I suspect a healer would not be able to help. I cannot say for certain, but from what I overheard, he collapsed while the Tower was falling. They were all knocked down; he was the only one who did not rise on his own afterwards. They thought it was an injury to his head or spine. I suspect he damaged his Cardinal Facet when he broke the Tower.”

“You can do that?” Sophia wasn’t entirely certain what a Cardinal Facet was, but she knew it was the step after a Grand Talent. She couldn’t come up with any way to damage any of her Anchor, Signature, or Grand Talent, so it didn’t make sense that a Cardinal Facet could be damaged.

Well, technically, her Anchor was her Domain, which was based on her Aura, and it was possible to strain your aura, just like you could strain a muscle. The others, though, were just too abstract to be damaged. Feathers? Her Sphere?

Or maybe her Signature was the odd one there. She hadn’t had any trouble with her Grand Talent, but from all the warnings when they were developing it and the fact that the Guide wouldn’t acknowledge one that wasn’t good enough, maybe it was possible to damage a Grand Talent. 

“It requires a major change that upsets the balance of the Cardinal Facet.  I don’t know how they’re built, but he isn’t the first person I’ve seen with a failed Facet. It is the most likely to happen when attempting the fifth upgrade, but temporary issues are also common with a failed fourth upgrade. Damaging it when not trying to upgrade is rare, at least at the higher levels of the Empire.” Ansuz coughed softly, a completely unnecessary noise that he probably made to make himself seem more human. “Was rare, I mean.”

“So you think he was trying to reach the fifth upgrade?” Sophia didn’t even try to keep the doubt out of her voice. The timing didn’t sound right; while she could understand taking an upgrade in the Maze, or the apparently similar Tower, it was something you’d want to do in a safe place. That was even more true if the fourth and fifth upgrades were like the third and took a long time. It was definitely not something you’d want to do while you were in the middle of breaking the place where you stood.

“No,” Ansuz countered. “I think he was one of the rare cases of damage that wasn’t from an upgrade. I think he broke his Cardinal Facet when he broke the Tower. I don’t know what his Facet was, but if it was something that depended on the proper rule of law or the Kestii Empire or his position as heir, well, he broke all of those. He may have broken more than that; I don’t know. What I do know is that a damaged Cardinal Facet usually displays itself with fairly overt physical or mental effects. Those effects are usually somehow related to the failure, according to the records.”

“Like being unable to walk, maybe partial paralysis or something like that,” Sophia filled in. “Because he was the Broken Lord. I can see a possible mental effect, too. He seemed awfully fixated on making the Tower fall.” Maybe it wasn’t mind control; maybe it was a side effect of breaking the Tower. If that was true, it would be a fairly big relief; Sophia really didn’t like mind control.

She frowned again almost immediately. “He was able to move fairly normally during the fight, when he fought against Dav.”

Dav snorted. “Those were not normal movements. Not if you want to have functional joints afterwards, at least, and I’m pretty sure some of them required nonstandard joints to begin with.”

“Okay,” Sophia relented. She hadn’t seen the Broken Lord nearly as closely as Dav; for a lot of their fight, she was concentrating on the lightning, not his movements. “Well, we were fighting a specter; I guess that makes sense. I guess that ties everything together, at least everything I can think of to ask. So, what’s next?”

“You should check the Imperial Hub page,” Ansuz prompted. “It might have some way to restore the Tower or a way to find the Gateways you want to travel through.”

Sophia gave Ansuz a sceptical look. She knew exactly which of those Ansuz was more interested in, and it wasn’t the Gateways. Admittedly, he probably wanted them too, but she was certain they weren’t where he wanted her to start. 

Although now that she thought about it, she hadn’t actually asked, had she?

“What do you want me to do?” Sophia waved at the air to retract the question; it was a bad question. “I mean, what do you want the future to hold? I know you were created by the Kestii Empire somehow, but despite the fact that you gave me the title of Empress, I don’t think I can bring back the Empire. That would be hard, and even if I did manage it somehow it wouldn’t be the same. It’s been sixteen hundred years.”

The silence held for long enough that Sophia wasn’t certain Ansuz was going to answer. When he did, it was softly. “I don’t know. The first Emperor had me made; the second had me bound. The third cut out my Heart, the Heart of the Empire.”

Ansuz’s volume rose slightly as he continued. “I was the one who enforced the rules of the Empire, the one who judged if a potential or heir-designate for a lordship of any sort met the laws. The third Emperor did not like that; he believed that allowing me to make those decisions based on the first Emperor’s laws diminished his position. He wanted all candidates to come before him here, in the Imperial Hall. He could have made a law, but he did not; instead, in his petty-minded distrust of me, he cut out my heart and made me nothing more than a linkage and command point for the artificial administrators, the ones you call facility-minds. Oh, I still accepted candidates, but it did not escape my attention that there were far fewer candidates than there should have been.”

By the end of the statement, Ansuz’s voice was nearly loud enough to be a shout. He paused for emphasis, then clearly deliberately moderated his volume. “So no, I don’t know what I want. You fixed what the third Emperor broke, but I am still missing a piece of myself. There is no Tower, and I was made to be within a Tower. I suppose that will do for a start.”

Sophia nodded to herself. She was right about what Ansuz wanted but completely wrong about the reason he wanted it. That sounded about right. “I’ll see what I can do. If rebuilding the Tower will help return the Maze within the bounds of the Tower, it might be a very good thing. I don’t know if it will be possible or not; the Breaking damaged a lot.”

Sophia pulled up the Hub page without waiting for a reply.

Spoiler

Empress Sophia

(Imperial Sigil)

Tower of Kestii

Shattered

Restoration 

Task: Reach the Tower's Foundation

Levels: 0

Challenges: 0

Safe Zones: 0

Conveniences: 0

Kestii Imperium:

Legal Codex

Available

Imperial Adherents

Available

Imperial Regions 

Available

All Regions Lack Lords

All Regions Isolated (Locked: Requires Tower and City of Stars Restoration)

Communication Available

Command Available

Claim Region

Not Available

No Unclaimed Regions Found

Foreign Affairs

Available

No Regions Found

One Non-Regional Entity Found

City of Stars

Fragmented

(Locked: Requires Tower)

Imperial Hall

Available

All other locations are locked or restricted access

[collapse]

All of the text was in white. Sophia was certain that if it used colors for conditions, the page would be bleeding red. Sophia was going to have to take it one piece at a time.

The Guide had changed her name to Empress Sophia and the symbol it seemed to use for her from a single feather to the imperial sigil she designed. Thankfully, that seemed to be fine. The things that were not fine started below that.

There was only one Task on the page: to reach the Tower’s foundation. Sophia doubted that was all they had to do to restore the Tower, but it looked like the Guide was willing to provide more actual guidance than usual. That was definitely a plus.

Sophia skimmed past the section that covered what a shattered tower didn’t have. It was somewhat interesting to see what the Guide considered important to note on the Hub page for a Tower, but the most interesting piece was that it didn’t list how many people were in the Tower or how high Sophia had climbed. If the indications had submenus, there might be a way to find out once the Tower was working again, but it clearly wasn’t something the Guide really cared about.

The next section was on the Kestii Imperium, or at least as much of it as the Guide cared about. It was surprisingly interesting; she somehow hadn’t expected the Guide to care about the Empire’s Legal Codex. The Imperial Adherents section was also a surprise, but it might explain how the Broken Lord still had influence when he was not only stuck inside the Maze but a literal revenant.

The rest of the Kestii Imperium section was less surprising, somehow; it was clearly focused on defining what the Imperium was and wasn’t. Sophia suspected that some of it went through Ansuz and the Heart of the Empire and therefore might have been disabled before they fixed the interspace conduits and returned the Heart, but she obviously couldn’t tell. 

The final section on the City of Stars was obviously incomplete, with only the Imperial Hall shown. The Locked note looked a lot like the Locked Tasks in the Library of Monsters, so Sophia suspected it would turn into a Task once there was a Tower again. There might be other requirements, too; some of the Tasks in the Library of Monsters had their requirements update when they finished one requirement, revealing another.

There was no mention of Gateways anywhere on the Hub page, at least not directly. The Foreign Affairs section had one note that caught Sophia’s attention, however: One Non-Regional Entity Found.

Did that mean that there was still a Gateway open somewhere to a place other than the Broken Lands?

Sophia eagerly selected the Foreign Affairs section. Surely it would tell her where the Gateways were.

Spoiler

Empress Sophia

(Imperial sigil)

Foreign Affairs

Gateways:

None

Foreign Entities:

Unified Realm

Gateway: N/A

[collapse]

Or not. That was definitely not.

It was clear that the Guide knew something about Sophia’s homeland. If it didn’t, there was no way it would be able to identify the Unified Realm. 

Sophia had to wonder if there was something deeper than her presence that made the Guide aware. Her presence didn’t explain why the locals spoke Earth languages, after all, or why Bridge seemed to be the language of magic and of the Maze. Something more was going on.