Broken Lands

Chapter 393 – Password

Sophia pulled her mind back to where it belonged: she needed to figure out how to open up the floor, not worry about the layout of the atrium of the Imperial Hall. “Ansuz, did the Mage say anything to open or close the floor?”

The easiest way to find out a password was to be told what it was. Sophia could probably bypass the password requirement if she tinkered with the ward enough, but if she had the password, she wouldn’t need to try. 

“The magical phrase? She said orlik after she was on the surface, then the entrance disappeared. I only saw her use it once.” Ansuz sounded apologetic. 

Sophia nodded to herself as she translated the word. It was a good thing that Ansuz wasn’t human; a human would have lost the word over that period of time. “Close. In Bridge … I wonder where she learned to speak it? No, wait, that’s a silly question.”

Bridge didn’t just appear on the doorways in the Maze and presumably in the Tower; it was the literal language of magic in the Broken Lands. Sophia’s team didn’t use it, because the only people on the team who were even mage-adjacent were Sophia and Xin’ri. Sophia didn’t need the help to focus her Intent and simply ignored that piece of it, while Xin’ri used items. Sophia wasn’t sure Xin’ri ever used the incantations the Guide gave for ordinary spells.

Most of Sophia’s stuff wasn’t counted as spells by the Guide anyway, even though they were all about the proper use of mana.

“Close,” Sophia muttered. This time, she saw the enchantment react to the password. It hadn’t reacted when Ansuz spoke the same syllables. Sophia wasn’t certain if that was because Ansuz was farther away or if the Mage had tied in a minor Intent requirement to the activation of the enchantment. If she had, she was a far better wardsmith than Sophia was.

Well, for creating wards. She definitely wasn’t better at securing them. 

At the same time, something simple like an easy-to-remember password that no one else would guess because they didn’t know the language was pretty good security, and having it be an entrance no one else would even think to look for was also pretty good. So maybe it was deliberate rather than careless.

Sophia shrugged, then tried the simplest thing she could think of. “Open.”

The ward reacted immediately to the simple word spoken in Bridge. Sophia could watch as it lit up the traces that led to the larger enchantment in the floor. 

Then the floor started to move. The square outlined by the enchantment simply lifted up and then slid to the side on top of the rest of the floor with a surprisingly soft swoosh. Sophia still couldn’t figure out why she hadn’t seen the cracks; they should have been obvious, since it cut straight through some of the tiles. The sides either fit together far better than they should have or there was some level of magical joining.

Sophia was willing to place her bet on “magic.” That usually was the answer, after all, and it was hidden by the Patrons of magic and building things. An illusion was possible, but Sophia’s guess was that it was probably something that depended on the fact that the squares had once been whole to let them be either whole or broken depending on the position the enchantment wanted them in. It wasn’t something Sophia could do, but she’d seen similar things done back home.

If nothing else, it would be a great way to keep people from guessing there even was a door there, and if no one guessed there was a door, they wouldn’t try to open it.

The stairs that led below the floor looked forbidding and dark, but at least they seemed sturdy. Sophia made it four steps down before lights began to turn on. The stairs went down about ten feet, then turned at a landing and headed the other way for about the same distance. There was clearly a significant floor, since the height of the room they entered was only about sixteen feet.

That was still plenty to be impressive. Other than the lower ceiling and the complete lack of windows or furniture, the space below the atrium was a near-perfect copy, close enough to make Sophia wonder which one was the original and which one was the copy. 

If she had to guess, she’d say it was the hidden one that was the original, in which case the important part of the room ought to be directly under Ansuz’s pillar.

Sophia expected to see a pillar when she looked that way, but that wasn’t what she found; instead, it looked like individual lines of colorfully shining crystal fell from above and twisted together until they gathered into the top of a polished but somehow dead-looking black sphere that sat in a depression in a pedestal that was clearly designed to hold it. It was strange, but what was even stranger was that Sophia recognized exactly what she was looking at.

The sphere was made of World Core crystal that had been separated from the World Core of a planet. It was linked into the ley lines that surrounded them … or, at least, it should have been. Sophia could feel that there was more mana around them than there had been up above, but it wasn’t enough more for her to be certain that they were in a ley line.

That wasn’t a good sign.

“Empty. Mindless.” Cliff expressed what Sophia was feeling even better than she could have; it was simply wrong.

“Yeah,” Sophia agreed. “I’m pretty sure Ansuz is connected to it somehow; World Core crystal would certainly explain why he can reach other cities. I bet they have similar areas somewhere, too. It’s interesting that they can talk even across different shards; Ansuz couldn’t do that with the other facility-minds until we restored the communication interlinks. This almost has to be the foundation -”

“Touch,” Cliff interrupted.

“Are you sure?” Sophia normally avoided touching World Core crystal without the permission of the World Core. It was far too close a connection, and while her native resistance to Core dust meant that touching it wouldn’t cause immediate negative effects, she was still cautious. She’d spoken to several Cores in the past and they usually preferred speech.

“Touch,” Cliff repeated.

The worst that was likely to happen was a mental connection to Ansuz or to the world. The best was that Cliff would get whatever he wanted from touching it. Sophia wasn’t certain what he was after; she didn’t see a monster. Maybe he wanted to be able to duplicate the outer appearance of the sphere?

Sophia made her way across the black marble floor and set her fingers against the crystal. It was smooth and cool, but she didn’t feel anything else. She held her hand there for a long moment. “Cliff? Is this enough?”

“Empty not empty,” Cliff answered confusingly.

“Is there … are you feeling Ansuz?” Sophia couldn’t think what else Cliff could be talking about.

“Patterns. Copies. Incomplete, shattered.” Cliff answered. His mindvoice seemed more distant than usual, somehow. “I will fix it. Bad design, broken. A lot to fix. Fun!”

That was more words than Cliff had said in the past month. “Are you … can you see the Maze from here?”

“Maze? No maze. Flux. Broken flux. Fun when desired, not good as default. Fixing!” Cliff sounded dismissive, then triumphant. “Good enough. A start.”

Before Sophia could ask what that meant, a message from the Guide appeared in front of her.

Spoiler

Prime Feat Completed!

You have restored the Tower of Kestii using a method never before seen: installing a sapient management tool, Cliff, into the Tower itself.

A communication link has been established between Cliff and the Imperial Management sapience Ansuz. 

Your ongoing link with Cliff will allow you additional options when interacting with scenarios in the Tower of Kestii and all associated Challenges. 

The Tower will support your link, enabling maximum functionality anywhere within the range of the Tower. This range can be extended by expanding the Tower or by conquering additional territory for the Kestii Empire and establishing nodal linkages for remote power transmission. Current range: Tower Shard, four to six mile radius from each nodal linkage. Planar boundaries may interfere with available functionality. Interplanetary functionality is currently disabled.

A new Hub page has been added to your Status. This Hub will be active as long as you are within range of the Tower or an associated nodal linkage. 

An Additional Reward is available. You may choose from the following rewards:

Derived Physical and Magical Alteration (heritable): Scion of the Towers - duplicates base functionality of Kestii Tower link while in range of other Towers

Derived Physical and Magical Alteration (non-heritable): Cliff's Host - duplicates current functionality of the sapient tool Cliff without requiring an active link

Directed alteration of your Anchor, Signature, or Grand Talent

Stimulated development of a Cardinal Facet

Directed heritable physical alteration

Directed heritable magical alteration

Expanded Shield pool

Increased Body or Core

Expanded Attunements

(feather)

Territorial Announcement! 

Restoration of the Tower of Kestii has been initiated by Empress Sophia.

Restoration of these broken lands shall progress as Tower stabilization increases. 

The Tower may be accessed only by non-upgraded personnel at this time. Entry may occur no more than once per tenday for any individual. Entry may be performed at any stable Challenge location. Entry into the Tower will be performed upon attempting Challenge access if the initiator has a valid Tower admittance available. 

Completion of Tower Challenges will improve Tower stability and allow access to additional Tower resources.

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Sophia wasn’t sure what a Prime Feat was, but it sounded good. The list of consequences and rewards was long enough and seemed useful enough that she was pretty sure the Guide thought it was good, too. It was pretty good evidence even without checking the Hub page for the Empire that she’d succeeded in restoring the Tower.

The Territorial Announcement that followed confirmed it.

Sophia knew she hadn’t done the deed, despite the fact that the Guide was giving her credit. Cliff was the one who managed it, despite the fact that the Guide seemed to consider him a “sapient tool.” Sophia didn’t like that term at all. 

He’d done it by moving into the sphere of World Core crystal. Sophia could already feel that the link to him was tenuous and it was weakening by the moment. She wasn’t sure how she felt about it; it still felt odd sometimes when she thought about the fact that she had a permanent house guest, but as guests went he was a good one: helpful and quiet.

She thought she was going to miss him, and it wasn’t just the summons. She could apparently get those from the Feat rewards, if she wanted to. She wasn’t sure what to choose.

“Well, that’ll put the cat among the pigeons, even if fixing those Spheres didn’t,” Dav said. “It calls you out by name, too, Sophia; did you get more than we did?”

“Yeah, I did,” Sophia answered, then went on to describe everything above the announcement. “Has everyone ever heard of a Prime Feat?”

She didn’t get a satisfactory answer to that question until they made it back upstairs and asked Ansuz. Unlike everyone else, he had heard of Prime Feats. They were exceedingly rare, but creating him granted both the Builder and the Mage a Prime Feat; he’d heard them talking about it shortly after his installation. He’d asked about them afterwards and it was something the two Patrons were happy to tell him about. 

Prime Feats were awarded for achieving something the Guide considered important to the Guide, rather than simply important to the local area or the person, like a Feat or Grand Feat, which were distinguished more by difficulty than by importance. The fact that Ansuz was the first of his kind, a new solution to the problem of the use of the Tower Pillar, combining it with the Imperial management system, was apparently worthy of a Prime Feat. 

That was similar enough to the reason given for Sophia’s Prime Feat that she suspected it was Cliff taking over the Tower that was worth the Feat. Restoring the Tower might have been enough on its own, but Sophia suspected that would have been a Grand Feat rather than a Prime Feat. 

The rewards would have been lower, but at the same time she wouldn’t have needed many of them.