The Fractured Tower

Book 2, Chapter 55

I should have seen this coming from a mile away, Sorin thought to himself. Of course it needs another of those slates. Why wouldn’t it? Son of a bitch.

He stood in his soulspace, staring at the revealed image of his sword on the mosaic. The fish kill had finally pushed him up to rank 9, showing him the rest of the blade. Right where that little black stone went on the cross guard was an empty circle, just the same as the spot in Liminal Gateway.

After all the work ranking up and deliberately pushing himself in one specific direction, he was missing the damn key to activate whatever this part of the mosaic was supposed to do, which was really more of an annoyance than an actual problem, but it was a damn big annoyance.

Sorin pulled himself back out of his soulspace and casually strolled toward the island. As always, his team weathered the rank-up process with varying degrees of resilience. Nemari still took it the best, but Yoru stayed on his feet as well. Surprisingly, Vendis almost managed it, only dropping to one knee and grimacing through the pain.

Rue was the most dramatic of the lot, physically dropping down onto her hands and knees and panting like she’d just finished a hundred-mile marathon run. Odric also took it badly, but his response was to go still as a statue and clench his teeth so hard Sorin could practically see them cracking. He’d bet good money that the first thing Odric had done when he came out of it was cast a healing spell on himself.

The Antechamber portal appeared in the middle of the island, or rather, it felt like it had always been there and they’d just been ignoring it. It amounted to the same thing from a practical perspective, so Sorin didn’t sweat over the details there. He just waited for everyone to finish collecting themselves.

“Now, I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m not terribly interested in diving to the bottom of the lake to fish up that corpse to see if there’s anything worth scavenging off it,” he said once he was sure all of them were paying attention again. “If there are no objections, I’d say we should just go through the portal and see what the Antechamber has in store for us.”

Maybe it’ll give me the slate key. That’d be convenient, which means it probably won’t happen.

“It’s… wasteful to just leave it behind,” Yoru said, eyeing the water, “but, yes, I suppose we have more important ways to spend our time.”

“Not to mention the lake is full of monsters,” Rue added somewhat sullenly.

“Yes, and that,” Yoru said. “Very well. I agree that we should just walk through the Antechamber portal now. It’s time to see if this whole experiment will yield the results we’re hoping for.”

Sorin’s biggest concerns had been Odric and Rue’s participation in this fight, and he was relieved to see them walk through the portal with no issue. He doubted any of them had gotten much in terms of anima from slaying the portal guardian, considering how little they’d contributed before he’d torn the monster apart from the inside out.

But it wasn’t a waste. It had pushed him to rank 9 in a coincidental bit of timing, and since he seemed to have no actual rank cap, the overage just helped him get that much closer to rank 10. That was probably as good a result as he could hope for.

The Antechamber looked much like it had when they’d climbed Floor 3, but this time, there was no raised dais for them to stand on. Instead, it held a more traditional setup of six pedestals arranged in a semicircle. As always, they were drawn to the pedestal meant for them.

On five of them, small glass orbs sized to fit comfortably in their palms waited. On Sorin’s, a key made of shining brass sat. Its head was shaped like a lion, regal and proud with two tiny rubies for eyes. At the bottom, the brass gave way to ivory carved to resemble fangs, all varying lengths and thicknesses in a facsimile of a real key.

Pretty, I suppose, but it’d be more useful if I knew what it goes to. Now, what are these orbs for?

Each one was a different color. Yoru had a dull yellow orb. Nemari’s was red. Odric had a pale green one, and Vendis had a gleaming silver orb. Rue’s was the most interesting, being a soft, almost textured velvety black.

“Amazing,” Yoru said, his voice almost reverent as he stared into the glass.

Sorin looked at it, but he didn’t see anything. It just looked like an orb colored yellow. The way the others were all seemingly fascinated with their own orbs told him there was something there, though. They were each seeing their orbs in a way nobody else could.

“What does it mean?” Rue asked. She was the first—the only—one to tear her gaze away from the orb.

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“What do you see when you look at everyone else’s orbs?” Sorin asked.

“Nothing,” Rue said with a puzzled frown.

“That’s what I see in all of them. Whatever they are, each one is meant for its owner only.”

“What do we do with them?” Nemari asked. She couldn’t quite bring herself to pull her eyes away from the glass as she spoke.

Sorin had no idea. Unable to see whatever everyone else was seeing made it difficult to advise, and he was reasonably certain that his own lion-headed key wasn’t related to the orbs other than being awarded at the same time.

Odric inhaled sharply, drawing Sorin’s attention. Then he held the orb up and clenched his fist, shattering the glass and causing the pale green interior to run down his arm like so much ink. It absorbed into his skin in moments, leaving him with nothing but shards of glass and tiny rivulets of blood in the palm of his hand.

“What did you do?” Nemari asked in a tone usually reserved for when someone got caught committing sacrilege.

“That’s what they’re for,” Odric said. “They’re part of us. We just didn’t know it yet.”

The fuck is that supposed to mean?

“He’s right,” Yoru said abruptly. He lifted his own orb and crushed it. Yellow liquid streamed down his arm for a few seconds before it vanished, pulled into his skin. “My God. It’s… There are no words.”

“Okay, everyone stop for a second,” Sorin ordered. “Odric, why did you do that?”

Odric appeared confused by the question, like Sorin had asked something so universally understood, so foundational, that he lacked the words to explain it. “Because… Because I needed to?”

“Okay, let’s switch targets here. What did it do to you?”

“It… I don’t know.”

Sorin’s eye twinged. “Yoru? Anything to add to this conversation?”

“It made my soul beautiful,” Yoru said.

Odric nodded in enthusiastic agreement. “Exactly! Yes, thank you.”

That’s not really helpful. They’re Antechamber rewards, so they can’t be dangerous, right? They have to do something useful, and moreover, since I’m part of this, it’s got to be something the tower thinks will help us fight back the void. But why give it to everyone else and not to me? Unless… Huh. Unless it’s something I already have.

“Do you mean it did something to your soulspace?” Sorin asked, trying to sound casual while his heart pounded in his chest.

“Whoa, your aura is going crazy,” Rue said.

“Just answer the question,” Sorin said, ignoring Rue.

“It’s personal,” Odric said.

Yoru nodded. “Exactly.”

Nemari shattered her glass then, distracting everyone for a moment. While they were all staring at her, Vendis did the same to his. Rue was the only one left still holding hers, but she looked awfully tempted by now.

“Oh,” Nemari said. Her eyes grew wet. “Beautiful.”

Vendis said nothing, but he held himself with a familiar stillness that indicated he was viewing his soulspace. Sorin watched him sharply for a few seconds until his eyelids fluttered and he came back out of it.

It has to be. But what does it mean for them? Can they outrank floors now, too? Will their soulspaces grow faster than their ranks? Will they get access to their own versions of Liminal Gateway?

“You might as well do it, Rue,” Sorin said. “I think I know what’s going on. It’s not going to be dangerous, but I can’t say for sure exactly how it will benefit you all yet.”

After Rue absorbed the color out of her orb and they got the glass removed from everyone’s hands—There had to be a better way to do that—Sorin asked, “So is anyone ready to say what you gained from this?”

No one seemed to want to speak up, but Rue was ever the practical member of the team. “It’s a picture in my soulspace, on the floor.”

“Do you feel like sharing what the picture is of?”

“No,” she said simply. “It’s a personal moment from my life.”

“Alright, I won’t push. Thank you for volunteering. Can I assume that everyone else has something similar?” When no one denied it, Sorin nodded. “Thought so. I don’t know what the tower would call it, or what anyone else would call it. I don’t even know if anyone else has it, but I do. I assume Samael does. For me, it’s a tile mosaic.”

“The same for me,” Odric said. Next to him, Nemari nodded mutely.

“I don’t know if the actual picture matters,” Sorin said. “I have a spot in the center of mine where Liminal Gateway sits. It doesn’t take up any of my normal soulspace.”

“Mine is called Passenger Through the Void,” Rue volunteered.

Oh, sure. They all just get their soulprints given to them, Sorin thought as he reflected on that hole in the middle of the second part of his mosaic. This damn key better lead to me getting something to fill that in, tower! You want me to help you. Quit making it difficult for me to do so!

“Everybody on the same page so far?” Sorin asked.

When nobody denied it, he took that as evidence enough. The name of the soulprint was clear enough. It seemed like perhaps they’d all gained a portion of whatever it was in Liminal Gateway that protected him from the void’s notice. He knew from harsh personal experience that it wasn’t an absolute, that the void could still find him, but he dared hope it meant group travel through liminal space was on the table again.

What he didn’t know was whether the mosaic represented access to any of the other rule-breakers he had. His soulspace was bigger than it was supposed to be, and the gap was getting bigger with every rank he went up. Then there was the fact that he could rank up past the floor limit at all. If all of them were capable of that now, they had an overwhelming advantage.

No, that’s the wrong way to think about it. First of all, we don’t know if they can do that. Second, even if they can, there’s no reason to think the tower is giving us anything it didn’t already give to Samael. Fuck, this could be a net negative. What if there are five more people under his control who are ranked up beyond their max?

“I think we have some experimenting to do,” Sorin said slowly, “but if your mosaic works like mine, then it’s entirely possible that you’re no longer bound by the floor limit.”

“Wait, are you saying—” Yoru started. He cut himself off sharply and took a shaky breath. “You’re saying that we’re like you now?”

“Well, minus forty years of climbing experience over a hundred floors, yeah, I think you just might be.”