Chapter One Thousand And Twenty Five – 1025 |
His first step on the staircase sent a thrill through his toes straight to the top of his head. It was like electricity, but more liquid and far colder. A single note accompanied it, somehow echoing the same sensation.
Felix worked his jaw, feeling his ears pop again. “Weird, but there’s no damage.”
He kept climbing, and the song never let up. In fact, it intensified with every step. Notes built up into a major scale, rising into a brightness that seemed to intensify the mint-green illumination around him. It built as he moved from one step to the next, adding more notes that started cascading into swift arpeggios. Pieces of music laid across him, some notes taken away but always building, until it felt like a physical weight upon his Body.
He sped up, lifting his knees a bit faster, but the song pressed all the harder, his Body slowing instead of speeding up. His breathing strained. The staircase did not want him to ascend, not to mention the Crucible’s effect as it dragged him against the Realms. Every note added to the song was like a brick stacked across his shoulders.
Was it a test? Or were the Nym used to this sort of thing?
You want to test my Body? Felix grinned. Let’s fucking go.
He flared his Agility, pressing himself farther and faster up the steps. There was a lurch around him, like the world yanked him back, but he did start to ascend quicker. However, not only did the weight across his shoulders increase, but his feet sloshed through the air in near slow motion.
The air had all but turned to thigh-high water, and it dragged at him. By the twenty-fifth step, his muscles started burning, his quads and hamstrings quivering with effort. By the fiftieth, his calves hurt, too, and even the bottoms of his feet ached. By the ninetieth, it had gone beyond burn into full-blown cramping and spasms. His muscles tried to lock up, seizing in spastic groupings, but Felix refused to let them. He flared Sovereign of Flesh, spending Essence through his Body in a relieving wave—it worked, but the result was temporary. Using the Skill was like pulling peanut butter through a straw, thanks to his Crucible, and the stairs’ confounding melody tore away at his efforts as steadily as waves eroded sand castles.
Still, it worked.
Rejuvenated, he fairly flew up the next ten steps, until he stumbled, his head ringing like a gong. His hand slapped out, grabbing onto the railing with crushing pressure as the room spun around him. The song leaned against him, a leaden boulder against his spine, even as he fought to get enough air into his lungs.
What’s happening? Pit warbled in alarm. Your core space is shaking!
“The…stairs…” Though the assault on his Body was still present—and had increased slightly, in fact—this was something else. “It’s…attacking my…Spirit, too.”
Sovereign of Flesh burned all the harder to relieve the muscle tears across his back and thighs, but it fought for every inch it reclaimed, only to have it torn away. Felix gritted his teeth and, with a bitten-off groan, he forced his foot up a step. Then the next.
I can’t stop. Stopping is death. Momentum…is everything.
Felix knew in his bones that, if he stopped, he wouldn’t begin again.
The song built, a new scale added to the rest that was somber and dark. It slid through the bright strains of the last hundred steps and dragged at him like a cloak of sodden wool. He continued, despite it all, muscles cramping and Spirit chafing.
I’m here, Felix! We hold together!
Wordless, they kept going.
Exalted Conjunction is level 105!
…
Exalted Conjunction is level 126!
Grandmaster Tier!
You Gain:
+500 AFI
+300 INT
+300 ALA
Deep Mind is level 107!
…
Deep Mind is level 113!
Void Sanctuary is level 136!
Predictably, on the two-hundredth step, his Mind felt the weight, too.
Anticipated or not, however, it wasn’t something Felix could brace against. The song of the stairs hit him as hard as ever, and the pressure on his Body and Spirit only climbed higher as he did. On and on, each step was like leaded chains across his Aspects, until his sludgy steps turned into a quaking shuffle, and even that was reduced as the time ground onward. By step four hundred, he was half-pulling himself along on the handrail as much as the stairs, and by step seven hundred, he could no longer manage that—he was reduced to crawling on his hands and knees.
The song blared around him, through him, and it gouged at his Aspects without mercy. The green light faded from his eyes, and he could barely tell one step from the next, save for the heatless pain that ground through his joints with every ascension. If it weren’t for the flush of agony against his Aspects, Felix feared he’d have lost himself in the sound as it drowned out everything else.
Sweat dripped from him and slicked the steps, fouling his hands as they slid across the impossibly smooth wood. His Garment kept refreshing on its own, cleansing itself and shedding the rivers of moisture that gathered across his back and legs as he dragged himself up. Felix's shoulders shook as he reached for the next step, grip nearly failing. His claws dug into the fine wood, barely piercing through its firm surface—just enough to hold on.
He hadn’t a clue as to which step he was on, but one glance into the cavity between steps sent vertigo spinning through his Mind. It was almost a relief, even if he swooned and almost fell off. For a moment, the song was dimmed by primal fear; then it was back, an avalanche of melodies that had built into an orchestral crescendo and remained there for…hours? How long had he been climbing? Felix hadn’t a clue. There was only the song now, only the effort, and both shook his Aspects to their cores.
Felix…you can do…almost there!
The Harmony was so brassy and bold, it all but drowned out his thoughts. He could barely feel Pit, either, though his words rose up from a vast distance. The thread of it, however, never snapped—Felix held onto his friend with a desperate strength as whispered encouragement found his ear through all the noise.
You can do it, Felix. You're almost there!
Felix didn't know if he believed him. Pit had promised that before. But still, Felix climbed. He climbed until blood spilled from the quick of his claws, and his shoulders rasped against bone. Until his abs twisted against themselves, his obliques tearing at him sideways and his hamstrings seizing with every other push. His Mind swam, and his Spirit pressed, one lost amid the song while the other crushed by its strains.
Still, he climbed. Higher. One step more. The mint-green radiance around him wobbled as if he were viewing the depths under the sea. The edges of it blackened, focused into a tunnel of light that Felix refused to turn away from as it brightened to blinding. Shadow or illumination mattered little—none of it brought relief. There was him, and there was the song.
Until there wasn’t.
The song stopped. Silence reigned.
Before him, the verdant radiance parted, revealing a pale wooden obstacle, carved with interlocking geometric shapes. Felix’s eyes tried to focus, to make sense of what he was seeing, but his Aspects were in disarray. He tried to climb again, but the ground refused to cooperate. It was as if…
Felix blinked. His hands found only smoothly planed wood as far as he could reach. The steps were done. He reached out, fingertips impacting another surface—not a stair, but vertical nonetheless. It had texture, one with tooth enough to bite lightly at his touch. Those geometric shapes were tessellated, fitting into one another like a dizzying puzzle. His hand groped higher, clattering across the textured surface that radiated outward from the center. He barely understood what was before him, his tired Mind swimming through a cold haze.
"It's a door.” Felix sagged against the landing, his face pressed against the smoothly planed wooden floor. He breathed heavily into the quiet.
See? Pit said. I told you that you were almost done.
Time passed. Felix wasn’t sure how much. He laid there on the landing, cheek pressed against the strangely warm wood, as his Aspects withdrew from extremis. Extended to their limits beneath the dual weight of song and Crucible, a formless fear finally dissipated as they retracted, healing from their ordeal by slow measures. His Body refreshed itself as his Spirit ceased to creak, and Sovereign of Flesh patched him together. His Mind was the last to rebound, leading his thoughts into spirals across meaningless topics.
He thought of Vess. Admiration warred against longing, bringing him back toward fear. What was she doing now? They’d lived through an ambush, one that had killed too many soldiers, but what happened then? He didn’t know. Couldn’t, not until he’d left Etrionn or fixed the Dissonance that scoured its corpse. That, more than anything, forced him to sit up, muscles protesting mightily, and prop himself against the wall.
Felix studied the door. The tessellated pattern was beautiful and no doubt involved more math than he cared to learn. Nymean stars were littered throughout the geometric patterns, almost hidden alongside curling vines. What wasn’t hidden and what Felix hadn’t seen before were the figures standing atop the texture. Blocked out in elegant silhouettes inlaid with precious stone to depict clothing, flesh, and hair were magi and warriors in enormous armor. The Geist were there as well, clad in robes or odd suits that looked like strips of leather braided around their limbs. All of them, Nym, armor, and Geist held amorphous shapes in their hands that were lifted into the sky. Each one was marked by color. Blue, red, and yellow.
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Centered above them all were three others. These were different. Their silhouettes were like a human had been stretched, limbs elongated and features angular. Off. They faced the ones below, carrying eight-pointed stars in their grip but swooping close as if handing them down to the Geist and the Nymean.
These things again. Like the statue in the Triumvirate. Like Castarion. Who were they?
A rolling song interrupted that thought, so loud that Felix flinched, expecting more pain and pressure. But there was only a notification.
The Realms Refute, But The Crucible Rewards!
Stride of the King is level 147!
Stride of the King is level 148!
Exalted Conjunction is level 126!
…
Exalted Conjunction is level 141!
Void Sanctuary is level 137!
…
Void Sanctuary is level 146!
Deep Mind is level 113!
Deep Mind is level 139!
Grandmaster Tier!
You Gain:
+500 WIL
+300 AFI
+300 INE
+232 STR
+194 END
+190 VIT
+188 WIL
+164 MIG
+155 REI
+112 FEL
"Huh. Would you look at that." Felix sat up straighter. His muscles still ached, but they no longer felt like they were going to tear out of him, and seeing how much he'd just benefited from the double whammy of staircase and Crucible, he was almost tempted to go back down to the bottom and start over again. Almost.
Instead, he stood up. It didn’t hurt nearly as much as he feared, so he took a step, then another, until he stood before the wooden door. There was no handle or latch, so Felix put his hand outward, touching the center between the Nym and their elongated friends. The wood was as warm as the floor had been, a smooth heat that radiated outward like a furnace.
Or like a living creature.
I thought this thing was dead?
Me too, Pit. But this whole staircase is crazy. At this point, I’m just wondering how it opens.
Without pressure or explanation, the door moved. Unlike any other door he’d used, the tessellated pieces bent into each other, folding out of the way in a flurry that resembled nothing so much as petals scattered by the wind. Beyond it was a place Felix could only assume was in the middle of Etrionn's forehead. He wasn't sure. The size of the Grove below was insanely misleading—but then, he guessed it didn’t matter. More importantly, he recognized the chamber before him.
He swallowed. “This is a Shaper’s Sanctum.”
The feel of it was unmistakable, thick in the stale air—it felt the exact same as the one back in Elderthrone. The same flowing walls lifted all around him, carved with cutouts depicting geometric star patterns and blossoming flowers and fruit, like a latticework made from the palest of ivory and wood and stone. Except, where Felix's Shaper's Sanctum was the size of a hut, this was something far vaster. It was clearly a place built to accommodate hundreds, if not more. There were dips in the floor, benches that were clearly meant for people to congregate around. Whether that was intended to converse or contemplate on the nature of shaping, Felix couldn't tell.
Different as well, and somewhat confusing, was the fact that there were a number of desiccated Spirit Trees rising from the uneven floor. They were knotted and twisted, clearly dead in addition to being far smaller than usual. No more than saplings, they lined the pathways around the Sanctum, forming circles around the conversation pits and the flow of the undulating floor space. Among them, freely intermingled, were the Roots of the Abyssal Soil.
Are we in the branches of the Spirit Tree?
“I’m not sure." Felix looked around, peering through the cutouts and the edges of the Shaper’s Sanctum. There was nothing but darkness outside, unrelieved even by stars or moonlight. A darkness he had not seen in days since Noctis' defeat. “But I don’t think so.”
His words were unintentionally quiet, but something compelled him to silence. The idea of speaking too loudly felt…crude. "I don't think we're on top of the Tree. We could be somewhere entirely different."
A number of Belais crystals were around, set into plinths and platforms, all of them dull, lacking any sort of Mana, save the one that hung above the central plinth. That one drew his eye as it flickered still with a faint light, one that bathed the object below it in dim purple. It was a chair. Simple by all accounts, it was worn into grooves on the armrests and seat where countless bodies had once sat for uncounted hours. The back, however, had a certain elegance to it, carved to flow the same as the Sanctum around them, its cutout pieces reached up toward the Belais crystal like flowers toward the sun.
Unseen Beholder had more to say.
Name: Halcyon Throne
Type: Furniture
Lore: The ancestral Seat of the Golden Empire. It was from here that the Empress ruled over the Empyrean Hall, and the Hall stood atop the empire.
Felix swallowed. The Empress. The Herald. Felix glanced quickly at the sword at his hip. It once belonged to her as well. He bared his teeth. “A Seat means a Seal.”
Oh! And if you claim it—
“I can boost my Authority and maybe get rid of all this Dissonance.” He started looking. If nothing else, claiming Etrionn would mean he could control the Skill Library and Record Room.
Felix approached the throne, weaving through dead saplings with as much grace his beleaguered Body could handle. He’d seen the throne from an angle at first, but now he spotted a line that bisected the chair at an angle. Closer still, that line resolved into a clean slice from the top of its back down to the very base. Felix made a slow circle around the throne, flaring his Perception so as not to miss a single detail. The…normalness of the chair persisted. There was no enchantment. There were no special properties to its material. The strangest thing about it was that it wasn't strange at all.
Except for the slice. It was a perfectly straight line, the edges as sharp as if it had been cut moments ago. Just like the damage he'd seen in the Library. The same kind he'd seen a handful of times, always in Nymean structures.
But does that mean the Seat is too damaged to claim? Felix wasn’t sure. And where the hell is the Seal?
Normally, he’d have felt it by now. The magic of a Seat and Seal were unmistakable, especially to him. Felix longed to use his Crown, but he'd already learned that lesson. He'd have to find it the old-fashioned way. He moved closer to the throne. At the very least, he could inspect the sigils that he could see marked against its base. Many of those looked familiar, at least.
He kneeled, hands brushing away dust and ash that had somehow collected in this place. Many of the sigils were known to him. Major glyphs to indicate elemental Mana types, he was familiar with, but there were others. Lots of others, with smaller sigils extending radially from them in successive groupings.
"Are these all Mana types?" Felix memorized them all, though his sigaldry Skill had yet to pick them apart. Time enough for that later. He moved carefully around the outside, brushing away the debris wherever it crossed the inscriptions and made parsing them impossible. Most of it vanished with a firm wave of his hand, but others were stuck fast, requiring Felix to pick carefully at them. Heart hammering and breath quickened, his Body was still shaken from the stairs, and no matter how much he steadied his hands, they wouldn’t stop trembling.
Which was why his fingers brushed hard against the sigaldry. Felix sucked in a sharp breath, freezing in place as his Perception flared—but nothing lit up. He exhaled. There clearly wasn’t enough Mana in the array to activate, but that didn’t excuse sloppiness. If the thing had been trapped, he would have just set it off.
Thunder sounded from above.
Felix threw himself backward, and it was almost not fast enough. The ceiling cracked, an egg against stone, and fell upward. Power flushed the chamber all at once, concentrated into dozens of pale beams in the dim space and the throne itself wobbled, its two pieces shifting for a moment before it snapped. One then the other half of the throne tumbled upward, smashing into the cracks and ripping through the ceiling with a crash.
"What the hell?" Felix crept forward, eyes wide. The hole in the ceiling was unlike anything he'd ever seen. He snagged a handful of ash from the ground and tossed it forward. It was immediately sucked up, as if gravity had been reversed in that place alone. A flash of familiar, clear energy came from above, along with a sense of heavy significance.
Something was going on. And if there was power, then maybe there was a way for Felix to take it.
What is it? Pit asked.
"Not sure, but if this Seal's gonna be anywhere, it's there.”
Felix braced himself and leapt. Immediately, the magic caught him. He fell, flipping around in wild circles before he passed through the ceiling with a faint whump. Feet first, he was dragged upward toward a spinning whirl of magic that roiled across the ceiling. Felix snapped his arm out, snagging the lip of the ceiling—now floor—and arresting his fall with a groan.
Above him, the caustic magic continued to pull, yanking pieces of the floor upward in jagged chunks. Felix kicked against the air and twisted his grip just as the piece he held onto broke apart. He fell, but his legs escaped the light’s pull. Felix was flipped over again, landing in a crouch inside a new dust-filled chamber.
He sneezed.
The magic above crackled, pulling his attention toward it again. The edges of the thing were raw and broken where the ceiling had been broken through again, except instead of another room, this looked like a hole into a storm. The whirling magic inside flared intermittently, its power increasing and decreasing at random intervals, but each flare pulled up ash or chunks of masonry into its grasp. As Felix watched, a piece of debris crashed into the gleaming white gap in the ceiling. It wasn’t destroyed or melted or burnt, but unraveled, pieces of it falling apart like faulty crochet.
Unmade.
Don’t touch that, Pit warned.
“I’ll keep that in mind, bud.” Felix stood up with a groan. His thighs were still killing him. “This place is…gross.”
All around him were walls covered in Roots and web-like ligaments holding bone to strange shapes farther in. It was clear that he was still inside Etrionn, but this looked far less like architecture or intentional design than it did…organics. The room was crowded, the Roots of the Abyssal Soil heavily joined by the desiccated branches of Spirit Trees. They were wrapped around one another until they had formed an intricate bulk that resembled nothing so much as a convoluted knot.
Or a brain. Pit gasped. Are you in its brain?
“Could be.” It did look like a brain, Felix couldn’t deny that. Those same Roots encircled the glitching magic above. They framed it, contained it almost as well as holding it open in a way that reminded Felix of something. “That’s a Shadowgate.”
Really? That looks nothing like ours.
“Maybe it’s a proto version?” Everything was crude and hard to even look at, despite his Tempered eyes. He couldn't see through it. The plane of it was opaque and moving constantly, the edges hazy with a visual static that oozed with Dissonance. Clearly, this was the source of the phenomenon that had cut Felix and Pit off from the world. "Still, it looks like we found the source of our problem.”
Meaning what?
Almost lost in the sound from above was the orb at his waist. Felix felt it now and fished it out of his pocket. The Eye of Tumult was going crazy, the lights within it flashing so fast that it was a single, continuous illumination across thousands of shades. He held it up toward the ceiling, and it vibrated in his grip.
“Meaning I’ve just found where we need to go.”