ARC 7: CHAPTER 28: BURROW

Vicar led us through the otherworldly forest. There was something like a path, though it wound and twisted through strange patterns so it became impossible to tell what progress we made, if any. Strange lights and sounds bubbled out of the rainforest, and I felt an awareness on us every step of the way.

“How is the pain?” Delphine asked me quietly, her voice full of a doctor’s professional distance. It seemed the intimacy of our earlier conversation had run its course.

“Manageable,” I told her. I felt sore and raw, and my aura was mauled. I doubted I could so much as summon a flicker of aureflame if we were forced to fight. I wondered if it had been permanently diminished by Delphine’s spiritual surgery. Ager Roth used my own essence to create the parasite, hadn’t he? If it’d been removed, didn’t that leave me with less of myself?

No way to take proper stock for the time being. I focused my attention forward.

We walked for hours, and eventually Delphine begged for rest. I think she did it for my sake more than her own, watching me sweat and struggle the whole way. I didn’t argue, though Vicar grumbled.

While Delphine napped inside a mismatched web of dream charms and scented oils to keep the spiritual predations of the Wend at bay, Vicar sidled up next to me and sat on a mostly dry stone. He’d taken a human shape again, and not the burnt revenant he sometimes appeared as. A weary sigh escaped his lips.

“What is it you found ahead?” I asked him, busying my hands checking my gear for hitchhikers. There were curses hiding in this forest, many of them in the shapes of leeches and ticks.

“This path ends some ways ahead. I am certain the demon that got away from us went there.”

I paused, feeling my heart quicken a beat. “You think he’s there?”

“I do not know. This might have just been a bolt hole, but if it’s a burrow…”

“Then we have him cornered.” I started buckling my armor back on. The filigree on my cuirass was different, the artful motifs and lines of text in old Oroion script taken on a more liquid quality. The Wend had soaked into it. I’d had it made for that purpose, as a curse trap so that wild od didn’t infect my flesh. Just like my golden armor from my days with the Table, only this set was black.

Color aside, its maiden foray into the Roads had proven successful. I didn’t feel any changes in myself, none from this realm anyway. I’d been worried about it, considering the exorcism.

I glanced at Vicar. He didn’t seem much the devil in that moment. He looked like a worn down man nearing his twilight years. If it weren’t for the faint burnt smell that always hung around him, I wouldn’t have known his true nature.

What Delphine had said about him rolled around in my mind, and before I could think better of it I asked, “What’s in all of this for you, Kross?”

My use of his assumed name drew the crowfriar’s attention. He tilted his head and glanced at me out of the corner of his eye. “How do you mean?”

“I mean, what’s the point of trying to find your missing relic?” I shrugged into a pauldron. “You’re an apostate, right? The Credo Ferrum is after your head. So even if you do find it, what’s the point? Will it put you back in their good graces? Give you some accolade with your masters in Hell?”

He inclined his head and spoke softly. “Assuming I can keep it. I expect you might take issue with that.”

I shrugged, feeling it didn’t need to be said. “Satisfy my curiosity. Why do you do this? Any of this?”

“Steal souls, you mean? Plot the downfall of heroes? Corrupt the innocent and scheme against the mighty?” Vicar snorted. “I see your mind. You mean to try to understand the evil in front of you. Should I take this as a sign of maturity?”

“Take it as you will.”

Vicar thought for a while, his flint gray eyes straying across the forest. “Why do I do this?”

I sensed he asked himself as much as me. I waited for him to find an answer, and somewhere in that waiting realized I actually cared about what he might say. What had brought this being into the service of darkness?

Could I avoid the same fate if I knew?

After some minutes, Vicar’s eyes hardened and he closed a wrapped hand into a fist. “It doesn’t matter. We all serve it in the end.”

I didn’t much like the tone in his voice. It sounded very close to resignation, and despair. “It?”

He stood and started walking. “Order. Wake the doctor, we’ve wasted enough time.”

“Kross.” I stopped him before he’d gone too far. He paused and turned his head slightly to one side. I spoke softly, but let an edge of steel creep into the words. “I haven’t forgotten about everything you’ve done. Not about Garihelm, and not about what you tried to do to Emma. When all of this is done, you and I have an account to settle. Remember that.”

Vicar was quiet a moment, then he turned forward and walked away.

What might have been a day or an hour later, we crossed over a tree branch large as a drawbridge, which brought us over a ravine with a river of green light flowing across its bottom. I started to make out more defined shapes amidst the trees. Shattered stonework, the remnants of walls, statues overgrown with creeper vines. We’d found ourselves inside a set of ancient ruins, perhaps some kind of town or temple.

“Ilcaernic,” Delphine muttered half to herself. “Maybe High Oroion? The architecture is distinct, yet familiar…”

“It could be from a dozen kingdoms across a dozen times,” I told her. “The Wend can trick you. Who knows what collective of minds dreamed this place up?”

“It might have been a real place,” she countered. “The Wend pulls the outside world in sometimes.”

That was true enough. My eyes ran across what was left of an old green-gray wall covered in a mural. It showed ancient warriors on ancient ships, all sailing towards what might have been a mountain stylized as a tall triangle. Or was it a sunset? Hard to tell. Winged figures with fractal bodies covered in eyes hovered over them. I couldn’t tell if they were guiding the sailors or attacking them.

“This is just an entrance,” Vicar said. He’d returned to his wolfish shape after our conversation earlier, and refused to speak until now. “The ruins go deeper. There is something here.”

“That demon?” Delphine asked, looking at the wall of stone and moss with trepidation.

I could feel a pressure hanging over the site. The light seemed to avoid it, so a gloom wrapped around the whole thing. The entryway was little more than a jagged scar in the wall, through which I could see nothing.

“It looks like the kind of place a wicked mage might hide,” I said. “Lias would like the aesthetic.”

“I suppose you know him better…” Delphine sounded unsure. “But he didn’t seem the moldering ruins type to me.”

In truth, he’d preferred comfortable tower rooms with hot fires and good wine. He’d have seen this place and lamented the damage it might do to his books. But this was the Wend, and there might be anything in there.

I went in first, navigating up the piled bits of broken masonry until I could step into the entrance. Despite the gloom hanging over the scene, I could make out light within. More of the same from outside, eddies of glowing mist and luminescent water. High walls rose to either side, but there wasn’t a ceiling.

Delphine stepped up close to my back. “Definitely continental. There are no auremarks, no images of the Saints or any other sacred symbols. I don’t recognize any of the motifs.”

“There were societies in the subcontinent before you Edaeans came over and conquered it,” Vicar said from behind us. “Not all of them elves.”

“We get it,” I growled, annoyed. “We’re a bunch of war hungry barbarians and we deserve what’s come to us. So do you know what this is, if you’re so damn wise and ancient?”

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Vicar remained quiet a while. Then, in a thoughtful voice he said, “I believe this may be a relic of Yrrk. An old Sidhe realm, once a rival to the Seydii. It had mortal vassals, and ruled much of what you call Urn.”

Delphine’s eyes widened. “Yrrk?” She and Vicar both said the unfamiliar word with a rolling R. At my questioning look, the scholar explained. “There are ruins all over the subcontinent. Some historians have theorized that the term Irk, which we use for wild changelings mostly, is actually a bastardization of that civilization’s name. There are societies of changelings in the wilderness far more advanced than they should be, if you just see them as a handful of generations removed from their Sidhe parents. They even have their own language, but everyone just lumps them together. Imagine it, the idea that many of these societies might be native remnants of a very old empire.”

“Hm.” I couldn’t muster much more of a response, partly because the idea unsettled me, and partly because she’d looked and sounded very much like Fidei in that moment.

Delphine didn’t seem to notice my discomfort. “I’ve always found it strange that there are somehow fresh hordes of beastfolk flooding out of the wilds whenever war visits the realms. I know elves tend to be, um, arduous, but that can hardly account for such numbers.”

“Why not?” I asked. “Think about it. Elves are immortal. A single nymph might have a child off a mortal man, then ten years on she forgets about him and

the child and does it again. Repeat for a millennia. The stories might talk about them like they’re greatly wise in their agelessness, and some can be, but most? They don’t think like us, and they don’t pay much attention to the passage of time. Trust me, doctor, I wouldn’t be surprised if changelings outnumbered both men and elves in this world, especially considering many of them end up getting pulled into the Wend by their own nature.”

“This place can hide entire worlds inside its creases,” Vicar agreed. “Ser Hewer is right.”

That quieted her, and there wasn’t much conversation for some time as we moved deeper into the overgrown town. We came out into what might have been a plaza or market once. The sky looked as it had outside, but more distant and dim. A few towers of undefined purpose speared towards the eerie sky.

Vicar fell behind a ways, inspecting the images on a collapsed chunk of wall. It gave me and the doctor a moment of relative privacy.

“About earlier…” She started.

“I’m not sure there’s time for more stories,” I said.

Delphine nodded slowly. “I know.”

Her eyes were remote, and I knew she still felt anger towards me, perhaps even a measure of vengeance. I could accept that. If our positions were reversed, if I’d made different choices and believed different things about the world, I might have done the same. What if some knight-exorcist or vampire hunter had killed Catrin, believing their reasons just?

I’d have killed him. I would have burned him to ash, and damn his reasons.

“What do you plan to do when we find Lias?” Delphine asked.

I shook my head. “I… Why?”

“Vicar wants to secure the Zoscian so us mortals can’t abuse it. I’m here because of… well, humanitarian reasons? I don’t much want my homeland to be reduced to a scorched waste. I was at Seydis too, I know where things can go if this escalates.”

That was true. I hadn’t thought about that much. She’d seen some of the same horrors as me.

“You’re not going to try and nab the evil scrap of paper for yourself?” I asked her.

“And do what? Put it in a museum?” She snorted. “I’m no Magi.”

I glanced at her, but she had her back turned. No way to tell if she was lying. I let it go and studied the dusky ruins.

“These are like the ones in Garihelm…” When Delphine shot me a questioning look, I explained. “This reminds me of the Undercity in the capital. Do you think that might be from Old Yrrk, too?” I butchered the name and winced.

Delphine nodded slowly. “The Undercity, and the drainage system and storm barricades connected to it, are considered to be one of Urn’s great wonders. I would not be surprised, but I am professionally obligated to express doubt until proof is presented.”

Her attempt at humor made me smile. The smile seemed to surprise Delphine. “Well, Vicar?” I asked. “Did this empire of monsters build Garihelm’s sewers?”

I waited for a reply. When I got none, I turned to find he’d vanished. Frowning, I called his name again.

“Where did he go?” Delphine asked.

Annoyed, I walked toward the center of the ruins. There was a wide, flat area with more of the green stonework jutting out of it here and there, like some of it had sunken into the ground. “Vicar! Renuart! Damn it, what game is this?”

I’d gotten used to the devil coming and going with little warning, but this seemed like odd timing. I closed my eyes and tried to cast out with my senses, but between my exhausted aura and the spiritual noise of the Wend I couldn’t pinpoint the crowfriar’s presence.

“Maybe something spooked him?” Delphine suggested.

“He’s not actually a beast. He would have warned us before vanishing. No, the wolf is up to something.” My eyes noted a number of statues scattered across the ruins. They reminded me of the ones in the Undercity; lithe, tall figures with conical helms and bizarrely shaped weapons. These mossy sentinels were more weathered than the subterranean guardians in Garihelm.

I recalled Rosanna telling me that Lias used animated statues to assassinate a nobleman. I walked deeper into the ruins, feeling a growing sense of unease. This place… it wasn’t familiar, but something about it brought my hackles up.

The place, or something else?

I paused in front of one of the stone blocks. There was a chip in it, like something had struck the piece of masonry solidly. I wasn’t sure why I thought so, but the wound seemed fresh. Was that dark patch in the grass dry blood?

I turned back to Delphine. “You said I was out for a day. How much of that day was Vicar around?”

A crease appeared between the woman’s eyebrows. “Some of it? He was there during the exorcism, and he helped bring in water and food from the forest. But I’d say… for much of it he was out and about?”

She shrugged, then noted the look on my face and asked, “What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking that he can move about much more quickly than any mortal man or beast, and he’s been vanishing quite a lot during all of this.” My borrowed sword hung at my hip in an improvised holster I’d fashioned from my belt, same as I’d used to use it for my axe before Catrin showed me how to access her shadows. My thumb brushed it idly as I thought.

Things haven’t been adding up. I’d said as much to Delphine, and I’d been thinking about it a while.

There’s not a war starting there. The Keeper had been wrong. He surely would have known about the synod, the call for Crusade, the presence of the Priory and other factions within the Church. He’d deflected. He’d been talking to the other crowfriars. All that talk about kicking the Credo out and Vicar not being welcome… how much of that was performative? And then there was what Chamael had whispered to me in the square, right before Ager Roth killed him.

It wasn’t this evil that attacked the mountain. We have been deceived.

What had Urddha said to him?

And another question, one that’d been bothering me a while. How had Lias gotten hold of the Zoscian? One of the crowfriars would have needed to summon it, which they only would have done during a signing ceremony. What were they doing when he stole it? How did the Gorelion find out about it? Why did only two crowfriars attack us beneath Tol, and how had they not found Lias’s secret room? It struck me as odd that the Inquisition, backed by devils and an angel, would have missed a false wall of all things.

“There’s too many holes in this,” I muttered. I’d been so busy focusing on what I needed to do, the task in front of me, that I hadn’t given myself time to run through everything that’d happened so far. The Wend had given me that time. My thoughts felt clearer here.

“Alken?” Delphine asked. I turned to face her, opening my mouth to speak some of these doubts aloud, when a sound interrupted me. I turned toward the largest structure in the ruins, the remnants of a temple of some kind with a collapsed roof. There was an opening in the front, narrow but large enough to walk into, like a cave entrance.

I’d heard the sound of wood striking stone inside that opening. Someone wanted me to know they were in there. A wintery calm began to settle over my limbs.

“You should stay out here,” I told Delphine. “I’m not sure it’s safe.”

“How do you know it’s safe out here?” She countered. I had no reply. I suspected I knew what lay in the depths of this place, and didn’t want her witnessing what came next, but didn’t argue when she followed me.

I knew my aura was weak when the darkness inside the fallen temple didn’t recede in my vision. I tried to summon flame onto my sword, but it flickered and sputtered out. I still glowed a bit. It wouldn’t give me much light, but enough not to fall into a pit. I pressed forward into the dark.

The entryway went on a while. Blasted masonry twisted forward almost organically in the same way as the interior of that island that’d brought us into this rainforest. Veins of softly glowing metal ate through the walls, illuminating the remnants of old scenes carved into their faces. A thousand eyes watched my progress, and after a while I couldn’t tell if they belonged to dead stone or something else.

And even here, I could hear distant waves against cliffs.

The floor gave way perhaps forty feet on, falling down into a crevice. The structure hadn’t fallen evenly, and I was able to navigate downward with some caution, helping Delphine do the same. It was hell on my injuries, but I grit my teeth and endured it.

When we drew close to the sound, I glanced back at the doctor. “You need to stay here. Please.”

Delphine watched me a moment, her thoughts unreadable, then nodded. I continued on alone.

The clicks of my armor echoed manifold through the ruins, melding with the swish of my cloak, the rhythmic tapping produced by whoever waited ahead, becoming an ominous song that built as I went deeper. Eventually, I began to hear the sound of dripping water. Artfully carved stone gave way to natural rock, and then back to masonry, until the two became indistinguishable from one another. The air felt charged. I heard the sound of wood striking stone more clearly.

I walked into a large cave lit by moss and hovering Wil-O’ Wisps. There were signs of habitation — a cot, a desk, some trunks and other items. Other exits on the far side blended architecture and natural rock. There was a hole in the ceiling that let the dusky light of the rainforest in.

The butt of the staff beat the cavern floor once more, timed to the same moment I stopped.

The man who stood in the middle of that scene glowed like me. His light was a dark silver, almost metallic, hanging about a deep green cloak and dark robes like the luminance of an eclipsed moon. His hood was up to shadow his features, but I could see the glint of a ruby in place of one eye. The other eye gleamed green and pale. His cloth was ragged and worn, as though he’d been living in the wilderness for many weeks. His gloved hand gripped a tall ebony staff with an iron nail hammered into its top, exactly like the one I’d broken back in Garihelm. Perhaps it was the same, repaired in the months since. He’d grown a beard. It was wiry and full of gray.

For all that, it was him. When he spoke, his voice rang out through the cavern. “Headsman. Have you come to kill me? Or have you come for this?”

With those words, Lias drew a hand out from his cloak and showed me the scroll.

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