Wakespire (The Weirkey Chronicles Book 7), page 21
His stomach hurt and he tried to identify the emotion before he realized that it was simple hunger. Hunger more intense than he'd felt in decades, maybe ever. Theo reached into his soulhome and grabbed food from his stores. He wanted to consume all of it and had to force himself to eat slowly with a little water so that his stomach could adjust.
How long had he been trapped in the false illusion? Judging from his physical condition, it had probably been a while. The bigger question was what had happened to Senka: she might have entered her own personal hell, been thrown somewhere else, or left the room if he'd apparently vanished.
Regardless, he needed to move forward into the labyrinth. Theo's body was young again, and flush with an Authority's power, but when he walked he limped like an old man.
~ ~ ~
There was a tree growing from the ceiling. Theo felt like saying "Why is there a tree growing from the ceiling?" which was probably a sign of his deteriorating mental state. No one was there to hear him anyway.
Someone had made a bed of grass on the ceiling, so at first he thought it was simply a tree growing in the wrong direction. The leaves were thin slivers of neon blue that sent a strange shiver through his arm when he touched them. They didn't stretch upward, though... nothing about the tree suggested that it had simply been planted upside-down. In fact, the light blue branches all appeared to be stretching toward the floor.
For a while he thought that he'd stumbled across a gravity-inverting tree, which would be an incredible find. But as his pain-numbed mind began to think critically, he realized that the cantae was all wrong. The tree wasn't manipulating gravity in any way and in fact the leaves collected dust on their upper sides. It somehow just grew in the wrong direction, as if reality was inverted for it alone.
The sublime tree was entirely wrong for his soulhome, but it was extremely powerful. Theo used a gravitational field to lift himself to the ceiling and used a shovel to try to dig out the tree. Its roots appeared to be stunted within the grass circle, which was effectively a large flower pot. Eventually he just tore out the entire stone base and pulled the whole mess into his soulhome.
That had been the most powerful sublime material he'd found so far. Most of the others had been mildly useful, though he needed to sort through them. Theo walked toward the next door.
~ ~ ~
"You know," Theo said, "if they wanted to be really nasty, they should put in a normal trap. Just spikes or fire or something. I'd probably just ignore it, assuming it was another illusion or forced pain."
He walked through another door and endured a wave of disgust.
"That's what I would do if this was my labyrinth. That and invisible teleport mazes. Those are the worst. I'm talking to myself now... am I doing it just to hear something, or am I going crazy?"
No one answered.
~ ~ ~
"Theo?"
He didn't really believe it, when he saw her. It had been a door like any other, just retracing his steps after a long and painful dead end. The vision of Senka floating in front of him seemed more like some sort of illusion setting him up for an even more cruel reality than something that could possibly be real.
"I thought I'd lost you." She hit his chest with almost no impact and wrapped her doll-like arms around his neck. "What happened?"
"I got... trapped in something." Theo patted her on the back as an automatic reaction. She soon pulled away, a bit embarrassed at her emotional display, and thrust out a hand.
"You'd better have food, because I'm so sporping hungry."
"Right, sure." He found some manna for her and they both sat down in the middle of the chamber. This one was a simple stone hexagon with a constant aura of anxiety and faint wails of agony, but after everything they'd been to, he didn't notice all that much.
For a minute Senka just tore her way through some food, then she managed to speak between bites. "Really, what happened to you?"
"I think it was some sort of personalized trap. It made me believe I was back on Earth." Theo sat back against the wall and stared at nothing. "I'm not sure if that was really my greatest fear or just a source of misery that the Archive mined. But I was in there for so long... I'm not sure how I could spend days wallowing in that."
"From my perspective, you just disappeared. It was like all the effects in other places, but much more intense."
"How do people even build things like this?"
"It's such a waste of time. If you have a lot of sublime materials with different effects, you can experiment with combinations, then soulcrafting them in..." Senka's confident words trailed off. One hand groped at the air helplessly. "I've lost it. It's not any amazing lost soulcrafting, just tedious work. Not very useful for strength."
"But useful for traps, I guess."
They sat in silence for a while and Theo let himself eat some more. His stomach was no longer cramping, so he thought that he'd mostly recovered physically. How bad things were on a mental level, he wasn't sure he'd know until he got out of the Archive of Misery.
"Was going back to Earth really your greatest fear?" She asked the question very softly, serious instead of needling.
"Now that I've thought about it, I'm not sure it was about fear. It was about tapping into all the bitterness in that period of my life. Maybe I still haven't worked through it."
"What made it so awful? Your world seems like it has a lot of conveniences, from what little you've said about it. Did you do it to yourself, or were you just afraid of death? No immortality on Earth, right?"
It was bizarre to hear Senka talking like this. Theo wanted to stare at her but instead just sat at her side while they both stared at nothing. He wasn't sure why it took him so long to respond. "No, I... wasn't afraid of death. I didn't like getting older, but that's part of life. I just... didn't want to live a dull and empty life. Visiting the Nine Worlds gave me a taste of something so wonderful, the life I had before just didn't seem to matter..."
"I was afraid of death." Senka was staring straight forward, her eyes never even flickering toward him. "The idea that I could just stop existing, that everything I am would just come to nothing... I couldn't let that happen. I'd do anything to prevent it. No matter how much strength I found, that specter just..."
He wasn't sure what he could say to that. If she had been a friend he would have put an arm around her shoulders, but he wasn't sure how well he really knew Senka. And yet, sharing these words an in empty room, he felt like they had more common than he'd thought. Slowly, his hands trembling almost as if he was old again, Theo grasped one of her hands.
"I'm here," he said. "I can't promise much, but I'm here."
"Thank you." The words were almost a whisper, then Senka gathered herself. "We're getting closer, Theo. Don't let it stop you. If we just get to the river, this will all be over."
Since he didn't know what to say to that, he just gripped her hand.
~ ~ ~
At the end of what he estimated was yet another day, Theo sat down and soulcrafted. He didn't trust himself to make any complex soulcrafting decisions, so he focused on making bricks. Soon he'd have enough to begin fusing them into full walls, which raised the question of where to start on his fourth floor, as the increased construction time required strategic building.
One logical decision would be to start with the walls around his central shaft, which would theoretically continue up through his later floors. That would make all future rooms faster to complete. Yet if he spent all of his carefully-crafted bricks on the central walls, they wouldn't gain him much. It might be wiser to start with a corner room, where he could at least place a new material. There would be no complex cantae flow or elaborate effects, but he could integrate something new into his soulhome immediately and enhance himself.
The design of his fourth floor was a massive headache he needed to resolve when he was thinking clearly. Not just the fourth, but how his design would flow to the fifth and sixth as well. For now, becoming stronger as an Authority primarily meant developing his skills and building out his floor... which required bricks.
How had he made so many? Theo often tried to keep track of how long he had been in the Archive of Misery and he was afraid he was losing track. He was fairly certain that it couldn't have been anywhere near a full month, so hopefully he should arrive in time to help everyone else. But judging from the number of bricks, it had been longer than he expected.
There was one major positive: the Archive of Misery was getting easier to navigate. His acclimatization chamber was slowly helping him adapt even to these rushes of pain and emotion. He was glad that he'd put so much effort into its details. A lot of acclimatization rooms could only help deal with small differences in temperature or atmosphere.
By contrast, Senka seemed to be getting worse. He'd tied a rope around her leg before soulcrafting in case she decided to wander off. Currently she was sleeping, but at any moment she might babble nonsense and sprint in the wrong direction.
They had to be close to the river. Because if they weren't, he wasn't sure what was going to happen.
~ ~ ~
"I'm so tired... have we been through this one before?"
"Senka, Senka!"
"If you're trying to cheer me up, it hurts too much t-"
"Skorpyborp!"
"Oh god, I've lost Senka..."
"Let go, ya fumpet!"
~ ~ ~
Theo didn't walk anymore, just neutralized his gravity and floated between rooms. New waves of pain or emotion struck him, but he could mostly weather them now. Could he have survived all this as a young man? He honestly wasn't sure whether his lifetimes of experience made him more or less resilient.
The river was close: he could hear water rushing around almost every room now. Senka hadn't ever come back, proving even more annoying than before and constantly trying to run away. He'd actually begun using her as a navigational device - if her curse was trying to propel her away from the river, then the opposite direction might be the best path. It wasn't perfect, but it had guided him into new territory so far.
When he finally arrived, there was no final challenge or great puzzle. The next door simply opened into an empty field with a pure white river running through it.
Both field and air dissolved into a blue haze of dimensional energy, similar to what had surrounded the entrances to the Chasm of Lamentations. These didn't show anything on the other side, so Theo decided to stay close to the center. Based on the design of the Archive, he presumed that these were exits only. If he tried to explore further into the field, he might simply find himself in another world with no way back.
After so long, the river itself was underwhelming. Powerful, but not a raging torrent like the Chasm of Lamentations. Negative emotions wafted from it constantly, which would have been miserable without his acclimatization chamber. Or, honestly, he might just be numb. Either way, he understood why ancient soulcrafters would have gone to so much effort to lock it away.
"No, no!" Senka began to run away and he automatically flattened her with a gravitational field. "I can't I can't!"
She began using cantae to lift herself up, which she usually never did while in her cursed state. Briefly Theo just stared at her, wondering if perhaps her real self was leaking through. Was it possible that she had realized that this river somehow wasn't what she needed? No, if he took that path he would second-guess himself endlessly. They had gone through so much effort and pain to get here, he had to follow it through to the end.
"Sorry, Senka. I hope you'll thank me for this later." With that apology, he threw her into the river.
Senka thrashed and spluttered, going under repeatedly, and for a while he worried that she was actually drowning. Then, all at once, she went still. He would have been concerned if she hadn't rolled over onto her back. Despite the rushing water flowing from one side of the dimensional rift to the other, she remained as still as a stone.
"I'm not going to thank you," she said, "but that's just out of stubborn spite."
"Then you're back." Theo smiled and sank down on the riverbank beside her. "Should I be worried about this splashing on me, by the way?"
"It wouldn't destroy you like in the Chasm, but you'd have a pretty unpleasant experience."
"But you're fine."
"Yeah." Senka dipped underneath the water for a time and then poked her head back up. Instead of floating unnaturally, she was treading water now. "These five rivers were used to bind me, so they can also unbind me. I'll need to marinate for a while, but it won't take as long as before. As soon as I'm done, we should be able to leave the rift."
"Does that mean you have your memory back?" Theo asked.
"Unfortunately not, at least not directly. What I'm getting back is... part of myself, I think. Toss me some food." When he threw her a fruit, she consumed it in an instant, then frowned. "It tastes like nothing. That's better than all food being an absolutely miserable ordeal. I think some aspects of the curse designed to hurt me are fading."
"Is that all? Not to complain, but after going through all this..."
"Don't worry, we still dissolved another fifth of the curse." When Senka grinned at him, her teeth looked very sharp. "My soulhome uncrunched itself, just a little. I can't store much cantae, but I can manage... one burst, maybe. That could be useful. And I'm remembering... some of myself."
"What do you mean?"
"They tried to rob me of my very identity, to humiliate me. Some of that's coming back now. Oh, those fumpets... wait, seriously? Nlermit all! Those sporping fumpets... nlerm, this blooky curse..."
Despite himself, Theo laughed. Her voice contained a deep and abiding wrath, but filtered through the nonsense words it was absolutely absurd. At first Senka glared at him, more maliciously than he'd seen in a long time, but her glare dissolved and she chuckled as well. She dipped her head under water a few times and then came up looking more contemplative.
"It's not really important, but I was actually Noveni."
"Wait, really?" He looked over her cursed body, trying to see it. "Are you some species I've never seen before? Or is there no connection between your old form and this one?"
"I think my skin was this color, but my hair..." Senka ran her hands through it and then smiled while holding up several locks that had turned black. "That's an improvement. I probably won't get my real body back until the curse is completely gone, but this is a step closer."
"So you do have some memories back."
"It feels like some things were specifically locked away by the curse and I don't think those are coming back. But little things, like my favorite food growing up... or the color of my wings... or locations where I may have left little caches of sublime materials for myself."
"Wait, really?" Theo sat up sharply and Senka immediately laughed at him.
"Glad you have your priorities straight! But no, I wasn't sporping with you. It's probably too much to hope that any of them still survived after so long, but we should try to check them all. There might be some materials you and your allies can use, or I might find some physical evidence about myself."
"Unless the people who cursed you made sure to destroy every cache."
"Maybe some, but I remember how paranoid I was now." Senka dipped under the water one more time and then floated into the air. "Alright, that's everything I need. I don't know about you, but I want to get out of this miserable place."
They couldn't simply weirkey out, but the hazy edges of the dimension blurred all around them. Theo glanced back at the door to the Archive of Misery one last time, then walked with Senka through the barrier.
Chapter 25
How many hours had it been? Nauda had endured through many tense situations, including pitched battles, but she was exhausted in ways that she had never expected. The initial attack by unknown soulcrafters, which she had expected to quickly escalate into fighting, had instead become a tense standoff.
An hour earlier, one of the Jadadictus Rulers had been taken down. Nauda and Fiyu had been defending their western flank from another avalanche and there had been a stealthy attack from within the clouds. By the time she turned back, the Noveni woman was already injured. Now she lay along with the unconscious Isorales, which just meant that they had even more people they needed to defend.
The worst thing of all was that it was obvious by now that no help would be coming immediately. If anyone from the city had been patrolling this region or watching them, they would already have arrived. So their attackers were free to attack opportunistically and wait for the defenders to wear down. Clearly there was no justice to be found on Noven, either.
Fiyu was the calmest among them, kneeling in the center of their position and focusing on her senses. Nauda simply wasn't capable of waiting patiently like that, and she couldn't leap into action from such a position. Instead she paced. After a while, she paced toward Fiyu.
"Could your stealth technique cover all of us?" Nauda asked.
"I believe it could," Fiyu answered without raising her head. "But we have no means of returning."
"What if I could pull our sleigh out of the rubble?" Nauda knelt down nearby and pointedly didn't look toward its location. "If they didn't know what I was doing, I might be able to get away with it in the confusion."
"I believe they are paying very close attention to us and would not be fooled."
"But we can't let this continue. Could you get there on your own?"
"They are also watching me, but..." Fiyu abruptly yawned, stretching her arms in a broader way than she ever had before, and shifted down onto her side. From that position she looked up. "I am not really tired, Nauda. I am being deceptive."
"Sure, I get it." Nauda reached into her soulhome and pulled out one of their small tents. "Here, use this."
Fiyu crawled into the tent, her body already disappearing as it passed inside. As soon as she had entered, Nauda felt a slight current of wind as Fiyu departed invisibly. Hopefully the movement would be obscured in the general movement of the tent flaps. While trying not to look toward the sleigh, Nauda closed up the tent carefully, just as if Fiyu was really going to sleep.
