Chapter 140: Chapter 141: Curtain Call

Khetzi and I walk through empty, abandoned halls.

They’re not empty in the sense that there aren’t people around, though that’s also true. Everyone’s gone, more or less; Khetzi tells me that there’s about a hundred people incorporated, and that by the time we arrive at the Silks, there’ll be all of ten; myself, my three companions, Lily, and five handpicked assistants who will help Lily finalize the designs for the next go-round.

By the time morning comes, the Tournament will have fully returned to nothingness. Spatial magics will have been unwoven and returned to the Temple’s wells of power along with the corporeal forms of all those not departing, leaving long stretches of halls and rooms disconnected from each other. Every bit of dungeonstone will be remaining, but it’ll be raw, as some stretches already are, and… generic, reusable. The only exception will be a door; my party will be in Keyhome, if they’re anywhere in particular, sleeping off the effects of the party, that grand goodbye-until-later by those who might be in entirely different roles and settings next time they awaken.

It won’t be the Tournament next time a party heads into the Temple, after all. It’s most likely to be what they call the Zakendra, but there’s a solid chance of it being Maarah’s Forge, and the less energy has to be spent turning this space into those, the more energy Lily can invest into people… which brings energy dividends in its own right, through Void-adjacent mechanisms I frankly don’t begin to understand. It’s possible nobody understands them, actually; Vonne says the fundamental mechanism pre-dates Lily’s existence—and she didn’t mean existence in the context of the Temple—and Zidanya implied to me at one point that it’s in use in other places.

Other places, as in Dungeons and Temples. Places that have existed since before Cadoran recorded history, since at a minimum the fall of the Firstborn.

It’s one of the many things that in hindsight would have been nice to talk to Tim about before he left. Sara’s ten times the mage and obviously there’s an enormous wealth of primary sources in the Temple, but for all that Zidanya has thousands of years of existing on Tim, he’s actually a better, though far from perfect, source for historical stuff. He has the right blend of skepticism and curiosity, and if I had posed him that question—or, probably, any question—a week ago, he’d have happily gotten as comprehensive an answer as it was possible to assemble from the serried Temple denizens plus any form of divination they’re aware of.

He’d probably have asked for an interview, in return, so that he could ask me questions about where and when I came from; he’d probably have called it a fair trade, too.

Too late, regardless. Rei’s whole party, presumably plus one additional Imprint—bound to him through the blessing of Seidr, no doubt—is long gone. They’d left as the party was barely beginning, collecting their fifth and their rewards along with anything they’d decided to bargain for and making for the surface with all the speed they could muster. Not that the strategy didn’t have something to recommend it, since they didn’t have… reasons to stay for longer.

The thought sends chills down my spine, ones which I can’t in good faith say are due to my attire. The Temple is… not exactly climate-controlled, but climate-normalized; outside of specific environmental effects or spells designed to inflict extreme temperatures, I haven’t been thermally uncomfortable no matter what clothes I’m wearing, just as no matter how tired my eyes have been, the light is always the perfect hue and intensity. Even the breeze fails to throw off the comfort, and I’m feeling the breeze on rather more skin than I’m used to, as it slips under the panels, between the loose weaves, and all in all around me, caressingly.

It’s nice, even though—or maybe not just because—I know full well that it’s deliberate. Still, if she’s minded to tease me, I’m not disinclined to play a little bit harder to distract, if only to provoke her a bit and enjoy the results.

And where did that thought come from?

I push the doubts away with an effort of will. It’s been… an adventure, and a learning experience, and a long chain of re-evaluating assumptions and conclusions as new evidence is brought to bear. What I initially assumed was a technological civilization beyond comprehension and then later thought was a vicious deathworld turned out to have been a more complex and nuanced planet full of, well, people, for better and worse.

And Lily, who defines both the extremes of for better and for worse, keeps stubbornly remaining in the forefront of my mind as we traverse the cavernously empty halls and chambers of her demesne. Keeps stubbornly capturing my train of thought as I head to a date with someone who is literally a goddess, who can go from being power and glory incarnate to being obsessively curious about magic as a leaf sways in its fall, whose whole scenario got fucked by my presence and still didn’t bear a grudge..

Very much the opposite, actually. I made the possibly-mistake of looking up what the design of the Tournament should, by rights, have been, and it was… instructive. No byes, no automatic inclusion into the upper bracket; the surface team goes into the group stages just like the qualifying teams of Imprints, and each team seeds into the playoffs according to how many people they lost and how overwhelming their wins were.

We’d have been destroyed. I’d have been destroyed; even if I’d managed to recondition myself to not fall apart so completely after every fight, even if I’d managed to find a new center and survive, I would have been a person so different as to be… not unrecognizable to who I was, but to be repugnant to who I once was.

I’ve changed, in my travels and travails in the Temple. Obviously I have. But I’m close enough to my former self that I understand that I’ve changed and that the changes I’ve gone through are wrong, that I’m a worse person for my shift in personality and reactions. I’m close enough to my former self that I can plausibly, given some months of quiet and peace once we’re done in this benighted place, readjust myself to a person who dwells within the realm of the prosocial, who inhabits the Fleet’s ethos against battle. A person who sees violence exclusively as that unkind, most final resort that destroys the best possible future in order to destroy the least desirable futures, a resort that is to be wielded only in a form so targeted and so overwhelming as to permit no answer, no retort, no reprisal or retribution.

A few weeks of fighting my way through the Temple, a measly few days of studying and preparing, and I’m a person who could get lost in the physicality of killing someone with my bare hands; without Lily’s act of grace, without her rigging the Tournament on our behalf for Zidanya’s sake, I’d have lost sight of what was right or died.

How much of what went right for me here was by her designs?

“Magelord.” I startle when Khetzi speaks; I’d not realized I’d spoken aloud, had forgotten I wasn’t alone. “This is the Lady’s domain.”

“You’re the reason I met Vonne,” I say slowly. “Maarah could easily have been a setup. The rue who challenged me, who backed down.”

“Some things happen by nature.”

“So not the rue. And maybe not Maarah, but what a coincidence, right? Zidanya gets a chance to clear the air with someone she should have been friends with for a thousand years, and we get the equipment we needed.”

“Maarah’s lack of regrets.”

“Lack of…” My feet slow as I frown. “Lily wasn’t just helping us. Maarah sends someone up, and she also gets to have the hatchet buried, to reconcile with someone before it’s too late.”

Khetzi returns to our companionable silence as we walk. The wind is even more of a caress now, and I’m filled with something vaguely like a quiet awe. It’s an n-body problem, solved with elegance, or at least that’s the closest I can come to understanding it.

It’s a series of acts of grace, of unearned, unasked for gifts. Some of them never mentioned, never highlighted; just provided for no reason other than she could. Even Vonne’s mother made a subtle point of how great a gift she was giving me by tasking Vonne to help us; Lily, who’d made it all happen, just… acted, and stayed silent.

“She does not elevate us.” Khetzi has stopped in the corridor, and I stop likewise, looking over in what I hope is a clear question. “She has not elevated you, has not laid laurels upon your shoulders.”

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“Hasn’t she? The difference between her rigging the Tournament on my behalf and her not doing it is the difference between me making it to the surface and my death.”

“And did the Lady shatter the illusion that gripped you? Did the Lady grant might to your companions, that the centaur should be impaled and the demonblooded fall to a spear?”

I nod slowly. “She set it up so that we could succeed. She handed me, us, the tools. But we’re defined by the divergence between the universe as it would have been and as it is, every time we act; if you say I won by my hands—” I stop, taking a breath as visceral memories of how exactly I won by my hands surface, and I shove them aside. “I say that even so, I won by Lily’s just as much.”

“How outnumbered is the Lady, then?”

We start walking again, Khetzi’s body language somehow communicating this conversation is over at me despite my usual failure to understand those signals. I don’t think the point is exactly wrong, but that doesn’t reduce the value of the act of grace, acts plural, even if it echoes my reaching out to Zidanya when we were dancing and Zidanya’s acceptance, her willingness to trust me and respond to grace with grace when she thought—however incorrectly—that she had me dead to rights, emphasis on the dead.

I suppose that’s the biggest difference between the Temple as I’d thought of it before the Tournament and what I think of it now. It’s a place that’s full of grace, in a way; the Imprints themselves, the slow trickle of their escape to the surface, the fact that they, in limited ways and bits of time, get to live, again and again, with a continuity of self that means they’re alive in every way that truly matters.

I’m still chewing on that thought when we get to the end of the corridors.

The door would be humble, if it weren’t made of dungeonstone with glyphs carved into it. It’s the first I’ve seen the substance be anything other than utterly plain, so instead, it’s an absolute statement of power. The ribbons that wind around themselves above the door in shapes that I don’t recognize but which seem to carry meaning are gorgeous and richly colored, but they’re just gilding on the impossibility of that slab of what should be nigh-immutable stone.

Belying the weight it must have, it opens gently, with a bare whisper of sound, before Khetzi so much as touches it. Lily is smiling faintly, leaning against the doorjamb, and she touches her fingers together and makes some sort of gesture.

“Adn.”

“Lady. You always know, and I know not how.”

“As it should be.” She’s smiling less faintly at that.

“Shall I…” Khetzi seems almost lost for words, letting the sentence trail off.

There’s something going on between them, some sort of communication in facial expression and body language, and I can’t follow any of it. “You may go, Khetzi Adn; I relieve you of your charge. The last have gathered in the secondaries of the second rung. There is space for solitude and space for working in company, as suits each of you.”

“My lady.”

With that, Khetzi is walking away at a measured pace, and my eyes barely glance over before returning to Lily. I’m walking forwards before I realize she’s beckoned me, feeling like she’s got a magnetic pull that’s grabbing at my vision and my body, stopping me from looking away and drawing me to approach. My Visor flickers open, registering some genuinely shocking levels of baseline magical density in the room, and then it’s gone, unresponsive and dismissed.

“You won’t be needing that.” I’d expected Lily’s voice to be like an electric shock down my spine. Oddly, it’s not, and for all that she’s commanding my gaze, she’s not hijacking my mind like I know she can.

“I’ll save my curiosity for later, then.” The lack of her commanding aura hammering at my psyche notwithstanding, my voice is audibly shaky. “So, what… what now?”

“Adam.” Her voice is gentle and slow, drawn out into a bit of a drawl. “What happens now is two things. Just two things from you, and then you don’t need to worry about what now any further.”

She pauses for a moment, but I don’t take the bait; I know a moment when I’m not supposed to interrupt when I get handed one this explicitly. Nodding ever-so-slightly, smiling every-so-slightly, she touches my cheek with two fingers, drawing me another step forward into the chamber.

The chamber I haven’t seen a millimeter of, other than Lily’s face.

“This is the Silks. In it, there will be nothing that does not bring you joy, and when comes your departure upon the morrow, you will have no regrets. This, I promise; but I will have nothing from you that I do not take, and you will have nothing from me that I do not give. This is the Silks, and here, I will happen to you.” She gives that a beat, smiling just a little wider. “And so the first thing I need is an answer. Do you consent to this?”

“Yeah.” I expect to need to swallow, expect my voice to break. Neither of those happens. “I do.”

Her fingers stroke, ever so gently, from my cheekbone down to my jawbone, and then depart, leaving me fighting the urge to crane my head back into her touch. “Then kneel.”

There’s no doubt, no hesitation before my knees drop down to the cushion on the floor, and her aura slowly unfurls to wrap around me like the first caress of many.

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