Chapter 39: Chapter 39 – Traversal

Saying let’s do this was one thing; actually moving out is another. It takes Amber to draw the deadbolts, heavy and stubborn as they are, and the hinges are stiff until Zidanya finds a little canister of liquid and drips them onto the hinges. After that, it’s two different keys, one of them on Samson’s corpse and the other hidden under the bit of the map-wall corresponding to the roundhouse, which seems like the obvious first guess and turns out to be right. There’s another key that Zidanya finds with some sort of Mana Perception style Skill, and we keep all three with us as we swing the great door wide and enter the prison complex.

It takes my eyes a few minutes to adjust to the dimness. We don’t wait for it; Zidanya uses some sort of Skill to make hers adapt instantly, and Amber’s are seeing just fine within a few seconds, so we’re moving as soon as we cross the threshold, despite my being mostly blind.

“Dungeonstone.” I say it with a groan. The footing of it is great, but it’s a possible major complication to our plan. “You can’t Sunder this, can you?”

“Not a chance.” Amber’s head is swiveling from side to side, checking each of the cells as we pass them. “There’s no breaking dungeonstone. Not with raw strength, not with magic, not with Skills. But there is always a path around it, if there is anything to find.”

“Well.” I crane my head side to side. I can’t see anything in the cells to the left and right of us, and certainly nothing in the rank of cells above us. “How do they even get people into or out of the cells up there? This seems really impractical.”

“Why should such folk as the Temple sees fit to place there have a need to ever leave?”

“Thank you, Zidanya. You’re a source of water to a tank gone dry.” She has the grace, whether ill or fair, to laugh at that, and I sigh. “At least it means that the scenario can’t possibly expect us to look up there, so by the rules, there can’t be anything worth seeing, right?”

“For this Temple. Be wary of developing the habit, Adam; no other Temple is like this one; held beyond the Gods’ reach and eye, run by a combination of a central clockwork automaton and a consensus of bound spirits.” There’s an odd note to Amber’s voice. I’ve noticed it in the past, haunting and eerie, like she’s speaking without particularly paying attention to her words, or like someone else is speaking through her. “In another Temple, the key might be anywhere, even a place that fails to make sense or which we would never think to check, if the overseer deems it.”

“Another Temple’d move a key, were we to not play along, and an entrance too. I’ve heard tell of parties chasing their tail through a labyrinth ever-changing until they begged forgiveness for their sins.”

“Well, that’s horrifying.” I try to keep my voice light. “I’m glad we only have to deal with this horror-show, and not the advanced version.”

“All things a trade-off, in their way. No proper Temple would permit a curse such as the one upon you.” Amber’s voice twists in a way I can’t really understand. “It is… improper.”

“Sounds, uh, a lot more than just improper.” We’re coming up on the turn westwards, walking down the south corridor. It’s been nothing thus far; just dark cells, two ranks of them on each side.

Dark cells and the not-people within. I’ve been trying not to think about that, with some success; looking without seeing, letting the sounds they’re making pass through me without a trace. My eyes are on Amber and on my footing - not that the footing needs any attention, it’s dungeonstone, best footing I’ve had outside of a gym and probably within one too - and my ears are tuned to her voice, but even so, some of the misery and begging and screaming leaks through. It’s made both more disturbing and easier to bear by how uncannily far yet uncannily close the simulacra are to a true facsimile of a person. As on the surface, they have a strange neutrality of expression, voice, and bearing where they aren’t actively emoting or saying something, and their bodies are… wrong, for where they are and the clothes they’re wearing.

Too fit, mostly. I’ve seen malnourishment, I’ve seen malnutrition, and I’ve seen dehydration; mostly as historical artifacts, sure, there’s absolutely none of that in the Fleet outside of exceedingly rare cases of one particular malabsorptive disease whose treatment baffled scientists across the entirety of settled space, but I’ve seen it, and there’s none of it here.

“I know that you are not a believer, my lord,” Amber is saying, with her careful voice, the voice she uses when she thinks I’m determinedly wrong about something for emotional reasons and she doesn’t want to break me. “But for those of us who partake of a faith, we feel… strongly about the precepts of that faith being so flagrantly violated.”

“I mean, I wouldn’t necessarily call myself not a believer. What makes someone’s belief in an entity beyond context and an eternal afterlife privileged over my belief in the lack of both?” Amber shoots me a flat look and I sigh. “Granted, granted, and I still don’t follow. Is it some sort of harvest thing? Like, I killed it, so it should be dead, not bothering me, in some sort of parallel to harvesting -”

“Think, Magelord. What domain has her God? What nature rules o’er and defines the soul of Kazir?”

“Uh.” I frown, trying to remember what Amber had said. “”Harvest, festivals, growth,” I say, and then slap my own forehead because of how obvious it is. “The curse is a… a blasphemy, because it’s stopping me from tiering up?”

“To forbid you from growing in strength is a sacrilege, as preaching that one should do so would be a blasphemy.”

“Right.” We turn right, appropriately, following the corridor as it swings. My eyes have adjusted, alas, so I keep talking, if only to distract myself from everything around us. “Is it just because, like, generically Kazir is the God of growth and tiering up is growing, or does Kazir have a specific relationship with doing that?”

“The answer is… complex,” Amber says slowly.

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“When the Goddess did die, and the Thousand erupt from Her corpse, then did Kazir consume the notion of growth itself, and place himself between mortal and the sublime.”

“As I said,” Amber says dryly, shooting Zidanya a long look, “the answer is complex.”

“Huh.” I blink, rewind the words in my head to make sure I heard them right, and blink again. “I thought you didn’t gender divinity? I’ve only heard you refer to Gods, not Goddesses. And you put a lot more emphasis on… well, the latter than the former.”

“The history of the Goddess Forsaken is… what’s that phrase you used, that one time?”

“Out of scope for the present conversation?” I say it almost reflexively; it’s a phrase I’m probably a little bit too fond of, and also a phrase that has a little bit too much personal history in it.

“Yes, precisely.” Amber grins at me for a moment, then returns to sweeping her head side to side. “Kazir is the hand that raises mortals to growth, just as Seidr is the hand that raises a Reca to fill a space left open.”

“There’s a God of… is Reca both the singular and the plural?”

“Yes?” Amber seems to take a moment to think about it. “Yes.”

“Okay.” I take a breath of air, grateful for the unnatural stillness preventing it from being properly fetid and disgusting in various ways. “There’s a God of Reca? Seidr, you say? Hey Zidanya, how did the Goddess die, out of totally-idle curiosity?”

“By some means unknowable, I bethink myself otherwise, of your curiosity.” Her voice sharpens. “The Gods can hear, when any speak of such things.”

“But not in this Temple.” We’re coming up on the right turn that leads to the galleries. “Not in the scenarios, not in the liminal spaces. And I’m curious, you know me.” I smile at them both, my best attempt at innocence. “Just your standard curious-about-everything fellow, that’s me. Anyway, what do you mean by a space left open?”

“A space. In a group?” Amber looks a little lost. “A group is five, five is the number of a group just as it is the number of fingers on a hand. We’re three now, and near the surface; you’re nigh guaranteed two more pylons proper, and the opportunity to bind two final souls to your path. We’ll find one at the end of this scenario and one at the end of the next, I expect, and you’ll leave the Temple… well, you should be leaving the Temple in your third tier. You’d be… not to be trifled with.”

“The opportunity,” I say quietly, “to bind two more souls to my path.” I breathe in deeply, and then let my shoulders fall, down and back. Step, step, carefully watching my footing; I’m in an icy calm. “Zidanya, are you… bound to my path, as Amber says?”

“Mmm.” She wobbles her hand back and forth. “I’d not be wishful of acting against you in the Temple, where a prisoner I was for so long; you’ve that surety, and I’d be a fool to provoke the wrath of Seidr by betraying you.”

“That’s… not really a no, is it. Bound, but imperfectly, or incompletely?”

“Magelord.” Her voice goes serious, and she stops and turns to face me, reaching out to grab my shoulder. “Think not for even a moment’s time of severing those bonds in the darkness. Sate your conscience if you will, when under Shamaya’s skies we stand; tell me then to depart you forevermore, if you must, but only then. You would do me no favors by leaving me here.”

“I wouldn’t.” I blurt it out, hand coming to rest over hers. “Nobody deserves to be left here. I’m just not totally okay with… with this whole binding thing, alright?”

She shrugs at me, voice taking on a musical, almost chanting quality. “Then call upon Shamaya to sever them under a clear sky, or upon Teiwa in the dappled shade of a forest. Strain against them an ye may, and with every drop of sweat wrung from your body, call upon Nahaseh; or hold our bonds an offense to you and the bondage you were once subject to and call you upon Mikha of vengeance and retribution. Even Safaran among her tomes!

“But call upon them once we are gone from here,” she says fiercely, artifice and musicality gone, waving a hand at the cells and at the gallery I had been too wrapped up in my thoughts to see us arriving at. She emphasizes each of the words, one at a time, and I can feel the heat of her hunger.

“Freedom,” I say softly, “should be the birthright of every sophont. We’ll figure this out, but yeah. I wouldn’t leave my worst enemy languishing in this shithole.”

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