She’d done what she could for him. And Orthos would not recover on his own.
Yerin might not be with him, but he wasn’t alone. These two needed his help.
“Are you hungry?” he asked softly. The Sylvan Riverseed let out a long, slow tone that sounded like a flute.
“I’ll find us something,” Lindon said, glancing over at Orthos. “This place was built by a Monarch. There are treasures in here we can’t imagine.”
His voice echoed back to him in the corridor.
He picked up the Eye, but pouring madra into it didn’t do anything useful. It only pointed him to distant locations; too far away to be any help. Still, he carried it with him just in case. The rest of his belongings stayed with Orthos.
He felt naked without the pack on his back, but the almost imperceptible weight of Little Blue on his shoulder gave him comfort.
Together, they walked down the sloping hallway.
Very quickly, he discovered that the corridor was not empty. There were keyholes like the one at the entrance every few yards. His first few discoveries were causes for excitement; if these were all exits, then he would be able to leave without risking an encounter with the dragon-girl or the fanged fish.
Excitement gave way to disappointment every time. The first time the wall melted away around his gemstone, it revealed a closet packed with buckets. Many of the metal buckets were rusted through, the wooden ones rotted away. There was a puddle of something that smelled metallic in one corner.
The next door was empty except for a pile of shredded and half-burned paper.
The next was a broad storage room with hooks dangling from the ceiling. That was all; just empty hooks.
The fourth contained bedframes. No beds, only frames.
He found a food closet with all the packages torn open, their contents devoured. There was a massive, empty warehouse that looked like it was sized to hold whole ships. But no matter how he explored it, he found no other exit.
He’d been exploring for what he guessed to be an hour by the time he spotted the end of the hall. It had stopped sloping downward long before, so now it was just a straight hallway with a flat wall at the end.
It was distant enough that he guessed there were sixteen more doors between him and the end. He had been trying to visit every door in order, so that he could easily keep track of which ones he’d checked and hadn’t, but so far he’d found only garbage and rot.
By this point, his thirst weighed on every thought, his stomach growled, and even this short walk had left his legs soft and trembling. If he couldn’t find anything in these rooms, he’d have to return to Orthos and go out the front door. If the gold dragon-girl was still waiting for them...well, he’d have to risk that.
With time pressing on him, he skipped the last rows of doors and moved right to the one at the end of the hall. If there was any one door that might have something in it, this would be the one.
He opened the door, and purple light radiated out, clashing with the endless blue.
The light in the room came from a knee-high well of worked stone, which overflowed with some glowing purple liquid. It spilled over the edges, pooling on the floor, trickling away into grates. As Lindon watched, a single drop of the purple liquid fell from overhead and landed in the pool with an audible plop.
The room wasn’t large, perhaps ten paces to a side, with floor-to-ceiling shelves against each of the three walls. All of the shelves were packed with piles of...junk.
There was a chaos in the air that he felt in his spirit, a mix of brief impressions with conflicting purposes. Random light flashed from one junk-pile or another, giving off colored sparks.
As he moved closer, he saw that some of the piles were metal, others wood. Still others were smooth and thin, as though made out of eggshell. Most of the surfaces had script-circles inscribed in them: mostly to contain madra, but others for a dozen other functions. Only when he turned one over and exposed a last trickle of madra fading to essence did he realize what he was looking at.
Constructs. This was the storage room for constructs.
Their spirits had all faded away over the years since Ghostwater had been closed, except for a few bits of madra preserved by scripts. The fully spiritual constructs would have vanished entirely, leaving only the physical vessels of those bound to some material.
Excitement warred with disappointment. He felt like he should be looking at shelves of treasure, the key to his escape from Ghostwater...but realistically, it had been too long. Some functions of these constructs might be intact, but they wouldn’t last long and probably would accomplish nothing like their intended function.
As though to prove it to himself, he flipped over one of the most complete constructs, in which he could sense flickers of madra that reminded him of the Path of the White Fox. With a tendril of pure madra, he activated its script.
“...first success of its kind,” a cold, flat voice emerged from the construct. “There were thirty-one other elixirs refined in the Life Well habitat. Which one would you like to see?”
A beam of light emerged as though to project an illusion in light, but it showed only a meaningless jumble of images.
Lindon grabbed the somewhat functioning construct—if nothing else, he could perhaps learn from its construction—and turned instead to the well.
The liquid inside, which he was careful to avoid with his shoes, was not opaque, as he had first imagined. It was clear water, tinted purple, and it radiated a spiritual sense of focus and determination. Every minute or so, another droplet fell from the ceiling into the pool, which had overflowed over the years and ran down the sides, draining into grates in the floor.
A few dark blobs at the bottom of the pool told him that some pieces of a construct must have fallen from the high shelf overhead. Bracing himself, he opened his Copper sight. The well was a dense concentration of shifting violet images that he associated with dream aura, though it had an equal concentration of blue-green water aura. The two powers flowed harmoniously, and from what he could tell, the water aura might even be stronger.
He closed his sight, thinking. Was this involved in the Soulsmithing process for these constructs, somehow? The one he had examined definitely had a dream aspect to it.
“Oh, don’t worry about the water,” a bright male voice echoed through the room. “It’s just water.” Lindon wasn’t startled by the sudden noise—one of the constructs must have activated because of his presence.
“At least, chemically,” the voice went on. “I know it’s glowing and purple, and it would be very reasonable to think ‘I will not drink this, because it will melt my insides,’ but I promise you, it will not melt your insides. Not quickly, at any rate. Technically, everything erodes your insides slowly, doesn’t it? Worth thinking about.”
None of the constructs on the shelves were giving off any lights, so Lindon examined the one in his hand. Still dark.
The voice piped up again. “You should give it a drink. The master used to reward workers with a sip from the Dream Well when they had pleased him. Or when they, uh, needed to complete a project and didn’t have time for sleep. Or when they had angered him, and he wanted them to be fully aware of the punishment. Total focus, that’s what it gives you.”
Lindon turned his attention to the well.
A cracked and rusted metal ball sat at the bottom of the liquid, in the middle of the other garbage he had dismissed earlier. With every word, light flashed from the cracks in the iron.
Lindon rummaged on a nearby shelf until he came up with a couple of arm-length rods that had once been part of a mechanical construct.