Lindon wished there was a tear running down his face so that he could wipe it away. “I’ve never seen anything so beautiful.” Even Little Blue woke up, sitting up on his head and cooing in wonder. He almost wanted to thank Ekeri.
Besides the more mundane objects, there were a few eye-catching treasures shoved into the corners of the closet. A sculpture of a woman in smooth white jade, a mirror of pure gold, a jeweled star, and a teacup that seemed to be made from a paper-thin eggshell.
None of them gave off the slightest aura of power, but Orthos suggested they were valuable enough that they could fund Lindon’s entire advancement to the end of Truegold. Assuming they could escape this pocket world and find a buyer.
“The real treasure is that necklace,” Orthos said, and Lindon fervently agreed. “If you were lucky enough to find anyone willing to sell one, that would cost as much as half the Arelius family. Sages are the weakest beings who can create void keys.”
“There was a void key storage room in this habitat,” Dross told them. “Room upon room full of them, each key filled with specialized equipment.”
Lindon seized him.
“…yes, it was the first thing the Heralds looted,” Dross continued, and Lindon’s heart crashed back into his chest.
His spirit and body were both still unstable after his fight, but he wobbled to his feet. “We should leave soon. As soon as we’re prepared.”
As it turned out, their preparation took two days.
The first thing Lindon did, once he could move his arms freely, was to smash the chairs and toss them back into the closet. He didn’t need furniture, but as a fire artist, he could always use kindling.
He placed the chest with all of his belongings next to the bundle of kindling, then emptied all the water jars and filled them with water from the Well of Dreams. The well was only a few inches deep now, but that was still far more water than Lindon wanted to leave behind. He filled all twenty-four vials they’d found in the storage room, placed them in their racks, and stored them in the void key as well.
A few of the Silverfang Carp had been killed by his battle with Ekeri without being reduced to ash by the Void Dragon’s Dance, so he found their corpses and stripped some meat. Thanks to the fires burning all over the habitat, he was able to roast them without tainting them in the flavor of Blackflame, then wrap the fish steaks up in leaves he cut from the remaining forest of stalks.
Even after two days of preparation, he was reluctant to leave. There was still water in the Dream Well, and plenty of food from the Carp. He and Orthos could cycle easily in the smoldering wasteland they’d made, and the return to regular cycling was helping heal Orthos’ spirit.
Dross kept up a steady complaint, but he couldn’t go anywhere without Lindon. He wasn’t what finally pushed Lindon to leave.
Yerin was out there, somewhere. He had no way of knowing what she was doing, if she was safe, if Bai Rou had attacked or abandoned her. He wondered about her sleeping and waking, and whatever he did, the worry stuck in the back of his mind like a splinter.
But if she knew this place was good for his advancement, she would surely tell him to stay here as long as possible. Little Blue was more urgent.
He was using everything he could spare from his pure core to feed the Sylvan Riverseed, but she was still pale as a winter’s sky and he could see straight through her. She spent most of her day sprawled on his shoulder, silent. He was no expert on spirits, but she couldn’t stay here much longer.
Even Orthos, despite his good humor, couldn’t fully recover just from cycling. If he could, he would never have gone insane in Serpent’s Grave. He needed to move on.
But there was one last reason that shook him enough to push him out of this habitat.
The cracks in space, which once had been the size of Ekeri’s body, had now spread to the size of a room. The web of nearly invisible fissures was growing. Dross said it had to do with the decay of the pocket world. Any forced spatial movement would fracture the world’s boundaries until the whole thing decayed.
And, as usual, he turned that into an argument for reaching the Spirit Well as soon as possible. This time, Lindon happened to agree.
He tied the tiny copper key to the shadesilk ribbon around his neck, so that it hung behind his gold hammer badge. Opening it one last time, he walked into the closet and pulled Little Blue from his shoulder.
“Wait for me in here,” he said, lowering her to the ground.
She scrambled up his arm, chirping in distress.
“I’ll let you out as soon as I can. We’re going through dangerous waters; if I lose you, I might not be able to find you again.”
She clung to his forearm and chimed like a bell.
Lindon sat down in the extra-spatial closet, lifting his arm so he could look Little Blue in the eyes. Her pale face was the picture of panic.
“I’ll come back for you,” he assured her.
She shook her head.
“You want to come with us?”
Silver bells rang.
“Are you more scared of being locked in here than coming with us?”
Another long, sad note from a flute.
Lindon couldn’t blame her. He’d been locked into tight spaces…too many times.
So he walked out and tucked her into his pocket, next to Suriel’s marble. “Try not to fall out,” he told her.
She was already playing with the glass ball.
Another wisp of madra shut the door to the closet, and Lindon was ready to leave. He looked over at Orthos, who held Dross in his mouth.
“Great, we’re ready to go! Fantastic! Don’t worry about the two days worth of essence I lost, each of which was a memory. As I decay, I lose more and more of who I am, but don’t you worry about that now, because we’re leaving!”
Lindon ducked his head to the construct. “Lead the way.”
Purple light sketched a line out of the bubble, into the dark water outside. The line extended into the darkness, then sank lower. And lower.
“The tablet library, and the Spirit Well it contains, is a tad deeper than we are,” Dross explained. “Not to worry, though, because I am both map and key. It will be a straight shot from here.”
A line of bright blue spots slid by the bubble, close enough that Lindon could have reached his arm through and touched them. In the light of the still-burning fires, he saw a glimpse of silver scales between the blue.
Dross cleared a nonexistent throat. “There’s the one complication. Diamondscale Sea Drakes. You remember when I told you the Silverfang Carp were raised like cattle? Well, this is what those cattle were meant to feed.”
The last blue light slid around the bubble, and Lindon traced its path until it moved out of sight. It was circling the whole habitat.
“The refiners kept them in captivity, but the facility records say they broke free decades ago. They’ve been breeding in the wild ever since.”
Lindon reached a hand out to the bubble-wall. “Was this meant to keep them out?”
“No, the boundary formation is meant to keep out the water. It doesn’t keep them out at all, they just prefer it out there.”
Lindon took a few steps back.
“Is there any way to avoid them?”
“Some believe that hope is the strongest force in the universe,” Dross said. “Although that is objectively untrue.”
Lindon looked back. He couldn’t see the blue lights anywhere in his vision.
“Can we form some kind of—” he started to say, but Orthos had already stepped into the water.
With a deep breath, Lindon joined him.
Chapter 11
Dross’ purple light and the deep red of Orthos’ shell were the only sources of illumination out here, in the icy deep. Swallowed by cold and dark, Lindon almost turned back on instinct, but the red and purple were his only guides. He swam after them, reaching a hand into his pocket to make sure that Little Blue was secure.