He stopped in front of Lindon’s face. “I can activate the tablets myself now! Don’t be surprised if I return as a master of the sacred arts.”
He whizzed off, out of the Spirit Well room and down the hallway.
Ziel watched the whole exchange with a complete lack of interest, sitting against the corner and staring at him from beneath emerald horns.
“Forgiveness,” Lindon said. “I did not mean to disturb you.”
Dead eyes drifted over to the Spirit Well.
“If you don’t mind, how long until I reach Truegold? In your estimation.”
“Two more weeks,” Ziel said without looking over.
“And we have that long, don’t we? You said a month…”
“You don’t want to stay here.”
Lindon wasn’t sure if that was a warning or not. “This is my new favorite place in existence. I want to stay here forever.”
“And you want to leave.” Slowly, Ziel’s eyes returned to Lindon. “Don’t you?”
Lindon stood there for a long moment before he moved and took a seat beside Ziel. “Well, I have this friend. She—”
Ziel held up a hand. “No. Stop. We don’t know each other well enough for this.”
“Of course, I’m sorry.”
“You’ll reach Truegold. Whether you do it in two weeks or two years, it won’t make much of a difference in the end.”
“Actually—”
“Stop. It’s my turn. I have nothing against easy advancement, but don’t let it blind you.” He raised a finger, pointing to the ceiling. It took Lindon a moment to see what he was pointing to: a long cobweb stretching from one corner to another.
“The decay has already begun. That is a naturally forming spatial crack. You still have three weeks or so before this world collapses, so long as nothing accelerates it. By the time they form fast enough that you can see space cracking, you should have left already.”
He pulled his worn cloak around him. “If you’re going to a deeper habitat, you’ll have plenty of time if you leave now. You don’t want to be racing the hourglass with a collapsing world.”
Lindon thanked him, though he was part relieved and part disappointed. He had already been apart from Yerin for so long; he found himself wondering more and more what she was doing on the outside. He had expected that to fade with time, but it had only grown worse.
On the other hand, he felt like a fool for leaving the Spirit Well without milking every second.
He filled every spare container he could find with the blue water: all of the vials he’d emptied so far and everything he could scavenge from the junk rooms in this facility.
He’d opened his void key and prepared to leave, Little Blue on his shoulder, Orthos at his side, and Dross in the Eye of the Deep. Still, he looked over the pool of blue water like he was abandoning a fortune.
Ziel waited for them at the entrance to the room, leaning on his hammer like an old man on a cane. He hefted a bag in one hand and tossed it to Lindon. It clinked as he caught it.
“Six bottles,” Ziel said. “Should be enough to get you to Truegold in at least one core.”
Lindon held the bottles for a moment before placing them into his void key. He actually teared up.
Ziel ignored him.
When they were ready to leave, they stood lined up in front of the wall of black water. Dross assured them that this was the way to the final habitat, the one containing the entrance to Northstrider’s quarters.
It was filled with the swirling blue lights of Diamondscale Sea Drakes.
Orthos chewed a mouthful of stone to gravel and swallowed it. “Hmmm…I left too many alive.”
He and Ziel had consumed far more of the original Drake’s corpse than Lindon thought should be possible, but when it started to decay, they had tossed it into the ocean. Had that attracted the others?
Little Blue chimed like a bell from his shoulder, and he patted her tiny shoulder with one finger. Together, they stared down a wall of flashing silver scales and blue lights.
“Do we have time to swim around?” Lindon asked.
“That depends,” Dross said. “Do you still need air?”
A loud scraping grew closer and closer, and they all turned to see Ziel dragging his hammer two-handed over the tile. “They focus on the biggest threat in their territory. I will punch through, and you head to the habitat. This is no task for a Gold.”
He hesitated and glanced down at himself. “…although I guess it is, isn’t it?”
With a heavy sigh, he pushed through the bubble and into the sea, his cloak billowing behind him. The faded symbol on the back reminded Lindon of spread wings this time.
“You could learn from him,” Orthos said, eyes blazing red. “He has the spirit of a dragon.”
“I’m not sure he would take that as a compliment.”
An instant later, a green script-circle bloomed above Ziel’s head. It was big enough to swallow his body, but then the ring expanded. And expanded again.
A second later, it exploded. Water rushed up in a violent column from his hammer, carrying most of the Diamondscale swarm with it. The bubble-wall of the habitat rippled with the force.
The other strings of blue lights converged on Ziel in an instant, but Lindon and the others had already ducked into the water.
The ocean of Ghostwater was a chaos of blood and dust, with nearby impacts shaking the ground. They pushed forward, guided by a purple light projected by Dross. Occasionally scales flashed silver or blue lights shone in front of them, but none of the Drakes attacked them.
Lindon’s lungs were starting to ache by the time the water cleared, and then the new habitat was already in view. It was a dome of bright light packed with green; it looked like a slice of a jungle transplanted to the bottom of the ocean.
He hung onto Orthos’ shell as the turtle swam toward it, but after a moment he felt a spike of battle-hunger from his contracted partner. The sacred beast turned, cycling Blackflame.
A pair of blue lights headed toward them out of the darkness.
The Burning Cloak had let Lindon down the last time he tried it underwater, the aura and the water dampening his movements. Now, he was a Highgold, and his body had been reinforced by weeks more of feeding on sacred beast meat. And this time, he had a new technique.
The Soul Cloak swirled around him, and he kicked forward, joining Orthos in battle.
Ziel waited until the last moment to use his gatekey.
Unlike a gatestone, the gatekey could be used without breaking it. The key was many times more valuable than the stone, but once he had been able to afford these things. Now he had to rely on his patron.
One moment he was using the last of his madra to swing his hammer in the face of a Sea Drake, and the next he was dripping water all over the grass, staring that patron in the face.
The Beast King sat on a log, tearing a hunk of meat between his teeth, grease sliding down his unkempt beard. A campfire crackled in front of him, casting long shadows. He showed no surprise at Ziel’s appearance. Silver eyes looked the Truegold up and down as he took another bite.
“Lot of blood in that water,” the Herald observed. “Do I have the Lord of the Dawnwing Sect back with me once again?”
Without his Enforcer technique active, Ziel’s hammer was too heavy for him. He let it sag to the ground, where its weight pushed into the soil. “The Spirit Well didn’t work,” he said, his hammer digging a furrow behind him as he walked to sit against the Vastwood Mammoth that lay across the landscape like a hairy hill.
The wall of fur gave a welcoming trumpet as Ziel leaned against it. He patted the sacred beast, though he doubted the mammoth could feel it. It would be like a human feeling the touch of a single ant’s leg.