Bren's family frowned in disapproval that someone had interrupted their son's ceremony.
“On the horizon,” the messenger said, panting. “Come and see.”
Jai Long had a good guess what he'd see, and he dashed from the tent without a word. Kral stayed behind to give a word to the waiting family, but Jai Long dashed up the side of a nearby tower. Its unsteady wooden planks creaked alarmingly, but he reached the top in seconds.
With that vantage, he could see the hideous Desolate Wilds spread out before him. The Purelake was a glimmering sapphire, the rest of it a black mess.
Except for a small group on the horizon, which his Iron eyes picked out immediately. They were a motley bunch, dressed in different colors and styles, but it was the banner they carried that caught his eye.
Deep blue and white, with a black crescent in the center.
The Arelius family had arrived.
He leaped from the top of the tower, landing next to Kral. “We're out of time,” he said, ducking into the tent for just long enough to retrieve his spear. Bren was still cycling, oblivious.
He emerged with his weapon, and heard Kral already issuing orders.
“Gather the Fishers,” the young chief said. “Inform the Jai clan. We're going in now.” To Jai Long, he said, “And, uh...if we can't open the door?”
Jai Long gripped his spear in both hands. Up to this point, they had tried to avoid unnecessary damage to the structure of the Ruins for fear of disrupting the script. They were dealing with an incredibly powerful script-circle they didn’t understand; the slightest disruption could change nothing, or it could detonate the Transcendent Ruins with enough force to obliterate the Wilds.
He had commanded his teams to avoid even chipping away at the walls, for fear of hidden scripts. Until he gave the order.
“We will make a new one.”
Lindon woke to a splash of icy water.
He jerked upright, gasping, hands raised to defend himself from the blow he knew was coming. But the first thing to hit him was the stench—it smelled like a dead pig rolled in rotten eggs.
He rolled blindly away from the stink, but it followed him. His hands were resting in a putrid pool of black sludge and red blood, and more of it caked his skin.
His sister Kelsa had been covered in something similar when she advanced to Iron. Did that mean...all this came from his own body?
The puddle of filth had filled the entire space at the bottom of the stairs a finger's width deep, and it trickled out the open door. He couldn't believe it all came from his own body.
Another splash of water landed on him, squirted from the twisted seashell binding in Yerin's hand, and Lindon hurriedly rose to his feet. His pack rolled off his stomach, one leather strap severed in the middle.
He'd bitten through it.
He staggered as he stood, his balance shifting strangely. Every step seemed to take him too far, too quickly, and his body felt like it would drift off the ground and float to the ceiling.
“Cut that out,” Yerin ordered. She sent another stream of water splashing over him from the binding in her hand. “I'm trying to clean you off, and you're jumping around like a chicken.”
“You made it,” Eithan said, in a tone of clear surprise. He watched like Lindon's mother examining a new breed of Remnant. “A flawless transition to Iron. Amazing. I'd like to say you have my extraordinary guidance to thank, but...well, how do you feel?”
Lindon glanced at his hands, turning to consider the unbroken flesh. A dreadbeast had fallen on him, leading to twisted fingers, but you couldn't tell now. He took another step, gingerly testing for pain on his formerly broken ribs. He breathed deeply, cycling according to the technique Eithan had taught him.
Once again, his eyes filled with tears and he had to blink them back. But this time, it was because the pain was gone. He could stand.
Another spray of cold water blasted him, scraping away another layer of black.
Eithan rested his hand on a brown backpack sitting on the stairs beside him, safely away from the pool of sludge. “I transferred your belongings over. It's not quite as big as your original, but I...doubt you'll want to use that one anymore.”
His original pack, empty and slack, was soaked in blood and sludge, one of its straps dangling in two severed ends. His mother had made him that pack, slaving over bits of leather and patches of canvas for weeks as she would have a particularly complicated construct.
If she knew it had helped him reach Iron, she would have been overcome with joy, though it still felt like leaving another piece of home to die.
He walked over to his new pack—actually the one he'd taken from Fisher Gesha, used to store her spider-construct—and staggered as a single step launched him five feet closer. He caught himself in the stairwell, face-to-face with Eithan.
The yellow-haired man carefully pinched his nose and stepped up a stair.
Lindon reached up his hands to catch Yerin's next blast of water, scrubbing his skin on stone until it was clean. Then he rifled through his pack, looking for the spare clothes he'd packed.
When he reached the bottom, next to the tank of a happily playing Sylvan Riverseed, he remembered that these were his spare clothes. He'd never had the previous set cleaned, and they were missing from the pack. Eithan must have gotten rid of them, and Lindon couldn't blame him. But that still left him without anything to wear.
Lindon looked up to see Eithan holding something out to him: an expanse of pastel pink fabric embroidered with metallic thread-of-gold flowers.
“I noticed your deficient laundry situation, and I thought to offer you something of mine.”
Only then did Lindon notice the...elaborate curtain...was actually a sacred artist's robe. It didn't have an outer robe to it, but was all one piece, with loose sleeves and enough room in the legs that it wouldn't inhibit movement.
Under the circumstances, he couldn't complain. It didn't matter what the robe looked like, it was better than one he had on.
He glanced between the pink and gold ensemble in Eithan's hand and his own ruined set of bloody rags, considering.
“Yerin, if you don't mind,” Eithan said.
Her silver sword-arm flashed, briefly overlaid with light in Lindon's spirit-sense, and his clothes were slashed to ribbons. He snatched at them, trying to preserve some level of modesty.
She turned quickly, which surprised him to some degree. He'd thought of her as a Gold first, but she was still a girl his own age. Now that he thought of it, that might have been a blush coloring the back of her neck.
Eithan grabbed the twisted blue seashell from Yerin's hand and activated it, sending a flood of water gushing out. It didn't end until Lindon spluttered at him to stop, minutes later, every inch of his body scrubbed clean by the force.
Something bright fluttered toward him, and he caught the pink-and-gold robe out of the air.
“It's surprisingly absorbent,” Eithan said, “and it will dry before you know it. The threads are plucked from the mane of a sacred beast known by the natives as a 'Celestial Lion-Horse,' and it is both comfortably warm and pleasingly cool. I had to hire a whole family to work on it for months. It's supposed to be worn as the inner part of a set, but I'm forced to waste it on you.”
“Gratitude,” Lindon said, wincing as he wrapped it around his wet body. If it was that expensive, he hated to ruin it. He could sell it instead. How many scales would this buy him? Come to think of it, how many scales would it take him to reach Jade?
He chided himself for thinking of Jade so soon after reaching Iron, his hands moving automatically to fold and tie the robe.
Maybe it was the expensive fabric, but something felt strange.
He stopped halfway, considering. The robe was tight across the shoulders, and the robe—which he'd expected to reach the floor—only stretched to his ankles. He looked back up to Eithan.