Chapter 157: Below The Well (Patreon)

Initially, I wanted to do a 9–10 chapter drop, but someone suggested that it'd be a good idea to spread them out to 2 chapters a day over the next few days instead. I like this idea, both for my backlog and for the reader experience, which I suppose would be better. That does not change the limited time I have for writing right now, nor does it mean my overall throughput will be higher, just that the chapters will come out a little bit sooner. Instead of waiting 2-3 weeks for one big drop, I can start posting a few days earlier, meaning only ~2 weeks of waiting between 5-day streaks of 2 chapters/day.

I would love to hear your feedback regarding this. Which would you prefer as a reader:

A big batch of chapters all at once (2–3 weeks of waiting in between)

A few days of 2 chapters/day (~2 weeks of waiting in between)

Kage fell onto a root.

It came out of the dark at a steep angle, thick as a wagon and slick with sap, and it caught him across the back. The air left his lungs in one hard push. Then he was sliding. His coat bunched under him, the root carried him down and sideways, and chunks of silver altar glass rained past his head into a drop he couldn't see the bottom of.

[HP: 63/760]

He rolled onto his stomach and drove Mumyo into the bark. The blade bit, went light the instant the cut registered, and he had to bear down with his forearm to keep the edge dragging. Bark peeled away in a long wet curl. His speed bled off a meter at a time.

[Clean Action. Convergence +2]

The root ended in a broken arch. Pale elven stone, fluted and graceful, jutted from the earthen wall where something had snapped it off centuries ago. Kage had a quarter second to pick between hitting it badly and hitting it worse. He wrenched Mumyo free, kicked off the root, and took the arch with his shoulder.

Stone met bone. He bounced, caught the arch’s lip with one hand, lost it, and dropped again.

[HP: 41/760]

[Unmitigated damage taken. Convergence -35]

[Convergence: 7/100 | State: Sharpened]

[Jisei Threshold updated. Physical Damage +47%. Action Speed +47%. Verse Potency +47%.]

Below him, Erthrix was hanging.

The officer had jammed his slab-shield sideways between a narrow stone ledge and a root running along the wall, living wood wedged against living wood. One gauntlet clutched the shield’s grip. The other clawed at the ledge, a lip of carved stone barely wider than a boot.

Kage landed on the root beside the shield.

The root sagged. Somewhere inside it, fibers began to pop. Erthrix’s head snapped up. For half a second they looked at each other over the shield rim.

Fantastic.

Kage pressed his palm flat to the bark.

Title: Hold the Wall.

Poem: [Bind].

[-50 AWN]

[Bind applied. Root fixed to anchor point.]

The tearing stopped. The root went rigid under his hand, locked to the wall harder than its fibers should have allowed.

“Ledge,” Kage said.

Erthrix didn’t argue. He hauled himself up with a grunt, dragged the shield after him, and rolled onto the stone. Kage stepped off the root and used the shield’s edge as a foothold on the way up because it was there.

Two seconds later the Bind expired. The root tore loose with a crack and fell into the dark, and it took a long time to stop making noise.

[AWN: 141/1690]

The ledge widened into a landing.

It was—or rather, had been a balcony once. A curved floor of pale stone ran along the shaft wall, half-swallowed by roots, its railing reduced to a row of stumps. A ghost of the original railing flickered above them in lavender light, there for a breath, gone for a breath. Far overhead, the broken mouth of the Central Translite Well showed as a ragged coin of gold. The noon light from Kage’s verse still burned up there. Very little of it reached this far down.

The other three were already on the landing.

The hammer officer was on his feet. Kage recognized him by the red line across the bark-plate at his elbow, the one Mumyo had left there ten minutes ago. He was big, square-faced, and held the hammer high with both hands despite the elbow. His eyes went straight to Kage and stayed there.

A second officer lay on her back near the wall. Robed, with a cracked focus-staff still in one fist. Her left leg sat at an angle no leg should have. A small red debuff icon pulsed over her head.

The third knelt beside her, both hands glowing green over the break. Lighter armor than the others. Leaf-stitched sleeves. A healer’s kit spilled open next to her knee.

“He’s dry,” the hammer officer said. “Look at him. Erthrix, he’s on fumes.”

Kage put his back to the wall and kept Mumyo low and forward.

Erthrix got to one knee, then to his feet. Sap streaked his face. He wiped it with the back of his gauntlet and took a moment longer than necessary to settle his shield on his arm. Kage watched him decide what kind of officer he was going to be in the next ten seconds.

“Hollis,” Erthrix said. “Wait.”

“Wait for what? He wrecked the whole—”

“I was there. Wait.”

Hollis waited.

Kage pulled up the skill without looking away.

[Return to Domain - The Shifting Galleries: Ready.]

One thought and he would be standing in the white Drafting Room with the Curator, safe, his petals intact. Then the Greenlanders would have this place to themselves. Whatever lay at the bottom of this shaft would be mapped, screenshotted, posted to the guild board by breakfast, and claimed by lunch. The song that had broken the well floor had come from somewhere down here.

The petals in his pouch were still humming. Quietly now. Every few seconds the hum dipped and rose with something under the stone.

The other option was the obvious one. Four of them, one already on the floor. With a full bar he would have liked his odds. With a hundred and forty Awen and forty-one HP, every exchange became a coin flip with his EXP on one side and a thousand-odd petals of uncertain drop status on the other. He didn’t know whether the game let quest fragments fall out of a corpse. He had no interest in finding out.

The healer looked up. “We could climb,” she said, to Erthrix.

Everyone looked up.

A spiral stair wound around the inside of the shaft. Elven work again, every step a thin crescent of glass. As Kage watched, a section of six steps faded to nothing. A different section above it faded in. A pebble fell through the space where a step had been a moment earlier and clicked off the landing’s edge.

“On what?” Erthrix said.

“The bits that stay.”

“And which are those?”

She couldn't tell.

Down the passage, away from the shaft, something rang.

It sounded like a hundred small glass bells shaken at once, then a long dry scrape, wood dragging over stone. The sound stopped. Hollis turned his head toward it without fully taking his eyes off Kage. The caster on the floor lifted herself on one elbow, wincing, to look.

Nothing came out of the dark. Something down there had moved.

Climb up towards a waiting guild, and a guy who wants me dead behind me, Kage thought. Fight four people on a shelf with no Awen and HP. Or walk toward the sounds.

He hated all three.

Erthrix made the first decision.

“Wren,” he said. “Finish Dace’s leg. Then heal him.”

The healer’s hands paused over the caster. “Sorry?”

“Heal him.”

“He put Bram and Tesh in respawn,” Hollis said. “He set the treants on our pull team—”

“He also knows what this is.” Erthrix tilted his head at the passage, at the flickering stair, at the roots. “None of us do.”

His eyes went to Mumyo, then to Kage’s feet, then to the narrow width of the landing. He had watched his best people fail to put one man down. Kage could see him running the same numbers Kage had run, coming out with a different answer about whose coin flip it was.

“And I’m not fighting him on a shelf,” Erthrix added.

Hollis’s jaw worked. He lowered the hammer six inches.

Wren finished the leg first. She took her time about it. Bone clicked back into place under the green light, and Dace hissed through her teeth and then went quiet, staring at the roots overhead. When the debuff icon faded, Wren stood, wiped her palms on her sleeves, and walked over to Kage. She stopped just outside Mumyo’s reach.

She looked at the sword.

Kage tilted the blade a few degrees toward the floor.

She raised one hand without a word.

[Wren has cast Sapwell Mending on you.]

[+40 HP per second for 8 seconds.]

Warmth crawled under his skin, slow and green and unwelcome. The crimson thread at the edge of his vision thickened strand by strand. With every tick, the Jisei bonus wound down.

[HP: 361/760]

[Jisei Threshold updated. Physical Damage +26%. Action Speed +26%. Verse Potency +26%.]

Half of his best multiplier, gone, courtesy of a woman who would have happily watched him fall the rest of the shaft. He still couldn’t argue with the extra three hundred HP. He said nothing. Wren said nothing. She went back to Dace.

Erthrix planted his shield rim on the stone and leaned on it. The manager came out. Kage could hear it in his voice.

“Terms. No one attacks anyone. Ordinary loot goes in a pile and gets split even once we’re out. We reassess on safe ground.”

“Five ways,” Kage said.

Hollis laughed, short. “Five.”

“There are five of us.”

“Five ways,” Erthrix said.

“One more,” Kage said. “Quest materials stay with whoever’s quest they belong to.”

Hollis’s eyes narrowed. “What quest materials?”

“Mine.”

Erthrix studied him for a long moment, the way he’d studied Kage at the forest border. “Fine.”

“Formation’s mine,” Erthrix went on. “I call positions, I call pulls, I call retreat. You don’t get a vote.”

“Anything your guild didn’t build is mine, if it can be taken.” Kage nodded at the roots, the glass stair, the passage. “So most of it.”

Erthrix didn’t like that, Kage could see it. But he didn’t refuse it either.

Then Erthrix said, quieter, “We had an arrangement. Stay off the routes. Leave the trees alone. And you went through the whole valley.”

“You ordered the flowers burned.”

“After you already cost us the night.”

“They were the only thing I came for.” Kage kept his voice flat. “I stayed off your routes until the routes were the only place left with blooms. Then you lit them.”

“After you broke our pulls.”

“After your pulls broke every bed in the Reach. And I'm not gonna accommodate a whole guild over finishing my quest.”

Erthrix opened his mouth. Closed it. His thumb moved along the shield rim, over a scorch mark from his own guild’s fire.

“We’ll argue about it topside,” he said.

“Sure.”

Kage knew the topside argument wouldn't end any better. It didn’t matter. Wren helped Dace stand. Hollis took the rear without being told. Kage noticed where he put himself: three steps behind Kage’s left shoulder, exactly where a hammer would land cleanly.

Mumyo pulsed once in his hand.

Yeah, Kage thought. I see him.

The passage sloped downward away from the shaft.

The walls were roots. Living roots, woven so tightly that only a few seams of black earth showed between them. Channels had been cut into their surface, shallow grooves no wider than a finger, and starlight sap moved through them. It ran uphill. Thin silver streams climbed the walls toward the well above them, against gravity, steady and patient.

Every so often the flow surged. All the channels brightened at once, and the petals in Kage’s pouch hummed in answer.

Set into the roots at intervals were panels of glass, each a little larger than a door. Behind them were gardens. Pressed flat and pale, preserved like specimens, the outlines of violet blooms and silver ferns and long-stemmed things Kage had no names for. Some panels held only the faint ghost-prints where petals had once rested.

He laid his palm against one.

The glass was cool. A faint vibration answered his touch. Storyteller’s Intuition offered him nothing as large as an Echo, only an impression: careful hands, a low voice reciting something, the satisfaction of a page filed in its proper place. Then it faded.

Archive storage, he thought. Like the beds upstairs. Except someone kept the backups down here.

Dace had stopped beside the next panel. She leaned on her cracked staff to spare her leg and pressed her face so close to the glass that her breath fogged it.

“These are labeled,” she said. “Look. Every one of them has a mark at the corner.”

She was right. A small sigil sat etched into each frame, a circle crossed by three curved lines.

Erthrix stopped walking.

“That’s on the north well,” he said.

Kage looked at him.

“Floor of the north clearing. Same mark.” Erthrix pointed at the sigil with two fingers, the way a man points at a spreadsheet cell. “Worn down, but it’s there. Our pullers use it as a marker. Kite the stag to the circle, drop it, the burn team has their line.”

“Wonderful,” Kage said.

Erthrix let that pass. He was watching the channels now. A pulse ran up the wall. Kage saw the officer’s lips move very slightly.

Another pulse came. Erthrix’s lips moved again.

“Forty-five,” Erthrix said.

“What?”

“Seconds. Between those.” He looked up toward the shaft, toward the wells they couldn’t see. “The wells re-pool every forty-five seconds. Sap comes up, mobs spawn, then the burn team clears. Main premise of our rotation is built on it. Tuned it myself the first night.” A short pause. “Thought it was a spawn table.”

Kage looked at the silver streams climbing the wall. The guild had built its industrial schedule on the heartbeat of the sanctuary’s storage system and never asked what was pumping.

“Anything else change?” Kage asked. “Since the first night.”

Erthrix took a moment before answering. Kage got the sense he didn’t like giving it away.

“Yields thinned,” he said. “A little. Resin drops, mainly. We thought it was variance, though. Not enough sample size to tell.” He shrugged with the shield arm. “And it wasn’t worth chasing. The yield was still enough to be worth it.”

Hollis spoke from the rear. “Are we sightseeing?”

Kage checked the clock in the corner of his vision. The filigree made the numbers harder to read than they should be. He squinted until they resolved.

4:51.

“When’s sunrise here?” he asked.

“Last night it was five fifty-one,” Erthrix said at once. “Rotation closes at five-forty so the burn teams are out before the forest goes solid.”

Dace turned from the glass. “Solid.”

“Twilight ends, the ghost stuff goes 'poof'.” Erthrix glanced back toward the shaft and its blinking spiral. “All of it.”

Nobody said the next part, so Kage did. “Then that stair stops existing in an hour.”

Erthrix straightened from the panel.

“Surface team has a rope down to the first ledge,” he said. “They can’t get an anchor lower. Apparently the glass keeps dropping their hooks.”

Kage started walking.

The passage narrowed fifty meters later and ended at an archway.

A tall arch of grey bark, ridged and old, so wide its sides vanished into the root walls. From its crown, glass foliage spread outward across the ceiling and down both walls, thousands of thin chime-leaves threaded through the roots like strands of frozen rain. Inside the arch’s hollow trunk, a dim blue fire burned low behind the bark. A starlight channel ran across the floor in a shallow trough and disappeared into the arch’s base.

The passage continued through the arch, a dark gap barely wide enough for two people side by side.

Dace said, very quietly, “That’s a treant.”

“That’s a door,” Hollis said.

Kage couldn't tell himself. The bark carried the same texture as the Glimmer-Bark Treants upstairs, only coarser, deeply furrowed, with moss in the cracks and something like age in the color. The leaves were longer.

Erthrix went first, shield up. That was his job, and he did it well. He stepped up to the trough to cross it.

Their movement crossed a shallow channel in the floor. Sap backed up around Erthrix’s boot, then spilled over the groove’s edge.

The blue fire inside the bark guttered.

Every glass leaf on the ceiling shivered at once.

“Back,” Erthrix said. “Slow. Hollis, left wall. Wren, behind me, ten meters. Dace, rear, keep your line clear of mine.”

They moved. Kage stayed near the right wall, where the glass leaves hung lowest.

Underneath everything, the chord was still sounding.

He had been hearing it since the fall, a deep tone coming up through the stone, too low to be music and too regular to be noise. Now he listened properly. It rose. It fell. At the bottom of each fall came a soft stress, a downbeat he could feel in his knees.

The glass leaves rang on the downbeat.

The arch shifted on the downbeat too. The movement was small, a creak of bark settling a quarter-inch. Then the chord rose again, and the arch went still.

The channels along the walls flared silver all at once, and the trough under Erthrix’s boots refilled with a rush of light. It slammed into the arch’s base. The blue fire inside the trunk roared up from embers to a pale, furious blaze that lit the hollow from within. The bark split along its old ridges. Two long limbs peeled away from the sides of the arch, roots tearing free of the walls in sprays of black earth, and something like a head lifted from the crown, crowned in glass.

Behind them, the passage closed.

Glass leaves swept down from the ceiling in a ringing curtain. Roots surged out of the walls and braided across the corridor behind Hollis, layer over layer, sealing the way back to the landing, the shaft, and the stair that would be gone in an hour.

[Choirbark Warden - Level 33 (Elite)]

The fire in its chest burned on the next downbeat.

Erthrix set his shield. “Formation,” he said.

Hollis shifted his grip on the hammer. He looked at the Warden, and then, for one second longer than he needed to, at Kage.