Chapter 43: Mirrors (Patreon)

The broadback dropped Elliot off at the edge of a small valley, its heavy tree cover broken only by a narrow river cutting through the center. The sun, having recently burned through the last vestiges of cloud cover, shone brilliantly at the peak of the sky. His target was obvious.

At the center of the valley, sitting astride the river, was what looked like a convoluted network of ceiling-less silver corridors. They were built from large, shining panels which caught the light so intensely Elliot had to look away immediately after spotting them. Rough day for dealing with mirrors.

Setting off down the slope, he kept his pack winched tightly to his back in case he had to move quickly, a pouch with a few useful items at his waist, and his staff out and ready. The dark wood always seemed to stay just slightly warmer than his hand, its jade green carvings flashing in the sunlight.

He twirled the small black key Breka had given him that morning. It imparted a small amount of energy to growing plants, which seemed like a particularly weak enchantment to Elliot. The effect was completely unnoticeable to the naked eye, but he’d been using [Golden Touch] to amplify it while touching grass, vines, and trees ever since he’d hopped off the broadback.

The wide variety of enchanted items Breka had found for him over the last few months had paid off with a much more complete sense for what was happening as he used the skill. Each enchantment was unique, with the feeling of using [Golden Touch] on an item like this subtly different than how it felt to strengthen something that summoned flame or filtered water.

Ten minutes later, he paused by the entrance to the silver maze. The sheen of light coming off the walls forced him to narrow his eyes to slits. Breka had assured him this was the site of another antique, and not just based on a feeling this time, although she wasn’t sure exactly what it was. The warren was new, and weak, so she had come personally a few days ago to make sure it wasn’t another project of some hidden cabal.

What Elliot was really excited about was what she’d said right before he left.

“My plan was to have you make it through the rest of the first circle solely by delving for interesting antiques—no I won’t tell you why, don’t give me that face—but things are progressing too quickly, and I can’t have you this weak forever. When you get into the warren today, you may kill enough beasts to get yourself close to the next upgrade. Mind you I said close, not all the way. Retrieve the prize, bring it to me, and we’ll push you to the fifth step.”

No more holding back, or at least not nearly as much. He made a small flicking motion with the tip of his staff. Hundreds of hours of training had him itching for a fight where he could let loose, and understand how far he’d come.

It was hard not to feel like a waste of space sometimes. He needed so much handholding to make progress, and even with his progress Hadrian still made him look like a limp fish in combat. Part of him knew that was unfair, that Hadrian was exceptional despite their ages being similar while Elliot was still laying his foundation, but it was hard not to think of Rowan being miles ahead of him by now if she’d been given the same starting conditions.

He eased forward. The first thing that became apparent was that reflected light wasn’t nearly as much of a problem inside the maze. Despite the lack of a ceiling, some kind of faint gray haze lay at the upper boundary of the warren, diffusing the sun’s glare and keeping the corridor faintly in shadow. [Detailed Appraisal] named the walls mirrorsteel, a rare product of dense ethera that was nearly indestructible. Elliot spared a brief thought for whether or not it would be productive to try to retrieve some, but dismissed the idea as too difficult to be worth the trouble.

Instead of having to be hunted, the first enemies of the day came to him. He was crouched down, his notepad and pencil in hand and already sketching out a diagram to use for tracking his route, when something small and reddish-orange shot out around the corner ahead.

For an instant, Elliot froze. The creature made him think of a gremlin, with long, spindly limbs ending in hooked claws and a harshly angular face. It had stilled as well, looking in his direction, its eyes wide and jet black. Then his months of training kicked in and he sprinted forward, shoving energy into his staff with [Golden Touch].

Anything that looked this small and weak was typically either unusually problematic—toxin in the teeth, projectile attack, etc—or belonged to a pack. If it was the second option, Elliot needed to draw it into a fight before it retreated and drew an indeterminate number of its brethren back to hunt him.

The thing spun, scrabbling at the hard-packed dirt in an attempt to sprint back around the corner. Pack beast it is.

Hefting the staff in one hand, he turned his next stride into a skipping leap and hurled it like a javelin. The weapon streaked forward, catching the creature in its lower left side, then a spike of gold cut through its torso as the thing shrieked. Elliot closed the distance in a few seconds, scooping up the staff and delivering two quick strikes to its head and chest, finishing the beast’s struggle.

Grabbing an arm, he dragged it back to the entrance and crouched down, listening. When a minute had passed with nothing crying out or shooting around the corner he relaxed fractionally and appraised the corpse. It was something called a grelik. They were commonly found as myr in weaker warrens, but also seen in the deep north. As expected, they ran in packs, and when found in the wilds their groups could be tens of thousands strong. They would swarm over an area and pick it clean, like landbound locusts.

Elliot pulled out his bestiary and jotted down a quick note, glancing up every few seconds to make sure nothing was creeping up on him. The social structure involved sounded fascinating. Most things in the far north were powerful, and this was the first example he'd found of a weak beast controlling territory through numbers alone. The resources must be rich to sustain such a horde of the things. What kind of land could host armies of creatures like this, and not have it be the defining feature of the ecosystem? They must be migratory, but what a distance they'd have to go to give everything time to recover. He'd love to see it for himself.

Focus, Elliot.

The air was unnaturally still for a space with no ceiling, even one with walls stretching at least twenty feet up. Rising to his feet, Elliot began to pad forward. The small black key was still in his pocket, but for some reason the ground here had no growth at all to target despite being packed soil. Not even a solitary weed disturbed the earth.

The basic premise of a warren was still something he found confusing. A spike in the local ethera was perfectly reasonable, and he could swallow his Earthly preconceptions enough to accept that a physical structure could spring up out of nothing due to the excess magic. What confused him were the myr. He supposed, in principle, that if magic could create walls out of nothing then why not life. But that didn't seem consistent with the rest of the world. In his reading on the frequent terrain changes of Condyn, he'd stumbled upon numerous examples of physical items being created. There were the terrifying volcanic storms of the Fanghold, turning the dense environmental ethera into shards of obsidian glass that rained from above for days. Elementals—either sentient beings or strangely mobile boulders depending on what you read—seemed to create stone frequently enough for small mountain ranges to pop up in a matter of decades whenever they appeared in a new area. But nowhere had he ever seen anything about life being created from magic, except in warrens. And to be so similar to the native populations?

His reverie was interrupted by a screeching from up ahead. He’d wended his way through a few turns, noting each on his diagram, and so far everything had looked almost identical. The corridor ahead ended in a T-junction about twenty feet away. Elliot pushed himself up on the balls of his feet as his heart started to race. Which way were the noises coming from?

The question was quickly answered by four of the greliks swerving around the corner on the right, practically tumbling over each other in their haste. He took a few quick steps back, staff held tightly in an upper guard position. What had triggered them to arrive now? It had been so quiet.

A reverberating bellow answered his question almost immediately, as something tall and green stalked around the corner after the greliks. Its sinuous torso was mounted on two thick legs—like a velociraptor the size of an ostrich—with an eagle’s head and a body covered in a coat of thick moss.

Elliot reached into the pouch at his waist with one hand and began channeling [Golden Touch] into a cluster of small paper balls. The predator refocused, fixing him with its gaze instead of the still-fleeing greliks, its head and shoulders dropping low. Taking a deep breath, Elliot raised the tip of his staff slightly, bracing the other end against the ground.

The beast darted forward even faster than Elliot had imagined, its tail lashing back and forth to keep it balanced as it sprinted. The sharply hooked beak was open, and he could see the whites of its eyes gleaming.

Expelling a harsh puff of air, Elliot cut the flow of energy from [Golden Touch] and hurled the crumpled paper spheres, squeezing his eyes shut. They travelled just far enough to spread out into a loose cloud, then detonated with intense, strobing flashes of light.

Elliot kept his eyes closed, trusting in his ears to track the alarmed screeches coming from the monster barreling towards him. He let the tip of his staff slip further down, the other end still pressed into the ground, and then let his body collapse backwards.

The impact an instant later sent a sharp, jerking quiver through the wood, and he felt a puff of displaced air above his head along with the clack of jaws snapping shut. Then a scream, as the force enchantment activated.

He threw himself into a lateral roll, pushing up to his feet as quickly as possible and spinning back around, already grabbing the handle of the hunting knife he kept strapped across his back.

The beast was still, leaning up against the staff that still jutted from the ground, blood leaking down its back. The moss that covered its hide had already started to wither.

This could be interesting. Elliot stepped closer, careful to avoid proximity to anything sharp until he activated [Detailed Appraisal], confirming he was working with a corpse. It was called a mosstalon, a predator native to the wilds of the south, near to the Crowns. It had a powerful nature affinity, with the ability to blend in almost perfectly with a forest environment. Lucky for him to have fought it here, with mirrorsteel walls and nothing at all to disguise it. He cut off a clump of the moss, now dry and brown, storing it in his pouch to examine more closely later. It fascinated him how the plant seemed to be growing out of the monster's thick skin, rather than on top of it. Was it a commensal organism? A parasite? Or perhaps a strange feature of the mosstalon’s own body.

Elliot felt a shiver pass through him as his adrenaline began to ease. The fear associated with fighting had never completely left him. More and more though, the act of risking his life for power was becoming exciting, maybe even mildly addictive. He’d like to say it was about Rowan, about knowing he was pushing his way closer to finding her, but that wasn’t the full truth. Testing his training, forcing himself to his limits, feeling his heart practically beating out of his chest as a monster bit the air over his head; it was more thrilling than anything he’d ever experienced. Part of him was glad he was adjusting to this new world, but it made a bigger part of him feel slightly ill.

The enchanted flashbangs had been excellent, better than he’d planned for. They were intended for use as party toys, like sparklers back home, but through experimentation he’d found [Golden Touch] could increase the power of a single-use enchantment considerably further than one designed to last. There also seemed to be a connection to the underlying power of the item, with the degree to which he could empower an enchantment being inversely proportional to its base strength. The force enchantment on his staff, despite being bound to him, was still hard to get beyond a sixty percent strength increase. The flash papers, though, which normally produced a single pop of light and held very little energy, could be amplified several times over to the point where they could blind and confuse an enemy. Hopefully that was simply a matter of skill level, with him needing more practice or a higher level ability to work with stronger enchantments effectively, but it was impossible to know without more time and experimentation.

After making another brief note in the bestiary he paused to consider his next steps. The T-junction up ahead was the first opportunity so far to make a choice of route. Was there any better way to do this than random experimentation? He sighed. Maze warrens had been fun at first, but they were at least half of what he’d seen, and were getting old.

Drawing his focus briefly into his inner world, he winced. Even with just the two kills so far, he was already almost a quarter of the way through to the next step. Hopefully it was mostly the mosstalon, and hopefully those could mostly be avoided. Another variable to balance.

He decided to commit to the left branch, feeling a hint of longing for the metal rod he’d used as a guide through the previous warren. Breka had taken it back, and probably wouldn’t have let him keep it even if he’d asked. She liked him to solve problems in new and interesting ways.

The next hour was a slog. In an attempt to minimize his kill count Elliot retreated quickly whenever he heard the shrill yelps of the greliks, only turning to fight if he couldn’t duck around a corner or press himself to the ground in front of a junction long enough for them to pass by. Despite his caution, by the time it was late afternoon he’d already had to kill a dozen more greliks, and was over halfway to the fifth step. The mosstalons, at least, were mercifully rare. He was tired after his poor night’s sleep, and the constant reflections flickering in the burnished silver mirrorsteel were starting to give him a headache.

He knew the prize was close. The warren wasn’t huge, and his map was becoming more and more fleshed out. There were only a few more routes that made any sense, and the longer Elliot observed the myr the more he understood they were circling something, almost certainly the focal point of the whole system, which would contain the item he was seeking.

As he approached the next turn, still walking softly, the sigil on his palm twitched and then started to burn. He yelped, flapping his hand, but before a full second passed the sensation faded.

Then the ground started to shake, and all around him the mirrorsteel walls began to dissolve. 

As the silver faded to mist, and the mist faded to nothing, he saw that the entire structure of the warren had disintegrated into thin air.

All that was left was the river, a large item of some kind on the ground about thirty feet away, and the myr. Dozens of greliks, three mosstalons, and some kind of wiry ape-looking creature in the distance.

Every single one of them was frozen in place, but as the moment stretched, they started to notice him. Multiple greliks began to release sharp, undulating cries.

Elliot ran.