Book 7: Chapter 20 - I Did It My Way (RAW) (Patreon)

Chapter 20 - I Did It My Way

“Steel breaks, courage fails, and men die. An Adventuring Company endures only when each warrior trusts the blade beside him more than the fear within. That is why the Crimson Blades return when better men do not.” 

- Attributed to Vaska Lowens.

Clara stared across the lake, her face washed pale beneath the impossible blue light. “Atarantu,” she whispered.

The name, however, meant nothing to me.

“What did you call it?” I smirked.

The Magister stepped nearer to the edge of the stone shelf, her staff held tightly in both hands as she studied the island.. “There is a tablet in the Barnesby Museum,” she said. “Older than the kingdom, or so the historians claim. I copied part of it during my first year at the Academy.”

Her eyes remained fixed upon the ruins “Ere the first kings set their names upon stone, Atarantu stood upon the lake, wrought of blue rock that neither rain nor age could mar. No road led unto it, for the waters bore only those whom the city suffered to approach,” she quoted

The words were spoken softly, yet the cavern returned them to us in fragments and echoes.

Jean glanced toward the tunnels behind us. “Well, that is not unsettling at all.”

Clara scarcely seemed to hear him.

“There was another line,” she continued in explanation. “Atarantu abideth, and that which dwelleth at its heart knoweth not abandonment.”

Her gaze moved toward the tall structure at the center of the island, its true shape obscured by distance and the faint blue haze hanging over the lake.

Bloody more exposition, I thought snidely.

Vaska followed her attention. “And the scholars knew this place was beneath the hills? Knew that the gates of the Trial lead here?”

“No.” Clara shook her head slowly. “Most believed it had stood somewhere along the coast before the sea changed. Others claimed the tablet referred to a city in the north. No ruins matching the description were ever found. It should not be here, even a fragment of its unreality.”

“Looks pretty real to me,” Roberts commented.

A slow ripple passed across the lake. The surface of it bulging for a moment before becoming still once more. Whatever significance the ruins held could wait. At present, the more immediate problem lay between us and them.

“The crossing will not be a problem,” I repeated again. “But you will all need to move back.”

Vaska turned from so-called Atarantu and regarded me with open suspicion. “How far?”

“Beyond fifty paces. Preferably farther, unless any of you possess an urgent desire to discover whether your armor can rust while you are still wearing it, or your flesh to fall from your bones,” came my warning.

It was also, in a way, a test. My dark magics would only affect those is saw as the enemy.

Jean looked down at his breastplate, then back at me. “You might have begun with that.”

My flat stare was all the answer I gave him.

Vaska continued studying me, perhaps waiting for some sign that this was another joke. When none arrived, he motioned the others away from the lake. Clara required no further encouragement. She gathered her robes with one hand and retreated quickly, her staff striking the stone with every third step. Roberts followed with considerably less haste but no argument, while Lorn and Kristoff moved far enough back to place several of the great ferns between themselves and me.

Jean remained where he was. “Fifty paces,” I reminded him.

“I heard you.”

“Then this is either defiance or an inability to count. Move back, or I will throw you back for the pure pleasure of it,” I growled.

He gave me a suspicious look before following the others. 

Vaska was the last to withdraw. “Whatever you intend, do not bring the ceiling down.”

He retreated beyond the others, though he kept his great sword drawn and resting against one shoulder. Sensible enough. If I failed, whatever lived beneath the lake would undoubtedly take the opportunity to prove his caution justified.

I remained alone at the water’s edge, taking a moment to center myself. The submerged causeway ran ahead through the dark lake, visible beneath the surface for perhaps thirty paces before depth and reflected light swallowed it. Beyond lay Atarantu, if Clara’s fragment could be trusted, its terraces and shattered halls gleaming beneath the vast crystal overhead.

The water stirred again. Not greatly. A ripple here, a slow swelling there. The lake possessed too much stillness for any disturbance to be accidental. Something below watched the shore, waiting for us to commit ourselves to the crossing. I could feel it.

I set the butt of my halberd against the stone and raised my hands. Magic was easiest when given voice. Spoken words shaped thought, divided intent into manageable parts, and told the world precisely how it was expected to manifest.

Spoken casting was also the province of those who had yet learned to get good.

My fingers moved instead and combined with my Silent Casting gave motion the function of language. One hand traced a descending curve before my breastplate, while the other divided it with two hooked gestures and closed into a fist. The spell construct formed without sound, an arrangement of intention, Mana, and the familiar certainty that all things were already dying.

Improved Entropic Aura hungrily awakened. Nothing visible emerged from me, at least not to ordinary sight. Yet I felt the power spread in every direction as a great sphere of dissolution. To my perception, it resembled invisible gray waves pouring from the center of my body, expanding until they reached the limits of my control approximately fifty meters away.

The voices, my companions whispered to me, and I cast Sage’s Sight to see what the voices were telling me.

The Trial of the Goddess resisted the alien power. Its resistance was not conscious, at least that was not what the voices told me. There was no mind behind it that they could immediately identify. Rather, the entire cavern seemed constructed around a refusal of foreign magics. The foreign laws maintaining the place pressed against my spell, blunting its edges and attempting to deny its existence.

Clara had felt much the same resistance when she attempted to raise the causeway. She had treated it as something to overcome through patience, negotiation, strength, or the gradual surrender of herself to Earth.

My magic preferred the inevitable, the inexorable—the very corrosion of existence that could not be denied. Improved Entropic Aura pressed against the Trial’s defenses and began to eat. The effect was subtle at first. The unnatural permanence surrounding the lake thinned by fractions, its hidden protections fraying beneath a force that did not attempt to command the dungeon so much as remind it that nothing was exempt from the decay of the universe itself. And like that, the invisible obstruction that had refused Clara’s magic weakened with every passing moment.

I formed another series of gestures, narrower and more intricate than the first. More forceful. Overboost answered as I drew upon it, a spell made not to accomplish anything alone but to drive another working beyond its natural limits.

Through experimentation, I had learned that Overboost could empower only one spell at a time. I could not magnify every active enchantment merely because doing so would be convenient. When transferred to another spell, its previous augmentation ended immediately. It was an irritating limitation, though perhaps a necessary one.

Without such restraints, I might eventually enter the realm of the Divine and I selected Freezing Aura even as my hands completed the final gesture.

Aura spells temporarily reduced my maximum Mana while still active, and this combination did so. Only much greater as a full four points were taken off my maximum.

Then the cold erupted around me. It did not arrive as wind, snow, or storm. Heat simply began to disappear. Moisture condensed upon the black-and-gold plates of my harness before turning to frost, silvering the edges of my gauntlets, vambraces, and pauldrons. The stone beneath my feet whitened with an unnatural frost.

At the edge of the lake, a thin skin of ice appeared around the toes of my sabatons. It spread outward in delicate lines, tracing the seams between the fitted stones of the submerged causeway. For several breaths, the growth remained slow enough to watch: clear water paling, clouding, and becoming rigid beneath an intricate web of frost. Then Improved Entropic Aura, laced upon my aura, found another weakness in the Trial’s resistance.

The freezing accelerated with a vengeance.

You have learned Improved Freezing Aura (lvl.1)

You have learned Aura Manipulation (lvl.4)

Ice rushed across the surface with the dry crackle of cold fire. It spread outward from me in a widening circle, first by paces and then by dozens of paces. Pale fractures raced ahead through the black water and branched into countless smaller veins.

Frost climbed the nearest reeds and plants. Broad leaves stiffened, their faint pulses slowing before stopping altogether. The Trial pressed back, but its resistance had already begun to fail. Entropy gnawed at the protections woven through the lake while Overboost forced Freezing Aura deeper into the opening.

The water fought to remain water. To fight the inevitable change. And to fight Entropy is to ultimately lose, so it lost.

I pulled my halberd free from the ice and stone at my feet, and stepped onto the causeway. The ice beneath my first footfall was not yet thick enough to support an ordinary armored man. Beneath me, however, lay the fitted stones of the submerged road. Water rose nearly to my knees, then froze around my greaves before I completed the next step.

I tore one leg free, breaking the newly formed ice, and continued forward as the aura remade the damage behind me. And, with every pace, the crossing became easier.

The water over the causeway froze solid first, bound between the ancient stones below and the expanding sheet above. Beyond its edges, the ice remained thinner, though it thickened rapidly beneath the unnatural cold.

Trapped bubbles gathered beneath the surface in pale clouds, and something long and dark passed below them. It moved beside me for several paces before turning away as the cold deepened.

I smiled behind my dark visor, even as behind me, the Crimson Blades had undoubtedly begun discussing something. However, their voices reached me only as faint, distorted sounds beneath the cracking ice and the low hum of my silent magical duel. Distance and the cavern’s strange acoustics ultimately stole the words before they arrived.

The Mimic corrected the inconvenience. Something stirred beneath the flesh of my left forearm. A thin black tendril moved upward beneath the armor, slipping between the joints of my rerebrace and pauldron before emerging along the outside of my upper arm.

Living organic darkness gathered there and formed a small, wet eye upon the black plate. It blinked once, and my vision divided. Through my own eyes, I saw the frozen road and the distant ruins. Through the Mimic’s eye, I saw behind myself without turning.

As ordered, The Crimson Blades stood beyond the reach of my aura, gathered near the great ferns and the blue-lit stone shelf. Vaska had folded his arms. Clara watched with naked concentration, her gaze fixed upon the widening ice as though attempting to understand which laws I had broken.

Jean was speaking animatedly and gesturing toward me with his mace, and Kristoff answered him. In response, Jean struck him lightly upon the shoulder with the back of one gauntlet.

Whatever the exchange had been, Lorn appeared to find it amusing. Roberts did not, though Roberts looked as if he were sick.

I returned most of my attention to the path ahead while allowing the Mimic’s eye to remain open. A bulge formed beneath the ice to my right, starting to follow me. The dark shape moved parallel to the causeway, large enough to displace the water beneath the frozen surface. The ice bowed upward as something struck it from below. Cracks radiated across the surface but immediately began sealing beneath the aura.

The creature struck again, but this time, part of the ice shattered and a long neck erupted from the water in a spray of broken fragments. The thing attached to it resembled some diseased union of eel, lizard, and deep-sea corpse. Pale scales covered its throat. A vertical mouth split open beneath a crown of whisker-like tendrils, displaying several rows of inward-curving teeth.

Two small forelimbs clawed at the edge of the broken ice as it lunged for my head. I grinned, and with my free left hand and caught it by the neck. The impact drove my arm back perhaps an inch.

Its mouth snapped shut a handspan from my visor. Tendrils whipped across my helm, scraping uselessly against the Adamantium. The creature writhed, its body still mostly beneath the water, and tried to twist free.

I tightened my grip, and its hard scales compressed first. Beneath them, cartilage gave way with a series of wet clicks. The creature’s jaw opened wider, though no sound emerged beyond a bubbling hiss. Its claws scratched furrows across the ice, and rest of its body convulsed beneath the surface.

“Pathetic,” I told it, closing my hand.

The neck collapsed within my fist as bone, or whatever structure served in its place, broke completely, and the creature’s head sagged sideways. I tore it farther from the water, exposing several meters of pale serpentine body before releasing it.

The corpse struck the ice and slid back into the hole from which it had emerged. The water around it froze almost immediately, locking the broken neck and part of the head beneath a clear layer. One lidless eye remained visible below the surface, staring upward as frost spread across it.

A minor notification appeared at the edge of my sight.

You have slain ??? 56 experience gained.

I dismissed it once I read it, secretly delighting in the harvest it represented and prayed that it was not a unique creature. The ice beneath my feet continued advancing.

Within the reach of Improved Freezing Aura, the lake hardened quickly enough to hear. Plates of ice formed, pressed together, and fused as I created a focused winter. Water withdrew from beneath the expanding surface, displaced by the growth of ice and forced through narrow gaps among the vegetation. The great reeds groaned as frost climbed their trunks, and teeth-lined flowers closed around themselves and became brittle statues.

Then the first line of ice passed beyond the fifty-meter limit. My aura could reach no farther. I felt its boundary as clearly as the reach of my own arms, a sphere beyond which the spell possessed no direct influence.

Still, the freezing did not stop. Cold already gathered within the water continued to spread. Heat flowed toward the region from which I stripped it away, and the surrounding lake paid the difference. The edge of the ice advanced beyond my magical reach, slower now, but inexorable.

Fractures ran into the luminous distance beneath the great blue crystal as ordinary physical law took up the work where magic ended. For all the Trial’s miracles, its stolen geography and concealed doors, even this place remained burdened by rules that heat moved, and if it moved enough away from the water, the water froze.

The universe obeyed the laws that my society had discovered long ago, and a cruel laughter rose within me. It began as a low sound behind my helm, more breath than voice. Then another section of the lake hardened beyond the aura’s limit, and the laughter escaped in full. It carried across the cavern, rolling over the ice before returning from the distant walls in broken echoes.

Minor experience notifications flickered across my inner vision as the ice I had conjured killed those too slow, or too stupid, to escape. 

But where was all the heat going?

The lake had been placed here as a barrier. Something beneath its surface had been prepared to murder us as we crossed. The Trial had the narrow causeway, and the certainty that those who entered would accept the puzzle and challenge as it had been presented.

But to me, a puzzle was a chance to think outside of someone else’s defined rules.

Behind me, Jean stopped speaking. And, through the Mimic’s eye, I saw every member of the Crimson Blades staring in my direction. Clara’s mouth had fallen slightly open, while Vaska, although looking slightly pleased, slowly shook his head.

The island remained far ahead, but the road toward it was no longer submerged. Ice stretched over the causeway in a widening band, thickening beneath every step I took. Beyond it, the lake continued surrendering its heat to the void I had created.

I walked onward, laughing beneath the false blue sun, while the lost city of Atarantu waited.

Secretly, I hoped that more of the Lake’s monsters would bare their fangs at me.