They filed over to the dais and climbed up. While they were getting into place, Sorin took a second to consider the appearance of another special upgrade on Floor 9. They’d done hardly anything there. In fact, they’d abused Liminal Gateway to skip the majority of the floor and then rushed straight for the portal guardian’s arena.
I guess that shoots my theory about our activity determining whether we get one of these unique reward Antechambers instead of a regular one. Maybe the tower is just doling them out whenever it feels like it—no rules and no pattern. Or maybe killing the kraken and the triton count.
The red light coming from the dais flashed once they were all finally in place, blinding Sorin despite his numerous soulprints designed to safeguard him from sensory attacks. Clear Eyes alone should have helped him see something, but the tower was too overpowering. Sorin wouldn’t have bet on even an S-rank soulprint to protect him.
Then the light was gone, leaving everyone blinking red spots out of their vision. Unlike the last time, there was no need to puzzle out what exactly had changed. It was glaringly obvious. Without so much as checking, he could feel exactly where every single person in the room was. Or rather, he could feel the location of their mosaics.
That wasn’t really true, of course. The mosaics didn’t physically exist, but Sorin could tell where they were attached to their climbers. From a practical standpoint, that meant he was perfectly aware of their locations, and it didn’t feel like something he could shut off. His mind interpreted it as a collection of red glowing circles crowded around him, each one distinct in some way that allowed him to separate them.
“You…” Rue trailed off.
“You’re blue,” Yoru blurted out for her.
“Huh?” Sorin asked.
“Your light, or flame, or whatever, it is,” Nemari explained. She pointed at Rue. “Red.” Yoru. “Red.” Odric. “Red.” Sorin. “Blue.”
“You already knew this,” Sorin said, confused.
“It’s one thing to take you at your word,” Yoru said. “Intellectually, I think we all believed your story. We’ve seen too many inexplicable things, otherwise. But this… This is direct evidence. I don’t even know how I know, but I know you’re blue in the same way the rest of us are red.”
Sorin rolled his eyes and stepped off the dais. “I’m glad a bit of colored light convinced you that I was telling the truth.”
“And I can feel him moving around,” Rue said. “Why does that feel so weird?”
It did feel strange, now that Rue pointed it out. The sensation wasn’t unpleasant, but Sorin didn’t really have the words to describe how his perception of the others’ mosaics shifted as he physically moved away from them. That’ll take some getting used to. It’s going to be a nasty distraction when we get into the next fight. Why did the tower give us this? How does it help fight the void?
“Has anyone else looked at the name?” Vendis asked. “Candle in the Void.”
A quick look in his soulspace confirmed that Vendis was correct. Strangely, the soulprint wasn’t part of the mosaic itself, but seemed to fill the space between each tile. The whole thing had a soft blue backlight to it now, stronger in the borders between each image and fading to almost nothing as it closed in on the soulprint embedded in each section.
It also showed Sorin how far he had left to go, and that confused him. He was still rank 14. There were seven sections if he counted the middle one he’d started with. Four of them were barely started, but the center was full, and he had two sections mapped enough to grant him the associated soulprint.
The mosaic might last to rank 40 before it was fully filled. Even if it slowed down as he climbed higher, he couldn’t see it still being empty beyond 50. Does that mean there’s another ring after this one? How many spaces would that be? I suppose they don’t necessarily need to be the same size and shape. Or I could be wrong, and the mosaic just ends at the border.
There was no answer to that, not now, at least, so Sorin turned his thoughts back to the blue light itself. Much like how looking at a soulprint in his soulspace told him everything he needed to know about it, observing the light brought out the knowledge of what it did. It was like remembering something he’d forgotten, except in this case, he’d never known it in the first place.
Candle in the Void turned each bearer into a sort of beacon, a lighthouse that guided travelers to them. Sorin was absolutely convinced that if he stepped into liminal space, he could make a path to anyone on his team, regardless of how far away they were. That sounded good in theory, but what the soulprint didn’t tell him was whether that beacon would attract the void’s attention, too.
Or worse, he realized, suddenly picturing a green mosaic that dwarfed his own. Has Samael known where I was this entire time? Even if he didn’t, if he’s got this ability, too, then he’ll definitely see me now.
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There was no reason to assume Samael had the exact same load-out the tower had given Sorin, but there was also no reason to assume otherwise, either. As always, he cursed the fact that he just didn’t know enough to make the objectively correct decisions, or even enough to cover his bases. Too much that he’d thought impossible had been proven wrong to dismiss any possibility.
The team stood there and traded speculations and theories about everything from what the tower really was to where they’d end up on Floor 10 to whether Sorin had a secret family back in the blue tower he was hiding from them. As impatient as he was to get on with things, he knew that they were really just catching their breath from the last fight. Rushing them through the exit portal wouldn’t help anyone.
The tower was less forgiving, however, and they only got a few more minutes to talk before the Antechamber itself made its displeasure known. They’d overstayed their welcome, as was evidenced by the flickering lights and slight but persistent rumbling that could be both heard and felt.
“Time to go,” Sorin announced, and everybody hurried to follow him.
He went through first, followed by Odric and Vendis just in case something brought him down and he needed emergency healing, then Rue and Yoru to check for anything lurking nearby that Sorin might have missed if he was busy dealing with the direct threat, and finally Nemari.
None of that was necessary. Floor 10, known more commonly as the Citadel, was a labyrinth of corridors, stairwells, and chambers that seemingly had no end. Cartographers had tried mapping it out, only to find that individual areas were subject to change from time to time, even if the overall placement of their relative positions remained constant.
It was essentially one giant ruin, hundreds of miles long and a dozen levels deep. Even those were just guesses, since it was impossible to get a true measure of its size. It expanded and shrunk as it saw fit, often swapping the exit locations between individual areas so that a climber could rarely ever be more specific than to say ‘Head west to get from the Crimson Halls to Mirespike or go down a level to the Dirge Lines.’
They’d emerged from the Antechamber into a square room made of granite blocks with no décor beyond the bloodstains on the walls and a set of iron-banded doors facing opposite each other, one on the east wall and one on the west. Sorin gave the bloodstains a glance and determined they were too old and dried to be anything more than scenery generated by the tower—freshly spilled blood would have been reclaimed along with the rest of the body.
“Thoughts?” he asked Yoru.
“Grinding Vault, maybe,” Yoru said, also studying the room. “Could be the Foreboding Walls, though this is a lot less, uh, foreboding than I was led to expect.”
“Let’s hope it’s not the walls. That’s guaranteed to be a long walk to go anywhere,” Sorin said.
“We can always just go straight to the hub if it comes down to it,” Nemari added.
“If we have to, but I think I want to stay away until we’ve gotten a chance to use the key,” Sorin said. “It’s better if no one knows we have it, and if there’s any floor that has higher ranked climbers lurking, waiting to mug someone who’s actually rank 10, it’s this one.”
“But how would they know we have a key?” Rue asked. “It’s not like we advertise the fact.”
“Servants gossip. The key is known to the Telpikes, and I have no doubt that information has leaked beyond the estate’s walls,” Yoru answered somewhat unhappily. “We’re probably safe, but I agree that it’s better not to risk it. An extra day or two of walking isn’t a big deal, and besides, think of all the anima we’ll collect. We’re once again on a rank-appropriate floor, and most of our advantages are gone with that.”
“We’re all close to rank 11 though,” Nemari said. “We should push that advantage as soon as possible, then try to reach 12 or 13 at minimum while we’re here. If the lion’s den is as profitable as all the stories make it seem, I have no doubt there’s a wealth of anima to be collected in there as well.”
“Alright, that’s enough talking about it,” Sorin said. “For as long as we’re on this floor, it’s best if nobody mentions it. You never know who might have some powerful eavesdropping soulprint and is just looking for rumors and clues so they can mug the rightful owner of a key.”
The team spent another few minutes preparing to start the next leg of their climb, mostly to finish drying out and to recover more of their lost anima, then they threw the doors open to see if there was any clue about which way to go. Unfortunately, both doors led to unadorned hallways made of the same gray granite as the room they’d landed in.
“Pick one at random,” Nemari suggested.
“No, west,” Yoru said. “If we’re in the Grinding Vault, west will take us to the core areas.”
“And if it’s not the Grinding Vault?”
“Then we’ll change direction once we find something that gives us a better idea of where we actually are.”
It would have been easier to simply send Sorin through the portal to Floor 10 like they’d done last time, and perhaps not everyone was convinced of Sorin’s need for caution, but they all agreed to spend an hour of their time to get a better idea of their location in the Citadel before they made any more decisions on how to proceed. With that in mind and no one having a better idea than Yoru’s, they went west.
Ten minutes later, they had their answer.
“Well, it’s not the Grinding Vault,” Sorin said.
“Indeed not,” Yoru replied with a scowl.
The Grinding Vault was an area famous for its copious amount of stone elementals and trapped kill rooms that crushed unwary climbers who triggered them. There was no concern over that, not with Sorin’s Living Earth helping him see such traps long before they encountered them.
“The Quarry is not a better option,” Nemari said.
The team stood at the rim of an immense hole, nearly a mile across and probably three miles down. Its walls were like jagged, winding stairways of unevenly spaced steps, the legacy of a million blocks of granite having been cut and removed. At least, that was the impression it gave. The truth was the tower had designed the area like this, and nothing any climber did could change that.
That said, climbers could and did cut stone for Floor 0 here. In fact, they could see no less than fifty people working in teams, utilizing powerful soulprints to slice cleanly through the granite and haul blocks of it up to the rim via complex rope-and-pulley systems that raised and lowered platforms.
The problem with the Quarry was that it was actually right next to the portal hub, barely a few miles away. That was great for the climbers harvesting granite for transport, but it also meant that they had a long, long walk ahead of them to reach the door that would fit the Lion’s Fang Key.
“Nothing much to be gained standing here,” Sorin said. “Might as well get going before someone notices us.”
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