Felun

“Take him out for a test run,” Iolite said.

Felun tensed, until he realised she was referring to the Healer—unconscious again, slumped over against the wall of the laboratory.

“You truly wish it?” Suria said. Her tail swished unhappily, dragging against the floor. “I have already harvested…some.”

“I dislike repeating myself, Suria,” Iolite said from behind her bench. She was tinkering with her inattention-gemstone and seemed to only have half an eye on the conversation. “I have analysed the contents. You have gathered barely a dozen in number, and most are weak in potency, at that.”

Among other items upon the bench—dried roots, copper cups, a bottle of foam—was the amphora. It practically pulsed with hidden magics. Felun looked it over uneasily; was it just his imagination, or had it deepened in colour since he’d retrieved it from its labyrinth-prison? He’d been so busy with other crappy tasks that he’d nearly forgotten of its existence.

“It is difficult to select risk-free targets,” Suria said sullenly. “First, I had to venture into the dregs of the city—”

“Yes, yes,” Iolite said. “I understand. Which is why I am handing you the reigns, for a little while. The binding is solid, and the healing abilities versatile; see what he can be commanded to do.”

Felun suppressed a shiver as the sleeping daemon emerged in his mind’s eye; coils upon coils, smothering a scrap of consciousness which had said I could feel every single one of my cells slowly dying, and, did you know, that the seconds pass in real time?

He shook the morbid thoughts away; it wasn’t as if he could do anything about the situation, other than be glad he was on this side of the enchantment.

Suria replied in hissing syllables, slipping back into the faery-language. Iolite, for once, didn’t interrupt with some preening spiel about switching back to include him. Instead, she cast a brief glance their way before setting down the inattention-stone.

“Let us step aside and speak for a moment,” she said.

Suria headed for the door, wings drawn close and tight. Iolite brushed past him without acknowledgement and closed the door.

Well, shit. Was he just supposed to stand here until they finished arguing? He glanced uneasily over to the Healer, allegedly still bound in a hundred loops of daemon.

The seconds pass in real time.

Was it really true, or had he just been fucking with him? It shouldn’t matter, either way—the guy was a murderer. Maybe Iolite had been right, about humans and sympathy for others of the same species.

The Healer stirred.

Alarm spiked through his brain like a physical sensation, and he dashed for the door.

“Iolite,” he said, flinging it open.

Iolite pivoted round from a sullen-looking Suria, every spine pricking up with agitation.

“What is it, Felun?” Her mouth curled into a scowl. “I thought it was well-implied you should not disrupt—”

“The Healer’s waking up,” he blurted out.

“Is that all?” Iolite blinked, her spines settling. “Ah, I suppose I did not inform you of that aspect.” She stepped forward to push him back into the lab, chitin-cold fingers planted over his chest. “The bindings will prevent him from inflicting any harm. Keep an eye on him.”

Felun made an indistinct sound of protest as she shut the door in his face. Half a second later, his nape prickled with the sensation of being watched—dungeonrunner instinct good for something after all. He whirled round to find the Healer standing up—or trying to. One arm was braced shakily against the wall, and he sort of looked like he was going to vomit.

“Hey now,” Felun said, reaching for his runequill. “Stay right there.”

“No thank you,” the Healer said queasily, and lunged.

Felun had a shield up in seconds, was already tracing out the beginnings of a concussive sigil—but the Healer stopped short, frozen mid-step, the muscles of his arms trembling as if he were pushing against an invisible barrier. Felun pried open his breaker-sense and saw not the slightest glint of enchantment indicating one.

“What the fuck,” Felun said aloud, before Iolite’s words came back to him: bindings. His half-written rune sizzled out, forgotten.

The Healer’s eyes locked with his as the pupils constricted, glinting red all over. When he coughed, smoke wisped out. He spasmed, crumpling to the ground. An unsteady wheeze tore out of his throat, the sound scraped raw on every edge.

Well, Felun thought. They must be very good bindings.

The Healer stumbled to his feet, catching his shoulder against the wall for support.

Felun tensed, but the Healer didn’t lunge again. Instead, he found his footing and stilled, one hand braced against the wall.

“Ah,” the Healer said. “That is very clever. Though not, I think, particularly useful.”

He took an unsteady step, away from Felun. For a moment, Felun wasn’t sure what walking away had to do with anything—until the Healer reached for one of the cauldrons, its contents violet and volatile.

Felun strengthened his shield and found that he didn’t need to. The Healer’s hand stopped well short, hitting another invisible wall—but it wasn’t an invisible wall, was it? The binding was all internal. A better way of looking at it would be to say the Healer’s muscles had cinched to a stop, blocking his intent from being carried out. But the sheer complexity that would require…his Breaker-sense expanded, curious and unbidden, and touched the edges of the magical field cast by those pale cuffs, that throttling collar.

The daemon slumbered still. Strands of enchantment pierced through its shape like siphoning tendrils, sunk into clusters of nerves, provoking reflex…those same filaments wound down, and further down still, past hundreds of scales and into the simmering dark. They pierced the Healer like knives: twined into every last millimetre of brain, notched down each segment of spinal cord. Realisation dawned. The bindings didn’t need to employ the cooperation of a daemon. It only needed to feed off the sleeping leviathan, binding itself in turn: a self-sustaining loop of pure magic and molten-hot intent, tearing through Healer to coils to Healer again.

It was an awful construct—a machine, almost, an automaton that would never wind down—formed of ancient, masterful craftsmanship. Iolite had reconnected the pieces, slotted pins home. There was no ghost of the old Breaker wreathing its surface: only his fears, only his imagination. He yanked himself back to full awareness as the Healer recovered, taking cautious steps away from the bench.

“Interesting,” the Healer said, sounding shaken. “Have they done this to you, too?” His eyes narrowed as he looked Felun up and down. “No, I think not. So. Why play the poisoner’s pigeon? You aren’t stupid enough to not see your own cage.”

He was saved from having to reply by the door clicking open behind him. The Healer tensed, twitched fractionally, then remained where he stood.

Iolite’s words rang out over Felun’s shoulder, crisp and clear. “All ready, I see. Be ready, fleshcrafter.”

For a moment, the Healer didn’t move but to twitch with outrage. Eyes narrowed, jaw clenched—and then, inevitably, an unnatural blankness misted over his expression. For a moment, his very edges seemed to ripple, as if he weren’t quite all here.

Felun sensed the ouroboros, turning in its sleep.

===

Glister streets did not glister. Or at least, not all of them. Suria’s route snarled through twisted Undercity alleyways so narrow that they had to tilt their shoulders diagonal in parts to make it through. The Healer went first, his steps like clockwork. Felun walked next, glad to only see the back of his head; every time Suria voiced a command, the Healer would grind his teeth against the red haze clouding his eyes. Suria herself strode behind them both, her presence as sharp as a gilt-edged blade—which was becoming familiar, actually. He was starting to feel more sick of it than anything else.

“Left now,” she said. “And down. There will be some stairs. And then we will see a gate, breaker-boy.”

The steps were narrow and steep, slick with drainwater and crumbling at the edges. Felun took shallow breaths; with every step ventured deeper came the scent of damp, rotting things. They passed faint letters carved into the walls—dead runes and what he guessed to be scriptures smoothed over by time. The gate, when they reached it, was half-unravelled already. It was a matter of moments for him to disassemble the wards.

An echo of prayer whispered past his cheek as he blinked his eyes back open. Whoever had crafted this once-splendid temple had imbued it with belief. Still, time had gnawed away at those remains…who would even want to live here? Felun hid his uneasy frown as he shook the stiffness out of his fingers.

Suria’s words floated over his shoulder like the rasp of a blade over nails. “The map says there will be a crossroads. Take the left turn. Walk until you encounter weakened humans and immobilise them.”

The Healer followed Suria’s instructions to their very meaning, spell-smoke leaking from his eyelids like fumes from an automaton. Felun had clutched his runequill at first, eyes trained on every errant twitch of the Healer’s fingers, every spasm in his step. But that had subsided quickly—now, they were some five hundred feet underground and still descending. He didn’t think the smoothening-out was an act; he’d seen the binding for himself, after all. Still, Suria had put him before her, and that likely didn’t mean anything good.

The light dimmed as they passed beneath the bones of ruined walkways, stacks upon stacks of levelled houses and empty street that were beginning to remind him of a labyrinth more than a lost temple-city. The air wasn’t heavy, but he expanded his Breaker-sense anyways—just enough to get a feel for the resonance of the place.

What he felt wasn’t exactly reassuring.

Gone was the usual, low hum of ambient magic. No enchantments sat in these walls—not even the weakest of wards. It wasn’t uncommon to encounter dead spaces, he reminded himself. A lack of magic didn’t mean sinister things lay in wait—often, it was quite the opposite. Nothing could hurt you if there was nothing there in the first place, as Orhan used to say. Or was it the other way around…? Felun shoved his uneasy reminiscing away as he withdrew from the Breaker-sense.

The crossroads-path opened up into a dripping hollow, much rougher-looking than any Undercity cavern he’d seen before. Shining stalactites dribbled from the roofs, but the ground was unpaved and uneven, formed of crushed rock.  Ragged tents perched amongst jagged boulders, crafted from scrap wood and grimy canvas—he counted perhaps a dozen, clustered in a rough corridor like a makeshift village. Everything was tinted with a dim, sickly green light cast by patches of glowing moss.

Something moved among the tents. Felun readied his runequill.

The Healer was already striding forwards, arm outstretched. A man’s face peered out from the nearest tent—gaunt-eyed and hollow-cheeked—then went slack, toppling over in perfect silence. The Healer caught his head before he hit the ground.

“Leave that one,” Suria murmured from behind. “Find them all.”

Her voice was barely audible to Felun himself. He wondered how the Healer could possibly hear her, before he saw her hand clasped over her mouth. Spell-light spiked out from between the gaps of her fingers.

The Healer faltered momentarily. Felun tensed, but the movement smoothed. The Healer laid the man onto the ground. He rose from his crouch and began to hunt.

Smoke trailed from his slack eyes and parted mouth, marking out a wake as he strode along the haphazard scatterings of tents. Pebbles crunched with every step. A few figures stepped from their tents to greet the intrusion and fell to their knees as they neared. Others turned to run at the sight—and Felun supposed the Healer’s creepy coalfire-eyes would be a sight—and crumpled too.

They all fell, first to their knees and then face-down. All soft and quiet, with only the faint shuffling of gravel to cushion their falls. His Breaker-sense showed him the flow of magic, invisible currents reaching into bodies and shutting them down. He realised, with a stir of dread, that he didn’t need his runequill at all. Not unless the Healer’s bindings broke. Straining his Breaker-sense, he saw consciousnesses doused like flickering candles. The Healer reached the far side of the cavern and began to drag bodies back towards them.

Suria growled as she drew alongside, still muttering commands into her own palm. There was a sack slung over her shoulder: roughly woven, dungeon-esque, scavenger-style. The only real reassuring thing about it was that it already looked full, the swell of some not-flesh shape beneath the fabric. She finished her stream of instruction and deigned to glance at him.

“Breaker boy,” she said absently, turning her gaze back onto the Healer. “Do you know how long it is that you humans are unconscious for?”

He shook his head.

“Then let us be quick.” There was a tight wariness in her voice; he could understand, somewhat. Being near the automaton-Healer felt like standing next to a ticking bomb.

She picked her way through the rocks to the first man who’d fallen, laying upon his side. Felun followed, eyeing the unconscious man with unease.

He looked even unhealthier up close: grey-skinned and undeniably haggard despite the several layers of robes plastered over his body. One of his hands clutched a cracked bowl; there was a wooden ring wound around one finger. Felun spotted a glint of copper a foot away and knelt to pick it up. It was a coin—had it rolled out onto the ground when he’d fallen? He frowned as he looked down at the fallen man again, at the empty bowl—he glanced over the cavern once more and wary recognition sparked. His stomach sank. Dead air—of course. These people had nothing; not even wards.

This was a slum-camp filled with lost acolytes, the cast-out and destitute. They’d kept this sort of thing hidden from him, back in Shenzhou, but he hadn’t needed to travel far out before such scenes made themselves apparent. The coin felt cold in his hand; why had they come here? He thought of broken fingers, severed arms—his stomach started to turn.

Iolite had told him, right before they’d left, that there would be no violence involved. But faeries were well capable of telling lies.

He placed the coin back into the man’s bowl and watched as Suria knelt by him. She unshouldered her sack. Relief flooded through him when she didn’t draw out a knife—followed by confusion, then dread.

Because—what the hell?

What was she doing with the amphora?

He recognised it, of course: his very own labyrinth of itching blisters had cemented its image into his memory. It looked as unremarkable as it had when he’d withdrawn it from its labyrinth door: a vase shaped from plain clay. So why did his heartbeat quicken at the sight of the thing? It didn’t look any different…or did it? It must be this place, the lighting.

He sent out feelers of Breaker-sense against his better judgement, tapping false fingers across the amphora’s surface as Suria placed it by the unconscious man’s head. Nothing. The clay was dead material, not dripping with rune-bright malevolence. So why was his pulse suddenly going a mile a minute?

Suria tilted the amphora’s mouth toward the man and murmured a word of power.

The air thickened. Felun froze still as his ears popped. It felt as though all the air had rushed from his lungs. There was no glow, no spellfire, no nothing. He caught sight of the amphora’s mouth over the curve of its rim, just a shadow-slice, bowed like a half-moon and—

And a weight like centuries crashed into him, overloading his Breaker-sense. The feel of the Songian Library bore down on his shoulders like a dozen different hands grasping, creaking joints and scratching bone, rolling hinges and grinning teeth. A feeling like blunt fingernails jabbed into his eye sockets, pressure without pain. Lights flashed in his peripheral vision, skittering sparks painted in un-colours. The curve of clay seemed to bulge to fill his vision, seemed to pulse before him—but that wasn’t the point. That wasn’t the point.

The amphora was just a decoy. It was real-but-not-real, like a—like skin stretched around a mouth that didn’t—didn’t even dare to—

Exist—

Until it was open.

Until it reached for the unconscious man with many-branched limbs, all-devouring. He saw, in the space between one heartbeat and the next, fingers tugging, ripping, intangible pieces shearing away.

Magic. Swallowed whole. As simple as water filling a vessel.

White-hot knowledge seared tracts into his head. His senses withdrew like a hand upon contact with a burning coal. He whipped back into his body mid-fall, coming to with a jolt as he whacked his palms against stony ground. He drew a wheezing breath as grey specks throbbed before his eyes. A feathery veil descended over half of his vision. Breaker-sense went brainsick, sending information that simply didn’t make sense.  Magic trembled in his veins like a cornered animal, baring teeth as it shied away. The backs of his eyes bubbled without sensation.

Nothing hurt. Nothing at all. His hands didn’t itch. His nose wasn’t even bleeding. The amphora cored him open anyway. It peeled his eyes like fruits for the crime of looking too closely.

He closed his eyes, seconds too late. Distantly, he was aware of Suria shouting something. Even more distantly, he was aware that he’d folded down onto himself. Laid supine, like a mimicry of the man the Healer had attacked. Chitinous fingers pried his eyes open and he saw Suria’s snarling jaw, blurry behind a film of black spots and jagged lightning-spots zipping along his peripheral vision.

Carafe, he thought dazedly. Artefact.

Suria yelled some more. He couldn’t parse meaning from her words, even though he knew they weren’t in the faery-language. It was as if the amphora—or maybe the thing inside, the wet, writhing object with clay for a shell—had taken hold of his thoughts, forcing him to focus only upon it. Each time he tried to pry himself away, remind himself of dungeonrunning principles for dealing with rare hazards such as this, it would claw at his ears and nose and chin and force him to think of nothing but its physical properties. He couldn’t even see it anymore, not with his crumbling eyesight. He could tell, just barely, that Suria had wrenched his head away. But he could practically feel every pore in the clay beneath his fingertips, could almost calculate the geometry of its volume and curves to mathematical perfection.

Break, the rational part of his brain told him, echoing Orhan’s shitty old lessons. Break away now, before you break yourself.

Yeah, okay—it was one thing to know it. Another entirely, to accomplish.

His thoughts tangled, artificially steered away from the important thing, the objective. Why was he here, anyway? Why? Because Iolite…? She couldn’t have meant this to happen. He was as useful a tool as the Healer was—ah, and there was the Healer, crouching by his side with eyes glowing red, the whites fully gone. His Breaker-sense lashed out and skittered over the outermost edge of binding daemon-coil, turning in its torpor. The sensation of shifting scales was a second-long respite before the amphora took him back into its fold. Breaker-sense sank back into the feeling of fired clay, dry hollows, hunger-magic.

Through the haze of amphora-thought, he heard Suria speak some sort of instruction. The Healer placed a hand onto his forehead and the flashing lights disappeared, along with the drifting shapes. The veil over his vision pulled away, and everything looked normal again. His thoughts, on the other hand…

The pressure was still there. Reason floated to the forefront of his mind as Suria started to drag him away from the amphora: physical distance helped, some. But not nearly enough. If he didn’t cut away the invading amphora influence, he’d lose his magic, or go mad. Or both.

He knew this for a fact. The amphora’s influence worked against itself in that aspect. Perhaps centuries spent soaking in ambient Songian knowledge was good for something after all. Or not—there was no time to be distracted now, revelling in the history crowding into his brain. Awareness relayed a morsel of information: his shoulder bumping against stone as Suria propped him up against the wall of the cavern.

He ignored it, instead seizing the tenterhooks embedding into his false-self, the self he used for diving into enchantments. Dry dust filled his mouth, packed into his cheeks and beneath his tongue, choking every last bubble of air from his body. He reminded himself that this wasn’t real, that he didn’t actually need to breathe here. On to the actual problem: clay quills pierced the head of his not-exactly-a-body, the skull like an archery target. It had happened without him even noticing until now. How? How had it been painless? Was it because—no, questions were a distraction. Never mind. Plucking each quill out sent a spike of pain through his actual head, and real blood dripped from his real nose this time. Deep cuts opened across his hands, then closed like an afterthought—good thing Suria had left the Healer next to him, or something.

He wasn’t too sure what was happening outside the grit-grinding task of pulling each clay-shard out of his own head. His magic neutralised each one, but they were all bound up with invisible strings, the more visible bits only acting as anchors. He had to snip each loose, fighting against filaments corded like muscle. The last quills blistered his hands as he tugged them free. Infinitesimal veins spiralled upwards like a spider’s net. If he looked up—he didn’t, he’d learned his lesson now, thank you very much—he’d probably see the thing, or the biology, or the machine, or perhaps another word that didn’t yet exist—that had spun them.

Reaching out, he cut the last one away. His stomach turned on itself as he fell free of its influence, noise curdling to words in his ears as he floated back into his own body. His eyes refocused. He blinked, gaze now crystal-clear.

“…Wake up,” Suria was saying firmly, not-quite-shouting. She filled his view with crisp-edged gold, shaking him roughly by the shoulders. “Felun, it is imperative that you—”

“I’m here,” he croaked. He could feel blood drying on his face, but his mouth was, weirdly, disgustingly dry. His tongue tasted powdery; physical grit scraped against his teeth. The clay dust hadn’t been real. Had it? Perhaps, with things as old as these, enchantment straddled the line of real and not-real.

Suria let go of his shoulders. She dusted off her hands as she stood, muttering curses beneath her breath. He waited as she passed a hand over her face, spines twitching with agitation. The Healer stood off to the side like a human-sized automaton, still breathing smoke.

“What was that?” Suria finally demanded. “What, in all Hive’s name, happened there? What did you do?”

“I don’t know,” he started, then shook his aching head. He did know, sort of. It had made itself clear, in a roundabout way. “It didn’t like being looked at. Changed shape when observed. It was…I think it was a Breaker thing.”

Suria shot him a withering look. “This was meant to be uncomplicated,” she said.

“Was it?” he asked, suddenly angry. His head hurt like hell, he’d just finished saving himself from getting possessed by a vase, of all things, and now she was blaming him for the mess Iolite had put them into? The outrage simmered; he pushed it back momentarily, but he could feel the days—the weeks, the months—weighing on his shoulders like lead. “Maybe you could’ve explained that in the first place. A little heads-up would’ve been nice. ‘Oh hey Felun, we’re going to steal magic from random people; just stay out of the way and try not to look at the vase.’”

“Iolite should have. You aren’t truly meant to be here.”

“Then why am I?” he snapped. “Because Iolite can’t bother buying enchantments, and I’m your walking key? This isn’t another labyrinth. What the fuck—” he gestured at the campsite, “are we doing? Did these people wrong you? Did they attack your Hive? The stuff with the shadow kingdom and the mages—yeah, okay. But why take it this far?”

“We’re acquiring resources,” Suria said coldly. “According to Iolite’s specifications.”

“For what? Is she—” He wracked his brain for reasons to want so much ill-gotten power. “Is she trying to rebuild your Hive, or is she trying for the kingdom? Because father’s already…” He trailed off.

She stared him down. “Iolite wouldn’t endeavour to place your kin in danger, boy. That would violate the terms of our agreement. But beyond that, I cannot say. The minds of Archivists are mysteries to one such as I.”

“So you’re not just being mysterious because you don’t trust me? You’re blindly obeying her?” he asked, too far gone to care for politeness.

“She follows the will of Titania Fauna, and I trust the will of a Titania. It is not a thing for humans to understand.”

“How do you know that’s—what if the Titania’s wrong? Or what if Iolite’s lying?”

“That is a dangerous accusation to make,” Suria said. “Keep your human mouth shut when our words do not concern you, breaker-boy. If you mean to start a mutiny, then it will not begin with me.”

“That’s not what I—” he snapped, then gave up. What did it matter what a tool meant to do? She was right. He wasn’t meant to be here at all. If things had gone fine, he’d be wandering around Kraedia without a care in the world. He put his head in his hands. Everything felt disjointed in the aftermath of wrenching himself free, like teeth pulled loose and put back into the wrong sockets. Like splinters of bone; like Ishaan, still alive and unconscious in the aftermath and depending on him to drag the both of them back alive.

“How many?” he asked heavily.

“How many of what?”

“How much magic are you harvesting with that thing? How many people?”

“Seven hundred and seventy seven,” Suria said, tilting her head. He hadn’t expected such a precise answer. “Actually, it is less. It was partway filled when we retrieved it. Still. Does that number outweigh your loyalty to your crippled friend?”

His mouth felt dry.

She barked out a bitter laugh. “Calm yourself. It doesn’t hurt them. Even if it did, they will get it all back.”

“What? That doesn’t make sense.”

She tapped her own forehead, right between the eyes. “You only got hurt because you were looking. They weren’t looking.”

“You took their magic,” he said, and felt a bit sick at the thought of losing his own. “How can they get it back?”

“If there is a spring which fills very slowly and I drink all of the water out of its pool, will it not refill itself if I leave it alone forever after?”

“You can’t be sure it works like that.”

“Don’t you humans already do this?” she asked disgustedly “You call them ‘tithes’? Or perhaps it’s only popular on this accursed continent. In any case, your predecessor was quite convinced.”

“The dead one?” he spat. “She never even saw this thing.”

“Iolite knows the value of research,” Suria said impatiently. “She set your predecessor to the task, before the madness came on. Read her notes, if you don’t believe me—the ones at the back of her book. She thought she was so clever with the disappearing inks, but we could all smell the lye she kept at the bottom of the chest. Now, are you done feeling sorry for humans who would rob you of your own magic given half the chance?”

“I’ve had enough,” he said. “I have to help you, right? That’s how it goes? Or help Iolite, at any rate. I’ll deal with other labyrinth stuff if that’s what you want. But this—no. Enough. I won’t help you with this. You don’t even need me.”

There was a long pause.

“That would be wise,” Suria eventually said. “I will speak with Iolite. It’s likely she’ll grant you your wish; that one is, after all, far more useful.” She lashed her tail, indicating the Healer. “Stay here, now. Don’t use your magic. Certainly do not observe, as you did previously.”

She picked her way back through the cavern, the Healer at her heels. Felun’s gaze—stripped of its Breaker-sense—skimmed over the shape of the amphora and he tensed reflexively, but nothing reached for him. No scratching fingers or pointed teeth, no turning of enchantment or bone-dry clay. His pulse rolled in his veins, slowing to a normal rhythm.

He watched as Suria picked up the amphora and worked her way across the camp. When some of the people stirred, the Healer put them back to sleep. Magic detached from blood and bone and bodies like keys clicking out of locks. Like runes floating off paper. Like a gauze peeling away from the backs of his eyes. There was no screaming, no glowing, no sprays of blood. Only a faint disturbance in the air, rippling across the cavern to touch gently at his brow.

Felun looked away and let himself drift.