“Out,” Serenity muttered. “Dad was thinking of getting out. And maybe a bit of Alice in Wonderland. What the heck? How does falling down a rabbit hole even connect to the Well of Souls?” He had his eyes closed as he tried to leave his great-grandfather’s library for the third time. Neither of the previous tries had worked; it was difficult to picture something based on a simple, incomplete description. Lex wasn’t able to say what he was concentrating on other than “out” and that meant Serenity didn’t have a good idea of what to focus his Intent on.
He was fairly confident that was the problem, anyway. Whatever it was, Serenity could tell the library was still there; the third attempt was a failure as well. Apparently visualizing a hole and a rabbit wasn’t enough.
Serenity wasn’t entirely certain he was ready to leave, anyway; that might have been the real issue. He didn’t want to leave Blaze behind yet he had no way to communicate with the other man. Perhaps that was a better thing to focus on?
Before Serenity even realized he’d changed locations, he was floating in a darkness that wasn’t dark. A fire burned next to him, shapeless and hungry, yet clearly Blaze. Shadows flickered around them both; any shadow that approached Blaze dissolved in his light, but there were always more shadows.
“That worked. I didn’t do anything different other than what I thought of. Why…” Serenity muttered to himself. He hadn’t figured out the rules of this space yet; it was clearly shaped by Intent, yet that couldn’t be all of it. If it were, people who passed through it wouldn’t leave echoes of themselves behind. No, there was something else here and Serenity wanted to know what it was.
It probably wasn’t something he could figure out quickly. The research he’d done in the Broken Mirror indicated that there was an entire project working on figuring out the Well of Souls network once upon a time; if it were easy to figure out, it would already have happened.
“Serenity?” Blaze sounded surprised. He had to be expressing his Intent since neither he nor Serenity was in their body at the moment, but Blaze still sounded exactly like himself. “I wondered how we’d catch up to each other. Does this place have an end?”
That gave Serenity pause for a moment. He hadn’t even thought about the fact that they might be moving; he hadn’t noticed it if they were, but asking about an end only made sense if they were moving. “Are we moving? I can’t tell in the darkness.”
“We are,” Blaze confirmed. “That’s why we keep running into more soul-shreds. Aren’t they attacking you? They seem to want to eat me or something. It’s probably nothing more than a desire to be whole again; there isn’t much left of most of them.”
“Is that what those shadows are?” Serenity took a good long look around himself. He’d noticed the shadows but he hadn’t really paid attention to where they were. It was obvious once Blaze pointed it out that they were clustered around the fire and seemed to be avoiding Serenity.
“They’re staying away from me. I wonder if it’s because they can actually tell what Skills I have.” Down to the River was an excellent Skill to deal with something Blaze called a “soul-shred”. At least, he thought it was.
Down to the River
When you physically envelop a being with a soul, you may choose to send their soul to the River of Souls. The soulless body will remain if applicable. Success rate depends on Ambit. When you do this, you will gain some of their knowledge but not personality. Decreased chance of success in any form other than Sovereign of Potential.
Yeah, that should work on a soul fragment that touched him just like it would work on a person. He’d never tried it in any other form than his Sovereign form, so he didn’t know just how much of a decrease it meant, but he was in his Sovereign form right now. That form was simply correct for this space in the same way the dragon form was right for his great-grandfather’s library.
“It’s probably because you smell of Death,” Blaze countered. “The same way I can’t hide what I am or my bloodline, your Death Affinity is showing through your normal methods of hiding it.”
All he normally did was control his aura. That was enough since it was the simplest way for people to casually notice something. It didn’t protect against things like his own Vital Sight or even Magesight; those were rare enough at low Tiers that he simply hadn’t bothered to set up the necessary protections. He probably could, now that he was Tier Eight; he certainly had the mana pool for a continual shielding spell, and that was the simplest way to manage a veil. It hadn’t seemed necessary.
Truthfully, it still didn’t; not only did he need to conserve mana while he was on Earth, but on Earth no one would care if he had a significant Death Affinity. They wouldn’t know that it was more than that. In many ways, it was the same reason he hadn’t bothered while traveling; no one really cared about people who would be gone the next day as long as it didn’t look like they’d be getting into a fight before they left.
On the other hand, Blaze had never commented on it before. “Is there something about this space that makes it more obvious?” Was he perhaps visually made of Death the way Blaze was made of fire?
“You smell of Death,” Blaze repeated. “Dry and a bit dusty with a hint of the copper smell of blood. Old death, perhaps? Certainly not Death where life of any sort would thrive.”
Huh. That was an interesting interpretation; Serenity wouldn’t have said his Affinity was old but it certainly wasn’t the sort of Death that made Life thrive.
“So why can’t you tell we’re moving?” Blaze sounded honestly curious. “It seems quite obvious to me.”
To Serenity, it looked like shadows were moving up to Blaze. None seemed to leave; of course, Blaze was evaporating them as fast as they approached him, so most of them never had a chance to leave.
“Lack of points of reference, maybe?” Serenity couldn’t see anything other than darkness. “Or maybe I’m not seeing it because I came here while thinking of you and you’re not moving. At least, not relative to me.” That seemed fairly likely. Spaces based on Intent could be weird; they weren’t physical. “In which case, maybe that’s what I need to change in order to get us out of here? Maybe I need to realize we’re heading towards an exit, preferably the one my parents used?”
Blaze didn’t answer. He was probably letting Serenity work through it on his own; that was a good choice. Serenity was clearly thinking out loud. Serenity would have preferred a solid answer, but Blaze probably didn’t have one.
This wasn’t the first ancient artifact Serenity had run into. Admittedly, it was the first one of a massive scale that he’d run into at such a low Tier, but he’d seem artifacts the size of moons in his past life as Vengeance and then the Final Reaper. They could be finicky but they always made sense to the person who built them.
At least, if they were built correctly and not failing. Serenity tried to push away his memories of “failed” gargantuan endeavors and those destroyed by time and combat; this one was old but it seemed intact. More than that, he had historical information on it, information that said it was expected to work. He just had to figure out how.
Movement. That was the common thread between what Blaze said and what Lex said. Blaze saw himself in a dark space where he was moving into the spaces of the shadows, or something like that, while Lex saw himself falling down a hole like in Alice in Wonderland.
No, that wasn’t just movement. It was movement they didn’t control. Serenity wasn’t moving; perhaps that was because he instead controlled his movement? Perhaps because he was trying to get somewhere specific, or perhaps because he wanted to go somewhere the Well didn’t know how to send him?
Or maybe he’d stopped because his initial intent, to find his parents, had been satisfied as far as the Well was concerned. That seemed plausible; moving to Blaze wouldn’t cause movement either, since Blaze was here. If it was the case, he had to figure out how to get moving again.
All he really needed was an exit.
By preference, the exit his parents used. Yes, that was the way to put it. He wanted to leave this dark space the same way his parents had and he wanted to bring Blaze with him.
It was complex but well within the complexity of Intent he could manage.
The world outside Serenity began to move. It wasn’t much, just a little, but a little was enough to let Serenity know that it was working.
It also seemed to be slowly separating Serenity from Blaze. They were only a few feet apart so far, but the distance wasn’t going to get any smaller if neither of them did anything. “Blaze! Where are you headed?”
“I’m not sure,” Blaze responded. “Wherever this place is taking me. Are you going somewhere specific?”
“I want to join my parents but looking for them didn’t work. I’m trying to head to the exit my parents used to leave this space. It seems to be working.” Serenity was convinced that what that really said was that there was no intelligence - no sapience - guiding the space they were in. That was probably a good thing, given how long it had been abandoned. Sapient items were resilient to the passage of time, but hundreds of years at a time wasn’t good for them.
“I don’t know your parents,” Blaze reminded Serenity. “Perhaps I can try to head towards the exit you are headed for?”
Blaze almost immediately started closing the distance between the two of them. That showed an impressive level of control over Intent on Blaze’s part, especially for a low-Tier caster like Blaze. He’d be able to go far as long as he could overcome whatever bottleneck kept him at Tier Four. Hopefully it was simply a matter of time; it wasn’t something Serenity had ever asked Blaze about, but Blaze was young. He might well still be working his way through the three or four Paths per Tier most people used.
For a moment, Serenity was amused by his own thoughts. Blaze was older than Serenity, at least if you only considered when they were born. Serenity wasn’t even forty yet; as a Tier Four, even a young one, Blaze was almost certainly older than that. Serenity’s past just made everyone seem young sometimes. At the same time, Serenity knew he himself made just as many mistakes as a youngster would; age was no real protection, not when he was always encountering new situations.
Blaze moved until he touched Serenity, then everything seemed to move around them faster. Serenity found that he was moving faster than the shadows could move away from him, but as he’d expected, Down to the River took care of them easily. It didn’t even take any concentration, which was a good thing since his concentration was fixed on finding the exit he needed.
And then he was falling.
Serenity fell less than five feet into a surprisingly soft agglomeration of what turned out to be mostly dirt. He was uninjured but distinctly dusty. The thump next to him was almost certainly Blaze, not that he could tell through the cloud of dirt that their impacts raised.
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