Lillene

Enjoy!

Were the bites taken before or after the person was turned to stone? It wouldn’t matter to the long-dead body, but it might matter to Serenity. There were a number of different creatures that had petrification abilities of one sort or another, but only a handful of creatures actually ate stone. 

At the same time, there were a lot of creatures that would eat flesh; very few of them could petrify and Serenity couldn’t think of any that would petrify something they considered food after they’d eaten from it. Before, yes, but the petrification was generally limited to either strategic locations like joints or to a skin layer.

No, wait. There was the catoblepas, the bull with petrifying breath. Some of them were carnivorous or at least omnivorous, even though they looked like large herbivores. Their breath could petrify and it worked slowly. Serenity had heard of people rescued from catoblepas in the past, petrifying more and more as the beast breathed on them while eating them alive. All they cared about was that their prey didn’t struggle too much, and partially petrified was enough.  They’d even eat the stone if it was thin enough; they probably had to eat a lot of stone since they couldn’t exactly stop breathing.

Even a quick glance at the bite marks made it clear that whatever ate the man wasn’t a catoblepas. The damage wasn’t nearly severe enough.

Well, that took it back to the other options: either something ate the man before he was petrified, which implied a creature that attacked the man followed by something like a gorgon or cocatrice that turned it to stone, or it ate the man after he was petrified. In that case, there might only be one creature. Serenity hoped for the first option, because several of the creature types that could petrify and eat stone, such as basilisks, could survive indefinitely in a hibernation state. Serenity wasn’t certain they could survive this long, but he definitely didn’t want to be surprised by them.

It was impossible to tell which type it was when he checked the injuries. Serenity had only seen a stone-eater as a dungeon monster and he’d never tried to check the wounds. He’d never helped someone with that as an issue, either; it wasn’t something that could be solved by killing. The petrified flesh was already dead. It needed real healers.

He’d better tell Ita. “There could still be something alive in here.”

“Something that can do that?” Ita sounded unhappy, maybe even scared. “What would it look like? Can you protect yourself from it?”

She was worried about him? Serenity hadn’t expected that. “I should be fine. I think it’s usually considered a curse, so I should be resistant. Even without that, I can probably heal through most types. It’s you who needs to be careful.”

Ita lowered her head for a moment, then looked directly at Serenity. “You are not Sterath. If we had more here…” She paused and sighed. “It is my honor to serve you.”

Serenity was pretty certain he’d just stepped on a cultural landmine. He was even pretty sure which one. Sterath simply didn’t place the same value on their lives as he was used to; instead, they bred, learned, and died quickly. It was the entire reason they could be an irritant to the Empire, but it was also why they were only an irritant. Few lived long enough to reach the higher Tiers. When Ita reached Tier Four, which should happen soon, she’d be considered high Tier by the Sterath.

It was also why wiping them out was such a pain for Vengeance.

Serenity moved on from that thought. Getting her to go back would be difficult if he stayed; she’d want to be an extra set of eyes. Serenity couldn’t say she was wrong, either. More eyes would help. He just needed those eyes to be sufficiently resistant to petrification.

There were spells for that. The easiest way would probably be a temporary shield, one that would stop or at least slow down the curse. Even if Ita were injured, if it was slow enough he’d be able to take her to Blaze and get her healed. He knew Blaze could do it.

Serenity knew several spells that might help, but most of them were designed to alter an existing shield. Neither Ita nor he had one, so he’d have to build the shield spell as well. To keep the cost down to something he could manage, even in A’Atla’s nexus, meant he was going to have to focus the effect almost entirely on petrification. 

Half an hour later, Ita and Serenity moved on to search the area. They found three more bodies quickly, all stone with clear chunks missing like bits, but there was no sign of what did it to them. 

As they went deeper, the temperature fell. Normally, A’Atla maintained a constant temperature but the Underworld apparently didn’t. The tunnels matched up to the map Serenity had, but there were no doors or rooms, just tunnels after more tunnels. The tunnels wound around in a confusing mess, but Serenity kept heading onwards and downwards. If he read it correctly, it didn’t matter which way he went as long as he didn’t get into a dead end or go in circles. That was entirely possible in the maze if he wasn’t careful.

After about a mile, the tunnels that continued that far came back together one after another. A wide hallway led to a progressively narrowing corridor.

A corridor that was crossed by a flow of mana so strong that it was visible to the naked eye. It was clearly deliberate and just as clearly dangerous; special precautions would need to be taken to cross safely. It had an odd resemblance to a river of flame; Serenity guessed that this was possibly where the idea that Tartarus was surrounded by rivers came from; if so, this was the flaming one, though Serenity couldn’t immediately remember the name. This was the Underworld, after all. 

Serenity wasn’t certain how long he spent watching the river of mana. It called to him, but he kept himself from walking into it. The mana itself wouldn’t be actively harmful, not with his resistances and draconic nature, but that didn’t mean it was safe. 

It wasn’t the danger that stopped him. Instead, it was his own contrary nature. He would not be told what to do, whether that was by the beauty of the mana or his own desire to consume it. He would control himself and do what he wanted, not what his body wanted.

While Serenity gazed, almost entranced, at the fiery river of mana, Ita explored the relatively narrow corridor that led to it. There were no monsters, fortunately; if there ever was a Cerberus at this river it was long gone. Instead, Ita found a set of hooks on one of the walls, set up sort of like a rack of coat hooks. There was space for a dozen things, but only three items hung from the hooks. They were all cloth and seemed intact, though colored embellishments disintegrated when Ita picked one up. There was dust under the hooks, as if there had once been more of them there.

Ita poked Serenity. “These are probably magical. They didn’t disintegrate like everything else did when I picked them up.”

Serenity shook himself. He didn’t like the pull the river had on his senses; it was entirely too pleasant and distracting. He turned away from the river so that it wasn’t clearly in his line of sight. He wasn’t wearing armor, so he didn’t have the additional cameras he and Aide had added; even if he had them, they were never as immediate as his eyes. That was probably psychological rather than real but it was still true.

Serenity focused on the cloth in Ita’s hands. She was correct; it was magical. It seemed to be a simple length of cotton fabric, but there had to be more to it than that. “Where did you find it?”

Ita pointed out the coat hooks. They were roughly three feet away from the edge of the fiery river, which made Serenity guess that they were probably protective items of some sort. That was closer than he’d have wanted to keep them unless the river was well controlled, but this was in a ship. Maybe it was controlled well enough.

Serenity debated scolding Ita for picking up an unknown magical item but decided it wasn’t worth it. This place didn’t seem to be trapped; more than that, that was exactly the place to find items that were useful. The question was if he could find anything useful in A’Atla’s records.

Once more, Serenity cursed the lack of a user’s manual, help files, or even contextual notes about areas. He had to guess what he was looking at, then find it in the files, and most of the readings didn’t have a convenient map to look for. They just had names and seemed to assume that he knew what the name was.

The only thing he had going for him now was that there wasn’t much in there about fiery rivers of mana. In fact, the only thing he could think of that was even remotely similar was the ship’s engine schematic. Naturally, it didn’t say where the engine WAS, just that it existed. When he pulled up the schematic then overlaid the tunnels he’d walked through, there was a match to one of the upper sections of the engine.

If that was right, A’Atla’s engine was absolutely huge, at least a dozen miles in its smallest dimension. Admittedly, it did have to move an entire island and that did explain the limited access, strange corridors, and reinforced walls. 

Yeah, it added up. In which case, those were probably some kind of safety gear for anyone who had to go into the engine. Why they were still here after the ship’s engine rooms were turned into a prison was anyone’s guess.

On the other hand, Serenity knew that he really should take the time to confirm that they were what he thought they were. Without actually activating them, it would be hard to tell-

Serenity paused. He could see active, functional spellforms when he concentrated on the cloth. There were two major components; the first was some sort of protection for the cloth; it seemed to be linked to A’Alta’s systems somehow. Maybe A’Atla could make them or repair them? The other option was that anyone not recognized by A’Atla’s systems couldn’t use them, but that seemed unlikely. It seemed far more likely that A’Atla considered a minimum amount of protective gear for working on its engines vital and simply periodically replaced them.

The second was very clearly some sort of shield spell. It wasn’t fully formed, since Ita was just holding the cloth, but it was definitely protective. In fact, Serenity thought it was based very heavily on the standard shielding Skill with an emphasis on shielding against magic.

Or maybe the standard shielding Skill was based on this spell?

Either way, they looked safe to wear and should protect against the raging mana ahead. Serenity picked up the one Ita held and draped it around his shoulders. That was enough for the spell to click into place; yes, it definitely was a very standard variation on the standard shield Skill. You didn’t get much more basic than that. “Go get yourself one,” Serenity told Ita, then waved at the fiery river of mana. “It’ll protect you as we go through that.”

He wrapped the cloth around himself then tucked the edges in. It wasn’t what he’d call truly secure, but it would do for now. It was probably built so simply so that it could be worn by anyone; it would be easy enough to wear even if all you normally wore was a harness, like the Sterath. In fact, based on how easy Ita found it to secure on herself, it was probably easier if all you were wearing was a harness.

Lillene

The flaming river around Tartarus is the Phlegethon. The Styx and Lethe are the two that seem to be used the most; Cocytus and Acheron are the least common, at least in my experience.