Original Story Sample Chapter- Ash Haven: Descent
Heyo guys. While you wait for the new chapter of Threads coming out tomorrow, I will provide the first chapter of a new story I am working on these days. This one is currently updating at a rate of one chapter a month, with the fourth chapter having just gone up today. It is however patreon exclusive to the Yellow Soul tier and above, and will likely remain that way until its ready to be published as an E-book. If you'd like give it a look and maybe check out the rest! If not don't worry main update is on track to be ready tomorrow, so no worries.
The wind rushed past my ears as I fell into the darkness. Luxuriating in the feeling of freefall, my heart pounded in my ears. Plunging downward into the unknown was exhilarating. There were only a few things I enjoyed more. But, living was one of them. I looked down, my heavy cloak flapping and snapping in the air above my head and saw the faint gray blur of the floor.
The pale green whorls tattooed on my palms flared with light, and the air howled as wind slammed downward, scattering dust and sand from the worn stone and slowing my fall. The glow on my palms expanded, curling lines traveling up my arms, visible through the dark blue fabric. I took hold of the wind, and kept myself from spiraling off course, controlling my fall. A moment later I landed, my heavy boots making an echoing thump as they struck stone.
I grinned as my legs absorbed the impact, and I fell into a crouch, the glow of my arms and hands fading as I felt warm stone brush my palms.
I felt something shift in my pack. "Would it have killed you to use the rope like a normal person, Kaz?" the buzzing electronic voice that hissed out was muffled.
"Why would I do something like that?" I chuckled, straightening and glancing around at the darkened chamber. With only the light of the entrance above, I could see little, the faint outlines of columns stretching up through the dark, and a few meters of bare stone floor, brushed clear of debris.
"It's wasteful," my assistant grumbled, and I felt more movement as he wriggled out of my pack and onto my shoulder, his burnished metal scales glinting dully in the faint light. "Using up Prana just to play around is dumb!"
"Ah, we're not that hard up, Vee," I said dismissively. Tugging at the collar of my cloak, readjusting it, and patted down each of the pouches at my belt, making sure they were all still in place. I winced at the feeling of tiny teeth nipping at my ear.
"Take this seriously!" Vee hissed. He was in fine form today. I gave the little construct an irritated look. He was about the size of a small cat, and the musculature of one too, but his features were reptilian, the structure of his chest and the broken sockets on his shoulders spoke of wings, but they were long gone. Little yellow lights blinked in his metallic eye recesses, glaring back unapologetically.
I looked away first. He wasn't wrong. Vee had been watching my back since I was knee high, and Gramps had fished the little construct out of the ruins and repaired him for me. Nonetheless, I couldn't let him think he'd won. "Yeah, yeah, now cut the noise before we alert something."
I let my hand rest on the worn leather hilt of the long knife sheathed at my hip, and set off into the dark of the ruin.
The world was full of places like this. Monuments far beyond the abilities of engineers and mages alike. Relics of an age even the crustiest graybeard can only remember as a garbled story of their own grandfather's grandfather. An age of abundance and plenty beyond imagination, now vanished into sand and ash. In my hands, a spark flared, lighting my lantern. Casting a searching cone across dusty stone, I paused as the light played across one of the columns, and studied the carvings.
"Too much weathering for rubbings," Vee muttered. "Figures, since the chamber wasn't sealed."
"Shame," I mused, squinting at the faint outlines still visible. What scenes had they depicted once, I wondered? What secrets had been lost to wind and time.
"Yeah, that kind of thing sells well to the city folks," Vee mused.
I rolled my eyes. Vee had no sense of wonder. I suppose wonder didn't fill your belly-or batteries- though. Still, I stared at the faded carvings a moment longer. Would we ever catch up to the builders, I wondered.
In the end though, I was just a salvager, here to loot their bones. One of many crawling over the vast ruin complex like rats. Keeping one hand on my knife, I panned the light of the lantern over the far wall. There would probably be a doorway right about… there. The lantern light gleamed off of ancient metal, two smooth and featureless slabs of truesteel. Unmarred by rust or grime even after uncounted years, that was the only thing it could be. Luckily one had fallen, leaving the passage open, so I wouldn't need the blasting charges hanging from my pack yet.
As much as I loved these old places, I couldn't let sentiment stay my hand, we needed every bit of scrap we could get. We'd need pulleys and packbeasts to haul those doors out, that much truesteel would sell well. Carefully I approached the door, scenting the air. On my shoulder, Vee arched his spine threateningly, his metallic claws digging into the leather padding of his shoulder perch, his crystal eyes peering around in the dark.
It was musty and stale, but there was no sign of the toxic gasses that sometimes filled the ruins. Warily I eyed the crumbling doorframe, studying the pockmarks and damage around where the hinges had been. I stepped through into the passage beyond, leaving footprints in the sand. The only sound was my breathing and the faint moan of wind and blowing sand against the walls, but there was a faint noise, scrabbling and scratching.
Smoothly, I ripped my knife from the sheath, and channeled. The red lines of the diamond tattoo on my forehead flared with light and the air grew warm as I channeled Fire, lighting the chip of Flame Prana embedded in the hilt of my knife and I stabbed upward. The edge shimmered, going white hot as it cut smoothly through chitin and hissed as it cooked the meat inside. With a flick of my wrist, I tore the beast down and tossed it away. The squealing wormlike thing thrashed and chittered in the light of my lantern, with a hundred spasming spiky legs and a shimmering carapace. Even now the shell rippled with color trying to conceal the creature once more.
"See, Vee? No problem," I said, as I brought the thick heel of my boot down on its snapping head, crushing it to paste with an unpleasant crunch.
My only reply was a tingling buzz in the air and the scent of ozone as light flashed out of the corner of my eye. The air crackled and there was another pained insectoid squeal as another many legged shaped smoked and thrashed in its death throes.
"Yah huh, no problem," Vee replied dryly, sparks of static still dripping from his jaws.
I chuckled. "Obviously, I have you to watch my back buddy."
All joking aside, these bugs, Mirage crawlers, were a pain. They liked to nest in great numbers underground, and they'd mess up an unenhanced scavenger pretty badly. I wasn't really equipped for extermination either. Hopefully I could just avoid their nest. I had a few flasks of liquid flame, but it was expensive, so I'd rather not use it. Gingerly pushing the twitching, arm sized corpse aside with my boot, I continued on.
Letting my lantern play across the floor and walls, I kept an ear open for any more skittering as I followed the passage, winding deeper into the earth, pausing now and then to mark down a map, since I was the first one down this passage. I kept to the main thoroughfare for now, passing by side paths.
Walking down the dark and empty hall, I let my lantern light pan back and forth across the sand strewn floor. Despite myself, my thoughts wandered.
The complex this ruin was part of was a huge, sprawling across a wide valley. It had probably been a city once, but now it was mostly buried by sand and ash blown from the Ashlands, a few tall towers of metal and unbreakable glass jutted out of the dunes like bones from a dug up grave, marking the spot. We had been with the camp city excavating the place for four years now, Gramps and I.
We'd found nothing but scrap, and I had to admit, I was starting to feel a little restless. I loved exploring, but this place was so mundane sometimes. Day after day, nothing but dust and scrap. There were none of the mysteries, none of the secrets or history that I'd hoped for here. I'd grown up on Gramps journals and travelogues. I wanted to know more about the people from before the Scouring. However, here I just picked through their trash.
Still, Gramps had his reasons for sticking around. I knew he wasn't any more content than I was. I trusted him, even if the crusty old bastard wouldn't tell me what his reasons were.
I paused and shook my head as I reached a wide four way intersection. But Vee was right, I was getting complacent. No matter how mundane a delve was, I needed to stay alert. Beasts, ancient security constructs, traps or even just mundane hazards of spelunking could all ruin an unwary delver's day. Stopping, I set down my lantern and pulled out my map, sketching down the last few hundred feet and the intersection . Then I carefully peered down all three passages. Unlike before, there was no clear distinction between the main path and the side ones.
On my left, the ceiling bowed downward though and rubble littered the floor, the passage was choked with drifting sand. I marked that one down for the diggers. The ways right and forward were less easy to choose from. Where the right hall was dark though, ahead, a single silver bar of light still flickered on the floor, buried in sand. It flickered wildly on and off, barely casting any light at all, but even that indicated that there might be some actual functional artifacts down the way.
"What do you think, Vee?" I asked idly.
"Like you have to ask," he sassed. "Working Prana batteries are worth their weight in gold."
I laughed under my breath. It looked like excitement and profit were on the same side for once. Lucky me.
The hall went on for quite a ways, and we began to steadily encounter more light on the floor and ceiling. They flickered and sputtered just like the first one, and we ran across our first real obstacle in the form of a broken panel in the ceiling, where broken cables and wiring hung out, disgorging intermittent sprays of sparking Lightning Prana.
"Definitely an intact battery, maybe even a generator," I said, peering up at the wires.
"If we can shut it off, I bet the guys at camp can get some good scrap metals of the wiring too," Vee mused. This really was turning into a lucky find. Usually channeling materials like those wires and cables were too burnt out or damaged to be much use. Even partially intact ones were good salvage. Lots of rare metals and Prana conducting minerals.
Maybe I could even have gramps upgrade one of my circuit tattoos if the haul was good enough. I shook my head, clearing my thoughts. Haul it might be, but right now it was an obstacle. "In the pack Vee."
"Yeah, yeah," he grumbled, scrambling back into my backpack as I threw the hood of my cloak over my head.
I hunched my shoulders and lowered my head as I crouched, preparing to jump through. My cloak was mildly flame and shock resistant, but it was better to keep contact brief. The showering sparks raining down sputtered and lessened for a moment, and I jumped.
I felt pinpricks of heat and smelled the faint scent of burning hair as stray sparks snapped at my hands, but a moment later I was through and rolling to my feet. It was only then that I heard the high pitched whine coming from further up the hallway. I dived to the left as a lance of light cut through the space where I had been standing, tracing a glowing red line across the floor. There in the corner at the end of the hall, a panel had extended from the ceiling, revealing a dully glowing white crystal as long as my hand. It was already reorienting on my position, a tiny pearl of light blooming on it's pointed tip.
I pointed my palms behind me and green light bloomed from the arrays on my palms, the whirling vortex that emerged launched me forward as a more powerful pulse of light lanced out to incinerate me. My feet left the ground, and for a moment, I flew. I snatched my knife from its sheath, and with my free hand, gestured. The wind currents shifted, launching me up toward the slowly reorienting crystal.
My knife slashed through the white prana crystal right as light was beginning to bloom again. I landed with a thump and a clatter as the severed piece landed on the floor beside me. For a second, there was silence.
"...Active defenses. We really did find something big," Vee muttered, poking his head back out of my pack.
"Yeah," I replied, caught between caution and glee. This was just what I had needed. But I had best be prepared so that I didn't choke on the good fortune. I reached down, and scooped up the severed crystal, it could be ground up for fuel still, even if it was damaged. Here at the end of the hall, I could see a pair of doors, and there was faint light coming from beneath.
I peered at the tightly sealed doors and pursed my lips. I didn't want to use the blasting charges when there could be expensive and delicate valuables on the other side. I might not have a choice. Peering closer, I saw that there was actually a gap there, if a tiny one. "Vee, watch my back while I pry this open."
"Can do," my assistant replied, slithering out to perch on my shoulder, his glowing eyes casting cones of light in the dark.
I sheathed my knife and cracked my knuckles. How hard could it be?
"Everything alright there? You sounded like you were dying at the end," Vee said smugly.
"Ah shuddup, I got it open didn't I?" I wasn't exactly unfit, but I just wasn't very big, and I didn't have the installed circuits to overcome that. Gramps was better at that sort of thing.
Course, he wouldn't have been able to dodge the sentry turret, so I figured it evened out.
I peered into the room as I spoke. Although the brightly lit interior was much cleaner than the rest of the ruins, it didn't have the eerily pure look of a completely sealed chamber. Sand still lay across the floor, and dust marked the furnishings. Nonetheless, the inside was a treasure trove. The room was circular, and lining the walls was a half circle of elegant machinery. Buttons and levers and prana emitters marked the inclined surface of the machine bank, and the skeletal remains of chairs, their padding long rotted away, marked where the ancient mages and technicians would have sat.
I wondered what it could have been used for. Was this the control of some powerful circuit? Was it a weather controller, or a mass transit array, or some other ancient and lost wonder known only in stories?
"Don't get too excited, you know that the codices are almost always wiped," Vee warned. "I don't want to listen to you getting sulky again."
"I know that," I replied, restraining a grimace. Whatever had happened in the end, it had mostly destroyed the information the ancients had encoded in their databases, and wiped out controlling circuits. Still, it was from the bare scraps that had been left that people had developed Prana encoding anew. The tattoos on my arms and forehead were woefully primitive compared to the miracles of the ancient world, but even so, they offered me all kinds of utility.
Carefully, removing my pack I shimmied through the gap, only after reaching through to pull the bag in too, setting it on the floor by the door. Examining the room from the inside, I didn't see much else. On the left, there was another narrow doorway, this one firmly shut. I'd examine that later. I noted the seams in the bank of machinery that would allow access to the internals for looting.
However, I had to at least try to see if there was anything to access. Crossing the room with Vee on my shoulder, I began a slow circuit, examining the arcane interface. I knew a little of the builder's tongue, more than most, but it was still mostly gibberish to me. Still, eventually I found a button labeled with glyphs that I was pretty sure indicated a request to display information.
Carefully, I pressed the smoothly textured button in, and watched as the pale blue prana crystal above it shimmered, projected, a square of light onto the blank wall behind. Glyphs appeared, spelling out text. At the bottom though, were the three familiar symbols that I had been expecting and dreading.
No one was sure why that particular set of numbers indicated what it did, but their meaning was clear. The information storage was empty, and there was nothing for the machine to access.
"It makes me mad that you're so disappointed when we're looking at enough salvage to fund the camp for a month, if there's half as many batteries as I'd think in this" Vee said dully. "Other people would weep for this kind of luck, you know?"
I rolled my eyes at Vee, obviously I was happy, but I had hoped for… something. Maybe some surviving documentation on the facility, or even some personal files. "Let me have a look around, there'll be maintenance access somewhere."
I caught something out of the corner of my eye then, something shimmering lying in the moldering pile of dust and bones that occupied the centermost chair. Turning, I took a closer look. It was a small rectangle of prana crystal, pure white and glittering, Text ran across it, and in one corner was a portrait of a man. Middle aged, with receding hair and dusky skin a little darker than my own. With a chin marked by poorly shaven stubble and bags under his eyes, the man managed to look a little slovenly, even in the strange garb of an ancient magus, visible from the shoulders up.
Carefully, I reached down and picked it up, examining the way the text changed as I turned it too and fro. I couldn't read most of it, but… ah, that was a mark of rank wasn't it? The ancients had had a complex and impenetrable hierarchy, but that was definitely a mark of rank. 'Facility Director' followed by a word I couldn't recognize. Something relating to health or medicine?
I stared down at the image of a man hundreds of years dead, and wondered what he had been doing here, at the end.
"Kaz, watch out behind you!"
Vee's voice jerked me out of my thoughts. I spun around in time to see the closed door I had ignored sliding silently open and a gleaming figure stepping out. Vaguely humanoid, with a wide, boxy torso and no head, the construct stepped out of the tiny space beyond on legs that whirred and clicked with the components within. A single red light shone from its chest like an eye, falling on me like a searchlight. A low, buzzing mechanical voice emerged from somewhere in the torso, speaking a string of incomprehensible words.
I understood 'trespasser', though. By the time I had fully turned around, it had leveled it's left arm at me, and I stared down the black barrel of a projectile launcher. But even as I dove to the side, Vee jumping in the opposite direction, the construct's aim followed me unerringly. The sound of compact air erupted, and I found myself on the ground, entangled in a silvery net, attached to long metallic rope.
"Shit," I cursed under my breath as I tried to escape, but the material of the net tightened around me, and even the heated edge of my knife did nothing to cut the silver material. The rope attached to the net jerked, and I was yanked across the floor toward the construct, where it was raising it's right arm at the end of which was a two pronged device that crackled with electricity.
"Let them go!" Vee growled, perched atop the remains of the chair he had landed on. His open mouth buzzed with electricity, and the bolt that shot out left a bar of light across my vision as it struck the construct in the chest.
The thing let out a buzzing noise like an alarm, jerking in place as the glass of it's 'eye' shattered, and it stopped reeling me in for just a moment. That was all I needed, finally maneuvering my hands in front of me, I channeled. My head burned as I forced prana beyond the simple circuits capacity through my system, and lines on my arms lit up like veins of magma. I smelled cooking meat as a single point of boiling heat formed in the cup of my palms.
It shot out in a solid bar of bright orange, melting through the net, and carving off through the rope, even tracing a glowing line of heat across the wall behind it. The construct's buzzing words turned into a wailing siren of alarm and damage alerts as I scrambled out of the net.
There was only one problem. The construct was still standing, and I couldn't do that again. It was hard to focus through the spike of pain as the feedback from overloading my heat projection circuit hit me with force. "Any bright ideas Vee?" I asked as I scrambled backward, putting distance between myself and the construct that was now stomping toward us.
"The blasting charges! I can keep distracting it, but you're gonna have to arm and place it!" Vee cried, hopping to the top of another chair. He spat another bolt of electricity, and the construct let out another aggrieved alarm and turned toward him.
I grimaced, scanning the creature, my pack was back by the door, and the construct was between us, the room was too small to easily go around it. I could knock it over with a blast of wind, but I'd risk doing some permanent damage, channeling again in this state.
So there was only one thing to do. As Vee spat another crackling bolt, I ran right toward it. The construct wheeled on me, swinging it's net arm like a club, and I ducked and rolled forward, feeling the breeze of the limbs passage ruffle my hair. Shooting to my feet, I crossed the rest of the distance to my pack, and snatched the satchel containing one of the blasting charges off the side.
The machine flailed and warbled as another bolt from Vee struck it giving me time to strip the leather satchel off. A blasting charge was a very simple circuit, this one inscribed on a pentagonal ceramic badge. It simply contained and released energy in a limited area, and adhered to a surface on command.
I swiftly stepped aside to dodge the jabbing thrust of the construct's pronged arm, and stepped into its reach to slap the adhering surface against its chassis. I grunted as the other arm struck me in the chest hard enough to make my ribs groan, but with the blasting charge already set, I just rolled with the blow.
For a second time, I ducked my head and rolled away from the machine, just as the blast detonated.
Thankfully, gramps did good work, so the majority of the force was contained, but I still had to bite back a scream as the trailing edge of the blast wave carrying slivers of shrapnel impacted. My cloak and padded shirt caught the worst, but I still felt slivers of metal and ceramic embedding themselves in my back.
In the silence that followed, I picked myself up wincing, and looked back to see two twitching legs lying in opposite directions, a scorch mark, and a whole lot of scrap. Beyond, in the closet it had emerged from, the healthy glow of a Prana battery lit the construct's recharging station "...Let's just grab the battery as proof," I said weakly. "Let the salvage crew know it's safe to haul out the rest."
"Probably not a bad idea," Vee said, sounding a little shaken.
Limping back toward my pack, my eye caught the sparkle of white crystal again. There was that card, somehow undamaged by everything. I scooped it up, maybe Gramps would be able to find some use for it.
Ash Haven
The wind rushed past my ears as I fell into the darkness. Luxuriating in the feeling of freefall, my heart pounded in my ears. Plunging downward into the unknown was exhilarating. There were only a few things I enjoyed more. But, living was one of them. I looked down, my heavy cloak flapping and snapping in the air above my head and saw the faint gray blur of the floor.
The pale green whorls tattooed on my palms flared with light, and the air howled as wind slammed downward, scattering dust and sand from the worn stone and slowing my fall. The glow on my palms expanded, curling lines traveling up my arms, visible through the dark blue fabric. I took hold of the wind, and kept myself from spiraling off course, controlling my fall. A moment later I landed, my heavy boots making an echoing thump as they struck stone.
I grinned as my legs absorbed the impact, and I fell into a crouch, the glow of my arms and hands fading as I felt warm stone brush my palms.
I felt something shift in my pack. "Would it have killed you to use the rope like a normal person, Kaz?" the buzzing electronic voice that hissed out was muffled.
"Why would I do something like that?" I chuckled, straightening and glancing around at the darkened chamber. With only the light of the entrance above, I could see little, the faint outlines of columns stretching up through the dark, and a few meters of bare stone floor, brushed clear of debris.
"It's wasteful," my assistant grumbled, and I felt more movement as he wriggled out of my pack and onto my shoulder, his burnished metal scales glinting dully in the faint light. "Using up Prana just to play around is dumb!"
"Ah, we're not that hard up, Vee," I said dismissively. Tugging at the collar of my cloak, readjusting it, and patted down each of the pouches at my belt, making sure they were all still in place. I winced at the feeling of tiny teeth nipping at my ear.
"Take this seriously!" Vee hissed. He was in fine form today. I gave the little construct an irritated look. He was about the size of a small cat, and the musculature of one too, but his features were reptilian, the structure of his chest and the broken sockets on his shoulders spoke of wings, but they were long gone. Little yellow lights blinked in his metallic eye recesses, glaring back unapologetically.
I looked away first. He wasn't wrong. Vee had been watching my back since I was knee high, and Gramps had fished the little construct out of the ruins and repaired him for me. Nonetheless, I couldn't let him think he'd won. "Yeah, yeah, now cut the noise before we alert something."
I let my hand rest on the worn leather hilt of the long knife sheathed at my hip, and set off into the dark of the ruin.
The world was full of places like this. Monuments far beyond the abilities of engineers and mages alike. Relics of an age even the crustiest graybeard can only remember as a garbled story of their own grandfather's grandfather. An age of abundance and plenty beyond imagination, now vanished into sand and ash. In my hands, a spark flared, lighting my lantern. Casting a searching cone across dusty stone, I paused as the light played across one of the columns, and studied the carvings.
"Too much weathering for rubbings," Vee muttered. "Figures, since the chamber wasn't sealed."
"Shame," I mused, squinting at the faint outlines still visible. What scenes had they depicted once, I wondered? What secrets had been lost to wind and time.
"Yeah, that kind of thing sells well to the city folks," Vee mused.
I rolled my eyes. Vee had no sense of wonder. I suppose wonder didn't fill your belly-or batteries- though. Still, I stared at the faded carvings a moment longer. Would we ever catch up to the builders, I wondered.
In the end though, I was just a salvager, here to loot their bones. One of many crawling over the vast ruin complex like rats. Keeping one hand on my knife, I panned the light of the lantern over the far wall. There would probably be a doorway right about… there. The lantern light gleamed off of ancient metal, two smooth and featureless slabs of truesteel. Unmarred by rust or grime even after uncounted years, that was the only thing it could be. Luckily one had fallen, leaving the passage open, so I wouldn't need the blasting charges hanging from my pack yet.
As much as I loved these old places, I couldn't let sentiment stay my hand, we needed every bit of scrap we could get. We'd need pulleys and packbeasts to haul those doors out, that much truesteel would sell well. Carefully I approached the door, scenting the air. On my shoulder, Vee arched his spine threateningly, his metallic claws digging into the leather padding of his shoulder perch, his crystal eyes peering around in the dark.
It was musty and stale, but there was no sign of the toxic gasses that sometimes filled the ruins. Warily I eyed the crumbling doorframe, studying the pockmarks and damage around where the hinges had been. I stepped through into the passage beyond, leaving footprints in the sand. The only sound was my breathing and the faint moan of wind and blowing sand against the walls, but there was a faint noise, scrabbling and scratching.
Smoothly, I ripped my knife from the sheath, and channeled. The red lines of the diamond tattoo on my forehead flared with light and the air grew warm as I channeled Fire, lighting the chip of Flame Prana embedded in the hilt of my knife and I stabbed upward. The edge shimmered, going white hot as it cut smoothly through chitin and hissed as it cooked the meat inside. With a flick of my wrist, I tore the beast down and tossed it away. The squealing wormlike thing thrashed and chittered in the light of my lantern, with a hundred spasming spiky legs and a shimmering carapace. Even now the shell rippled with color trying to conceal the creature once more.
"See, Vee? No problem," I said, as I brought the thick heel of my boot down on its snapping head, crushing it to paste with an unpleasant crunch.
My only reply was a tingling buzz in the air and the scent of ozone as light flashed out of the corner of my eye. The air crackled and there was another pained insectoid squeal as another many legged shaped smoked and thrashed in its death throes.
"Yah huh, no problem," Vee replied dryly, sparks of static still dripping from his jaws.
I chuckled. "Obviously, I have you to watch my back buddy."
All joking aside, these bugs, Mirage crawlers, were a pain. They liked to nest in great numbers underground, and they'd mess up an unenhanced scavenger pretty badly. I wasn't really equipped for extermination either. Hopefully I could just avoid their nest. I had a few flasks of liquid flame, but it was expensive, so I'd rather not use it. Gingerly pushing the twitching, arm sized corpse aside with my boot, I continued on.
Letting my lantern play across the floor and walls, I kept an ear open for any more skittering as I followed the passage, winding deeper into the earth, pausing now and then to mark down a map, since I was the first one down this passage. I kept to the main thoroughfare for now, passing by side paths.
Walking down the dark and empty hall, I let my lantern light pan back and forth across the sand strewn floor. Despite myself, my thoughts wandered.
The complex this ruin was part of was a huge, sprawling across a wide valley. It had probably been a city once, but now it was mostly buried by sand and ash blown from the Ashlands, a few tall towers of metal and unbreakable glass jutted out of the dunes like bones from a dug up grave, marking the spot. We had been with the camp city excavating the place for four years now, Gramps and I.
We'd found nothing but scrap, and I had to admit, I was starting to feel a little restless. I loved exploring, but this place was so mundane sometimes. Day after day, nothing but dust and scrap. There were none of the mysteries, none of the secrets or history that I'd hoped for here. I'd grown up on Gramps journals and travelogues. I wanted to know more about the people from before the Scouring. However, here I just picked through their trash.
Still, Gramps had his reasons for sticking around. I knew he wasn't any more content than I was. I trusted him, even if the crusty old bastard wouldn't tell me what his reasons were.
I paused and shook my head as I reached a wide four way intersection. But Vee was right, I was getting complacent. No matter how mundane a delve was, I needed to stay alert. Beasts, ancient security constructs, traps or even just mundane hazards of spelunking could all ruin an unwary delver's day. Stopping, I set down my lantern and pulled out my map, sketching down the last few hundred feet and the intersection . Then I carefully peered down all three passages. Unlike before, there was no clear distinction between the main path and the side ones.
On my left, the ceiling bowed downward though and rubble littered the floor, the passage was choked with drifting sand. I marked that one down for the diggers. The ways right and forward were less easy to choose from. Where the right hall was dark though, ahead, a single silver bar of light still flickered on the floor, buried in sand. It flickered wildly on and off, barely casting any light at all, but even that indicated that there might be some actual functional artifacts down the way.
"What do you think, Vee?" I asked idly.
"Like you have to ask," he sassed. "Working Prana batteries are worth their weight in gold."
I laughed under my breath. It looked like excitement and profit were on the same side for once. Lucky me.
***
The hall went on for quite a ways, and we began to steadily encounter more light on the floor and ceiling. They flickered and sputtered just like the first one, and we ran across our first real obstacle in the form of a broken panel in the ceiling, where broken cables and wiring hung out, disgorging intermittent sprays of sparking Lightning Prana.
"Definitely an intact battery, maybe even a generator," I said, peering up at the wires.
"If we can shut it off, I bet the guys at camp can get some good scrap metals of the wiring too," Vee mused. This really was turning into a lucky find. Usually channeling materials like those wires and cables were too burnt out or damaged to be much use. Even partially intact ones were good salvage. Lots of rare metals and Prana conducting minerals.
Maybe I could even have gramps upgrade one of my circuit tattoos if the haul was good enough. I shook my head, clearing my thoughts. Haul it might be, but right now it was an obstacle. "In the pack Vee."
"Yeah, yeah," he grumbled, scrambling back into my backpack as I threw the hood of my cloak over my head.
I hunched my shoulders and lowered my head as I crouched, preparing to jump through. My cloak was mildly flame and shock resistant, but it was better to keep contact brief. The showering sparks raining down sputtered and lessened for a moment, and I jumped.
I felt pinpricks of heat and smelled the faint scent of burning hair as stray sparks snapped at my hands, but a moment later I was through and rolling to my feet. It was only then that I heard the high pitched whine coming from further up the hallway. I dived to the left as a lance of light cut through the space where I had been standing, tracing a glowing red line across the floor. There in the corner at the end of the hall, a panel had extended from the ceiling, revealing a dully glowing white crystal as long as my hand. It was already reorienting on my position, a tiny pearl of light blooming on it's pointed tip.
I pointed my palms behind me and green light bloomed from the arrays on my palms, the whirling vortex that emerged launched me forward as a more powerful pulse of light lanced out to incinerate me. My feet left the ground, and for a moment, I flew. I snatched my knife from its sheath, and with my free hand, gestured. The wind currents shifted, launching me up toward the slowly reorienting crystal.
My knife slashed through the white prana crystal right as light was beginning to bloom again. I landed with a thump and a clatter as the severed piece landed on the floor beside me. For a second, there was silence.
"...Active defenses. We really did find something big," Vee muttered, poking his head back out of my pack.
"Yeah," I replied, caught between caution and glee. This was just what I had needed. But I had best be prepared so that I didn't choke on the good fortune. I reached down, and scooped up the severed crystal, it could be ground up for fuel still, even if it was damaged. Here at the end of the hall, I could see a pair of doors, and there was faint light coming from beneath.
I peered at the tightly sealed doors and pursed my lips. I didn't want to use the blasting charges when there could be expensive and delicate valuables on the other side. I might not have a choice. Peering closer, I saw that there was actually a gap there, if a tiny one. "Vee, watch my back while I pry this open."
"Can do," my assistant replied, slithering out to perch on my shoulder, his glowing eyes casting cones of light in the dark.
I sheathed my knife and cracked my knuckles. How hard could it be?
***
Pretty hard, as it turned out. I winced as I flexed my sore fingers, feeling the strain I had put on my arms, and sweat beaded on my forehead. Before me the ancient doors had been dragged open just enough for me to squeeze through. Beyond, I could see a bright light and sharp, clean lines of metallic furnishings."Everything alright there? You sounded like you were dying at the end," Vee said smugly.
"Ah shuddup, I got it open didn't I?" I wasn't exactly unfit, but I just wasn't very big, and I didn't have the installed circuits to overcome that. Gramps was better at that sort of thing.
Course, he wouldn't have been able to dodge the sentry turret, so I figured it evened out.
I peered into the room as I spoke. Although the brightly lit interior was much cleaner than the rest of the ruins, it didn't have the eerily pure look of a completely sealed chamber. Sand still lay across the floor, and dust marked the furnishings. Nonetheless, the inside was a treasure trove. The room was circular, and lining the walls was a half circle of elegant machinery. Buttons and levers and prana emitters marked the inclined surface of the machine bank, and the skeletal remains of chairs, their padding long rotted away, marked where the ancient mages and technicians would have sat.
I wondered what it could have been used for. Was this the control of some powerful circuit? Was it a weather controller, or a mass transit array, or some other ancient and lost wonder known only in stories?
"Don't get too excited, you know that the codices are almost always wiped," Vee warned. "I don't want to listen to you getting sulky again."
"I know that," I replied, restraining a grimace. Whatever had happened in the end, it had mostly destroyed the information the ancients had encoded in their databases, and wiped out controlling circuits. Still, it was from the bare scraps that had been left that people had developed Prana encoding anew. The tattoos on my arms and forehead were woefully primitive compared to the miracles of the ancient world, but even so, they offered me all kinds of utility.
Carefully, removing my pack I shimmied through the gap, only after reaching through to pull the bag in too, setting it on the floor by the door. Examining the room from the inside, I didn't see much else. On the left, there was another narrow doorway, this one firmly shut. I'd examine that later. I noted the seams in the bank of machinery that would allow access to the internals for looting.
However, I had to at least try to see if there was anything to access. Crossing the room with Vee on my shoulder, I began a slow circuit, examining the arcane interface. I knew a little of the builder's tongue, more than most, but it was still mostly gibberish to me. Still, eventually I found a button labeled with glyphs that I was pretty sure indicated a request to display information.
Carefully, I pressed the smoothly textured button in, and watched as the pale blue prana crystal above it shimmered, projected, a square of light onto the blank wall behind. Glyphs appeared, spelling out text. At the bottom though, were the three familiar symbols that I had been expecting and dreading.
No one was sure why that particular set of numbers indicated what it did, but their meaning was clear. The information storage was empty, and there was nothing for the machine to access.
"It makes me mad that you're so disappointed when we're looking at enough salvage to fund the camp for a month, if there's half as many batteries as I'd think in this" Vee said dully. "Other people would weep for this kind of luck, you know?"
I rolled my eyes at Vee, obviously I was happy, but I had hoped for… something. Maybe some surviving documentation on the facility, or even some personal files. "Let me have a look around, there'll be maintenance access somewhere."
I caught something out of the corner of my eye then, something shimmering lying in the moldering pile of dust and bones that occupied the centermost chair. Turning, I took a closer look. It was a small rectangle of prana crystal, pure white and glittering, Text ran across it, and in one corner was a portrait of a man. Middle aged, with receding hair and dusky skin a little darker than my own. With a chin marked by poorly shaven stubble and bags under his eyes, the man managed to look a little slovenly, even in the strange garb of an ancient magus, visible from the shoulders up.
Carefully, I reached down and picked it up, examining the way the text changed as I turned it too and fro. I couldn't read most of it, but… ah, that was a mark of rank wasn't it? The ancients had had a complex and impenetrable hierarchy, but that was definitely a mark of rank. 'Facility Director' followed by a word I couldn't recognize. Something relating to health or medicine?
I stared down at the image of a man hundreds of years dead, and wondered what he had been doing here, at the end.
"Kaz, watch out behind you!"
Vee's voice jerked me out of my thoughts. I spun around in time to see the closed door I had ignored sliding silently open and a gleaming figure stepping out. Vaguely humanoid, with a wide, boxy torso and no head, the construct stepped out of the tiny space beyond on legs that whirred and clicked with the components within. A single red light shone from its chest like an eye, falling on me like a searchlight. A low, buzzing mechanical voice emerged from somewhere in the torso, speaking a string of incomprehensible words.
I understood 'trespasser', though. By the time I had fully turned around, it had leveled it's left arm at me, and I stared down the black barrel of a projectile launcher. But even as I dove to the side, Vee jumping in the opposite direction, the construct's aim followed me unerringly. The sound of compact air erupted, and I found myself on the ground, entangled in a silvery net, attached to long metallic rope.
"Shit," I cursed under my breath as I tried to escape, but the material of the net tightened around me, and even the heated edge of my knife did nothing to cut the silver material. The rope attached to the net jerked, and I was yanked across the floor toward the construct, where it was raising it's right arm at the end of which was a two pronged device that crackled with electricity.
"Let them go!" Vee growled, perched atop the remains of the chair he had landed on. His open mouth buzzed with electricity, and the bolt that shot out left a bar of light across my vision as it struck the construct in the chest.
The thing let out a buzzing noise like an alarm, jerking in place as the glass of it's 'eye' shattered, and it stopped reeling me in for just a moment. That was all I needed, finally maneuvering my hands in front of me, I channeled. My head burned as I forced prana beyond the simple circuits capacity through my system, and lines on my arms lit up like veins of magma. I smelled cooking meat as a single point of boiling heat formed in the cup of my palms.
It shot out in a solid bar of bright orange, melting through the net, and carving off through the rope, even tracing a glowing line of heat across the wall behind it. The construct's buzzing words turned into a wailing siren of alarm and damage alerts as I scrambled out of the net.
There was only one problem. The construct was still standing, and I couldn't do that again. It was hard to focus through the spike of pain as the feedback from overloading my heat projection circuit hit me with force. "Any bright ideas Vee?" I asked as I scrambled backward, putting distance between myself and the construct that was now stomping toward us.
"The blasting charges! I can keep distracting it, but you're gonna have to arm and place it!" Vee cried, hopping to the top of another chair. He spat another bolt of electricity, and the construct let out another aggrieved alarm and turned toward him.
I grimaced, scanning the creature, my pack was back by the door, and the construct was between us, the room was too small to easily go around it. I could knock it over with a blast of wind, but I'd risk doing some permanent damage, channeling again in this state.
So there was only one thing to do. As Vee spat another crackling bolt, I ran right toward it. The construct wheeled on me, swinging it's net arm like a club, and I ducked and rolled forward, feeling the breeze of the limbs passage ruffle my hair. Shooting to my feet, I crossed the rest of the distance to my pack, and snatched the satchel containing one of the blasting charges off the side.
The machine flailed and warbled as another bolt from Vee struck it giving me time to strip the leather satchel off. A blasting charge was a very simple circuit, this one inscribed on a pentagonal ceramic badge. It simply contained and released energy in a limited area, and adhered to a surface on command.
I swiftly stepped aside to dodge the jabbing thrust of the construct's pronged arm, and stepped into its reach to slap the adhering surface against its chassis. I grunted as the other arm struck me in the chest hard enough to make my ribs groan, but with the blasting charge already set, I just rolled with the blow.
For a second time, I ducked my head and rolled away from the machine, just as the blast detonated.
Thankfully, gramps did good work, so the majority of the force was contained, but I still had to bite back a scream as the trailing edge of the blast wave carrying slivers of shrapnel impacted. My cloak and padded shirt caught the worst, but I still felt slivers of metal and ceramic embedding themselves in my back.
In the silence that followed, I picked myself up wincing, and looked back to see two twitching legs lying in opposite directions, a scorch mark, and a whole lot of scrap. Beyond, in the closet it had emerged from, the healthy glow of a Prana battery lit the construct's recharging station "...Let's just grab the battery as proof," I said weakly. "Let the salvage crew know it's safe to haul out the rest."
"Probably not a bad idea," Vee said, sounding a little shaken.
Limping back toward my pack, my eye caught the sparkle of white crystal again. There was that card, somehow undamaged by everything. I scooped it up, maybe Gramps would be able to find some use for it.
