Yo, self– one chapter a week is a respectable pace, but the hope was to finish by the new year? Plus we have people waiting on Cinders and Ashes. Can we maybe stop getting distracted, please?
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"He did what?"
Ingressus nearly dropped the apple he held. He caught it again before it could hit the ground, steadying himself on the branch as he looked for the source of the shout. The voice was still ranting as her companion tried to quiet her down. "--can't believe he would do that, why did he think that was a good idea, he... rrgh! What was Joseph thinking?"
Ingressus had spotted them now through the leaves, two Humans standing under a nearby tree. The girl– Leah, he thought– had her hands pressed to her head in exasperation, while her friend made calm down motions at her. Ingressus crept along the branch to listen more.
"I don't know," the friend said. "But he's screwed if we can't replace them before Mr. Duncan gets back."
Leah let out a groan. "I don't have any slimeballs to replace them with. I used all of mine when we pranked the marketplace."
"So did I. We'd have to go slime hunting."
Oh, so they were the ones who did that? Ingressus figured he shouldn't be surprised, Leah had a reputation as a prankster. The Great Marketplace Sliming had been the talk of Ataraxia for the past few days. Items had been glued to tables or walls and sometimes even ceilings overnight, and the sticky goo had dripped down from the stalls and across the flagstones. Ingressus had had to peel his feet up from the ground even after he left, and he had left a trail of dirt- and grass-filled footprints behind him in the forge for a good hour. At least most people hadn't blamed him for it, if only because they didn't think he would do it to himself.
"Eehhh," Leah said with discomfort. "Everyone says slimes are pretty easy monsters to deal with, but those won't be the only mobs down there. Spiders, creepers, undead... I'd feel better if we had more backup. I can handle a spear but I'm no expert."
"I'll go."
The two Humans jumped as Ingressus dropped from the tree. Leah's friend– no, her brother, probably, they looked similar– gave a nervous laugh.
"Go?" he stammered. "Go where? I don't know what you're talking about. Who said anything about slimeballs?"
Leah pressed a hand to her forehead. "Matt."
Matt gave up on his excuses. "Okay, that was bad, I know."
"Were you listening that whole time?" Leah asked Ingressus.
"You were only one tree away."
"Okay, fair."
Matt looked around for more listeners, glancing up into the treetops as well. "So," he said. "To confirm, you want to come slime-hunting with us? There aren't any swamps around here, so we'd have to go down into the mines. Just so you know what you'd be getting into."
You have much practice with swords?" Leah asked. "Because you'll need it."
"More than half my life," Ingressus confirmed. "I've fought the undead in the mountains, and I've helped bring down a creeper. As long as one of you knows your way around caves, I can deal with the monsters."
"I'm an apprentice miner," Matt said. "I know the mineshafts."
"It's a deal, then."
Matt held out his hand, but Leah raised a finger to stop him.
"How old are you?" she asked Ingressus. "I know Ardoni ages work differently than human ones."
"Thirty-one."
Leah paused, doing the math in her head, then nodded. "Okay. You can come."
Ingressus shook their hands in a deal.
"What's your name again?" Matt asked. "Voran, Veltis... no."
"Ingressus Voltaris."
"Oh."
Leah elbowed Matt teasingly, and Matt rolled his eyes. "Hey, I could've had it more wrong."
"Where and when do I meet you?" Ingressus asked.
"Midnight tonight," Leah said. "At the bridge to the mainland. The mines are about a twenty-minute walk from there."
"You'll have to bring your own sword," Matt added. "We don't have enough to spare."
"That's fine."
Galleous had stopped keeping the sharp objects locked away from Ingressus several years ago, once he was sure Ingressus could be trusted to not maim him or anyone else, and that his judgment on the "unless I have to" caveat could be trusted as well. Instead of keeping the weapons he forged in the locked chest like he had in the beginning, Galleous now stored them in the same chest as the rest of his wares.
This wasn't the first time Ingressus had borrowed a sword to train with. Tiris Sendaris had forbidden Galleous from training Ingressus with weapons, but Galleous pretended not to notice when Ingressus practiced on his own. Nor was it the first time he had taken it to go monster hunting. After a particularly bad day, often after having to put up with one too many taunts from Selarin or his friends, Ingressus would take "his" sword and sneak off to the mainland to find some undead to challenge and to work out his frustrations. Whether Galleous knew about that, he wasn't sure; the Sendaris had never mentioned it. But still, Ingressus waited until Galleous was soundly asleep before sneaking out to the bridge.
Matt and Leah were already waiting on the other side, just outside the glow of the torches and under a stand of trees. He hadn't seen them at first, until Leah waved at him and gestured for him to join them. Humans' lack of bioluminescence must have its advantages.
Ingressus joined them under the trees as Matt greeted him. "Good to see you. You have your weapon? Spare torches?"
Ingressus nodded, tapping the handle of his sword. "You?"
"Torches, charcoal, sword, spear." He gestured to Leah on the last one. "We're just waiting for our last person to show up."
"Is it Joseph?" Ingressus asked, remembering the name Leah had mentioned in the orchard.
"He's ten, so, no," Leah said. "It's his... friend's older brother, I believe he said. Oh, that should be him."
Ingressus turned to see a Kaltaris darting along the bridge. He paused, looked around, then started towards them. But when he got near he paused, staring at Ingressus.
"He's your fourth person?" the Kaltaris asked.
Ingressus squared his shoulders, holding the Kaltaris's gaze. The Kaltaris looked away first, muttering something about "thought he was a Magnorite."
Ingressus groaned. "I am not a Magnorite."
"Obviously," the Kaltaris muttered.
"Okay!" Matt clapped his hands together. "Saylor, this is Ingressus. Ingressus, Saylor. If we're all ready, then let's go!"
He turned and marched off away from the islands. The other three followed, and though Ingressus could feel Saylor's gaze on him, the Kaltaris made no further comment. Good. As long as he kept his mouth shut, he could think whatever he wanted and there wouldn't be a problem.
Matt led them over the ridgeline and across the mountainside. The light from Ataraxia was soon blocked by the mountaintops, replaced by the light of the half-moon. Leah lit a torch, bathing their surroundings in yellow light.
Ingressus had studied all the maps he could of the lands around Ataraxia, in case something happened that forced him to flee. There were no neighboring towns or farms, especially to the south where they were. The path they followed– really, it could barely be called a road– was the only sign that the land was inhabited at all. In the Barrier Mountains a torch that wasn't sheltered by a cave or valley walls was a beacon to raiders, but here there was no one to see the light.
They crested one last ridgeline and the mine entrance came into view. The cave itself was still out of sight, but a swathe of trees had been cleared away, and the open space was fenced off and lit up by lamps to keep animals and undead out. As they got closer, Ingressus saw a number of chests scattered around the yard, and a section of furnaces off to one side. As the road circled around the mining yard, the cave entrance was revealed: a high and narrow ravine that broke through the earth's surface and plunged into the mountain.
Matt walked right up to the fence and climbed over. "Come on. This way."
"No one's here overnight?" Ingressus said, looking around. This seemed... far too easy. Even though they weren't planning to steal anything, they were still breaking in, and the fence was hardly a deterrent. It was barely taller than he was; it wouldn't keep out a determined intruder.
"Nope," Matt said. "No night shift. The demand for ores in Ataraxia is pretty small, and we've only started trading with other towns pretty recently. Not much point in making people go nocturnal when we can easily meet our quotas in the daylight hours."
"Besides, who would they be keeping out?" Saylor sniped, already slinging his leg over the top of the fence. "Undead are too dumb to climb and there's no living being for miles outside of Ataraxia."
Ingressus ignored the jab and simply climbed over the fence himself, dropping to the ground inside the mining yard. "Lead the way," he said to Matt.
Isolated or not, the mineyard still felt incredibly poorly secured. Though the chests were locked, they were still just sitting there out in the open, and with no one watching over the yards, and prospective thieves would only have to bring an ax and they could help themselves to the spoils. Ingressus knew better than most that steep, supposedly-impassable mountains made for good places to hide.
Then again, though, this wasn't a typical mountain range. The Guardians patrolled the lakes, rivers, and bays throughout the mountains, keeping watch over the Heart of Ardonia. Maybe they kept potential bandits out, too.
An idea struck Ingressus with such suddenness that he nearly missed a step. Could his clan... relocate here? Would the Guardians let them pass? Would they keep out the raiders? They had let him though, after all, and if being in Ataraxia had taught him anything, it was that non-Ardoni tended not to have much opinion about the Voltaris.
But as welcome as the gentler environment would be, it could work against them, too. Guardians were waterbound; all the raiders would have to do to get past them was to avoid the water. Ingressus could think of three Mobilium Songs off the top of his head that could get past a waterway with ease. And beyond that, the Voltaris would have no protection. It was the harsh northern environment that limited the raiders' attacks on the Barrier Mountains: the blizzards, the ice fields, the dangers of frostbite and the high winds that kept Mobiliwings-wielders grounded and covered the tracks of the Voltaris. If the Voltaris came to the lands here maybe they would be safe for a while, but the instant word of their presence got out, it would all be over. The Ataraxian Ardoni barely tolerated him alone; if he brought his clan here, they would see it as the invasion they had always suspected him of planning.
Ingressus sighed. He hated feeling this helpless.
"You okay?" Leah asked from beside him.
Ingressus nodded, dispelling his thoughts. "Fine. Just a personal issue."
"Well, better get your head in the game," Saylor warned from next to the minecart rail. "Lots of monsters underground."
"I've faced plenty of monsters," Ingressus retorted.
Matt finished disconnecting the first two minecarts from the rest. "All right. Everyone hop in."
Saylor unsubtly claimed the space in Leah's cart. Ingressus climbed in behind Matt, who leaned out from the cart, trying to reach the lever to activate the rails.
"Don't let me fall out," he requested.
Ingressus grabbed a fistful of his shirt. Matt strained to reach, and just managed to flip the lever. The rail activated and the cart began to rattle forwards. Ingressus pulled Matt back into the cart, and the Human gave him a nod of thanks as the carts reached the ravine and accelerated down the tracks. The rail descended along the side of the ravine, leveling off a couple times in front of an offshoot tunnel before continuing its downward plunge.
The carts eventually came to a stop at the end of the ravine. The four climbed out, and Matt faced the others.
"All right, safety lesson," he said. "Number one: monsters like the dark, but they will come into the lit areas if their prey is there. So keep your eyes open and your weapons ready if there are shadowed areas in sight. I assume we all know what undead and creepers are and what they can do, so I'm not gonna cover that.
"Number two: if there's sand or gravel on the ceiling of a tunnel, don't walk under it ever. If it's on the walls, stick to the other side of the tunnel. It's often very precariously suspended, and it can be set off by anything. You don't know how much is above or behind it, and getting buried alive would not be pleasant.
"Number three: finding your way. You see that sign?" He pointed to a red square of wood mounted in a nearby tunnel. "Those are everywhere in the explored parts of the caves. They're directional: one side's red, the other is blue. The red side marks the path deeper into the caves and the blue marks the way out, so as long as you're walking towards the blue and away from the red, you're heading for the surface. Blue like the sky, red like lava: remember that. If there's blue in more than one direction then either path will lead you out, and the best route will be marked with a green border around the blue.
"Now, slimes like it in deep and damp caves. This cave system hasn't been explored enough to lead that deep, so there's another set of rules for us tonight. Everyone take a couple of these."
He held out a handful of charcoal chunks. "Use these to make the walls on your left side as you walk. When we're ready to come back, we keep the marks on our right. Remember, right to return. You all got that?"
Saylor, Leah, and Ingressus all nodded.
"Any questions? Speak now."
Leah raised a hand. "If the mines haven't been mapped that deep, how do you know we can get to the slimes' level?"
Matt pointed. "That tunnel goes most of the way, and two days ago we found a sinkhole that goes the rest of the way. We know there's more cave at the bottom, but we haven't explored it yet."
Leah nodded. "Gotcha."
"Any other questions?" When only silence answered, Matt headed for the tunnel. "Follow me."
The tunnel stretched deep into the earth, lit by torches evenly spaced along the walls. The red-and-blue signs were placed at regular intervals as well, though the tunnel followed such a straight line and had so few offshoots that they were barely necessary. Wooden stairs and handrails had been added where the path took a steep angle, and Ingressus could see random scars and holes in the walls where he assumed ores had once been.
A dark hole yawned in the ground up ahead. Matt led them to the edge, holding a torch over the pit. Saylor kept his distance from Ingressus as he looked down the hole, keeping one eye on him as though he expected Ingressus to try to push him in.
"This is as far as we've explored," Matt said. "We all stick together down there. If we get separated for any reason, we all come straight back up here to meet up. No delaying, even if someone does find slimes. Everyone being safe is more important."
Ingressus nodded in understanding. Gauging acceptable risks had been a part of daily life in the mountains, and while Mr. Duncan's displeasure was something no one wanted to face, in the big scheme of things the stakes weren't high enough to justify endangering anyone's life.
Matt leaned over the hole and dropped his torch over the edge. The burning brand fell down the hole, its light illuminating a halo of rock around it before coming to a stop a few seconds later at the bottom of the hole. A startled bat flapped around the sinkhole before vanishing again, but there was no other movement from below.
"Let's go," Leah said.
The four climbed down into the sinkhole, picking their way along ledges and helping each other down some of the larger drops. Saylor had somehow ended up directly behind Ingressus, which he was silently but obviously unhappy about. He kept one eye on Ingressus as they climbed, and Ingressus noticed how his grip tightened on the stone whenever Ingressus found a handhold too close to him.
Different Ardoni had reacted differently to a Voltaris living in their town. Some were suspicious, keeping an eye on him whenever he was in their vicinity. Others just ignored him, acting as though he didn't exist. And others were afraid of him, keeping their distance from him and flinching whenever they saw him. Ingressus guessed Saylor was either the first or last– maybe both.
A scrabbling of stone was the only warning. Saylor slipped and Ingressus's hand shot out, closing around his wrist. Saylor grabbed for the wall, his eyes wide with fear as he realized who was holding him. He pulled himself back to the ledge, shaking Ingressus's hand off almost before he had a hold.
"I don't need your help!" he snapped.
"Don't worry," Ingressus deadpanned. "I won't tell anyone you owe your life to a Voltaris."
"Shut up."
Leah cleared her throat from behind them. She was balanced on the ledge behind where Saylor had fallen, watching the two Ardoni with an arched brow as she waited for them to keep going.
Ingressus turned to hop down to the next ledge, but spun around again when he saw Saylor jump off the wall. He and Leah both grabbed for him, but a yellow ribbon of light materialized beneath Saylor's feet and he slid along it, passing by a surprised Matt as he spiraled to the bottom of the hole.
"Okay," Leah said, impressed. "I'm jealous."
Ingressus was, too. Tiris and Heralas hadn't budged on their ruling that Ingressus wasn't allowed to use Songs. By the standards of any clan he should've been old enough by now to have a Song of his own, or at least to begin training with one. But their continued paranoia meant he had been denied, and apparently would be indefinitely.
But that didn't matter. They had a job to do. Ingressus banished the envy from his mind and started climbing down the sinkhole again.
"So, Saylor doesn't seem to like you much," Leah observed.
Ingressus held on to the wall as he stepped over a wide gap. "His clan and mine have been enemies for centuries."
The three soon reached the bottom. Saylor had brought out his own torch, and was pacing the tunnel mouth as he waited for them.
"Slimes like the damp," Leah said as they set off. "So look and listen for water sources."
"And remember to mark the walls," Matt added.
The unexplored caves were a stark contrast to the mines up above. The torchlight threw sharp-edged and flickering shadows across the wall, putting everyone on edge at the scraps of motion at the edge of their view. The quick flash of a bat made Ingressus grab his sword, which made Saylor snatch his own weapon, his green gaze flashing between Ingressus and the possible danger.
Saylor didn't trust Ingressus, that much had been clear from the beginning. Based on the way he had freaked out back in the sinkhole despite having his Mobilislide Song, and the way his gaze first shot to Ingressus rather than searching for whatever had startled him, he was probably afraid that Ingressus would take this chance to do what Voltaris supposedly did and kill him. No witnesses to the crime, no one who even knew where they had gone. It would probably be a while before anyone even found a body down here– plenty of time for the trail to go cold.
Ingressus made a mental note to avoid the mines after tonight. No point in tempting those who might take the chance to finish him off.
Fortunately, Saylor wasn't quite jumpy enough to actually make a strike at him, even when Ingressus did fully draw his sword to deal with a pair of zombies. Still, Ingressus made note of Saylor's fighting technique, and he was sure Saylor was doing the same for him.
Their first real scare came when a creeper dropped down from an adjoining tunnel. Everyone obeyed Matt's order of "scatter!" without question, splitting into a semicircle around the green beast. The creeper scuttled after each one of them in turn as they darted in to distract it from one another, until Leah threw her spear and impaled the beast through the head. Its about-to-explode hiss choked off as it fell to the ground, its stubby legs twitching one last time before falling still.
Ingressus wiped a line of dark blood off the tip of his sword. Leah, on the other hand, went right to the creeper's body and cut a long line into its torso with her spear.
"What are you– oh, Songs, please don't use TNT in your next prank!" Saylor pleaded.
Leah stood up again, a mass of something dark in her hand. "Relax, I'm not gonna blow up Ataraxia. I want to try and make fireworks."
"That's only a little comforting."
"I'll be very careful."
Their tunnel stopped abruptly not long after that. They backtracked, and ventured down the tunnel the creeper had come from. Ingressus took the lead, throwing a torch up into the passageway before leaping after it with sword drawn. He decapitated a skeleton, then called the all-clear, gathering up the bones. Kittrian would appreciate the bonemeal, and any extra would sell well.
The new tunnel was narrower than the last, weaving through the rock like the bed of an ancient river. There were fewer mobs but as they walked, something felt... off, something strange and foreign to Ingressus's Song-sense. It didn't feel like a Song, it was so much... not louder, the opposite, but still so powerful, surrounding him and the others like a shroud. Something felt wrong, deeply wrong, the opposite of the way things should be.
He looked over at Saylor, the only other one with the necessary senses to pick up on whatever it was. The Kaltaris was walking along, looking annoyed but otherwise calm. Could he not feel it? Or had he felt this before?
Saylor noticed him staring. "What?" he snapped, eyeing Ingressus.
Matt had noticed Ingressus's troubled look as well. "Something wrong?"
"Can none of you feel that?" Ingressus asked.
Leah stared at him blankly. "Feel what?"
"It's..." how could he describe it? "It's empty. Quiet, but— it's like something should be there, but isn't. It's like more– no, less than nothing."
Matt echoed Leah's stare. "Are you okay, man?"
"It's a resonance." Saylor looked at Ingressus with some disgust. "You don't know what they feel like now?"
"I've never been to one," Ingressus retorted. "They're all dead; what would be the point?"
"What's a resonance?" Leah broke in.
"They're places where Songs used to grow," Ingressus said. "But no new Songs have formed in centuries. Now they're just remnants of what they used to be."
He lifted his torch, looking around as though the walls would reveal some secret. He had kind of imagined that resonances would look something like the Ardoni shrines; with small pockets on the walls for the Songs to grow in. But the tunnel just looked like any other section of cave.
"That sounds bad," Matt observed.
"It is," Saylor agreed. "An Ardoni's Songs used to be buried with them when they died. But they've been so scarce that that hasn't been done in generations."
"So what happened to the resonances?" Leah asked. "Did they all just, what, turn off one day like a redstone gadget?"
"No one knows," Ingressus said, at the same moment that Saylor answered "The Voltaris sabotaged them."
Matt muttered an "oh, boy," as the two Ardoni glared at each other.
"The resonances in the Barrier Mountains are dead, too," Ingressus pointed out. "Which you should know, given that your clans have been staking them out for longer than I've been alive. Why do you think we would do that to ourselves?"
"Yes, why would you?" Saylor retorted. "We don't know you can't restart them for yourselves. It'd be the perfect strategy; depriving us of Songs while you hoard them for yourselves."
"If we could do that, then why would we need to steal Songs from convoys?" Ingressus challenged. "We don't risk bloodshed for fun, unlike what you seem to think."
"Okay, let's keep moving!" Leah said loudly, clapping her hands together as the echoes of her voice bounced off the rock walls. "The night isn't gonna last forever, and we've got a lot of cave to cover! Ingressus, you take the front and Saylor, you watch our backs. Onward to find those slimes!"
She marched on down the tunnel, blatantly shoving Ingressus ahead of her. He didn't resist, accepting the excuse to drop the argument.
It was no surprise that Saylor blamed his clan– and by extension, him– for the dead resonances. He had known from the start that the four clans had believed the Voltaris to be responsible, taking their research into the Songs before their exile as evidence of guilt. It was the reason Tiris and Heralas had forbidden Ingressus from using Songs: the fear that he would do something terrible with or to them.
The tunnel opened into a rounded cavern, and Ingressus knew that they had come to the resonance proper. To his eyes it was just a cave, the high, arching ceiling faintly lit by the torches and fading to shadow near the opposite end. But to his Song-sense the cave was like nothing he'd ever experienced. The emptiness from before filled the cave like a flood, radiating from a patch of floor that must have been where the Songs once grew. Songs had a life to them; movement, sound, light. But this cave... Ingressus understood now why the nonfunctioning resonances were called dead. It was like coming across the ruins of a destroyed camp– a place once full of life now still and silent and filled only with ghosts.
Ingressus stepped slowly into the cave, his footfalls light in an unconscious attempt to preserve the silence. Saylor followed, his expression somber. The two Humans were silent, sensing the mood if not the resonance itself.
Ingressus crouched in the center of the cave, staring at the place where the emptiness was emanating from. The stone there was empty and unmarked– had he not been Ardoni, had he not felt the scars of the dead magic with every heartbeat, every breath, he could have walked across the cave without any idea of what had happened here so long ago. He wondered if his ancestors had sat in this very spot, watching the Songs grow and the magic fill them with power and purpose, learning about the gift the land blessed their species with. He imagined being there with them, watching the four little glowing cubes, utterly ignorant of the looming calamity that would face their clan, their entire species.
"Someone must've been here before us," Saylor said, his low voice pushing the silence away. "Otherwise the Songs would still be here."
He turned, shining his torch around him. "It's weird that there's no signs of anyone."
"It has been a few hundred years," Leah pointed out. "Maybe whoever it was came soon after this place stopped working."
"Maybe," Saylor agreed. "But we do keep an eye on the other ones."
Ingressus stood. "There have to be plenty of easier resonances to get to. There wouldn't be any point in coming all this way just to stake out this one. There's nothing to find here that can't be found somewhere else."
The resonance was stifling. Ingressus couldn't imagine being one of the Ardoni assigned to watch a dead patch of dirt or stone for any major length of time. But then again, he spared no sympathy for those trying to turn the mountain resonances into ambush sites. They brought that misery on themselves.
The four moved on, converging on the tunnel on the other side of the resonances. Saylor faltered when Ingressus approached him, watching the Voltaris with uncertainty. The emptiness of the dead resonance hung in the air around them, permeating the stone and the Ardoni themselves, leaving a hollowness that sapped the life from their past argument.
"Do you really think my people would do this?"
Saylor opened his mouth, but closed it again without speaking, the look in his eyes saying what his voice didn't. Yes. He did. Maybe he was reluctant to say it, but he did believe it. Ingressus turned away, leaving the resonance and the topic behind.
The dead aura of the resonance faded behind them as they walked, but the solemn mood remained with them. The four walked in silence, until the sound of flowing water rose from up ahead. One last turn and they were greeted by an underground river, green blobs of goo hopping along beside its banks. The nearest slimes turned their eyespots on the intruders, splatting against the ground as they turned to face them.
Matt stuck his torch on the wall and drew his sword. "We're here."
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Total word count: 29,004