12 Miles Below

This time around, the transition in terrain was a little more subtle, for mites at least. The metal city and scraps slowly started to be overrun by vegetation. Large tree vines first, squeezing through the abandoned structures, injecting hints of life step by step. Buzzing of insects returned, weeds and other hints of small plants started to grow through the cracks, until we started going into sections that had more artificial light shining from above. That’s when life decided it had enough trying to be sneaky about anything.

Giant tree trunks swam frozen through ruins of concrete and bent metal, and the city was promptly eaten up. Yrob continued to lead us all by the nose, sometimes jumping from trunk to trunk and over the large roots.

“This looks really familiar.” I muttered as we passed under one of the larger trees. Lot of red leaves at the canopy eating up all the artificial lighting. I’d seen a forest exactly like that before, and we were just about in the same general area come to think of it. Not too far off the clan, and not too far off the old Undersider city. I’d have thought Abraxas was having a little giggle at us if it hadn’t been Yrob leading us around. “...Where exactly did the Chosen pick to set up their workshop? Just curious.”

Yrob gave a grunt. “Large field. Silver flowers. Open air. Good for running. Good for farming. Good for defending. Have mite fountain too.”

I turned my helmet to Wrath who was jogging besides us, taking light steps with slight flutters of her wings, still hidden under all her baggy clothing, making her jumps look a hell of a lot more graceful than the rest of us.

“Is this the place I think it is?” I asked.

“Are you suspecting the location where we first spotted Abraxas?”

I shot her a thumbs up.

She hummed. “I suspect it would have been selected as well. The location is distant enough from most landmarks, and contains all items needed for survival. The only missing condition had been a city pillar heart.”

And since they’re working hand in hand with Machines like Yrob, would be a tad rude to have a giant fuck-off tower built to vaporize machines anywhere in a giant radius.

“Joy, lot of nice romantic memories there.” I laughed, thinking back on our impromptu boat ride.

She stumbled halfway past a root, almost face-planting into the ground if her arms hadn’t shot out to summersault her back on her feet. She brushed off dirt, gave a few looks around, confirmed I’d seen all of it, and quickly shuffled away, head looking straight down at the ground.

“You okay?” I asked, a little concerned. Wrath was a lot of things, but usually anytime she lacked gracefulness it was in social situations. When it came to physical acrobatics, I’ve seen her thread a needle in midair, while jumping through tiny rings of fire. Almost tripping on a root felt a little too human.

“My systems are functional, yes.” Wrath said with a huff. “I was simply caught off guard.”

“How does a Feather get caught off guard?” I asked.

She didn’t answer, just keeping ahead of the pack instead.

Father scoffed up ahead. “Fools made for one another.” He muttered.

But given we were going at a pretty quick jog instead of a leisurely walk like last time, we hit the end of the red forest in record time.

The giant silver fields stretched out all ahead, like how I remembered this zone before.

“How’d the city look?” I asked Yrob as we started making headway through. “What’s the latest thing you machines have picked up from humans?”

The machine lumbered away, thinking. “Have music now.” He said. “Very new. Focused on cooking, not music. But other packs are. They are okay.”

Giant machines with half-skulls singing snow chanties and other myths made for a funny mental image. Last time Wrath and I had crossed the silver flower fields, I’d taught her a few popular clan acapella songs that we could sing together to pass the time.

The knights behind me weren’t great singers, none of us Retainers were to be honest, but the spirit was still there. And there wasn’t anything to do other than run forward following Yrob’s direction. Father and Wrath’s sight and sensors were too powerful for anything to sneak up on us, stealth wasn’t needed and for once we weren’t being chased down by anything trying to throw me off a cliff.

So we sang again, sharing a few different songs between surface clan, and the newly minted Chosen.

The trip ended at one of the rocky plateau, an empty one at the halfway point between the Chosen town and our position. This biome was massive, and basically empty of everything.

We didn’t need to use up a firepack at least, plenty of plant material around us to start a campfire.

Food cooking, I walked over to the edge, and looked over the horizon. The red forest was long out of sight by now, just rolling hills of silver and black pillars that broke up the scenery.

“Good place as any.” I said, sitting down and sorting through Journey’s HUD options. “Time for tonight’s attempt at deciphering insanity.”

“If only my squires had been as dedicated to practice as you are to reading gibberish.” Cathida pouted in my ear. “But you do you deary, let me know when you give up.”

“I’m sure you found other ways to keep your squires in line.” I said, clicking through documents I’d stored up until I found what I wanted. “But I know this isn’t a prank from him. There’s more to his book than just scribbles.”

The manuscript appeared, marking my page progress at twelve percent. That wasn’t where I actually had been, I’d already read through the whole one hundred fifty three pages he’d left me.

Words written down by Hexis Galrament, my old mentor. Exactly as pretentious in words as he’d been the last time I saw his ugly mug.

Ahem. “Go back to page three.” I asked, and the HUD moved around, progress bar going back.

The words lined up neatly, appropriate dramatics, bold and italics where they should thematically be, and some nice diagrams and art in the background. I re-read the section again.

“A well known counterargument to both unified and the disrupted network theory has been dubbed the ‘gravity parable’.” I read, looking specifically for a few hidden markings within the text. “When Grand High Warlock Eshtiros made his original claims of the occult’s true nature, Grand High Warlock Relia rebutted with a simple story. ‘A blind man walks into the world. In each corner of the world he measures and finds the same force pulling him down - gravity. And so, he claims this is the rule of the universe for he has measured and measured all across his little world and never once found any deviation to his claim. I see you, blind man.’ She said, pointing at Eshtiros, then pointed up, past the roof of the world. ‘Do you not recall the stars and the worlds beyond when you still had eyes?’ Then she pointed down under his feet. ‘Do you not remember the whims of the mites when you still had a soul?’ and finally she pointed at him directly. ‘Do you not remember your own title when you still had your pride?’ And when the conclave grew quiet, she spoke the most famous line in history: ‘Is gravity our fate to rediscover again and again?’ And while it is unlikely those were the exact words Relia spoke, we need to examine between the pages instead and go directly to the truth: It’s far more probable those were simple dramatics as written down by A.R. Artarius. The lesson, however, remains the same. We cannot claim to know the world, simply because a few facts happen to line up in our direction. Thus, any proof from either Unified or Disrupted network can never be completely proven unless the very nature of the occult itself makes itself revealed to humanity.”

Straight up warlock fantasy political grandstanding. This was the kind of romance books the warlocks drank up like ants after sugar. A mix of dramatics, plausible historical inaccuracy, and a philosophical lesson all wrapped up in one.

Some of it he’d already told me face to face, and a lot of this was just more details on what he’d explained during his lessons. The practical reason was pretty simple: If some warlock made a reference to the gravity parable, I’d know what he was referring to. Anyone calling me a blind man wouldn’t find me quite so blind.

As for the philosophy, that was a little on the nose for this passage. Other worlds had different constants of gravity the blind man didn’t think about - likely blind being a metaphor for the idea not even passing through his thoughts. Then the second verse about the mites showing even in the current world, gravity can be messed with because mites. And the last verse probably implying warlocks themselves could muck around gravity, so there were basically all kinds of other ways things could be mucked around that the man didn’t consider.

All things Hexis had explained already. Or explained enough I could read between the lines here.

Anyone else reading through this historical book would probably scratch it at just that - a book about history and some basic warlock knowledge. Nothing about fractals or how the occult itself worked.

Except Hexis hadn’t put that much time into writing all this without some additional goal in mind.

That was the crux of the issue. It was a one hundred fifty three page book all about the knowledge a warlock would have - all except for fractals. There wasn't a single mention of them anywhere. I’d have considered Hexis to be doing his version of a prank, which would make some amount of sense: I forced him to read a few pages of Wrath generated food recipes with the actual information he asked for weaved inside, so sending me on a wild goose chase was somewhat deserved.

But here’s the real issue: The file size was twenty four gigabytes. For one hundred and fifty three pages of dry text with pictures. Get real. He’d hidden stuff inside it all somehow like a puzzle, and it was a matter of time until I figured out how to open it.

Problem was that he hid his stuff really, really well.

“Why do you keep going back to this particular section?” Cathida asked as I skimmed over the page again and again.

“Because it’s right by the start, and check the image it’s put on.” There was a relic knight, drawn posed in a T-shape, with two additional hands reaching up and down, for a total of six hands all crafting a circle around the man. A blindfold had been placed around his head, but the short hair cut and lack of a beard made the figure a little… familiar. And the armor’s sigils and shape looked eerily like my own.

“He’s sending a message here.” I said. “That’s me. I’m the blind man, and he’s trying to tell me something in this passage. All puzzles start with some kind of opening to begin the work, and the gateway is here. Somewhere. I figure it out, and from there I can re-read all the other clues he left in the book.”

Cathida rolled her eyes, or at least it sounded like she did from her groan. “He’s a senile old man who was losing it. And vengeful too, he remembered that stunt you pulled on him and holds some grudges. Deary, be real. Why would a grand warlock write down all the secrets of his guild in any place that could be read? That’s their first cardinal sin. He wouldn’t break that for anyone.”

I could toss it to Wrath and ask her to crack it all open for me, and there was a decent chance she could. But this was some kind of gauntlet that Hexis had left for me to solve, and I didn’t want to meet him again just to confess I didn’t have what it took to break his secrets myself.

The rest of the night was spent looking at the picture, trying to find what the hell it meant. And getting no further at all. The design patterns on the armor looked similar to mine, but not quite so I tried interpreting them as possible fractals, and that’s how I spent the rest of tonight’s study going absolutely nowhere.

But I still believed I was getting closer to finding out the secret. One idea at a time.

The plains had a night day cycle, mostly with all the artificial lighting far above. Misty clouds made the whole thing seem like an overcast day and night, but the ‘sunrise’ was technically in the right direction according to Journey. Guess the mites paid attention to some details.

In that overcast sunrise, we set out again, jumping down from rock to rock until we were back in the field of silver flowers, and on our way forward again. Yesterday had been peaceful, and today of course, couldn’t last.

We didn’t get ambushed or attacked, but we did arrive right after what looked to be one. The town was as Yrob had described: Made on the side of a cliff, and fortified. What he meant by fortified were walls, shelters and very, very thick mite-made construction.

What wasn’t mite made were the additions the locals had generously sprinkled all over. Felt like I was walking into a weapons trade convention where we were the guests of honor — everything from pistols to cannons had us in their sights, making me wish I'd dressed up a little. Basically firepower big enough to rethink how much relic armor could tank through it all.

“They’re friendly, right?” I asked as we approached. Yrob was now cordially sent to the front, where he continued his jog as if nothing was wrong in the world, the oversized sack carrying all his cooking goods with him.

The rest of the knights took a casual V formation, keeping me mostly by the center without making it too obvious they had favorites. Wrath was jumping along without issue and Father kept pace at the rear, eyes constantly darting around for possible danger.

He wasn’t looking at the fortress directly ahead of us with all the guns, so I think he ruled them not a threat already.

“If they haven’t shot at you yet, they’re friendly.” Cathida said. “Or, you could send the captain there ahead of everyone. He’s unkillable as far as I can tell.”

We could send Sagrius at the front of the line and huddle behind him, the man was now basically unkillable due to the occult he wielded like a god’s shield. One problem with that. I gave a look at the fore-runner of our group, lumbering alone without a care in the world and about twice as tall as Sagrius. “Yrob’s not going to fit.”

“Tell him to suck in his gut.” Cathida huffed. “If he complains, he should have gone on a diet long ago, so that’s his problem. Did he not get the message that there’s massive machines looking to rip people up lurking around outside? Less patina isn’t going to kill him.”

I gave the machine a look. He turned back. “I have best diet.” He said, completely serious.

There was a simple solution to all this, and it was basically a quick comms chat of us asking ‘hey, mind not shooting at us?’ and they answered, ‘sure, so long as you don’t shoot at us.’

They still had those guns pointed at us. Trust but verify and all that.

Reasonably enough, they asked for just one person to pass through the gates and talk shop with the town leaders.

We sent Wrath in alone to chat without any hesitation, while we sat before the giant gates and waited. The revelation that their absentee leader has returned must have gone off without a problem since about half hour after those gates reopened and out came Wrath, followed by a few machines, some Chosen knights and some regular folks. All coming to our group in a casual stroll instead of a sprint with weapons up.

And at the forefront of that welcoming band was an old friend.

He’d made it back to join his original people in the end. A pleasant smile on his face, his replaced eyes glowed violet for a moment as he studied us before returning back to their normal shade. He had that ridiculous looking staff and everything I’d seen him in the past, all except for his relic armor. Don’t know if the clan confiscated that and kept it, or if they let him slink back home with it. I’ll have to ask him just how he’d gotten here.

“Greetings clan knights.” Lejis, priest of the Chosen, said with his usual intonation. “We are grateful to see friendly faces in these more somber times.”

That wasn’t the only old friend I found. The real surprise was to the machine that sulked right behind him, easily padding along as if on a short leash behind that priest. Looming with a far larger frame than any Runner or even spiders. One giant paw curled into the ground, easily sinking in, while the rest of the hulking body idly sat back down, like a cat loafing in position. The tail behind brushing through the silver flowers back and forth absentmindedly.

And that skull like lizard’s head, teeth and all, staring me down.

“Oh, never seen a gymrat get that big.” Cathida said. “What kind of diet is that monster on?”

“Lots of crickets. Overcooked to a crisp.” I muttered back.

The claws, feet and tail looked brand new. Shining white ceramic, with only the tips of the feet and claws having any kind of regular dirt built up. Right up those clean arms and legs, like a direct cut, the plating went from polished white to burned charcoal. Not just the arms. Almost every part of the drake’s body looked like it had been scorched through an inferno and left with soot. It was as if the drake had held some kind of bomb right in those grubby paws of his, and that bomb had exploded in his face, taking out his hands a little too cleanly along the way.

I knew what that bomb had been. Last time I’d seen this particular machine, it had been hobbling away on stumps. Clearly upset and unable to do a thing about it.

“Hello Fido.”