Chapter 499 – Remember

The next morning, the fog seemed even deeper when Sophia stepped out of the tent. It made her clothing cling clammily to her body, but at least it didn’t interfere with her wings. She was certain Ci’an would have had some choice comments if she hadn’t been called back to Izel.

Sophia found that she actually missed the complaints.

Following the key was easy enough, though Sophia still managed to fly past her destination at least three times before she realized that it wasn’t pointing at a building; instead, there was a circular plaque embedded in the stone of the mountain, almost like a USGS marker. The material looked similarly bronzey, but instead of elevation or a date, it had an ankh surrounded by the words Rejoice in Refuge on the top semicircle and Remember Those Left Behind on the bottom semicircle. They were upside down and written in Suras, but Sophia could still read them easily.

“I can see why the key led us here,” Sophia mused out loud. “I thought it was going to lead us to the workshop. I guess … is this the mountain peak the note mentioned?” 

“Turn around,” Dav told Sophia. “You’ve got your back to it.”

When Sophia turned, she saw it. Ahead of her, hovering above the slope, was a dark circle rimmed in white light. It had to be the eclipse of Arsalos in the note. “That wasn’t there a moment ago.”

“What’s not where?” Xin’ri asked.

Sophia pointed at the eclipse. “Right there, the dark spot floating in the fog. Don’t you see it?”

It was surprisingly clear despite the fog, now that Sophia thought about it. It should have been blurred, but it wasn’t.

Xin’ri shook her head. 

“Maybe it’s positional?” Dav proposed. “I didn’t see it until I was here, even though it should have been visible.”

It took a few minutes and a little walking to establish the rules, but Dav was right: it could only be seen from certain angles even though there was no obvious reason for that. It was a magical effect, but a very weak one; Sophia couldn’t even see the magic that made it if she wasn’t in position to see the image. 

The eclipse was clearest if you stood directly in front of the medallion in the stone, where the words would be upright and easy to read, then looked beyond it towards the valley. The eclipse disappeared if you went more than ten or fifteen feet from the marker in any direction except downslope. 

That had to be what the Guide meant in the note when he said to follow the eclipse.

Even though the visual clue was visible only from near the ground, it didn’t take the terrain into account; following it on foot would have been decidedly annoying. They’d have had to climb down several cliffs, cross one three-foot-wide crevasse, and manage not to break an ankle on a clearly loose scree slope, all within the first mile of the hike. Sophia suspected that it would be an annoying task of leaving the eclipse’s line and then attempting to find it again lower on the mountain; there had to be an easier way down.

It was much easier to fly. That wasn’t without its own challenges, but those had to do with staying close enough to a straight line to keep the eclipse within sight rather than the terrain itself. The wind was not particularly helpful, though that was more of a problem for Xin’ri than for Sophia. 

It was early afternoon when they reached the valley floor. It was wide and covered in brush, with no obvious ruined buildings, but the eclipsed moon still shone from ahead.

They were only about a hundred yards from a brush-covered mound when it suddenly clicked in Sophia’s mind that the eclipsed moon wasn’t leading them past the mound, it was emanating from a spot roughly fifteen feet above the mound.

Sophia slowed her flight and tried to get a better look at the ground she’d mostly ignored. The mound was one of several in the area, though it was definitely the largest in both height and width. It was also surprisingly linear on the face she could see. 

As she got closer, she could confirm that while it had been effectively rounded off by dirt and the plants growing out of the dirt, there were definitely ruined walls under the mess. She’d expected something like Othala’s complex in the Skylands, which was mostly above ground, but this wasn’t nearly tall enough; how much of it was buried? “How are we supposed to even get at the building?”

“Do we need to?” Dav hopped off the Echo and drifted through the sky towards Sophia, closer than the Echo could easily fly. “You can affect the mana through your aura and I’m not sure I want to get any closer than we have to anyway.”

“Maybe, or maybe not. Certainly not immediately,” Sophia admitted. “Let’s scout the whole building first, I guess?”

The building was at least twice the size Sophia initially guessed, far larger than it seemed from the outside. The lowest level was below ground, a fact she would have discovered after she counted the layers if it weren’t for the other surprises about the building.

The first surprise was that the building was falling - or, perhaps, flying - apart. It wasn’t moving at all, but crazy lines of darkness ran randomly through all of the walls and ceilings. In a few places, they were brightly lit instead of dark, which made what was going on even more obvious: something happened inside that was tearing the building apart before their eyes. It was like looking at a single frame of a slow-motion video of an explosion; nothing was moving, but it certainly looked like it should be.

If that happened two thousand years ago and Sophia was right about the way the stasis worked, the building should already have fallen apart. It hadn’t, which said that either she was wrong about the stasis or the damage was more recent. Sophia naturally guessed the second one was more likely; after all, if the War never ended, who was to say that the fight hadn’t continued inside the workshop despite the stasis?

That didn’t explain why the stasis was triggered in the first place, but it didn’t have to. There were a bunch of possible reasons other than “the building is being destroyed” to want to freeze an enemy leader inside a building with you when you were attacked.

Well, that was one guess anyway. Sophia put it at no better than one in three odds of being right, mostly because she had only guesses to base it on. She couldn’t even say for certain that the workshop belonged to the Mimir who made the Guide; that was pretty likely, and guessing that he was the one allied with the Archons seemed even more likely given the eclipsed image of Arsalos above the building, but she couldn’t be sure.

The second thing they discovered wasn’t really a surprise; in fact, Sophia guessed she probably should have expected it. The image of Lost Arsalos, the Eclipsed Moon of Suryas, could be seen from eight different angles: perpendicular to each of the four walls and aligned with each of the four corners. It seemed to travel out flat rather than rising for all of them, which made Sophia suddenly realize that it was not a straight line; instead, it stayed close to the ground. She probably should have realized that when they entered the flatter part of the valley, but it simply hadn’t occurred to her.

The second actual surprise made it seem even more likely that the explosion was new: on the far side of the building, the hill had been excavated enough to reveal a door. It was painted a deep blue with a white curved symbol almost like a comma that was wider at one end than the other. The door wasn’t falling apart; in fact, it looked more intact than the upper parts of the building.

The excavation was not recent. Sophia’s guess was echoed by Revanos the moment it came into view: the once-cleared doorway was evidence of the Mage’s passage through the area. It didn’t give any immediate idea of where she was, but it did say that she’d been there.

Well, that someone had been there. Sophia was willing to bet it was the Mage.

The door wasn’t clear enough to open, but the fact that it had been cleared meant that it was probably safe enough to approach the workshop. Despite that, Sophia spent quite a while examining what she could see from the outside first. 

All that took was time, and spending time to prevent later issues was usually worth it. There was a reason they’d planned so many of their Arena fights ahead of time; yes, they were trying to put on a good show, but they also had to manage it without any injuries they could avoid. Dav’s healing was good but it was still best to avoid the injury in the first place.

The first thing Sophia was able to discover was that the workshop was influencing the outside world in more ways than just the projection of the narrow images of Lost Arsalos. One of the walls seemed to exude mana. It was subtle and Sophia found it hard to pin down what the mana was for, especially since it seemed to stay away from her. 

She kept poking at it while the others set up camp around her. As far as they were concerned, Sophia was the expert and she was busy, so they’d take care of what little needed to be done. 

That lasted until Dav tapped Sophia on the shoulder. “Sophia? Do you know where Xin’ri is?”

Sophia blinked, then extended her aura towards the camp instead of towards the buried pyramidal workshop. “No, I don’t feel her nearby. Why do you ask?”

Dav frowned, obviously worried. “Dinner’s ready but I can’t find her. She’s not answering when I try to contact her through the mindlink, either. I hoped she was taking a nap or something.” 

Sophia shook her head. “That’s not like her. Revanos?”

“Hasn’t seen her either,” Dav answered. “I asked him first.”

“We’ll have to follow her,” Revanos said clearly. He pointed off to his left and added, “She left the camp over there. She was walking, so I don’t think she meant to go far.”

It wasn’t directly away from Mimir’s workshop, but it was definitely not towards it. It wasn’t in the direction of the stream that led down the valley, either; that was in the other direction, past the workshop. “I can’t think she was headed out to hunt, so … firewood, maybe?”

“Or something else she saw around here,” Dav countered halfheartedly. “I think we’d better all go, in case she’s in trouble.”

When they found her an hour and a half later, Xin’ri was, in fact, not in trouble … at least, not of the physical kind. She was sleeping next to a banked campfire. There was no sign of danger but also no obvious reason for Xin’ri to be away from the camp, and there was certainly no reason she’d have simply set up camp in the wilds with no one around her and then fallen asleep without a care for possible danger.

They might not have seen anything particularly dangerous on Arcatiz, but there were any number of completely mundane animals you didn’t want to anger and this was a part of the planet no one had been to in centuries.

No one who returned, at least.