Chapter 23
ARIENNE
It was a stone building in the Imperial style, the one that had looked out of place among all the melted buildings of wood and leather. Likely the prefect’s seat.
Marble pillars like half-melted candles lined the hall, but more than half of them were broken and their fragments scattered over the floor.
This entrance hall, where officials high and low must have busily walked, had a collapsed wall and was completely in ruins.
And standing in the middle of it was a Power generator that had become a fearsome pile of detritus.
Its humming was accented by a rhythmic thumping like drums.
Arienne gulped. It was the very sight she had seen when she gripped the imaginary starlight string. Fractica had indeed Powered the enchantment protecting the catacombs for nearly two hundred years, after the first death of Eldred, and even after the death of everything in Mersia.
Arienne cowered in the doorway where she still stood.
This mass of rusting iron, rotting leather, fragmented furniture, and torn fabrics looked as if it were about to whip out its many arms to her at any moment.
The strand of starlight that had made its way from the catacombs to the surface was completely incongruous with the hideous monster before her.
Swallowing her fear, Arienne stood straight and shouted into the room in her mind.
“Noam!”
“What?” he called back through the half-open door.
“Is Tychon sleeping? Wake him!”
“Aren’t you … going to run?” Fear had crept into his voice.
“I can win this fight.”
Loran had felled a gigatherion the size of a castle in her battle against the Twenty-First Legion; a lump of trash animated by a single Power generator was nothing compared to that. Of course, Arienne did not have the protection of a dragon, nor a sword made from its tooth.
“But what I do have,” whispered Arienne, “is your name. Fractica.”
In one of the old sorcery traditions, it was said that to know someone’s name was to have power over them.
She had never learned this sorcery, didn’t even know if it truly existed, but she knew that when making images in her mind, there was a big difference in knowing and not knowing the true shape and state of things.
To her, Fractica had once been a fearsome monster and nothing more.
But now she knew its name and what it had once been in Danras.
The Star of Mersia had devastated this land a hundred years ago, and Arienne had come here to seek out the truth behind this mystery.
Not everything had been explained, but she had learned things from the catacombs, from Noam, and from her climb up the crumbling staircase—that whatever happened here, it involved Fractica.
And at the same time, the catacombs beneath them had been protected because of this very same Power generator.
The rest of the truth lay underneath all that trash, hidden in the lead sarcophagus within.
The question of how to defeat Fractica had preoccupied Arienne throughout her climb up the stairs. But this monster was not merely a thing to defeat; it was a safe of secrets to unlock. What those secrets would be was still unknown, but her mission remained—she needed to uncover them.
Tychon woke, and his babbling made something snap within her. A hot wave spread outward from the center of her body. There was a movement near her left foot at the edge of her vision. Arienne didn’t even look at it as she sliced off the tentacle.
“You won’t get me like that twice,” she said, confidence in her grin.
She leaped behind a pillar that was still upright. The hall was big, but Fractica was so large it kept bumping into the other numerous pillars on its way to Arienne. Despite her hopes that its rusted legs would snap as it tripped over the melted stone, Fractica’s awkward advance continued.
Another tentacle stretched toward her pillar. Arienne attempted to jump behind a fallen statue and fell, tripped by some debris, but not before slicing off the arm that was reaching for her as well, backing away from the flailing tentacle as it slowly gave up. Her eyes kept darting around the hall.
The administrative buildings of the Empire were supported by overlapping arches that were said to withstand a thousand years of time. Many of the pillars, merely decorative, did not even touch the ceiling.
Those pillars were the linchpin of her strategy.
“Watch, Noam, what a true sorcerer is!”
Fractica was not quick on its feet, but its every step rang cacophonously through the hall.
Arienne tried to imagine a house caving in. She had encountered Lysandros for the first time at a derelict inn, below Finvera Pass. Using a spell Eldred taught her, Arienne had brought down the house on Lysandros.
But this building had no crossbeams, no load-bearing pillars. Arienne simply did not have the knowledge to topple proper Imperial architecture.
Instead, she drew one of the pillars in her mind and imagined it breaking like the rotten crossbeams of that inn.
She repeated the scene several times in her head, and Tychon’s babbling turned to cries.
The sudden increase in the flow of Power pushed immense pressure into her every capillary, her every nerve.
Thousands of steel pins needled her heart, and something warm trickled from her nose.
Sensing a change in the air, Fractica became frantic.
“There’s only one chance,” Arienne half murmured, half moaned, and stepped forth from behind the fallen statue. “Halt, Fractica!”
Fractica looked as if it had momentarily forgotten how to walk. Raising her arms, Arienne then shouted not in a human language but in the wail of sorcery, and a ball of Power so intense that she could not hold it in her mouth for longer than a moment exploded from her.
One of the pillars that had stood for a hundred years began to lean over, falling directly toward Fractica, as it failed to withstand the test of time imagined by Arienne.
Fractica tried to block the pillar by extending scores of arms against it—but by the time it did so, another pillar already began falling toward Fractica too.
The once beautiful marble pillar smashed into Fractica’s side.
The sound of rock striking iron was earsplitting, and the many rusted legs tried to maintain balance even as another pillar fell, shattering over the Power generator before the echoes of the first fall had even faded away and filling the space with stone dust.
Breathing deeply, Arienne wiped the blood from her nose and lips with her sleeve.
Bits of stone fell and Fractica struggled in vain under the weight of the pillars.
The generator thumped even louder. A Class 3 generator would have had more than enough Power to survive the destruction, but Arienne counted on the frailty of the old and rusted body it animated.
If Fractica managed to rise again, there was nowhere for her to run—the spiral staircase leading to the generator chamber, already crumbling to pieces during her climb, was surely finished now from the shock of the fallen pillars.
Following the last trace of the string of starlight, Arienne crept into the debris where Fractica lay stuck, flailing about like a bird that had fallen from the sky and was unable to take flight. Its arms still darted threateningly like vipers, but the generator was no longer a threat.
Arienne bent over and carefully lifted the starlight string with her hands. No visions this time. It was the visualization of the supply of Power Fractica had been using to guard the catacombs of Danras from Eldred, an imaginary string Arienne now wound around each of her hands.
Fractica was wrecked, not just the trash-covered frame but the Power generator itself. She could see violet smoke seeping out of its body like intermittent coughs, and could feel the string of starlight dimming.
“Fractica,” she said in a quiet voice.
Power generators were supposed to be mere energy sources, but here was Fractica behaving like an animal that had lost its mind.
But if it truly had lost its mind, there had to be a reason—and there had to be a “mind” to lose in the first place.
As Eldred had, maybe Fractica somehow retained its memories or consciousness from its life. If so, Arienne was going to find out.
Fractica’s broken body puffed another spout of smoke. The string in Arienne’s hands fluttered like a dying butterfly. Fractica could go silent any moment.
Gripping the starlight string, Arienne thought back to what happened in Arland’s volcano, summoning as much rich detail as she could remember.
Eldred had stepped out of the room in her mind and entered the mind of the dragon.
So, if Eldred could enter Arland’s dragon, then Arienne might be able to enter Fractica.
Eldred had once said the dragon was a living Power generator after all …
“Fractica.”
This time, Arienne said it louder and clearer.
The string in her hands became warmer. Arienne repeated the long spell Eldred had chanted in the volcano.
She didn’t remember it precisely, nor did she understand how it worked.
But she had faith that it was possible, and that faith was enough for her imagination—and her imagination could make things real.
Arienne was standing in a room. No, not a room—the walls were of cloth-thin leather and they moved a little in the wind. This was a large tent, but there was no one inside. A fire burned in a stove, and there was a scent like flowers. She had never been here before, but it felt strangely familiar.
“When Eldred did it, a portal appeared in the air … Noam?”
“Is it … is it over?” answered Noam from within her room.
“Yes, it’s over. You don’t have to worry anymore. Everything is fine in there, right? What do you see out the window?”
“Are we … inside a tent? Where are we?”
“We’re inside Fractica’s mind.”
“It looks like the tents that the herders of Danras used to have.”
That was why everything in here was so familiar—the chair and table and bedding. They were the same style as the furniture in the first house she had entered upon arriving in Danras, except these weren’t melted …
“Was Fractica a Mersian in life?” Arienne asked Noam.
“No, it can’t be. It was created before Mersia was annexed. The Grand Inquisitor had brought Fractica to Danras.”
The entry flap fluttered behind her. Arienne spun around at the sound. There stood a young man with a boyish face. His thin legs and arms were reinforced with a metal frame, which softly glowed violet. Arienne took a step back.
The man blinked, staring at her. He didn’t say a word. His eyes were unfocused, and like Noam used to be, his outlines were blurry.
Hesitant, Arienne decided to break the silence.
“Who are you?”
The man stared into space for a moment before giving his answer, as if summoning a very old memory.
“… Lysandros. Inquisitor … of the Imperial Office of Truth.”