Chapter 5 #2
He listened as the clicking claws grew louder. The hound rounded the corner, entering the massive cavern Riven had just occupied. The smell hit him instantly—a foul, eye-watering stench of rotting meat and battery acid.
The beast sniffed the air. A low, wet growl vibrated through the cavern.
Riven’s heart hammered against his ribs like a trapped bird. Ba-thump. Ba-thump. Ba-thump.
He prayed the stone wouldn't sync with his heartbeat again. He prayed the dungeon would remain dead and silent.
The hound took a few steps closer to the obsidian spires. The acidic drool hissed as it hit the calcified ash near the entrance to Riven's crevice. The beast was blind, but it could track the heat of his blood.
Execute structural compression, the Lexicon whispered coldly in his mind, flashing the crimson wireframe mere feet away.
I am a ghost, Riven screamed internally. I am nothing!
The hound lingered for ten agonizing seconds. Riven’s lungs burned. Black spots danced on the edge of his vision. He was going to pass out.
Finally, the beast snorted, a wet, dismissive sound. It turned away, its heavy claws clicking against the stone as it ambled off into the dark, following a different, older scent.
Riven waited until the sound completely faded before he let out his breath. It came out in a ragged, shaking sob.
He had survived. Not with god-like magic. Not with ancient runes. He had survived by hiding in a hole like a rat.
He felt a twisted, pathetic sense of victory. He was still himself. He hadn't surrendered to the mountain.
He slowly extracted himself from the crevice, wincing as his broken collarbone protested the movement. He stood in the open cavern, swaying slightly on his feet.
He looked out into the distance.
There.
Through the dense forest of obsidian spires, roughly a half-mile away, he saw a light. It wasn't the erratic blue of the subterranean moss, and it certainly wasn't the terrifying, warm gold of the Builder's Lexicon.
It was a sterile, perfectly steady, piercing azure light.
A Delver's Waystone.
It was a beacon of the Spireheart Academy.
The High Proctors placed them throughout the upper Strata to serve as checkpoints and emergency extraction lifts for the highborn initiates during their exams. It was a pillar of carved silverwood, saturated with the academy's heavily regulated, rigid magic.
To Riven, it looked like the gates of heaven.
"I'm going home," he whispered.
He began to walk. The half-mile trek was agonizing. His adrenaline was fading, leaving only the crushing reality of his massive physical trauma. Every step sent a jolt of pain up his spine. His boots felt like they were filled with lead.
But the sterile blue light pulled him forward. It was his anchor.
As he approached, the golden wireframe of the Lexicon in his vision began to glitch.
The ancient architecture of the dungeon did not like the Waystone.
The golden lines mapping the cavern floor distorted and warped around the silverwood pillar, treating it like a foreign object, a virus injected into the stone.
Riven ignored the glitching runes. He stumbled the last twenty yards, his eyes locked entirely on the polished surface of the academy's artifact.
The Waystone stood eight feet tall, a smooth cylinder of pale wood wrapped in thick bands of runic silver. At the center of the pillar, at chest height, rested the activation crystal—a massive, flawless sapphire that pulsed with the cold, controlled energy of the High Proctors.
Riven fell to his knees before the pillar.
He had made it. He was going back to the miserable, wonderful, ordinary world.
He would press his hand to the crystal. The Waystone would scan the biometric signature of his Unattuned academy caste mark burned into his right shoulder.
It would recognize him as a servant and activate the low-tier aether lift, pulling his body through the spatial ether directly into the servant's receiving bay.
He would steal the bandages. He would lie in his bunk. He would survive.
Riven raised his good right hand. His knuckles were raw and bleeding from the Gloom-Hound acid. Faint, golden runes pulsed beneath his skin, but he aggressively willed them away.
He pressed his bloody palm flat against the cold surface of the sapphire crystal.
The reaction was instantaneous, and it was violent.
The Waystone did not hum with the gentle, welcoming tone of a low-tier extraction.
It shrieked.
The sound was a deafening, high-pitched squeal of conflicting magic. The sterile azure light inside the sapphire instantly turned a violent, flashing crimson.
A shockwave of raw, kinetic force erupted from the crystal. It hit Riven in the chest like a battering ram. He was thrown backward, flying through the air before slamming hard onto the calcified ash ten feet away.
He gasped, rolling onto his side, his vision swimming.
He looked up at the Waystone.
The silver bands wrapping the pillar were smoking. The sapphire crystal was cracking, flashing angrily with the red warning light of a severe security breach.
A mechanical, disembodied voice echoed from the pillar, a magical recording of a High Proctor.
"Alert. Unrecognized hostile entity detected. Biometric signature heavily corrupted. Builder-class anomaly present. Lockdown initiated. Extraction denied."
Riven stared at the smoking crystal. His amber-fractured eyes widened in sheer, unadulterated horror.
Hostile entity.
Builder-class anomaly.
The academy's magic had scanned him. It hadn't found Riven Cale, the Unattuned sweep. It hadn't recognized the lowly servant caste mark on his shoulder.
When he pressed his hand to the crystal, the Waystone had read the golden geometry pulsing in his blood. It had read the Lexicon.
The academy recognized him as the dungeon.
Riven looked down at his trembling right hand. The faint golden runes beneath his skin were glowing brighter now, pulsing in rhythm with the frantic beat of his heart.
He couldn't go back. The system had locked him out.
If he ever managed to reach the surface through mundane means, the academy's wards would instantly flag him as a monster, an anomaly to be eradicated.
The ordinary world he was so desperately trying to cling to had just slammed its doors and bolted the locks.
He was not a ghost anymore. He was an infection.
The heavy, mechanical voice of the Waystone echoed once more in the silent cavern.
"Anomaly recorded. Dispatching Inquisitor Phalanx to Waystone Sector Four."
Riven's breath caught in his throat. The Inquisitors. The soulless, mirrored guards of the faculty. They were coming down here. They were coming to hunt the anomaly.
He sat alone in the freezing ash, the red light of the locked Waystone washing over his broken body. The delusion was shattered. He could not put his head in the sand. He could not sweep this away.
If he wanted to live to see the dawn, the Unattuned sweep had to die right here in the dark.
Riven lowered his hand to the ash. He looked at the golden wireframe mapping the cavern floor. He stopped fighting it. He stopped ignoring the whispers of the Lexicon.
He let the architecture in.