Chapter 8 #2
They rolled across the uneven stone, tangled in a heap of canvas and limbs, until they slammed against the far wall of the junction.
The air was instantly choked with a suffocating, impenetrable cloud of grey ash and pulverized mortar.
The deafening roar of the collapse slowly faded, replaced by the ominous, shifting groans of unstable rock settling into a massive, impassable barricade.
Riven lay on his back, staring blindly into the dust.
He tried to inhale, but his lungs refused to expand. He turned his head to the side and violently coughed. A thick, dark spray of blood splattered against the stone floor.
He was burning alive from the inside out.
The physical toll of the massive, uncontrolled edit was tearing his body apart.
The veins in his right arm had turned entirely black, the dark, bruised lines creeping up past his shoulder and snaking up the side of his neck.
His skin was blistering with a feverish, unnatural heat.
The Lexicon had extracted the energy required to shatter the tunnel directly from his own cellular structure.
Every mistake, every miscalculation in the geometry, was a tax levied in blood.
He was playing a game he didn't understand, and the board was killing him.
"Riven! Riven, look at me!"
Carys’s hands were on his face. She wiped the thick layer of grey dust from his eyes. Her glasses were skewed, her face streaked with dirt, but her eyes were sharp and entirely focused on his deteriorating condition.
"The caloric burn is critical," she muttered, her fingers flying over the blackened veins on his neck, feeling the terrifyingly rapid pulse. "Your nervous system is literally frying. You channeled too much aether without a grounding conduit."
Riven tried to speak, but only a wet, bloody wheeze escaped his lips. The world was spinning into a dark, narrowing tunnel.
"Stay with me," Carys ordered.
She ripped her heavy canvas satchel open. She didn't pull out a sterile academy healing potion or an expensive runic artifact. She pulled out the handfuls of raw, glowing blue bioluminescent moss she had harvested down in the Ashen Reach earlier that morning.
"It's an endothermic reactive," she babbled rapidly, crushing the glowing moss fiercely between her palms until a thick, glowing blue paste formed. "The moss feeds on ambient thermal energy to survive. Your body is currently producing enough thermal runoff to cook a drake."
She slapped the glowing, freezing poultice directly onto the blackened, feverish skin of Riven’s neck and right shoulder.
The relief was instantaneous and violent.
The freezing chemical chill of the moss rapidly leeched the terrifying heat from his veins. The blue glow of the paste pulsed rapidly as it absorbed the lethal magical runoff. Riven arched his back, gasping, a sudden rush of oxygen finally penetrating his paralyzed lungs.
He lay there, trembling, bathed in the soft blue light of the poultice, the darkness receding from the edges of his vision.
"You're an idiot," Carys breathed, slumping back against the stone wall, her chest heaving. "Your geometric alignment was off by at least two degrees. You nearly collapsed the entire Stratum on our heads."
"I missed," Riven croaked, his voice raw. "I'm a sweep. Not a math tutor."
Carys let out a short, breathless laugh that bordered on hysteria. "Well, for a sweep, you just successfully assassinated two elite Inquisitors of the High Faculty. I believe that earns you a promotion."
Riven slowly pushed himself up into a sitting position, leaning heavily against the brickwork. The massive pile of rubble blocked the corridor entirely. The Inquisitors were buried, but the path back to the Waystone and the Atrium was permanently sealed.
"We can't stay here," Riven said, looking at the shifting dust. "They'll send more. The vibration will draw Gloom-Hounds."
Carys pushed her glasses up her nose and surveyed the ruined junction. She pointed toward the center of the floor, where the dust was swirling down a rusted iron grate set into the stone.
"Storm drain," she said. "The original architecture used gravity-fed aqueducts to flush the lower levels. It should bypass the blocked corridor and drop us deeper into the Ashen Reach."
Riven didn't argue. Deeper was the only direction left.
With Carys’s help, Riven managed to stand. His legs shook, but the freezing moss poultice kept the paralyzing heat of the Lexicon at bay. Together, they limped to the center of the room. Carys used a loose iron bar from the rubble to pry the rusted drainage grate open.
It revealed a steep, slick stone chute that plunged into the dark at a terrifying forty-five-degree angle.
"Ladies first," Riven muttered, his cynicism returning as his survival instinct kicked back in.
Carys didn't hesitate. She grabbed her satchel, sat on the edge of the chute, and pushed off, sliding rapidly down into the darkness. Riven followed, awkwardly maneuvering his broken body into the slick stone tube.
The slide was a chaotic, dizzying descent. The stone was slick with centuries of condensation and subterranean slime. They plunged downward in total darkness, twisting and turning through the bowels of the mountain, the sound of their own sliding echoing loudly in the enclosed space.
Suddenly, the chute leveled out, spitting them violently out into the open air.
Riven hit a hard, flat stone surface and slid for ten feet before grinding to a halt. He groaned, rolling onto his back and staring up at the cavernous ceiling.
"Oh, First Builders," Carys whispered from somewhere nearby.
Riven pushed himself up. They were sitting on a narrow, hidden architectural overlook—a balcony of dark obsidian protruding from the sheer cliff face.
He crawled to the edge and looked down.
The scale of the room below was staggering.
They were hundreds of feet above the floor of a massive, circular colosseum carved directly out of the bedrock.
It was a sanctioned testing arena of the Spireheart Academy, illuminated by dozens of massive, floating aether-lamps that cast a harsh, brilliant white light over the pale grey ash covering the arena floor.
The walls of the colosseum were sheer, unscalable obsidian.
In the center of the massive arena stood a lone figure.
It was Vael of the Solar-Crest.
Her golden-blonde hair was plastered to her face with sweat and grime. Her crimson and gold bodice was torn, exposing the silver scars on her ribs. She was gripping the Sol-Cleaver with both hands, the runic halberd blazing with a brilliant, heatless white light.
She was completely surrounded.
Not by one Gloom-Hound, but by a pack of at least twenty.
The hairless, six-eyed beasts circled her with terrifying, synchronized precision, their jaws dripping acidic drool that hissed as it hit the ash.
They weren't acting like wild animals. They were moving in tactical formations, intentionally wearing her down, snapping at her heels and retreating before she could swing.
"The mid-term exam," Carys breathed, kneeling beside Riven at the edge of the overlook. "The faculty rigged it. They dropped her into an Alpha-class swarm without a support vanguard."
Riven stared down at the golden warrior.
Vael swung the halberd, a massive arc of blinding white light that severed a hound cleanly in half.
But two more immediately lunged into the opening, their jaws snapping shut inches from her thigh.
She was fast, she was incredibly strong, but she was entirely alone.
She was going to die.
Riven felt the Lexicon pulse in the back of his mind. The golden wireframe of the arena illuminated his vision. He saw the hidden trapdoors beneath the ash. He saw the structural supports holding the massive obsidian walls. He saw the geometric pathing of the hound swarm.
His right arm, still blackened and bruised, throbbed with a terrifying heat. The steep learning curve of the dungeon had nearly killed him in a narrow hallway. Now, the game had expanded. He was looking down at a massive, complex board, and a heroine was about to be torn to pieces.
Riven reached into his pocket and pulled out the blood-stained iron stylus.
He didn't want to be a god. But he refused to watch the academy butcher the only people who were trying to survive its cruelty.
He looked at the golden math of the arena, and prepared to rewrite the rules.