Chapter 13 #3
"Hold him, Carys!" Vael barked.
The Lore-Keeper scrambled forward, throwing her entire body weight over Riven’s legs to keep him from kicking out.
"I have the alignment," Vael grunted, her muscles trembling with the effort of holding his violently spasming arm in place. "Activate the field!"
Riven couldn't hear the command. The blood rushing in his ears sounded like a hurricane. But he felt the change.
The circle of green aether-crystals ringing the dais suddenly flared. A wave of cool, emerald light washed over his body.
The healing was worse than the break.
The localized restorative field didn't numb the pain; it simply hyper-accelerated the biological process.
Riven felt every single microscopic capillary knitting itself back together.
He felt the osteoblasts rapidly multiplying, sealing the jagged edges of the bone with a violent, burning heat.
The muscles in his shoulder seized and writhed beneath the skin, repairing torn tissue in seconds instead of months.
He squeezed his eyes shut, tears of pure agony leaking down his face. He bit down on the leather strap so hard he tasted blood from his own gums.
The intense, burning sensation peaked, a searing fire radiating from his collarbone straight into his jaw and down to his fingertips.
And then, just as suddenly as it had begun, the fire vanished.
The green aether-crystals dimmed, returning to a low, dormant hum.
Vael slowly released her iron grip on his arm. She took a step back, her chest heaving slightly, wiping a bead of sweat from her brow. Carys scrambled off his legs, looking at his shoulder with wide, fascinated eyes.
Riven spit the mangled leather strap onto the floor. He lay back against the stone for a moment, panting, staring up at the dark crystal ceiling.
Slowly, testing the waters of his own biology, he rolled his left shoulder.
There was no grinding. There was no blinding spike of pain. The joint was stiff, the skin stretched tight and hypersensitive, but it moved fluidly. He lifted his left arm, raising it above his head. The bone was completely, flawlessly healed.
He looked down at his right hand. The localized field had done its work there as well. The pulverized knuckles had fused back into shape, the split skin sealed with thin, silvery scars. The golden circuitry of the Lexicon pulsed steadily beneath the healed flesh.
"Thank you," Riven rasped, his voice raw.
Vael picked up her gauntlets and began strapping them back onto her forearms. "Don't thank me. A broken tool is useless. I need my Architect functioning if we are going to survive the week."
Riven stood up. He rolled his shoulders, feeling the heavy, comforting weight of the rune-embroidered leather duster settle perfectly against his frame. He felt whole. For the first time in his life, he wasn't injured, he wasn't starving, and he wasn't afraid.
He walked back to the meteoritic drafting table.
Vael and Carys joined him, the three of them forming a triangle around the glowing, three-dimensional wireframe map of the Crucible.
Riven reached out and placed his hand above the crystalline pages of the Architect's Codex. He didn't carve a rune. He just thought the command.
Isolate upper strata. Display hostile aether-signatures.
The massive projection instantly zoomed in, expanding the upper layers of the Ashen Reach and the mechanical corridors they had just fled. The golden wireframe was suddenly peppered with dozens of bright, aggressive crimson dots.
"The Inquisitor Phalanxes," Vael said, leaning over the table, her golden eyes tracking the red dots as they swarmed through the tunnels. "They're flooding the sector. They're searching every vent, every drainage pipe, every shadow."
"They can't find us," Carys reminded her. "The Sanctum is completely masked. We could sit in this room for a hundred years and they would never detect our aetheric footprint."
"So we wait them out?" Vael asked, looking at Riven. "Let them search until Morne assumes we fell into a gear-chasm?"
Riven stared at the crimson dots swarming his dungeon. He watched them march through the corridors he now owned, their sterile, academy-sanctioned magic polluting the ancient geometry of his foundation.
He thought of the twenty years he had spent waiting. Waiting for the beatings to stop. Waiting for the shifts to end. Waiting to die quietly in the dark.
He placed his hands flat on the meteoritic iron table. The golden circuitry on his skin flared, matching the brilliance of the projection.
"No," Riven said, his voice cold, steady, and echoing with the unyielding authority of the stone itself.
He looked up, meeting Vael's calculating gaze and Carys's wide-eyed stare.
"We don't wait," Riven commanded, the First Architect claiming his war.
"This is my house. They are trespassing.
We are going to find the deepest foundries in this mountain.
We are going to use the Builder's forges to arm ourselves.
And then, we are going to start breaking the academy from the bottom up. "