Chapter 18
Riven’s fingers were slick with his own blood.
He dug his hands into the narrow, jagged gap between the cavern floor and the massive slab of basalt pinning Vael.
He planted his boots into the wet mud, locked his jaw, and pulled upward with every pathetic ounce of physical strength he possessed.
The muscles in his back screamed. The freshly healed bone of his left clavicle throbbed with a sickening, hot pressure.
The mountain did not care about his effort.
The stone did not shift a single millimeter. It sat there, an indifferent, multi-ton monument to his utter failure.
Riven let go, collapsing to his knees in the pitch-black darkness.
He was panting, his chest heaving, the icy subterranean air burning his lungs.
He couldn't see his hands. He couldn't see the rock.
He was entirely blind, stripped of the golden, omniscient wireframe that had made him a god.
The Lexicon was a dead, silent void in the back of his mind.
"Stop," Vael whispered.
Her voice was a terrifyingly fragile sound in the vast, echoing dark. She was lying flat on her back, crushed from the waist down. Riven couldn't see her face, but he could hear the wet, bubbling rattle deep in her chest with every shallow breath she took.
"I can get leverage," Riven lied, his voice cracking. He wiped his bleeding hands on his heavy leather duster, frantically sweeping the mud around his knees for a stray piece of iron, a sturdy branch, anything. "I just need a wedge. I can move it."
"You are just a man, Architect," Vael rasped, followed by a wet cough. "You cannot lift a mountain."
The guilt was suffocating.
It was heavier than the basalt slab. Riven closed his eyes, squeezing them tight, though it made no difference in the absolute dark.
He had done this. He had dragged the Vanguard down into the abyss, riding the arrogant, intoxicating high of his new power.
He had looked at a map that was thousands of years old and assumed he knew the math.
He had believed he was the master of the Crucible, and the Crucible had swatted him out of the air like an insect.
He had promised her an army. Instead, he had built her a tomb.
Somewhere in the vast, uncharted expanse of the cavern, a heavy, wet sound echoed through the gloom.
Squelch. Drag.
It was the sound of colossal, calcified limbs pulling a mountain of mutated flesh across the stone. The Leviathan. The anomaly the academy had lobotomized and turned into a living pump. It was awake, it was blind, and it was angry.
Riven’s heart hammered against his ribs. He felt the cold, familiar grip of mortal terror seizing his throat. He had no glowing circuitry. He had no kinetic compression. He was a sweep in the dark, listening to a monster approach.
A sudden, sharp hiss cut through the damp air.
Fifty yards to Riven's left, a tiny, brilliant spark of violet light ignited in the gloom.
Riven flinched, shielding his sensitive eyes against the sudden glare. The spark flared, stabilizing into a steady, glowing orb of concentrated aether. It hovered in the air, casting long, erratic shadows across a landscape of absolute devastation.
Standing beneath the floating crystal was Carys Moon-Spun.
She looked like a ghost. Her star-patterned scholar’s top was torn to shreds, covered in thick layers of pale grey ash.
Her thick-framed silver glasses were cracked down the left lens, and a steady stream of dark blood trickled from a nasty gash near her hairline, matting her midnight-blue curls to her cheek. But she was standing. She was alive.
"Carys," Riven breathed, the sheer relief nearly buckling his knees.
Carys limped toward them, holding her right arm tight against her ribs. As she approached, the violet light from her focus crystal washed over the immediate area, illuminating the horror of their situation.
They were at the bottom of a massive, subterranean basin.
The ground wasn't just mud and rock; it was a graveyard.
Half-buried in the damp earth were the colossal, bleached bones of ancient, unidentified beasts.
Towering ribs curved upward like the hulls of dead ships.
And amidst the bones lay the shattered ruins of the Nerve Center floor that had fallen with them.
The violet light fell upon Vael.
Riven had to turn his head away for a second.
The Vanguard’s lower half was completely entombed beneath a jagged block of solid basalt.
Her pristine golden armor was crushed flat against the stone.
A thick pool of dark, arterial blood was slowly expanding into the mud around her torso.
Her face was chalk-white, her eyes half-closed, the fierce, golden light in her irises dimming.
"Oh, First Builders," Carys gasped, dropping to her knees beside the trapped warrior. She raised her trembling hands, her ink-stained fingers hovering uselessly over the massive boulder. "Vael. Keep your eyes open. Do not go to sleep."
"I am awake, Lore-Keeper," Vael mumbled, her head lolling slightly to the side.
Carys looked up at Riven. Her cracked glasses reflected his pale, desperate face. "Your arm. The circuitry is dark. You lost the sync?"
"The feedback loop severed it," Riven said bitterly, grabbing a long, bent piece of rusted steel pipe that had fallen with the academy wreckage. "The map was wrong, Carys. It wasn't stone. The pillar was biological."
"I know," Carys said, her voice dropping into a horrified whisper. "I saw it when the floor collapsed. It's a bio-aetheric siphon. But we can't fix that now. We have to get this rock off her."
Riven jammed the flattened end of the rusted pipe into the narrow gap beneath the basalt. "Help me pull."
Carys scrambled to her feet, ignoring her own injuries. She grabbed the rusted pipe next to Riven.
"On three," Riven growled, planting his boots deep into the mud. "One. Two. Three!"
They threw their combined body weight backward, hanging off the end of the steel pipe. Riven’s muscles screamed, the tendons in his neck standing out like cords. Carys let out a ragged cry of exertion, her boots slipping in the bloody mud.
The physical reality of the world mocked them.
The steel pipe groaned, bending sharply under the massive pressure, warping into a useless, V-shaped curve. The basalt block did not shift. It did not even tremble.
Riven lost his grip, stumbling backward into the dirt. He stared at his trembling, bloody hands. Without the Lexicon, he was nothing. The magic had abandoned him the moment he made a mistake.
"Stop," Vael coughed, a fine mist of blood spraying her pale lips.
"We just need a better fulcrum," Riven insisted, scrambling frantically through the debris. "I can find a thicker beam. I can—"
"I said stop, Architect." Vael’s voice carried a sudden, razor-sharp edge of absolute command. It wasn't the arrogant bark of a noble; it was the final order of a dying soldier.
Riven froze, looking down at her.
Vael slowly shifted her gaze to Carys. "You brought something with you. From the rubble. I heard you dragging it."
Carys hesitated, her eyes darting nervously toward the shadows just beyond the violet light.
"It's... it's a piece of the academy terminal.
It was bolted to a slab of the floor that fell near me.
The outer casing is shattered, but the internal memory core is still humming.
I grabbed it because... because it shouldn't be humming. We severed the main line."
"Show me," Vael demanded.
Carys scurried back into the shadows and returned dragging a heavy, rectangular brass console. The metal was warped, the glass screen shattered, but faint, erratic blue sparks danced across the exposed circuitry.
"The local battery is holding a residual charge," Carys explained, dropping the heavy console into the mud near Vael’s head. "I didn't know if we could use it to signal for a low-tier extraction, or—"
"I don't want an extraction," Vael hissed, her golden eyes burning with a sudden, feverish intensity.
She reached out her gauntleted hand, gripping Carys by the wrist. "That terminal was connected directly to High Proctor Morne’s office.
I want to know why I am dying in a hole.
I want to know why my father's academy fed me to a swarm of beasts. Read the log, Lore-Keeper."
Carys looked at Riven. Riven nodded slowly, his heart heavy. Let her have her truth.
Carys knelt over the shattered terminal.
She raised her right hand, the jagged obsidian focus ring catching the faint blue sparks of the machine.
She didn't use a physical keyboard. She pressed her ring directly against the exposed aether-circuitry, closing her eyes as she interfaced her own magic with the corrupted academy tech.
"Bypassing the encryption," Carys muttered, her forehead creasing in concentration. "Accessing local cache. There’s a highly classified audio-visual log stored here. It was downloaded to this terminal an hour before we breached the Nerve Center."
"Play it," Vael commanded.
Carys twisted her hand.
The shattered terminal hummed loudly. A beam of pale, glitching blue light shot upward from the broken glass, projecting a flickering, three-dimensional hologram into the damp air of the cavern.
The hologram depicted a luxurious, opulent office high in the upper spires of the academy.
Sitting behind a massive desk of polished silverwood was High Proctor Aricen Morne.
He was a towering, broad-shouldered man with iron-grey hair and eyes as cold as absolute zero. Standing before him was Proctor Vance.
Riven recognized the feed. It was the other side of the conversation they had intercepted in the colosseum.
"The hound swarm was annihilated. Total operational failure," Vance’s holographic ghost reported.
"Explain," Morne’s deep, resonant voice echoed through the dark cavern, sounding chillingly clear.
The projection skipped slightly, the blue light stuttering.