Corvis Eralith
We worked quickly. In just a day, thanks to Berna acting as carrier for every material we could possibly need, we set up a perfect camp around the Sea Den.
She moved between the site and our supply cache with the patient endurance of a creature built for labors that would have broken any lesser beast, her massive shoulders laden with canvas and rope and the crates of preserved food that Albold had nearly forgotten to bring.
I watched her work and felt, through the bond, something that might have been contentment. She liked having a purpose. She liked being useful.
The former underground inlet was no more. It had crumbled after the Reset, the ancient stone that had held it together for millennia finally surrendering to the forces that had been waking beneath it.
Now only the original Djinn structure remained, rising from the rubble like a corpse clawing its way free of a grave that had been meant to hold it forever.
It was a solitary oval building, its domed ceiling pierced by a hole at its center that let the sun enter perfectly, its rays drawing amazing spectacles on the walls that shifted and changed with every passing hour.
The entrance was flanked by columns like those I remembered from Greek temples in another life, and for a moment, standing before them, I felt the strange vertigo of recognition.
We excavated the mana crystals rich with water-attuned mana. They lay in veins through the exposed stone, their blue light pulsing softly, rhythmically, as if the walls themselves were breathing.
They did not contain as much mana as Cherry's beast core—nothing I had ever encountered contained that much—but the sheer number of them made this a perfect new source of power.
I held one in my palm and felt the water mana within, cool and patient, waiting to be drawn. I would have to decide what to do with them. I could probably use them to reach the dark stage of the yellow core, but it would take a long time to absorb mana from each crystal.
Absorbing mana from a crystal was far more difficult than doing the same from a mana core—an organ that evolution through millions of years had made the perfect conductor of mana.
But I was not going to complain about free mana.
Now, the only thing left to do was secure the area and make sure this ancient structure of the Ancient Mages was preserved.
I was sure the many historians of Darv and Elenoir would kill to visit this place. I could already imagine Rahdeas turning this site, which belonged to the greatest people that had ever existed, into a money farm for the Warend Trading Company.
The thought should have bothered me. Perhaps it did, a little.
These halls had been sacred once. They had held knowledge that the Asuras had murdered to bury. To turn them into a tourist attraction, a scholar's trap, a source of silver and gold—it felt like a second desecration.
But as long as the dwarven elder made this site well-kept and respected, he could turn it into whatever he wanted.
I had bigger concerns.
This left only two other problems: one easier to deal with, albeit more immediate, and the other far more existential as a threat.
The Adventurer's Guild was not going to sit idly after what we had done. They were probably going to try to find how the Company of the Unraveler was able to restore a dungeon beyond that of a normal Reset.
Which would cause many frictions between the two organizations. I thought of Nathaniael Suncore, the guild-grandmaster who had closed the Zestier branch, who had recalled Magnus Redson to Blackbend, who had revoked House Wykes's exclusive rights to the Red Gorge. A man who could make Otis Wykes yield was not a man who would ignore a rival organization waking dungeons that should have slept forever.
The Unraveler's Company was small now. It was new. It was unknown. But if we kept finding places like this, that would not last.
The latter problem was the Asuras. The Red Gorge could have been considered an incident, considering the destruction that followed—caused by Cherry, his flock, Olfred, and the workers of House Wykes fighting back.
But the Sea Den was here right now, perfect as if nothing had ever happened. As if the genocide made by the Indrath Clan had never occurred in the first place. That would surely not go unnoticed.
Whether it was Agrona or Kezess who noticed it first, I could not know, and I did not know which was worse. I had Berna, of course. I hoped that she would make Epheotus think of me as even less of a threat. But I could not be sure.
They could even consider me a blasphemy for being bonded with a Guardian Bear without the explicit consensus of the Asuras. The thought made my chest tighten. I had seen what the Asuras did to blasphemy. I had read about it. I had walked through the ruins of it.
As for Agrona... I could not forget that someone had corrupted Berna. I could not forget that the taint of the Vritra had been in her veins, had been trying to turn her into something she was not, and that someone had put it there. I knew Alacryans were already in Dicathen.
Cynthia Goodsky was one of them, but she was a traitor to Alacrya, a refugee who had built a new life in a new world. There were others, though. Others who were not traitors. Others who were waiting.
I needed to ask Grandpa to make me meet the director of Xyrus Academy. Throughout the years since Tessia's awakening, Grandpa had always wanted to make my sister meet the director, his friend, but Cynthia Goodsky, in this timeline where relations between Elenoir and Sapin were colder than ever, was not allowed to make visits to the elven kingdom. Not even casual ones. But I needed to speak with her.
I was walking through the corridor that led inside the Sea Den's restored heart chamber. Ashton and Albold were outside, slowly letting the hate of their rivalry melt. I had left them to it, to the slow, awkward work of becoming something other than what their Houses had made them.
Berna was, as she always was, with me.
Alone in the great room, I felt smaller than I already was. The light of the sun made a blade cutting through the gloom of the chamber, illuminating one side of the room, leaving the other in shadow so deep it seemed to swallow the light itself.
I stood at the edge of that blade and watched it move, watched it crawl across the floor, watched it climb the walls. As the day progressed, I had noticed through my observations that the light of the sun would paint a perfect hundred-and-eighty-degree travel on the circular walls, the remaining hundred and eighty degrees being made by the light of the moon.
Did the Djinn have a special bond with the sun? Everything about this structure suggested so. The materials were pristine, untouched by the centuries of burial. The architecture followed the sun's travel across the sky as if the building itself were a sundial, a calendar.
I had expected to find answers about aether in this dungeon. I had come here seeking knowledge of the power that underlay reality, the force that had made the Djinn what they were and had been their death.
But standing here, watching the light move, I had to remember that the Djinn were not just the greatest discoverers of aether. They were people. They had beliefs, cultures, bonds.
Just like us elves with the Verticil, our bond with the Elshire Forest, our history and our politics.
From my storage ring, I summoned an apple and bit into it. The taste was sharp and sweet, the flesh crisp, and I let it ground me as I walked to the center of the room and looked up. The sun was not yet at its zenith, but midday was close.
When the high noon sun bathed the Sea Den, a strange effect happened in the room. For a few minutes, all the room was equally invested by the sun. The blade of light had widened, had spread, had become not a blade but a blessing, and I stood at the center of it, waiting, watching.
I wanted to test it again. The last time, I had observed from the edge. This time, I stood at the center.
After a while, midday came. With it, the sun reached its highest point in the sky, and the peculiar architecture of this Djinn structure reacted.
What had been a dimly lit chamber just seconds before—like a large study where one would retreat for deep reflection or study—was now a solarium.
Like the sun rooms of the Royal Palace in the best days of summer, but more. The light was everywhere, warm and golden, and it did not blind. It illuminated. It revealed.
I looked around myself, amazed, but also searching. Searching for anything that might have slipped past me, past Ashton and Albold. But there was nothing.
Nothing, at first. I swept my gaze across the walls, the floor, the ceiling, and found only the light, only the stone, only the silence.
Then I raised my eyes.
As if they had been there all along, there were three blue crystals. Similar to the mana crystals we had excavated, but of a richer blue, with white veins—white cracks—running through them like lightning frozen in amber.
They were floating in the air. Harmoniously. Effortlessly. As if they had always been there, waiting for someone to look up at the right moment.
"Berna, do you see them?" I asked, turning to face my Guardian Bear.
She tilted her head, confused. Her golden eyes followed my gaze, but I felt through the bond that she saw nothing.
"Right... come here," I said, and Berna padded toward the center of the room, her claws clicking softly on the stone.
"So? Do you see them now?"
I raised my head again, and now that I had seen them once, I saw them clearly. Three crystals, floating in a slow, silent dance, their white veins pulsing with something that was not quite light, not quite shadow.
Berna tilted her head again. She saw nothing. Perhaps Guardian Bears could not activate this mechanism of the Sea Den. Perhaps whatever part of the Djinn's legacy required a different kind of seeing. It did not matter. I knew what I had found.
"Berna, help me reach them!" I exclaimed. "Ehm... throw me in the air."
I gestured to show her where I wanted to go. I did not have many ways to reach them. I could use wind magic to propel myself, but they were far too high, and if using wind magic like that was so easy, then flight would not be something reserved for white core mages.
So I relied on my Guardian Bear to throw me and then catch me again before I was crushed to the soil. It took a few attempts. The first time, I misjudged the angle and sailed past them, my fingers closing on empty air.
The second, I reached too early, and they slipped through my grasp like water. The third, my palm closed around the first one, then the second, then the third, and I was falling, Berna's jaws catching my tunic, lowering me gently to the ground.
I looked at the three chunks of crystal-like stone in my hands. They were cracked, their surfaces traced with those white veins, and when I brought them together, I saw they took the shape of a lamp.
I tried to absorb the mana within, but they were not mana crystals. No mana was contained inside.
"Berna, what do you think?" I asked my bond.
She tilted her head again, and through the bond I felt her confusion and curiosity.
"You don't see them even here?" I asked, holding the crystals up to her eyes.
She sniffed them, her breath warm on my fingers, and then she sat back, her gaze moving from my face to the crystals and back again.
What were these crystals? A relic of the Djinn? Were they aether? The thought struck me like a physical blow, and I turned the fragments over in my hands, searching for something I could not name.
If they were aether, they were completely useless to me. I did not have any way to even properly see aether, let alone touch it, let alone use it. The only thing I knew was that these were the fragments of a larger object.
A keystone, perhaps? But the keystones—the relics that Arthur had used in the novel to obtain his Godrunes—were only in the Relictombs. This was something else entirely.
—
"Finn," Albold greeted me after I left the Sea Den, his voice carrying that particular edge of curiosity that meant he had been watching me longer than he was willing to admit. "Why are you looking at your hands?"
I glanced down at my palms, at the sunlight that fell across them in golden bars, at the shadows that pooled in the lines of my skin. The crystals were there.
So he does not see them too, I realized. These crystals must have had something to do with me in particular. Berna was able to more or less feel them only because our bond tied our very souls together, the threads of our connection woven so tightly that what I perceived, she could at least sense.
But to Albold and Ashton, they were invisible. Invisible, and silent, and waiting for something I did not yet understand.
Fate. The word surfaced unbidden, rising from the depths where I kept all the things I could not explain. I would need to investigate these crystals, to understand what they were and why they had shown themselves to me. But not now.
Not with Albold's curious gaze on my face and Ashton's quiet presence at my shoulder and the long road back to Zestier stretching out before us.
"Nothing," I said, shaking my head, and I forced my hands to drop to my sides, forced my shoulders to relax, forced myself to be Finn Warend again. "I think we have done everything we needed to."
"Does that mean we are going back to the Royal Capital?" Ashton asked.
"Yes. I think we can return to the headquarters," I confirmed. "I already asked our coachman to inform the Company about our findings. People will be sent here to preserve our discovery."
I wondered, not for the first time, if it was better to leave the Sea Den alone. To let it return to the earth, to let the stone and salt reclaim it, to let it sink back into the silence that had held it for millennia.
Anything to not catch the attention of Epheotus. But there were no signs that screamed Djinn in the structure. No obvious markings, no aetheric runes, no clear evidence of the people who had built it. To the eyes of anyone who did not know what to look for, it was simply a ruin—beautiful, yes, and strange, but no stranger than any other remnant of the Ancient Mages.
Leaving it alone would have been more suspicious. A site that the Unraveler's Company had visited and then abandoned, left to crumble when it could have been studied, preserved, understood. That would raise questions. That would draw eyes.
I stashed the crystals inside my storage ring, burying them among the other things.
"I have a question," Albold said, and I heard the shift in his voice, the particular restlessness that meant he was already looking ahead, already planning the next thing. "What is going to be our next unraveling? And when?"
"Are you already thinking about the next mission while not having finished this one yet, Chaffer?" Ashton asked, his tone as even as ever, but I heard something beneath it.
I watched Albold's reaction, waiting for the scoff, the retort, the familiar spark of rivalry that had defined their interactions since before I had known either of them. But Albold did not scoff. He simply rolled his eyes, and there was something almost playful in the gesture, something that might have been the beginning of a smile.
"This is not a military operation," Albold said, and there was far less contempt toward Ashton than there had been a week ago. A day ago. He turned to look at me again, and his eyes were bright with the same hunger I felt in my own chest. "So?"
"Ashton is right," I said, and I saw the flicker of surprise on Albold's face, the brief flash of disappointment that I had not taken his side. "Let us return first. We have done enough for one expedition."
"Ah," Albold sighed, and he let the word stretch out, let it carry the weight of his impatiencez ambition and his unwillingness to stop reaching for the next chance to prove himself. "Fine."