Dream 2 - Chapter 23 (Patreon)

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Race: Saurian

Bloodline Powers: Improved Strength, Rending, Firebreath
Greater Mysteries: Fire (Noble) 4, Wind (Noble) 2, Sound (Advanced) 1
Lesser Mysteries: Heat 4, Oxygen 4, Embers 4, Pressure 4, Current/Flow 4

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“Fascinating,” Samazzar remarked, his eyes sharp with excitement as he watched Adam toss a half dozen daggers into the air and snatch the glittering blades one at a time as they fell toward the ground.

On foot, it would have been an impressive feat of eyesight and agility, but atop a moving warhorse while clad fully in gleaming plate, it seemed almost impossible.  Still, with almost casual precision the weapons clinked as the knight pounced on them, grabbing them out of their twirling falls without drawing a single prick of blood from his bare hands.

“He’s cheating you know,” Meredith said from beside him.  The younger woman, curly red hair wreathing her head and spilling out over the back of her armor, shook her head, leaning forward slightly to pat the neck of her smaller white horse.  “The trick is impressive, but the Lieutenant specializes in the advanced mystery of metal.  He can tell where the knives are going and at what speed with his eyes closed.”

“But it still must be a useful skill for training your reflexes and agility?” Sam asked.  “I don’t feel like the average human would be able to catch six daggers without harm even if they knew exactly where they were.  Most people simply don’t move that fast.”

“Precisely,” Adam replied, shooting a slightly sour look at his adjutant before turning back to Samazzar.  “As you’re probably aware, most people have an upper limit to what they can do.  No matter what you eat or how you practice, you can only grow so strong or run so fast.  Elixirs let us break through those barriers.  Once you reach those natural limits, you can keep practicing to improve your strength, speed, reflexes, coordination, and resistance to damage.  It gets increasingly hard to progress as you push forward, but I’ve seen some of the older and more powerful warriors move as fast as a loosed arrow and destroy entire rock faces with a single blow.”

“As for the exercise you just saw,” he continued, a hint of pride in his voice.  “It is designed to help me push toward another breakthrough in coordination.  Most squires focus primarily on strength and resistances, but that path seems to be a dead end to me.  Unless you hone your reflexes, you can lose your life to a surprise attack.  Coordination helps every aspect of fighting and swordplay in small ways.  Frankly, speed is almost as essential as strength itself.  If your footwork can’t keep up with your opponent, you’ll become overwhelmed in a matter of seconds.  Only a balance of the five can produce a truly formidable warrior.”

While the rest of the group spoke, Takkla eyed the knives in Adam’s hands.  One by one she drew ten of her own, until there literally wasn’t any more room for her to carry any more of the weapons.

“It’s true,” Dussok said from his spot beside Meredith.  Even though the knight was mounted on a horse, his head came up above her elbow.  “When we were trapped among the goblins, their warriors almost exclusively used elixirs to improve their strength.  Most of them were capable of impressive feats, but at the same time it was incredibly common for them to overextend themselves during sparring.  So long as their opponent dodged the first blow, they were wide open for a follow up.”

“But they couldn’t dodge the first blow because none of them developed their reflexes or speed,” Samazzar chimed in.  “Half of the sparring matches were just a question of which goblin managed to hit the other with a big stick first.  Then the stick would break and the injured goblin would roll around grunting for a while.  There wasn’t much artistry to it.”

Meredith laughed, her voice the peal of a clear bell as she leaned back in her saddle once more.  Her eyes twinkled as she smiled down at Sam.

“As amusing as the idea of goblin’s with elixirs is, watching them create unbalanced builds simply because they were obsessed with the idea of being stronger than their companions seems utterly unsurprising.”

She paused, brow furrowing as she chewed her lip for a second while lost in thought.  Finally, Meredith blew a lock of thick copper hair out of her face in frustration.

“How did the goblins get elixirs anyway?” The redhead asked.  “Most of the common recipes only work on humans and elves.  I’m sure an alchemist could brew a goblin elixir, but that’s a whole lot of time and effort to spend on mud slugs that are just as likely to pay their debts in half gnawed chicken bones as reagents and trade goods.”

Ignoring the rest of the banter, Takkla tossed one of her throwing daggers in the air, watching it rise and fall before letting it thud into the prairie soil.  She leaned down to pick it up, a thoughtful expression on her face while the rest of the group rambled on about goblins.

“Miss Lewtin,” Adam corrected her sternly.  “I will not have you acting dismissively toward nonhumans simply because they are a bit different.  You know that ‘mud slug’ is an incredibly offensive term for goblins.  It’s not their fault that they were born into poverty and violence.  I’m sure that a number of goblins would have become respected citizens of Vereton if given the opportunity and choice.”

Dussok snorted, startling Meredith’s horse and causing the animal to shy away from him.  The woman quickly regained control of the animal, but not before shooting the saurian a dirty look.

“I doubt it,” he said.  “Most of them could barely speak, and what I could understand was childish and needlessly cruel.  I honestly can’t think of a single goblin that was a good person.”

“They did certainly like the mud,” Samazzar responded thoughtfully.  “Honestly, when we drained their reservoir I thought the tribe was going to be much more angry, but they mostly just had fun rolling around and fighting in the stuff.”

Without preamble, Takkla threw all ten of the knives into the air, silencing the four of them.  For a second, the blades glittered in the sun, hanging in the air at the apex of their flight like a constellation of sharp stars.

Then they fell, her hands moving in a blur as she expertly snatched them out of the air by their hilts before spinning them in her hand and whipping them blade first into the soil.  A smile blossomed on Sam’s face as they thwicked into the sod, buried up to their hilts in an orderly line in front of his sibling.

Samazzar looked up.  Meredith’s mouth hung open while she stared blankly at Takkla while Dussok beamed proudly and Adam shook his head, a rueful smile on his face.

“By the Patrician’s ring,” Meredith muttered, eyes fixed on the hilts as they quivered in the dirt.  “How many elixirs have the three of you taken?  Unless she spent all of her time solely on coordination and reflexes, Takkla has to be at least on her second.”

“None,” Adam said with a chuckle.  “The three of them are walking the path of the bloodline.  Once upon a time the three of them were kobolds.  They don’t need to take elixirs and train abilities like us, instead they find monsters with bloodline magic and absorb that energy from them.  It’s significantly more random than the path of the flesh, but at the same time, it’s the doorway to a number of intriguing abilities that humans can’t access.”

“Exactly,” Samazzar interjected excitedly.  “For example, Takkla can almost fly and I am at the first stages of being able to breath fire.  Before long the three of us will truly resemble the dragons we actually are.”

Dussok grunted noncommittally, but like most of his doubts, Sam simply ignored him, keeping his exuberant eyes fixed on Meredith as the human woman chewed over his words.  Discontent warred with surprise on her face until finally she lost all restraint and blurted out her response.

“That isn’t fair!  All you have to do is find and kill monsters?  The Lieutenant has me shifting a pile sand from one end of an obstacle course to another, one bucket at a time, in a room that he’s magically keeping colder than ice.  I don’t think I’ve been this miserable since boot camp.”

She paused, a light of realization going off in her eyes.

“This is worse than boot camp.  He’s working me twice as hard.  The only thing that's more comfortable is that I get a full dinner and eight hours of sleep every night.  I’m just so tired by the time I hit my bunk that it feels like the four hours I got during training.”

“Strength, coordination and cold resistance,” Adam replied, a hint of pride to his voice.  A moment later, the faintest of smiles cracked the granite exterior of his previously severe expression.  “Plus, a little suffering builds character.  You’ll be better for it Miss Lewtin.”

Dussok shook his head, casting a sidelong glance at Samazzar before voicing his own opinion.

“I also do not think you understand what goes into evolving a bloodline.  The only monsters that we can use are truly monstrous and difficult to bring down.  Anything near our size simply has no effect.  Even then, unless the little dragon brews something to temper the creature’s blood, the process of taking a step forward is agonizing.  Imagine every muscle and bone in your body burning at once as it changes into something better.  It is very common to black out from pain.”

“Wait,” Meredith interjected, her brow furrowing with confusion.  “Who or what is the little drag-”

Before she could finish her sentence, a low, mournful howl echoed across the prairie.  Adam raised a hand, cocking his head slightly to the side.  The sound faded for as the wind died down, returning their expedition to restive silence as the tall grass brushed Samazzar’s chest.

They stood still for the better part of a minute.  Meredith tried to speak up once only to be shushed by Adam.  Finally, the wind blew again, rustling across the field and drawing another rising moan from the landscape.

“There we are,” the Lieutenant said with a nod, “we must almost be at Whistling Gorge.  Sam, if you could stretch your senses I would appreciate it.  Our destination is likely somewhere nearby, but its precise location is almost impossible to discover until we are on top of it.”

“What am I looking for?” Samazzar asked, cocking his head slightly to the side as he shifted his gaze up to Adam’s glittering figure.  “I’m happy to look, but unless you give me some idea of what I’m searching for, it’s a bit like giving me a bucket full of sand and asking me to pick out the prettiest grain.  The mystery of wind produces a lot of input, not all of it terribly useful.”

“I’m not going to spoil it,” Adam replied with a quick shake of his head.  “I can tell from the sound that it's coming from the northeast.  If we’re actually near the Whistling Gorge mine you should be able to find it with a cursory search, and I don’t want to ruin the surprise.”

“Surprise?” Sam questioned, closing his eyes so that he could focus his senses.  “What sort of surprise is- oh.”

The words caught in his throat.

Ahead, a little over two thousand paces, was a jagged gash in the ground.  One second there was grass and sod, and the next the wind was rushing past massive rocky cliffs carved deep into the soil.  Sam let his mind wander over the smooth stone for a couple of seconds, but he couldn’t get anywhere near the bottom.  Maybe it was his distance from the valley itself, but even the winds echos didn’t stretch far enough into the dark for him to find anything other than-

“Wait,” Samazzar said, pointing to a spot on the grassy horizon.  “There’s a gap in the ground over there and what looks like a ladder carved into the rocks.  Is that what I’m supposed to be searching for?”

“Yes actually,” Adam said, a hint of surprise washing over his face.  “That’s almost certainly one of the staging centers.  When caravans come to and from Whistling Gorge to pick up the peat, coal, and raw iron they pull out of the earth, those are the spots where they will gather to transfer the resources.  Unless I miss my guess, there will be a mechanism buried near the ladder for setting up a platform that can be used to raise and lower bulk goods while people climb up and down the ladder.”

“How high is this ladder?” Meredith asked unhappily.  “I’m not a big fan of heights normally, let alone when I’m wearing a couple layers of metal armor.”

Samazzar stretched his senses one more, letting wind play over the cliff faces and tracing the ladder down as far as he could.  At around two hundred paces, the black and white outline of the handholds carved into the rock face faded into nothing.  He switched to heat without much success and then sound.

That was a bit of a shock.  Maybe Sam should have expected something given the mine’s name and how they had found it, but the second he tapped into the mystery of sound he was filled with input.  It was like the entire world had transformed from the grayscale of dusk to the bright and vibrant colors of a field of flowers at noon.

Vibrations in the air carried a starburst of sound to him.  Suddenly, Samazzar could hear and feel every whistle and rustle as the wind flowed like a river past caves and outcroppings in the gorge.  To everyone else in his group, it may have sounded like a wailing howl, but Samazzar heard an entire orchestra of nuance.

He shook his head to clear it.  Despite everything, Sam couldn’t see the bottom of the ladder, and his magical sight extended quite deep into the valley.

“It’s high,” he said, shrugging at Meredith.  “At least more than two hundred paces.  I hope you’ve done some work on your strength and endurance recently because you’re going to need it.”

“The mine itself is more than six hundred paces deep,” Adam interjected, leading his horse in the direction that Samazzar had indicated.  “But that’s just how far down the riverbed that carved the gorge is, but most people don’t go that deep.  There isn’t much of value left there because the river floods, carrying everything away every time the prairie sees any rain.  The real treasures are in the cliff faces.  The walls themselves are a warren of mines and living chambers.  If we are going to find Vereton’s workers, that’s where they will be hiding.”

“Uggggh.”  Meredith groaned, blowing out an unhappy sigh as she stared up at the sky, as if one of the isolated fluffy white clouds floating in the sea of light blue would have the answer to her predicament.  “That sounds awful.  Why couldn’t the colony have been built on the surface?  If they have a pulley-lift, it has to be just as easy to drag the things mined out of the depths and store them on at a more reasonable height.”

“Defense I presume?”  Samazzar questioned, glancing at Adam’s back as their team approached the unseen gash in the landscape.  “Right now it’s almost impossible to find the colony let alone attack it.  I can’t imagine how hard it would be to scale a cliff while attacking the denizens.”

Another howl of wind as it rushed through Whistling Gorge drowned out Meredith’s exasperated reply, but Adam simply ignored her, raising his voice so he could be heard over the keening.

“Yes.  The colony only should have a handful of defenders that have taken elixirs, and I would be surprised if they have more than a pair of entry level practitioners, but that should be more than they need to hold off a much larger number.  The only way to get down is to lower soldiers on the lift, and all it takes is a couple of defenders attacking it to make the platform rock so much that almost everyone would fall to their deaths.”

“That’s a large part of why we’re traveling to Whistling Gorge first,” he continued grimly.  “It has the best natural defenses of any of Vereton’s resource gathering colonies.  We can’t be sure that any of them have been attacked until we manage to investigate, but of all of the extraction teams that have gone silent, Whistling Gorge has the greatest chance of surviving.”

The grass ahead of them parted, revealing the massive hole in the ground, a line that twisted through the prairie as it followed the invisible riverbed far below.  Samazzar walked to the edge, peering over.

Below him was darkness.  Darkness and wind that blew at gale forces to generate the baleful sounds that periodically echoed across the boundless plains.  He reached out with his mind, a smile touching his face as he reveled in the rush and flow of the air beneath him.  For the first time he was close enough to sense the caves and mines drilled into the cliff walls deep beneath them.  The ladder near them led to one of the largest gaps, by the could feel another ladder and a smaller cave almost a thousand paces to his left.

To his other side, Adam handed his reins to Meredith before jumping off of his horse.  Samazzar tuned out the armored man’s conversation with Dussok and Takkla as he sank to one knee.  He put a hand against the dusty prairie soil to balance himself and pushed with his senses.

Both wind and sound mingled together, blurring the line between the two mysteries.  A raging torrent of energy that hinted at secrets beyond his comprehension.

His breath caught in his throat.  This was it.  Everything Sam knew about wind filled his mind like water pouring into a vase.  There were gaps, spots where he hadn’t been able to piece together how particular aspects of pressure or temperature interacted with the flow of air, but every one of them called out to him, whispering and promising that one more push would be all it took for him to secure their answers.

Sam was at the edge, so close to learning their secrets that he could almost taste them.  He felt like he was hanging from the edge of a cliff, his claws digging into the hard rock as he grunted and exerted, trying to pull himself up and over.  There were glimmers of knowledge peaking over the edge, but Samazzar knew he was almost there.  He was only one step away from bursting through another barrier that stood between him and a deeper understanding of the mysteries.

“Hey!” Dussok’s shout shocked Samazzar out of his rapidly spinning thoughts.  “Meredith is tying up the horses and then we’re about to head down.  You should tie on your harness so you’ll be ready when she gets back.”

“Harness?”  Samazzar asked, looking up and focusing on a snarl of leather and rope in his sibling’s hand.  “What?”

“The human found a dozen or so safety harnesses.”  Dussok shook the collection of strips and cord in his hand.  “Apparently when humans don’t use the lift, they’re supposed to tie their harness to a rock up here so they don’t simply fall and die if they slip.  Hardly reassuring, and I suspect anyone that falls will break a rib or three but I suppose some safety apparatus is better than just climbing in the dark for a half hour only to die when you get tired and miss a handhold.”

“That does sound a bit painful,” Sam replied absently as he took the harness from Dussok.  It was a surprisingly simple apparatus of leather and buckles that strapped over his shoulders and around his chest in a way that would catch him by his torso if he were to fall.    Dussok was right, the three sets of straps would keep him from dying, but they would likely break some bones.

He glanced longingly at the gorge as he finished buckling the harness on.  Someone handed him a length of rope which he tied to a metal ring on his back as the wind whistled through the valley again.  As best he could tell, the rope was made of some sort of elastic substance rather than hemp, allowing it to stretch a bit, cushioning the fall of anyone that needed to use it.  More importantly, Meredith returned around the time he finished double checking the harness.

Adam went over the edge first, carefully clambering down into the darkness of the gorge.  A couple of seconds later, Takkla followed him with Dussok going third.  The entire time, Samazzar watched them descend, his eyes kept flicking back to the almost pitch black of the hole itself.

Sam could feel the wind rushing through the valley at speeds that he hadn’t seen outside of Pothas’ lab.  He could almost taste the sound as the air howled through the winding passes.  It called out to him on a primal level.  Samazzar couldn’t explain it but somehow he knew there was something in those depths that would unlock the next level of his knowledge.  He just needed to be brave enough to reach out and seize it.

He peeked over the edge of the cliff as Meredith stood beside him.  The top of Dussok’s head was still visible in the dim light as he slowly progressed down the rungs carved into the cliff face.

Samazar glanced over at Meredith.  She wasn’t paying too much attention, instead grumbling to herself as she double checked her harness.

Adrenaline surged through his body, sinding tingles to his fingers and toes as his breath came in short quick gasps.  Energy raced through him, and Sam’s arms and legs felt light, like he could wrestle a bear on his own.

He took a quick breath to steel himself, before looking over at Meredith one last time and winking at her, hooking his hands under the edges of his harness so that they were tight to his side.

“Don’t worry.”  Samazzar’s voice was distant, like a stranger was speaking rather than him.  “This is going to be a load of fun until it isn’t.”

She jerked up, opening her mouth to ask a question of Sam, but it was already too late.  His teeth bit down into his lower lip, almost drawing blood as he stepped off the edge of the gorge and plummeted into the darkness, the elastic rope of the safety harness his only lifeline to the world above.