Chương 79: Book 2: Chapter 14 - Retcon

Samara believes she is a cold thing wearing warmth like a borrowed coat. She has confessed it to me in the dark, the way other people confess a sin. I've stopped arguing - you cannot talk a person out of a story they've decided is true about themselves. Instead, I watch her, cataloguing her kindness, noting the way she learns the names of the kitchen staff, weeps at music she swears is beneath her. Whatever she was made to be, I know what she has become. I only wish she could see the woman I do.

Perhaps our son will have her eyes and show her what I see in them. - From the private diary of Duke Merek Petracca MASON A full day in the bleached bone corridors of the second stratum and I still couldn't adjust to the way the air was somehow so still and so agitated at the same time; serene on the surface but in [Architect's Vision] a chaotic miasma of constant microscopic warfare. This was a dead world; a once beautiful archive of history and culture had been reduced to a blistering white emptiness.

The air carrying the twisting mana poison still hung in the passages and drifted on the wind, but I'd used a modification of [Sovereign's Will] to tie off a protective barrier of thin repulsion that clung to our skin, preventing it from affecting us any more than it already had. Dario followed a pace behind me, his bone charm now resting idly on his knuckles.

"You're certain about the ward?" he asked for the fourth time in the last two hours.

"I don't feel good about leaving her alone."

"You have good reason not to trust me," I said with a sigh, trying not to let the second guessing feel insulting, "but I promise you nothing in this dungeon is going to reach her, it would take an S-Rank threat to break into that vault and if that existed down here we'd know about it. It wasn't like we had a choice, she insisted we leave her." The passage widened ahead and Dario pulled up level beside me, the water now less than ankle-deep.

"I won't pretend to know what passed between you two, but I've never seen her like this." Since our entrance into stratum two, and the revelation about the power I'd been hiding, Liarra had barely spoken to me.

"Her hands were shaking..." He let the thought trail off, not wanting to give voice to the fear I knew he was feeling. I felt it too, but for different reasons. The poison was affecting her more than us, though it was unclear why. Dario had tried to heal her, but his skills were ineffective against it. Without knowing the cause, it was difficult to engineer a remedy. I had offered to try - I had extensive experience with mana nullification fields and my alchemy skills were extensive - but she'd refused outright.

For now, she insisted she was fine, but the fact that she wasn't with us made that lie rather obvious.

"We'll find out what's causing it, then we'll know how to treat it," I said, hoping it was true. We walked awhile in silence, the only visible life a sort of pale coral that grew on the walls, sharp as a razorblade. I'd built a link into the wards protecting the vault where Liarra currently slept, I could feel her heartbeat even now, it had slowed almost a full beat per minute in just the last hour.

The drip from the ceiling measured the moments passing like a metronome as we followed the Commission map toward the center of the stratum two anomaly where we hoped to find the source of this pollution. Combat encounters had been minimal since I'd stopped wearing the disguise, the dungeon's wildlife stalking around the periphery of my aura, other mages keeping their distance... for now anyway.

Gold-Rank auras always brought curiosity eventually and there were monsters down here that would see my power as a challenge rather than a threat.

"Why did you do it?" he asked without context, though I didn't have to think hard to decipher his meaning.

"Why did I do what?" I said, forcing him to spell it out.

"Why would you lie to Lia? She doesn't trust many people, Caden, you nearly let her die to keep your power a secret. To what end? What is there to gain by this deception?" It was a sharp accusation and one I was sure he'd been sitting on this entire time. For all his talk of life debts, even I wasn't safe from the wrath of a husband's love for his wife.

"I wouldn't have let that happen," I said defensively, but I wasn't sure it was true. I couldn't explain the stakes to him, make him understand the monumental scale of the threat I faced, what it could mean for the planet if my identity was discovered. Would the Exaltians simply purge the place and start over to ensure the mistake of my birth was not repeated? I knew from the archived logs of a hundred planets that they'd done it before for less.

We were not life to them, we were a rounding error in the scheme of a cosmic-sized energy harvest.

"That isn't an answer."

"There's a lot about me you don't know," I offered somewhat lamely, stating the obvious.

"There's a lot about me I can't tell you, not because I don't want to, but because the knowing is a danger to everyone, you included."

"My grandfather was a wise man, a leader, and he was forever keeping secrets.

'Darinos,' he'd said to me one day after I insisted he explain the reason for a particularly unreasonable clan restriction, 'there comes a time when you must keep your head down and mouth shut. Trust the blood and only the blood, and you might live to be old.'" A brief smile of remembrance played across his face, a fresh thought pulling it back down into a frown.

"He did live to be old, my grandfather, but died the loneliest of men in a house full of descendants who never knew him as anything more than the keeper of a list. Maybe he found in that a purpose that fulfilled him, but I saw only sadness and regret in his final days."

"You think our situations are the same, but I am not keeping secrets to protect some arbitrary code of honor, I do it to protect lives - real flesh and blood who will never know the sacrifices I make to keep them safe." Anger was leaking out into my voice, I could hear it, the resentment I'd begun to carry from years of forced solitude was threatening to burst at even a gentle prodding. He nodded at that, a sincere grief playing across his expressive eyes.

"I would help you carry that burden, I can see it on your shoulders with every step." I could feel tears welling in my eyes, keeping silent lest I reveal too much of myself to this man who was little more than a stranger.

"Lia would too, if you'd let her. She shows a stone face to the world, but I know the truth of who she is. You've hurt her badly, however good your reasons for doing it." I had nothing I could say to that, no defense that would undo the damage. I couldn't meet his eyes, my gaze pulled to the cold water at my feet. I remembered the last time I'd let someone in completely, his hand going cold in mine, his last words a gratitude I could never feel I'd earned, his absence a hole that never stopped hurting.

We fell into another uneasy silence, and I was grateful for the reprieve. Truthfully, I'd have welcomed an attack, anything to distract from being forced to think about things I'd rather leave in the box where they belonged. When he spoke again, his tone was softer.

"My people have a saying, 'A man is owed the weight of what he carries.' Like you, we believe in individual sacrifice for the benefit of the whole... but sacrifice is only useful if it is necessary, a man holding a burden that would be better shared is hurting not only himself but everyone who depends on him."

"You seem to think you know me, but you don't," I countered, maintaining a neutral tone to disguise the boiling frustration.

"Whatever burdens I'm carrying are my own, and no amount of folk wisdom can change that." I owed Liarra an explanation, I knew that, but she wasn't hearing it right now and I wasn't about to offer it to her husband, whatever incisive sayings he threw at me.

"You're right," he said, raising a hand in apology.

"Perhaps we focus on the task ahead." I nodded in agreement, increasing the pace as we approached the center of stratum two. The character of the ruins changed, the coral thinning, the bleached stone resolving into worked archways of veined white marble flanked by broken stumps of columns that had once held up the majestic edifice of a grand library now crumbling and cracked. The building itself was huge, the top nearly reaching the domed ceiling above us some fifty feet up.

There were no windows, but recesses ten feet high and five feet deep were cut into the face at regular intervals, each housing marble statues depicting elven leaders in various states of disrepair. I returned my attention to [Architect's Vision], the overlay revealing intricate ley lines that ran through the structure like wire and converged at the building's massive double doors of polished ash. It was made to look elvish, but the magic here was of a different sort entirely, a sort that I recognized immediately.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

"This is First Magi built," I said.

"Are you certain? How is that possible?"

"I don't know, there's no record of a facility here," First Magi ruins were highly researched and catalogued by System scholars like Fenris, and most of these places dated back to before the Cataclysm. This one was clearly hidden, but for what purpose? The security features ensured nobody would be able to access it anyway, and I'd never heard of the Exaltians disguising their facilities.

"This is definitely the source of the poison, the density of the corruption is so thick around the door I can almost feel it through the barrier."

"We can't enter a First Magi ruin, they're impenetrable," Dario said, reciting a fact as unchangeable as the tides. I didn't bother correcting him as I stepped up to the building's threshold. A shield of hard mana surrounded the entire exterior of the building, rebuffing anyone who got close. I let my mother's ring interface with a recessed port that [Deep Structure] identified as a security terminal. It beeped twice, then pinged a loud chime. < FACILITY AUTHENTICATION CONFIRMED: Operative identified as SAMARA-7.

Welcome back to Deeprock Hub, Archivist Prime > The mana shield dropped with a dying buzz, the pressure in the room dropping.

"What did you do?" Dario asked, his calm demeanor cracking.

"How?" High Exaltian script bloomed across the doors in a slow spill of golden light, then the large ash doors swung open.

"Come on, we need to close this up before someone else stumbles in after us," I said, entering the building's atrium to re-engage the defenses. Dario hesitated, the limits of his understanding bumping up against what he'd just seen with his own eyes. I'd known about the truth of the First Magi almost as long as I'd been in this world, it was easy to forget just how radical a truth it was to the people who'd grown up believing they were gods.

Liarra knew what I was, that my existence disproved millennia of religious indoctrination, but apparently she'd made the same threat calculation I had and left her husband in the dark about the First Magi's true nature. I'd have pointed out the hypocrisy to her were she standing in front of me now, but I'd have to save that for later.

Dario finally followed on shaky steps, the doors sealing behind us as he passed the threshold, the mana-shield reforming outside with a command I channeled through the ring, which seemed to interface directly with the facility itself. Should anyone come looking, they'd find the place as the Commission had described it, an ancient elven archive protected by an impassable barrier. I stood in the atrium and saw for the first time a place I'd spent a thousand years in my mind.

It was the Athenaeum, a piece of it anyway, the exact same layout of archives that existed on an infinite series of floating islands in the deep void of space. There was no void here, no faceless floating archivist to answer my queries, just shelves and desks, books and tablets - but there was no mistaking the fingerprints. Something or someone had pointed Isabella to this place, there was more than coincidence in that.

Behind me, Dario had not moved from the threshold but had fallen to one knee, head bowed, his lips moving a soundless prayer. When he looked up, his face was streaked with tears.

"I never thought," he breathed, eyes beaming the same ecstasy I'd once seen in Fenris's the first time we'd discovered what this ring really was. I opened my mouth to try and move him along, to reveal the cruel joke that this place actually was, but I had no words. I knew what awaited him on the other side of that revelation, the pain of the world shattering... I didn't have the heart to see it again, not today.

"Stay close," I said finally, the truth would do him no good.

"The poison is thicker below." I let [Architect's Vision] find the current, a black river of ruined mana pouring in from the stairs at the far end of the room. Whatever this place was, the answer would be down there. Dario was not responding, head and hands raised toward the ceiling where an elaborate fresco depicted gods descending - the Exaltian's own Sistine Chapel. I felt an urge to tear it from the ceiling, but resisted.

When he had recovered his wits enough to follow, we made our way past workstations and cabinets and down the creaking wooden steps that led underground. The further we descended, the stranger things became. The ancient artifice above led to metal stairs surrounded by a thick concrete foundation and a heavy security door that would have been at home in a doomsday shelter. A panel beside it lit up red.

I hovered my ring near it like a keycard and it blinked green, the chime followed quickly by the loud click of a lock releasing inside the door. I pulled it open, Dario slack-jawed but silent behind me. The facility on the other side of the door was newer, perhaps only a few decades old. It smelled of disinfectant and spilled reagents - not alchemy but chemistry.

The hallways beyond were flanked by rooms of thick glass full of equipment I'd never seen before but conjured images of modern Earth gain-of-function research facilities, places where they kept the things too dangerous to breathe. Dario's religious rapture had settled into a reverent calm, even he could see that whatever this place was, it was not a temple.

We followed the stream further in, proximity lights clicking on as we walked, passing rooms where experiments appeared to have been stopped midway, the place frozen in time, not even dust to indicate its passage. Finally, we reached the thickest door of them all at the terminus of the corridor, yet another security panel blocking our way. We were in the heart of darkness now, the very origin point of the poison that was now strong enough to smell through the barrier.

My mother's ring bypassed the panel once again, a readout appearing in gold script showing her face and title: Archivist Prime. She looked younger than the holograph, perhaps a trick of the lighting, her hair pulled back in a ponytail. The ring was not providing me a generic clearance level, she'd worked here, and she'd been management, a Prime. Heart beating fast, I stepped through the door, it was so thick I'd have expected to find a vault full of money on the other side. What I found was much, much worse.

The room was full of machinery, clearly Exaltian in origin, glyphs and warning script flashing silently on a glass containment box on the far side of the room. It had been shattered, the containment glyphs scratched off, the poison we'd been chasing flowing out of it in a seemingly infinite stream. It looked like deliberate sabotage.

"What is that?" Dario said, startling me. The man had been so silent I'd almost forgotten he was here.

"It's a bioweapon," I said, no longer possessing the strength to lie. Dario seemed unable to process that, his mouth opening and closing again without saying a word. The terminals still worked, a hard light screen flashing to life as I approached it. I left Dario to ponder and started to read. Most of it I couldn't finish, or rather didn't want to, the casual nature of the experiment logs reading like the doctor's notes from a Nazi death camp. I felt sick, a visceral disgust that forced bile into my throat.

They had been running experiments on the elves here, weaponizing Aetheric Ossification - to what end, the notes didn't say. Ossification was a System process that evened out the power curve for species with longer lives, ensuring a balanced playing field for the striving that fueled the Exaltian energy harvest. Whoever was running this facility had reverse engineered the process, magnifying it to produce a much stronger effect than would happen naturally.

The poison had been structured to specifically affect a particular genetic strain of sun elves, presumably to keep it from being noticed - whatever the Exaltians were, they did have rules and I knew first hand how seriously they were enforced. If this facility was hidden, maybe it wasn't the mortal races they were hiding it from. I saw my mother's name again and again - logged, signed, authored. She was the source of most of these reports, or was supervising others who were.

I needed to believe there was an explanation for this that wouldn't condemn my love for a woman I'd never met, a woman who had rebelled to give me life, but there was no escaping the black and white reality of what I was reading. The truth was that I didn't know my mother at all. She existed as an idealized figment of my imagination, one constructed from need and longing not facts - but here in plain text was a woman who could poison an entire species and catalogue the results like dissecting a frog.

But then, that's what we were to them, wasn't it? Frogs pinned to a board. They'd created us, given us life, seeded our planets out of boredom and self-interest. Why was I surprised? I had no right to be. My mother was still Exaltian. All the talk of love and rebellion she'd left in her letter, maybe that was just the twisted justifications of a guilty mind.

I filtered through the files quickly, looking for any further threads I could follow, something that might help understand how all this tied back to Isabella or her father, to my parents' deaths. One other name appeared over and over: VORRIC-7. The apparent overseer of the facility, his name showing up repeatedly alongside my mother's, many of the logs written explicitly for his eyes only. Then I found it.

Thorne's name appeared in a log dated five years before I was born, an oblique reference to his involvement in a field experiment. The details of that experiment were not described, but there were enough pieces here to line up the timelines. The so-called 'logging consortium' that Liarra credited with destroying her tribe had not been in search of lumber at all, and Thorne had been more than the Guild Secretary cataloguing the yield.

This was why Isabella had sent me, but how she knew what I'd find here I couldn't even guess.

"What is it?" Dario said, noticing the sudden shift in my demeanor. He had sat silently while I read, not even asking me how it was that I came to read First Magi script - perhaps he knew better than to think I'd actually tell him.

"I know what's happening to her. We have to go. Now." But first, I needed a sample to engineer a cure, and to make sure this evil was contained. I moved over to the broken container, reaching in to extract the bottomless vial that still spewed its slow death into the air. The glyphs that had contained it were torn off or slashed through, but I could see the shape of them. I didn't know how to unmake it, but at least I could contain it again.

I took a sample, containing it to my inventory, then I repaired the broken container using [Mana Forging], carefully recreating the exact patterns that had kept it locked away. Finally, when I was sure I had reproduced it exactly, I opened the box to place the vial back inside. The dormant panes of glass lit up suddenly red, the facility itself blaring to life with a warning alarm that made it painfully clear I'd tripped some kind of security protocol.

I shoved the vial into the box and closed it, satisfied at least to see that the containment held. Beside me, the terminals had all lit up and were flashing one very ominous message in a language I knew Dario could not read. < GUARDIAN PROTOCOL ACTIVE, PLEASE SHELTER IN PLACE AND WAIT FOR FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS >"Run!"