He wasn’t much taller than the Jai Underlord, but he loomed nonetheless.
With white fingers, he tapped the Twin Star emblem on Jai Long’s outer robe. “However you decide, remember that I will take anything you do while wearing that symbol as though it is done in my name. And you will answer to me for it. Tell me now if anything I have said is unclear to you.”
Jai Long dropped to one knee. “No, honored Sage.”
“I am glad.” Lindon restored his veil and offered Jai Long a hand up. His left hand.
Hesitantly, the Underlord took it, and Lindon pulled him to his feet. “Now, I think you have training to return to. Apologies once again for my disturbance.”
Dross drifted up from Lindon’s spirit. The dark purple spirit didn’t say anything, but pointed to his one eye and then to Jai Long.
Jai Long shuddered.
5
The stone door in the Ancestor’s Tomb opened as Lindon approached, and he strode for the inner door at the hall’s end.
[Do not worry,] Dross whispered, [I see that this is the perfect time for you to spend some time alone with Yerin. I would leave you alone…if she were here.]
“I could go get her,” Ziel suggested.
“I asked you here for a reason,” Lindon assured him. He, Dross, and Ziel walked into the labyrinth side-by-side, and soon they were surrounded by ancient stone walls filled with unbreakable authority.
Lindon merged his mind with his surrounding, feeling the labyrinth’s weight of significance like an anvil pressing down on the world. This place was ancient beyond knowing, and it had had many owners and guardians before him. Just as it would likely have many after him.
He focused, guiding the weight where he wanted it to go rather than wrestling with it. “Move,” he ordered.
The walls blurred around them, the exits from the stone room vanishing.
“This would have been handy last time,” Ziel observed.
“There are many restrictions to it, and I haven’t figured out the patterns fully yet.” Lindon could order the labyrinth to move things in its range fairly easily, but navigating the halls themselves remained just as confusing. Perhaps more so, though Dross had unraveled some of the patterns.
The halls couldn’t leave them in impossible positions, like splitting a room in half or stretching it across multiple locations, and couldn’t seal the visitors in any chamber with no exits for very long. Lindon didn’t need to learn all the possible alignments the rooms could make, but he wanted to at least become familiar with the rules.
Every time they went anywhere, Dross paid close attention. He hoped that soon, Dross would complete a clear picture of this place.
The walls stopped blurring, revealing another long hallway of small wooden doors. This one hadn’t been as thoroughly raided, and he quickly found the weapon he was looking for: a spear of pure white hunger madra, etched with scripts to funnel the madra into the person attacking.
Subject One would have been unable to reach the weapon, restricted as he was to the lower half of the labyrinth, but Lindon merely opened the door and grabbed the spear.
Ziel stood in the doorway between the ancient stone chamber and the new one. He scribbled something onto a wooden tablet.
“This is why I wanted your expertise,” Lindon said. “What do you think about the different scripts?”
Ziel didn’t look up from his notes. “Well, clearly these are two different traditions, but that won’t surprise you. This outer room might be a thousand years newer, so of course their scripts are different. I’m more interested in the circles that seem to regulate spatial travel.”
He ducked back inside the room as Lindon took them onward again.
Lindon mused aloud over Ziel’s comment. “I have no thorough understanding yet, but they feel to me like…guard-rails, I suppose you could say. I could command this room to move, but without the script to define its location in relation to the others, it might take me a hundred miles away. Or deep into the earth.”
With one finger, Ziel scribbled a few more sentences of light into his wooden tablet. The notes sank inside for retrieval later. “It will be hard to give you a complete picture, me not being a Sage myself.”
“You were an Archlord for years, though,” Lindon said. He gestured for Ziel to follow him. Their chamber had hooked into another hallway, sloping downward, and this one was a fixed point. They had to descend into the next room to continue.
Dross noted that down.
“Not a peak Archlord. And I had always seen myself as more of a Herald than a Sage anyway.” Ziel’s cape fluttered behind him as he walked.