“We were still worried,” Orthos grunted.
Blue nodded.
“I am sorry, but I’m glad you weren’t around for our fight with Reigan Shen.”
Orthos and Little Blue glared at him together.
“We were concerned about you,” Orthos said. “You could have informed us.”
Lindon dipped his head and apologized. They should have been able to sense that he was still alive, even from within a separate space, but he should have kept them aware.
Yerin strolled back to meet them and sat on her heels next to Orthos. “Yeah, we fought a Monarch. Got whipped like the slowest mule, but we didn’t die. So there’s a shiny spot.”
They were all sitting around for a while, waiting for another trapped room to die down. While flames of all colors raged in the next room, they sat in the hallway. Eithan paced back and forth, Mercy cycled, and Ziel loudly snored as he slept.
Lindon filled in Orthos and Little Blue about what had happened since they were locked inside the Dawn Sky Palace. They were a rapt audience, eyes glowing as they listened.
When he finished, Orthos thoughtfully chewed on something for a long moment. “That’s not a bad excuse,” he allowed.
Little Blue clambered up Lindon’s shoulder, chiming about how glad she was that everyone had made it out alive.
The chimes woke Ziel, who rolled over to squint in the spirit’s direction. “Glad you’re happy,” he muttered.
“Almost ready!” Eithan called from the brink of the next room, and everyone began to busy themselves.
Lindon still hadn’t closed the entrance to his void key, so the Dawn Sky Palace hung open.
Mercy brightened and ran over as she saw Orthos and Little Blue, but Lindon addressed them first. “If you stay out here with us, I’m afraid I might not be able to open the key again. You might get hurt. Are you willing to risk it?”
Orthos and Blue traded uncertain glances.
Little Blue gave a whistle, but it wavered unsteadily.
“If you get too weak from the hunger aura, I’ll have to send you back,” Lindon said, as he let the void key vanish. He didn’t add that the same remained true for the rest of them.
Soulfire now burned merrily in all of them; Ziel, Mercy, and Yerin had used up the last of the natural treasures Lindon had brought along. At least the ones that he could successfully balance out to create soulfire.
Everyone’s cores were full too, even Lindon’s. But they were completely out of elixirs. The only compatible scales they had left were pure or Blackflame.
Lindon and Eithan hadn’t needed to refill their madra as much as the others, but at the same time, when they did need to recover, it took them more to fill up their cores. They also couldn’t restore pure madra using aura, but that disadvantage was shared by everyone down here.
Every second, the hunger aura nibbled away at their power. Anything that they spent now, and any energy consumed by hunger techniques, would be gone for good. Lindon and Eithan were the only ones with scales left.
When the traps cleared, they dashed through and found a hall with a mark that seized Lindon’s attention. It was the four-part symbol that had marked the Ancestor’s Tomb from the outside.
The mark of the Dreadgods.
They passed beneath it and into a room that seemed to be nothing but row upon row of circular transparent tanks. They weren’t made from glass, though, but from some kind of loose fabric like transparent skin.
These tanks, or sacs, or whatever they were had long been empty. Lindon suspected from the scripts and tubes around them that they would usually be filled with liquid, and at that point, the skins would be taut. But this machinery hadn’t been operational for centuries.
Dead tanks spread ahead of them in rows, but Lindon studied them in glimpses as he ran past. Dross was responsible for noticing and remembering more details.
[These were nothing compared to the specimen tanks in Ghostwater. So outdated! We glorify the past too much, and we fail to notice the strides we’ve made in more modern times.]
Lindon tuned Dross out.
They were rushing through the labyrinth as quickly as they could, but all of them slowed when they reached the end of the room.
Four tanks had been removed from the last row, elevated onto a higher platform and surrounded by tools. Lindon didn’t need to identify the scripts on the scopes, gauges, and marked sticks to know that these were all measuring tools.
And he had a good guess at what was special about these tanks. One had been stained red, one blue-gold, one a heavy yellow, and one purple-and-white.
Lindon slowed to examine some partial notes that remained on the nearby tables, but he knew what these had to be. The tanks where the Dreadgods were born.