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You know, when you set foot in Caed Nua, when you see the great adra protrusions like fingers clutching the chapel, what you will find underneath.
You don't know about the dragon and the vithrack, the experimental chambers and the animats, the spirits and the memories of violence and the ancient tragedy, not until you carve a slow, painstaking path through the winding levels, down and down and down. But the air of the keep itself, stale and rotting until you make it a little less so, trembles with something you haven't felt in a long time, a vibration so infinitesimal that it nearly escapes notice.
It would slip past you entirely, had you not spent so many years attuning yourself to this particular type of resonance.
It drags at your skin and bones and blood, down and down and down, the more time you spend at Caed Nua. Fainter here than in the Living Lands, but resounding like an echo or impression of what once was. Like it had been stronger in ages past.
You know why Maerwald's Awakening overcame him here. Why Od Nua's grief turned to obsession turned to madness. Why so many adventurers and hapless beings, whose bodies and souls you find below, dashed themselves to death and madness against the unyielding earth of the Endless Paths.
You know because you've seen the same in the Living Lands, because the little carved wheel of adra and copper hanging at your neck glows faintly amid the ruin, and it looks like home.
"The veins of the world call to us," Dherys says. The two of you sit on the ground outside the camp, in the shadows of towering trees that become an impenetrable mass of wilderness beyond. The wilderness teems with life, warm and pulsing, that murmurs at the edges of your senses like an itch that you can't quite scratch. "They deliver us to and from the Beyond. Their nature is to draw souls into themselves." She smirks. "If you listen too closely, you'll go mad."
You, all of seven years old, consider this for a while and frown. Dherys says there's a great energy below you, under the ground. You see a lot of dirt, which doesn't seem so remarkable, but it's tingly under your fingers, and Dherys had seemed pleased when you told her so. "So why are we listening?"
Maybe it's only the hindsight of memory that adds a foreboding glint to Dherys's eyes as she chuckles. "To learn, little one."
You descend into the Endless Paths again, when they are quiet and calm and more or less empty of all souls and masters save for you. You pass through every level on your way down, and all but one are silent and bare -- or so it appears. You check them all, and your steps echo oddly, muffled by dust and grime. You find signs of your party's passing not yet worn away, marks of battles and makeshift camps, and melancholy wraps around your heart.
You imagine that the green hands of the adra titan draw your heart's heaviness into itself as you pass, because the further down you go, the lighter you feel. As if concerns of the surface are only a matter of physical distance from them.
At the back of your mind, the Steward's presence glows. There is no oppressive presence of the Master Below to muffle it, even this far beneath, and her watchfulness shadows your steps.
Please be careful, my lady, she says, the first time you stop to rest and eat in the fourth level, at the foot of the platform near the titan's head. Her voice in your mind comes as if through a tunnel, but it's clear and strong, reverberating against the walls of your skull. This is still a dangerous place.
Not a physical danger, she means. A danger to the mind, and one would think you've had enough of that. But maybe there's a little too much of your mentor in you still. For a moment, you want to draw into yourself, to strengthen the walls of your mind so that the Steward cannot see any further in. But you don't. You gaze upon the great face of the titan, your eyes tracing the soft glow of its swirling markings, and you let her walk freely in the thoughts and memories that have dwelt near the surface too often as of late.
I've dealt with this before, you say. And then, after a moment: I'm not Maerwald.
The Steward's thoughts wrap around yours like warm arms. It makes your throat tighten. I know, she says. I do not doubt your strength, and I can see your experience. But I told you once that Caed Nua has a will of its own, borne of the land. I have seen too many fall to what lies beneath. She falls silent. I am certain that I would not have been so eager to attach myself to Caed Nua had it not put its influence upon me.
The admission gives you pause. A bit of anxiety rises up in your throat. That doesn't bother you? you ask. If you want to be free, I could--
No, the Steward says, with a patient laugh. You can stop offering, my lady. If I change my mind, I will tell you. But I have no wish to return to the Wheel. I am happy now, and I do not wish to lose who I am.
She isn't the first woman to tell you so. Your throat tightens again as you run your fingers over the ground on which you sit, and the dirt and dust and grime beneath your skin tingle faintly. You think about what she said, turning it over in your head.
It is the Wheel, you say, somewhat absently. The veins. The adra. At least, that's the theory. The theory your mentor had always adhered to, while in pursuit of greater questions. She'd pulled a lot of information out of Engwithan ruins for someone who wasn't a Watcher -- before she'd been driven out of her homeland, at least. Sometimes you entertain the idea of rubbing all that you've discovered in her face. The resonance from the cluster is powerful enough to reach the surface. I think strange things happening above are a byproduct. And like you said, there's a will behind it. But... it's faint, too. Distorted.
The Steward is silent, listening.
One of your hands extends to lay palm-down upon the ground. The other hand reaches up to thread fingers through the cord hanging around your neck. The dragon said the veins retreated, you say, slowly and thoughtfully. Did they move on their own? Did something pull them back?
Was it a natural reaction, or something more? That is the real question. The densely packed adra beneath the Living Lands had always seemed to exist just out of reach of instrument and excavation, no matter what Dherys and her Resonants did to study and uncover it, quite unlike the singular strata winding horizontal through the upper crust and their protrusions growing out of the earth, and unlike the powerful veins in the Deadfire that Dherys had studied before moving north.
The clusters beneath the Lands and the veins in the Deadfire certainly hadn't seemed to want for a master. Why a master, you think? Why a steward? To protect what the Glanfathans would not?
Even in the Living Lands, there had been no ancient dragon to offer a firsthand account on the matter. There had been no Steward with her soul's finger on the pulse of the land. There had been no monument to grief dug deep by forgotten forebears.
Your fingers drop down to the pendant you'd carved and calibrated many years ago, a little wheel of adra burning with essence against your chest. It feels like a tantalizing answer is waiting just underneath your feet, if only you could dig a little further to reach it.
Images are pulled forth from your memory, flashing in your mind's eye with gentle admonishment: the great maw of the White Forge and the looming shadow of an Eyeless, blurring together.
Those, the Steward says, are dangerous questions.
Questions with no easy answers, though you have your theories. There are theories, too, about what lies at the center of Eora. A burning mass of adra filled with millions of souls. The gods themselves. The Beyond. The hub of the Wheel. You know all too well how easy it would be to dig for answers until your fingers bled, to dash yourself against the false gods in an attempt to learn just how much they've hidden from the world.
You're right, you say, getting to your feet, and your lips curl back into something like a smile. But I still like to ask.
The White Forge blazes against your skin and your soul. The dragon spews fire, lit by your hand. The adra gleams bright, and when you reach out with your mind, you feel the way it travels down and down and down. A river of resonance roaring down to the heart of all things.
If you let your mind wander too far, you think it might never come back.
With effort, you focus on your line of sight, on Pallegina directly within it, feathers and eyes glistening in the light of the adra pillar and the dragon's fire as she moves in to check on you. You smell Aloth's singed robes and Edér's steel-and-sweat-and-whiteleaf hovering close. You hear murmurs from the others, and you blink and reorient yourself, returning to the surface in slow moments that stretch out like an age.
But the pull isn't gone. It sings like heavy lead under your skin and bones and blood.
You know, too, why so many dashed themselves to death against Durgan's Battery.
You step forward towards the adra pillar, nodding to reassure Pallegina, and you reach out again, this time to the foundry, to the White Forge, to the Battery. The souls of the Pargrunen are free, but their essence has soaked the Battery for hundreds of years, and you move between Watcher and cipher without thinking. The pendant at your neck glows, and you pull at every world line and memory that you can find, piecing together old knowledge and skill not your own and making it yours.
You've worked with adra before and with your hands ever since, and the knowledge melds into your mind easily, like it was meant to be there. Your hands itch with the desire to work the forge yourself, hammering and refining until the knowledge sinks into your muscles too. The adra pillar blazes with essence and light and warmth, and the little wheel at your neck burns in answer, and you gaze up at the pillar and grin.
If only Dherys could see you now.
You feel the vithrack before you reach the level in which they've made their temporary home, a strange but oddly comforting humming of minds vividly present against your senses. It's just as you remember, shadowy caverns lit dimly and strung with webbing, but marked by signs of more intensive study since you'd last visited. It reminds you of years gone by, of long treks to new and more promising locations, of days and nights spent in consideration of a single lead or variable, exploring and examining and fine-tuning and digging until something gave way, whether that thing was pride or the secrets of the world.
Human-animal is always welcome among vithrack, Tcharek says when you approach. Warmth buzzes across the surface of your thoughts with a thousand skittering legs. Your mind twinges with his alien voice as chittering echoes in your ears. But is needing new title. Calling human dragon slayer, yes?
You smile as your eyes flick over the cavern. Over the organized chaos of study, the mindful attention to caution alongside the reckless pursuit of knowing more and more and more. It looks like childhood and home. Then you return your attention to Tcharek and reach back with your own mind, only a little tentative. You'd spoken aloud before for the benefit of your friends, but here and now, in the Endless Paths, the only souls to speak to are ones for whom there is no need. I didn't do it alone.
You hadn't even struck the killing blow. You remember a delirious, laughing debate about it, and the melancholy tugs at your heart once more, distant but not entirely stilled.
Vithrack are never alone, Tcharek says, and the skittering brushes up against your mind again. You feel the way his mind bleeds outward towards the other vithrack nearby, the way it yearns towards a flash of images that you'd seen before, nests and webbing within a vast cavern. A web of energy strung tight, radiating out from Tcharek. Vithrack are many. Many is strength. New master of old place gathered many and gathered strength, became dragon slayer. His eyes blink at you. Let that be first lesson, yes?
It doesn't surprise you that he already knows what you want to ask. I learned from some of the best a long time ago, you say, with a surge of nostalgia and bitterness far too complex to categorize. But it was just one perspective. Yours is... different. Stronger, I think. I'd like to learn from it.
Dragon slayer gave vithrack tools. Made old place safer. Offered friendship to us, Tcharek says with a tilt of his spider head. Tcharek offers knowledge and friendship in return. He pauses and regards you, and phantom talons comb through your thoughts. You let them. Cipher. Is strange word.
It's one word for it, you say. The Glanfathans call those like us mind hunters. Brîshalgwin. Bitterness again, but tempered this time. You like the brîshalgwin you've met in Eir Glanfath, and one day soon, you will seek out their tutelage too. Dherys's perspective is only one, limited in scope by her own bitterness and obsession.
Tcharek absorbs this, tapping a talon against one of his fangs. Watcher. Is different?
In some ways, you say. It's hard to tell where the lines form and blur for you, and your nature as cipher and Watcher both has broadened the scope of the world in ways you never dreamed possible, even as so much has remained frustratingly out of reach. You could say the difference is in breadth and depth. I can do more as a cipher, here in the physical world, but I can go deeper as a Watcher, into the spiritual planes. I can... touch souls in a way I couldn't before. Speak to spirits. And I've had to work to develop my cipher abilities. When I became a Watcher, things just... came to me.
Tcharek's talons tap together smartly. Is similar to vithrack, he says. Things come to us. But vithrack not burn bright like dragon slayer. Not speak to dead. There's a strange combination of clacking and chittering in your ears, and in your head, an impression arrives. There are no words attached to it in any language you know. It feels like the earlier impression of Tcharek's web of energy, only more defined, woven into a circle lined with spokes. Is how we describe ourselves.
You take a moment to wrap your thoughts around the impression, committing it to memory, and then you reconstruct it and send it back to him along the connected thread of your minds.
Tcharek clacks approvingly. He gestures to the cavern, to the other vithrack and the scattered piles of adra-based contraptions and machine parts and tools. Must finish work for the night. Dragon slayer stay and watch. Learn. After, he tilts his head, we practice.
Luminous eyes bore into you, hot like the air whipping against your face, and a mind fed by thousands of souls threatens to crash over yours like a tidal wave. But yours holds steady, and the wave hangs in eternal suspension. The ground trembles as great claws rake through the dirt, joints scraping like rock upon rock. "It is where the adra veins converge, before descending into the hollows of the world," the dragon says. "That is what calls you all down here, in the end, though it lies now beyond reach. Do you feel it, now that you are so close? That pull towards transformation."
You do. You don't need proximity to feel it. You spent too long as a child straining to hear the hum of the world, and attuning yourself to it now is second nature. In a way, becoming a Watcher was only an extension of everything else you'd learned to do.
Ciphers work where the mind and the soul meet in the body. The physically anchored fields of essence that some call housed souls are easiest to manipulate and brightest in the forms of kith, but the thing is, those aren't the only soul fields that sing to you. Something whisper-quiet hums all around you, everywhere you go. It's too low-level a medium for the greatest of your powers, but the world lines of memories are etched into it, are read like the edges of any housed kith soul.
Your mentor called it the quintessential field, and at places like this -- where the veins of the world cluster, where great living pillars of adra breach the surface -- that field roars. It's densely concentrated in the far north and south, but it radiates outward from the core of the planet, stronger along the looping lines of adra veins that you and many others have long theorized about -- spokes of the Wheel, some might say. Here under Caed Nua. Deep beneath Durgan's Battery. Far away under the valleys of the Living Lands, under the Deadfire. Many places around the world, some you only know from Dherys, identified by the peculiar nature of the surface and its dwellers, all shaped by an implacable push-pull.
By the song of something that resonates like the housed souls that are a cipher's domain. Something that resonates discordant, for reasons that remain frustratingly unclear.
At least, that's the theory.
The dragon wants you to find a suitable host for her. She gives you a pendant not unlike the one at your neck and claims that she cares only for escaping the confines of her dark prison. But obsession raised you and taught you much, and you know that she will be back, if you let her escape. She will be back, or she will find some other way to feed off of souls, because once you've spent time attuned to the heartbeat of the world, it will always, inexorably, draw you in.
That's why you're here, you think, and instead of giving in to the instinct to drift and move and run, you're trying to claim a cursed land that's claimed the mind of its every previous master, that reminds you far too much of home.
You look into the dragon's blazing eyes, and you lie with truth layering your mind and soul like honey meant for flies, and you succeed, because obsession raised you and taught you well.
Within the Endless Paths, now quiet and calm, you sit with your legs folded and your back to the adra titan's head.
The vithrack are long gone, back home to their colony. Now, when you come down here, you are the only living being left in the paths. But behind you, the titan pulses with energy, with essence that resonates along your spine, warm and sonorous. The souls within the titan are too many to count, too dissolute and fragmented and old to retain distinction. If you listen, you catch only snatches of what they might have once been. Nothing is whole enough to hold conversation.
Still, sometimes you come down here to listen to them, and sometimes you come down here to listen further and deeper. The resonance of the cluster far below is a whisper, and for all that it's a pulse of the world several orders of magnitude greater than most, it's often quieter than the surface, than the thoughts in your head. You listen the way Tcharek taught you to, and you take it further, to the hollow parts of the world, to empty air and dead rock and mindless fire, to the places where essence is theoretically too quiet for mortal minds to hear.
But nothing exists in a vacuum. All things connect. All things exist only in relation to each other, because of each other, and so you dig deeper through what you hear to find the way it bends in relation to what you shouldn't. You find the tiniest thrums of resonance below in places where it shouldn't be possible to listen, and you latch on and pull yourself down and down and down. Towards the thing that sings like an housed soul, a soul your cipher's hands can touch.
Sometimes, you come down here simply because you can, but sometimes, you come down here to listen until your mind rights itself. Until the knots in your shoulders relax, until the heaviness in your limbs lifts, until your stomach stops clenching. Until your skull stops pounding, on days when a cipher's sense of the world turns into never-ending headaches. You don't ask to understand why the resonance below, so similar to thoughts, rings discordant -- not yet, anyway. You don't ask for wealth. You don't ask for a soul to return to this world. You don't ask for anything at all, except to feel and exist in your not-solitude until feeling and existing become a little more tolerable.
Maybe that's why Caed Nua hasn't claimed you as anything other than its master, yet.
You always leave a gleaming thread, a woven anchor leading back up to the surface, and it pulls on you with a gentle tug. You rise up into your body slowly, hazily, as if from a dream, and the adra titan glows warm at your back like the sun as you open your eyes to the dim cavern.
My lady, the Steward says, and you blink several times. As you requested, I have woken you at the noon hour. I must admit, you seemed so peaceful that I was hesitant to comply.
You grasp at the ground beneath you, your fingers digging into the dirt to familiarize yourself with the sensation of touch again. Then you gingerly unfold your limbs, grimacing. Sometimes, you come down here to steel yourself, to leave your irritation in the depths of the earth. It doesn't always work. Then who would deal with our incoming guests? Vela?
I am confident that she could go toe-to-toe with any lord, the Steward says, amusement filtering into your mind. She is learning from you, after all.
You huff and get to your feet, placing your weight carefully, letting seconds tick by until you remember what it's like to have a body. But when you take a few steps forward, your feet drag, like there are weights attached, like the ground is clinging to them.
You slow to a halt and hesitate, glancing around as if that will reveal something to you. There is nothing to see, save for the titan's unseeing green and bronze head towering above you. The warmth of its essence brushes up against your mind like always, and far below, the adra veins whisper like the ghost of a breath against your consciousness. The wheel of adra at your neck glows in the presence of both.
My lady? the Steward asks.
In all corners of your mind, her presence shines. You focus on that, and you trace the paths she's walked there, matching your mind's footsteps to hers, all the way up to the surface.