Unbound

Chapter Three Hundred And Forty One – 341

Chapter Three Hundred And Forty One – 341

"Drink this, Pit."

Felix tilted a blue-stone carafe into his Companion's open beak. The tenku choked on it, warbling in agony.

"It doesn't taste that bad," Felix chided. He stroked the chimera's feathered throat, encouraging him to swallow the mixture and grimaced as the smell wafted back up at him. "Okay, it's...not the best. But it's good for you."

Pit drank it all while his tail lashed angrily into a stack of half-empty barrels to the staccato tattoo of furious displeasure. Felix watched his friend struggle with the mixture, thick as it was, but he finished it all. Carefully, he lowered the carafe and backed up.

"Alright?" he asked.

In response, Pit cautiously shrugged. Golden eyes widened. Feathers lifted and his tail bristled like a chimney brush.

"Again?" Felix groaned.

Pit retched, neck and chest undulating as clouds of noxious, black fumes roiled from his gullet, followed closely by a thin stream of fetid fluid. The clouds boiled upward, slipping into the grated vents located in the ceiling while the liquid pooled thickly on the polished floors. A smell like rotting meat and vegetation filled the air, making everyone in the Lab gag in disgust. It was not the first time they had smelled such, and much as Felix wished it were otherwise, he did not think it would be the last.

Felix carefully stroked his friend's back as he tried to empty himself of all the impurities his Cleansing Tonic had isolated, until only bile was coming up. By that point, the liquid had itself sublimated into a far thinner smoke, leaving only a stain upon the pitted, wooden floor.

"At least it wasn't as much this time," Felix said, giving Pit an extra pat between his shoulder blades. "I think we're getting closer to getting all of it."

Really? he sent.

"...No. This is barely scratching the surface," Felix admitted before rubbing his hands across his tired face. He'd been up for an entire day distilling that tonic, and still it had only grasped the most superficial of impurities in Pit's channels. With a quick flex of Cardinal Flame, a tendril of Felix's Mana delved Pit's pathways. "We haven't even touched your core space yet."

Pit wilted, his triangular ear tufts drooping.

"But, uh, have hope, we'll figure this out," Felix said. "These impurities aren't impeding you yet. Karys says you could most likely evolve and suffer no diminished capacity at all."

Pit snorted. The man with holes in his Mind?

Felix opened his mouth before letting it shut with a snap. "Fair point."

They had tried this mixture three times now, and over the past week Felix had put the majority of his attention into solving the mystery of a Cleansing Potion. There were no records of how to make one, and none among the Stronghold's residents had been any help, not even the Farwalkerthough the man had been a font of knowledge regarding Companion Pacts. In the end, Felix had been forced to improvise his Cleansing Tonic, though he'd been given good general instruction by Karys' faulty memory. Alchemy was as much about the physical process of mixing and distilling as it was about the crafter's Intent. One could, in fact, skip much of the basics and simply impress Mana and one's Intent upon a mixture and make a passable Healing Tonic. Not a great one, mind, but passable. Enough to cure a few scratches and bruises. Coupled with Felix's impressive Intent and near bottomless Mana and they had, at the very least, a place to start.

"I'll mark this variation as 'needs improvement,'" Felix said as he set the blue-stone carafe upon his workstation.

Also 'tastes like krem butt,' Pit offered.

"I'll make a note," Felix said, grinning. If Pit's sense of humor had returned, then it wasn't as awful a process as he'd feared. "We still have variation number four brewing in the cold storage. Hopefully the lack of heat will"

"Sir!"

Felix whirled toward the voice and saw Vyne urgently waving at him. The man was standing near Felix's Ladder of Ascension, where a series of tubes, alembics, and retorts fed into a vial at the very top...a vial that was supposed to be holding his newest attempt at distilling the Spirit Fruit. Instead, the vial was producing a large quantity of prismatic steam, all of it so heavy it was pooling around the base. It sparked, like fireworks going off, popping and snapping.

"Get back!" he shouted, while driving his Intent and Affinity through his core space. His Stone Shaping responded, manifesting a foot-thick dome of grey stone around the entire Ladder, which slammed in place just as an explosion rocked the Lab. It was so powerful Felix could feel it through his feet, numbing his toes while it sent his alchemist falling to their knees in pained shock.

Vyne, meanwhile, had slammed a massive shield made of blued steel into the wooden floors. The dome cracked, releasing a rainbow-hued spray of Essence in a sharp-bladed arc that neatly bisected his very impressive shield and threw the warrior back a dozen paces. Felix sent Mana hurtling across space, while his core rang out the pattern of Stone Shaping once again. Another slab of stone burst upward, shattering floorboards as it turned aside the explosion's deadly edge.

"Vyne!" Nevia said, rushing to his side. She held a pair of Healing Tonics in her hands, but the young guy sat up all on his own.

"I'm, ouf," he winced and held his chest. Blood welled up, but it was a shallow cut. "I'm fine. Barely scratched me."

"You stupid oaf," Nevia cursed. She poured one of her Tonics onto his chest, letting the solution bubble and fizz against his opened flesh before pulling out a roll of bandages. "You're supposed to run from a failed experiment!"

Vyne gave a pained chuckle. "I didn't know you cared. Ow!"

Nevia smiled smugly, deftly tying the knot she'd just tightened. "Hold still."

"Gonna need a new shield," Kikri mused, running a finger across the sundered edge of his former armor. She hissed and recoiled, her finger bloodied. "It's sliced clean through."

"That's why I brought the granite in here," Felix said as he walked by. "Nevia's right. Next time, run."

"A-aye, sir," Vyne said with a swallow. He traded glances with the Dwarf.

Felix left them to it and inspected the dome of granite. It had been cracked all along a side, and within he could only see swirls of chaotic Mana. With a flex of his Will and expenditure of Mana, he tore the thickened dome apart into chunks of swirling liquid stone. They spun about him for a second before returning to the block of Tier II Granite that he had kept nearby for exactly these situations, reconstituting it seamlessly.

Stone Shaping is level 74!

Beneath the dome was absolute wreckage. Felix let out a heavy breath, annoyance and resignation both, and inspected the remains of his Ladder of Ascension. The alembic and nearly every retort had been shattered, while the frame and circular inscriptions were all twisted beyond remedy. Perhaps if Felix had managed to figure out Metal Shaping he'd have been able to reconstitute it in some form, but that Skill had been elusive. He was sure it existed, but again, his Shaping Skills were missing something. He'd yet to find out what.

At the top of the broken Ladder, the vial holding his latest attempt at an Essence Draught was split in half. It contained nothing more than an oily foam, like bubbles in an oil slick.

"Failure. Again." Felix had tried distilling an Essence Draught an entire sixteen times while working on the Cleansing mixture, but where he'd found limited success with the latter, the former had proven a stubborn obstacle to his alchemic advancement. He massaged his temples, fighting back the stress headache that was taking up more and more of his mental space each day. He wasn't getting much sleep as it was, and the strain of his friends being held back by this was maddening. "How many Spirit Fruit do we have left?"

"Over two hundred," Kikri said.

Felix nodded. He hadn't harvested an eighth of what the Spirit Tree had to offer, but squandering even one of them felt like a colossal waste. "Get me another."

Need sleep, Pit said from across the Lab.

"I need to figure this out," Felix insisted. The others went about their tasks, ignoring him talking to the air. Half-conversations between Felix and Pit had become common-place. "Sleeping can wait."

Dreams are worse, he said. I hear them.

Felix looked up at his Companion. The tenku was looking at him with concern in his big gold eyes. The headache behind his eyes redoubled, a pain sharp enough to push beyond his Song of Absolution. His Body, Mind, and Spirit all felt like taut strings, stretched over the rim of a hollow abyss. The dreams were still there, worsening by the day. "I know. I'm sorry."

No sorry, Pit snorted. Fix. Action. Confront dreams.

"What?"

BEWARE.

Felix stumbled, the words shoved into his brain rather than a blue-box notification. It had felt like the System talking to him almost, except that it came from the very earth around him. He looked around, unable to shake away the impression of enormous footsteps headed in his direction.

What is it? Pit asked, leaping to his feet. His wings rustled.

"Someone's here," Felix said. No matter how he pushed his Perception however, he sensed nothing amiss in the Crafting Halls or beyond. "Come on."

They tore out of his Lab, down the steps and across the Beacon's landing and into the Temple proper. He leaped, bouncing off the steps he'd constructed around the base of his Spirit Tree, out of the crevasse and into the early autumn air above. There, he and Pit skidded to a stop, the waterfall thundering to their left and the cliff dropping toward his Stronghold on their right.

I see it!

A speck hovered in the distance, just beyond the jagged peaks of the eastern mountains folks were starting to call the Teeth. It flashed once, twice, before splitting into two specks. Felix focused, his Perception tightening upon their shapes until they took up most of his vision. It was a feature of high Perception that he rarely utilized, but what amounted to telescopic vision was handy as hell. Now, it allowed him to see that the two specks were, in fact, two Manaships.

A woman stood on deck, her long sea-green hair tied back in a series of braids. She raised her hand in greeting, the midday sun glinting off a smile that put sharks to shame.

"Zara," Felix whispered. Then, more fiercely, "They're here!"

What followed was a mad scramble to clear space among the houses and impromptu market that had sprung up in the past weeks. They had kept the football field-sized area clear where Felix had fought the Giants, at first simply because they had the housing they needed and then because it made for a good place to trade the various resources found within the Foglands.

When Felix and the Henaari had set about creating more residences within the walls, they had intentionally set aside a number of open spaces. This was due to the Henaari's understanding of civic engineering more than any decision on Felix's part; he simply chose to listen to the more experienced voices among them, devising the start of roads among all the stone and wooden homes. The Frost Giants, meanwhile, had remained staunch isolationists beyond their frozen wall, venturing out only to hunt, train, and trade within the market.

Relations between the Henaari and Frost Giants, while tense, were not overtly hostile. Yet when Felix had landed among them, shouting for the area to be cleared, they had both responded the same way.

They scattered in fear.

Felix wasn't exactly happy that people feared him, but it had proven useful on more than one occasion. He'd take the advantage while he could. Drawing from his memory of airship docks back in the Void, Felix hastily constructed a sort of dry dock out of the stone beneath them. It was barely more than a deep 'V' supported by rocky framework, but based on what he'd seen of the ship's general shape, it'd do the trick.

The Manaships soon cleared the distance between the Teeth and his Stronghold, and by that time everyone had noticed them. Crowds gathered, the Henaari pointing in excitement and curiosity while Giants fingered the hilts of weapons and cast nervous looks into the skies, as if more were coming. His team trickled down from the Temple too, gathering behind Felix as he stood near the makeshift dry docks, waiting with him as the ships slowly landed. Jets of powerful air Mana shot off from beneath them, massive downward drafts that normally swirled about their hulls in a complex whirl of power. Unlike the ships in the Void, these Manaships seemed to operate on entirely different premises, weaving dizzying strains of power within and without their hull to harness the winds.

"Blind gods, those're big!" Evie shouted over the roaring wind. "How'd they get them?"

"Stole them from a Governor, I'm told," Felix said.

Evie laughed and nudged Vess in the ribs. "Your minder finally lose that stick up his ass?"

Vess smiled primly. "Doubtful."

Evie snorted even harder.

The Manaships settled into the docks with a groaning of stone, and Felix quickly shaped a few more supports for the structure. The whole thing was eyeballed, so that it worked at all was enough for him, and when the swirling Mana finally cut off he made sure to cast his Perception and Affinity across the whole structure. He grunted in approval. It'd hold.

The gangplanks on the first ship dropped to the earth with a crash, and the first off the boat was a hulking figure in freshly pressed robes of green and yellow and gleaming silver armor. A sword the size of a small tree was on his back, the man more than large enough to wield it, and even beneath his impressive armor Felix could see his muscles bunch and flex during his stolid descent.

"He's lookin' healthy," Evie said, admiration clear in her tone. Atar gave her a sideways look. "What? He might be a dick, but I can appreciate a good Body when I see it."

Alister barely stifled his laughter as members of the Haarguard filed off the ship behind the Hand. Felix hadn't expected that, especially not thirty of them; the Haarguard seemed intent on staying in Haarwatch, which had been fine with Felix. Anyone was welcome, so long as they were willing to listen to him. The ones who had traveled with him for so long had been indoctrinated into the team at that point, but thirty more, and all of them looking like they were following the Hand?

"The Blade Overcomes!"

An Apprentice Tier shout shook the air as first one then dozens more men and women of various Races marched off the Manaship. All of them carried a sword of some sort, whether slung over their back or at their hips, and their dark blue uniforms were accented with bronze-colored armor across their chest and leading arms. Their long coats extended in flaps that hung to their knees, where greaves and boots of the same bronze color stomped the ground in a rhythmic march. The lead was a bald Human named Fenwick Cole, nearly as burly as the Hand if still only an Apprentice Tier. He marched to the fore and saluted to Felix, hand to heart. "We serve."

Suppressing a grimace, Felix only nodded.

"The Fist Prevails!"

"The Bone Remains!"

"The Arc Ascends!"

One after another, the...Legionnaires stepped off the Manaships, the first and then the second. Damn near fifteen hundred men and women marched out in surprisingly solid formation, divided neatly by their orders or divisions or whatever they called it. Blade, Fist, Bone, and Arc. The last one is new. He'd spotted each of their insignias, one of which was the same glyph for fire, lightning, and eye. The other depended on their affiliation, and they looked increasingly professional. All of them wore jackets and pants with armor laid atop them, save for the Arc, who were kitted out in much the same as any Guild mage might have been. He was so preoccupied by the ranks saluting him, Felix almost missed the black and gold robes of his mentor until she was right in front of him.

"Zara," Felix said, repressing the urge to step back from her; she was standing entirely too close. Then he looked again, noticing her surprisingly gaunt face. "You're tired. What happened?"

"What happened is that I burned most of my Mana fueling these ships," the Naiad said. She begrudgingly tilted her head toward the Legion behind her. "The mages of your little army here did provide some aid. It is why we were able to reach you so fast."

"About half a week before schedule," Vess stated. She seemed distracted by the presence of the Hand, still some yards away, and for good reason. They hadn't left on the best of terms. "I am impressed."

Zara inclined her head. "Thank you, your Grace." Her eyes danced across the faces of the Henaari and Frost Giants. He hadn't told her of them before, but if she were shocked none of it showed upon her face or Spirit. "It has been a long week. If the grandstanding portion is over with, I'd greatly appreciate a bed."

"Of course. We prepared for your arrival, though we're all living a little rough out here, so I can't promise all the amenities you'd find in a city," Felix said. He motioned to his team and they split up as they had discussed, each of them going to address a different portion of the group. "We'll lead you to your rooms now, and later...Later we can talk."

Zara met his eyes, her ice blues meeting his own darker set, and neither of them so much as blinked. She inclined her head, in much the same way she had for Vess. "As you wish, Autarch."

"Felix Nevarre."

Sound and activity stopped among the crowd, the words not so much as bellowed as they were spoken with such utter authority. Adept Tier lungs shook the air as a Body of a small giant strode toward Felixthe Hand approached.

"You have given question to my honor and my duty. By endangering my ward you have endangered the House she represents, and the Territory for which I am a representative. By Oath and Blood I challenge you, Fiend of the Fog. Autarch."