Luke Chmilenko
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Starbreaker: Volume 2 - Chapter 17
🕑 Added 2024-11-22 17:00:05 +0000 UTC“Relic worlds are a warning. They are what could have happened to us if our path had strayed just a little. Yet few see the warning, few go to the places of the dead and witness the destruction wrought there. Few delve into the wreckage of civilizations just as advanced as ours and recognize that like us, the dead were people. As virtuous and sinful, stupid and intelligent, lucky and unlucky as us. To walk through the necropolis world of Perisanté and see the murals still painted on the walls in once vibrant colors faded to almost nothing, to look through the empty window frames and see tables still set for dinner. These were not worlds of deranged and cartoonish cultists devoted to bringing about their own ending, they were just people.”
—Requiem For the Vanished, Luvid Hagen
Sylvas escape from the temple tower was relatively simple, he had a clear map of it in his head, and while he had a few near misses with tumbles heading down the stairs, he was ultimately alright. Crossing from the tower to the cliff-face was a different matter entirely. Indoors he had a fairly clear mental map of layouts, but outside there was too much space and the skew of perspective. He knew which way he thought that the cliff-face complex entrance was, but that didn’t mean it was actually going to be there. Not to mention the problem of the sand.
With every step on Strife, the sand beneath his feet shifted. Normally this was a minor nuisance, but when he was blind, each time the sand shifted it put him subtly off-course. The more steps he made, the more it shifted and the further off he went.
In the distance, he heard a few of the other recruits calling out to him as he went, but he couldn’t have guessed who, or where, the sound echoed strangely by the cliff, distorting positions. He waved his arm in a vaguely friendly way and moved on in what he hoped was the right direction. Luck was not on his side, nobody dawdled by who happened to be heading his way. By this point in the day, everyone else would be deep into their personal improvement program, and Sylvas’ big improvement for the day was losing the ability to see.
He didn’t run directly into the cliff-face, there was enough of an echo off the surface that he didn’t have to worry about that kind of impact, but when he stretched out his hands and touched nothing but stone, he had reached his first real crisis since losing his sight. Left or right. The entrance to the complex could be either way, and he had absolutely no way of knowing which way he had strayed as he made what he’d hoped was a beeline for the door. Logically, he could just proceed along the length of the cliff until he found it, but if he went the wrong way, there was a whole lot of cliff to get through before he found a sign that he’d gone astray. He could just wander back and forth a little, on the assumption that he hadn’t strayed far, but none of this was what he’d actually been blinded for. He was meant to be using his Waveform Paradigm to sense the world around him.
Closing his eyes, despite them being dead in his head anyway, he stretched out his other senses. His second sight was still there, overlaying the nothingness with vibrant color that did little to nothing to help him navigate the real world, since mana flowed through solid objects as easily as open air. It was chaotic and useless for this, so he let his Clearmind wipe it away and focused on his sense of gravity.
He couldn’t see it. Sight and gravity didn’t seem to match up very well in the sensory apparatus. It was more like a low sound. Just too deep to really hear. But he felt it. The hum of the world underneath him, the deep gravity getting more and more intense the lower he reached. But it wasn’t the only thing that he could feel. Like a distant duet playing in another room he could feel the pull of the binary stars beyond Strife itself. The other planets of the system were more like whispers at this distance, but they were there, and when he strained just a little, he could feel so much more, the background hubbub of the entire cosmos, just waiting to be heard.
He knew where he was in relation to the wells of gravity beneath him and around him. The information alone would have been fairly useless if it wasn’t combined with his ability to mentally map out the area with Lockmind. But even knowing exactly where he was did little to help him navigate the current situation. He needed more information than where he was on the planet, he needed to know where other things were in relation to him.
Returning to his gravity sense, he reached out again, not listening to the deep and heavy bass notes of the planetary gravity, nor the quiet notes of the other stars and planets, but for something even more quiet.
He wasn’t listening for the gravity now, he was listening for the echo where it struck objects. Everything had its gravity, every object, no matter how small, and perhaps with time he’d be able to sense every grain of sand, but for now he couldn’t. He needed to see without eyes, and he couldn’t sense the gravitational pull of every solid object, so he had to resort to feeling for the echo and the pull of gravity on them. It came slowly but surely, manifesting itself in his mind like lines stretching down from each solid thing, streams flowing all the way down to the planet’s core. All the world was painted with those lines, that drag of weight, and with his senses he could make them all out.
The place where stone had been carved away to make an entrance to the cliff bore just as many streaks of weight as any other part of the cliff-face, but right ahead of him, they were layered a little thinner. He could almost make out the big black nothingness beyond them. Reaching out his hand, he brushed through the lines of weight and then stepped forward, into the stone.
Here his newfound sense became completely and utterly useless. He was moving through the gravitational warp lines, threading through them like he were weft and this was some great weaving, but he couldn’t see beyond them. Even trying to use Clearmind to filter out the information was useless. He could eliminate some parts, only for the rest to stop making sense without them. He was not so attuned to this new sense yet that he could eliminate half the information it was giving him and still make sense of it. With acclimation, maybe he would get there, but for now, he was as good as blind all over again.
He tried to overlay his mental map of the cliffside complex over the passage that he was in, but he’d never accounted for all the rough patches on the floor and walls, the inclines and the divots in the stone. Despite having had all the time in the world to memorize everything here, he’d never taken a moment to give it focus.
Vague ideas of what direction he was headed in, and where the next turnoff might be, were all well and good, but he kept his hand running along the wall as he went all the same.
He tripped a lot more than he would have expected, unsure of the floor and unaware of how much he relied on his eyes, he persevered with his gravity sense, abandoning the attempts to use echoes of planetary gravity to give things shape and straining for the minutiae, the tiny pull that each individual solid object gave off. It still escaped him.
An opening that he hadn’t recalled opened up to one side and he lost his balance, stumbling to crash into the wall and having to bite back a noise that could only be described as a growl of frustration. He didn’t see any of the other recruits having to go through nonsense like this. He chuckled involuntarily; he didn’t see any of the other recruits at all. The absurdity of his situation was enough to get his temper back under control, and he started making progress again. Creeping forward with a hand up on the wall and his head pounding from all the sensory data that his Waveform was bombarding it with.
Out in the open, the gravity’s reflection had worked perfectly well. He suspected that he’d even be able to sense things in flight up above him, which would no doubt come in handy during eidolon battles, but indoors it lost all use because everything above him was pulling down like a curtain, obscuring his vision. The fault wasn’t with the technique, it was with his position. If he could shift around to a different perspective on the streaking lines of gravitational pull, he’d be fine. Of course, the best vantage point would be at the center of the lines, at the heart of the gravity well, from there he’d be able to make out everything in relation to himself, just by the length of each line. The sensory information alone would have been useless, but once again his Paradigm would allow him to overlay it into a map.
So why don’t I make myself the center?
Slowly, tentatively, Sylvas increased his own weight, amping up the density of his body through Tidal Shift. In the beginning it had no effect at all on his vision, but then as he crept closer and closer to the point where his body would be strained beyond its limits, he saw the curve. Every line of gravity was now diverting from its course straight down towards the planet’s heart, and towards the alternate well of gravity that he was generating. It wouldn’t be enough to navigate by, but once he had his embodiment fully under his control and his body was no longer tearing itself apart, he’d be able to rely on it.
He allowed himself to return to his normal mass incrementally, thinking of how Chul made him slowly lower the weights she had him lifting. Slowly, slowly, he returned to normal, and he couldn’t feel any of the tell-tale aches of hairline fractures. It had worked. His embodiment had worked, at least. If not his attempts to use himself as a gravity well.
The answer was so obvious it slapped him in the face. He didn’t need to be constantly seeing everything around him, just a brief shutter-shot glimpse of it all would be enough, then he could retain the mapping of the area until his next flash of vision. He cast a Gravity Spike, right at his own feet.
The result was instantaneous. He was yanked off his feet to his knees. All the dust in the corridor swept into a heap for him to land in. And the map of the tunnel that he’d been trying to piece together sprang to life. A three-dimensional representation of the tunnels around him, as clear as any illusion that the instructors had ever used. And it was tunnels, not just the one that he was in. Beyond the solid walls of the tunnel he had been walking, there were expanses of stone that gave away to other things, gaps where stone should have been, shapes and structures that he eventually managed to decipher into objects, people and furniture.
The pulse of gravity faded as swiftly as it had come, letting the lines of gravity droop back down, but Sylvas had his map now, vague and fuzzy, but definite. He was able to walk along a distance without any issue, and when it became too fuzzy up ahead to safely navigate, he cast another little pulse.
Step by step, pulse by pulse, he made it further and further into the cliffside. It was a massive mana sink, of course, to be constantly casting Gravity Spikes, so he did what was ostensibly the smart thing, and began drawing more mana.
The walking-pace progress slowed to a crawl as he tried to get to grips with the sensation. The channels that had been carved through his body for magic to flow through had only been used in one direction until now, and feeling mana flow the opposite way was disconcerting to say the least, like undrinking a glass of water.
But there could be no denying that it worked. He unclenched the fist around his core, cast a Spike, transliterated what his senses told him into a layout and then clenched the fist again. His whole body felt like it was collapsing inwards each time that he did it, his stomach turned over as the flow of mana reversed, but it worked. He could walk around while drawing mana, even if it did leave him extremely uncomfortable. Filtering out that discomfort with his Clearmind would have been easy enough, but for now he insisted on feeling it. This was all too new, and he didn’t trust it fully. Only once he was sure of it would he feel safe to start ignoring it.
He wandered. For the first time since he’d arrived on Strife he had something resembling free time to explore, and while he might have been inclined to head out to the more substantial ruins beyond the field if given the choice, there was so much down in this cliff that it boggled his mind. Whoever had lived here before had been thorough in their burrowing. Even when he got down to the cold area of the deepest tunnels that the Ardent knew about, there were still more pinging off his Spikes. Hidden from sight by the solid stone, hidden from magic by warding that Sylvas couldn’t have guessed at. They would have gone unseen forever, if someone with his Paradigm hadn’t come wandering along. For a moment he pondered keeping them as his own little secret, but it would have served no purpose, he’d report them to whoever it was relevant to at some point… probably Quartermaster Chul, who’d promptly fill the tunnels with more shelves.
Time lost all meaning in the darkness. He could have counted the pulses of gravity that he unleashed like a metronome, but he had no clue how often he was stopping to check his position, so it would have provided no useful information. The long night went on with him plodding around in silence, listening for the echo of footsteps or distant voices to tell him that his session was over. They were not forthcoming, but gradually he realized that he had strayed so far into the cliff-face that it was quite possible the area was entirely uninhabited by the Ardent. He had certainly encountered more collapsed tunnels than a well-maintained military base was liable to contain. Bracing himself against the drag yet to come, Sylvas cast another Gravity Spike. Maintaining it long past the point that his surrounding area was revealed to him. The sphere of its pull expanded ever outwards, growing weaker and weaker, but he could still feel it. Pouring more mana into the spike, increasing the gravity slowly but surely until it surpassed the pull of the planet itself, his senses expanded out, overlayed with the memory-map of the places he had been until he could sense everything in a mile. The strange shifting gravity of things in motion, people. The fixed mass of the solid stone. There was so much to see.
Releasing the spike, he had the fullest picture of his surroundings as he’d been able to muster all day, turning around and heading back to the surface seemed like a solid plan now that he had gotten to grips with a feasible way to use his Paradigm.
As he plodded along, the complex mapping that he’d created with his pulses began to tickle something in his memory. The calculations that Fahred had him making to perform a teleportation. Each line that he saw when looking for the echo of gravity pulling on a solid object was one of the variables that the man had him adjusting for. The central formula was simply the line between him and his location, this gravity sense could now give him all of the rest. The measurement of the lines that he’d used to work out the position of objects around him could be transferred. It wouldn’t work over the vast distances he’d need to traverse when piloting a ship unless he had an incredibly potent gravity well to work with, so potent that it was nearly punching through to null-space itself, but it would work. Perhaps there was a way to use the gravity spike created by the teleportation spell to navigate? What if he made one tiny jump first to map out the coordinates ahead and then…
A white shield sprang to life in front of him.
Sylvas was extremely relieved to be in the midst of the pitch darkness of the empty tunnels, because nobody heard the extremely unmanly noise he made. He blinked a few times, mystified by the sudden return of his sight, then realised that it could have been gradually returning for quite some time while he was roaming the unlit areas of the complex without him being any the wiser. Presumably his sight returning meant that this particular lesson was done.
Touching the white sending, he was surprised to find it was from Sagran. “Parts are ready when you are.”
Technically it was time for him to get a rushed dinner and then try and cram in a few hours of sleep before Chul came hammering on the door of his chambers again, but just the memory of breaking apart and reconstructing enchantments put a spring in his step. It felt like real magic, instead of the rote learning he’d been doing since he arrived on Strife, or at least, since he was nearly court-martialed for daring to change a spell.
Ignoring the growl of his stomach, he set off for the temple to get back to work on his new staff.
