Re-Awakening: I Ascend with a Legendary class

Chapter 811: Carried Thrones

Five of them went down.

Almond, Lily, Rudra, and Ainen, because nobody had seriously expected it to be anyone else. And Maya, because Farsight Loom was the only reason anyone on the Sundered Shelf knew there was a bottom to reach at all.

"I want it on record that I volunteered," Maya said, at the edge of the canyon. "Nobody picked me. I picked me."

"Noted," Rudra said.

"Because if I die down there, I want Marcus to know it was my idea, so he can’t blame himself."

"He’ll blame himself anyway," Lily said.

"I know. But he’ll have to work harder at it."

Big D saw them off himself. He did not make a speech. He simply gripped each of their forearms in turn, the old way, and said the same thing to all five.

"Come back up."

Then they stepped off the edge.

The canyon was deeper than anything had a right to be.

They fell for almost a full minute before Almond slowed them, and when their feet finally found something solid, it was not rock. It was soft underfoot, and warm, and it moved very slightly in a rhythm that matched nothing any of them could hear.

"Pulse," Ainen said quietly, crouching to press his palm flat against it. "It’s got a pulse. Slow. One beat every eleven seconds, maybe."

"Don’t touch it," Lily said.

"I’m a cook. Touching things is how I learn what they are." Palate of Truths ran through his hand and into the floor, and his face changed. "Oh. That’s not good."

"What?"

"It knows we’re here. Not the way a creature knows. The way skin knows. We’re a splinter, and it’s already started working out how to push us out."

The first tunnel led down at a steep angle, walls ribbed and pale and faintly luminous, lit from within by a glow the color of old bone.

Maya led. Nobody argued with that either.

"Left branch," she said, at the first split. "Right one closes in about four minutes."

"How do you know?"

"Because it’s already closing. Slowly. The whole tunnel’s narrowing behind us too, if anyone cares to look."

Rudra looked. The passage they had just walked through was visibly smaller than it had been.

"It’s swallowing," he said.

"It’s swallowing," Maya agreed. "Keep walking."

The heat grew as they went down. Not the dry heat of fire but a wet, close warmth, like standing inside a mouth, and it pressed on them the whole way. Ainen loosened his collar within ten minutes. Lily tied her hair back without being asked.

"How far down does this go?" Rudra asked.

"Further than I can see," Maya said. "And I can see a long way."

"That’s not reassuring."

"I wasn’t trying to reassure you. I was trying to be accurate."

The soldiers found them twenty minutes down.

Not the forty-foot giants from the surface. Down here, the body grew something else, smaller and faster, built for tight passages, and they came out of the walls themselves, peeling away from living tissue fully formed.

Lily met the first wave with Nightcrown Legion, and the tunnel filled with constructs that simply occupied every inch of space the soldiers needed.

It held for eight seconds.

Then the walls began to push.

The whole passage contracted at once, living tissue closing in on every side, and Lily’s constructs were crushed where they stood, not by the soldiers but by the tunnel itself.

"It’s not sending soldiers anymore," Maya called. "It’s fighting with the tunnel. The soldiers are just to keep us still while it squeezes."

Rudra spent Deadwater Dominion without hesitating, flooding the passage with black weight and freezing it solid, and for ninety seconds the walls could not close any further.

"Ninety seconds," he said. "Then that’s gone and I can’t cast it again for a while."

"How far to open ground?" Almond asked.

"Nothing’s open down here," Maya said. "Not for miles. Almond, this whole body is built to close on things. Everywhere we go, it’s going to try to crush us."

Almond had known that since the edge of the canyon. He’d known it since the night before, when he told Lily he would bring the Choir.

He had simply been hoping he would not need it this soon.

"Rudra," he said. "When your ninety seconds run out, don’t cast anything else. Save it."

"And do what instead?"

"Let me take the ground."

Lily looked over at him, and whatever she saw in his face made her step back from the wall and give him room without saying a word.

The Choir of the Severed Sovereigns had been a summoning deck once. Eight Spirit Lords, called one at a time or three at once, fighting beside him. It had been strong. It had also always had the same weakness, every single time he used it.

His Spirit Lords fought on borrowed ground. Wherever they stood, the rules belonged to someone else.

Almond had spent ten years rebuilding it around one question. What would they be if they never had to borrow ground again?

Choir of Carried Thrones.

Alfred came first.

Not as he usually arrived, a silver rapier and a straight back. He arrived standing on something. A small patch of floor spread out beneath his feet, perhaps twenty feet across, pale marble that had no business existing inside a living thing, and where that marble touched the tunnel wall, the wall stopped moving.

It did not stop because it was held. It stopped because inside that circle, the body’s rules did not apply. Alfred had brought his own.

Sylvia arrived next, and her ground was green and deep-rooted. Then Benedict, whose ground was fortress stone. Galvaren, whose ground was open storm-sky, impossibly, forty feet underneath a living world. Meliora, whose ground shifted between states faster than the eye could follow. Velkris, whose ground folded light. Nyssara, whose ground burned and froze at once.

And Ashkryon, last, whose ground was molten glass shot through with white-hot lattice, and which the body’s tissue recoiled from on contact.

Eight thrones. Eight small worlds, each one carried on the shoulders of the Spirit Lord standing on it.

Where they overlapped, they formed a single continuous circle of ground that belonged to Almond and nobody else.

Deadwater Dominion ran out at exactly ninety seconds.

The tunnel tried to close. It pressed inward from every direction at once, and when it reached the edge of the eight joined thrones, it simply stopped, as though it had walked into the side of a mountain.

Lily let out a breath she had been holding for a long time.

"That’s why you never used it," she said. "Not because it wasn’t strong enough."

"Because it’s never been needed," Almond said. "Every fight we’ve ever had happened on ground that let us stand on it. I built this for the one place that wouldn’t."

[Alfred: Master. We are here.]

[Sylvia: The ground holds. Whatever this thing is, it cannot reach us here.]

[Benedict: At last. We fight on our own terms.]

[Ashkryon: How far do you wish to carry us?]

"All the way down," Almond said.

They moved again, and this time they moved differently.

The eight thrones traveled with them, a moving circle of carried ground sliding through the body’s tunnels like a stone through water. Where the passage was too narrow, the thrones simply made it wider, because inside their circle, the passage had no say in how wide it was.

The soldiers still came. They came out of the walls in growing numbers, and they found that the moment they stepped onto the carried ground, they stopped being part of the body at all.

Grown armor needed the body’s rules to stay grown. Inside the thrones, those rules were gone, and armor that had been alive and seamless went dead and brittle in a single step.

Ainen barely needed Vintage Eternal. He used his cleaver instead.

"This is the easiest fighting I’ve done in two days," he said. "I feel like I’m cheating."

"You are cheating," Almond said. "That was the point."

They went down for six hours.

Maya called the route the whole way, and the route did not go in any direction a map could have described. It spiraled, and doubled back, and at one point went straight downward through a chamber so large that the thrones seemed very small crossing it.

"There are other things in here with us," Maya said, somewhere around the fourth hour. "Far off. Not soldiers. People."

"Other kingdoms?" Rudra asked.

"I think so. At least one group. Deeper than us, and further east." She frowned. "They’re moving fast. Faster than they should be able to, down here."

"Can you tell who?"

"Not yet."

The link went dead at the sixth hour.

It did not fade. One moment Marcus was reading out casualty numbers from the Shelf, the same careful voice they had heard all morning, and the next there was simply nothing.

"Marcus," Almond said. "Marcus, come in."

Nothing.

"We’re too deep," Maya said. "The body’s between us and the surface now. Miles of it. Nothing gets through."

"So they don’t know if we’re alive," Lily said.

"And we don’t know if they are," Rudra said.

Nobody said anything for a long moment. Eight Spirit Lords stood on their carried thrones in a circle of borrowed ground, miles beneath a world that wanted them gone, and around them the living tunnels pulsed their slow, eleven-second pulse.

"Then we keep going," Almond said. "The faster we reach the heart, the faster this ends for everyone up there."

They kept going.

Somewhere above them, cut off and alone, the Sundered Shelf was entering its third day.