Chapter 462: Seven Days North

I had been ready to leave, and there was no reason for me to turn back. I think it was simply the part of me that has died a great many times, and knows the face of death better than anyone, that urged me to look back, and when I did, nothing had changed.

I had expected the dead figure behind me to have vanished, or something, but it was still there, and I could feel no life inside it... but it was smiling.

The mouth under the mask had opened in a grin so wide that the mask could not hold it. The blank white face had cracked from the corners of the mouth up towards the eyes, two long jagged lines that split the mask like the shell of an egg, and through the cracks I could see the blue lips pulled back and back, much too far, over teeth that were very white and very even and much too many.

It was as if it was grinning at the rows of the dead, and was not looking at me.

It did not need to, because I knew that smile... even in the past, Death had found me.

[Eldritch Perception: 53 → 59 (Acolyte)]

I stood there for a long moment with my heart beating like a drum before I turned and left. I wanted to save the world, but everywhere I went, I brought death.

I did not run, but I will not pretend I walked slowly either.

∞

I climbed back up through the shaft I had made, and came out into the cold night air, and stood there with the crystal burning quietly against my ribs while the stars turned overhead.

I could feel Eldritch Perception straining against the barrier that separated Acolyte and Adept, and I stopped reaching for more. The mysteries of this world were pushing themselves into my soul, and I knew that I had to be strong enough to meet them on an equal footing before it was too late.

Then I turned around and looked down at the hole. Down there was a chamber with millions of dead people in it... and Death.

I frowned... Some doors you close. I was not yet ready for this fight.

I set the nib against the ground and wrote Break, and then Splinter, and then Shatter, and I put more into those three Scripts than the work required.

The ground answered. The whole shelf of it, a mile across, dropped as the bedrock gave way beneath. I felt the roof of that chamber come down in one long shrug, a hundred feet of stone folding onto the rows and the altar and everything sitting on it, and the shock of it threw a wall of dust and powdered glass into the air that rolled out across the valley and made the bones of the serpent ring.

When it settled, there was a great sunken bowl in the earth where Serrath had been.

"Sleep well," I said, to several million people, and I turned north.

∞

I caught them a little after dawn. I could have arrived earlier, but I was making sure that there was no trail left behind. The warband barely left any indication when they passed, but I was more thorough.

They had not made poor time in the dark, and they were already a good distance from Serrath when I reached them.

Thurrim saw me first and told the others. As I reached their campfire, Ogg handed me a bowl without being asked, and I settled among their number and enjoyed my meal in silence.

When I finished eating, Ruggah sat beside me and brought out a map.

"The map we have only goes for about four hundred miles, so we will need a better one soon." He gestured towards areas he had marked on it. "If we move north without diverting, then in seven days, eight if we go slow, there is a town where we can resupply. After that, we see where you point us."

I nodded. "That’s a good plan." I glanced at the compass and saw it was still pointing north. I closed my eyes and pushed more of my focus into my soul.

∞

We rode north for seven days.

I would like to tell you about all of it, but the truth is that most of it passed me by. I was inside my own soul for nearly every waking hour of it, and quite a few of the sleeping ones.

The seal lay over my soul like a net thrown across a lantern, and everything I wanted from my own soul had to come through it or not at all.

So every morning I would climb onto my Drakespawn, and let my body follow the warband north across a country of grey ash and black rock, and send Eldritch Perception down that crack.

My soul was a landscape. That was the only way I could think about it without going mad. A vast dark country with a crystal at the heart of it and the seal lying over everything like a winter, and me at one tiny window in that winter with a lantern, trying to see across a continent.

Somewhere in there were nine Lightning Law Shards. I had comprehended one of them, and I could feel it roaming through my soul, but I could not touch it. The seal was blinding me to it.

I kept searching for the room with my lightning shards, and on the first day I found nothing at all, and the same thing happened on the second and third days. Although I came across the Hollow Room, and in my excitement I nearly rode my Drakespawn off a hill before Ines pulled me back.

I could feel a growing pressure inside the Hollow Room. Was the Hollow Avatar going to be waking soon? I wondered what it would think of this time when it did.

However, none of that would matter as much as the help the Hollow Avatar would give me. I had barely begun to understand a fraction of the knowledge and power it could give me, and if there was anything that could change my situation, it was the Hollow Avatar.

Even Death had dismissed it from my soul, but the stubborn bastard was clawing its way back.

On the fourth day we came across a burned caravan, and I stopped searching long enough to help bury what was left of the people on it, and I noticed the hunger lift its head at the smell and lie down again when I told it to. Every day it obeyed a little faster. I did not know whether that was because I was getting stronger or because it was getting more patient.

On the fifth and sixth days I made real progress, in the sense that I was able to hold my perception steady inside my own soul for hours at a time without the seal pushing it out. It is difficult to explain how much work that is. It is like holding a door open with your shoulder while writing a letter.

I was getting closer to my lightning shards... I could feel it.

The town appeared on the evening of the seventh day.