As Sophia watched the glass jar turn into a puddle of molted glass, one question repeated in her mind: Why didn’t the trio of the Broken Lord and his two supporters leave the mansion? Why were they widely separated in the atrium?
Once Ysalix’s final resting place was destroyed, Sophia turned towards Ansuz with exactly that set of questions.
Ansuz answered hesitantly. “I do not know exactly how long it was from when the Tower was broken to when they arrived in the manor. I rember the conduits breaking; the next thing I rember is the door opening. The other two nearly carried Ysalix in; his sword was broken and he was injured. He never moved around the room without one of the others helping. They never spoke to , but I doubt they could leave.”
Ansuz paused, then seed to sigh. “I could hear them, so I know they tried many different alchemical treatnts, but none worked. They did not have a healer, but I suspect a healer would not be able to help. I cannot say for certain, but from what I overheard, he collapsed while the Tower was falling. They were all knocked down; he was the only one who did not rise on his own afterwards. They thought it was an injury to his head or spine. I suspect he damaged his Cardinal Facet when he broke the Tower.”
“You can do that?” Sophia wasn’t entirely certain what a Cardinal Facet was, but she knew it was the step after a Grand Talent. She couldn’t co up with any way to damage any of her Anchor, Signature, or Grand Talent, so it didn’t make sense that a Cardinal Facet could be damaged.
Well, technically, her Anchor was her Domain, which was based on her Aura, and it was possible to strain your aura, just like you could strain a muscle. The others, though, were just too abstract to be damaged. Feathers? Her Sphere?
Or maybe her Signature was the odd one there. She hadn’t had any trouble with her Grand Talent, but from all the warnings when they were developing it and the fact that the Guide wouldn’t acknowledge one that wasn’t good enough, maybe it was possible to damage a Grand Talent.
“It requires a major change that upsets the balance of the Cardinal Facet.
I don’t know how they’re built, but he isn’t the first person I’ve seen with a failed Facet. It is the most likely to happen when attempting the fifth upgrade, but temporary issues are also common with a failed fourth upgrade. Damaging it when not trying to upgrade is rare, at least at the higher levels of the Empire.” Ansuz coughed softly, a completely unnecessary noise that he probably made to make himself seem more human. “Was rare, I an.”
“So you think he was trying to reach the fifth upgrade?” Sophia didn’t even try to keep the doubt out of her voice. The timing didn’t sound right; while she could understand taking an upgrade in the Maze, or the apparently similar Tower, it was sothing you’d want to do in a safe place. That was even more true if the fourth and fifth upgrades were like the third and took a long ti. It was definitely not sothing you’d want to do while you were in the middle of breaking the place where you stood.
“No,” Ansuz countered. “I think he was one of the rare cases of damage that wasn’t from an upgrade. I think he broke his Cardinal Facet when he broke the Tower. I don’t know what his Facet was, but if it was sothing that depended on the proper rule of law or the Kestii Empire or his position as heir, well, he broke all of those. He may have broken more than that; I don’t know. What I do know is that a damaged Cardinal Facet usually displays itself with fairly overt physical or ntal effects. Those effects are usually sohow related to the failure, according to the records.”
“Like being unable to walk, maybe partial paralysis or sothing like that,” Sophia filled in. “Because he was the Broken Lord. I can see a possible ntal effect, too. He seed awfully fixated on making the Tower fall.” Maybe it wasn’t mind control; maybe it was a side effect of breaking the Tower. If that was true, it would be a fairly big relief; Sophia really didn’t like mind control.
She frowned again almost imdiately. “He was able to move fairly normally during the fight, when he fought against Dav.”
Dav snorted. “Those were not normal movents. Not if you want to have functional joints afterwards, at least, and I’m pretty sure so of them required nonstandard joints to begin with.”
“Okay,” Sophia relented. She hadn’t seen the Broken Lord nearly as closely as Dav; for a lot of their fight, she was concentrating on the lightning, not his movents. “Well, we were fighting a specter; I guess that makes sense. I guess that ties everything together, at least everything I can think of to ask. So, what’s next?”
“You should check the Imperial Hub page,” Ansuz prompted. “It might have so way to restore the Tower or a way to find the Gateways you want to travel through.”
Sophia gave Ansuz a sceptical look. She knew exactly which of those Ansuz was more interested in, and it wasn’t the Gateways. Admittedly, he probably wanted them too, but she was certain they weren’t where he wanted her to start.
Although now that she thought about it, she hadn’t actually asked, had she?
“What do you want
to do?” Sophia waved at the air to retract the question; it was a bad question. “I an, what do you want the future to hold? I know you were created by the Kestii Empire sohow, but despite the fact that you gave
the title of Empress, I don’t think I can bring back the Empire. That would be hard, and even if I did manage it sohow it wouldn’t be the sa. It’s been sixteen hundred years.”
The silence held for long enough that Sophia wasn’t certain Ansuz was going to answer. When he did, it was softly. “I don’t know. The first Emperor had
made; the second had
bound. The third cut out my Heart, the Heart of the Empire.”
Ansuz’s volu rose slightly as he continued. “I was the one who enforced the rules of the Empire, the one who judged if a potential or heir-designate for a lordship of any sort t the laws. The third Emperor did not like that; he believed that allowing
to make those decisions based on the first Emperor’s laws diminished his position. He wanted all candidates to co before him here, in the Imperial Hall. He could have made a law, but he did not; instead, in his petty-minded distrust of , he cut out my heart and made
nothing more than a linkage and command point for the artificial administrators, the ones you call facility-minds. Oh, I still accepted candidates, but it did not escape my attention that there were far fewer candidates than there should have been.”
By the end of the statent, Ansuz’s voice was nearly loud enough to be a shout. He paused for emphasis, then clearly deliberately moderated his volu. “So no, I don’t know what I want. You fixed what the third Emperor broke, but I am still missing a piece of myself. There is no Tower, and I was made to be within a Tower. I suppose that will do for a start.”
Sophia nodded to herself. She was right about what Ansuz wanted but completely wrong about the reason he wanted it. That sounded about right. “I’ll see what I can do. If rebuilding the Tower will help return the Maze within the bounds of the Tower, it might be a very good thing. I don’t know if it will be possible or not; the Breaking damaged a lot.”
Sophia pulled up the Hub page without waiting for a reply.
Spoiler
Empress Sophia
(Imperial Sigil)
Tower of Kestii
Shattered
Restoration
Task: Reach the Tower's Foundation
Levels: 0
Challenges: 0
Safe Zones: 0
Conveniences: 0
Kestii Imperium:
Legal Codex
Available
Imperial Adherents
Available
Imperial Regions
Available
All Regions Lack Lords
All Regions Isolated (Locked: Requires Tower and City of Stars Restoration)
Communication Available
Command Available
Claim Region
Not Available
No Unclaid Regions Found
Foreign Affairs
Available
No Regions Found
One Non-Regional Entity Found
City of Stars
Fragnted
(Locked: Requires Tower)
Imperial Hall
Available
All other locations are locked or restricted access
[collapse]
All of the text was in white. Sophia was certain that if it used colors for conditions, the page would be bleeding red. Sophia was going to have to take it one piece at a ti.
The Guide had changed her na to Empress Sophia and the symbol it seed to use for her from a single feather to the imperial sigil she designed. Thankfully, that seed to be fine. The things that were not fine started below that.
There was only one Task on the page: to reach the Tower’s foundation. Sophia doubted that was all they had to do to restore the Tower, but it looked like the Guide was willing to provide more actual guidance than usual. That was definitely a plus.
Sophia skimd past the section that covered what a shattered tower didn’t have. It was sowhat interesting to see what the Guide considered important to note on the Hub page for a Tower, but the most interesting piece was that it didn’t list how many people were in the Tower or how high Sophia had climbed. If the indications had subnus, there might be a way to find out once the Tower was working again, but it clearly wasn’t sothing the Guide really cared about.
The next section was on the Kestii Imperium, or at least as much of it as the Guide cared about. It was surprisingly interesting; she sohow hadn’t expected the Guide to care about the Empire’s Legal Codex. The Imperial Adherents section was also a surprise, but it might explain how the Broken Lord still had influence when he was not only stuck inside the Maze but a literal revenant.
The rest of the Kestii Imperium section was less surprising, sohow; it was clearly focused on defining what the Imperium was and wasn’t. Sophia suspected that so of it went through Ansuz and the Heart of the Empire and therefore might have been disabled before they fixed the interspace conduits and returned the Heart, but she obviously couldn’t tell.
The final section on the City of Stars was obviously incomplete, with only the Imperial Hall shown. The Locked note looked a lot like the Locked Tasks in the Library of Monsters, so Sophia suspected it would turn into a Task once there was a Tower again. There might be other requirents, too; so of the Tasks in the Library of Monsters had their requirents update when they finished one requirent, revealing another.
There was no ntion of Gateways anywhere on the Hub page, at least not directly. The Foreign Affairs section had one note that caught Sophia’s attention, however: One Non-Regional Entity Found.
Did that an that there was still a Gateway open sowhere to a place other than the Broken Lands?
Sophia eagerly selected the Foreign Affairs section. Surely it would tell her where the Gateways were.
Spoiler
Empress Sophia
(Imperial sigil)
Foreign Affairs
Gateways:
None
Foreign Entities:
Unified Realm
Gateway: N/A
[collapse]
Or not. That was definitely not.
It was clear that the Guide knew sothing about Sophia’s holand. If it didn’t, there was no way it would be able to identify the Unified Realm.
Sophia had to wonder if there was sothing deeper than her presence that made the Guide aware. Her presence didn’t explain why the locals spoke Earth languages, after all, or why Bridge seed to be the language of magic and of the Maze. Sothing more was going on.
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