Unbound

Turns out the Eidolons could run, and damn fast too—the problem was their sheer mass. Whatever was beneath their feet was gonna get pulverized. Thankfully Felix’s Stone Shaping reinforced by Astrum Ascendence was up to the task. His Essence stores dwindled rapidly as they moved, but it was worth it, if only because Vess would have left them in the dust had they slacked even slightly.

The hours passed and the miles all but vanished beneath their boots.

As dawn arrived and the air shifted from black to a dim gray, their road hit the end of the swamp. It rose at first in small, lumpy hillocks but then in a smooth slope toward the mountains that loomed high overhead. The Gloaming Way continued there, rising out of the mire but still broken and upturned. Large stones were lifted at angles unfit for travel, and stretches were entirely covered in soil and swamp plants. The Dragon statues stood ramrod straight along the Way, fully above the ground now, though they were covered in moss, mushrooms, and the occasional bird’s nest.

Once everyone was safely on properly dry land, Felix turned back to his Stone Shaped road.

“Are you gonna break it down, like I did?” Beef asked.

“I am. Pay attention. Archie, you too.”

“Why?” The small man hobbled closer regardless, rubbing at his legs. “Whatever. Doesn’t matter. Just so long as I can stand still for a second. That pace you set was brutal.”

“Did your Endurance increase?”

Archie folded his arms a touch belligerent. “I hate that you were right about it. Yeah. Endurance and Strength.”

“Exercise is very useful when your stats are low,” Felix said with a neutral expression. There was no need to antagonize the hot-headed Delven.

“Low? I’ve got tons of stats. They’re just measly compared to yours, you freak.”

Beef chuckled. “My physical stats are twice as good as yours too.”

“You’re both giants, is why. If I had known ‘Delven’ meant ‘shortstack with a giant head’ I’d have picked something else!”

“Quiet,” Vess said through her teeth.

Beef ducked his head in embarrassment and Archie pursed his lips in annoyance, but shut up. Felix couldn’t help but trade worried glances with Harn.

> Harn signed. >

Felix focused on the road behind them, placing a single hand in the air above the rock. “Listen close.”

Lightning coursed across his arm and Felix grasped the thick blue thread that connected him to the path, and with a surge of Mana and Essence, he activated Stone Shaping and Astrum Ascendence. There was a faint pressure, but Felix pushed through the resistance with ease, and the cascading sound of thrumming chords resounded through his entire being. He felt each piece of his work, separated by many miles of swamp. It was easier perhaps due to the Dragon statues; they worked as guardrails for his Affinity as it traveled back to the very start of the valley.

Vanish.

Between one breath and the next, it all turned to mud. The Gloaming Way was gone once again.

Felix straightened as the lightning fizzled out around his wrist and looked to the other Unbound. “Did you catch that?”

“Catch what? You just stuck out your hand and the whole thing fell apart,” Archie said.

“I—I heard something, but it was too loud. Like I was standing next to my dad’s speakers.” Beef stuck a finger in his ear and wiggled it around. “I couldn’t make out words or the tune. Just a lotta noise.”

“Hmm. Best to keep practicing. We’ll crank your Affinity up higher once you’ve earned an Omen Key.” That was another of Felix’s goals for his team. None of them had walked their Omen Path, meaning each level they gained was a loss compared to the stats they could have gained otherwise. The problem was that no one knew exactly how to earn an Omen Key; it was highly personalized. “We should—”

“Felix.”

Vess nodded to the trees. A distortion among them resolved into Evie, who hopped down to stand on their patch of dry ground.

“What’d you find?” he asked.

“Tracked the raiders back to a busted up fortress after this rise, where the swamp comes back. Couldn’t have had more than two full walls standing, and the rest was choked by vines and moss.” She pulled a piece of cheese from her pack and started eating it rapidly. “Still, it was a big place. Lots of rooms and towers. Plenty of places for folks to hide or defend.”

“How many did you count?” Harn asked.

“Raiders? At least fifty, but they were movin’ a lot. Hard to keep track.” She swallowed. “I saw a lot more kids and old folks than that, though. At least a hundred.”

“What were—” Harn started, but Vess cut him off.

“How are they being treated?”

Evie’s gaze flicked to Harn’s and back so fast Felix doubted he saw it. “Seemed fine, though plenty skinny. Heard the raiders complainin’ about that a lot, actually. Too many mouths to feed, they said.”

“Then why take them?” Felix asked.

“Dunno. Only hint I had was that they kept sayin’ that priests chased them outta the lowlands.”

“Priests? Pathless Priests?”

“Sounded like it.”

“The Dragoons should have handled them, or my father’s army. The Priests shouldn’t have the numbers to do that…but then, I thought the raiders were gone.” Vess looked troubled. “I’ve been away from home too long.”

“What are their defenses?” Harn asked.

“Well, they’ve got guards, and they’re not half bad. My Gloomstalker is powerful, but a few kept tracking where I just was, but never quite spotted me. Not sure how, since none of ‘em looked like much, Tier-wise.”

“What are our chances of getting in and defeating them?” Felix asked.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“Ain’t gonna stand a chance against me, let alone all of you.” Evie finished up her wedge of cheese and pulled out a dried apple. She bit into it messily. “Gettin’ in quiet’s the hard part.”

“Quiet is ideal. I don’t wanna rush in there and risk people’s lives,” Felix said. “Abyssal Skein should work, but we’d need a plan. Can you draw out the area around the fortress?”

“Sure.” Evie shoved the apple into her mouth and grabbed a knife, quickly scraping a layout into the dirt. It soon resolved into a fairly simplistic structure that reminded Felix of his old Bastion of Will. A set of walls around a central keep, with inner grounds that were relatively open. A major difference was that this fortress was pressed back against a mountain, with the main keep built into the cliff face.

“The open space. This is where the children were?” Tzfell asked.

“Yeah. Tents all over here and here. Pens here with some livestock. Lizards mostly, probably taken from the farms.” Evie tapped at the squat keep at the back. “This is where I saw lots of armored raiders, goin’ in and out. Some had weapons, but most didn’t.”

Harn leaned forward from the rock he was perched on. “And the wall is broken across the northwestern side? Was it attacked?”

“Like a giant smashed into it. Most of the blocks are the size of houses, and they’re all half sunk in the swamp and covered in vines. Somethin’ attacked this place, but it was a long time ago.”

Yin floated over, belly bloated but his eyes narrowed as he gazed at the rough schematic in the dirt. “Vessilia. Your book.”

“Yes, I thought so as well.” Vess pulled that tome from her pack again and flipped open to a set of dog-eared pages. She turned it around so the rest of them could see. “This has to be one of the ancient Dragoon fortresses.”

Inked onto the vellum were a series of architectural drawings describing a fortress that roughly matched the same layout Evie had sketched. This one, of course, had five complete walls and three towers that were absent from the dirt.

“That looks about right,” Evie said. “Minus all the swamp water.”

“If that’s the case,” Vess said, snapping the book closed. “I may have a way in.”

Vess led them through the edges of the swamp and into the rolling hillocks that abutted the Rimefangs around them. This required them to step off the Gloaming Way, which wasn’t ideal…but Felix found that the wards at this part of the valley were considerably more tame. Instead of filling his head with cotton and turning him around in circles they simply pressed against his Mind like cobwebs; easily dispelled by a significant Will.

The worst effect was on Archie, who was convinced there was gold at the bottom of a shallow pool where a number of nasty creatures waited. He had to be restrained and carried by Beef for several minutes before he stopped trying to claw his way free. Once they’d passed into the true foothills, the effect faded entirely. Sheepish and red-faced, Archie had refused to look at any of them as he marched right behind Vess.

Perhaps an hour after setting out they reached a section of cliff that pushed out from the nearest mountain by a good half-mile. It was stepped, segmented into crumbling, descending layers that were riddled with natural caverns and overgrown with plantlife. It was here that Vess took a sharp turn, until they came right up to a dog-legged section of cliff.

“What’s this?” Evie asked. “We climbin’?”

“No.” Quick as a flash, Vess summoned six Spears and stabbed them into the rock. Immediately the cliff wavered like a mirage, until it faded entirely to reveal a very wide pass flanked by two enormous Dragon statues. Her Spears stuck out of those statues, fitted nicely into carved recesses along the Dragons’ bellies. “We walk right through.”

“Holy shit, could you see those?” Archie asked.

Vess gestured and the Spears returned to hover around her like a set of violent shadows. “No, but I am familiar. The Dragoon fortress in Pax’Vrell has the same warded mechanisms on its internal gates.”

“So definitely a Dragoon fortress then,” Felix said as they walked through the now cleared pathway. It was perhaps a hundred feet wide and four times that in height. Even the stepped cliffs had been an illusion. “Is this revealed to everyone? Will the raiders see it?”

“They shouldn’t, and besides it will only stay visible for a short while. Once we are inside the wards will reset. Come. We must see if the access is the same as I hope.” Vess hurried ahead, her steps fast enough that everyone had to run to keep up.

At that speed, it wasn’t long until they reached the end of the unnaturally wide pass. It was wide enough to fly a commercial jet through, though it tapered toward the bottom where they walked and had been slowly invaded by stunted trees and swamp plants. Felix was still wrapping his head around its purpose when the walls opened up even further, the cliffs curving outward another hundred feet in either direction before intersecting the massive expanse of the mountain proper.

“It’s here,” Vess breathed in obvious relief.

Contained within the circular area was a pool that filled up every available inch between them and the mountain. Felix estimated it at four hundred feet across at a minimum, and it was covered in algae so thick that it had to be several feet deep before the actual water started. Large Dragon statues flanked the pool, seven of them, their bases obscured by more of those stunted swamp trees. Several were even broken to pieces. They were equal in size to the statues Vess had unlocked.

“Okay, I know I’m gonna sound stupid again, but how does this help us?” Evie asked. “We just spent entirely too long walkin’ through this kinda muck.”

“Give me a moment,” Vess said, before a pair of spectral wings manifested from her back. “Yin? Can you aid me?”

“Of course.” The now-rotund Wyrmling floated off of the shoulder of Telys and over the water, describing a serpentine pattern across its surface.

Vess, meanwhile, leaped upward and into the sky. Her wings flashed, catching the morning light as it spilled like liquid gold into the upper reaches. Felix followed her progress as she landed on the far side of the pond, right where Yintarion idly circled. She touched down…and stood evenly atop the water.

Is there a ledge or something…?

Vess slammed her partisan down with incredible force. A click so deep it vibrated Felix’s bones was followed by a roar of wind and water to rival any hurricane back home. The pond before them began to swirl with astonishing speed, until the center dipped down and vanished as every single drop of water was flung to whirl at the periphery.

Somewhere below, Felix could sense Mana moving through the loops and whorls of sigaldry so vast and complex that it might have stood toe-to-toe with his Seat and Seal back in Nagast. It was intricate enough to overwhelm his Mind and that—combined with being etched beneath hundreds of feet of stone—fairly vanquished his ability to parse exactly how it worked. What he did gather, however, was that it was working as intended.

“It’s a tunnel,” he said. Just like the Deepking made, back in the Ghreldan Hills.

Vess stood atop another curled Dragon statue, this one jutting from the mountain’s side just below the surface of the water. Her spear had stuck into some sort of slot, similar to the statues outside the passage, only far larger. She grinned with such force that it was like the last few hours of unease and anger had melted away entirely. Dawn’s light graced her then, lighting up the subtle red hidden in her dark brown tresses.

She looked beautiful.

“Secret tunnel into their fortress?” Harn lifted his chin, as if trying to peer past the cataract of racing waters and into the hollow depths. “Handy thing to have. These Dragoons are a sight more skilled than I expected.”

“Were,” Beef said. “Remember? Vess said the old Dragoons were totally different than they are now.”

“True. That lizard keeps yammerin’ on about the power of Dragons and bond this or elements might that. Probably had loads of secrets they lost when the Dragoons went all—” Evie mimed stabbing, repeatedly. “Ya know?”

Archie raised an eyebrow. “What’s this?”

“This is how the Dragoons used to enter the fortress,” Vess said, landing among them. Archie and Evie both shut their mouths like they’d been caught stealing sweets.

“On the backs of Dragons,” Yin added, floating down beside her. “A working easily accomplished thanks to our elemental might.”

Evie smirked. “Yeah? Well most of us can’t fly, so unless you’ve got an Evolution up your sleeve right now, how’re we gettin’ down this?” Evie kicked a rock into the rushing flow and it was swept away faster than they could track.

“Oh oh!” Pit wriggled in Felix’s arms. “I know!”

His Companion was slipperier than he looked, because the tiny Dire Hound leaped through Felix’s grasp…straight out into the chasm.

His Mask fell away.

Four powerful wings unfurled in the space between heartbeats, snapping outward like tempest-tossed sails. All of them beat the air, hurling water away and uprooting several stunted trees.

“Pit!”

“What?” The Chimera’s back was huge, easily large enough to carry them all. Pit grinned from the edges of his beak, and his huge eyes fairly glowed with power. “All aboard!”

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