12 Miles Below

The clan saw an uproar over the next few days.

By the first hour, every single person in the clan was already informed about the two new Deathless and talk was shifting over to what they could do. By the third hour, the stories were all wilder than the prior ones with everyone completely giving up on being factual about anything. Stories grew on top of each other, a few people started making short chanties, and others piled in more verses rhyme after rhyme.

Nobody cared too much about where these Deathless were staying, that was things for the Retainers to worry about.

Of which I’m part of.

House Winterscar was as much a curse on people’s lips as it was a compliment these days. Either they saw the house as something reborn from the ashes, or they were suspicious of even the stars existing. Usually those were the Houses my old family had history with, and it’s always been pretty damn poor.

‘Oh the Winterscars dropped by and gave us a nice basket of cooked goods. Aren’t they lovely?’ is not something I’ll ever hear. More like ‘The Winterscars conned my eldest son out of all his inheritance. While I’m still alive and staring them in the face.’ - See, now that’s more like the good old days.

And yes, that was something that happened. Part of the to-do list was to pay off reparations for old grudges now that we actually had money and resources flowing in, so look who’s eating fish now.

Kidra’s words: If you can throw money to have a problem go away, that’s a great deal. And I can’t find any fault with that logic.

She had been the one to ‘convince’ the two Deathless to join the fight. Officially. So it makes sense that they’d stay with someone they’re already familiar with. After all, can’t exactly demand the Deathless lords to go live somewhere else just because everyone felt jealous. So they moved right into our estate and none of the other houses could lift a finger to object about it.

Without any stick to wack our house with, they had to grind their teeth and try to figure out ways to wave a big enough carrot. A good plan, but theses Deathless were special cases. Wrath was oblivious to all the underhanded attempts - they’d have better chances if they waved an actual edible carrot. And Father’s care cup on that topic had the entire bottom cut out, and then the whole mug thrown as far as possible. Into a chasm. Possibly shot a few times on the way down too, for good measure.

On our end, since Wrath was staying within our estate grounds, we’d make her work for it of course. No free meals.

Which led Father, Kidra, Wrath and I sitting around deep in our House estates.

“It should be within capabilities.” Wrath said, flicking one side of her wing back into place. “I’ve regenerated a heart, skin, muscles and jugular veins. Not just for Keith either, the process is repeatable. However, there was a price.”

“What price?” Father asked.

“I am unsure.” Wrath said. “Each time I’ve tapped into this acasual power, something within felt… consumed? Diagnostics did not show any differences, no matter how many times I ran them. Whatever the price is, it is not physical.”

“Your diagnostics are notoriously unreliable when it comes to the occult.” Kidra quickly said. This whole thing was her idea and she was going to push for it with everything she had. “You can’t see the soul trance. Everything about souls seem mostly out of your scope.”

There was a pause in the room while Wrath contemplated, before I figured a possible compromise. “She could when she had someone else connect their sight to her soul fractal. So there’s still stuff we can do. But healing me and others hasn’t done anything terrible to her yet, I'm with Kidra on that. I still think we should do some testing while we’ve got the time. Who knows when the next expedition out is going to be?”

Father grunted. “Bring in one of the soldiers. No point in stalling.”

Wrath nodded. “I concur with that assessment. A test would conclude all outstanding issues.”

Kidra grabbed her comms unit, then gave a short order. “Helmets on." She said a moment after, "If we are doing a full examination of the occult, we’ll need to be able to speak without boundary. I trust my soldiers, but soldiers can be captured.”

A hiss around my neck and my helmet was firmly back on. Father and Wrath didn’t need any, they didn’t need to breathe or speak to talk directly through the comms channels. Kidra and I were still human though.

“Ready.” I said, and Kidra sent a quick ping to the servants outside.

Jension Winterscar was a soldier for our house who’d fought on the frontlines against slavers. He’d been among a group that shared the few Winterscar blades I’d forged and had working. As he recounted, on his part he’d taken out at least half a slaver’s shields before he’d had his hand cut off, but been able to kick his severed hand and blade away from the slaver’s reach, where it was picked up by the next soldier. And for that, he’d also gotten kicked in the ribs before other soldiers managed to drag him out of that fight. Anyone might feel miserable having lost a hand, but for Jension and others who fought the slavers hand to hand, it seemed more like the highlight of his life.

All those years spent training with knives, blades and rifles paid off. In one singular moment, he’d held off a full army of knights long enough for reinforcements to arrive. If he and others hadn’t put their lives on the line, the rest of the House who didn’t have combat training would have been slaughtered or had their lives turned into a living hell. The missing hand wasn’t a curse, it had been proof that when his personal worth was tested, he’d stood his ground for himself, his family, and his clan as a whole. There was purpose to it, and that made all the difference.

Like other soldiers who’d been maimed or wounded during that fight, they’d group together and share their stories over beer and food. They couldn’t brag and boast to other people without revealing secrets of the House and clan, so to outsiders, if they asked he’d say he lost his hand fighting slavers and buying time for the knights to arrive. Nothing about his true contributions. The gravesties and vigil had been solely within House Winterscar.

He hadn’t been given any strenuous duties since. Simple patrols and escort details for other servants walking outside the House. A single hand was still enough to use a pistol with, and like others who’d been wounded, he still showed up at the training fields to keep in shape. Captain Sagrius outright demanded it.

He hadn’t been picked to come see us first for any specific reason, more that his name had been randomly drawn.

So he walked in, door sealing behind him, gave a crisp salute and took a seiza position, waiting to hear why the Winterscar house leaders had called him up.

“Jension,” Kidra said. “Raise your wounded hand up. We want to examine it.”

He did as ordered, taking off his prosthetic hand, and lifting the stump up. No questions, no hesitation. Kidra turned to Wrath. Helmet might be hiding her face, but I could practically imagine the hope inside her at this. Death was often expected within the Retainer caste, and news of the dead knights had already been taken in by the respective houses, each holding their own ceremonies to honor their fallen knights. However, hope was something new these days. Many of the elites knew there was a chance those dead might return within the soul fractals, if Sagrius had survived and was still walking. Arcbound was living proof that there was a chance. Windrunner would be the only true gravesite ceremony planned out.

Now, if Wrath's abilities were useable en-mass, it wouldn't be just death Retainers had a fighting chance against. Any kind of injury that would have entombed them into a sickbed could possibly be recovered from. And across history too. Old veterans who had long ago put down the blade might very well pick them back up.

Wrath rose from her seat, wings stretching for a moment almost by reflex before she fussed them back into place. She walked next to the soldier, and reached out her hand to his maimed arm. A beat passed as occult began to pulse around her arm, crackling. “Yes, I can feel the grafted instructions. I could heal this.”

“Begin.” Father said, lips unmoving. “The rest of us will keep watch in the soul sight.”

Wrath nodded, closed her eyes and focused. Occult pulsed further across the room. It felt more like a gentle soothing wave, but that might have been my imagination twisting things together in my head. Occult was the occult, healing or destruction should be the same to it.

Father was the first to notice anything within Wrath's soul as the rest of us watched the soldier’s arm being outright rebuilt from absolutely nothing, pale blue light fusing with the man's hand. Jension himself took a sharp intake, feeling the occult pulse sink into his arm. Parts of his hand seemed to outright reverse dissolve from nothingness back into reality.

“I’m seeing concepts of rebirth and matter being created but nothing else I can understand.” I said, trying to figure out how this fractal worked. I knew the fractal itself was fused into her soul fractal, so trying to extract the mathematical formula was going to go wrong because of that bridge section. Still should try to replicate it anyhow, having healing powers in my armguard would be amazing for my skin routine.

“Look at her soul itself.” Father said. “Parts of it are disappearing.”

Without a second to hesitate, I switched my focus straight to Wrath's fractal, panic rising up. Soul trance is tricky. The entire world turns into concepts, so it’s easy to miss the smaller details. But now looking directly at Wrath’s soul, I could see small sections being eaten away, as if she weren’t being protected by the soul fractal anymore.

Moments after, it all ended. Jension’s arm was healed completely. The soldier kept staring at it, opening and closing the fingers.

The room went back to the dark somber colors it had before. Kidra tutted in her helmet. "We'd been so close to helping so many others. Of course there was a price to pay."

“No. Soul is regenerating.” Father said, hand raising up to point at Wrath's heart. “Look closer.”

We did, and found the concept of her soul being... healed in a way? Or more like returned to origin. Had a couple of theories about that. Mostly starting with ‘what the scrap is going on?’

“Slower regeneration.” Kidra noted. “Far slower than it was consumed.”

She’s right about that. “How does parts of a concept get eaten in the first place?” I asked, seriously confused at what I was seeing. “How do you feel right now Wrath?”

The Feather stood up, glancing down at her hands. "Nothing tangible. Diagnostics show no error or issues within. I... I feel off. The same way I felt when I performed healing on Tamery for the first time. As if something were taken."

Jension hadn’t noticed, he was still staring at his arm with awe. He couldn’t hear our discussion, since it remained on encrypted comms. Far as he knew, the room was silent. Up until Father waved for his attention.

“Sire?” He asked, head raising up to look at Father.

On his part, he answered with his usual grunt. “The healing is done. We will see how many more we can heal. Harsh times are coming, Winterscar will need every knight it can hold.”

"Knight?" He asked.

"Knight." Kidra confirmed with a nod. "More armor will soon be seized from the raiders. Our house will be on the front lines of it all. And I do not waste talent. You were recruited into my House for a reason."

"I understand, Lady Winterscar." He said with a swift bow. "I will not disappoint."

Kidra gave a laugh, "You did not disappoint when your mettle was last tested. None of you faltered when it counted the most. I have full confidence relic armor will be well used in your hands. Go on, prepare the next in line to see us. Winterscar takes care of their own first."

The soldier gave a crisp salute, turned on his heels and marched away with a straight back.

The rest of us watched Wrath, observing. Her soul did fully regenerate as far as we could tell, it just took some time. Why it regenerated or what even ate pieces of it in the first place, that’s stuff we had no godsdamned clue about. Father was rapidly picked as the one who'd investigate this part of the Occult, given his skills with souls in general. Kidra was in charge of organizing the house to file in for healing, and I wasn’t just standing around doing nothing while watching Wrath heal the whole House up. Next to me was a large suitcase, inside of which was the true mite seeker Tsuya had led me to.

Wrath healed another soldier, and through the soul sight we confirmed she really did regenerate parts of her soul without issue. Soon the room became one the busiest rooms in the House.

My thoughts were the same as usual - figuring out how to make things work. In the past, this black brick of mite metal was basically inscrutable. Other than the handle and trigger buttons plus that power intake valve, I had no idea about the internals. Wrath had been less than amused at seeing the very brick of fancy light that caused her to lose that first battle, but she stayed focused on her task, while I magnanimously chose not to torment her with the brick.

Like before, there were two sigils for ‘capture’ and ‘release’, written in plain wording. Language didn’t change much over the few hundred years apparently, but that wasn’t too much of a surprise since there were people who lived for all those years running around the world already.

I had screwdrivers, pliers, crowbars and all the power tools I could think of, but nothing I could figure out to use to pry open the box in a way that wasn’t completely destructive. For all I knew, there might be a pressurized gas inside, and once I made a tiny crack in it - boom. There goes the whole thing. Tsuya would probably not be happy with that, and back when she was friendly she blew up an entire site at my feet. Now I knew she had an orbital death lazer on demand if she wasn't on a time crunch and could wait for it to get into position.

What I didn’t have in the past was the soul sight. And now that the clan was on the right feet, I had the time to really dig into this brick of scrap.

And in between the wait periods, I’d dive into the suitcase at my side, and scan through the insides of the box. Concepts of an empty space, concepts of machinery, data collection, and specimen containment.

Or at least, the same feeling I got when I looked at a bug cage. Agrifarmers had tons of those, all of them precisely calibrated to whatever they were growing, so it’s not a new concept to me. I could sense this particular containment was less about the physical boundaries, and more about keeping any emissions captured by the equipment and read into that data collection concept within it.

Putting all the pieces I had together, my conclusion was this: It’s called a seeker, and it has some empty space within where it’s supposed to collect a specimen and keep it alive. It collects data. And given Tsyua said the mites were the key - with two clearly labeled buttons for capture and release - I think what I’m supposed to do with this brick is to nab a mite somewhere and feed it into the box.

Now, figuring out why Abraxas is so insistent on getting this is the next puzzle I’ll have to figure out first. He called it a lantern, while Tsuya called it a seeker. And that the mites would be the key to it.

Tsuya also said this is probably the last one in existence, and Relinquished is terrified of it enough to want every bit of it destroyed anywhere she found them. Tsuya also said she has no idea what it does, but believes it’s supposed to lead someone to an old weapon of some kind that Relinquished couldn’t destroy easily. Something that Tsuya can’t find herself anymore because the mind-wars went both ways.

I had a flashback of that giant black cube that Wrath explained was containment for things even the mites couldn’t clean up. Somehow, my gut was telling me this seeker was going to lead us to one of those black ominous cubes. Assuming we got it to work right.

Then what? Those cubes were supposed to be impossible to open.

The mites had outright told Wrath to go talk to Tsuya. And somewhere out there in the white wastes, she’d put down shrines that crusaders go up to, rumored to have a way to speak to Tsuya herself, though not on a daily or even yearly basis.

That's got to be the next target to visit, see if there’s any way to speak to Tsuya directly from those. So while we’re at that, I could ask the goddess herself what she wants me to do with this seeker.

And maybe figure out who Abraxas is in all this.

Had a gut feeling Tsuya might recognize that name.

Next, we opened Wrath’s skills up to the clan. She’d healed up the entire House of Winterscar, and didn’t seem phased at all from it. No errors in her systems, and nothing Father, Kidra or I could spot within her soul being off even after having used that spell so often. Once we were confident all she had to do was wait in between healing someone, it seemed like the obvious next step. Keep a knight with the winterblossom technique running to let her know when she’s good to keep going, and things seemed to work out.

Easy to find a few Logi to volunteer their time in sorting the sheer massive amount of people coming in for healing, once word really started to go out.

The Logi quickly got together and applied the traditional triage sorting, making a solid plan to tackle the numbers pouring in. After that, they brought out detailed plans on optimizing rest periods along with possible things she could do around the clan, expecting her to behave like a normal human with normal human stress points. Even a Deathless needs to take care of their mental health.

Then they discovered that Wrath didn’t stop. Nor sleep. Nor seemed to ever get bored.

By that point, it was still only half a house’s worth of Logi working around the clock, with more steadily trickling in as they heard the project. Every single one that started working with Wrath all ran through the same train of thought: Here was someone who was more dedicated to the work than they were. No way would they allow anyone else to beat them at their own game, their pride was on the line now, even if the contender was a Deathless.

None of them could actually match her focus of course, even with all the coffee in the world. They weren’t competing against someone that just seemed to work like a machine - she was literally a machine. But by the gods did they try anyhow.

That finally got slapped down when they realized they were growing sloppy and letting numbers slip through the cracks. At this point entire Logi Houses were being brought in to not only manage the people coming for healing, but also manage the Logi managing those. It was like watching the clan get roused up from sleep, realizing something was going on and going all in.

Rotations were setup, redundancies were made, each hour’s number of patients were carefully cross examined, and assigned an exact time to line up. They didn’t want things to just go fast, they wanted them optimized. And they needed to.

Quite a large chunk of people had come just to get to see Wrath herself. The rumors that she looks like an angel are pretty spot-on in this case. So they’d invent all kinds of reasons to visit and try to sneak past the Logi doing full medical examinations.

I’m sure she’d feel pretty smug to hear all that, probably preen and say her shell was performing as expected. Seemed almost tied into their core personalities to flaunt everything that makes them better than humans, especially if it’s superficial.

A few specific letters quickly started to show up on my desk demanding to go eat dinner and spill the gossip with a very notorious platinum blond gossip monger. But I figured if that’s going to happen, might as well bring Wrath directly. Once she was done and free.

Father, on the other hand, was the unknown Deathless to the clan. He really did just up and vanish into the Winterscar sanctuary and simply trained night and day against anyone who was up for the challenge. While Wrath was quickly becoming the only Deathless everyone talked about as a true divine gift sent from the gods, he was becoming an underground legend among a very few select group of elite knights.

His teaching approach stayed the same, but the caliber of his pupils had gone from a single scrawny, resentful son with no interest in combat, to a group of already extremely skilled warriors.

Problem is that even though he had a whole entire school to teach to, he still dragged me from my workshop to keep training with him.

And he just so happened to be strong enough to pick me up by the scruff even while I’m wearing full armor. Teaching style didn't change. It did lack the anger and frustration from the past though. Father knew I had far more to my name than simple combat skills - failing to beat him or match with him wasn't the end of everything now and he knew it. Still just as brutal as it always had been. As it goes, if I had time to breath, I had time to train.

Cathida laughing the whole way didn’t help anything of course.