Broken Lands

Sophia used her wings to lift her over the parapets at the edge of the wall and onto the roof of the first floor, then dismissed them. The roc probably knew they were there, but that didn’t mean she wanted to make it pay attention to their presence. It thought they were beneath its notice; Sophia wanted to stay that way.

If there was ever a sign that said Do Not Start A Fight, it was a bird bigger than a building. It was probably by design that the gigantic bird wasn’t interested in them.

They were third upgrade instead of the first upgrade the area was intended for, so they might or might not be able to win the fight. Sophia had no desire to try. “I get the feeling that some of what’s on this floor is about discouraging people from starting fights they can’t win.”

“Could be,” Dav said quietly as his feet hit the roof more heavily than Sophia’s had. “Could also be there to encourage the formation of larger groups with bigger strategies. It’s not for us, though, that’s for sure.”

Sophia nodded slowly. Making larger groups to take on the bigger monsters wasn’t something Sophia thought about; most fighting back home happened in dungeons, and dungeons deliberately limited how many people could enter. Challenges in the Broken Lands were far more likely to allow large numbers to stay together, but there were entry limits even there. The Maze handled it the other way, by adjusting to the number of people who entered. Maybe this was a third way, where there were threats that you could take on in larger groups or avoid in smaller teams.

“I wouldn’t have wanted to fight that at the first upgrade,” Xin’ri stated firmly. “Now, maybe, but then? Back then I was good enough to fight the parasites that live in its feathers, not the bird.”

Okay, that was a third option, something else Sophia hadn’t thought of.

Sophia sighed. Any of those things was possible; in a well-designed place like the World Tree, it was even likely that all of them were possible if you got the right team together. Dav was right, though; they weren’t the right team for that. They weren’t here to chase parasites or even kill a bird bigger than a football field. They were here to find out what was in the roc’s nest while it wasn’t here.

Sophia looked around. The space in front of her was large, true, bigger than the bird … but the middle was taken up by a large building set on top of the first building, then another on top of that. It was almost like a step pyramid, except that each step was a building with its own entrance, set more than twenty feet away from the previous wall, with its own roughly four feet of parapet around the edge except where the stairs were level with the rooftop. Each of the buildings had a large opening that faced the spot where the stairs met the wall below it, but unlike the step pyramids Sophia was familiar with, those openings weren’t in the middle of the section. Instead, they alternated between right and left of the middle.

The space between the parapet and the building was not clean and empty; instead, it was filled with detritus from bones and tree branches to piles of dirt. None of it was large, if “large” meant the size of a person, but there was a lot of it. “If this is the roc’s nest, where does it sleep?”

“On top of the buildings,” Ci’an answered. She’d landed softly while Sophia wasn’t looking and had already shifted back into her wolf-eared human shape. She pointed almost straight ahead of them and up. “Do you see where the space is clearer on that half of the nest? I think that’s the roc’s space and it leans on the building.”

Ci’an paused. When she continued, her voice held wry amusement. “I’m not looking forward to going inside. The walls are still standing right now, but who knows how long that will last?”

“Maybe we’ll find something outside?” Sophia wasn’t certain that was better, with the threat of the roc’s return. “Though I guess we’re going to check inside, aren’t we?”

“The pegasus is still alive,” Dav announced from ahead of them. “It’s breathing. She’s breathing, I guess I should say; she’s a mare. Ci’an, do you know enough about anatomy to set her bones while I heal them? I know a little, but I’ve never actually done it.”

Sophia knew Dav’s healing wasn’t enough to truly heal a broken bone quickly, but it would certainly help once the bone was set. If he used it before the bone was set … well, they’d never needed to test whether it would shift the bone fragments into place or not. None of the Flying Stars had broken a bone. It did handle joint injuries, which was a significant point in its favor.

“I can try,” Ci’an answered doubtfully. “Are you sure we should take the time?”

“We should have hours, and Xin’ri and Sophia can search the area while we set her bones. Once we’re done, you can join them.” Dav looked towards Sophia with a question in his eyes.

Sophia nodded. She thought that was a fine plan.

“No, I can’t,” Ci’an countered with a shake of her head. “I’m going to have to keep her unconscious while she heals. The last thing we want is to have her wake up and try to fight us or fly away; we’d have to set the bones again, if she survived. I can keep her asleep, which is more reliable than alchemicals.”

Searching the place didn’t take as long as Sophia expected. Less than half an hour later, Xin’ri and Sophia were done. Unless they wanted to dig through the dirt and bones, there just wasn’t much to look at.

Only one area had anything of note: the area below where the roc slept held a group of eight egg-shaped boulders nestled up against a large iron stub stabbed into the roof of the building they stood on. Chains made of rusted links the same size as the ones on the roc’s feet extended from the short but wide post. It didn’t take much thought to know that the two had once been linked, even without seeing the twisted remains of a handful of the links that had been pushed to the edge of the roof.

The eggs were roughly three feet wide and a bit more round than the oval profile of a chicken’s egg, but neither Sophia nor Xin’ri had any doubt that they were, in fact, eggs. They finished searching the area before Xin’ri turned to Sophia with a speculative look. “Do you think you can fit the eggs in your pack?”

“What?” Sophia glanced between the eggs and her friend. “I’d be close, but why? They’d take up most of the space if I can even get them in there.”

“Monster eggs are valuable. I don’t know roc eggs specifically, but I saw others in the market, so I asked. There are apparently several Clans that practice beast taming with monsters out of the World Tree and eggs are one of the best starting points.” Xin’ri chuckled. “They’re also good for alchemy, but if something as big as the roc can be tamed … I can see a lot of uses for something that big and that strong to carry things between the islands. Or people.”

Sophia took a long look at the eggs. “They’ll probably fit, but I’m not sure we should, not yet. What if the roc comes back and finds its eggs gone while we’re still here?”

“It won’t know who did it.” Xin’ri waved at the open archway that led into the building on the roof. “And we can hide inside until it leaves again.”

Sophia gave Xin’ri a flat look. She didn’t know that much about birds, but even she knew that much. “Birds can smell pretty well. Some can track by smell. A roc’s sense of smell isn’t as good as a vulture’s, but it’s still good enough to track people who were moving around in the area its eggs were into the building next to the spot.”

Maybe she knew more than she thought. Getting fed knowledge by the World Tree was weird. It felt like memory, just like what Cliff fed her, but it was information she’d never known. At least with Cliff’s knowledge, it was things she’d once known.

More or less, anyway.

Sophia pushed the disorientation aside. She’d get used to it. She had to; she’d picked the Ability and the only way she wasn’t going to end up using it was if she avoided the World Tree and all other Towers. She’d also have to avoid monsters. Neither was going to happen. She was going to find her way to Archon Issvako and then get the Archon to help her go home.

Well, to Dav’s home. That would have to be enough for now. She wasn’t certain how she’d get home from there, but they’d figure it out. Dav got to Earth once. All they had to do was repeat the trick.

“We should get the eggs now anyway,” Xin’ri asserted. “We know it won’t be back for a while, and I’d much rather hide from an annoyed bird under cover than be caught stealing its eggs when we’re not inside.”

Xin’ri had a point, but Sophia didn’t think her solution was right. “After we’re done here, Ci’an can watch the sky and warn us well before it gets here. We’d leave with whatever we managed to get, and I’m pretty sure we can outrun it or outlast it. If we’re inside and it tracks us there …”

Sophia waved at the opening in front of them. “It’s open in two places and they’re pretty big. If the roc can get under it and lift up … it doesn’t even have to be able to get inside. All it has to do is shift enough rock to collapse a wall or ceiling.”

“Do you really think it can?” Xin’ri frowned at the series of increasingly smaller buildings. “It’s been sleeping on them, surely they’re sturdy enough to stay in place.”

“I’m surprised it’s as intact as it is,” Sophia admitted. “But do you want to risk it just so that we can get a little more aurichalc?”

Xin’ri sighed and muttered, “It’s not a little.”

Sophia knew surrender when she heard it. She also knew better than to crow about it and make Xin’ri defensive. “Can you tell if any of them are about to hatch? I can’t.”

Xin’ri shook her head. “I don’t know birds that well, even ordinary birds. I definitely don’t know birds the size of a Registry building.”

Sophia nodded. She’d hoped for a different answer, one that would tell her if she was preparing to put a roc egg that might hatch at any time into her backpack, but Xin’ri’s answer was the one she expected. “Then let’s go check on a horse.”

Xin’ri gave a muffled snort of surprised humor. The laugh continued on into her words. “A horse. Sure.”

The pegasus was asleep on her side with her wings stretched out away from her back when they returned.

“We’re almost done,” Dav stated before Sophia could ask. He glowed the soft green of his healing emanation. “Or as done as we’re going to be, at least. The bones are aligned as well as we can figure them out. All that’s left is healing. The leg … well, if we weren’t here, I’m pretty sure the pegasus would have died of blood loss.”

Sophia felt something moving at the edge of her aura, so she turned towards the entrance in time to see a larger version of the young gryphon they met the previous day step out of the shadows. One of its wings dragged on the ground instead of being folded on its back. Sophia winced; that looked an awful lot like a broken wing, and it had to hurt. She could guess how the gryphon’s wing was broken, too.

“All of the pegasi do,” the gryphon said in passable Suras. It was more than a little distorted by the gryphon’s lack of a flexible mouth, but apparently it was skilled enough at mimicry to make up most of the difference. “They don’t handle uncontrolled falls well. Who are you and why are you here?”