Broken Lands

It was not easy to get moving the next morning, especially not with Dav cuddled next to her in the surprisingly comfortable inn bed. Sophia made herself get up anyway; she could already feel where her arm ached from sleeping on it and it wasn’t going to get better unless she started moving.

At first, moving seemed hard. She slowly stretched out the ache, then looked at her still-sleeping boyfriend. He was usually up before she was, so he had to be really tired to still be asleep. They weren’t in a hurry this morning, so there was no reason to wake him up. He’d probably be up soon enough.

She made her way downstairs and found the inn’s kitchen preparing lunch. It was still a little early for the meal, but even so it meant she’d really slept in. They were happy to let her wait with a hot drink while they cooked, so that’s what she did.

Soon after she found a spot, Ci’an joined her. She seemed annoyingly cheerful as she dropped into the seat next to Sophia. “Good to see you’re up, and you look like you actually got enough rest. I made Xin’ri go back to sleep an hour ago.”

Sophia took a sip of her tea and shook her head at the cheerful wolfkin. “Do you have to be so cheerful in the morning?”

Ci’an grinned. “This morning? Definitely. I get to start working with the Sphere-alteration treasures I picked up this evening. They work best at twilight, since I’m changing a Nightowl Sphere, and I slept too late this morning to start at dawn. Have you already started on yours?”

Sophia blinked, then reached for her pack. She hadn’t even thought about the Treasures! How had she forgotten about them?

Well she was tired. That was her only real excuse. “No, I just got up. I have the key here, though; we can look at that before lunch.”

Ci’an grinned at her. “And know before Xin’ri does? Let’s do this!”

Sophia shook her head at Ci’an’s silliness. She knew they’d tell Xin’ri and Dav as soon as they came down to eat, and that would probably be soon.

The slip of paper that would reveal information on World Tree items was plain other than a green tree icon in the upper-right corner. From the instructions in the Treasury, all she needed to do was set the key on the paper and then touch both with her mana at the same time. It wasn’t the only activation method, but it was definitely the easiest for Sophia.

Key to the Temple of Memory

This key is a true replica of an Entrance Key for the Temple of Memory in the Inchoate Mountains. It will only recognize those who have earned the right to hold it.

Using this key on an entrance to the World Tree will initiate a limited Event based on the Temple of Memory.

Sophia nodded and handed the sheet to Ci’an. As they’d expected, it didn’t really tell them that much they didn’t already know. It did confirm that using it when they entered the main World Tree would trigger an actual Event, which meant that completing it would open the following level. A limited Event meant that it would only open for the group that triggered it, instead of for everyone who entered that branch.

When Ci’an held the paper up to read it for herself, Sophia noticed something she hadn’t looked for: there was something on the back of the paper. She was pretty sure it wasn’t there before. “Hey, Ci’an? What’s that on the back of the paper?”

Ci’an turned it over, then frowned as she held it out for Sophia to see. “Some sort of fancy design.”

Sophia shook her head. It wasn’t a fancy design any more than the runes around doors in the Maze were. It was words in Bridge. “Only a keybearer can see through the mist that guards the Inchoate Mountains and find their way to the true Temple of Memory. But … we did that.”

“On the second branch,” Dav’s deep voice countered as he finally arrived. “But was that the true Temple of Memory?”

Sophia started to answer that of course it was before she caught what he must have already caught. “The true Temple of Memory. You think the one in the World Tree is a fake?”

Dav looked just as bright and cheerful as Ci’an did, in his own way. He wasn’t as light on his feet as she was, but he was smiling and that was enough; Sophia knew him well enough to know that a smile before he had his morning tea meant he slept well. “Of course it is. Everything in there is … I don’t know, a dream. There’s no way we were on an actual rocky plain with only a galaxy in the sky above us watching meteors fall and turn into monsters; it’s dangerous, certainly, but it’s not real, not the way the outside world is real.”

It was something Sophia had heard before, though Dav didn’t often talk about it. He was convinced that the Maze and World Tree were similar to, if more complete than, the augmented reality setups he was used to from his homeworld. Sophia couldn’t even argue about it too much; while the effects were real, they were artificially made. That was apparently also part of Terra’s augmented reality, if not to the same extent.

“I’m not sure what to do with it, then,” Sophia stated with a frown. She picked up the key and examined it. It still looked sort of Egyptian to her, but then so did the glyphs on the outside of the Temple of Memory in the World Tree. For that matter, the rest stations in the Inchoate Mountains were pyramids. That wasn’t the only Earth culture with pyramids and Sophia knew that many Earth cultures had elements from multiple outside cultures, but it made her wonder if it was connected somehow.

They looked absolutely nothing like the modern Archon structures, but they were separated by thousands of years. She wasn’t certain exactly how many thousand, but the Kestii Tower’s Gateway was a bit over halfway up the tree. That might mean it was half the age of the tree, which would put the birth of the World Tree and the War of Two Mimirs at roughly three thousand years earlier.

There were a lot of assumptions in that date. The one that Sophia figured was most likely to be wrong was the steadiness of the growth of the World Tree. Many trees grew a lot early on and then slowed or even stopped after reaching their final height. Worse, it might not even grow like a normal tree at all; if it grew like the Kestii Tower, each stage would be more expensive than the one before but would also allow more people into the Tree and therefore let it gain what it needed to grow more quickly. It might well grow in spurts that changed wildly over time.

“We’ll keep it for now,” Dav answered with a shrug. “There’s no need to make any decisions about it yet. If we end up stuck here, we might want to do the Event … wait, it does still trigger an Event, right?”

“Yeah.” Sophia explained what she found, including the fact that the last part was in Bridge, a language no one spoke as far as she could tell. It was strange, but at least it was partly explained by the fact that the creator of the Guide came from the same universe Sophia originated in. It was a little weird the language hadn’t changed in that long, but maybe it was stabilized somehow by the Guide and the Voice.

Xin’ri didn’t show up for another hour, which gave the three of them time to eat and start going through the rest of the stuff they got from the Meteor Pillars Event. Dav’s memory was particularly useful in that, because he could remember the entire descriptions from the Treasury and also figure out when similar treasures were something other than what they thought they were.

When Xin‘ri finally did arrive, she looked even worse than Sophia felt when she got up.

Sophia spoke before she thought. “Did you have trouble sleeping?”

Xin’ri yawned. “Woke up early and started going through everything.”

“Sleeping on everything, you mean,” Ci’an corrected Xin’ri with an impish smile. “You’re looking better, but are you sure you don’t need more sleep?”

“Not going to get more sleep. Might take a nap later.” Xin’ri yawned again. “I’m too old to stay up all night like that, throws off my whole schedule. Still, it was worth it. I’ll have to go out and talk to a few people, but we’ll probably make a few Suns off the extras we picked up at the end; I’ll want to spend some of that on materials and … oh. Yeah. Sophia, Dav? Don’t use the Item Manifestation treasures you picked up yet. I have some ideas about ways to improve the items you’re going to use them on …”

Xin’ri made them go back through everything they’d already looked at. She was pleased with Dav’s memory and asked him to write out everything. Somewhere in the middle of that, Sophia managed to explain what the note said about the key, which made Xin’ri add it to her list of things to ask about when she spoke to merchants over the next few days.

Sophia was glad someone else was handling all that but annoyed that the final result of the item sort was that she handed over more than half of the feathers she’d collected, at least for now. Xin’ri also asked her for a bunch of the other feathers they’d collected or bought over the past few months; she planned to do something to Sophia’s armor but wasn’t clear about what she was going to do. There wasn’t room for more enchantment on the armor, but all Xin’ri did was grin and say that she had a way around that.

For now, Sophia kept the key and its information sheet, the duplicate feathers she’d collected that weren’t also magical items in their own right, three of the items made from feathers, and a collection of trinkets she picked up because Xin’ri marked them on her list when she ran out of things on her initial list.

The first was a bracelet made of small feathers tied in a repeating V shape, with a small gem glued to the cord that ran down the middle where each pair of feathers met the cord.

Featherflight Bracelet

Made for those who cannot fly on their own by one who could, the Featherflight Bracelet makes the flightless light on their feet, almost as if they could fly.

Sophia liked it because it had feathers, of course, but it also made it far easier to move across rough ground without needing to manifest her wings. It also ought to make it far easier to move through places without making noise by stepping on things and might even prevent issues with weight-based traps. The Maze and World Tree didn’t seem to use that many traps compared to the dungeons at home, but it was still a consideration.

Even better, it didn’t require attunement. That wasn’t normally a big concern of Sophia’s, but she did point it out to the others, and Xin’ri ended up picking one up for that exact reason. Sophia wasn’t sure if Ci’an got far enough down her list to get one, but she did know that Dav deliberately didn’t get one for himself; he could alter his weight if needed with his Calls and didn’t want to be easily moved normally.