Chapter 66 : Dark Shuang
Nobi stared at the sword, which was emitting several cubits of yellow-red light. Not the white radiance associated with divine artifacts in the religious tradition — something warmer, more mineral. Evan understood now that the sword was connected to the same power source as the mechanical warrior, and that the sensitivity of the array might extend to goblin spiritual force.
He tossed the sword to Nobi.
"Try activating it. Concentrate your attention into the blade."
Nobi held it with both hands. The light flickered, went out, came back unstable, and then steadied. Nobi's expression went through surprise and into something considerably more calculating.
"Keep it," Evan said. "Good night."
Nobi left without needing to be told twice, although he paused in the doorway long enough to deliver several compliments that Evan didn't listen to. The door closed.
Shuang yawned elaborately. "Sleeping now," she said, from somewhere in his hair, and was asleep before he could respond, still clutching a fistful of his hair with both hands.
Evan set the magic lamp on the metal table — which had been built for some purpose he couldn't determine and served adequately as a dissection surface — and brought the Lion-Wing Beast out of his storage ring.
He worked methodically: recording the runic patterns on the membranes and bones first, then opening the body and clearing the cavity. His hand found the magic core in the dorsal cavity near the spine. Fire element, octahedral, deeply red, excellent quality.
He was examining it when the temperature in the room dropped.
Not literally — but the quality of the air changed in a way that temperature-drop described adequately. An aura rose from the direction of his head, dark and cold, distinctly different from the flower fairy who had fallen asleep there.
Shuang floated up from his hair, surrounded by black light, her expression nothing like the personality he'd been traveling with all day.
"That core is mine," she said, in a voice that had ice in it.
Evan looked at her. "You have two of them in there."
"Typical. A flower fairy with a split personality — one bright face and one dark face living in the same body." He kept his tone conversational. "Which one are you?"
"Dark Shuang. The day belongs to the light one. The night is mine." The cold quality didn't leave her voice. "She found herself a lich, of all things. You're more to my taste than hers."
"She doesn't know about you?"
"She knows something is different about her. She doesn't know what. Dark-attribute flower fairies don't exist in the normal accounting of things — we're not supposed to be possible. But here I am." A pause. "The core."
"Why would I give it to you?"
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She didn't answer that. Instead she became a line of dark light aimed at his hand.
He had been expecting exactly this. A small barrier of his own dark element formed between her trajectory and the core, and she hit it at speed. She made a sound. Then, instead of bouncing off it, she began to absorb it — the dark light pulling into her body, the barrier thinning and vanishing.
He had not expected that.
He put the core in his storage ring while she was occupied with the barrier. She turned to him with an expression that had shifted from imperious to something marginally more diplomatic.
"Master. Could you possibly see your way to —"
"We don't have any agreement," he said. "Calling me master doesn't create one."
She looked at the ring on his hand for a long moment. Then, with the air of someone conceding a chess match, she said: "Fine. A contract. I'll sign the contract."
The light that came from her forehead was small as a firefly. It crossed the space between them and entered his skin at the temple, and the world went briefly abstract — shapes losing their edges, the room becoming a space of light and resonance and something that wasn't quite sound, an impression of the way elements actually moved rather than the way his training had modeled them. Then it was over, and he was sitting at the dissection table in a stone room in a goblin fortress, and he understood a new thing.
A mutual-aid contract. A symbiosis. Through Shuang's body, he could interface with elemental energy in ways that his own nature didn't permit — his magical capacity, effectively, doubled.
He took the core out of the ring.
She had it before he finished extending his hand, clutching it to her chest with the intensity of someone who has wanted something for a very long time. The core was larger than she was, which didn't seem to matter.
"You could get these yourself if you went looking," he said.
"Could I? A creature my size, with no combat ability to speak of?" She gave him the look that statement deserved. "I walk a peaceful path."
She flew to a concave spot on the ceiling, clutching the core. "The irritating part is that by the time I'm done resting, it'll be morning, and the light one will be the one who absorbs it. All my effort for her benefit."
"Can you use dark-element cores?"
"In theory. But cores only stay useful for a day or so — the magical beast's residual spiritual imprint dissipates, and after that it's just inert energy, which I can't use. You have to absorb it immediately." She settled further into her chosen spot. "Does that happen with humans?"
"I've never heard of it."
"We're closer to elemental beings than physical ones. Different structure entirely." She was already half-asleep. "The element spirits are the real mystery. Those are phantasmal beings — they don't actually exist independently. They're projections of consciousness from someone powerful enough to make their imagination into something real."
Evan sat with that for a moment. "What?"
She was asleep.
He sat at the table and continued his work, but part of his mind stayed with what she'd said. Phantasmal beings — living things that were, in some fundamental sense, the product of someone else's imagination made physically real. The implication was that at some level of power, consciousness could directly create existence. A door had opened in his understanding and he couldn't see how far back it went.
The Lion-Wing Beast's bones showed faint arrays beneath the surface. He recorded them and kept working.
……
Somewhere below, around the time the darkness was at its deepest before dawn, sounds came up through the fortress floors. Shouting. The sound of a crowd. Evan added a sound-suppression ward to the room and kept working.
Nobi had been preparing this for longer than the night. The lower-level goblins had complaints that needed very little encouragement to become action — the current king's monopolization of reproductive access was, in a population of a few thousand, an existential problem for most of the males. Nobi had promised reform. More importantly, Nobi had a sword that produced several cubits of yellow-red light on command, which was, to the available audience, indistinguishable from a divine miracle.
The ground-level guards at the third-floor entrance had been doing what guards do at three in the morning. The mob came through them before they had finished waking up.
One defender stepped forward with real intention. Nobi's sword came out and the light blazed.