143 - Tomb Raider
Alexandra had learned enough from her confrontation with Speck to know diving straight into a tomb filled with bone elementals was a terrible idea.
“Have you fought bone elementals before?” she asked her companion. Seeing that Speck had spent its whole life relatively close to this tomb, it should be possible.
“No.”
She opened her mouth. That wasn’t the answer she was expecting.
“Wouldn’t they be a good source of nutrients?” she pressed.
“No. Darkness. Only,” Speck whispered in her ear.
She tapped her fingers on the pommel of her sword. Turns out elementals could only consume their own type. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise.
“Okay, any idea how they fight? Can we beat them?”
Speck gave her a silent shrug, its source shifting on her shoulder.
“You’re not being very helpful,” she said.
The darkness elemental materialized a limb and pinched her cheek.
“Hey!” She tried slapping the shadow away, but her hand slipped through it as if it wasn’t there.
“Silver.”
The bone elementals being Silver helped. At least, it meant she could defeat them.
“Fine. Let’s try. There’s no way they’re as annoying as you are.”
Speck didn’t answer. Instead, it moved its source inside a minuscule crack in the ceiling above the staircase.
“Ready.”
Alexandra nodded. Relying on their shared senses, she walked for the stairs, sword already unsheathed. She walked down the first step and kept going. The staircase was wide enough to fit her five times over, and long enough that she couldn’t feel the bottom.
Speck followed her, moving along the ceiling cracks and ready to hide its source into one at a moment’s notice.
When they reached the bottom, they found themselves in a large, rectangular chamber. The walls were carved with reliefs of battle. Alexandra didn’t have the leisure to examine them further as her attention was focused on the three rattling figures that were looking at her.
Human skeletons.
They were moving.
She raised her sword and let her senses envelop them. The three skeletons were mostly complete, standing upright, and wearing large, rusty sabers. Clunky, they were moving in her direction, waving their weapons above their heads.
She didn’t sense any elemental source.
“Fuck, is this another Speck situation?”
“No. Coffin.”
Alexandra turned her head. Remembering that her eyes were of no use without light, she pivoted and used her darkness elemental senses to feel around the room. Sure enough, there was a massive stone sarcophagus standing on a pedestal in the far corner of the room.
Darkness was pervasive, and since the inside of the sarcophagus was no exception, she was able to locate a heap of mismatched bones resting inside. Flowing inside the marrow of those bones was the source. Faint threads of mana connected it to the three skeletons outside.
“Speck, immobilize the skeletons.”
The darkness elemental didn’t need to be told twice. From its source hidden in the ceiling, it materialized a shadow figure, like the one it had used to fight Alexandra. Then, it fired three shadow limbs, one for each skeleton. They wrapped around their targets. The puppets of the bone elemental were too clumsy to answer properly.
Alexandra stepped past the restrained skeletons and close to the sarcophagus. With precise control over her mana, she connected Drain Life and Aggressive Assimilation to the source. This time, she didn’t have to get stabbed in the heart to understand the effect of this elemental’s lifeforce.
It was one of the least pleasant experiences of her life. In a way, even worse than the sickness of empathy that had plagued her in the past. Alexandra became acutely aware of every bone in her body. From the smallest toe phalanx to her tibia, her skull. She felt them grind against her flesh. She felt every imperfection, every long-time injury she’d accumulated over time.
Somehow, she also understood that she could grow them at will. All it would take was a bit of mana. Her bones would pierce through her flesh, muscles, and skin, finally jutting out of her body.
“Ew.” She disconnected Aggressive Assimilation and prepared to open the sarcophagus. She moved slowly, careful about the fact that the elemental could likely shape the bones that were hosting its source in some capacity.
She paused. Knowing that, opening the coffin was a bad idea.
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“How long can you hold them?” she asked Speck, who had deployed two more shadow limbs to gather stray bones that were trying to escape from the skeletons.
“Eternity,” Speck whispered, its voice more cheerful than usual.
“As long as you’re having fun…”
Alexandra turned her attention back to the sarcophagus. The elemental inside didn’t seem interested in coming out, and opening it was dangerous. So why would she? A plan clicked into place in her mind.
She put a hand on the coffin, feeling the ambient mana course through it. When the mana entered the stone, it lingered, slowed down, and imbued the sarcophagus with its presence.
“Sure enough. It’s enchanted.”
Alexandra doubted bone elementals were capable of enchanting items, meaning the enchantment dated back to the inception of this tomb. Unless someone else had come inside at a later date to enchant the sarcophagus, but that seemed unlikely.
During his lessons, Tristan had been ambivalent about old enchantments. There were instances where age degraded the intent of the enchantment, making it easier to unravel. There were others where countless cycles made the enchantment part of the object’s nature, making it harder to remove.
Alexandra got to work, feeling the mana, talking to it with her intent, and trying to understand what it was doing.
The mana resisted her at first, sliding away from her intent like oil on water. She pushed through it anyway, letting her own reserve seep into the stone in thin tendrils, feeling for the shape of the old working underneath.
She found threads of intent laid down so long ago they'd fused with the mineral grain of the sarcophagus and followed one with her senses, tracing it from the lid down through the base, where it split into three smaller strands and diffused into nothing.
A ward. Something to keep the dead in, or something out. She looked at Speck playing with the skeletons. Probably the latter, as the dead were already out.
She reached in again, this time pressing her intent against the thread instead of following it. The stone pushed back like someone leaning on a door to keep you out.
“Speck, still good?”
“Eternity,” came the whisper again, delighted.
The skeletons scraped against the shadow limbs pinning them, sabers dragging uselessly against the stone floor. She ignored the sound and went back to the threads.
She tried something else. She let Drain Life brush against the ward itself rather than the source inside it. If the enchantment had become part of what the sarcophagus was, then maybe it could be drained like anything alive.
The stone went warm under her palm.
That, she hadn't expected.
“Why would it go warm?”
She kept her hand still and pushed a thread of mana into the warmth, testing it. The ward pulsed once, sluggish, like something waking up annoyed at being disturbed. Threads that had been dormant for who knew how many centuries stirred, re-tightening around the lid.
"Oh, come on."
She eased back before the ward finished closing, retreating to where she'd started. The stone cooled again.
She sat on her heels and stared at the sarcophagus, mapping the threads one more time from a distance. Three strands from the lid. All three converging somewhere she hadn't checked. The pedestal underneath.
“Warmth,” she whispered with a smile. “Good idea.”
With a touch of her will, she brushed against the pedestal where the threads converged, whispering sweet words into the enchantment. Then she pushed a thread of her own mana into it. Feel it. Feel that warmth. Yearn for it.
Deep underground, far from the sun, cold. The enchantment felt the warmth and shuddered in excitement.
“Yes,” Alexandra said. “It feels good, doesn’t it?”
“No,” Speck whispered as it slammed a skull into the ground.
“I know. Not you.”
“Oh.”
Alexandra focused back on the enchantment and kept feeding it ideas of warmth, teasing it with her solar mana. Don’t you wish to be warm?
The enchantment’s mana responded positively, slowly warming up. She kept pushing the goalpost, from warmth to heat, from heat to scorching.
She stood up, stepped back, and watched the result.
The enchantment flared, mana circling inside the stone of the sarcophagus faster and faster. Heat started radiating from the stone.
The stone shifted from hot to too hot in the space of a breath. Alexandra backed further away, boots scraping across the floor. A hairline crack split down the lid, releasing a thread of pale smoke.
"Keep going," she muttered, more to herself than the enchantment. She fed it another pulse of solar mana, layering the suggestion on top of what was already spiraling out of control. Hotter. Hungrier for it.
The sarcophagus answered. Heat rolled off the stone in visible waves, warping the air above it. Somewhere inside, marrow was beginning to sizzle.
The three skeletons convulsed against Speck's shadow limbs. Their sabers clattered to the floor as their arms lost tension, joints rattling loose. One skull tipped backward and hung by nothing, its jaw swinging open.
“Speck?”
“Cooking,” Speck said, delight bleeding through the single word.
A high thin whine came from inside the coffin. The lid cracked further, and grey smoke poured out through the fissure, curling up toward the ceiling in a long ribbon.
Alexandra kept feeding suggestions to the enchantment, refusing to let it cool, refusing to let it think about anything except how good the heat felt. The stone glowed faintly orange at its edges.
The whine inside the sarcophagus rose, then broke. Alexandra felt the source's presence stutter through her connection to Drain Life.
The lid split clean across the middle.
Heat rolled out in a wave that dried the sweat on Alexandra's face. It smelled like charred bones.
Silence, except for the tick of cooling stone.
“Well.” Alexandra let Drain Life fall away from the ruined source, the connection dissolving with nothing left on the other end to hold it. “That worked better than I expected.”
Speck's source slipped free of the ceiling crack and dropped onto her shoulder, letting the shadow figure dissipate. “Fun,” it said.
“You didn't even do the hard part.”
“Held. Forever.”
“It was maybe ten minutes.”
“Forever,” Speck insisted, and pinched her cheek again.
She swatted at the shadow, missed, and walked toward the sarcophagus. The stone had dulled from orange back to grey, cooling fast now that its structure had collapsed, and the enchantment with it. She peered over the broken lid at the wreckage inside. Nothing recognizable as bone anymore, just crumbling black shapes that shifted to ash when she nudged the lid further with her sword.
She winced. “How am I supposed to gather the source like that?”