If Liv had harbored any hopes that a single entrance to the ruins beneath Godsgrave would be the key which opened the entire underground, she was quickly disabused of that idea. Neither the Well of Bones or the Tomb of Celris had ever been quite so thoroughly damaged as the long-dead city of Corsteris. Walking through those long abandoned halls, she’d never truly had to worry about ceilings collapsing, or the floor falling out from beneath her feet.

  But the undercity beneath the crater was a much more tenuous thing. The original V?dic structures had, quite obviously, only barely survived the original impact. Even the short length of hallway into which Ghveris had fallen was, within the space of perhaps fifty yards, buckled and broken. On the rimward end, this had caused one portion of the hallway to drop away from the other, so that a jagged cliff face of unworked rock twenty feet high separated them from the continuation of the corridor.

  The end reaching toward the center of the crater was even worse: a flow of molten rock had swept across the corridor, and, upon cooling, hardened, leaving a great blockage of black stone that looked like nothing so much as dark, curling waves and eddies frozen in time. There were even half-sphere shaped absences which Liv assumed must have once been air bubbles.

  Liv and her companions had better luck with the five doors opening off from the short stretch of corridor they had immediate access to - though even in that case, things were more complicated than she was used to.

  “All of these glyphs are long dead,” Sidonie proclaimed, after taking the time to trace her fingers along the walls to either side of the hall. “I can’t imagine any of the mana stone linkages remained whole after the Trinity’s attack, given how absolute the damage is even at the edges.”

  “Even then, I would have expected some of the ambient mana to sink in,” Arjun said.

  Liv shook her head, sending a few errants strands of hair flying, and handed her helm to Keri, who tucked it under his arm. “No. Take a closer look - most of the glyphs themselves are cracked or broken. They were never meant to withstand what happened.”

  She removed the Crown of Celris from the leather case she wore on her left hip, and settled it onto her forehead. Before Liv could close her eyes and reach out, however, Keri put a hand on her shoulder.

  “Sit down,” he urged her. “Please. You’ve never tried to connect with anything this large, or this damaged, before. I’ll catch you if you follow over, but I’d prefer that I didn’t have to.”

  “That’s probably a good idea,” Liv admitted, and settled herself down onto the cold metal floor. After a moment’s thought, she stretched her legs out and leaned back. If she was lying flat, she couldn’t even pitch over to one side. Then, she closed her eyes and reached out to the rift.

  The moment Liv touched the broken enchantments of Corsteris, she felt every muscle in her body tighten at once. Dimly, as if at a great distance, she was aware of her back arching, so that she was bent nearly as far as a drawn longbow, so much of her body coming up off the hallway floor that her weight was actually on the back of her head rather than her shoulder blades. She heard herself screaming, but was only the smallest part of an entire chorus, a cacophony of pain.

  Everything was broken. If Corsteris had once been a body, someone had methodically ground down every single bone to fine dust, then opened its neck to drain the blood. Entire massive sections of the city were simply missing: there were linkages for over two dozen waystones, each one like the stump of a severed limb, spurting mana up into the air.

  The worst part was that, at some level, the enchantments which remained wanted Liv to help them. After a thousand years of ruin, her touch stirred every piece of magic which had once been created to respond to a V?dic Lord’s touch. They turned toward her like flowers toward the sun, reaching out in an attempt to feed her information and to do her bidding - but it was like stretching out her fingers to clasp a lover’s hand, and finding only bone and gristle, where there should have been soft skin.

  And yet, during that endless moment when she screamed out every shred of air which had been in her lungs, the suffering was not entirely wasted.

  Liv couldn’t hold the connection, but she did feel traces of what was left beneath the cracked surface of the crater. A part of her was astonished at just how far down beneath the ground the V?dim had excavated: the foundations of many buildings reached more than fifty yards down into the surrounding rock. There were tunnels everywhere, and ancient veins of mana stone, now run wild like a hedge that had been left untrimmed for years, stretching out from no less than four separate blooms.

  And nestled near the center of the crater, buried beneath rubble, ancient machinery, and flows of once-molten rock which had cooled and hardened, Liv could feel the corpses of three gods. Each one was close to the severed root of a waystone, which must all have once served their owners’ needs just as the personal waystones at the Tomb of Celris and the Well of Bones, and even the Garden of Thorns, had done. Liv could picture it: how the ancients must have walked between their capital of white stone towers, and their personal homes, flung across the entire world, as easily as a baker might step out the door of his home onto the street.

  Each corpse pulsed with mana, leaking it out into the surrounding rock, tinged with the power of a particular word, a particular fallen god. Liv had enough time to glimpse each of them, more a flash, an impression than anything clear or coherent.

  The corpse of Asuris ate light. All around it was absolute darkness, so deep and impenetrable that it caused the eye to imagine shapes, forms, movements where nothing existed. Liv could feel how the dead god’s lingering intent kept the clouds anchored overhead, tied to the crater which had once been a city. Some last, panicked thought given form as the desperate god had looked up, glimpsed a tongue of fire descending from the heavens, and tried to blot the light out before he died.

  Antris had been more prepared. Liv could feel how layer upon layer of machinery had closed around him, armored walls and doors and shells of many shapes, interlocking and connecting. The defenses might even have been enough, if his lair had not been at the absolute center of the impact. Had Tamiris known that the V?dic Lord of Machines had been the most well defended, and so aimed his attack directly to crack that armor? Liv couldn’t know for certain, but it would not have surprised her. Some number of Antris’s mechanized servants must have survived, and then spent the intervening centuries repairing and rebuilding their cohorts, for she could see an immense, clockwork sarcophagus had been built around the corpse to preserve it.

  Of the three carcasses, the only one exposed to open air was that of Iravata, Lady of Wyrms. A chunk of the falling ring had broken the crust of the world here, collapsing the stone sixty feet down into something almost like the cenotes of the surrounding jungle. The water here steamed, and bleached the rocks upon the shore, and Liv knew without needing to check that nothing living moved in those waters. The corpse, in the vague shape of a woman, was curled up around itself at the very center of the pool. But where Antris had been surrounded by dumb, mechanical constructs, still labouring to preserve him long past need, Iravata lay within sight of a clutch of eggs, half-buried in the sand close enough to soak in the mana which leaked off her bones.

  Something moved at the edge of Liv’s awareness, at the edge of the cavern - an eye opened, gleaming shades of purple and violet, the eye of a serpent...

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  “I’ve got it!”

  Someone pulled the crown from Liv’s head, taking not a few strands of long white hair with it, torn from her scalp, and she found herself cradled in Keri’s arms, head drawn into his lap, while Arjun’s fingers were pressed to her neck, measuring her pulse. With the pain gone - no, not entirely gone, her head was throbbing - she collapsed, formerly rigid muscles loosening all at once, and was able at last to suck in a breath.

  “Is she hurt?” Keri asked.

  “Physically? No,” Arjun answered. “But her heart is still beating too fast. Liv, I don’t want you moving, not even sitting up, until I give the word. What happened?”

  “Alright,” she agreed, with a groan. Liv allowed her eyes to close, and she turned her face in toward Keri’s hand, where he’d been cradling her head, so that her cheek lay against his palm. “Everything’s broken. It wanted to connect with me, the entire city - what’s left of it - wanted to do whatever I asked, but it couldn’t. It was like every broken piece of machinery, every cracked glyph, they were all begging for me to repair them.”

  “I think that the crown should be put away until we leave this place,” Keri said.

  “Mmm-hmm.” Liv tried to nod, and instead ended up wincing. “Someone hold onto it, for me?”

  “I have it,” Miina told her. “I’ll keep it safe until you need it again.”

  “We should take her back to camp,” Wren called, from further away. If Liv had to guess, she was helping to form a perimeter, with Ghveris, Kaija, and Lina.

  “No, not yet,” Liv called back. Even her own raised voice made her temples throb, felt like stabbing behind her eyes. “I did see a few things.” The corpses of three gods. Somewhere in her nightmares, the God-Eating Queen grinned, sharp teeth bared, hungry. “The middle door on the right-hand wall of the corridor, facing away from the rubble. If Ghveris can get that open, it leads to a stair which will take us down a level. That’s where will find one of the vaults. I’m not certain how many of the enchantments are still working in this one, but it's so close we should at least check before we head back.”

  “Alright. But you are staying right here,” Keri told her. She didn’t recall when he’d removed his gauntlets, but the feel of his hand stroking her hair back from her forehead was so soothing that Liv couldn’t find it in herself to worry about the detail. “Ghveris, see if you can break it down. Wren, go with him and then scout ahead. Arjun, Kaija, Lina, I want the three of you with us - but if Wren says the route is safe, the rest of you can go check it over.”

  The corridor burst into motion, but Liv kept her eyes squeezed tightly shut, trying only to slow her breathing like Master Grenfell had taught her so many years before. There was an enormous crash, as Ghveris presumably battered the door down, or ripped it off the wall, and it was so loud and hurt Liv’s head so much that she nearly threw up her last meal. But after that, things grew quiet again.

  “Is she going to be alright?” Kaija asked Arjun, after a moment.

  “So far as I can tell,” her friend answered. “As I said, Liv isn’t physically hurt. From the sound of it, she was experiencing the damage to the city as if it had been inflicted on her body. And there isn’t much of the city left.”

  How much time passed until Wren and Ghveris returned, Liv could not have said: she stopped listening to the conversation of her friends, or paying attention to anything other than Keri’s hand on her head. If they had been at the encampment, she would have clung to him until he’d carried her back to her cot, so that she could sleep the pain away.

  She must have fallen asleep at some point, because the next she knew, Liv was being gently shaken awake. She opened her eyes, flinched at the light from Keri’s orbiting spheres of sunlight, and found her hand folded in his.

  “Are they back?” Liv asked.

  “They’ve come, and gone again,” Keri answered her. “We’ve found the enchanted caskets, but Sidonie wants you to have a look at the enchantments with her. Do you think you can walk?”

  “I’m going to have to, one way or the other,” Liv grumbled. She carefully rolled onto her hands and knees, and felt Keri letting his hands fall away from her. When she planted one boot on the metal floor of the corridor, however, and lurched upright, he caught her by the arm to steady her.

  Liv squinted at the light, which set the place behind her eyes to throbbing again, but the pain wasn’t quite so bad as before. With Keri helping her, Kaija leading the way, and Lina trailing behind them, she made her way through the wrecked doorway. It turned out that Ghveris had, in fact, first punched the door half off its - hinges? - and then torn the entire thing away, setting it off to one side. It occurred to Liv that they should find a way to keep at least some of the doors functional, if they could, because at some point they might want to bar a route to the wyrms and other mana beasts prowling the crater above.

  She mostly allowed herself to be guided, through rooms with cracked walls, piles of debris, and broken floors. Keri kept as close an eye on her as a mother watching her child take their first steps, and Liv was certain she would have planted herself face down at least twice without his help. The stairs were the worst: there, Kaija squeezed in on Liv’s other side, and between the two of them they got her arms over each set of shoulders, and down they all went, like a three-legged sack race at a spring market day. It would actually have been easier, Liv was certain, if Keri had just scooped her up in his arms and carried her, but perhaps they’d felt that was unbecoming of a queen. At the moment, she couldn’t have cared less.

  Finally, however, they entered a room that looked just like the dream Jurian had shared with her, while Liv slept in her bed at High Hall, what seemed like a lifetime ago.

  It wasn’t the same one: Liv knew that immediately. There was no blood at the door, where Jurian’s friend Lora had bled out her life to hold the wyrms at bay. The humming was muted, coming not from all around her, but only the far end of the chamber.

  But for the rest - it was exactly as she remembered. Row upon row of caskets, metal and glass, each one attached to the walls by a mess of tubes and pipes, leaving only a central corridor for walking. It was in that corridor that Liv’s companions were grouped together, and she could see at a glance, by their faces, that things were worse than they’d expected.

  “I need to see,” Liv muttered, and Keri helped her over to the nearest of the left-most caskets. The glass should have been half-frosted over and cold to the touch, but instead it was clear and the same temperature as the rest of the room. None of the glyphs etched into the metal glowed, and rather than a sleeping face, Liv saw only an ancient skull. The empty, dark sockets glared out at her, as if to accuse. If we’d come sooner, Liv wondered, would this one still be alive?

  She didn’t think so. It took more than a year for a corpse to decay, from dead flesh to bare bones. Liv doubted that the person inside this casket had been alive for the entirety of her lifetime - most likely, they had died long before she was ever born.

  “Most of the enchantments are broken,” Sidonie shouted, from more than halfway down the central aisle. Her voice echoed off the bare metal of the walls, ceilings and floor, tumbling about the room like a thrown pebble.

  “You said most,” Liv called back, pushing herself back upright from where she’d leaned her weight on the broken machinery. “How many are still working?”

  “Perhaps a quarter,” Soaring Eagle said.

  Keri helped Liv over to them, and she saw that the Red Shield chief’s face was set, like a carved piece of rock, but his eyes were red and full of pain. She scanned the room, taking a quick count of caskets, and guessed their number at perhaps fifty. She tried to imagine what it must be like for him, to find his own people, long hoped for, at last - but only corpses by the time he’d arrived.

  “I’ll look at the final dozen caskets, then,” Liv said. Still, she couldn’t help but glance into the glass, as they moved down the aisle, at the face of one corpse after the next.

  The enchantments had not failed all at once, that was clear, and not in any neat order. Some caskets held only bones, but others must have finally lost mana more recently: in those, Liv saw the faces of men and women in various states of decay. Cheeks sunken, clumps of hair still clinging to a scalp: lips drawn back from teeth in a stretched grin. Sometimes, the skin of the face was like scraps of ancient, dried parchment, flaking away - but in a few, the person inside might have died yesterday, and been well preserved. Liv wondered if the magic that kept them alive and dreaming might have flickered on and off, before finally giving way.

  Worse, what if some magic had broken, but not ever enchantment at once? Might some of these people have been trapped, no longer dreaming and unaware, but conscious of their imprisonment and yet unable to move while they starved and died?

  Finally, she came to the last dozen caskets. Someone had wiped the frost away from the glass of the nearest, and inside, a young woman with dark hair lay dreaming.

  “I’ll get you out,” Liv whispered, making a promise. “Every one of you that’s still alive, we’ll get you out, and we’ll get you to safety.”

  volume nine is off and running!

  here. I am more available there than I am here.

  Dramatis Personae

  Livara T?r Valtteri Kaen Syv? - Archmage, former scullery maid at Castle Whitehill, the bastard daughter of Maggie Brodbeck and Valtteri Ka Auris. Mountain Queen, and Lady of Winter. Broke herself good in this chapter. [36+ Rings of Mana, not counting mana stored in items.]

  Arjun Iyuz - Journeyman Guildmage from Lendh ka Dakruim; his jati specializes in healing magic. '...why did you have to discover psychic damage?' [18 Rings of Mana]

  Inkeris "Keri" ka Ilmari k?n B?lris - A young warrior of the Unconquered House of B?lris, father to Rei. Taking care of Liv duty. [20 Rings of Mana.]

  Kaija - Former Armorer at Kelthelis, captain of Liv's personal guard. Can't protect against this. [21 Rings of Mana]

  Miina t?r Eilis, of House D?ivi - Daughter of Eilis, niece of Eila, cousin of Liv, Lady in Waiting. Holding the thing that breaks brains. [21 Rings of Mana]

  Sidonie Corbett - Guildmage. Filling an entire notebook on this place. [19 Rings of Mana]

  Soaring Eagle - Husband of Calm Waters, father of Blossom. Red Shield Tribe. Came to free his people - found an awful lot of corpses.