5.5 A Name is Earned

General Summary

Day -2

In the morning I wake wrapped in my Mistress’ arms. As much as I would love to stay like this, we rise and prepare to travel towards the mountain. There is a familiarity about breaking camp with her - there is no hesitation about which jobs are mine and which are hers. We fit together seamlessly.   At mid-morning we feel a small earthquake as we hike up the mountain, and they slowly get more frequent as we approach. By midday we come to a chasm with a large tunnel, which Mistress tells me is where we first entered. This time, we find a smaller entrance. Before we enter, Mistress calls upon an ancestor, who arrives with deep, sea-blue eyes and the scent of saltwater. I wonder if this is an elf, or an Osyr who is determined to join the fight against the Oldest Adversary.   And so we descend into the cave system. We find cracks in the mountain with scarabs chittering and lurking about, but they are easily dispatched with a combination of my sound magic and Mistress’ water magic. Once, they try to group together into a larger spider-like creature. I can see how these things could become unmanageable very quickly.   We continue deeper and find an horse-sized Ingan with 8 eyes. It surges towards us and Mistress encases its feet in ice. For the first time, I summon my illusory duplicates in the form of Dal, Thalien, Bran, and Hella, and cast through Hella’s hands, sublimating the ice and shattering the Ingan into scarabs. I may not be an elemental caster, but with a fine enough focus, transmutation can accomplish some interesting things with the elements.   We slip deeper into the cave through shadows cast by the flickering magma, until we come to another chasm with a molten river flowing through it. Some tendrils diverge from the main flow and into a carved magic circle that pulses with energy...energy that flows from the Hand, imprisoned in the centre. All six of his limbs are encased in stone that looks like it flowed around him in its molten form, anchoring him to the ground. Symbols in a harsh, angular script are carved into these stone shackles.   The path ahead is simple, but treacherous - I will create shadows for us to use to slip across the river. Mistress will defend me while I cross the circle and try to free the Hand. Just as I reach him, I hear a roar behind me but there is nothing I can do but trust that Mistress will defend me as I work. Once again I turn to transfiguration and transmute the molten shackles into obsidian, which shatters easily from the frequency of my mastery of sound. As his hands emerge, I can see the horrible burns and disfigured fingers.   Before freeing the final hand, I grit my teeth and blood bond us, hoping that he’ll be able to carry his own weight. The runes that Kadia completed for me made me strong but not strong enough to carry an Osyr. I’m nearly overwhelmed by the pain I feel through the bond, my limbs aching from the burns he suffered. And then in an instant, it is gone.   I find myself in a dreamspace once again - a windswept beach and crystal spires in the distance. The Hand is there, whole and unharmed...and younger. He tells me we have time, in this dreamspace where it seems he has been for quite some time. He doesn’t recognize me, of course, and I stumble over my words identifying myself to him. He observes my runes, and the sort of magic I wield, and I feel self-conscious.   The Ingan, he tells me, drove the Osyr from the sea. The Empress sought to return her people to the ocean, and that is she waged her war of unification. The Ingan are an unstoppable collective (my heart pounds when he says this. I wonder if this is one Collective that we fight in multiple wars, in multiple times?) because they can break apart, scatter, and reform. Their consciousness lies so deep in the earth that it cannot be killed. They seek to transform the entire world into their home - molten, hot, and dry. Expansion is their goal, and there is no room for anyone else in their plans.   The Hand has been here, near death and unable to leave this dreamspace, waiting for a weapon to be used against the Ingan, for they cannot be defeated underground where they are close to the source of their power. He thinks that it must be severed from its consciousness before it can be destroyed.   He asks if I am willing to make a sacrifice to do this, and I say yes before I can even think about what other sacrifice I could possibly make. My magic is rooted in the act of sacrifice; I have given up my memories, and every family I have known, time and time again; who would I be if not for my sacrifices?   As I agree to whatever sacrifice is needed, he pauses and looks at me closer, seemingly at my entire life until this point.   “I had thought you would need to sacrifice your oath to the Empress, but you are already a perfect weapon, meant to strike at the heartsblood of our enemy. You have sacrificed again and again...I think you will be able to perform this rite without severing your connection.”   The rite he teaches me is one that gives me one opportunity to attack an Ingan at its core, severing its connection to the greater consciousness.   He wades into the sea and lets the water lap at his ankles, returning with a mussel from which he takes a single pearl on a chain, and hangs it over my head, to bring the strength of the sea with me.   And then he severs our blood bond, sending me back to the material world. I turn away from his older form and find Mistress facing an enormous Ingan, one that dwarfs the one I fought in the future. I shout for her to give me an opening and once again summon illusions of my family to stand with me, this time I bring Bran, Thalien, Hella, and Lyssa. They only last for a moment as I plunge through the heat of the Ingan with my sword pointed towards it, enacting the rite that the Hand taught me.   As I strike, I pour my fury and sorrow into the blade, like the tide pulling out my emotions. It sweeps through the Ingan and carries it out to sea, far from the safety of its collective consciousness. In an instant, it shatters into scarabs and then further into glass, defeated.   Mistress staggers over to me and her eyes return to their usual colour. She wraps her arm around me (just one, because the other is broken) and we take just a moment to breathe in the rapidly cooling air. The dry, oppressive heat is receding, leaving us in the cool darkness of shadows once again.   It takes us many hours to carry the Hand back to the surface and it is nearly morning when we finally emerge and camp just inside the cave.  

Day -3

In the evening, Mistress heals her arm and tends to some of the Hand’s burns. His eyes open for just a moment and focus on me.   “You are different from the dreamspace...I love mysteries…” and his eyes flutter shut again. I laugh at this. When I am less exhausted perhaps there will be time to dissect the intricacies of time travel and what it means for my life to have shaped me into the perfect weapon to strike at the Oldest Adversary and for the Empress to have given me the perfect name for my role. For now, I can laugh and poke fun at him, wondering if he’d still like mysteries if his life was like mine.   I suggest that we simply not tell him how we rescued him, and see if he likes that mystery as well. Mistress tells me that he is one of the few who could command her, as the Fourth Hand of Darkness. I laugh at this as well - he’s not my Fourth Hand of Darkness.   The evening subsides into more rest, entwined with Mistress in a comfortable pile. We talk about what is on both of our minds - having destroyed the Ingan, I might wake up tomorrow in my own time without her, and she will wake up...with a different version of me.   In the future I have only a few more weeks before I can send her a letter to her through the Shadowgate, and the prospect of doing so doesn’t feel as incomprehensible as it did a few days ago. She tells me she will count the days until she receives it.