Chương 111: 102. Egersis

The keeper sleeps with the line and wakes with it. A hand carrying the pledge needs to prove its worth. Lack of it at a relay will prove catastrophic. — Codex of the Long Watch, Operational Directive Arthur kept his shield up long after it was clear there was nothing left to use it on. They had come up onto the cape in a loose diamond formation, weapons drawn, but the headland remained utterly silent.

There was only the wind, the scent of hot stone and crushed thyme underfoot, and the columns at the end of the land drawing closer with every step. The pull was unmistakable. Now, with the temple a hundred metres off and closing, it had teeth.

"Anything?" Sarah asked, scanning the area.

"Empty," Donna said. She had drifted out to the right, reading the ground, where the terrain was nothing but bare rock and baking sun.

"No tracks. Nothing's been up here in weeks." She looked toward the columns.

"At least we won't be ambushed from behind."

"You must have a rather weird definition of optimism," Steve said. The platform, when they finally reached it, opened up to reveal the white marble columns glowing gold in the high sun, with the Aegean Sea laid out endlessly before them. The columns stood back from the seaward lip, and the rock ran out past them to the drop and the water beyond. It was easy to see why the view had filled so many postcards. The sight was jaw-dropping.

Steve stopped in front of the nearest column and placed his hand against the stone like a man greeting something he had only ever read about.

"We talked about this a few days ago," he said.

"Now theory meets field work. Count the flutes." Arthur studied the grooves and counted.

"Sixteen."

"Sixteen. Not twenty," Steve said.

"Every Doric column has twenty, because twenty is what the proportion wants. It was codified by the Roman architect Vitruvius. These have sixteen." He moved down the line, one hand trailing along the ancient stone.

"And no entasis. None. A standard Greek column swells in the middle so the eye reads it as straight when you're standing in front of the temple. These don't swell. They're dead straight, and the shafts are drawn longer and thinner than the rule allows."

"Because this temple was meant to be seen from the sea," Sarah said.

"Isn't that what you said?"

"Yes, exactly," Steve agreed, pointing past the cliff's drop out to the open water.

"From down there. From a ship. A temple this high on a cape would look squat and stubby from the deck. So they built the columns taller than tradition dictated and removed the bulge in the middle." He paused, looking up at the structure.

"There is something so satisfying about confirming a report with physical observation."

"You must have a rather weird definition of satisfying," Donna replied. Arthur took the massive view in, then shifted his focus to the perimeter, scanning the open spaces around the temple while the other three admired the architecture.

"I've been here three times before," Sarah said, looking up at the gold-lit marble.

"Not once did I think I'd be back here to activate magic." Ether is not magic, and nodes are just systems, Archie said. Granted, you do not currently possess a proper frame of reference for it.

"Oh, hush, Archie," Sarah said with a small smile.

"You have no sense of wonder."

"Steve," Arthur called out.

"Where's the waking point?" Steve had the ledger open already.

"Last line of the corner verse," he said, reading off the page before looking up to scan the seaward edge.

"'The first hand sleeps in the wave-cut stone.' The first hand. A wave-cut stone." They found it right at the lip. The rock at the temple's seaward edge had been worked, or perhaps had grown, into a shallow socket the size of two cupped hands, smoothed and hollowed out precisely where the living stone met the open air above the drop. The sea lay twelve metres straight down from the edge, clear enough that the jagged, dark shapes of submerged rock showed through the aquamarine water.

Set into the back of the socket, so faint it was almost lost in the natural grain of the stone, was a carved spiral.

"That's the one," Steve said quietly.

"Seeder symbol." Donna looked at the socket, then down at the drop.

"Walk me through it before anyone touches anything."

"Arthur lays his hand in it," Steve said.

"He's the only one of us the nodes answer to, being the candidate. It wakes up and does whatever a node does. Probably triggers a guardian, though."

"Flimsy, as always," she replied.

"We're standing on a strip of rock the width of a corridor over a twelve-metre drop to a rock garden. Let's at least spread out and take positions before we ring the doorbell." They set up. Arthur stood squarely in front of the socket. Donna positioned herself a pace back and to his right, safely off the lip, where she could move in either direction without the edge coming into play. Steve backed off fifteen metres, his focus rod raised and his line to the socket perfectly clear.

Sarah took her place a few paces to the right of Arthur, staying within healing range. Donna gave their positioning one last glance and nodded.

"Touch the stone, Arthur." Arthur set his palm into the wave-cut stone. The rock gave a faint, deep hum, and the spiral lit up in a now-familiar violet-blue. The light bled out of the socket, tracing down through the stone beneath his hand and travelling onward, plunging down into the cape, through the cliff and straight into the water below. Then the sea turned violent.

"Get ready," Arthur called out, his eyes locked on the churning water.

"Something's happening." Twelve metres down, the clear water humped into a dome and broke, as if shouldered by something, rising fast from the depths. Something came bounding up the sheer cliff at a terrifying pace, cleared the lip in a sheet of water and brine, and landed on the platform between the party and the columns, the ancient rock cracking under its massive weight. It stood taller than Arthur by half again. The top of the guardian was the shape of a man.

It had clearly defined shoulders and arms and what could be thought of as a face, though everything was covered in barnacles. Below the ribs it stopped being anything so mundane as a man. The torso ran down into a knot of muscle and grey-green hide and slick scale, tapering as it went down. It carried a length of three-pronged barnacled metal in one fist, longer than Donna was tall.

Water sheeted off the guardian continuously, pooling and vanishing the moment it hit the stone floor, as though the creature had brought a piece of the sea up with it and meant to keep it close.

"So much for positioning," Steve said, his voice tight.

"What is that? A merman?" Donna muttered. Somewhere to his left, Steve muttered an ancient Greek name under his breath, but Arthur didn't have the time to ponder what the thing was or what it was called. The guardian was already moving, lunging straight at him. Arthur got the shield up, triggered Counterforce Plant, and set his feet to eat the blow and bank it. The trident came down and Arthur took it square on the shield, except that the lattice never flared to bank anything. There was nothing to hold.

The blow broke over the shield like surf, a thousand small impacts at once with no single force to gather. The technique closed on it and found nothing solid to store, guttered and bled out useless through his arm, a hollow shock running to the elbow and dying there. Worse still, the iron of the shield had changed where the trident's prongs had made contact.

A patch the size of his hand had gone dull, pitted and chalky grey, as though forty years of harsh coastal weather had landed on that single spot in the span of a second. Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings. Arthur stared at the ruined metal for the half-heartbeat he couldn't afford to waste. He had stood his ground against everything so far, because the shield always held. That was the entire architecture of how he survived and kept the rest of them safe.

Now, that architecture had just failed completely. The shield would wear away under this thing, one strike at a time, no matter how perfectly he angled the defence. He took the next strike on the move instead of planting his feet, angling his wrist to slide the heavy prongs off the shield-boss rather than meeting the impact head-on. Even the glancing pass left a deep, chalky grey scar down the face of the Ironhold.

"We might have a problem," he called out, his voice straining over the wind.

"The shield won't survive this." The guardian answered by sweeping the trident low. Arthur lunged backward, the prongs missing his legs and striking the base of a nearby column instead. Old marble met ancient metal and lost instantly. The white stone aged before their eyes, the surface turning pale, brittle and porous before cracking straight through. A heavy section of the column broke loose and came down with a thunder of dust and shattered rock.

Sarah had been moving closer to Arthur to position herself for a heal, and the falling slab clipped her shoulder. The impact knocked her sideways, driving her straight toward the crumbling edge of the platform. She went down hard on her hip and elbow, her fingers scrabbling desperately for purchase as the broken rim of the cliff began to disintegrate under her weight.

"Sarah!" Donna shouted. Arthur threw himself in front of her and triggered Contact Reinforcement. It felt like ages since he had last deployed the technique in the deep, underground levels of the hypogeum. The Ether flooded down through his legs, anchoring his boots to the stone and forcing the reinforcement channel into the fracturing surface of the cliff. The broken edge stiffened under the technique, the stone knitting just enough to hold her weight.

"Get her!" he roared, locking his legs to maintain the skill as he absorbed another heavy, grinding blow against his shield. Sarah's boot slipped out over the open air just as Donna lunged, catching her wrist and hauling with a hard, violent wrench. For one suspended second, Sarah hung precariously over the twelve-metre drop to the sea. Then Donna dragged her bodily back onto the platform. Sarah rolled inward, coughing through the limestone dust, her arms scraped raw where the debris had caught her.

The guardian turned its attention back toward them, the water still sheeting off its grey-green hide. Its next strike hit the floor precisely where Sarah had been lying a second before. The marble aged visibly under the trident, veins of white turning to soft powder. A jagged crack raced outward, and a massive chunk of the lip sheared off, sloughing away into the aquamarine water below. Arthur's technique couldn't hold the fractured rock together against a direct strike from the weapon.

He cut the channel, letting the skill go, and moved fast toward the temple structure.

"Inside!" Arthur shouted, gesturing with his maul.

"Back from the edge!" Donna had moved wide, circling into the spray. She activated Threshold Drive, crossing the platform in a stuttering sequence of afterimages that tore through the sea mist. She came hard at the guardian's flank, targeting what should have been a blind side. The thing was too fast. It pivoted on its dense, scaled lower torso, faster than its massive bulk should have allowed, and brought the trident around in a flat, lethal sweep.

Donna was forced to burn the very last of her speed burst just to stay clear. The metal prongs missed her chest by inches, striking the marble floor instead. The stone aged instantly, and another large bite of the platform broke away, tumbling into the sea.

"Arthur," Donna snapped, her breathing ragged as she recovered her footing.

"It's turning the ground into dust. We can't win a fight of attrition."

"I noticed." Arthur closed the distance on the next strike, shield raised high and maul ready. The trident gave the guardian too much reach for a standard approach, so he met the incoming prongs on his shield-boss, angling the iron to deflect the thrust away. The weapon gashed another pale, chalky line across the face of the Ironhold, but Arthur was already inside its guard. He drove the heavy head of the Skullcleft straight into the metal shaft.

The guardian jerked, uninjured but forced a fraction off-balance by the sheer impact. Arthur struck again, driving the maul into the creature's encrusted forearm, then shoved forward with the full weight of his shield to force the massive entity back. Steve moved the moment Arthur bought him the opening. Stepping out from behind a column, he levelled his focus rod and let the Matrix engage entirely on thought. Heat surged down one channel; absolute cold drove down the other.

The Convergence met directly inside the guardian's torso, where the living tissue could not equalise against the sudden thermal disparity. The creature seized. Its muscles locked rigid. The lower coils spasmed without rhythm, and the heavy trident arm dipped toward the stone. Steve kept channelling, his face tight with concentration.

"It's open," he panted.

"Not long." Donna had anticipated the opening. She was on the move before Steve finished the sentence. Threshold Drive flashed again, crossing the marble in a blur of afterimages before she buried the Ravener axe deep into the seam where the upper human torso met the lower knot of muscle and hide. The guardian bellowed, a wet, deafening roar, and tore itself half-free of the thermal seizure through sheer brute force.

Whipping the trident sideways in a blind, furious sweep, the creature swung directly where Arthur was standing. Arthur angled his shield upward to catch the blow. The trident connected with the iron, compromising its structural integrity even further, but the slope of the shield forced the prongs to skip off in an upward arc. The deflected strike smashed violently into the temple column beside them.

The next thing Arthur felt was a feeble shove from behind, prompting him to move more out of surprise than the actual force of the push. The column cracked and crumbled on his right, collapsing straight toward Sarah. She had tried to scramble clear after shoving Arthur out of the danger zone, but the ancient marble gave way too fast. Heavy debris rained down across her side, trapping her beneath a massive falling slab. Her cry was sharp and raw.

Arthur saw the trident coming back around, aimed straight at a target that could not move, so he did. He threw himself over Sarah, the shield taking the brutal sweep that would have broken her body. The trident struck the centre of the shield-boss with a hollow, dead thud. Another massive patch of iron dulled into a chalky grey, and Arthur felt the structural strength of the metal weaken in his grip.

While the trident was still moving through its arc, he clipped the weapon's shaft with all the force he had left, trying to disarm the guardian. The ancient metal rang out and kicked sideways, the prongs crashing into another upright column. Through the rising dust, Arthur saw Steve scrambling for cover behind a neighbouring pillar. Arthur turned, using his shield to shove a heavy slab of the broken column off Sarah, before immediately pivoting back toward the threat.

Donna was a flickering shadow near the guardian, burning her third burst of speed to keep its attention, though the creature's quick pivots left her unable to find a clean opening. Arthur dropped his shield and hammer, mentally thanking Donna for buying him the window. He wrenched Sarah free from the remaining debris, ignoring her sharp cry of pain as he dragged her bodily away from the edge. She got clear, coughing and bleeding from the impact of the stone, but she was out of the line of fire.

Her shoulder and collarbone were a mangled mess. Arthur grabbed his shield and maul from the dirt; there would be time to count injuries later. If there was a later. The moment Sarah was clear, Donna disengaged and drifted behind the guardian, killing her technique to conserve her resources. Arthur smashed his maul hard against the face of his shield to recapture the creature's attention. Flakes of brittle, decayed iron chipped off the front, fluttering down to the stones.

The guardian turned toward him again, its heavy trident raised high. Arthur met the incoming strike with his shield angled just enough to spoil the line of the thrust, then stepped inside the trident's massive reach and drove his maul hard into the creature's forearm. The guardian jerked back from the impact. He followed through immediately, delivering a heavy shield-boss strike straight into its chest, before bringing the maul down to clip the side of its torso.

From behind a column, Steve lifted his focus rod once more. The guardian seized again under the sudden grip of Convergence, but this time Steve didn't stop there. He snapped his free hand forward and loosed a concussive shock wave simultaneously. Two spells occupying the same breath. The kinetic blast slammed into the guardian's chest and drove its massive bulk backward, just enough to unbalance it right as Donna triggered her fourth Threshold Drive to bury the Ravener axe deep into that exact same ruined seam.

The guardian convulsed, its grey-green hide rippling as it tried to recover its footing and failed. Arthur saw the opening. He stepped past the line of the drooping trident and brought the Skullcleft down onto the base of the guardian's skull with everything he had left in his arms. Hauling the maul back, he drove the iron head into the creature's wrist. Having taken two direct hits earlier, the encrusted joint gave a sharp crack and shattered completely.

The heavy trident slipped from its grip and skittered across the marble floor. The guardian lurched, but it did not fall. Stripped of its weapon, it came back at Arthur with a savage, bare-handed grab. Arthur took the massive claw swipe directly on his shield. The compromised iron groaned, and a large piece of the Ironhold finally shattered and broke away entirely.

Arthur lunged with his broken shield, driving his weight forward to anchor the beast and keep its massive bulk from toppling back into the rest of the party. Steve reacted before the entity could reset its stance. A Thermal Lance snapped from the tip of his rod, a hard spear of concentrated heat driven straight into the guardian's torso. The creature's body arched violently with the hit, its muscle shuddering under the sudden impact. Donna was still burning through her technique.

She materialised directly behind the guardian and drove the Ravener even deeper into the open seam, and this time the gap-seeking blade stayed in long enough to matter. Arthur swung the maul up again, striking the base of the skull a second time. Something inside the neck ground together and finally gave way. The great body sagged, its muscles still twitching, refusing to understand that it had been beaten. Donna wrenched her axe free with a wet twist and drove it in one last time.

This time, the upper human torso buckled completely. The lower, scaled coils shuddered, locked and then folded. The guardian crashed down onto the platform in a heavy flood of brine, barnacles and shattered stone, shaking the entire headland under its massive weight. ETHER ABSORBED: +3, 000 LEVEL UP: LEVEL 20 INTEGRATION: 1, 114 / 3, 712 ATTRIBUTE POINTS AVAILABLE: 3 SARAH LEVEL UP: LEVEL 19 INTEGRATION: 1, 344 / 3, 456 ATTRIBUTE POINTS AVAILABLE: 3