The atmosphere was tranquil enough to border on eerie. A breeze moved through the trees, rustling their pitch black leaves, and the distant sounds of unseen wildlife filled the space. Kael crouched in front of a beast's belly.
It was massive. Even on its side it towered over him several times his height.
He reached back and drove his fist into its hide. The echo reverberated through the space and was swallowed almost immediately by the sound of running water.
'Thick.'
He was starting to understand how much he had underestimated the beasts of the first Depth. This wasn't the first he had passed. It was closer to the twentieth. But he was beginning to move beyond the range of the mote that held influence over the dwellers. Every beast he had encountered out here was dead. From the look of them it was as though the mote had pushed them into a kind of idle state, minds going blank, until they died of starvation or simply forgot how to breathe.
"I got lucky."
He stood.
The hide had to be at least a fist's width thick. He had considered taking it as an ingredient, but he refused to activate the Stone Coffin within range of the Royal Noble families' mote. He also wasn't confident his blade would cut through hide like this without snapping.
He turned his head absently, thoughts drifting.
Arthur had raised a good point. Or rather, a good question.
Why hadn't the mote affected Kael?
He had no defensive mote. But he had always kept part of his consciousness split toward his inner realm, a habit Syleena had made necessary. It wasn't much of a defence on its own. At best it made him aware when his mind was being touched. It could not, by any reasonable measure, stand against a Primordial mote however, which he suspected was the source of everything happening down here.
So then why?
That was when he had noticed it.
Just as the eye had influenced Kael's thoughts in Velthoria, it was doing so now. But completely differently from before. He didn't fully understand the mechanism yet, but when the Primordial mote had reached into his mind, the eye had responded on its own, almost instinctively. The moment his Thoughts began to be displaced, thousands of tendrils had shot out from the golden cracks in his soul and entered his river of Will, taking hold of each affected Thought and guiding it back into alignment with his own intent.
If it tried to prevent him from thinking about the Royal Noble families, the eye adapted and worked against it. If the Primordial mote displaced a Thought three steps to the left, the Primordial eye moved it three steps to the right, returning it to its original path as though the interference had never happened.
Not a defence exactly but something closer to a perfect counter.
Kael started walking toward the head of the beast.
The eye felt just as much a mystery now as it had when he first came under its influence. But he had become certain of a few things.
It was a consumable mote, like the Golden Horned mote had been, absorbed rather than summoned. No one could take it from him, but equally he couldn't rid himself of it. Not that he wanted to.
From what he could tell, it had good intentions toward him. That made sense and didn't make sense at the same time. Motes were instinct driven by nature, inherently wary of humans, the only living things capable of controlling them. Or so he had always understood. But he was still largely unfamiliar with Primordials and the behaviour of higher ranked motes in general. The more he observed the more it seemed like the higher a mote climbed in rank, the more character it developed. As though genuine intelligence accumulated with it, slowly, the way understanding does.
He didn't let the excitement drown out his wariness though. The eye might be capable of countering another primordial mote, but it operated so far above him that he was effectively a hostage to its goodwill. He needed more control over it. Nothing about how it would act could be left to chance.
Kael rested his hand on the handle of his sheathed blade as he turned to study the head.
It was larger than any building he had ever set foot in. Its mouth hung open in something close to a grin, wide enough to swallow a village whole.
His grip tightened as he stepped closer.
Its eyes were the first part of its body that came close to his own scale. Grey, like fog had settled permanently inside them, clearly evolved for seeing in absolute darkness.
Only when Kael was a hundred steps away did he let his hand fall from the blade and hang loosely at his side.
A small squeaking sound came from ahead. A strange rat-like creature passed, moving on unnaturally long legs. It panicked at the sight of him, ran a tight circle, and darted into the bushes.
'This must be where the primordial mote's protection ends.'
At a first glance this distance shouldn't take weeks to cover. But with what stood between him and the other side, a few weeks was starting to sound almost optimistic.
"Shouldn't explore without being rank five, huh."
He couldn't help but repeat it.
The ground ahead simply disappeared. A cliff stretching so far in either direction that even on a clear day he wouldn't have been able to find its ends. It was as though the earth itself had been swallowed whole by the dark.
He walked to a small boulder, kicked it over the edge, then tilted his head upward.
The ceiling sat only thirty meters above him. Against what most people might assume, there were no stalactites. Instead the entire surface was blanketed by roots, swirling and twisting over each other in an endless tangle, some hanging straight down in search of water that may or may not have been there.
Bang.
Kael crouched with a sigh when the sound finally reached him.
'More than two minutes. That puts this drop at roughly four thousand meters.'
He brushed a water droplet from his forehead and walked to the edge.
How easy it would be to simply jump. He had survived a three kilometre drop, but he was uncertain if he had hit the ground at terminal velocity. Here he would reach it well before the bottom. And he doubted whatever lived down there would be as patient as Arthur had been while he regenerated. He couldn't allow himself to reach that state again. Not ever.
"Climbing it is then."
If he'd had two hands he would have clapped them together here. Instead he secured the blade on his back and stepped off the edge, catching the cliff face with his hand.
He looked down, found a suitable hold, and dropped himself again.
He had initially considered climbing back up through the sewers the same way he had come down. But Arthur's position and potential strength gave him pause. Information pathway, almost certainly, given how much he knew about this space at rank three, but he was also valued by the Royal Noble families, not in the sense they would go to war over him, but in the sense that he managed their operation here. If he disappeared it would be noticed. Arthur had also mentioned the entrance to the first Depth was guarded. It was entirely possible that Kael's fall had been either extraordinarily unlucky or extraordinarily lucky in going undetected. Which version was true wouldn't change the final decision though. He couldn't afford to appear on the Royal Noble families' radar yet, and he suspected his hunger to explore the depths further couldn't be satisfied any other way.
Kael's torn clothes thrashed as he dropped the last fifty meters.
Water erupted around him on impact, rising to his waist before settling back into the same mirror stillness it had held before.
Beneath his boots an underwater meadow stretched out. Grass plants with purple and white blossoms rose from the bed, swaying in slow synchronised movements, like a small sea of their own making. Curious koi circled his intruding figure in slow perfect loops, apparently unbothered by whatever had just fallen into their water.
Maybe the depths weren't all bad after all.