“Hoo,” Tara exhaled, forcing her breath to exit in a steady stream.
She sat cross-legged on her bed within the former slaves’ temporary encampment. Tara had initially suspected that Nemesis was throwing them all together in a room due to some snobbish disrespect—not that it mattered. Her compatriots lived essentially in a cage, so even sharing a single room was a massive improvement.
However, Nemesis had showered them with food, clothing, and—literally—showered them. They had some kind of plumbing that allowed water to fall from the ceiling. Standing under the water, which felt like bathing in the rain, was an experience Tara would never forget.
The kindness they had been shown by the scant few members of the guild they had met, coupled with the fabulous meals and living conditions, had Tara beginning to believe Theron when he said there were no guest rooms. How such a titanic structure could be built without expecting to have company was beyond her. Theron’s explanation was straightforward, but also difficult to parse.
“Our lady built the guild exactly to the specs we need. There’s not more than a single bedroom for every member. When you use the bathhouse, you’re using the same facilities we use. When you eat in the dining hall, you’re sitting at the same tables we sit at.
“Might be hard to believe, kid, but there wasn’t any ‘visiting’ back in our day. If you were showing up at our door and not a member of the guild, well…I’d hate to be in your shoes. It was real dog-eat-dog, though I hear that’s not changed much after two hundred years.”
That was certainly true—the Crater, the Peaks, it was all kill or be killed—but even the clans had holdings for various visitors, and they were just as brutal as what Theron described.
Tara inhaled steadily, forcing her body to remain calm, despite what felt like fire running through her veins. Her idle musing was helping to distract her from the pain, but she could not afford to be too loose with her thoughts. The mana exercises Nephthys had described were brutal, and even worse, they required her to actively think.
She almost wished she could do something physically taxing, like digging holes. At least that way, she could zone out and forget about how her body screamed. Not so with mana circulation, though, and it took all her concentration to make sure she did not scream to match the cries from her muscles and bones.
She pushed her mana through her body, circulating it throughout her frame in a pattern that matched her Light spell, or an approximation of it, at least. This was what Nephthys suggested: manually circulating her mana—a nearly insane notion to Tara, as the Words handled mana circulation during a spell’s cast.
How could she ever circulate her own mana better than the force that controlled the world? Yet Nephthys had clearly demonstrated that such a thing was possible. Or if Tara took Nephthys at her word, she had. The Bolide demonstration was obvious even to the untrained.
Nephthys’s self-cast spell had been significantly stronger and faster. It was possible that she had simply specified a lower power output when using the Words to cast as a feint, but not only would Nephthys have no reason to do that, it would not explain why her self-cast was faster than the Words’.
No, Tara suspected that Nephthys was being straight with her, so straight that it was uncomfortable. The woman acted as if she had never cast with the Words at all. How was that possible? How would one even learn to cast on their own, never interacting with the Words? Had Nephthys simply found Praxic spells and studied the diagrams long enough to cast them herself?
Impossible.
“Haa—hoo,” Tara breathed, steadying herself once again.
Losing herself in thought eased the pain slightly, but she also lost her calm; her breathing became erratic. One thing she knew for sure was that the body would follow the mind, but if she let her body lead, her mind would follow. A chaotic body would lead to a chaotic mind, and she did not want to know what would happen if she failed to circulate her mana, leaving it to run rampant and uncontrolled through her body.
It already felt like she had molten lava moving within her, and this was the controlled version. It felt as if the mana were scouring her out from the inside, obliterating anything in its path, be it flesh, blood, or organs.
With a long exhale, she streamed the mana back into her core, deciding her practice would have to end for the time being as her gut rumbled. When the last trickle of mana faded from her body, she bolted upright. She cleared the distance between her bed, positioned near the back of what was obviously meant to be some kind of storage hall, and the door in a matter of seconds.
She covered her mouth as she sprinted down the large corridor, grateful there was no one around either to get in her way or see her like this. She flung the door open to the nearest toilet—blessedly unoccupied—and bent over the strange water-retaining bowl on the ground.
What she heaved was repulsive beyond imagining. She had thrown up plenty, just like anyone else, yet it had never been this…dark or odorous. The black sludge exited her mouth far too slowly for her liking, and she followed her retches with a good deal of gagging and spitting, desperate to get whatever horrendous infection possessed her out.
Huffing and puffing, she flipped the lever to send her shame away. Leaning back against the wall, she stared at the ceiling, contemplating.
What was that?!
Tara felt as if she had excised a demon. Strangely, she felt good now that it was out. Her mind was focused, sharp. She felt no pain, her body not even sore. She had thought for sure that the mana scouring would leave a mark at least as bad as exercising, yet she felt as if she could run the perimeter of the Crater without stopping to catch her breath.
She sat there, slumped against the bathroom wall, for a few minutes as her sweat dried up, gathering herself. Eventually, footsteps hurrying past the door, accompanied by eager voices, drew her out of her reverie. She recognized Numa’s voice among them and opened the door, just as they passed.
“Oh, Tara! You’re just in time! Come on!” Numa squeaked, surprised by Tara’s sudden emergence.
She grabbed Tara by the arm and ferried her along with the small group down the hall. She noted that most were carrying some form of cleaning utensil: mop, broom, or bucket. Numa herself had a broom thrown over her shoulder that swung precariously close to Tara’s head as they fast-walked.
“What’s going on?” Tara asked.
“We asked Ramose where we could help today, and he suggested the farm,” Numa replied, wearing a bright smile.
Tara was relieved to see her condition. She was still far too thin, but color had returned to her face, and the bags under her eyes were lessened. The sunken cheeks and dark lines around her sockets would take more than a few days to remedy, but her progress was undeniable.
“The farm? That would mean—” Tara started.
“Going through the core!” Numa finished, laughing.
Although they had been shown kindness over the past few days, Nemesis was not foolish enough to grant unfettered access to their base’s interior. They had been settled in a storage hall, set up as a bunkhouse, along the exterior corridor just inside the front gate. The bathhouse, toilet, and other facilities were all present somewhere along this enormous entryway, which Tara inferred was meant for visitors.
Ironically, Nemesis seemed to have facilities for day visitors but none for overnight guests. Granted, the guild was not an inn, but Theron seemed to suggest that they expected no visitors at all, so having some facilities and not others was strange.
This sort of quarantine meant that most of Tara’s group had seen precious little of the guild, and even fewer of its actual members. Even Tara herself had only seen a bit more thanks to her visit to Nephthys’s chambers and the vault, and those visits had seen her following Ramose through a complicated labyrinth of corridors she could never hope to retrace on her own.
Whether Nemesis had secretly confirmed that none of the group were spies or were simply beginning to trust them more, the farm was at the core of the base. This meant that getting to it should mean going through what Theron fondly described as ‘another world’.
It was becoming almost like a legend within the group; what wonder could impress itself so firmly in these strange, powerful people’s minds?
“Ah, there you are. I was starting to wonder if you got cold feet!” Theron bellowed from the doorway ahead, boisterous as ever.
His grin grew as he noticed Tara being dragged along with the group. He turned around and stepped forward, the door sliding up soundlessly to admit him.
“Haven’t updated any of the security to allow you all free entry. Sorry, but it’s dangerous around here. The farm animals can be as dangerous as any animal, but I’d be more worried about you getting too close to one of the other members’ workshops. You don’t want to be too close to a master while they work, especially at your levels,” Theron chuckled, walking through the door.
Tara squinted as a bright light suddenly assailed her, lifting an arm to shield her eyes. She passed through the door, lowering her arm slightly, and gasped. Before her was another world.
A circular room—though that word failed to capture its scale—stretched before her, easily a mile in diameter, maybe two. She stood on a terrace overlooking the room's bowl-shaped floor. The center contained a lake of the clearest blue water she had ever seen, occupying perhaps sixty percent of the total area.
Running through the lake were four arms in a cross that met at a platform in the middle, though whether this was a platform atop the lake or an island, she could not tell. The four arms of the cross led to opposite sides of the rounded room, resembling a compass’s cardinal directions, while the central island’s diameter was about a third that of the lake’s.
The ground surrounding the lake was terraced into five distinct levels, each rising five-to-ten stories above the previous. Scale was difficult to tell, both due to Tara’s distance from it all and the enormity of the room. This was construction on a scale she could scarcely imagine. Capital cities in the largest kingdoms would be envious.
Though she could see small structures, or what appeared to be small structures from this distance, dotting the island in the lake and the terraces around, what immediately drew her eyes was in the air.
Four islands of different sizes floated hundreds of feet above the lake, their shapes reminiscent of when Tara had yanked large weeds out of the ground. There were large trees and vines and all manner of greenery occupying the top of the islands, while the dirt and stone beneath tapered down to a point, bursting with hanging roots.
The largest of the islands was around half the size of the island in the lake, and they got progressively smaller and higher from there. Dark shapes back and forth from the islands, which Tara intuited to be fowl of some sort.
Above it all was a blue sky, as blue as any she had seen while in the Peaks, where the air was clear and dry. The sun shone down, providing natural light and warmth throughout the space. Clouds dotted the sky, though they were sparse.
This had to be an illusion. Tara knew intellectually that the pyramid's ceiling would be above, and the sky above Nemesis was choked with fumes. However, the warmth the sun provided was real. She felt it on her skin, which was particularly sensitive to the light above ground.
“Welcome to the core,” Theron said, turning around with his arms spread and a grin on his face.
Not for the first time, Tara realized that the people she was dealing with were of a quality and scale she had never encountered before.