The night had left me with an old man's back and nearly half a glass of rainwater in the hollow of the bark. I drank it slowly, holding each mouthful until it warmed, before crawling out of the shelter on all fours to find that it had weathered the downpour better than my knees. My stomach, empty since my arrival, protested as a matter of form.
Yesterday's pebble had at least given me a direction. A river had brought it into the world, and rivers have the decency to run along the bottom of valleys. So I went down, with the quartz in my right hand, the stake in my left, the sharp stones deep in my pockets, and the bark wedged under my arm, ready for the next rain. I found the stream by mid-morning, less than a kilometer from the shelter. My enthusiasm died the moment I knelt on the bank.
The water ran murky, laden with a gray silt that refused to settle. A slimy film coated the pebbles, and the Ether kindled an unhealthy glow in it. From the current rose an acrid smell of decay, where I had expected the green coolness of wet moss. I dipped my fingers in. Beneath the surface, the molecules swarmed, tying and untying their hydrogen bonds amid eddies of Ether. It was a superb spectacle, but it didn't tell me whether this water would kill me within the hour or chain me to a latrine pit for three days. One sniff of my fingers settled it. Without fire or a container to boil it in, I wouldn't drink a drop.
The silt thickened downstream, so for lack of anything better I headed upstream, watching the water clear a little as I climbed, until I reached a band of gray cliffs that closed off the vale.
As I approached, I made out broad black patches on the rock, smooth and glossy as obsidian, where the stone seemed to have melted and set again where it stood. It takes over a thousand degrees to make granite flow, lava temperatures, and I saw no sign of a volcano. Below the patches, the trees leaned the same way, away from the wall, like pines on a windswept coast.
A thicket quivered, and I raised the stake on reflex. The silhouette from the day before, with its overlong limbs, had hardly left me since I woke. A brown bird burst from the branches and skimmed across the water. I lowered the stake, calling myself paranoid.
At the foot of the cliff, between two thornbushes, a cave opened a good three meters above the stream. I studied it at length before venturing in. A line of twigs and packed leaves left by the last floods ran along the slope well below the threshold. The entrance was so narrow that a barrier or a fire would suffice to defend it, and it showed no sign of anything living there, not even a smell. Inside, the floor was dry.
That dry floor decided me. I doubted I'd come through a second soaked night under branches in good shape. The survival manuals put shelter ahead of water in their list of priorities, and that morning my back was their most convinced disciple.
The air in the cave was cooler and smelled of cold stone. The crystalline lattice of the walls stirred faintly under my perception, and I recognized its components by instinct, without really understanding how: quartz, feldspar, flakes of mica. In other words, granite, which I had studied under the microscope so often that I could identify it with my eyes closed. Here, that was no longer just a figure of speech.
The moment I laid my hand flat on the rock, a very brief echo ran up my arm, so distinct that my perception and the stone's structure seemed to have found a common frequency. With the quartz held against the wall, the image sharpened further: the cave took on the shape of a structure, with its sound zones, its stress points, and its cracks where the Ether seeped in threads of gold. I couldn't tell whether it came to repair or to finish the job.
I took stock of the place the way you inspect an apartment before signing the lease. In the ceiling, two old cracks had long since gone still. A tiny fissure crept along the foot of the wall, and another, wider, bit into the entrance, while the floor crumbled into grains at the exact spot where I wanted to sleep.
I started with the smallest, the way you begin a series of trials with the sample you can afford to ruin. At first, I laid my fingers on it only to feel it, but the urge to close it came right away. A resistance like slightly cold modeling clay gave way under my palm. A sting went through the hollow of my hand before warmth stretched along the fault. I pulled my hand back sharply. The crack had vanished. In its place ran a smooth, near-polished line that I followed with my fingertips without feeling the slightest ridge.
[MINOR MATERIAL MODIFICATION (STANDARD STONE): STRUCTURAL REINFORCEMENT]
[Bonus: First repair / Use of World Energy / Tangible impact on the world]
+30 XP
Progression: 57/100 toward Level 2
"You can weld rock?"
I had only restored the order the stone had lost, and on either side of the weld, the Ether already flowed more steadily.
Emboldened by how easy it had been, I tackled the crack at the entrance. It resisted, so I foolishly forced it until a sharp pain, like needles driven in from the inside, joined the heat returning to my palm.
The crack had narrowed by only half. Its edges had blackened and turned glassy where the rock had melted a millimeter deep before setting, and the Ether, far from flowing again, fled the area. The System granted me eleven points for this half-success, which I found generous.
My hand bore no mark. From wrist to fingertips, however, every nerve burned. I shook it in the cold air of the cave before admitting it would be wiser to practice my scales on a stone whose ruin wouldn't cost me my roof.
I went back down to the stream and picked a flat, fine-grained piece of granite the size of a plate, which I carried to the threshold and laid across my thighs. I traced its weave with the slowness of a watchmaker facing an unknown mechanism, then tightened it, timidly at first, then with growing confidence. The surface polished under my fingers until it had the smooth cold of glass, and in its depths tiny crystals formed, packed against one another by a pressure the earth would have needed centuries to impose. The System saluted the performance with fifteen points. I barely had time to smile.
The stone burst between my knees.
A chip opened my cheek in a thin, clean cut. I jumped back swearing, my hand clamped to my cheekbone, amid a spray of fragments. The biggest had rolled to the back of the cave, and the rest were no more than gray powder scattered across the entrance.
"What the hell was that?"
Warm blood between my fingers, I needed a moment before the answer surfaced from first-year lecture halls, where a mischievous professor had passed a Prince Rupert's drop from hand to hand before crushing it to dust with a pinch. You make one by dropping molten glass into cold water. The bulbous head can take a hammer, but snap the thin tail and the whole drop bursts into powder, because the sudden quenching locks in enormous stresses, balanced against one another, that only need a breach to release all at once. I had quenched my granite without knowing it. By tightening certain zones faster than the others could follow, I had loaded it with tensions it held as long as my will weighed on it, then released all together the instant I let go.
Back at the patch of sick ground, I knelt, laid both hands flat on the loose earth, and sought only to bring its grains closer, fill the voids, and spread the tensions as they arose so that none could build up anywhere. The soil yielded in light waves, in rearrangements so small I barely felt them. About ten minutes passed like that. When I opened my eyes, the earth had hardened under my palms into a smooth gray slab.
[MINOR MATERIAL MODIFICATION (MINERAL SOIL): STRUCTURAL STABILIZATION]
[Bonus: Stabilization]
+15 XP
Progression: 98/100 toward Level 2
So novelty alone didn't set the rewards. The material, the scale of the work, and its usefulness all entered into a calculation whose scoring table the System guarded jealously.
Day was already fading over the vale. I wedged the bark under the slight overhang of the entrance, where a night shower would fill it without my having to go out. I stretched out at full length on my new slab with the quartz on my chest. I was thirsty and hungry, my back ached, and my cheek stung. Yet I had dry stone beneath me and above me a vault whose every crack I knew. After two days of forest, this troglodyte comfort felt like a luxury bordering on the indecent.
The lab came back to me only then, for the first time that day. Over there, someone had no doubt already opened an incident file, sealed the door of the experiment room, and begun to fill in, in that careful handwriting reserved for catastrophes, the box where the names of the missing go.
Before closing my eyes, I turned my head toward the wall. In the dim light, the morning's weld still shone with a thin thread of gold.