Chapter 364: Convictions

“When ya called us up here I never thought I’d be watchin’ one o’ yous carryin’ around a livin’ dungeon core.” Cedric eyed the orb like it was a coiled snake. “Never seen anyone do that before…almost expect it t’bite ya or somethin.’”

“Yeah, if I think about it, it’s the first time I’ve ever seen a live one up close like this.” Hart inspected the core. “It’s got kind of a sheen to it. Almost looks like a giant pearl.”

“But more dangerous than any jewel,” Drestra said, her voice crackling like flame. She looked from the orb to the Generasians. “Are we…supposed to see an image in it? Like in a crystal ball?”

“No,” Alex said, taking the core in both hands. “Nothing like that. As a matter of fact, you’ll want to watch the wrecked dungeon down there. Oh, and Cedric, Drestra? Pay attention to your mana senses. You’ll know why in a sec.”

The two Heroes frowned, but Hart already had his large eyes trained on the ravine, scanning the debris and dark crevices below.

“Right…I’m watching,” Cedric looked down.

“What am I looking for?” Drestra asked.

“You’ll know it when you see it,” Alex said, directing his mind to the core then shattering his mana into hundreds of streams and pouring it into the dungeon core. He called on the Mark and attacked the core from all sides, expecting resistance…but he needn’t have bothered. The orb was stronger, but not strong enough to stop his mana. It rushed through the entrances, bypassing the core’s weak attempts to eject him and then, he was in, right where he wanted to be, in the centre of the dungeon core, where its magic originated from.

Alex’s mana had entered a control centre of sorts, like a windowless room filled with levers, dials and buttons that drove the core, deploying its power in countless ways.

Eventually, the research team would have to explore and map it, but not today. Today was for controlling the dungeon core for the Heroes to see. So he moved his mana, sending it flowing into the centre of the core, then ‘pulled a lever.’

A sudden rush of dark mana poured out.

“What?” Drestra cried. “Beware, everyone! The core, it’s—”

Thoom!

From the bottom of the ravine, a five-foot wall erupted, shedding soil as it rose. Carey made a choking sound as the colour drained from her face, then she began to whisper, making the sign of Uldar over her heart.

“I can hardly believe it, even though I’m seeing it for myself,” Professor Jules murmured, taking a notepad from her robes. She conjured a pair of Wizard’s Hands and a pen. One held the notepad steady, while the other began to record her observations.

Baelin simply said. “And there we have it.”

As for the Heroes?

They looked stunned.

“Wha—?” Hart grunted, drawing his blade. His head pivoted between the orb and the wall. “What just? Cedric, Drestra! What happened? What in all the Ravener-spawning hells did I just see? Since I can’t do any of that fancy stuff like sensing mana, what just happened?”

“No…” Cedric’s jaw dropped. “Noooo bloody way. No. No, I must’ve been bewitched ‘cause I’m bloody well seein’ things! Feelin’ things that don’t make any bloody sense! I thought I felt mana come outta the core and flow inta the gorge down there, then that bloody wall popped up!” He was wild eyed.

Cedric ground his teeth, his gold tooth glinting in the sunlight. “No, no, no. No. Can’t be. Did the dungeon core do that on its own? They can’t do that! They need a monster to control ‘em! Everybody knows that, I learned that shite from the priests a day after I got marked!” He touched the golden scales glowing on his bare chest.

“Drestra!” The Chosen turned to the Sage. “Drestra, your mana senses’re better than mine! Drestra? Drestra?”

But the Sage wasn’t moving.

It was like she’d become a statue in mid-air. Her cloak and veil blew listlessly in the brisk autumn wind. She was shivering, but Alex suspected it wasn’t from the cold. Her golden reptilian eyes slowly slid from the wall below, up to the dungeon core in Alex’s hand.

“Impossible,” she murmured. “I felt your mana…I felt it flare and go into the core…and then that wall came out of the ground. It felt like when a dungeon commander’s controlling a core…it’s…oh by the spirits! Did you do that?”

Alex slowly nodded. “Yeah. It takes a lot of practice with mana manipulation, and when the core’s fully powered, it’ll fight you like a demon, but yeah: you saw what you saw and you felt what you felt. I actually controlled it.”

His eyes drifted from Hero to Hero, noting their body language.

Cedric oozed disbelief. He’d crossed his arms defensively, and his openness wavered before Alex’s eyes. He was trembling. Drestra was stiff, and though her veil hid most of her face, her emotions were coming off of her in waves, just like the aeld tree.

Disbelief. Fear.

…Anger.

As for Hart?

Alex couldn’t really read him: the Champion’s body language was a jumble, too alien for him to distinguish one past Champion from the next. But his face?

Shock had faded.

His jaw was set.

His eyes were measuring. Calculating. Like the experienced soldier he was.

All of a sudden, a deep sound boomed off the ravine and soared above the trees as Cedric burst out laughing. His head was thrown back, his eyes were closed. But the laughter had no trace of humour in it, it was harsh and cynical, and he kept it up until he was coughing, breathless, and his voice was hoarse.

When he finally opened his eyes, they were hard, ringed with anger and something else. Mixed emotions? Maybe uncertainty? Maybe fear?

“Look, if’n this is some kinda bloody joke that you people are puttin’ on, then s’not bloody funny,” the Chosen’s voice was like flint, his eyes raked over all four Generasian wizards before returning to Alex. “What’s this, some sort o’ illusion? Some trick?” They flicked back and forth between Carey and Alex. “The two o’ you should know better, bein’ fellow Thameish an’ all! Draggin’ us all the way out here for some cruel trick, I’d expect that from the fae, but you lot?”

An eyebrow rose, his eyes filled with suspicion, and Alex watched him closely. There was something fighting within him. Confusion? Recognition and denial? Desperation? Horror? Either way, Cedric’s outrage was shaky. Anger was leaving his voice. “An’ you, Alex, back in the—”

“Stop,” a deep voice cut in.

Hart was looking at Cedric with an expression that could’ve been carved from stone. “Stop. You’re not making any sense and you know it. Why would this be a joke? You sound like you’ve lost your mind.”

Cedric whirled on Hart, going red in the face, then seemed to bite back his words. His attention turned to the orb. “Bloody hell…just…bloody hell.” Was all he said.

“And now you can see why we wanted to show you this,” Baelin said. “And why we kept quiet about the details until you could see it for yourselves. You didn’t believe your eyes when the evidence was right in front of you. You certainly wouldn’t have believed anything we simply told you, and I cannot blame you: as we’ve been discussing, this has been an unforeseen development that calls many things into question.”

“Many, many things,” Drestra agreed. “How…how did you learn about it?”

Alex glanced at Baelin. “We were here investigating a dungeon and looking to get our hands on a living dungeon core to see if we could figure out how it made its monsters. But…while I was messing with it…well, you just saw what happened.”

“By Uldar,” the Sage said. “This is…this could change the war. But how did you make it work? Did you use some special mana technique from Generasi?”

“No,” he said. “As a matter of fact, you and Cedric could probably do it with a few minutes of practice. The core doesn’t have much mana left, so it won’t be strong enough to stop you.”

“What…what? By wildfire,” the Sage swore. “Well if you could do it…and Cedric and I could—”

“Ugh, bloody hell, can’t bloody believe it.” Cedric ran both hands through his hair. “Can’t bloody believe what I’m listenin’ to. Mortals controllin’ dungeon cores? Not even the most crazed doomsayer could think up such bloody nonsense.”

Drestra looked at him for a moment, then at Baelin. “So when you did it, Chancellor Baelin, you must have—”

Now it was Baelin’s turn to laugh. Cedric and Drestra startled, but Hart was still focused on the ravine, calculating.

“Oh, no, I cannot do it,” the chancellor said frankly. “Unfortunately, I could not even begin to try.”

He explained how he couldn’t interact with the dungeon core.

Now Hart's focus shifted back to the wizards. “It kinda sounds like a gate that only opens for some folk, but not others.” He looked at Alex. “And if it only opened for you, why do you think Drestra and Cedric’d be able to do it?”

“Because I, to my dismay, did it too.”

The Heroes’ heads abruptly turned toward Carey.

“I’m afraid it’s true,” she said. The young Thameish woman set her jaw and held out her hands toward Alex. “Would you be ever so kind as to hand me the dungeon core?”

A determined look had taken her features, and Alex did as she asked. “You need…any guidance?”

“No, it’d be better if I did it myself,” she didn’t try to hide her bitterness. “And show off this…‘gift’—” Disgust had joined the bitterness of her words. “—that’s been given to us.”

“What d’you mea—” Cedric started, but trailed off.

Carey’s eyes were closed. She gripped the orb tightly between both hands, and her knuckles paled. Alex felt her mana pierce the dungeon core.

She was slower than he was; minutes passed as they floated in silence, with Drestra, Cedric and Hart watching the core, Alex and Baelin watching Carey, and Professor Jules’ Wizard’s Hands taking notes.

Time dragged by, but Carey stayed focused until finally, she found her way into the centre and took a deep breath.

Alex felt her mana twisting, trying to catch on to…anything inside the core.

Then a rush of dark mana exploded.

Thoom!

In the valley below, earth shuddered and a patch of soil became a spewing mound of mud. It reminded Alex of Vesuvius’ shell.

“Damn my eyes,” Cedric muttered. “Damn my bloody eyes!”

Carey handed the dungeon core back to Alex without a word. Her fingers clenched and released, her face quivered as though she were fighting tears, but beneath that, her anger was unmistakable.

“There you have it. So far, I’m the only one—aside from Alex—who can control this thing,” she paused, biting her lip. Her tone was resentful. “Do you want to take a guess as to what Alex and I have in common that no other member of the research team does?”

“You’re both Thameish,” Hart said. “I remember that there’s nobody else from Thameland who’s part of your expedition.”

“There’s another thing, holy Champion: we’re both followers of Uldar,” she said, and her words were solemn, like she was pronouncing a death sentence.

The air seemed to grow colder and nobody spoke for heartbeats.

“...oh. Oh,” Drestra said, her voice very quiet. “Oh.”

“It just keeps gettin’ better n’ better,” the Chosen said, looking up at the sky, his eyes searching through the blue. “What’re you thinkin’ up there, Uldar? What’s the plan in all this?”

“Why…would only our people be able to use it?” Drestra asked.

“That’s not the question you need to be asking,” Hart growled.

All eyes turned to him.

“This tells me something. Either we’ve been lied to, or every scholar, priest, and Hero who came before us have been the biggest idiots ever born.” He shook his head, clearly irritated. “And you can’t tell me nobodyever picked up a dungeon core in the last how many thousand years and thought to fiddle with it. C’mon, I’ve seen enough wizards to know that they’re all the same—no offence meant to you four—poking around in all kinds of different magic stuff. I can’t believe that not even one of them ever tinkered with a core; it'd be like expecting a fish not to bite at a worm. Way too tempting to ignore.”

“You’re thinkin’ folk’re lyin’ to us?” Cedric asked.

“Yeah, I kinda do,” Hart said. “It wouldn't be the first time I’ve been hired by someone to do a dirty job, only to find out the job’s a hell of a lot dirtier than they said. Mercenaries get lied to all the time. You know why?”

He bared his teeth. “Because a lot of lords think we’re fodder. And I sure as hell don’t like being treated like fodder.”

Alex saw doubt go through the other Heroes.

This…this was going better than he could have hoped.

Drestra looked at Hart. “You’re right…something is wrong. This is too big to never have been noticed. And the fact that we’ve only seen followers of Uldar control this core, well…it makes me wonder.”

“You said Cedric or I could do this, Alex?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Good.” She held her hand out. “I want to try it and see for myself. Then…we have a lot to talk about.”