The hunter plucked it from the blade, turning it over and over between his fingers. Frowning, he sheathed his knife and then reached into one of his many pockets with his free hand. After some rummaging, he found what he was looking for.
It was another seed. This one was roughly rounded in shape; it looked like a walnut, and was just as wrinkled, though its surface was pinkish-white rather than brown. I saw my avatar glance over curiously. Touching minds with her, I gleaned that she recognized the object as having been cut from the mole-rat queen we’d fought, months ago now.
Longshank held it out in his palm, comparing it with the fangfin “seed” in his other hand.
I activated Insight. Nothing happened. No matter how hard I stared at the seeds, the Augmentary remained a blank.
I recalled the scouts had harvested a similar item from the dire badger queen in the forest. I’d caught a glimpse of it before it was handed to the botanists. It had been of a similar wrinkled texture; silver-white in color with black grooves, it had been a perfect match of the fur of the creature from which it had been taken. A creature which had also been a “dire queen”.
Since Insight only worked on living things, there was no way to be sure, but I was willing to bet the butchered fangfin—which was larger than the others that had attacked us—was also indeed a queen.
“But what does it all mean?” asked Ket when I told her.
I didn’t know. I felt there was a connection here, but I was missing some vital component that would help me put everything together. It didn’t help that my mind was still reeling from the flashbacks to my past. After so long with barely a hint of recollection of my former life, to have experienced so much of it, so vividly, was like drowning in memory, and I still hadn’t properly caught my breath.
“Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Just a bit disoriented,” I lied.
The words tasted sour. Withholding the truth from Ket—my only companion for so long—felt wrong, but I’d never quite been able to shake the memory of her reaction upon first learning I’d been a dark elf. Given that these new memories confirmed what I’d long suspected—that I most certainly had not been a shining beacon of benevolence among my otherwise maligned race—I decided to hold on to them for the time being. I’d process them later.
Besides, I had a task to complete before I could afford the luxury of wallowing in my past.
“I’m going to try something,” I told Ket.
Activating Double Sight took me a moment longer than usual. My concentration was still somewhat scattered, and it was hard to focus, but soon I was looking out through Ris’kin’s eye. Her blind right side felt even emptier without the presence of Sir Fura; I recalled seeing the squirrel safe on the bank and hoped it had remained that way. My avatar was saddened by his absence.
Ris’kin felt significantly weaker than usual—no doubt a consequence of fighting for her life under a crushing weight of water—but that didn’t make me revel any less in the sensation of having access to working limbs and all five senses.
I reached down and closed black-furred fingers around my gem. I braced myself, then lifted the gem from the ark.
Nothing happened.
Blackness did not descend as I expected. It seemed that so long as I was using Double Sight when my gem was removed from its anchor—in this case, the holy box—my consciousness would remain tethered to my avatar rather than being sucked away into the void.
It had its limitations—I could no longer slip back into my god’s-eye form—but as a temporary solution, it was good enough. A quick test reassured me that I remained within Ris’kin even when she was no longer in physical contact with the gem. I relaxed a little and finally took proper stock of our surroundings.
With Ris’kin’s darkvision, the illumishroom’s faint light made the area beyond its greenish aurora even darker. There was no sound beyond the running current and the gnome’s breathing, both echoing in the narrow confines in counter-rhythm to the beat of Ris’kin’s own heart. The weight of the mountain pressed on the ceiling above us, and I felt the brief touch of an alien sensation: claustrophobia. I found myself longing for fresh air and clear sky, for sunshine and rain and the scents of grass and earth. I couldn’t tell how much of it was Ris’kin’s and how much was mine. Clearly the past few weeks spent out in the open had affected me more than I’d thought.
Well, it’s a good thing we’re heading back up to the summit anyway. One way or another.
Before us lay two options. The first was to ascend the mountain from within via a rough passage Ket had discovered in the corner of the stone ceiling. We had no idea where it led, if anywhere—I attempted to scout it via god’s-eye, but the vertical shaft continued to climb beyond the upper limits of my Sphere. The handholds carved into its sides looked precarious at best.
Our second option was to risk the river again and then climb the mountain from the outside. But the river flowed west and curved around the mountain. That meant we’d been carried around to the same side Ris’kin and I had scouted previously—the side where we’d encountered the mountain bear.
The Augmentary had said the bears were known for using their keen sense of smell to track prey for miles. If it caught even the slightest whiff of squirrel-fox…
I tried to picture us managing the same daring escape as before, except this time with Longshank and my gem. No, the swim and the subsequent climb were both too risky. Besides, the journey had taken Ris’kin almost five hours. We no longer had that kind of time. Our only
