Heir of the Fog

CHAPTER NINETY

Only the Climb

Months drifted past, marked only by the steady glow-and-dim of Vadis's ceiling crystals. During that span Rogara rose from half-starved scrap-picker to the name whispered whenever the Saruk drilled at dawn.

I watched every step. When she sparred, I borrowed her eyes; when she slept, I crouched in the shadows, Hazeveil drinking the light around me. Each time practice tore a muscle fibre I rewove it before morning; each time fatigue blackened her limbs I sluiced life-mana through tissue until the ache dissolved. A normal Saruk might stagger for days after a hard bout; Rogara woke recovered in hours, sometimes less.

The weakest part of her, once that paper-thin heart, now beat stronger than most Vadruk could boast. Her core, refilled whenever reserves dipped, thickened and clarified with unusual speed. Vadruk instructors, impressed, allotted extra mana-crystals. By the third week her ebony core touched its peak. After that I could flood it thrice a day without straining her body, drawing barely the mana harvest of a few heartbeats for me.

Sharn, skeptical at first, came to hover at the edge of the training ring. Though she had scorned my choice, ambition outweighed pride: if this frail Ultharis could ascend, Sjakthar's name would echo deeper through the abyss. She tutored Rogara in forms and doctrine, especially doctrine. I noticed the results the first night I slipped into trance.

"Oh great Baruk…" Rogara began, voice low. She recited phrases clearly shaped by Sharn: reverent titles, miniature litanies of gratitude. She knew I was no God; still the prayer steadied her breathing, eased the fretful flutter beneath her ribs. Belief itself, I realised, could warm a mind whether or not the object was divine. Humans had taught me the same lesson, even if the belief was based on a lie; Orcs differed little.

I did not discourage the ritual. When she reached the end of a whispered stanza I sometimes sent a single pulse through the bond, a simple acknowledgment and nothing more. Each time, pride kindled in her chest and spilled faintly into mine.

Weeks lengthened into a season. My interventions grew lighter: a minor tendon repair here, a subtle tweak to calcium flow there. She trained sunrise to crystal-dim, then recovered almost as swiftly without aid. Her stature remained small—compact muscle layered onto a narrow frame, but no Saruk now mistook compact for weak.

At last I admitted the truth: until Rogara shattered her current limit and shed the ebony shell, there was little more I could do. The canvas was ready; the next stroke had to be hers.

The crystals high overhead had dimmed to twilight violet when I spoke, voice threading along the bond: "It's time for me to leave Vadis."

Rogara looked up at the glittering ceiling, thinking the words came from the sky itself. "Oh… Great Baruk, are you sure? Where shall we go?" She never guessed I stood less than a spear-length away, Hazeveil's shadows folding light around me.

"I am going," I clarified, "but you will stay."

She gasped, shoulders tensing. "But… Great Baruk, I should follow—or… is that my mission?"

A flicker of concern crossed my thoughts. What exactly has Sharn been drilling into her? I had watched Rogara's bouts, not Sharn's lessons. Orc custom was not mine to judge, yet the creed of blind obedience did not please me. I allowed the prayers because they brought comfort to Rogara, but I could not let it develop further than that.

Aloud, still within her head, I answered, "I have asked you to stop with 'Great Baruk.' My name is 'Omen.' No more, no less."

She hesitated, torn between reverence and the unfamiliar plainness of a name. I had a title, for sure, but I doubted "Artifact Holder" or "Chainrunner" would mean anything to her, so I continued before embarrassment could take root.

"Yes, this is your task—always has been. Kharvad begins next week. You will descend into the lower caves, return as Vadruk, and keep rising until you forge yourself into a Baruk." That was why Sharn wanted me to create a warlock, after all, she would live for her purpose, and I saw that it was also what she truly wanted.

Rogara bowed her head. "As you say, O—Omen." The title almost slipped out again; she caught it just in time.

I could feel her uncertainty ripple across the bond: the knowledge that Kharvad kills as often as it elevates. Stronger warlocks might roam below, and stray onyx beasts hunted those tunnels for easy prey. But fairness is no part of the cycle.

"You may still die," I admitted. "That choice, to live or to fall, belongs to you alone."

Even with distance between us, the link would remain. I could no longer mend tissue with life magic, yet a pulse of mana, when truly needed, would still reach her.

As farewell, I resolved to grant Rogara her first blessing.

Everyone in Vadis already assumed she possessed one; Sharn called her surge "a mighty Khoris," and Rogara herself believed the same. They mistook daily stitches of life-mana for divinity. A genuine Khoris is tied to will itself, not merely acts of kindness.

I pressed a palm to the lens beneath my ribs. There, behind the pulse of mana, rested the quieter well of will, a resource that does not refill with rest. To share it is to thin my own boundary against the world; still, a warlock deserves more than borrowed strength.

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A filament shimmered forth—silver-white, laced in green life-mana, edged with hair-fine frost. I spun it thinner than breath, guiding the green aspect along the bond until it hung over Rogara's sleeping figure.

"Live so long as thy mana lasts," I whispered, letting the words fall directly into her dreaming mind.

The thread slipped through skin, wrapped her ebony core, and sealed itself in a slow pulse of light. Painless, yet I felt the pull inside me—an ounce of will severed forever.

The life-mana filament for self healing became her first true aspect, a gift her body could barely afford. Yet that scarcity made it ideal. With so little mana on hand, the blessing would lie dormant until crisis demanded it, flaring only when life itself balanced on a blade.

Self healing is dangerous not because flesh refuses to knit, but because flesh knits too eagerly. New cells form in a rush; errors slip through, and errors breed mutations. A few rare beasts carry built-in sentinels that patrol and correct those faults. Rogara and I do not. I survive battlefield regeneration by anchoring layers of runic "kill switches" inside every cell, a mechanism that first revealed itself in the quiet aisles of my mind-library when I touched life-mana years ago.

Rogara cannot yet bear such latticework, so I forged a simpler fail-safe: her own poverty of mana. The strand will awaken only in mortal peril, drinking her core dry to seal the wound, then falling silent until she replenishes. A single life bought at full price.

Should she limp home defeated from Kharvad, alive but mana-drained, the blessing could curdle into a curse, its unchecked growth spawning tumors. But I knew Rogara's heart; she would sooner die in the caves than return bearing failure.

When the binding settled, our wills chimed together, then drifted apart like joined bells left to ring on their own ropes. She slept on, peaceful.

Hazeveil folded snug over me. I watched a moment longer, counting her newly steady breaths, then let the shadows swallow my presence. "Earn your ascent," I said, voice a hush in the stone hall. Whether she heard or only dreamed, I could not tell.

I stepped from the temple, trusting that the next time I glimpsed these caverns it would be through the eyes of a Vadruk.

***

Leaving Vadis marked only the first rung of the climb. I traced my path through the upper caves the way a scribe inks a labyrinth, cautiously, revising each time I sensed I was walking a familiar path.

Despite all the knowledge I had gained in the abyss and this strange sense of connection to the other aspects of myself, as the same clarity I had in my mind-library began to color my thoughts, my objective remained unchanged: to leave the abyss, to reach the surface again, and to feel the true sky, not its imitation.

So I climbed. The upper caves formed a snarl of switchbacks, slanted crawl-spaces, and echo wells that could turn a wrong footstep into an endless loop. Each time I discovered a new junction I carved a rune into the rock and transferred the sketch to my notebook.

When a path ended above the deep abyss, I froze the humid air into stepping-discs, crossed in silence side by side with the wall, then searched for a passage that angled upward. It was slow, obsessive work, but losing a week to the maze would have cost me more.

The higher I moved, the richer the crystal seams. Here the walls gave off a pale emerald glow—bright enough for moss but not bright enough to mimic Vadis's sky. Where crystals multiplied, I soon discovered, creatures multiplied faster. It was among those light pockets that I found the first other settlement: a honeycomb of mud towers whose inhabitants resembled furless apes. Their females birthed litters of six, culled three by daybreak, and marched the survivors straight into a miniature proving pit.

That colony was only the first. I recorded seven in total—seven that I could find, at least. Each belonged to a species with an absurd birth rate; each practiced a culling trial; each sheltered at least one warlock wearing Sjakthar's mark like a living seal.

The most alien settlement perched on a ledge above a slow lava river. Its citizens were four-legged, one-eyed, with tails as long as their torsos. They spoke entirely by tail vibration: a triple-crack for greeting, a rolling flutter for warning, a descending snap-snap for mourning.

Mimicking the language bruised my spine for days, but I learned enough to eavesdrop on councils. Their rite, rough kin to Kharvad, dropped the young into a spiraling trench. Only the single strongest emerged, wearing recently grown bone plates streaked with crimson. Watching, I felt the same chill of recognition I had tasted in Vadis: birth, trial, crimson ascent, and then the long slide toward the true pit.

The constant flood of horrors I had battled in the deep abyss was no accident. The abyss was a farm, its product measured in crimson cores. Sjakthar's warlocks stood as registrars: at least one per settlement, often more, each blessing hopeful champions to improve their odds below.

Sharn's eyes, it seemed, were a rarity. None of the tail-speaking warlocks so much as twitched when Hazeveil drifted past. So, the moment my sketches and tissue samples were secured inside the ring, I turned to depart, only to feel a sharp tug in the lens at my chest.

"Rogara," I whispered, letting the name ride the immaterial current.

Her perceptions flooded me—a torch sputtering in an uneven corridor, the reek of damp clay. She stood in a feeder tunnel two levels beneath Vadis, a corridor pocked by narrow shafts. Worms bred there; old tracks criss-crossed the floor like dried rivers. Had I been present in flesh I would have heard the worms' burrow-rumble, smelled their acid glands, felt micro-tremors in the stone. Through Rogara's ebony senses I felt only a prickling wrongness.

She heard my warning and peered upward, scanning the cave roof for flying monsters when the danger oozed below. A mistake, but one she needed to make. Over the past month the pattern had repeated: she wandered close to peril, I felt it, and every instinct screamed to guide her hand. Each time I had held my tongue, knowing that coddling would rot the very will that set her apart.

Should I break the rule now? A single pulse of direction and she would shift her weight, feel the vibration beneath her boots, leap aside before the worm breached. But the lesson would dissolve the moment I left her sight. Kharvad's arena would not pause so I could whisper corrections.

Grow or perish, I reminded myself and by extension reminded her. I quieted the bond to a mere thread, watching through her eyes as the ground beneath her right foot began to swell.

If pain was coming, it might scar her memory deep enough to replace inexperience with instinct. And instinct, not borrowed sight, was what a future Baruk must wield.

I let the silence stretch, trusting that whatever happened next would serve the design better than any rescue. Then I turned from the ledge above the lava river, notes folded, map updated, and continued my ascent—while far below, fate opened its jaws around my warlock.