The Great Core's Paradox

A sound.

“...happened here? Everyone’s just…dead…what could have done this?”

A voice.

“...xenlite destroyed...delegate’s already here. If she hears about this…”

A shout.

“...to do? There’s no way we can meet the quota like this! We barely even managed to move enough rocks to get in the damn door!”

Eli groaned, trying to lift an arm to bat at the air and quiet the noises down. Death wasn’t supposed to be so loud. Or so painful, either, he thought. His arm didn’t move, obviously. Because he was dead.

His stomach growled, though.

Loudly.

“What was that?” one of the voices said again, closer that time.

Eli wanted to call out, to tell the voices to be quiet, that they were disturbing his peaceful death. But even that was too difficult, even the thought of voicing the words like rubbing a wound far too raw. His throat ached with an unimaginable thirst.

Is this what death feels like, he thought deliriously. No wonder everything tries so hard to keep living.

Death sucked.

His stomach rumbled again.

“There it is again! That noise, something growling!”

“...yeah, I heard it. I swear, if whatever did this is still around here…”

Eli’s stomach rumbled again, and suddenly his entire world flipped around. Something slapped him in the face lightly, and then a little harder. Eli’s eyes fluttered open in shock, blinking against the dim light of the tunnel. The voices were clearer now, no longer distant murmurs but urgent whispers.

“He’s alive!” someone exclaimed, their tone a mixture of surprise and disbelief.

“Get some water,” another voice ordered. “Quickly!”

Hands reached for Eli, trying to pull him into a sitting position as a canteen was pressed into his hands - and then spilled down onto the ground, Eli’s skeletal fingers unable to form a proper grip. He watched the water run, feeling the cool liquid spread and seep into his boots.

“...more like a skeleton than a man, I don’t even understand how he could…” another of the voices was saying, the sound trailing in and out of Eli’s awareness.

I’m…not dead.

The realization did much to break him out of his delirious fugue, and Eli - with much effort - craned his neck toward the nearest of the voices. He didn’t recognize the voice’s owner, but his vision was so blurry that hardly meant anything. It felt like someone had dropped a pound of dust into his eyes.

“Damn it!” the voice called out, the man it belonged to lunging towards the spilling canteen and lifting it back towards Eli’s lips. “I got you. Here, drink.”

He drank, regaining some small semblance of clarity. Enough to speak, to give voice to the thing that he knew his body desperately required.

“...food…” Eli struggled to say. “...need…food…”

Something unidentifiable was pressed into his mouth, and Eli didn’t even bother to chew it before swallowing. “...more…”

“That’s all I got, do you think I walk around with snacks in my pocket?”

At that depressing admission, Eli’s head lolled back downwards, chin resting on his armored chest. Something slapped his face again, and a voice called him back to consciousness.

“Hey - hey! Need you awake, here. Everyone else…they’re gone or dead. What happened?”

Eli thought. He remembered. The snake. The dead-that-weren’t-dead. Something being pushed deep below his skin. Fleeing for his life.

Dying - or so he’d thought, in that final moment. Now, he wasn’t so sure. Unless…

Oh, Skies. Am I one of them now? Those things?

Eli panicked. His vision closed in at the edges. His heart pounded in his chest - and it was that very pounding that finally brought him relief. His heart pounded. Thrummed. Beat.

He was alive. Alive enough to be terrified, to panic at the thought of being dead. Alive enough to send his heart racing. He was alive.

“I…don’t know what happened,” Eli admitted, his voice hoarse and barely audible. The words tumbled out in a rush, disjointed and fragmented as Eli struggled to make sense of his own memories through the haze of delirium. “There…was a snake…and those things…the other guards…they weren’t dead, but they were and…it bit me and now…I’m here.”

The man who’d been holding the canteen frowned, his expression troubled. “We need to get him back to the tower,” he said to the others.

The journey back was a blur of pain and confusion. Eli drifted in and out of consciousness, the small morsel of food he’d received nowhere near enough to keep the excruciating sensation of starvation at bay. And, of course, his mana enhancement did its best to fix the issues that same starvation caused - sapping him dry of what little nutrients he had and exacerbating the issue further.

Stolen story; please report.

Underneath the armor, Eli’s body was little more than bone topped by a layer of skin.

Finally, they reached the familiar walls of the tower, the ever-present glow of enchanted metal worming its way through Eli’s closed lids. He opened his eyes, blinked, and then found himself somewhere else again. There was a cot underneath him, and his armor had been removed. Someone placed a spoonful of stew into his mouth, urging him to swallow, and Eli closed his eyes again.

Somewhere to the side, a pair of voices were locked in a conversation.

“...know what happened?”

“...delirious, sir. Couldn’t get an intelligible answer out of him. Something about a…snake? But, sir, the guards…the prisoners…they’re all gone. He was the only one left.”

“...I see…and the last shipment of xenlite we were waiting on?”

“Seemingly destroyed during the disaster, sir.”

There was a banging sound before the voices started up again.

“...need new blood to fix this before things spiral even further. Gather the men. We’ll have to make a visit to some of our neighbors. Get some volunteers. Skies know that it’s all some of them are good for.”

Eli lay on his cot, barely registering the nearby conversation. His mind was still reeling from the events in the mines, and every so often he’d imagine that a tiny snake was somewhere right behind him, forcing him to flinch away. He couldn’t shake the fear that the monster wasn’t gone. That Eli would see it again.

And that, next time, he wouldn’t be so lucky.

As the voices continued, discussing plans and strategies that Eli couldn’t fully grasp in his weakened state, he wondered vaguely what they meant by new blood and volunteers. But only for a moment; his thoughts were quickly consumed again by the rumbling in his guts, and a spoonful of stew that found its way to his mouth.

He swallowed it down, drifting off to sleep.

A snake-ridden nightmare quickly woke him back up.

Elara danced across the dueling ring floor, dodging spear thrust after spear thrust in a display of unnatural grace. Ewan followed her along, growing increasingly frustrated at his inability to land a blow. And, just when that frustration peaked, she twisted around a thrust, snapping a kick to land a boot upon his hand. With a yelp, Ewan lost his grip. The spear went flying forward and out of the arena, and Elara placed her weapon against the enemy’s throat.

“Yield?”

He sighed, nodding in agreement.

They quickly beat a retreat, leaving their borrowed sparring weapons at their racks and heading off to grab some food. As weird as it was, Elara found that she quite enjoyed eating in such a lively atmosphere. And, even better, the sounds reverberating from the dueling rings provided ample noise to cloak any conversations. Ever since their first bout, she had taken to having discussions with Ewan in the area. The bouts provided a good excuse for the two of them to meet and talk afterwards; they could have done it in her rooms like before, but Elara liked being out and about. It meant that she could listen in on any other conversations that might be happening in the area.

The constant noise didn’t really stop her from hearing anybody; once she started to tune out the harsh thwacks of wood against wood, Elara got along just fine. The perks of unnaturally enhanced hearing continued to astound. Earlier, she’d even heard hints of a Guardian Grove growing at the other end of the cavern, though nobody had called it that. Elara was too far away to see it herself, but she trusted the information. Nothing else she knew of could really be described as ‘a giant skies-damned forest popping up out of nowhere, no I’m serious I haven't been drinking’.

It was a relief to hear that the Little Guardian had found his way back to the others safely; it meant that Elara was able to put her full focus on the things that were happening in front of her, rather than worrying about where the little snake slithered off to.

With her food in hand and a hunger in her stomach, Elara took a seat at their customary table. Ewan sat down immediately afterwards, but he looked less interested in his food than she was; while Elara was already busy tucking in, enjoying the feeling of filling her stomach after a satisfying bout, Ewan was simply pushing his food around, a morose expression on his face.

Before she could broach the subject, he’d already started talking. “I’ve been thinking about what you said, that first time we talked. You know, about…” He made a meaningless gesture, as if that would describe the thing left unsaid. It didn’t. They’d talked about a lot of things.

“About…” she continued, motioning for him to continue. “You’re going to have to give me more than that.”

“You asked me what I thought would happen if we failed to gather up our tithe in time. I told you that we’d be in breach of contract. That we’d lose our Core, and maybe more.”

Elara nodded, remembering that part of the conversation.

“I heard something earlier - and I think…I think that you should have asked me a different question,” he said, a haunted look on his face. His voice was whisper quiet, and Elara wasn’t actually sure that his words would have been audible to anyone but her, even without the constant shouts and thwack of wood against wood coming from the nearby dueling rings. “I, uh, I’ve been paying more attention lately. To things. You know, just in case. And, well, I heard my father say something that I wasn’t supposed to hear.”

Elara leaned in. Ewan’s father was the Chief Treasurer of the White Towers, ostensibly the very man in charge of ensuring that, among other things, the yearly tithe was all accounted for.

“We’re short. By a lot. Something went wrong in the mines, something about a…snake? I don’t know…all of the people disappeared - the miners, the guards, all of them. There was only one guy left, and he’s barely talking. Still recovering, I guess.”

She kept a straight face, but immediately knew that the previously missing Little Guardian had played a role in whatever happened. Elara debated prodding for more information about that, but she figured that she could find out later. With a Guardian Grove in the process of growing elsewhere, it was clear the Little Guardian had already finished with whatever he was doing in the mines and returned to the others. Instead, she waited for Ewan to continue; there was something more that he wanted to get off of his chest. Something that, from the way that his eyes stayed trained on the plate in front of him, he was finding hard to talk about.

“...either way, they’re going to do everything they can to make sure we don’t come up short. Which means they need to put a lot more people in the mines, fast, and they need to work them to the bone.”

“How are they planning on getting these people, Ewan?” Elara asked, but she already had a feeling about the answer. She’d already heard more than once about the methods used to fill the mine when it wasn’t empty. Now that it was…

The boy looked very sad when he answered, disappointment heavy in his eyes. “With everything at stake, especially since they already think a member of Virtun is here and the others will be quick to arrive…they’re not going to worry about how it looks,” he admitted. “They’re going to take them by force, and gather the rest of the xenlite needed, one way or another.”

Elara stood up in a hurry, reaching over to grab her helmet.

“The question you should have asked. I guess…it was whether we would let ourselves fail to gather the tithe in the first place. Or, maybe, what we would be willing to do if it looked like we might.”

Ewan sighed again.

“I’m finding I don’t like the answer to that question.”