Chapter 37

  Raime thought about the conundrum he found himself in, and decided to opt for a middle ground.

  He had trained the blunt brutality of his body until steel felt like cloth; he had trained the finesse of his threads until they answered a thought before it fully formed. But in the quiet hours after practice—hours he’d spent alone in the temple basin—he had pushed at the thing he enjoyed the least too: control of other minds. He never liked the idea of it. He never wanted to be the kind of person who took people apart from the inside. Still, necessity had a way of making ethics into tools.

  The technique he'd been refining was surgical rather than invasive. Rather than overwriting a mind, he learned to fold parts of it in on themselves: memory first, then the associative webs that fed action from thought. In testing, he left his subjects intact but hollowed—able to perform learned motions, to follow orders, to respond reflexively to stimuli, while the memory of the instruction, the context, and the moral weight of the act were tucked away behind a locked door. They were functional mannequins with their will preserved but their recollection suppressed. It felt like mercy at the time. It felt like a promise: do not break what you cannot mend.

  Now he stood before three guards and the door they protected, and the promise felt thin. He could take control, and then release them with their mind intact, none the wiser to the manipulation.

  The cavern corridor folded into a low chamber where violet-purple crystal clustered like a congregation. Their glow made the shadows dense and dark. The guards paced in tight, synchronized loops—muscular silhouettes striding the way a clock ticks. He watched their minds like a field of faint, pulsing lights. They were not beasts. Not at all. Layers of discipline lay over their impulses: training, order, ritualized aggression. Each mind hummed with the residue of commands and counter-commands. Together they were a lattice; pull the wrong node and the whole thing might snap.

  He closed his eyes and breathed slow. Threads slid from the center of his consciousness, warm and precise. He let them fan out, reaching, feeling, not touching until he was ready. His sight sharpened—attributes lent him clarity—and the violet shimmer provided enough vision.

  You can do this, he told himself. But you have to do it perfectly.

  He began with a surface wash: a whispering, not of words but of tone. It slid along their minds and met the first wall of training. It pinged. The guards’ minds registered just an itch—but their bodies kept moving. Raime felt the hit like static sliding up his spine. He slowed his breath, steadied his focus, and adjusted. The technique was not domination; it was overlay, a soft bandage of forgetting.

  He sent the first anchor to the guard nearest him, it shuddered in place, a muscle twitch, then kept walking as if nothing had happened. Then he reached for more.

  The second guard presented a broader weave. He threaded the suppression into its edges, a strip of shadow that would swallow recent context. The guard’s eye flicked once, blank, then smoothed. Motion continued. Raime felt his confidence rise a degree. He became aware of the third guard as a distinct presence now—a darker, denser light. Something about that mind was thick, layered with defensive knots, a quality he’d met before only in the adult centipedes. This mind was clearly stronger, probably it was the highest in command among this group.

  Careful, he thought. Just a little push, soft as a whisper.

  For a moment, it worked perfectly. The third guard’s gait slackened, the purposeful angle in his shoulders softening; his eyes clouded as if sleep wanted to pull them down. Raime allowed himself a breath.

  Then the third mind fought back.

  A shock of raw resistance that struck his Threads like a physical blow. The psionic feedback hit his center, a jagged note that made his teeth ache. His hands shook despite himself. A scream of ancient, animal fury flared from somewhere below the surface of that guard’s thought—an echo of a command or a memory Raime had not expected. The guard’s head snapped up, pupil narrowing; his body tightened and swivelled, as if searching for the source.

  Raime’s control faltered.

  Fuck! What the hell happened!? It was working fine, damn it!

  The sentinel’s mind began to brush outward, tasting for the intrusion. If he backed away now, the guard would sound an alarm with the mental equivalent of a bell; if he pushed harder he might break something irreparably—or worse, leave the guard intact but aware in a way that screamed without speaking.

  He pulled inward, too fast, and the Threads recoiled; the partial folds he’d made loosened. Two steps of his plan collapsed into a single breath’s failure. He felt cowardice and clarity at once: this was the exact moment that would teach whether mercy was the wrong path in a place like Ithural.

  Calm came again. He let his will narrow to a single pinprick of intent and re-threaded the fold, this time slower, with a soft cadence meant to fool the mind into thinking the world was folding inward of its own accord.

  Soundless words ran in his head. The third mind met the cadence and, grudgingly, its resistance eased. The guard’s shoulders dropped; his jaw worked like a man shrugging out of a tight coat. He kept moving.

  Raime exhaled. He watched the three guards continue their loops, instruments of lethality and ritual, now walking with the hollowed calm he had given them. They looked the same. Their eyes matching with the violet light. But something fundamental had shifted: their memories of the last minutes, of seeing a lone intruder above them, would be gone. If he walked past them now, they would register a ghost of motion and then move on. They would not act, and they would not remember him.

  The fourth guard was not in line of sight, there was no reason to take control of that one too. He forced himself to move on from what he had done. This was not killing. It was not even going to harm them. It was theft—theft of context, of continuity. He had made them act without bearing the burden of the acts. He had made living puppets. Mercy in this case, he told himself, was a softer kind of violence.

  A new anxiety pricked him: he had never done this with such a spread. Three minds at once had been never tested. Here, in a place that hummed and watched, with beings who were neither animal nor human, he had pushed the edge of his skill. The technique had teeth; he knew that already, and he used those teeth to bite at his enemies. No matter how gently.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  He drifted forward, levitating low so that the halo of his weight did not draw eyes. The guards moved past him in a thinned sequence; their thoughts were closed petals. After he passed the one currently stationed near the entrance to a deeper part of the mountain. His Threads hummed, still tethered, still listening for a tremor, but nothing came. He looked at it, taller than himself, and built like a professional swimmer, all corded muscles and predatory efficiency, It held a spear made of a crude metal and wore little more than a ragged loincloth, but its visage was the most alien thing about it. Up close he could clearly see the exposed teeth, the muscles of the jaw and the strange conformity of its head. Raime studied the anatomy of the human body with great care in his first years as a medical student, and he could firmly say that while the creature followed a humanoid biped template, that was the end of the similarities between these creatures and a human. He couldn’t feel any heartbeat, nor he was seeing any superficial vein despite the thin skin. All the muscles had different attach points, different ligament placings, the joints weren’t similar to any he studied, he could tell just with an external observation that their range of motion was much broader in range than his own, it would be a hassle to dislocate any limb. The bones weren’t following a normal length ratio, and the cranium was composed of different sections too.

  I wander what kind of brain they possess, it doesn’t look like it’s divided into hemisphere from the ridges protruding under the skin…Doesn’t matter, I can’t just jeopardize this opportunity just to answer my academic inquiries. I need to move.

  The corridor beyond the guards yawned open into a vaulted chamber. An archway carved with the same sigils he’d seen outside swallowed the violet into deeper shadow. The air there was thicker, but he could again feel that pulse beat just beyond the stone.

  He should have felt triumphant. He had bought passage without killing or harming anybody. Instead he felt raw and hollow, like a man who’d paid for victory with some currency he could no longer afford.

  He steadied his hand on Thunk’s haft and let the Threads recede, rolling the folds closed like a book. They won’t remember, he whispered to himself, not sure if he was convincing the world or trying to convince his own conscience. They are not hurt, and they won’t know.

  But as he moved under the arch, the mountain’s pulse thumped against his mind—slow, measured, like a heartbeat that had been waiting for footsteps to reach it. Deeper in, something watched with attention that was not hostility yet not benign. He could feel intelligence, ancient and precise, turning its gaze toward him.

  His choice had carried him past the first test. The thin mercy he had crafted had not failed outright—but the feeling in his chest warned him that the price might only reveal itself later.

  The end of the chamber opened into a web of passages, each ribbed with jagged seams of violet crystal. Their glow more prominent here, the mountain was becoming brighter the deeper he ventured.

  Raime slowed his pace, threads unfurling with every step. He could sense them—the guardians—scattered like faint beacons. Minds pulsing with that disciplined aggression, their presence forming patterns in the stone. He moved by instinct now, choosing corridors that carried him nearer to the rhythm he’d been following since he entered the mountain.

  The first fork led him left. The passageway descended in a narrowing spiral, walls crowding in close enough that his shoulder nearly brushed. He let his awareness stretch far down the curve, but there was no mind, no sound. Only stone and the echo of his own breathing. When he reached the bottom, he found himself at a flat wall, smooth and blank. No door. No carving. No sign of passage.

  “Dead end,” he muttered, exhaling. His voice sounded too loud in the silence.

  Retracing his steps was worse than the descent. The empty corridor pressed at him, as though the mountain was squeezing his chest. He hurried back up.

  At the next branch he went right, where faint pressure tickled his senses. Minds again, disciplined but faint—like heartbeats behind a wall. He followed, weaving deeper until a faint light grew ahead. A checkpoint.

  Two more stood in a small alcove carved into the corridor. His Threads brushed their surface thoughts. They had orders, discipline and focus. Their mission was blocking the way forward.

  He steeled himself. Again, then. Don’t falter.

  The fold came easier this time. He was faster, cleaner, more confident—but not reckless. He slipped the memory-suppression around their thoughts, dulling awareness, leaving the rest intact. They kept standing, eyes glazed with the calm he had imposed. He drifted past, silent, heartbeat steady only because he forced it to be.

  This is wrong, a voice whispered in him. Each time you do this, you’re cutting pieces from yourself.

  He ignored it.

  Another corridor split into three. He probed ahead—two paths dead with silence, one alive with a pulse. He followed the pulse. Again it dead-ended. He stood in the stillness, jaw tight, before turning back.

  The map helped, filling itself in with his steps. But even with its guidance, the mountain felt like a maze designed to waste time and test patience. He pushed forward anyway, methodical, suppressing another pair of guards when their patrol loop crossed his path. By now, sweat prickled along his back; not from exertion, but from the stress of the infiltration and fear of getting found. The certainty that he’ll have to pave his way back with corpses if they noticed him there.

  They make it seem so easy in the movies… The super spy infiltrating and killing everyone between them and the mission. Reality really has a way of ruining fiction.

  Finally, the labyrinth ended.

  The corridor widened into another hall, not vast, but tall. The ceiling arched high above, heavy with jagged crystals that spilled violet light in a crown over a single door. The door itself was crude stone, massive, its surface covered in strange symbols and lines and framed by a growth of violet crystals.

  And before it sat a guardian.

  Unlike the others, this one was no soldier. No pacing steps, no crude spear, no animal discipline gnawing its mind. Instead it sat cross-legged on the bare stone floor, clawed hands resting lightly on its knees, spine straight as a pillar. A simple tunic draped its body, and where the other guards’ minds were lattices of command, this one was a pool. Still. Deep.

  Raime froze where the corridor opened. His Threads brushed the space carefully, tasting.

  The guardian was not asleep. Not absent. Its mind radiated calm pressure, like a boulder sunk in water. Not thoughtless, but thought contained. It knew he was here—or if not him, then the approach of something. And yet it didn’t stir.

  Another growth of crystals around the guardian hummed faintly, vibrating in harmony with the being’s stillness. They weren’t random growths. They had sprouted in a perfect circle, their violet glow framing the figure.

  He tightened his grip on Thunk, then loosened it again. Violence would not be his first choice. The presence in that mind was too deliberate, too prepared. And it felt powerful.

  He swallowed, a bead of sweat sliding down his temple.

  So this is the test. The others were just obstacles. Why does it feel like it’s expecting me? Did it notice me since I entered? Sneaking inside is virtually impossible, I know already that trying to control this one won’t work, and I will recur to attack only if I don’t have any other option left. So the only thing that remains is to…

  Raime’s thoughts were interrupted before he could finish them.

  The guardian’s eye opened.

  A single violet orb, perfectly centered in the middle of its face, cutting through the chamber’s glow like a beacon. The instant it locked onto him, Raime’s Threads quivered. A pressure surged against his mind—neither sharp nor hostile, but undeniable.

  Images bled into him. A procession of impressions.

  The slow breath of mountains, exhaling power over endless stone. Towers spiraling into skies black with stars. A rhythm of drums like thunder that rolled through caverns lit by the same violet crystal. A thousand figures standing in silence, heads bowed toward something vast, unseen, but radiant with gravity.

  Raime’s hand tightened on Thunk’s haft. His instinct screamed defence, but there was no attack—only a flood.

  The guardian did not rise. It did not speak aloud. The flow continued, smoother now, threads of concept weaving into his thoughts: a greeting, solemn and deliberate. A recognition.

  He forced his breath steady. His mind, sharpened by training, began to assemble the pieces. The intent was not to overwhelm, but to open.

  Then, the question came. Not a sentence, but a shape. A coil of meaning that sank into him like a hook:

  Have you heard the Call of our God?