Die. Respawn. Repeat.

Chapter 52: Crows and Cavalries

It's some time before Mari and Tarin return. Ahkelios and I spend the time talking about anything and everything, from our experiences back on our home planets to the builds I could potentially try to work towards. He tells me a little about his Sword concept, which does little except convince me that that's absolutely not the path I plan on taking.

He doesn't try to convince me to take that path either, to be fair. He seems to regret it. Ahkelios stares wistfully out through one of the windows in the hut, a finger tracing shapes on the ground, and after a moment I recognize the shapes he's tracing as a sketch a messy outline of the clearing he died in.

The fact that it's even recognizable in the dirt is impressive to me.

Mari chooses that moment to burst through the door, carrying a sopping-wet and cawing Tarin in her arms. "We back!" she announces cheerfully, and then unceremoniously dumps Tarin onto his bed. The old crow groans a little bit, pressing a wing against his back.

"If you not careful you put me in coma again," he grumbles.

"You more durable than that!" Mari scoffs.

"Were you carrying Tarin that entire time?" I ask, eyeing Tarin and then Mari, who puffs out her chest in pride. "Mari, that wasn't a compliment."

"Bah!" she says. "You not know how hard it is to carry angry old crow around. It compliment."

I... suppose she has a point? She's not technically wrong. Tarin pushes himself up off the bed, dusting off imaginary dust with his wings and somehow scowling with his beak, although it's more playful than anything else.

"Clean now!" he squawks. "We need talk. You can talk?"

There's a measure of concern in his eyes, though it takes me a moment to realize that he's asking me if I'm okay to talk. I laugh a little. "Ready as I can be," I say.

"You meet Naru," Tarin says, his expression settling into something serious. "You have question?"

"You could call it that." I want to know how he ended up like that, but it seems like a rude question to ask, and the answer is fairly obvious in and of itself the Trials must have done a number on him. "...What was his Trial?"

Tarin's face darkens. "He climb tower," Tarin says. "Need to reach top."

"That doesn't sound so bad." Judging by the expression on Tarin's face, there's more coming.

"He need fight to reach next floor of tower." Tarin pauses, trying to find the words. "One boss per floor. He not strong enough to beat boss. Not many ways to grow. People on floor not want help him. So he fight them to gain credits."

"Ah." A realization settles in. "But he can't get Firmament credits that way."

Sort of. I remember getting four credits here and there from various deaths despite not actually killing anyone or anything but I still don't know how to reproduce that. The majority of my Firmament credits have come from...

"Not unless he kill," Tarin says heavily, echoing my thoughts. "He talk to us. Use chat. We tell him not do that. But Hestia Trialgoers all dying. He one of last ones left."

"I can see how that can change a person."

"He weak," Mari scoffs from the side. "Coward. Could have trained more, but took easy option. Killed. Now he forget how not to kill. He hide behind his strength."

Tarin glares at her, but there's not much heat in it. "...Mari not wrong."

What they're painting for me is a picture of someone who grew addicted to power after being forced to gain it. I wonder why Naru didn't just ally himself with those on the tower but I suppose that takes a measure of trust.

I'm lucky, I remind myself. Mari, Tarin, and the rest of the crows they're extraordinarily trusting for all that I'm a stranger to them. I doubt things will remain this way once I head out into the wider regions of Hestia, especially the Great Cities that the crows have mentioned here and there.

"I sorry he kill you," Tarin adds after a moment. I can't help but snort out a laugh at that.

"Not your fault," I say. "I got to see Mari kick him between the legs. That was pretty great."

"You telling me I missed that?" Tarin exclaims, and at almost the same time, Mari lets out an irritated caw.

"I angry I not remember that," she says when I look at her. I laugh.

"The look on his face was pretty great," I say. "But speaking of remembering..."

I glance at Tarin. He still remembered the last loop he was in when we spoke during my phase-shift; I assume he still remembers it now. "You remember," I say. "How?"

"I not know." Tarin looks away. "Your friend know?"

Ahkelios blinks. "Who, me?" he says. "I have no idea. I didn't even know he remembered the last loop. That's really weird."

"Never happened to you, I take it?"

"No." Ahkelios pauses in thought. "Maybe it's something to do with the way the Interface tried to kill him? He wasn't supposed to survive that, right?"

"Interface weak," Tarin scoffs. I raise an eyebrow at him, and he studiously ignores my gaze until he finally relents. "...Okay. Interface not that weak. But I strong."

"Stronger than you look, I think," I say, and Tarin waves me off.

"Strong," he repeats. "Not strong enough. Integrators always watching."

It's not the first time he's said that. I stare at him for a moment, and he ruffles his feathers a little in discomfort. I wonder how involved he is with the Integrators, exactly.

"We're not going to be able to get much done if we try to hide from them forever," I say eventually. "If it didn't work before..."

Tarin is silent, and then he sighs.

"Integrators hard to fight," he says. "Because they watch. But maybe this different. You say you in loop, yes? It harder to watch things through loop."

Gheraa had said something about temporal banding. "You know something about what the Integrators want?"

Tarin points down. "They want Hestia."

"Don't they already have Hestia?" I frown. "The entire planet's under their control. They're using it as testing grounds for their Trials."

"No." Tarin frowns and struggles to find the words for a moment. "They want Hestia. They control... land. People. But not heart. You been to... big hole?"

It takes me a moment to figure out what he's talking about. "The Fracture?"

"Interface call it Fracture, yes," Tarin says, looking relieved. Presumably because he won't have to keep calling it the 'big hole'. "Better name. Fracture leads down, yes? To heart."

Oh, good. I'd been worried he just meant that the Integrators hadn't broken the spirit of the people, or something. That would be a good thing, but it's also not really information I can use. "The Fracture leads somewhere important?"

"Yes." Tarin stops, and Mari rolls her eyes from her position sitting next to him on the bed.

"He too scared to talk," she says, smacking him on the head with a wing gently although Tarin still rubs his head and scowls playfully at his wife. A moment later, he flops backwards into her lap, and she snorts as she pets him on the head. "He dive into Fracture once. Escape with his life. But barely."

"The Fracture is something old," I say. I've gathered that much. "Older than civilisation here?"

"Old," Tarin confirms. "We not know how old. I not go all the way down. But deep Fracture... dangerous. Very old mechanisms, very old creatures. Integrators want control, but they not able to go deep."

"Why not?" I ask. "They've got to be stronger than any of us, right?"

Even if the Interface doesn't belong to them, the Interface is strong. They're presumably powerful enough to control elements of the Interface, and they have to be stronger than their Trialgoers if they expect to control them.

"I not fight them before," Tarin says, shrugging. "But it not matter. Integrators not able to control heart. Need Trial for it."

"Why?" That doesn't make sense to me. The Trial is needed to control the heart of Hestia? "Do all planets have these... hearts? Are all Trials targeting them?"

"I not sure." Tarin hesitates. "But... I think yes. Hestia close to Source, I think. Heart very strong. Other hearts easier to conquer."

"Source?" I have so many questions.

"The Source of the Interface," Ahkelios speaks up, surprisingly. "Given that we suspect the Integrators don't have complete control over it, it has to come from somewhere. How do you know all this, Tarin?"

Tarin shrugs uncomfortably. "I fall into Fracture. I fall in... deep. It give memories. But memories... fractured, incomplete. Not always there. It clear now, might not be clear later. So talk now is important."

"The heart of the planet..." I muse. "It's related to the Trial, I have to assume. Hestia's has something to do with time?"

Tarin looks worried. "That explain why they want Trial here so badly."

"You aren't sure?"

"I not know that much." Tarin throws up his arms, and accidentally smacks Mari in the face; she squawks and swats his wing away, and I can't help the slight smile at their antics. They make a good couple. "I try tell others before. But they disappear. So..."

"Ah." He'd been scared to talk about it before, then. As a Trialgoer, I assume I'm relatively immune, or else the Integrators would be trying to get rid of me already.

I'm starting to put together a little more of a timeline, although not everything's clear yet. "Did Hestia always have Firmament?"

"It not called Firmament before Integrators." Tarin answers this question quickly. "It not the same before Integrators. Before, Hestia have... less. We crows call it the Wind. We put Wind into our bodies, make us stronger, see? We put Wind into items, make them stronger, too.

"After Integrators arrive, it become stronger, but harder to control. Become... heavier. They add something. They call Firmament."

"Right." I organize my thoughts, taking into account the information I got from the obelisk in that Hotspot. It's clear there was another civilisation here, although not clear that that civilisation is necessarily the first. "Ahkelios, did you have anything similar on your planet?"

"Only in legends." Ahkelios sounds thoughtful. "I think we called it the Light. There are a lot of children's stories about people wielding the Light and empowering their blades with it. I used to love those stories."

There's a pattern there. We have those same stories on Earth, too, except we call it magic and mana; I don't know if this is important, but I file this pattern away anyway. The crows are different in that they were outright actively using the Wind, while for Ahkelios and I our respective forms of Firmament became nothing more than legend.

Or something like that.

"So the Integrators want the Heart," I say. "We don't know what it is, or what it does, but we know it's probably at the bottom of the Fracture. The Trials are something used to try to control the Heart of a planet, presumably in some way that integrates it with their Interface, hence their name and what they're doing. Do I have that about right?"

"It close enough," Tarin says.

"The Hotspot basically told us there was another civilisation here before," I continue. "But my only guess from that is that the Interface creates skills out of phenomena that actually happen. And then there's Gheraa..."

"Gheraa?" Tarin cocks his head.

"The Integrator in charge of my Trial." I grimace a little bit, then explain my encounters with the Integrator; Tarin and Mari both listen in silence.

"So you not know if you can trust him?" Mari asks, and I nod. She snorts and fold her wings. "You not trust him. He Integrator."

"He seem like he help Ethan," Tarin argues.

"Integrator trick."

"He get hurt."

"...Also Integrator trick."

"Guys," I interrupt. "I haven't made any decisions about trusting him. But even if he's only pretending to be on my side, I can use that and if he's not pretending, then he's someone that needs help.

"I don't have to trust the Integrators to want to help someone being hurt." I clench my fist. "My phase-shift was about figuring out my foundation, and I decided I'm going to do whatever I want. Right now, I want to get Gheraa out of there. If he's an enemy, that will screw with his plans; if he's not, then I'll have rescued him."

"You not want to leave him inside to help?" Mari asks me, and I shake my head.

"We have a lot to figure out. But first opportunity I get, I'm pulling him out."

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