“So why are you here?” Yun turned and faced Laurence. “It’s been a long time”.
“Too long,” Laurence replied. “I’ve been working on bringing her back, and I discovered something. It’s nothing definite but I have a massive clue to a way to actually bring Cleo back!”
“So you’re here because of that...” Yun sighed and looked into the middle distance. “What do you want, brother?”
“Come with me. We’re going to get her back. We’ll be the first people in the history of the Tower to bring a person back to life. Doesn’t that excite you a little?”
“You and the boy?” Yun turned back to look at Laurence. “That’s a little light”.
“We have Peter as well, but we need more. That’s why I’m trying to get everyone back together. If we work this as a group then there is nothing that can stop us. We’ll be untouchable”.
“Peter? The Mephisto boy?”
“The one from spirit,” Laurence said. “He came to me with some dumb prophecy about me finding a clue to solving his problem with Rose”.
“Is he still chasing her?”
“No, he seems to have caught up with her. It didn’t exactly go to plan though, and now he’s basically in the same situation as me”.
“Rose is dead?” Yun frowned. “How?”
“I have no idea. He’s not told me. Anyway, are you going to come with me?”
“Stay here a while,” Yun replied, “I need to do a lot”.
“Alright, I’ll stay for a little while, we aren’t on any clock other than my sanity really”. Laurence walked back over to the edge of the stairway he watched Peter struggle for a few moments before turning back to his brother. “Is there any way of speeding Peter’s journey up here? As much as I like to watch him struggle, we’ll be waiting here for a while if we keep letting him”.
Yun smirked and waved his hand. Almost immediately the space the stairwell took up seemed to be compressed and the thousand or so steps between Peter and the town itself became a single step. Slumping down on the ground, Peter held his body up with a pair of shaking arms. Rivulets of sweat ran down his face as he tried to catch his breath. He looked back down at the thousands of steps that now sat below him in horror; there was something truly unsettling about someone who had such fine control over space that they could transform miles into millimeters. Laurence and Peter both saw that this would be the ultimate weapon of assassination in the hands of a Destruction practitioner, but fortunately for them, Yun did not seem to favour that.
He pulled Peter up and they began walking through the town, all the while his truesense fired off at the arrays and glyphs that formed the keystones of the town. The more he looked around the more he got a feel on the path that Yun had eventually chosen. Everywhere he looked he saw golems and mechanisms that allowed for anyone to actively manipulate them. He smiled, his brother had chosen a path that was surprising, but not unheard of. As they continued their path through the town they watched as a young girl stuck her hand into the ring on the abdomen of a golem that stood on the corner of the street they were walking down.
Laurence stopped, his eyes open wide as he watched her pull out an orange, or something that looked very much like an orange. She patted the edge of the ring and watched as it blinked out of existence, leaving a simple copper ring behind. As the golem stood back up the girl began peeling the orange and eating it as she walked away, leaving Laurence gobsmacked by what he had just seen.
“Yun, did... Did Manas actually do it?”
“Of course. It was his Manifestation”.
Laurence swallowed, a glint appeared in his eyes that had been gone for a long time. He turned back to his brother. “Is he still in the mountain?” Pulling out his codex he began sketching the golems that they walked past as they continued their journey. His stylus darted around the page as he took the creatures apart within his mind, marking down the arrays that made them and paying special attention to the rings that were situated within their abdomens as well as the makeup of their brains. The brains were just as amazing a creation as the rings, but for different reasons. They were the first step in Yun’s path, combining his original way with his future, so Laurence could not help but focus upon them. Despite not seeing each other for near to a cycle, Yun was still Laurence’s brother. He still wanted to know how Yun was doing in his journey to become an Ascendant Immortal.
“No one is in the mountain now. He’s in the city instead”.
“Nobody? What happened to it?”
“It became the mother brain for the golems,” Yun replied.
Rather than responding, Laurence simply frowned and sketched the words mother brain down beside the entry he was making for the golems before continuing to record everything he could about them. Finally he closed the book and looked around. As they had walked through the town it had been difficult to notice, but now that he was paying full attention to his surroundings he could see that the buildings that surrounded them were much taller than the buildings near the edge of the town.
“This is the central district, it has the gateway into the realm, and some grand libraries of the clan. The source library surrounds the mountain in my world”.
“Source library?” Laurence said, “You managed to get someone to make the fiftieth Manifestation?”
“Of course, I used the idea of it to make the mother brain”. The source library was something that had been well known when the Hephaistians had been prevalent, but since their decline all of the buildings which had been connected to the source library had become derelict. Hearing that someone had remade the source library gave Laurence hope that this fledgling phoenix of a clan would be able to persist through the cycles and become as stable and powerful as the other great clans.
“So how does the mother brain relate to the source library?” Because the mother brain appeared to be the current culmination of Yun’s path, Laurence had no way of knowing the process of its birth. He had spread himself too thinly in his obsession, and his journey was a different one to his brother’s.
“I can answer that, sir,” Piao said, before Yun could respond. He looked at both men, waiting for a response. Only when Yun nodded did he finally continue. “The library is something that was made by Master Yorick Riffem, and as you know the idea behind it is to allow original copies of books and to disseminate duplicates to the various libraries that we set up. In theory we only need to set down five array cubes in order to make an entire library, but that’s not the point. Using the idea behind the source library Master Yun created a sort of nexus, a centralised point that all the golems gain their commands from. Mostly it’s automatic, with a pseudo-intelligence controlling all the golems and directing their routines, allowing for adjustment depending on the interaction of persons, and remote control in case of a dangerous situation. The mother brain of the golems not only allows for us to avoid situations like the ones that were witnessed back in Biqiril. The golems aren’t sentient, but instead a very complex array that can feign sentience but is still perfectly under control of the clan”.
“Impressive knowledge,” Laurence said as Piao finished speaking. “Why did you decide to travel on the path of control then, Yun?”
“I need to walk the path of the leader, and this is that path. I know you might disagree, but I had to make decisions based upon my insights. I did not have the luxury of becoming a hermit on a mountain and leaving my friends behind. I had to lead this new family of ours”. There was a bitterness in Yun’s voice that was impossible to hide. It was an old resentment, one that had obviously no hold upon him now, but it was drawing up memories from his past that he would have obviously preferred not to have thought about.
“I’m sorry Yun... You know that Cleo was special to me. The fact that her death was my fault is something I will never be able to forgive myself for”.
“Her death wasn’t your fault”. Yun sighed, grabbing Laurence round the shoulders. “You couldn’t have stopped Declan, he was a different league from all of us”.
“I did though. I stopped him, it’s just it was too late. If I had been able to ascend even moments before Cleo would have survived”. He turned and faced Yun, breaking the comforting grip that Yun had around his shoulders. “I COULD HAVE SAVED HER”. Laurence’s eyes were wild as he screamed at his brother, his obsession leaking through and making him seem like more of a wild-man than he already was. The earth rippled as his power began to spiral out of control. The air rippled and collected itself in front of him and as he felt his rage and anguish rise he watched as the world around him slowed down.
He looked around wildly, seeing faces he barely recognised, people who did not want to help him and simply wanted to use him. Their visages warped and twisted. He had to end them before they took him. He collected his power in his hands, preparing to push it all into him and end everything when he caught a glimpse of a face he recognised. A young boy looked on at him with sad eyes. The young boy was someone he knew, someone who he cared for, someone he had raised from infancy. The young boy was someone who didn’t deserve to die. The boy was innocent, unlike him.
The longer he looked at the boy, the more familiar he became, the world seemed to cease twisting and warping, and finally he began to recognise the faces of those people who stood around him. He saw the fear in the eyes of those around him, the worry that was easily identifiable upon his brother’s face. He sank down to his knees and began to shake, the energy that he had collected still held in his hands, but the power was quickly falling under his control.
He opened his hands as the glow faded from between his fingers. Inside his cupped palms was a small hourglass, simple in form, and extremely unobtrusive. It was almost as shocking that such a simple device would come from such power as the one who caused such huge shock-waves to be a shaking wreck on the floor mere moments later.
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