(I) Tome

-77 (I)

Tome

Shiv's Hydromancy wasn't that advanced, but it was still good enough to manifest a makeshift shower. And a shower was something both he and Uva desperately needed.

Hydromancy > 2

They returned to the anchor somewhat cleaner and in far higher spirits than before. Despite the constant searing pain and the near-death experience, Shiv and Uva both sported barely-suppressed smiles as they re-entered the anchor. Shiv felt that they hadn't been away for too long, but still... they must have been lost in each other for some time, since everyone else was already back before them.

As soon as they walked in, he saw Can Hu and Valor both pointing at different details within the open tome. They were flipping back and forth and debating about something. Siggy, meanwhile, was standing right next to them on one of the metal chairs Can Hu made, peeking between them while raising herself up on the automaton’s shoulder. Adam stood a few steps away beside the anchor’s doorway, but his attention wasn't on the book. Rather, his arms were folded, and he seemed deep in thought.

At least he was, until Shiv and Uva strode into the room. A beat of unease passed between the Deathless and the Young Lord, but then Adam's expression turned to one of utter incredulity as his radiant gaze snapped between Uva and Shiv. The Young Lord shook his head in utter astonishment. "? Here? Just now? In this rat and bug infested place?”

"We had to make sure the building was safe," Shiv said, trying to play things off. "I just wanted to make sure our battle against the Educator didn’t draw any unwanted attention."

Adam narrowed his eyes. “Uh-huh. Four bloody hours of surveillance. And you remember what Tier my Awareness is at, right?”

Uva huffed a slight laugh at Adam’s reaction and pecked Shiv on the chin. Then, she strode past the Young Lord—but gripped him by the shoulder and all but commanded him to speak with Shiv. After that, she left the slack-jawed Adam staring as she joined Valor and Can Hu in examining the tome.

Slowly, Adam’s eyes fell on Shiv again, and they both regarded each other in a moment of awkward silence.

"So you want to talk about this here or outside?" Shiv said.

“Does it matter? Everyone already—” Adam hesitated for a moment, and then he let out a suffering sigh as he pinched the bridge of his nose. "And I know you said a lot to me before I stormed off," the Young Lord forced out. "But please tell me again that you're not lying. Tell me again that my mother—that my dead mother—is inside your soul. I need to hear it from you again so I know that I wasn’t hallucinating.”

"Your dead mother is inside my soul, and she's calling out for you right now."

Rose breathed. She was still trying to reach for him.

"Good godsdamned hells. Shiv, it never ends. It just never ends." The Young Lord let out a barking laugh—the kind of laugh let out by a man at the end of his patience. "It's unbelievable. I don't know if it's because I'm stuck with you all the time now, or if the System just has it out for me."

"Probably both," Shiv replied. "I'm favored, and your family is being targeted. The Inquisition is going after your father, your fiancée's father wants him dead for some reason too, and the Ascendants are also going after the Starhawk according to the Educator. You’re trapped under a mountain of building shit, Adam.”

"Thank you Shiv, that's very good for my morale." Adam let out another weary breath. "So, my mother is trapped inside of your strange vitality-infused soul. She evolved out of the Foreshadowing skill you had. Which… was technically always her skill?"

"Yeah," Shiv said, "at least that's what the Educator told me. And, well, apparently she knew a lot about us. Her Foreshadowing revealed a lot of information." And Shiv realized something just then, something he'd neglected to think about this entire time. "I think I know my parents' names now," Shiv said, a little bit startled.

"You do?" Adam asked, looking unnerved. “My father—he struck them from all the records. He even had his court Psychomancer erase their faces from his own mind.”

"Yeah, the Educator mentioned them during the fight. Harlon and Vera Lowe… She even called me Tanner and the ‘Lowe boy’ a few times. Didn’t much like that.”

"The Lowe boy?" Adam said the words, but a look of distaste crossed over his features. "No. That’s a real mouthful. I think I’ll stick to Shiv.”

Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

And something about that made Shiv smile warmly. "Thanks. Listen, I'm gonna do everything I can to help get her out, or whatever. It's just a lot of shit I don't understand, either. I don't know how she got in there, I don't know if it has to do with the ritual. I don't know what other madness is about to happen, or anything about this whole Ascendant business." Shiv sighed. "It seems that every step we take that brings us closer to Blackedge, the more chaotic everything gets. Like we’re moving deeper and deeper into a burning house.”

"I know what you mean," Adam said. "I feel a strange sense of foreboding. It's like we're crawling through multiple webs at once for me. And these webs are growing tighter and tighter, as if they're going to snap. Before they snap, they might crash together first. And we're right in the middle of it. We're right in the middle of everything. And there's too much happening for this all to be a coincidence. At least, that's how it feels to me. A forgotten Ascendant just happens to stumble over us? A supposed civil war between Ascendants? My father's patron god being hunted by the other Ascendants? And there’s what’s happening down here in the Abyss… Aviary agents going around, stealing fragments of Legendary Pathbearers and trying to bomb a city’s teleportation network. It all feels connected to me somehow. But I just can't quite put my finger on it."

A look of focus came over him. His arms were folded, and his finger tapped against his armor. The young lord had a particular look to him, a gleam to his bright eyes while he worked his mind. However, working his mind also came with deleterious side effects sometimes. Adam blinked at Shiv. "When you use the skill, does my mother speak to you?"

"She speaks to me even when I'm not using the skill sometimes," Shiv said. "It's just when I use the skill and I shift out of the real world, back into my Vitae, basically it's just me and her, and she's composed out of my soul." Shiv shrugged. "Yeah, it's kind of awkward. She wants me to tell you that she loves you deeply and a lot of things. But she’s also… not all there. She just cries sometimes. And I don’t think she likes me very much.” He grimaced. “I don’t know if I can blame her there.”

Adam flinched for a moment, struggling to take the news. "I miss her, I miss her badly, even if I barely remember her. But I do remember the story. That's how I knew you weren't lying to me. That book, the Hark a Sparrow or whatever it was called… 'Bark, Bark, Bark,' it's practically the first memory I have.” Another quiver ran through the Young Lord’s lip, but he closed himself up like a fan before the grief overcame him.

And Shiv felt like absolute shit. He could empathize with Adam before, but there was too much distance between them, and Shiv had his own misery to handle. Now, he just hated seeing this low.

"I'm sorry," Shiv muttered. “I wish I could change things for you.”

"What for?" Adam sighed. "It's not your bloody fault. It's not. It's not your fault." He repeated the words three times as if trying to convince himself. "It is your parents'," Adam growled. "But how did they do this? Why did they do this? This—there’s more to the picture we’re both missing, and I can’t help but feel that’s connected to what’s happening now as well. At least somewhat…" Then, Adam trailed off again. He blinked twice as he narrowed his eyes. He'd just realized something else. "Wait. You said my mother can always talk to you."

"Yeah," Shiv said, unsure where Adam was going with this.

"So can she see out of you?"

"Uh, yeah, kind of?"

"And hear what you hear."

"Yeah. She emerged during the Foreshadowing Skill Evolution, and now she’s basically the embodiment of my Outside Context Problem Skill.”

"So, then… while you and Uva were," Adam coughed, "..."

And suddenly it hit Shiv. He hadn't even thought about this that entire time. Shiv grunted. "Uh, well, you know..."

"I can't believe you," Adam breathed. A look of utter incredulity washed over him and broke the building melancholy gripping him. "I cannot believe you. You two couldn't control yourself for one moment."

Shiv looked at Uva, and her eyes glinted as she returned a faint smirk. It was enough to make Shiv’s stomach do a flip.

"Not a chance," Shiv breathed. But it did feel kind of awkward. This was practically the second situation like this he and Uva inflicted on someone else. The first was with Valor, when the Legendary Pathbearer was still nothing more than a dagger. Now, Adam's mother got front row seats to the most intimate part of Shiv’s love life.

That made this whole thing twice as awkward as before.

"Yeah, okay," Shiv coughed. "I do feel a little bit bad."

"A bad?" Adam nearly shouted. He sounded like he didn't know whether to be outraged, furious, or somewhat amused. "I can't believe this. You bastard. You—you m-made my mother some—some kind of .”

Shiv cracked. He couldn’t hold the laughter back. The left side of his body detonated with pain as he struggled to stop cackling. “S-soul-chained cuck.”

“It’s not funny, you bastard,” Adam said through clenched teeth. But the absurdity was getting to him too. He was shaking, trying to keep from cracking up.

To make the moment perfect, Rose decided to reveal just how open-minded she was about the whole thing.

“She’s so understanding,” Shiv wheezed. “She says it's normal for Pathbearers.”

“No, she didn’t,” Adam hissed. He jabbed a finger in Shiv’s face. “You’re making that up.”

“I felling wish, man.” Adam was on the verge of crumbling. Shiv gave him a final push. “In fact, she’s talking about how she misses your dad's—”

Adam let out a snarl halfway between rage and maddened laughter as he shoved Shiv. Shiv’s laugh broke into a ragged shout of pain as he tripped and nearly collapsed.

“Shit, Shiv,” Adam cursed as he helped Shiv stay upright. Suddenly, the expression on his face was grave. The others were looking at them with concern. Uva was halfway across, but she stopped as Shiv held out a hand.

“I'm fine,” Shiv said, laughing again. “Just… some of my body’s a bit more sensitive than I remember it being.”

Adam looked at Shiv’s burns and squeezed his eyes shut. “I have no idea how you’re standing, let alone joking or laughing.”

“I wasn’t joking,” Shiv grunted, trying to get his breathing under control. He straightened his body, and a slight sheen of cold sweat painted his forehead in a glossy shine. “That’s why I fully broke. Your mother does miss you. And your father. And it’s all just so I couldn’t help it. I had to laugh.”

Adam bit his lip and nodded. “Ridiculous is right. My life is ridiculous. What’s happened to my mother is ridiculous. And you are ridiculous. These burns—”

“They’ll go away,” Shiv said, swallowing back a sudden rush of nausea. “Like the whip scar from Confriga. Just give it time. I’ll heal. I’ll deal with it. It just… hurts like hell. That’s all. Maybe… I can get a Pain Resistance skill from this.”

“Mad bastard,” Adam chuckled. Then, his expression softened into one of shame. "I should have done more. It shouldn’t have been just you against a god. I should have been there guarding you instead of the other way around. I just—I made too many mistakes, and you had to save me. Again. .”

“Shut up, Adam.” Shiv snorted. “If you didn't fire that Necromancy arrow, I don't think I would have ever been able to finish that fight. We would all be in the book now. Well. I don’t know what would have happened to me. The brush just cut me up pretty bad, it couldn’t swallow me like it did you.”

"And because I fired that arrow, you are half-burned," Adam said, looking disgusted with the way things turned out. “If I could have been more accurate—”

Shiv grunted, and he placed his left hand on Adam’s shoulder. He ignored the extreme pain flaring through him as he made the Young Lord meet his eyes. "I told Uva this, and I'm going to tell it to you too. I'd burn myself to the bone if it meant killing the god. I’d burn down to the marrow if it meant keeping you guys safe. The responsibility you feel is not one way. So. Stop blaming yourself, stop feeling like shit. We’ll kick her ass together next time.”

For a beat, Adam just stared at Shiv. Then, he let out a quiet laugh. “Right. Next time.” He licked his lips. “Mother. If you’re there, I—I miss you and—” He hissed and looked away. “Sorry, Shiv. But your half-melted face doesn’t really conjure memories of my mother.”

Shiv laughed, and he lightly clapped the Young Lord behind the head. “We’ll find a way to get her out. Or something. Now. Let’s go talk with the rest of the group. Oh, and before I forget, I need to tell you guys about my Blessing.”

Adam blinked. “Blessing?”

“Yeah. The orc god decided to save my ass and brand me with something that makes me and everyone around me suffer more pain and damage. I’ll probably use it on him at some point, so… Looking forward to that.”

“W-what?” Adam stuttered. “Y-you got another B-blessing?”

A massive, shit-eating grin spread across Shiv’s face. “If you hate that, you might be impressed to learn that a fragment of your mother amounts to a Unique Skill. My congratulations to your father, by the way.”

Adam’s nostrils flared. “SHIV! YOU BAS—”