“How much further do we have to go, already?” Rose grumbled. Liv was getting pretty sick of translating between the machine and her friend, but repeated the question anyway.

Just ahead of them, the crippled form of the winged Antrian paused in its awkward, dragging motion down the corridor. The light shed by the mana stone in the hilt of Liv’s wand illuminated only a dim circle around the two women, and their reluctant guide often moved at the very edge where that light transitioned into darkness. There were the Vædic sigils that pulsed with a cold blue glow, running along the walls of the underground ruins, but those hardly provided enough light to see by.

“Not far now,” the monstrous war machine assured them, in a voice that was a cross between the grinding of gears and the hiss of escaping steam. “Lord Celris at last confronted the rebels in the heart of his fastness – the place from where he could command all his defenses.”

“The control room,” Liv guessed.

“Just so.” The Antrian inclined its bestial, skull-like head in confirmation.

“That makes sense, at least,” Rose said, once Liv had filled her in.

Its explanations apparently concluded, the broken shell resumed dragging itself forward to the sound of steel scraping against stone. So far as Liv was concerned, that was just fine: the racket served to cover her conversation with Rose, so long as they kept their voices down.

“Have you noticed there aren’t any signs of fighting?” Liv murmured. With a flick of her wand and a sliver of unspoken intent, she left an arrow of ice crusted along the floor of the corridor behind them, so that Arjun and Keri would be able to catch up.

“Should there be?” Rose asked. “Remember, I’ve been to less rifts than you have. The Gull Island Rift at Freeport didn’t have any signs of a battle, and neither did the one we found up in the mountains. Even the Garden of Thorns seemed pretty intact – empty, but intact.”

“From what Elder Aira said, Ceria surrendered at a certain point in return for assurances that her daughter would be cared for,” Liv recalled. “Something Semhis Thorn-Killer glossed over in his diary, but that’s not important at the moment. The Well of Bones is the one rift I’ve been to where I know for a fact people fought their way in and killed the Vædim that lived there, and there were damaged doors and wrecked Antrians everywhere. These halls don’t have any of that.”

“And the mirror-trap still functioned,” Rose added. “You would have thought that someone would disable that during the assault. Even the outer doors opened and closed. There wasn’t any sign someone had thrown rocks at them with a catapult or something. You think that thing’s been repairing the rift all these years? Like those scavenger machines at the Foundry Rift?”

“Those claws don’t look suited for that kind of work,” Liv decided, after a moment’s consideration. “No, I think our guide is a guardian, nothing more. But I suppose there could be some of those spider things in storage somewhere around here, to come out and clean the place up.”

“There’s something else,” Rose said, after a moment. “Have you noticed the sigils on our guide pulse in time with the ones on the walls?”

“I have,” Liv confirmed. “You think they’re connected, somehow?”

“If Sidonie was here, I’m sure she’d have a theory,” the other woman replied. “I don’t know. But I also feel like – well. When you first ripped off that thing’s wings, weren’t the stumps sparking and smoking a bit? They don’t seem to be doing that anymore.”

Liv narrowed her eyes, peering into the dim light at the edge of the darkness. Was Rose right? It was difficult to get a clear look at the war-machine’s damaged body, especially with it out in front to lead their way. Keri’s spear had pierced its chest, but the steel plating and crystals of ice that made up the thing’s back were undamaged. Honestly, what she could make out the best were the broken stumps where its upper set of wings had been attached.

“Could you hold my hand for a while?” Liv asked Rose.

“You don’t have to ask me twice.” The dark-haired woman shifted Keri’s spear to her left hand, then reached over with her right and wrapped her fingers around Liv’s.

Liv closed her eyes, inhaled deeply, held the breath, and then let it out. She fell into the rhythm of the breathing exercises Master Grenfell had drilled into her, and felt her body relax. Liv even put aside her worries about navigating the hallway – she simply put one foot in front of the other, and let Rose guide her.

Instead, Liv roused Aluth. When she’d first been imprinted with the word of power, back at Coral Bay, she’d experienced a moment of nearly overwhelming insight, during which the flows of mana throughout Blackstone Hall, and even as far as the courtyard beyond, had been clear to her. She’d been able to sense other mages as concentrations of mana, moving about the building, regardless of the stone walls and floors between them.

Now, Liv felt outward with that same perception. The first element she perceived was the system of sigils engraved in the walls of the Tomb of Celris. Each individual sigil was not so much a discrete thing as a component of a massive, intricate enchantment that she immediately understood to extend throughout the entire structure of the rift. She could feel the sigils pulsing in an endless, inexorable rhythm – and the sigils on the machine in front of them were part of that.

The difficulty was in determining exactly what the enchantment did. Liv could feel a frown on her face, her lips twitched with unspoken words, as she felt her way through the mana flows. The closest thing she could think of was actually something she’d first learned about from Master Cushing, so many years ago – the way in which human lungs worked. They pulled air in, held it, pushed air out of the body again.

In precisely the same way, the network of sigils was drawing mana in, and then pushing it back out. The blue glow of the sigils intensified as they charged with mana, then dimmed as the enchantment expelled magical power. The questions now were two: first, where was the mana coming from, and secondly, where was it going?

To Liv’s perception, faint streams of mana – barely even wisps – simply appeared from nowhere, from nothing, to be sucked into the sigil network. But there had to be a source, even if she couldn’t perceive it. Liv allowed Cel to awaken in the back of her mind, as well, and that provided the next clue.

The entire time she’d been inside the rift, all of the waste heat that her spells would normally produce had vanished before Liv had been able to do anything useful with it. If she and Rose hadn’t already been wearing armor enchanted to keep them warm, it would have been a real problem – and even with the armor, Liv felt like she’d just spent hours wandering through a Whitehill winter. Now, with a combination of Cel and Aluth, she could finally see what was happening.

Every bit of heat in the hall was being converted into mana and drained away.

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The realization put everything into a new perspective. Liv thought back to how Keri had complained that his spells were both more costly, and less effective than normal. If the heat had been sucked away from his spells to fuel the sigil network, that puzzling and frustrating phenomenon suddenly made a great deal more sense. His magic had been drained every step of the way by the defensive enchantments of the Tomb.

And this was a defensive enchantment, of that Liv no longer had any doubt. An intricate, subtle magic that would leach the very warmth of their bodies from every person who came to this place, finally leaving them to freeze to death on the cold stone floors of the empty halls. If Celris’ slaves had once lived in the homes that surrounded that central shaft, they must have been gone long before the dead god began this particular working.

“Warm flesh has no place in my home,” Liv’s nightmare of Celris had told her. “Watch your friends and lovers die, and their bodies cool. Watch my darkness swallow the light in their eyes. And when there is nothing of you left, you will come at last to my final truth: the end of all that is, was, and shall ever be –

“Silence and stillness and darkness,” Liv murmured, repeating the titanic figure’s final words to her. Drain away heat, and cold remained. Drain away light, and darkness remained. Even moving required fuel, didn’t it? Without the right food, the body weakened. Run for long enough, and your muscles were exhausted, leaving you no choice but to rest. To be still.

“Steps,” Rose murmured, and Liv allowed herself to be guided while she thought through the permutations. If the enchantment drained light, and heat, and converted them into mana, that still left the matter of where that mana was going. The sigils on their guide had pulsed in time with those on the walls, but a slow draining like that wasn’t a combat enchantment, wouldn’t be worth placing on a guardian. And it would make no sense to be draining the mana of Celris’ own servant. No, the only reason you might link a soldier to that kind of network would be to give it mana. To be constantly charging its mana stone reserves. But there was a limit to how much mana could be stored; what would be done with all the excess?

The wing-stumps weren’t smoking anymore, Rose had pointed out. And throughout the entire Tomb, they hadn’t found any trace of damage from battle – not even at the great doors, which must have been battered down at some point, for their ancestors to storm Celris’ home.

Before she could think things through completely, Liv turned her head to perceive the sigil network in more detail, searching. There were variations of Aluth among the sigils, of course, along with both Cel and Savel, but those weren’t what she was looking for at the moment. Liv scanned the ancient engraved spell, searching – there. Cail – one of Arjun’s healing words. To make whole.

“Watch out!” Liv shouted, opening her eyes and pulling Rose to one side with her.

The two women had come halfway down a wide, curved stair, Liv saw – almost like stone slices of a crescent moon, descending to a circular tiled floor. The ceiling above was lost to darkness, high enough that it rose far beyond the reach of Liv’s faint light. Their guide was nearly all the way down, having drawn further ahead of them, and now that it had turned back to track their sudden motion, Liv could see that the entirety of its chestplate was now whole and undamaged.

At the center of the floor below was a great throne; there could be no other word for it. Unlike many of the other control rooms that Liv had seen, where there was space for many people to sit, Celris had clearly intended only for himself to rest at ease. Around the throne curved great sheets of glass, lit with shining traceries of Vædic sigils in half a dozen colors. In the throne itself, a corpse - a skeleton rested, with a plain silver band upon its yellowed brow.

For a moment, Liv was back in the darkness, with the presence of her grandfather at her side, somewhere between worlds, and his voice in her ear. “There’s something you need to get from the tomb of my father.”

Then, she saw the second corpse, in front of the throne.

The skin and flesh of her aunt’s body were shrunken and grayed, from time and cold, and what had once been a face so close to Liv’s own was now pulled so tight across Livara tär Auris’s bones that she looked like nothing so much as a grinning, grotesque skull, with only wisps of white hair hanging limply. Her body was pierced in a dozen places by thin spires of ice, which rose up from the floor high enough that she’d been lifted ten or twelve feet above the stone tiles. A single sword lay on the floor beneath her, half frozen in the base of one of the spears that had taken her life.

All of this, Liv saw in an instant, but that was time enough for the once-crippled war-machine to throw itself forward, making for the glass panes upon which sigils danced brightly in the dark.

“The whole place is an enchantment!” Liv told Rose. “It's sucking in all the light and heat, converting it to mana, and then feeding that back as power. It's repairing that thing, repaired itself all these years!”

“Blood and shadows,” Rose cursed.

“Don’t let it get to the controls! Celevet Aiveh Kveis!” Liv waved her wand from left to right, sharpened her mana and her intent, and raised a towering wall of ice, a jagged escarpment between the winged Antrian and the throne, with its curved glass controls. The monster hissed and ground its mechanics, then turned back toward them. Nine rings of mana left, Liv counted silently, plus what she had stored.

Rosamund rushed forward down the last stretch of curved stairs, swung Keri’s spear, and shouted her own incantation: “Aluthent’he Aiveh Encve Scelim’o’Mae!”

A spread of five blue mana knives shot forward from the cut Rose had made with the spear, and while their once-guide threw itself to one side, tumbling and scraping across the stone floor, two of them still sunk into its back, leaving the armor plating there pierced and cracked. Then, the monster’s four remaining wing-structures spread wide and erupted in jets of fire, propelling it up into the darkness, casting flickering shadows in every direction.

“Get the crown!” Rose shouted back to Liv. “I’ll distract it!”

“Blood and shadows!” Liv wanted to yell at her to stop, but instead she ran down the wide, curved steps, flicked her wand, and broke the icewall apart into two halves, leaving herself a gap in the middle to run through.

Rose, in the meantime, had used one of Master Jurian’s old tricks: platforms of mana, miniature versions of the discs Liv used so often, appeared one after the other just long enough for the dark-haired woman’s boots to touch, and then disappeared again. Rose ran up them like her own ephemeral staircase, charging spear-first up toward the Antrian with its flaming wings.

The ancient war-machine flew only clumsily now, struggling to compensate for the loss of one set of wings, off balance due to its missing arm and leg. That awkwardness was just enough for Rose to reach it, and she lunged forward with an edge of blue-gold mana coating the blade of Keri’s spear. Once again, the enchanted spear pierced the armor of the monstrosity, releasing a jet of steam and a spray of sparks that illuminated the fierce exaltation on Rosamund’s face.

“Enough!” the broken Antrian roared. It raised its good arm toward Rose, as if to ward her off, and a spiral of sigils flared to life around the vambrace plating that shielded its forearm.

Liv, at the foot of the throne now, felt the magic erupt from the ancient enchantment that had been triggered. Desperately, she flung her Authority outward to encompass Rose, to protect her, but the source of the magic was just so much closer to Rose that Liv couldn’t get there in time.

Between one heartbeat and the next, a column of ice encased Rosamund Lowry, extending all the way down to the floor of the control room like a great pillar. Liv could just make out the blurred shadow of her friend – her almost lover - frozen inside.

Someone screamed, a ragged, pain-filled wail that Liv didn’t even realize came from her throat until after she’d stopped, gasping for breath. The Antrian turned toward her, the fire-jets of its wings guttering for a moment, then flaring back full force. It floated above her, next to the pillar, and the blue light in its eyes was cold and cruel.

“Rose.” Liv choked the name out as if it were vomit from her belly, and it came up just as painfully. She blinked tears from her eyes and looked from the Antrian, high above, to the corpse of a god on its ancient throne, and the silver crown that rested still atop Celris’ long-dead skull. Liv looked down at the impaled, withered corpse of her aunt, and then back up at the machine. If she could have just used the waste heat from her icewall, she could melt Rose free. But the rusting enchantments had already stolen it.

The crown was what they had come for, and it was within her reach.

“Aluthent Aiveh Dvo Fetim Æn’Mæ,” Liv growled, and her magic roused to answer her intent, and her fury. Two wings of blue light, striated with gold, extended out to either side of her torso, anchored to the back of her Elden steel armor. Cel came even more easily, with only a thought and no need for incantation. She pulled mana from the guildring on her right hand, the set of bracelets she’d won on a beach years before, even the pommel of her wand.

A blade of ice froze into existence, directly into Liv's clenched left hand, the hilt fitting her fingers comfortably. Six more assembled around her, floating in the magic of her Authority three to each side, the tip of every one pointed at the monster that had frozen Rose.

With a flap of magical wings, surrounded by a cloud of blades, Liv screamed without words and launched herself up into the darkness, flying directly at the Antrian.