While both Arjun and Liv had been to the ring once before, with Elder Aira, Wren and Keri had been, respectively, either escorting prisoners or recovering from injuries during that trip. As for the Antrian Ghveris - Liv doubted that the Vædim he’d served had ever shared many of their secrets with their manufactured soldiers.

When the light of the waystone faded - after a time in darkness that was blessedly empty of any trace of Celris - the three newcomers looked around in confusion. The presence of Ghveris cramped them together in a room that was only just large enough to contain the waystone, so Liv opened the steel doors with a wave of her hand. Thankfully, she’d already dispersed the mana-constructs that formed her wings; they wouldn’t have fit in the cramped spaces up there.

“Where are we?” Wren asked, though she didn’t hesitate to follow Liv down the same ancient corridor that Aira Tär Keria had first shown Liv and Arjun only days before.

“You’re inside the ring,” Liv explained, guiding the group to the control room, with its great curved window that looked down on a spinning world. It was a different experience, wearing the crown. Liv could tell that she didn’t have full control of the ring - it recognized her not as a master, but as a guest. Her presence was permitted, but the array of enchantments that surrounded her was not under Liv’s control. The extent of it was astounding: there must be hundreds of inscriptions tucked away beneath the walls and floors, extending for miles throughout the ring. Even trying to understand a portion of it all was simply overwhelming - so Liv didn’t try.

Instead, she turned to make her way out of the control room and into the labyrinth of corridors that Aira had navigated so easily. The trick to that was obvious to Liv, now: she merely focused on where she wanted to go, and the combination of the crown and the ring in concert guided her.

“Anyone who wishes to can wait in the control room,” Liv called back over her shoulder. “There isn’t any danger there.”

Arjun followed her, of course; he would want to check Rose over for himself. Wren must have hesitated for a moment, but the soft steps of her boots fell in behind Liv after only a moment. Keri and Ghveris, it seemed, would remain behind. Liv didn’t blame them: the view was wondrous.

The door to what Liv now understood was only one of several healer’s rooms opened at her approach. Inside, Rosamund lay on a raised bed, wrapped in flows of mana that emanated from the Vædic enchantments left behind so long ago.

“What happened to her?” Arjun asked, immediately moving over to the bed. He looked between Rose and the glass pane that displayed a colored outline of her body, labeled with Vædic sigils. Carefully, he removed her helm, and Liv could tell he was moving her head as little as possible. Then, he examined her hair and scalp for any sign of blood or injury.

“She was frozen inside a pillar of ice, dropped to the ground from when it broke, and then left exposed to a miniature blizzard,” Liv explained.

“I can only understand half of what it says here,” Arjun complained. Finally, he turned away from the panel of glass to examine her entirely with his own eyes. “From what I can tell, she may have bruised a few bones - maybe even a few minor fractures - but no serious breaks. I’d guess that without the combination of Cail and Vær this place is using, she’d have lost most of her fingers and toes to frostbite. I don’t have any way to tell how long she was without air, or what that will do to her.”

“I don’t know, exactly,” Liv admitted. “Long enough for me to fight that winged Antrian. A few moments.”

“Let’s hope you got her out quickly enough that her brain wasn’t damaged, then,” Arjun said. “And that she started breathing again on her own, as soon as you had her free. I’m not sure even this level of magic could repair her mind.”

“Is there anything you can do to help?” Liv asked.

Arjun shook his head. “I don’t want to interfere with what’s already happening when I hardly understand half of it. If I had a few months to study this place, my answer might be different. But we’ve barely had time to stop and catch our breath since we left Coral Bay.”

“I know,” Liv admitted. “I know. I’m sorry.” With a wave of her hand, she conjured a chair of coherent mana at Rose’s bedside, and then slumped into it. “I’ll stay with her until she wakes up. You two don’t have to wait around with me.”

Arjun hesitated, but Wren took him by the arm and pulled him for the door. “Come on,” the huntress said. “You just told us you couldn’t do anything for her anyway. Let them have a moment.”

The doors slid shut behind Liv’s two friends, leaving her alone with Rosamund. The sudden silence of the room was disconcerting; though Liv could sense that the enchantments were busily doing something, courtesy of Aluth, like Arjun she didn’t have the knowledge to understand what.

“I wonder if it will mess things up if I hold your hand,” Liv said aloud. She pulled the glove from her right hand, then considered Rose’s borrowed gauntlets. Carefully, she loosened the buckles, and then pulled the piece of armor off, exposing the other woman’s bare skin. Rosamund’s hand looked very, very pale, and when Liv took it in her own, she found it still cold, despite whatever the healing enchantments of the room had been doing.

“I’m not used to being the one to sit at a bedside and wait,” Liv admitted, after another moment. There wasn’t much of anything for her to do but talk, after all. “First Keri and his fever at Al’Fenthia, and now you. I’m not very good at this. I’m surprised you all can put up with me getting hurt so often. I’d be pretty sick of it, in your place.”

She tried to smile at the joke, but couldn’t quite manage to pull it off. “I’d rather it was me getting hurt, though,” Liv continued. “At least then I’m the one paying the price for my decisions. When its someone else - I feel like it isn’t fair. Or that I made a mistake.”

“And it's only going to get worse, isn’t it?” Liv lifted Rose’s hand in her own, and pressed it to her cheek. “I know I’ve been pushing everyone too hard, but I also don’t know how to stop. We did what we needed to do - I’ve got the crown. I don’t think we’ll even need to travel overland through the jungles in Varuna,” she reasoned. “I can use the control room and the waystone here to send us directly to Feic Seria. Though if we get there before my father does...”

She tried to think it through, but everything was a complicated knot in Liv’s mind at the moment. It should have felt like they’d won a victory - she had the key, after all - but instead she just felt tired and worn down.

“I was right,” Liv admitted. She closed her eyes, and tried to focus on the feeling of Rose’s hand pressed against her cheek. “My aunt - she saw me with the crown, not her. She died for it, and her friends - we might be able to save one of them. Trinity, I can’t imagine that. Waking up forty years gone by with all of my friends dead. I don’t - I don’t know if I can keep doing this if it means everyone around me is going to get hurt or killed.”

“Easier if you’re the only one getting beat up?” Rose murmured.

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

Liv practically jumped to the ceiling; before she’d even realized it, she was out of the seat she’d made and leaning over the bed. “You’re awake,” she said, though it was obvious. “Are you alright? Can you feel everything? Can you move?”

“I think so,” Rose said. With her bare fingers, she squeezed Liv’s hand.

Liv felt as if she could finally exhale, for the first time since she’d seen Rosamund frozen in that pillar of ice. The wave of relief that coursed through her was so overwhelming that it made her nearly giddy. She leaned over the bed and kissed Rose on the lips.

They were both filthy, sweaty, and still wearing most of their armor after who knew how long fighting through the Tomb of Celris, but at that moment Liv didn’t care in the slightest. When she finally broke the kiss to breathe, she rested her forehead against Rose’s, because she couldn’t bear for them to not be touching each other.

“Did you beat them?” Rose asked, eventually.

“I did,” Liv said.

“Good.”

☙

Arjun insisted on examining Rose before he’d let her stand up on her own, of course, but he agreed with Liv that the magic of the healing chamber seemed to have done its work and then subsided again. The enchantments still existed, but they waited, quiescent, for the next patient to be placed upon one of the beds in one of the identical rooms.

His examination necessitated stripping Rose out of her battered armor, which the three of them loaded onto a mana disc, which Liv summoned.

“You’re not using incantations for those,” Arjun pointed out, as he felt along Rose’s limbs for broken bones.

Liv shook her head. “Aluth is feeling more and more natural,” she admitted. “Not quite to the level of Cel, but much more than any of the other words I know. I’m not sure if it's just the natural progression of getting better at silent casting, or -”

Rose let out a short laugh from where she was sitting up on the bed. “The natural progression is that you practice each spell hundreds of times before you can discard the words, Liv,” she pointed out. “That’s what Archmagus Loredan taught, anyway. That it takes years to have more than a spell or two you can cast silently.”

“Breathe in deeply and hold,” Arjun told her, and pressed his ear to Rose’s chest.

“-if you were anyone else, I’d give you a lot of grief for this,” Rose complained to the healer. Nevertheless, she took a deep breath.

“How is she?” Liv asked.

“As far as I can tell, Rose will recover just fine,” Arjun said. “I think the only reason that’s true is because you got her here, Liv. I didn’t have the mana to save her, and I’m not sure we’d have found you two in time, anyway.”

“Good, then I’m standing up,” Rose decided, and slid off the bed. She almost immediately fell over, but Arjun and Liv caught her from either side and got her arms over their shoulders. It would have been easier to simply dump her onto the mana disc with her armor, but Rosamund insisted on walking the entire way back to the control room, with her gear silently skimming above the corridor floor behind them.

There, they found Keri waiting, oiling the blade of his spear. Wren, in the meantime, sat on the floor next to the enormous bulk of Ghveris. Even seated, the Antrian juggernaut loomed taller than Liv.

“Who’s the big guy?” Rose asked, once Liv and Arjun had got her settled on one of the padded benches.

With a grinding of gears and scraping of metal against itself, the war-machine turned just enough to regard Rosamund with its burning blue eyes. It remained silent, but Wren answered in its place.

“This is Ghveris, the Beast of Iuronnath,” the huntress explained. “He’s one of my people. Served as a commander for the Vædim back during the war, and when he got hurt, they put what was left of him inside this.” She knocked the knuckles of her right hand against one of the enormous enchanted steel plates that made up Ghveris’ armor, and it rang like a bell.

“He speaks an old form of Vakansa,” Liv said, settling down onto the benches at Rose’s side. “But not Lucanian. Which is something we’re going to have to fix. Wren, can you translate for Ghveris while we talk?”

The dark haired huntress nodded, then leaned in toward the war-machine and began speaking quietly.

“We did what we came to do,” Liv began, doing her best to gather her thoughts as she went. “We recovered the key to the Tomb of Celris.” She raised her hand and tapped one finger against the silver crown that rested on her forehead. The thing was going to make it impossible to wear her helm, and she resolved to see an armorer as soon as she had the time.

Keri nodded. “That means we need to join up with your father en route to Feic Seria, so that you can take control of the rift there.”

“Right,” Liv agreed. “But it's going to take him a lot longer to go overland from the bridge. Now that I’ve got the crown, I’m pretty confident that I can send us directly to the waystone in the painted desert from this control room. Sidonie has it marked on a map, and she can show us exactly where we need to be.”

“If you’re saying you intend to take a break and recover before heading out, I think that is a very good decision,” Arjun said. “Everyone here needs time to recover. But I thought we were worried about Ractia finding us up here on the ring?”

Liv shook her head. “Actually, this may be the safest place from her. According to what was left of Celris, Tamiris locked them all out from the ring at the beginning of the war. I’m not sure that I’d put a lot of faith in what he said - for several reasons - but we’ve seen no signs of her in two visits. Of course, this place is huge, and she could simply be in another part of it, for all we’d know.”

“No,” Ghveris said, his rumbling voice making the Vakansan words sound strange to Liv’s ear. “It was a source of great frustration among the Vædim, and they spoke of it often. They blamed each other for not acting first; they blamed Antris for not finding a way to usurp Tamiris’ control. By the time of my injury, they had not yet found a solution.”

Liv translated the war-machine’s words for Rose and Arjun, then posed her own question back to the Antrian. “You served the Vædim in the past. I don’t know exactly what Keri, Wren and Arjun told you, but we’re fighting against Ractia. She is our enemy.”

“I caught him up a bit while you were with Rose,” Wren said. “I told him there were groups of our people sleeping at Godsgrave, and what Ractia did to my father.” Then, she quickly passed Liv’s words on to the great machine.

“There’s so much to do,” Liv said, with a sigh. “We can’t leave those people there forever. We need to get the remains of my aunt back for a proper funeral - and try to wake up the one member of her culling team who might survive. We need to get the key to Varuna, and if all of that wasn’t enough, Benedict’s going to attack Whitehill because he can’t understand all of this is more important than he is.”

“It is a lot,” Keri agreed. “But don’t forget, Liv, that you don’t need to do every one of those things yourself, or alone. I’m sure the group of you felt alone when you were fleeing north through the mountains, but that isn’t the case anymore. There are plenty of people who are willing to help.”

“You’re right,” Liv admitted. “Once everyone’s had a chance to catch their breath, I’ll bring us down to get help. I’m fairly certain my grandmother will know how to wake someone up from being suspended in ice, and now that I have control of that rift it's not nearly as dangerous as it used to be. That means we’re headed for Al’Fenthia, to catch up with her.”

Keri nodded.

“As long as we give everyone a chance to rest and recover, Al’Fenthia is as good a place as any,” Arjun said. “It means that we can get Sidonie’s help, as well.”

Liv turned to Ghveris, and swapped to speaking Vakansa. “We’re going to go to an Elden settlement,” she explained, “to meet up with our allies. People are probably going to be afraid of you, at first. You’re the only Antrian we’ve ever encountered who was anything but an enemy.”

The enormous machine shrugged. “I will follow where you go. But I would request a detour to the city of Celris; there will be stores of supplies there that I will need.”

“I think we can manage that,” Liv agreed. “We need to recover someone from there anyway. But are you certain you want to be part of this? You’ve only just woken up, and the world’s changed quite a lot.” As convenient as it would be to have an Antrian on their side - and as much as she didn’t want to make an enemy of the juggernaut - Liv felt a bit uneasy, almost as if she was taking advantage of Ghveris’ ignorance.

The war-machine shook its head slowly. “I was created to fight for the Vædim,” it explained. “And when I fell, I was forged anew to continue my service. This is the life I know. Keep your pledge to aid my people, Lady of Cold and Winter, and you have my loyalty.”

Liv frowned. “I’m not one of the Vædim.”

Ghveris tilted its head to one side. “Are you not?”