Spear of Destiny by James Baldwin (little bear else holmelund minarik .TXT) 📕

Rose is because I think I have a solution for how to rebuild the Warsingers. We need to go and find a language tutor for the Meewfolk tongue. You know, before we go to Meewhome.”

“Wait… before we go to Meewhome?” Suri tilted her head, her hands planted on her hips. “I don’t think anyone asked me about this.”

“No, but that’s where we’re going to find Perilous Symphony,” Rin said fussily. “It’s marked as being just off the coast of Meewhome, on the Chorus Vault map we found in the Temple of the Maker. I need to see if I can study some more Old Agatic… if I could read it fluently, then I might be able to get more information out of those screenshots we took in the Rose Vault.”

“Sorry, you’ve lost me, too.” I squinted. “Roll back a bit. Why do you want to go to the Chorus Vault of Perilous Symphony?”

Rin struggled to find her words: her brain was on a fixed track, like a train, and I could almost see the gears turning as she grappled with what she was actually trying to communicate.

“Uhh.. uhh… well, sandworms are weak to sonic weapons, as far as I know. T-Though we’ll need to confirm that,” she stammered. “We should go to the Royal Library to learn more about them. But, um, anyway, we’re going to need to defeat the corrupted sandworm queen guarding Withering Rose, right? I don’t know if you remember, but when we were in the Rose Vault, there were nine Warsinger statues.”

“I remember,” I said. Suri nodded her agreement.

“Right! Well, they all had descriptions, and the description at the base of Perilous Symphony noted it had especially powerful sonic weapons,” Rin continued brightly. “If we raid that vault, we check off three problems at once. We get spare parts for Withering Rose, and maybe a new Heartstone to install in her. We might get sonic weapons we can mount on airships and use to defeat the sandworm. We also might also be able to configure sonic weapons to stun dragons instead of killing them outright. More generally, I think it’s possible the Meewfolk have records of the Warsingers we don’t. But we won’t know until we go there and actually speak to their sages.”

Suri blinked at her.

“Okay, now it makes sense.” I bit back a laugh. “You generally communicate that stuff first, then suggest we go to Meewhome.”

“Oh, sorry. I-I got carried away again.” Rin’s cheeks flushed. “It just seemed kind of obvious to me.”

“I dunno. Meewhome is a long ways away, and we don’t have much time. Baldr conquered two-thirds of Revala in a month. If we take a week to go to Meewhome and dick around without knowing what we’ll find there, we might lose the whole bloody country.” Suri wrinkled her nose. “I don’t even know if humans are able to travel to Meewhome. I’ve heard they’ve got some kind of magical protection that keeps invaders off their island.”

Rin bounced on the spot. “They are very insular, yes. Very different to the Meewfolk who live on the mainland. And humans can travel there, I’m sure of that. I don’t know a huge amount about their culture, but I believe they like to host smugglers.”

“‘Host’ smugglers?” I squinted at her.

“They consider theft and smuggling to be artforms,” Rin said briskly. “Ebisa would know more. Don’t worry about it, though—it will be tricky to find passage, but leave it to me. I can arrange a way there.”

Suri chuckled. “The Nightstalkers come to mind.”

“Yep!” Rin laced her hands behind her, rocking on her heels. “We shouldn’t talk about them in the castle, though.”

“Okay.” I heaved a sigh. “Jeez… I don’t know. I keep thinking back to what Ebisa told us, about Lucien’s fucking slaughtering families and villages in Revala. I feel like we should be back in Myszno preparing in case Ororgael or Lucien tries to raid. Their dragons can teleport, too. I don’t want to go all the way to Meewhome, then come back and find everyone slaughtered and my castle burned to the ground.”

“Ignas wouldn’t issue you this quest if there wasn’t some reason for it,” Rin urged. “This is an RPG. Coincidences like that don’t happen in Archemi. Besides, the money and EXP he’s offering us for the retrieval of just key components would be a huge benefit for us.”

“Why Meewhome, though?” Suri asked. “Why not the Chorus Vaults in Vlachia and Jeun, or the Dragon Gate in Zaunt? The Mercurions are the best Artificers in the world. Surely they’d have information on them.”

“Because I really don’t think Mercurions built the Warsingers,” Rin said. “The Mercurions certainly didn’t win the war against the Drachan, because we weren’t even invented back then. We were created by the Aesari to fight in their war against the humans and dragons, based on technology from an earlier era.”

“Then why was that Mercurion-made Dark Zarya thing in the Rose Vault?” I asked.

“That’s a good question.” Rin stood up on her toes, her gaze wandering over the patterns on the ceiling. “My theory is that Mercurions and humans restored the Warsingers. Withering Rose was used by the last two Triads to re-energize the Caul of Souls and keep the Drachan sedated. Five thousand years ago, only three races lived on Archemi: The Solonkratsu, the Aesari, and the Meewfolk. Of them all, only the Meewfolk had the kind of knowledge, wealth and infrastructure to build these machines. They might have had help from the others, but the clue for me is in the materials the crafters used. Both Withering Rose and Nocturne Lament are primarily constructed of a magically augmented aurum super-alloy. The ONLY source for aurum in Archemi is the Shalid. Before the Aesari became a global empire, they lived in Daun. The cradle of Meewfolk civilization was the Shalid, which is where the Warsingers were first