“Sure,” said Naomi. “Common practice. As was raiding the lockers of famous Great Souls once they died for their loot.”
“Wait, what?”
Naomi shrugged one shoulder. “Was one of the first ways I became disenchanted with the Academy. Technically your locker is meant to be inviolate, but it was sickening how often the trainers or more powerful students would raid a locker when word reached them of a notorious Great Soul’s death. Of course, that also meant that most Great Souls didn’t bother leaving anything of worth in their lockers once they realized the truth. So it’s not nearly as amazing a cache of treasure as you might think.”
“But they’d leave something behind? Journals?”
“Journals, sure. Art, objects of sentimental value. It’s not cut and dry. If a Great Soul had powerful friends, their locker might remain untouched until those friends died, too. And if the Great Soul was reborn in time, they might actually get access to their stuff before it was stolen. But… how long did you say it’d been since you were last reborn?”
Scorio’s heart sank. “Two hundred and thirty-three years.”
Naomi gazed at him sorrowfully. “Add in the fact that you’re a Red Lister, and the odds of there being anything of value in your locker are incredibly small.”
Scorio sighed. “Great. I thought… well. There’s still a chance, right?”
Again with the one-shouldered shrug. “Nothing’s impossible. But it’s not as if you could walk into the Academy and ask to see your old belongings.”
“Not walk in, sure. But what if someone smuggled me in?”
Naomi raised an eyebrow. “And who would do that?”
Scorio smiled pensively. “I’m not sure they would. But there’s no harm in asking, right?”
“Would that that were true.”
1
After Naomi disappeared for the night, Scorio wrapped the bands of leather he’d salvaged from a discarded harness about his near defunct sandals and carefully slipped out the window into the darkened ruins.
Second Clay was already fading to twilight darkness, the sun-wire a livid seam of garish orange across the dim sky wrapped in funnel clouds, the maroon and musty brown hues of the last cycle’s light giving way to smoldering umber and deeper shadows.
It wasn’t true darkness; there was enough deep light to illuminate the edges of buildings, to wash the darkest chocolate brown over raised surfaces, to give a sense of the objects around him as he descended to the street.
But shadows seemed impenetrable, windows and exposed interior spaces beyond crumbling walls revealing nothing but ebon night.
Scorio took a moment to stretch, easing his aching muscles and limbering up, then set off at a light jog, giving himself time to warm up, his footfalls echoing softly off the rough walls.
Heavy rain began to fall, the droplets fat and warm, spattering down from the revolving clouds in spiraling curtains that washed across the city. Scorio raised his face to the rain and allowed it to wash the day’s sweat and dust away. This moment had become one of his favorites; the rain didn’t last long, but while it fell it seemed an absolution.
It was his fifth run, but this time he left the trail he’d made for himself that ran radially around the city in a neat path, and instead angled deeper into the ruins, striving to keep to open streets or broad avenues, though even these were often choked by collapsed buildings or washes of shattered masonry.
Nothing but exposed stone and shadow lay around him. The darkness seemed to swarm with movement, but he’d learned to relax and not let his paranoia get the better of him. Instead, he jogged with soft focus, allowing his peripheral vision to pick up on dangers that he might not otherwise have sensed.
Because for all that the ruins seemed a blasted wasteland of gray rock and charred stone, there was a subtle ecosystem existing within it, subsisting, he now understood, off the Coal mana that wafted across the desolate urban landscape like smoke off the charred remains of a fire-stormed city.
The mana wasn’t actually like smoke, however; it had—if not an intelligence—then perhaps a reason to where it gathered and thickened, and where it grew sparse to the point of non-existence. At first, he’d wondered if it didn’t simply settle into hollows and depressions like a heavy fog, but no; he’d come across dense pockets high up in the buildings, or dropped into lower basement levels, wary and with his senses tingling, to find that the cramped, half-collapsed rooms might prove devoid of any Coal.
There seemed to be a system to it, but he couldn’t divine its rules. So instead, he simply jogged through the lessening rain, and challenged himself to envision his Heart as he went, to hold it before him like some talisman, so that he could get a weak sense of the Coal mana about him as he went.
It wasn’t easy.
More often than not he’d realize he’d been running for a spell without any sense of the mana at all, and have to stop to summon his Heart once more. Or he’d get such a tenuous read on the ambient mana that he couldn’t really tell if it was thick or thin, more just if it was there or not.
But the creatures that lived in the ruins were obviously attuned.
More than once he nearly ran into a funnel of delicate strands that were woven across entire rooms or even streets, their filaments beaded with Coal mana that had condensed like dew upon blades of grass. He’d been tempted at first to harvest these droplets until he’d seen movement above, a hint of massive, insectile legs and burning red eyes. He’d backed away and then fled, realizing he’d almost fallen prey to a not-so-subtle trap.
The fire salamanders with their strange gill stalks were quiescent during the night, but occasionally he’d jog through a nest and startle a dozen of them into waking, sending them shooting away in all directions like streaks of crimson fire.
More wondrous and strange were the fist-sized and stone-shelled barnacles he’d come across that clustered across entire streets and encrusted entire buildings with their conical forms; usually they’d be dormant, their mouths hermetically sealed, looking like little more than part of the decay, but sometimes he’d come across stretches of street awash with Coal mana, and there the barnacles would have opened up and waved their filaments in the air.
Random boulders might be covered in gray mussels the size of his palm, and occasionally he’d espy glowing motes of soft green light floating within the Coal mana currents, each of which would resolve itself into small, transparent organisms whose simple internal organs were visible, each of them trailing long and incredibly fine tendrils behind them.
Once he turned a street corner and froze, looking up to see a curved shell the size of a wagon floating down the center of a particularly rich flow of Coal mana, its shell patterned with gray and pink stripes, a great, unblinking eye pinned directly in the center of the spiral, gazing at him with alien intelligence as it jetted its way slowly down the street, trailed by a mass of rubbery tentacles.
But there were more overt predators as well.
He was forced to barricade himself into a small chamber with the help of his chalk when a pack of black-furred beasts that came up to his knee came leaping after him, eyeless and squat, their huge mouths filled with glowing green fangs, their entire bodies seeming to be little more than sleeves in which to fit their maws.
Another time he realized that a massive feline was keeping pace with him along the rooftops, six-limbed and utterly silent. Scorio had frozen, heart hammering, staring up at the beast, which ceased trailing him to stare back down, only for its head to lurch up from its shoulders as its neck elongated and then spread out violently into a hood, revealing glowing patterns scrawled across its interior that immediately dulled Scorio’s wits and drowned him in lethargy.
It took all his will to stumble away and sprint through the streets, garish afterimages of that mesmerizing pattern hanging before his eyes all the while as if seared into his mind.