Chapter 17-437: Deeper Knowledge (1/2)

His name was Pawlie Blakhamar, and he was the Mountain and the Hammer.

He wasn’t the only one, of course. There were Void Brothers all over the place now, especially given how people were quietly looking for Voids to Awaken.

He’d thought he was just a dhatun who liked being underground more than most, rather like a true dwarf. He’d never had any skill with the chi skills or magic, but it hadn’t bothered him, as he was happy to live down below, do some mining, and work away as a proper Blakhamar son did.

Getting Awakened had changed all that.

He’d gone to China to Level up, well ahead of his brothers, and then he’d gone up into Tibet, and plied Deep against the phobos there, over and over, staying up on the hated surface while he did, feeling the infection in Reality that extended everywhere, and knowing it had to go.

But it wasn’t really his place or his job. His job was down deep, in the Felldeep, hunting dark things in the darkest corners of the world that should have died long, long ago.

Lady Traveler had given some time, but not that much, to crossing the landscape and peeling open its secrets. The Felldeep went down more than ten miles, out of reach of the lesser Casters above... but not out of reach of Lady Azaia Morningwind, who had made it her personal mission to see The Map of the European Felldeeps completed.

He was now twenty-five miles underground. He had followed the will of the Land, sometimes walking along the Veil, sometimes with his feet on good hard stone, his nose twitching at a vibration and a feeling that something didn’t belong, something wasn’t right.

Some of the morlocks here had green brains. He had ghosted by and through the savages, seeing and feeling the effects of forced mutation upon them, turning once-humans into servants and slaves of older things that shouldn’t exist.

The lines on the wall of psychic cephalid tenta-script in this dusty tunnel wrapped around with faint psychic feelings of hunger, dread, and alien power had been another.

The Templars had been born in Europe, and likely their first discoveries of the cephalids were there. It made sense to go looking for such things there, and now, many, many miles below the Swiss Alps, he stood over a yawning tunnel into yet greater depths, and felt something old and foul below.

Something that should have long been buried beneath the mountain’s roots.

He was about to jump and waft down on the Veil, but something stayed his hand. This place smelled of old power, and such power tended to be crafty and careful.

He didn’t know how deep it was, but he swung over the edge of the rough pit, and began his climb down.

It wasn’t that he could mold the stone, it was that he always knew where to grab and hold, where the stone was strong and where it was weak; where he could drive a hand in for a grip, and where something would give way if he touched it.

He was two hundred feet down when the walls of the flue suddenly began to straighten out, and the stone began to wind and flow in an unnatural manner.

Shaped, and not by normal processes. He could feel the crystalline alignment of the stone had been changed to resonate with an alien paradigm, conducting psychic power upwards to radiate discouragement towards anything that might want to come down this way.

He didn’t use the Markchat at all, fairly confident any use of telepathy would disturb something down here. It was faint, but he could feel waves of awareness slowly sweeping past and around him, tirelessly and patiently looking for something, anything intruding on them.

The stone was slick now, with basically nothing to grab.

He tapped his heels together, and flexed his hands once. The adamantine claws and spikes slid out silently from their homes, blackslake ensuring that they made no sound when he pressed them against the stone, which gave way like cheese.

The makers of this flue might become aware if he disrupted the psychic resonance of the stone, but he was aware of how the power flowed through it, and his hands and feet moved with smooth assurance into the flaws and cracks between that flow. Unafraid and resolute, grim thoughts in mind of those drowned by shattered dams, slain by assassins, or rising to undeath in their thousands after being slain by nerve gas, he went down into the greatest depths any of his Brothers had ever been to, his Hammer Deep waiting on his back, solemn and ready to be used.

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There was a Construct down below, built out of brain tissue. His revulsion was matched only by the necessity that it had to live for now, and that he would see it dead soon enough.

He could feel the static of its awareness all around him, radiating through him, looking for living thoughts to center itself on and attack.

He was a Void Brother. It might as well have been trying to sense an empty void.

It had visual organs, too, lobster-like things waving out from the front of its face, but its ability to sense thought was its main perceptive power. It wasn’t even looking up the shaft.

His Helices wrapped around him, the predominantly grey and brown hues gathering the shadows of the unlit stone to him. Directly above and behind the creature where it stood opposite a distinctly Shaped passageway out, he patiently and silently descended, one step at a time, splayed against the stone and no more than an odd trick of light atop it, moving with the innate grace, control, and precision of a Void Brother Ten.