The Monarch never responded.
Without his help, Lindon’s chances of repairing Dross fell significantly. But Lindon could try again. Until Dross awakened, he had time to research.
In the meantime, he brought Yerin to the Sword Sage’s void space.
Lindon had expected Yerin to follow him out of curiosity, but the more he hinted that he had something to show her, the more reluctant she became. He dropped several hints, expecting her to sprint ahead of him. Instead, the more she learned, the slower her feet moved.
It was as though she dreaded finding something her master left behind.
Lindon marched into the half-destroyed Tomb, a chunk of its roof caved in and one of its pillars cracked. He had to pick his way around pieces of debris that looked like they had been deposited here by a hurricane.
Yerin paused at the entrance, at the top of the stairs where she had once fought her master’s Remnant. The cold wind grabbed the lock of red hair over her eyes, which she hadn’t had all that time ago.
“Is this gonna kill me if I don’t see it?” she asked.
Lindon stopped. He moved back to her, gently placing his hand on her arm.
She didn’t tremble, but her spirit did.
“We don’t have to do this now,” he said. “We can come back later.”
“It’s not his…body, is it?”
This was the first time he had seen her hesitate over a dead body. Even when she’d removed her master’s sword from his corpse, she hadn’t seemed disturbed.
Then again, he hadn’t known her well back then.
He hurried to reassure her. “It’s not. It’s just some things he left behind.” Lindon had waited to tell her exactly what he found because he had expected her to be eager to see for herself, but he had been wrong.
“Do you want me to tell you first?”
Yerin squared her shoulders. “Nothing to be scared of, is there? He didn’t leave a Dreadgod tucked away.”
Lindon thought of a shriveled, gray-white mummified hand and hesitated to respond. Yerin saw that.
“Bleed and bury me, if he really—”
“No, no, nothing threatening. But there’s no hurry either.”
“Doubt either one of us wants to come back into this script longer than we have to. Let’s do what we’re going to do and be gone.” The suppression field hung heavy on them both, and it hadn’t been long since they’d escaped it the first time.
Lindon searched her face, but took her at her word. He focused his will on a barely-sensed indentation in space at the back of the room.
Then, using a finger of Blackflame madra as a medium, he cut through it.
“Open,” Lindon commanded.
The Sword Sage’s private void space expanded in front of them. They looked through a rift into a large room filled with collected treasures.
Most of the collection seemed to be organized in sections—refining equipment here, training area there—but you could find artwork and swords anywhere. Landscape paintings hung over a rack of nicked wooden swords, while a dancing sculpture of light fluttered beside an Overlord-level sword of condensed venom madra.
Lindon had expected Yerin to gasp, or to exclaim, or to make a sound of some kind. Instead, she was silent.
When he focused, he realized she had stopped breathing entirely.
Her red eyes were wide, her face pale. As a Herald—if a partial one—her body and spirit had a unique relationship to one another, one that he didn’t quite understand. But even her spirit felt faint, as though her soul was on the verge of dissipating to essence.
Lindon stepped in front of her, blocking the view behind him. She continued to stare.
“Yerin?”
“I need…I need to…” She swallowed. “Come in with me?”
Silently, Lindon followed her inside. She drifted from one section to another like a wild Remnant, from a rack of training manuals to the portrait of a woman Lindon recognized as the Winter Sage.
For more than ten minutes, Yerin just floated around, absorbing memories. Finally, she slowed as she approached a rack of black training clothes. Each of them were shredded on the edges, as though they’d been dragged through a thicket of thorns.
She ran her fingers over the shreds. The ones she had left herself on these robes as she trained the Endless Sword and lost control.
“Used to say I’d be ready when I stopped cutting my own clothes. He was going to have me a sword made, like his. And I…I lost his sword. I broke it.”
That was when her tears started to flow.
Lindon didn’t say much. He just held her as she cried.
“I wasn’t allowed in here,” she muttered after a few minutes. “He’d take out what I needed when I needed it. Thought I’d never see these again. Should be dust in the wind.”
With another moment surveying the space, she turned to Lindon. “I want it.”
“I would never leave a scrap behind.” He hesitated. “Unless you wanted to, of course.”
“My key’s not big enough for everything, but we’ve got space in the house. We can carry it the old way.”
“No need for that,” Lindon said immediately. He had prepared to come back here. Yerin’s void key wasn’t big enough to hold everything, and neither was his.
Fortunately, he had spares.
There was only one thing they didn’t pack up: a small metal cube, marked with a crescent moon, that Lindon knew from experience contained the hand of Subject One.
Lindon also held in his palm a small purple-black jewel that had caught his eye. It was clearly a dream tablet of some kind, and he suspected it was a composite gemstone used to hold pieces of several memories instead of one complete experience.
Dross could have told him for sure.
Without him, Lindon had to spend a few minutes scanning through the memories. After a few glimpses and brief words, he was certain.
And far more excited.
He handed it over to Yerin while he explained. “Your master prepared before he entered the labyrinth. These are some records from other teams who explored the labyrinth first.”
Yerin’s eyes widened as she skimmed the dream tablet herself. It would bear further study, but Lindon had come to some conclusions already.
First, almost every explorer had gone in alone. Those who did have teams treated them as support crews rather than partners.
This made sense, based on the other things he had seen. You had to have some degree of control over your willpower to navigate the labyrinth’s environment, and the more advanced you were, the harder it was to find companions of equal ability. At least, those who wouldn’t betray you.
Indeed, one of the memories he glimpsed was a three-man group of Archlords who had bickered and betrayed one another after finding a treasure. Only one survivor had escaped, forever spiritually scarred, to leave a dream tablet behind.
Yerin noticed the same thing, because she grimaced. “Can’t say I’m blind to why my master went in on his own. Not that it’s a shock. My hair would have fallen out if he ever worked with a team.”
“Look at the last memory.” It had stuck in Lindon’s mind, clear enough that it was like Dross had replayed it for him.
A man with short, blond hair and a cropped golden beard sat behind a desk, speaking to the person leaving the memory. There were few thoughts attached to it, only his appearance and his words.