Harmonics.
I’ve been practicing the mental forms for it a lot, this past month. A mixture of Pádraig’s exhortations and gut instinct that thenasceann, the connection to their weapons, havesomethingto do with that branch of Will usage. Still, it’s no different to my taking the Will from the blade. Instinct rather than thought, reflex far more than any logic. And once again, I cannot say what drives me to attempt this particular technique as my only, desperate chance, when imbuing something that’s already imbued should be utterly impossible.
But I imagine us both as warriors. Me, and the statue. United by the fight.
Connection.
“STOP!” I scream it desperately, almost weep it. My hand still miraculously against the lines of its face, metal vibrating beneath my palm.
There’s a full second where I’m frozen, expecting cold silver to wrap around my neck; when it doesn’t come, I manage to croak “Let go,” just as the other statue gets in position and pulls back to strike.
I fall to the water as its spear slices the air where I was hanging a moment earlier. Pain arcing through me I manage to roll forward, evading another jab and slapping my hand against the first, still motionless, statue’s leg. Hope firing in my chest. “Protect me.”
It moves.
The unaffected statue—the one with its head still completely intact—tries to skirt it to stab again, but the one I commanded attacks, swift and violent. It doesn’t bother with its spear, bodily slamming into its counterpart and wrestling it into the water. Metal screeches and the unnatural liquid sprays, though still refuses to ripple. Silver hands scratch and punch and claw. I scramble to my feet and away to the safety of the columns, shaking.
The one following my order seems to swiftly get the upper hand, straddling its twin and grasping the silver knot of its head.
With a wrenching twist, it tears the symbol clean off.
The pulse of Will from the beheaded statue vanishes. The silver body in the water lies still, and the one on top of it stops moving too.
I watch for an eternity. Still slowly backing away, past the black statues until I am in shadow up against the slick wall. But nothing more happens. The two masses of silver are as motionless now as when I first arrived.
I slide to a seated position and, hiding from the virulent, unceasing glow of the Aurora Columnae, weep my relief.
I DON’T ALLOW MYSELF LONG TO RECOVER, NOR CONsider the impossibility of whatever it was I just did. Not because I don’t need to, but because I know that outside, the moon is travelling across the night sky, and I am still very much trapped in here.
I examine the stone covering the exit, first. Hoping for some hint of how it might open again. But it’s smooth, Will-cut like the rest of the structure. I can’t even get a fingernail beneath it to try and pry it upward.
It still takes some resolve, after that, to approach the motionless silver statue again. But there are no options and no time so I do, ready to spring back at any sign of danger. Tentatively crouch behind it. Place my hand on its shoulder. I feel it in my mind. A true extension of myself. I cannot comprehend how fortunate it was that the bizarre Harmonic connection I chose to try for the first time, in the heat of the moment, worked. Nor, in fact, how I was even able to get the Will to create it.
That’s a puzzle for later, though.
“Get me out of here.”
I flinch back as the statue stands, then moves calmly to the entrance. It presses its engraved silver palm against the surface blocking my path.
With a shudder, the stone rises.
I resist the urge to sprint and leave all of this far behind. That sharp sense of Will has faded a little since I touched the Aurora Columnae, but I can still feel more pulses out there. A lot more. I step out and creep along the short passageway. Inch to the edge of the exit, still curtained by thin dribbles of water, and peer into the moonlit streets of Fornax.
I was half expecting what I see. My heart sinks anyway.
The black, polished statues that knelt along the way have risen to their feet. Hundreds upon hundreds of them clog the streets, completely motionless but all facing the archway where I’m concealed. Pulsing with Will, just like the one inside.
I watch for a few minutes but there’s no movement, no change.
Heart in mouth, I take a single step out onto the street.
Motion, sharp and violent. A thunderous clacking as the horde of dark statues burst at me with terrifying synchronised intent; I shout and leap back, about to flee, but as soon as I’m beneath the archway again the things stop. Shocking in their abrupt freezing, snapping back into the same ready pose they were in before.
Just … closer now.
“Not this way, then,” I eventually mutter shakily to myself as I retreat to the pool.
I sit with my feet in the water for a while, staring at the faint shimmering of the scattered, submersed weapons that lie throughout the atrium. Even if I took Will from each one of them—and I’m not sure I could, given the mental effort required to keep all of them locked in my mind—it would be impossible for me to imbue more than a few of the statues outside, the way I did the one in here. Not nearly enough to fight my way through.
