Reaper(Cradle #10)(8)

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.

His looks—like an older version of Eithan—and the lightning crackling behind his blue eyes had made Lindon assume at first glance that this was Tiberian Arelius.

“You have the backing of House Arelius to study the labyrinth,” the Monarch in the memory said. “But I expect you to keep that quiet except at great need. I cannot trust any Sage or Herald under a Monarch’s protection, and I’m certain you understand why.”

“That’s clear as new glass,” said the man leaving the memory, and his casual drawl made Lindon think of Yerin. Lindon wished he’d recorded more of his thoughts, because this had to be a personal record of the Sword Sage himself.

“Since you’re going deeper into the labyrinth than you planned, you might consider taking a team. Just be sure you’re only bringing people you trust.”

The Sword Sage laughed. “I was going alone before I heard a word from you. If you’ve got a list of people who can keep up with me, can be trusted, and are itching to run off across the world on my say-so, I’d love to see it.”

Tiberian’s posture sagged, and he rubbed his forehead. “I take your point. If I had so many subordinates who were capable, trustworthy, and unified in purpose, I would have no need to employ you. But please, don’t risk yourself. My advisors and I are simply testing a theory. We should have many years left before this becomes urgent.”