Editing Rivers Between Us (section)

==The Wondersmith Reborn==

I alone survived.  I alone can tell the tale.

Adamant is like glass in the way that orichalcum is like lead.  It can hold an edge keener than the most finely honed steel.  In its natural state it is nearly invisible, and it serves as an excellent conduit for essence is sorcerous constructs.  When the first blade slid out of the walls and flicked towards my wrists, I was aware of it only as a faint whisper of jade cogs and drawn orichalc wires.  I twisted away from the panel for an instant, then my fingers were once more in the touch with the panel.  The runes were Old Realm, but they seemed like a name.  I half-remembered it, something about a sunken city... a region of earthquakes.

I traced a glyph with one finger.  A few more years and I might have had my essence awakened, but there was no time then.  I willed the essence to flow, sluggish in the world about me like, imperciptible and  inescapable.  My essence was not my own... another whiff of adamant drifted past me and opened my side, painlessly, and a damp warmth spready over my hip like a curtain of molten lead.  Behind me... yes, they were screaming.  Perhaps one of them was dead.  This did not displease me overmuch.

Eight said something, probably a threat.  Six months ago, when I first met that heartless abomination, I told him to his face that if he did not let me go then I would kill him at the first opportunity for my freedom.  In response he found my family and took my sister hostage.  Poor [[Marta]], she wrote me letters to reassure me of her safety, not realizing how deeply they would wound me.  I was broken to his will.  Now, perhaps, she would be free.  Here I was, trapped in some strange [[The Infinite City|Ruin]] beneath a river, about to die for a beast I despised with all my heart.

Eight was not an exalted.  As near as I could tell he was something other than human, perhaps with the blood of a ghost or demon in him.  He was not lucky, only cruel.  He was born with thirteen fingers, but had thus far lost five in various accidents while scavenging.  He was ugly.  One eye was twice as large as the other, and he used this to his advantage.  And he was a sadist.  Marta had burns on her when I found her, and I still have a lump in my forearm from when he twisted it into snapping, in those first few days.  And he is dead.

Eight was yelling.  My blood was pooling at my feet.  The room was now singing with invisible blades.  I had no essence to awaken the controls, and then I remembered.  I still had my life.

I unwrapped my kerchief from my neck and mopped the blood at my feet and thrust it against the hole in my side (it was so deep I nearly passed out from looking at it).  With the bloody rag in hand I traced my life across the panel.  The essence of blood, primitive necromancy, did its work, and the   panel, smooth and black, was lit from within by a pale white glow.  The code was in fact the prayer to lost things awaiting daylight (what a strange conceit), and in a moment the room was still and silent.  I stood and whispered a prayer of thanks to whatever place this was, to whatever god watched over foolish scholars like myself.  A moment later, I fell to one knee from the blood loss, still oozing from my open side.

Then the blood ceased to flow; the prayer was heard.  I could see it all around me now, a translucent flame of blue and gold.  My party saw it too.  Nine of them were still living of the twelve that entered.  They were staring at me.  I saw the hate in Eight's eye.  He lifted his axe (the axe that had nearly cut off my leg when I joked about his fortune once) and his face twisted in a wordless snarl.  The nine men picked up their fallen weapons and stepped forward.

I remembered then that the essence was mine, and with my essence and searched my own essence shard for secrets long hidden.  Then the name of that place's god was on my lips, and he awoke to my call, reminding me that the defenses of this room were not so crude as to allow the death of their true master.  The panel thrummed under my fingers, and the adamant sang now to my own tune now.  And I had my vengeance on [[Eight]].

I don't care about him.  I would have been fine fleeing on my own, leaving him dead or alive, I didn't care.  I was free.  I was Murakani again.  I could find my sister and my brother again.  But I was also something else now, somehow separated from everything I once was, and separated from my life of hiding.  Beneath the river I was reborn, and that river forever distanced me from the Nathan that fled and wept from the never-ending wars of the scavenger lands.  There were rivers between us forever.

-''Rivers Between Us''