SOLAR KNIGHT

Azinax looked up from her kneeling position in the courtyard. The sun was beginning to peek over the walls, its rays glinting off the morning dew. Oceanic salt scented the air.

"Do you swear to maintain the honour and customs of our order?" asked the priestess, her snow-white shift hemmed in rust-red shifting in the faint breeze.

"By the light that blinds and reveals, I swear it," replied Azinax. The priestess handed her a killing-edge, still in its sheath.

"Do you swear to show no scruples or weakness to those who would oppose its sacred duty?"

"On this blade that I will bear in its name, I swear it!"

The priestess handed Azinax a second sword also sheathed, this one with a square end, but kept her own grip on it as Azinax laid one hand on the sheath.

"And do you swear to mete out whatever justice Phaetusia demands, no matter what form, no matter what cost?"

"On this holy instrument of her will, I swear it!"

The priestess let go of the second sword and allowed Azinax to take it.

"Arise Syr Azinax, knight of Phaetusia, proxy of the Light that Blinds and Reveals. From now on you kneel to no one but her."

m s s s n

17 M. Talundri 1003 AAW

Azinax had long since given up hope of survival. She lay in the dark, wondering what specifically would kill her; whether she would ultimately succumb to her existing injuries, perhaps dehydration if she was especially unlucky, or else one of the complex's other denizens might arrive to finish off. Footsteps approached. Here one comes now, she thought to herself.

"Can you hear me?" asked a voice.

Azinax squinted blearily into the dark and grunted a response. The voice was familiar but she was struggling to place it. Pain permeated her lower legs, but there was something distant about it as if her body was too baffled by its own continued existence to properly process it.

"I'll take that as a yes," the voice went on. "I'm going to lift this rock, but I can't drag you out at the same time. You'll have to crawl out on your own."

Azinax twisted in place an attempt to get a better look at her rescuer but from her position under the bench all she could see was a pair of leather boots. Plantigrade. I guess that narrows it down a little bit, she thought.

"I'm ready," she said. "Lift it and I'll go."

"One-two-three!" the voice counted and then grunted as the rock pinning Azinax lifted slightly. She began working her way back slowly using only her arms, growling through gritted teeth as she felt the movement further aggravate her injured legs. Finally by inch-wise struggle she manoeuvred herself free. No longer constrained by the slab of debris, she sat up as best she could, hunched under the bench, and gently eased off her boots. Even in the dark with the under-layer still on, her legs were plainly crushed.

Her rescuer knelt down beside her and for the first time of the encounter Azinax was able to get a good look at him. Intense eyes, though she couldn't tell the colour in the dark; a broad nose; black mutton-chop beard shot through with silver and grey. Her mind churned slowly as she parsed the individual features into an identifiable face.

"...General Tellius?" she stammered.

"Not a general any more, unfortunately," said Tellius. "But you already knew that."

"I never forgave them for what they did to you," said Azinax. "But you... you were executed! I was there! If this is the afterlife, it's a pretty poor one. The pontifex rotae lied to us."

Unless... A worrying thought crossed Azinax's mind, and she strained her senses for any trace of magic or extraplanar energy nearby. Aside from a few stray hints of evocation and abjuration elsewhere in the room and the foul vibrations left by Cinder's blood, there was nothing. Tellius himself was clean. No illusion, no conjuration, no transmutation. It really was him.

"I regret to inform you that we are both very much alive and therefore obligated to continue trying to stay that way," said Tellius.

"But how?" broke in Azinax before he could elaborate. "How did you survive?"

"That's a long story, and I promise to give you all the details later," said Tellius. "But first I need to finish what I started. I was sent here in the name of Essokia and my mission is something I can't finish on my own."

While Tellius had been speaking, Azinax had been mentally steeling herself for the task ahead. She gently applied her gloved fingertips to one injured limb, mentally felt out the extent of the damage, and gave a metaphysical shove. Her vision flashed and she let out an audible squeal as bone and sinew were reconfigured. Recovering her composure quickly, she then wiggled her toes experimentally. All appeared to be in order, although while she now had the benefit of a working leg she struggled to assert that she really felt better; her other leg was now throbbing more intently in the presence of a point of reference, and using her healing magic on herself inevitably left a sickly sort of spiritual aftertaste. Azinax suspected it was a result of the same energy being squeezed out of and being shoved into the same body, like drinking one's own saliva. But that was just the cost of doing business in this line of work.

Azinax healed her other leg in the same fashion as the first and lay back down. Then, after composing herself as best she could, she crawled out from her place of concealment and stood up. If anything about the situation surprised Tellius, he showed no indication of it.

"I came with a group," said Azinax. "I don't know if they'll be much help to us on the other side of the rubble, but I'll contact them anyway."

"Don't tell them about me just yet," said Tellius hastily. "Just let them know that you're alive and looking for another exit. You never know who's answering to whom these day."

"You're not wrong," admitted Azinax. "Not all of them are of the most reliable provenance."

She paused to focus, trying to pick out the link between her and Razorfang against the background hum of mundane perception. A thread drifted into reach, and she pulled.

"Razorfang, can you hear me?" she asked. Incoherent joy flooded the link.

"You're alive!"

"More through luck than judgement, but I scraped through. The entrance looks blocked, but I'm going to go on ahead to see if there's another way out. How are things at your end?"

Razorfang didn't respond immediately, which Azinax interpreted as a sign he was conveying news of her miraculous survival to the others.

"After the shaking stopped, we went back down to look for you. We couldn't get to your side of the room so we went left to see if there was another way around. So far we've gone deeper underground, but Kaellatch doesn't think we're much closer or further away than we were before. We found some trinkets that Dain and Micaiah were both very interested in, but I didn't really understand why. We haven't encountered anything really dangerous yet, but I'll let you know if we do."

"Good," said Azinax. "Keep me up to date, and hopefully we'll meet up in the middle soon."

She then turned back to Tellius, who was waiting sternly by the door, his piercing eyes crowned with bushy caterpillar eyebrows. "I'm done," she told him. "I didn't mention anything about you, so your secret is safe for now. Razorfang told me the group with down the other side chamber looking for another way around. Now let me know what's going on and what I can do to help."

"Let's get going and I'll fill you in on the way," said Tellius, leading her down the right side chamber. In the aftermath of the earthquake, this was the only way out of the room that wasn't completely blocked off. "It all started after I was arrested," he continued. "The execution was a clever ruse, because the consuls needed someone they could trust who wouldn't be under scrutiny, and the only way they could get the Khalduran spies away from me was if they thought I was already dead. The praetors needed help with a precursor artefact, but in order to retrieve it I needed to completely shed my old identity. I wanted to tell you this earlier, and on multiple occasions I even recommended recruiting you, but the risk associated with a breach of secrecy was too great to let anyone in on it who wasn't absolutely essential to success.

"I understand," said Azinax with sincerity. "You were only fulfilling your duty to the best of your ability. I just want you to understand that I never believed you were guilty of any of the things they accused you of, even when everyone else was quick to turn on you. I came here to fulfil a dictate of the Tome of Antekasmai to reconsecrate the temple, but when I tried to perform the ritual something lashed out at me and prevented me from completing it. Of course I couldn't admit defeat immediately, so I went looking for the source so I could finish the ritual properly. Meeting you down here feels like a divinely ordained coincidence."

The side passage Tellius was guiding her down had terminated at a spiral staircase that took them even further down. The staircase had many landings with doors leading off into the complex, but Tellius swept past all of them.

"I take it the precursor artefact is down her somewhere?" Azinax asked. "Maybe there's a connection with the presence that attacked me outside earlier."

"That sounds like a good guess," said Tellius. "The ancient elves kept a precursor weapon here, and I was leading a task force to retrieve it. But another group got wind of the operation and tried to get in ahead of us to steal the weapon first. There weren't many of us to begin with on account of the need for secrecy and to avoid antagonising Khaldur, but between the rival group, the temple's defences and the quake, I was the only one left."

"That would explain the ruffians who had a go at us on the way in," said Azinax. "And besides, you're not alone down here any more. You have me now, and I have allies too."

At long last they arrived at the bottom of the stairwell. This led to a corridor with several more doors. Some had painted labels in elvish but to one without understanding of the language they were largely indistinguishable. Nonetheless Tellius marched up with confidence to one he evidentally recognised and hefted it open. Azinax followed after him into the passageway beyond. The new corridor ahead turned a sharp right not far ahead from the door, and was sparse and bare except for an ornate door torn off its hinges lying in the middle of the stone floor. Azinax could see by the profile of the door that it was formed from several materials sandwiched together. The surface either side was stone panelling painted with runes and dotted with raised lumps in arcane patterns, while the interior comprised pastry-like layers of a combination of metals, though Azinax couldn't identify what kinds in the darkness.

"The last of us were in here when the quake struck," said Tellius, stepping over the door and through the denuded door-frame. "We tried to retreat outside but got separated in the confusion when we took a wrong turn. As far as I know the others were crushed by rubble somewhere further along the outer corridor. The reason we were here in the first place was that this room seemed like the sort of place someone would store something magically dangerous, so naturally we searched it. Other than a rather nasty-looking ward trap, we didn't find anything in the obvious places but figured we'd at least turn up something. On the one hand, the quake interrupted us so it's possible we just needed to look harder, but on the other, the answer could be staring us right in the face without us realising because everything down here's in elvish."

"There's an elf in my team," said Azinax. "Maybe she could help." She followed Tellius into the room, taking care not to step on any of the runes or lumps on the door.

"We still haven't finished turning this place upside down yet, so you take that side and I'll take this one," said Tellius, gesturing first one way and then the other.

It was a large room, open plan, that contained several multipurpose work-benches with generous space between them. Each was furnished with a different contraption, some of which were hooked up to an elaborate pipe system that lead up into the ceiling. Others were set up for their effervescences to be stored in detachable vessels.

"Lux,"intoned Azinax as she drew her sword, and the blade began to emit a soft white light.

While many of the devices out in the open might have been precursor-derived in design, none of them looked like they were likely to be the precursor artefact they were looking for. With that in mind, Azinax began opening up all the cupboards and drawers lining the walls on her side of the room. As she did so, she could see by the unevenness of the dust that some of these had already been searched.

"What exactly are we looking for?" Azinax asked, calling across the room as she examined a greasy smear in the bottom of one of the laboratory's innumerable glass bottles.

"Anything that could give us a hint about where the proper artefacts are kept," said Tellius. "Normally in cases like this, the consuls or the grand praetor would send a small army and they'd tear the place up until they found everything. But we're a bit too close to Khalduran territory for that to work. The locals wouldn't like it either but they're less in a position to do anything about it."

"I've found a good rule of thumb in dungeon-delving is that if you encounter resistance, you're going in the right direction," said Azinax. "And that's what this has turned into, really, though it feel sacrilegious to call a temple of the Wheel a dungeon, even if it was built by sectarian elves. What is it with ancient elves and underground bunkers anyway? It feels like that ought to be more of a dwarf thing."

"My understanding is that most of the infrastructure was already there, built by the precursors, and the elves just co-opted it," said Tellius. "And while I'm aware of that heuristic and consider it a good one, it wasn't working here. Once we got properly inside the complex, we didn't find any obvious resistance per se. Just a whole mess of corridors and rooms full of weird junk."

Azinax tugged on the door handle of one of the taller cabinets, but unlike the others this one was stuck firm. She pulled a little harder and on the third yank the door swung open, a withered arm still clinging to a supporting strut on the inner side. Azinax wrinkled her nose as she saw the corpse – another desiccated elf holding something tight to its chest with its one remaining arm.

"There's a dead guy in here," Azinax called out to Tellius.

"How old?" asked Tellius from the other side of the room.

"Thousand years minimum." Azinax reached in, hiding uncharacteristic trepidation, and tugged at the flat object in the dead elf's hand. At first she tested it with her fingertips, then adjusted her grip after it didn't immediately come loose. She tugged much more firmly on the second attempt, pulling out not only the object but the corpse as well, dumping the latter at Tellius's feet just as he arrived behind her.

Tellius stared at her with an air of bemusement.

"I found something," she announced flatly. Tellius took the object from her. It was a rectangular piece of matte black material resembling a tile embossed with symbols around the edge.

"I've seen these before," he said. "The ancient elves used them as recording devices. They never struck me as having the elvish aesthetic, but no one has ever accused me of having much aesthetic sense. This one doesn't look like it's working anyway."

"A thousand years of neglect will do that, although this place might leave you thinking otherwise," observed Azinax. "It figures that the one piece of technology down here that might help us is the only one that fell victim to decay."

"It's possible that it's not broken necessarily, just depleted of magical energy," suggested Tellius. "Do you think you could do something about that?"

He handed back the tile, and Azinax allowed her higher senses to range over it as she held it in both hands. As Tellius had proposed, there was still the residual hum of magic within it, along with an indication of hollowness waiting to be filled. After making an estimation of the magnitude of energy required, well within her capacity depleted though it was by earlier exertions, she teased out a fragment of her power and shoved. The runes on the tile's border flared gold, and the surface rippled like a lake disturbed by the breeze. The ripples coalesced into elvish glyphs, slightly raised and glowing gold in the pitch-dark.

"It worked!" exclaimed Tellius. "Now give it here."

Azinax didn't resist as Tellius snatched back the tile, since in addition to the matter of hierarchy there was also the issue that she understood no elvish. From the way he was handling the tile she suspected Tellius was no better off but he did appear familiar with the interface, which was operated via a series of patterns traced on the surface with a fingertip. After minutes of sifting through reams of elvish text, Azinax began to fear that the hope they had felt on finding the device had been illusory.

Azinax pinged the link to get Razorfang's attention. "I went down a staircase to a lower level, and it's a labyrinth down here so I'm not all that optimistic about finding a second exit. How are you going?"

"We ended up going downstairs too," Razorfang replied. "It was Kaellatch's idea to get around the blockage. So far she's been trying to steer us around to your side, but the corridors never seem to want to go that way, even though I know that as the crow flies you're not far away."

"It sounds like you're getting closer gradually, and what matters is that you get there eventually," said Azinax. "We would have had to go downwards anyway, since that's where the force that attacked me before seemed to be coming from."

Meanwhile Tellius was still fiddling with the tile. At long last he succeeded in displaying an image of intersecting lines and shapes that bore a suspicious resemblance to a map. After scrutinising it intently, Tellius laid the tile flat and face-up on one palm, then rested his other palm on top of it to make a sandwich. As he drew the top hand up the glowing lines on the surface were brought up with it, pulling the map out into the third dimension and extending it like a telescope.

"That's a bit better," said Tellius. "Does that look familiar to you?"

"That looks like the entrance," said Azinax, pointing to a thread near the top that snaked downhill and then bifurcated into a T-junction. "That would mean we're currently right here." She then pointed to a battery of rooms further down. "The only question now is, where's the artefact?"

"Where, indeed," mused Tellius. He tapped one of the rooms of the map, and a spray of elvish glyphs spidered out ordering themselves into a paragraph hanging near where he had touched.

"Seems reasonable to infer that's a description," said Azinax. Tellius tried a few more rooms, getting a different unintelligible paragraph each time. Most of the descriptions glowed faintly in a cool blue, but a couple emanated an uneasy shade of yellow.

Finally Tellius tried one near the centre at the bottom of the map, poking his finger in between the golden tendrils of corridors. As he did, the resulting cascade of glyphs was a hostile shade of crimson and the two of them flinched as the tile emitted a shrill chirp.

"I think we should try that one," said Azinax.

"Agreed," said Tellius. "But before we leave, there's one more thing. There was something about the ward trap that didn't quite seem right. The scholar we brought with us was quite curious about it. I don't expect to get to the bottom of it right now, but it might be worth coming back later, given how potent he said it was. Aejura herself couldn't wriggle out of that one, were his exact words, as I recall."

"You want to bring it back to Essokia and study it," inferred Azinax. "I can take a look at it now, if you want."

"That's exactly what I was getting at. It's back here." Tellius pivoted back towards other side of the room, leading Azinax to an alcove at the rear hedged in by alchemical equipment. On the floor of the alcove was a gold-inlaid circle of runes in a combination of elvish, draconic, and other languages Azinax didn't recognise. The circle was divided into twelve segments each decorated with the astrological symbol of a different zodiac god. Azinax recognised this configuration immediately, but unlike the instances she had seen before, in this case the wedges did not meet at a point in the centre. Instead there was a thirteenth symbol set in its own smaller concentric circle.

"What do you make of it? The centre symbol I mean," asked Tellius. "I haven't seen the likes of it in any temple before, or anywhere for that matter."

"It looks a little like a calligraphic version of the rune for the draconic word for perfection," described Azinax. "That makes sense if it's supposed to be an astrological symbol. What strikes me though is how lopsided it is, like the symbol was cut in half and the two pieces don't line up any more. Not exactly perfection. The binding circle certainly perfectly intact though. It's definitely still active, which shouldn't be surprising what this place is like, especially considering that a binding circle is exactly the sort of thing you'd hope was horribly over-engineered for durability."

While Tellius appeared to take interest in a stack of small glass orbs on an adjacent table, Azinax moved a little closer, hoping to take a better look at the rune, enclosed as it was by the binding circle. Mid-stride something alerted her, some incongruity in Tellius's movements, and she turned around just in time for a glass sphere to hit her square on the face-place of her helmet, erupting in a cacophonous flash and spattering lurid fluid as it shattered. With his quarry momentarily stunned, Tellius pushed her back, sending her sprawling into the runic circle.

"What the hells is this about!?" snarled Azinax, staggering to her feet. "Explain!"

"You laid it on too thick and let your guard down to boot," said Tellius dismissively. "I expected better."

"That doesn't explain anything!" Azinax shied back as far the confines of the circle would let her, her sword drawn and pointed directly at him. Fragments of glass lay on the floor in front of the ward trap glinting in its light.

"You're allowed to drop the act now," Tellius insisted. "The game's over and I won. Or do you really expect me to believe that you'd trust so easily? You didn't even try to find holes in my story."

"I checked you weren't mind-controlled, an illusion or transformed, so what else would I check?" retaliated Azinax. "Of course I trusted you! I served you loyally for years, so why would you expect me to stop now? You can't even begin to imagine what I sacrificed just to expiate your name! And to think it was all a waste of time in the end, just not for the reason I thought it was. I should have listened to the others. I should have listened to anyone but you!"

Tellius hesitated. Then his face locked back into his characteristic chronically unimpressed expression.

"I don't know why I'm wasting time here when this is obviously a false dilemma," mused Tellius. "Either you're lying to me like I originally thought, or else you're telling the truth, in which case someone so inflexible has no place in the new world anyway.

"New world...?" repeated Azinax, her sword still raised.

"You won't live to see it, so it's none of your concern," said Tellius. "Robust as that ward circle may be, I'm not taking any chances."

As he spoke he reached for something Azinax couldn't see, but stopped as a crash sounded from the front of the laboratory. At the same time, Razorfang called out to Azinax through the link.

"Found you."