Valor had very little confidence that they would find the entrance to Falmíer’s upper cave system by following the lyrics of the song Hurinren and Yujao had found. It wasn’t that he didn’t think the song likely to be about the cave system—if anything, he had more confidence than anyone else that the song actually was about two lovers, separated from one another by a sudden event that left them on different sides of a conflict. According to the song, one was left within Falmíer—or
the heart of the dirt covered nation
, which was both an accurate descriptor of the largely subterranean Free Colony and something of a slur against their populace—while the other was simply stated to be
from afar
.
The problem, he thought, was in the words of the song, everything about them implying that it was the most recently known version of an ancient tale—very likely a tale so old they wouldn’t even be able to place it into the historical record had they the original version.
The problem was that while Baylor loved myths and legends, eating up every tale he could from Emilia and the rare Free Colonier they met through her, and Taelor had a mind primed for strategy and managing the people around him, Valor was the one who learned. He liked learning, for the most part, although he knew that his lack of overt passion for any specific subject meant he would never match his classmates in their own educations. Still, he knew a lot, vague and formless as it was at times.
He could program skills and functions if necessary, although his talent would never compare to Emilia or Halen’s. Still, he could discuss theories with them—well, with Emilia. Valor wasn’t sure Halen knew he had any knowledge of coding.
When it came to injuries, he had more than the basic training all clones had by this point in their life. Slowly, they would learn more. Valor already knew that
more.
That wasn’t to say he had any passion for it; rather, he just wanted to be sure he could keep his brothers and Emilia and all those she loved safe. Coral and BJ could bounce ideas off him, in the rare cases where someone in their class was seriously injured, but he knew BJ read through medical studies sometimes, wanting to get a better grasp of new treatments, as well as learn about all the theories on how skills could be used in medical care.
From what Valor knew, having overheard BJ and Emilia discussing skills in medicine, it was an ethically fraught subject. Something about how, while doctors tended to skew into lower D-Levels, it wasn’t an actual requirement because most medical care relied on machines and the occasional skill. According to research out of the Ridge Rind, there were a number of applications of skills that could do the job of the machines. More important than the potential cost savings of skill usage was that they could be deployed anywhere, as opposed to only within a healthcare environment. Most of these theoretical skills, however, would be both aetherstore intensive and processing intensive. So, the question became whether it was fair to actively create skills that some amount of doctors would be incapable of ever using. Many machines could be used by any doctor, and while there were specialties, anyone within those specialties could use the most common machines for treatment. Only some of those doctors would be capable of using the skills, and that created a potential problem that no one seemed to want to touch.
Emilia had suggested the next war would change that—war always pushed innovation past that was ethical or safe or sensible—but for the most part, she and Halen had resisted programming many medical skills themselves. Mostly, their skills focused more on first aid—stitching up of injuries, checking for concussions, and such. Currently, they remained a secret to everyone outside of their friend group and The Black Knot, however, because even those skills could only be used well by low-devs. Part of it, Valor suspected, was simply that they had enough low-devs in their cohort that tweaking the skills to work for higher D-Levels wasn’t necessary. Part of it, Valor suspected, was that there was a whole other ethical issue with such skills being released to the public: people were stupid.
People were stupid and likely to stitch up their injuries or do simple scans of their bodies then go on with life, not realizing they still needed to go see a doctor.
It was a whole thing. It also wasn’t particularly relevant to why he thought the song unlikely to lead them to the upper cave system’s entrance, although it was relevant to how Taelor and Halen were deciding to split up their groups, if splitting up became necessary. He didn’t envy them the task of having to manage the abilities and personalities of their group, so instead, he was microsparking through the forest, searching for things that lined up more with the Falmíer that had allegedly existed before the underground city had been created because there was the problem with the song: while Lüshan had certainly had internal conflicts before, especially when cities closer to the border fell under foreign control, it was actually rather rare that they actively fought one another.
In other words, while the song Hurinren and Yujao had found told of a love broken by a conflict that would
forever hold them apart
, Valor doubted said conflict was any of those that filled the various museums of Lüshan—none of those conflicts had lasted more than a decade or two, after all. This wasn’t something new; rather, it was the norm for Lüshan’s conflicts to fizzle out relatively quickly. Perhaps the
forever
within the song was an overexaggeration of young love. Perhaps it was something more permanent: the love of people from different nations, and given how nations tended to favour stories of their own people, the lover
from afar
was likely someone of Dionese descent… maybe. Nation’s also took stories from their neighbours, morphing them until they were something more
theirs.
Working with so little information, much of it so old it was more myth than absolute fact, Valor was just going with his gut.
Regardless, Valor thought it likely the song was far older than they realized, morphed by time to seem more recent when it likely reached back past even Lüshan’s impressive historical record. The nation, being primarily underground, had suffered far fewer information loses due to war and espionage than most. The fact that they kept most of their history in a mixture of digital, paper, and archaeological form probably helped as well.
Valor knew all this because he had long ago decided that if he couldn’t find something he was passionate about, he would know a lot about plenty of things. Never a depth of knowledge, but always a breadth, wide and reaching wherever there was information to be found. On the occasions where he and his brothers had travelled with Emilia—visiting Lüshan and the Inner Court and Seer’ik’tine, mostly—he had spent so much of his time learning the history of the nation, learning about the culture and the beliefs of the various people who lived within the nation’s borders.
Usually, what he learned was surface level, but in this case, he was able to bring what he had learned together with the myths Baylor had heard and other songs Yujao and Hurinren were finding—Simeon was helpfully accompanying him as he made his way through the forest and relaying the messages they were getting from Yujao through one of the two xpherns their group had.
In the first song the Dionese men had found, one of the lovers had found the tallest, oldest tree in the forest while searching for the entrance that would lead them to their love, hidden beneath dirt and stone and caverns so deep they ate the light. Tall, old trees were currently what the rest of their group was looking for, so there was no point in Valor or Simeon looking for such things. Valor also had little hope they’d get anywhere with such a search. Part of it was simply that the flora in this area of Lüshan, unfortunately, weren’t very long-lived. If he had to guess, the oldest trees in the area were likely only two or three hundred years old. The oldest trees were also short, while the mufa tree grew fast and fierce, reaching far above the rest of the forest by the time it was only a few years old, then barely living a hundred more years—not that Valor had shared that with anyone. There was no need to bury their spirits, especially since none of them were stupid enough to not be searching for other signs that the cavern entrance might be nearby, hidden under a short little bush.
Well… a few members of their group might be stupid enough to only look at the ground directly around giant trees, but that was why they had been teamed up with more sensible people. The problem was actually more people like Leerin, who seemed unenthusiastic about the whole situation, and while Levi’s excitement wasn’t appropriate either, it was better than Leerin’s seeming desire to call it a day and turn back.
Maybe, if they were lucky, she would do something truly egregious and Emilia would finally drop her as a friend? All their lives would be better without her, even if Valor knew the risk of casting Leerin out: that she would take Darrian with her.
Much like his brothers, Valor didn’t exactly like or dislike the rest of their
friends.
They were Emilia’s friends first, and while Valor vaguely appreciated the personalities and company of several—most notably Simeon, Coral, and Rafe, who were just as quiet and contained as he was—neither would he say that he craved their company the way he did his brothers or Emilia. Still, he had something of a soft spot for Darrian because it was similar to a situation that came up within clone pods and black knot families sometimes—this attachment to one another that was uneven and unhealthy, leading to problems when one member wanted to split off and the others demanded they stay.
Valor knew he and his brother loved each other
wrong
, but it worked for them because they loved each other the same amount. Occasionally, especially when they were younger, Taelor had worried that Valor had been dragged into the current of what his older brothers felt for one another.
If we do this, there’s no going back
—Valor had been the one to say that, back when they had been young teenagers and Baylor had been begging, whining, Taelor perfectly happy to fill the need inside him. Taelor, he thought, had known that Valor wouldn’t have gone down this road had he been the one making the final call. At the same time, it wasn’t something he regretted—wasn’t something he would take back, even if his eldest brother was right in assuming that he often was the one being dragged along in the current that was Baylor’s need to be taken care of and Taelor’s answering desire to care.
Valor was fine being cared for, but he didn’t need it.
“Valie?”
Simeon’s sign shifted through Valor’s mind, his Censor giving the smallest disgruntled sigh as it worked to translate the sign he couldn’t see, but could instead feel through the aether with the aid of his Censor. Halen had done a good job in the time he had, Valor thought. Emilia still might not be happy about him trespassing into what they all knew she considered her territory—although she’d never say as much—but just as Simeon had thought it might be necessary, Valor had to agreed.
It was one thing to use relays to communicate when they could be trusted to work. As Emilia’s brief
death
within that room had shown, relays might be unreliable within Falmíer. Better to have a backup plan for communicating if they suddenly found their group similarly cut off from communicating via relays while facing down an enemy, even if it was currently a little processing intensive, his Censor not happy to have received even the single sign to translate. It was fine; his Censor would get over it eventually.
When he looked back at Simeon, the other boy was staring high into the forest. Following his gaze, it took a moment for Valor to see what he was looking at: the oddly coloured leaves high above them, these particular trees near bare of leaves on bark that would never see the sun.
Aetherstreams left their mark on the world, even long after they had shifted and found a home elsewhere. While it was more common today to use technology to force aetherstreams to stay put or move to a specific location so they could be used to traverse nations, it had once been all the rage to let aetherstreams mark the world so they could create beautiful kaleidoscopes of colour over the world. The more times the aetherstreams passed over a piece of land—the longer it lingered there during those stops—the more the colour of the natural landscape would shift, and there were giant, ancient books detailing the now-uncommon art of aethergardening.
Thanks to his reading such a book, Valor knew exactly how certain species of flora were changed by aetherstreams. Combined with the various histories and myths of Lüshan, which detailed how ancient battles with neighbouring Free Colonies had played out…
Valor had a guess, based on an older song Hurinren and Yujao had found—one that spoke of a traitor to Dion riding an aetherstream
near straight to the doors of our enemies, only a single break away to the city of unbreaking strength.
Then, there was a bare fragment of a myth from Baylor to add in:
Once, there was a war with Dion—although it wasn’t yet called that in Lüshan, nor was Lüshan yet known by that name, for this all took place so far in the past that language was not yet how it is today.
This war of our nations was not the first, but one spread millennia apart.
Before this war, the last ended when a boy with a weeping heart came to reside within ours, his story a telling mark over the aether.
That mark was pressed afar, left to weep in spitting fire.
Now, it returned, in this the nation’s time of need, to bring our feet with steady speed to Dion’s door, no single break to be found.
Then, only when the war is won and done, shall the marks of war be pressed afar once more, left to weep in spitting fire for an eternity, our heart closed up tight.
Alone, this didn’t seem like a lot—if anything, Valor thought the fragment more confusing than anything. So, normally, he wouldn’t have thought about it as something leading to the entrance to Falmíer’s upper cave system—it never mentioned the city in question being the capital and Baylor said the fragment was said to be over ten thousand years old, after all—except when they had been discussing what the Dionese drinking song said, Baylor had said something else:
We’re gonna have no luck finding any sort of tree that existed before the last Colonial War. Lüshan is known to raze the countryside over the capital the moment war ignites. No idea why. Tradition, maybe? They don’t do it anywhere else, just over Falmíer.
Just over Falmíer
—almost as if they were hiding something hidden with the foliage of the forest itself by letting fire consume the land, some
mark over the aether
, perhaps. It was still a long shot, but worth considering regardless—it wasn’t like their search options were great to begin with, especially considering…
Valor’s Censor exploded his awareness outwards, cataloguing everything it could before the range fluttered out.
Emilia was right: they definitely needed a better recon skill—probably a few, to cover all their various needs. Something for her to do later, once they found her and got her out of Falmíer.
“Which way?”
Valor asked Simeon, sending over what his Censor had come back with.
The other boy stared off into the distance before his feet began taking them southwest, along the river of strangely coloured flora, a mark that the aether had swum over the land they grew from at least four times. Maybe it would lead them nowhere; maybe it would lead them somewhere. At least Valor felt like they were doing something useful—not that everyone else’s searching was useless, even if he couldn’t shake the feeling that it would never lead them to the cave system.
Hopefully this at least would take them somewhere—anywhere.
Anything was better than standing still and just waiting for Emilia’s name to flicker off in their relays again. Who knew how many close calls the girl he loved had, before her name wouldn’t flicker back on.
.
!
Arc 9 | Chapter 405: All the Bits We Do and Do Not Know
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