Chapter Text
This place was far too much like Reverie for Clive’s comfort. Never mind how light-filled this building was, compared to Reverie’s bleakness - the lines of it were the same. The cold, oppressive atmosphere was the same. Beautiful as it was, Clive did not like it. Not at all.
Recovered from that awful alarm, Torgal took point again as they ventured into the higher chamber from where the crystal miners had emerged. Clive followed, Joshua behind him, and Jill bringing up the rear.
Inside was… not what Clive had expected.
Instead of orderly columns and those chill Fallen aether-lights, the interior was almost entirely overgrown by those dull dusk crystals. They spilled down the walls; formed a jagged carpet across large sections of the floor; hung perilously from the ceiling. Joshua tugged at his arm, pointed up towards the spikes of crystal suspended above them, and gestured for quiet. Clive nodded; he’d been in enough caves to know that any disturbance, even a raised voice, could knock those sharp points down like spears. Red lights reflected off the dark crystals, giving the building an almost bloody glow.
There was no sign of any Fallen constructs. Yet. Clive had no doubt they were there somewhere. They were always lurking around somewhere, even if they looked like statues or wall ornaments at first.
The miners, whoever they were, had picked a path through the crystals. They’d been working the site for a while. How they’d found it, Clive had no idea.
Behind him, Joshua whispered, “If this is the source of the dusk crystals - were the Fallen trying to make their own? To reduce their dependence on the Mothercrystals?”
If so, the Fallen hadn’t mastered the art. The dusk crystals were notoriously fragile, only a step better than nothing and far more expensive than nothing. It was also more than any scholar or engineer today could manage. Clive reached down to run his fingers across one. They wouldn’t work in the deadlands, of course, but did they also draw aether from the land like Ultima’s crystals did? If so, this was just replacing a problem made by god with a problem made by man. No real solution at all.
Clive sighed, straightened, and kept walking towards the centre of the room, where the crystals were densest and largest.
He didn’t make it halfway there.
From somewhere, nowhere visible, the inhuman voice that had spoken in the courtyard spoke again. Threat detected. Unauthorised biometrics detected. Engaging Sigma protocol. Evacuate level one. Evacuate level two. Evacuate level three.
Instinct alerted him to the bolt of aether. He leapt aside. He came down on crystals and nearly fell, the footing sharp and treacherous. “Shit!” Another bolt came soon after, then another from across the room. The voice repeated its message, absolutely calm. There were gaps between the sentences, the ideas stitched together in a strange patchwork of sound. Clive strained his senses for aether, the best warning he’d have of an attack in this echoing chamber -
“Clive!” Jill called. Clive twisted as much as he could while avoiding the bolts. She pointed upwards, where more ominous shapes were starting to fill with light.
Clive wanted to call back, but he was interrupted by a heavy thump, followed by a strange grinding sound neither quite like stone nor quite like metal. The entire room shuddered. Clive found himself dodging not just more aether bolts, but falling crystal as well. The shaking stopped, but the thumping noises continued. “Sentry!” Clive shouted. “I’ll handle it, you two take care of whatever’s shooting at me!”
The Fallen construct came into view. It was huge. The largest of its type Clive had ever seen, fully twice as tall and twice as broad as he was. Humanoid and skull-headed, the lights animating it were a colour Clive had never seen before, especially in a Fallen construct, an almost sickly violet-pink. Its fist was also nothing Clive had ever seen before, slamming down on Clive’s position like the wrath of the heavens.
Rolling away hurt. Crystals sliced into his exposed skin and jabbed sharply at any unarmoured area. It hurt less than being hit with that fist would, so he called on Odin’s powers to right himself before the follow-up blow, from the other hand, could crush him.
It was fast, this thing. Clive caught a third blow on his sword and felt the impact ring all through his torso. He dodged the fourth and had to keep going to avoid another bolt of aether from above. Phoenix flame carried him back close enough to slash at the creature’s back.
To his shock, its head simply rotated. Its arms and legs followed, turning to face Clive without turning at all. Once again he was forced to use Odin’s powers to escape. The construct followed him with a kick. Clive ducked under that too.
With Clive off balance, the construct was relentless. The bolts of aether from above made it worse. He had to trust in Jill and Joshua, keep himself alive, and wait for his opportunity.
The construct couldn’t be worse than Odin, after all.
As a bolt of violently pink levin scorched past him, Clive had to acknowledge that even if the construct wasn’t worse than Odin, all it would take was one mistake and he’d be a smear of blood on these crystals.
“Hang on, Clive!” Joshua shouted from somewhere above.
He didn’t have much choice about it. Between the bolts and the blows, Clive was hard pressed to survive, much less counterattack.
A whirling kick grazed past his chin. Clive took the deepest breath he could manage, reached inside, and semi-primed.
Flames ran down his skin in a rush of power. It felt good. It usually felt good. He was faster like this. Stronger. Every sense was alive and aware, his body ready for anything. The next punch came towards him almost in slow motion, and it was hardly an effort to slip past the attack this time and start cutting towards the main body of the construct. His blade gleamed with fire so intense it started to flicker towards blue rather than red, white rather than black. It gouged into the construct’s side, the edges of the cut briefly glowing molten orange. Clive flickered back, then around, the painfully incomplete fragments of the Phoenix within him still enough for this.
He called Titan’s power next. He couldn’t manipulate the crystals themselves, but the floor beneath them was a different story. Clive reached from wall to wall and shook the floor as hard as he dared. The crystals came free from their roots. More importantly, the construct wobbled on its feet. It was so large, so heavy. It needed firm footing. Clive could use the Phoenix. Clive could use Odin. He didn’t need the ground beneath him to fight anywhere near as much.
So he turned the floor to sand.
The construct was not a highly intelligent creature. Whatever the Fallen had made it for, it couldn’t respond quickly to a change like this. It tried to kick him, only for its shifting weight to betray it. It crashed to the floor, shattering the crystals and adding them to the sand.
Clive was on it in an instant. Bahamut’s light hampered the thing even more, catching one of its arms and holding it long enough for Clive to drive his sword into the thing’s core. Levin crackled. Some of the veins of energy dulled. It thrashed, hard enough that Clive had to retreat.
The bolts from above were fewer now. Clive released his semi-prime. He didn’t want to rely on it. By the time he’d readjusted to himself the construct had at least struggled to its feet. Clive waited a second longer, but whatever thought animated it, it coould at least learn a little. It set itself low and solid. Clive doubted he could knock it down again without shaking the tower to pieces and getting yelled at by his brother.
The construct started shooting levin at him. Bolt after bolt. Clive wove between them as best he could. It was less controlled than before, flashing and arcing unpredictably. More crystals smashed every time it missed him. Afterimages flashed across Clive’s eyes. He wanted to finish this quickly.
He could see it. Clear as day.
Bahamut to tie its arms. Garuda to launch him high in the air. Odin for the finishing blow.
Clive landed close behind the construct. Then he scrambled out of the way before its upper half slid free of the lower, the dismembered creature falling with two distinct if sand-muffled thumps. He turned and watched the pink levin flicker once, twice, thrice - and then fade entirely. It groaned, cooling metal a death rattle of sorts.
On the other side of the room, there was another crash. Joshua smashing whatever it was that had been shooting at him. “All right up there?” Clive called.
“Fine,” Jill called down, “They were focusing on you. Joshua just got the last one.”
Joshua poked his head over the railing of one of the upper floors. “And I’ve found the platform leading upwards, too. Come on, you two.”
Before any more of those constructs could appear. Clive was well and truly sick of fighting. He returned his sword to its harness and hurried upward.
—
Joshua frowned at the platform that led to the upper floors of the Sagespire. They could be thwarted right here if they didn’t work out how to operate it.
“Can we operate it by aether?” Jill asked him. She’d knelt to examine the strange grooves in the floor. Clive stood as close to her as he could without putting her in range of his sword should he need to draw it.
The fight had put Clive on edge. Joshua too, for different reasons. There was a theory taking shape in his mind that he did not want to voice quite yet.
At least that disembodied voice had ceased calling all personnel to their stations. An interesting choice of words there; were the people here not trained in arms still expected to fight? The machines Joshua and Jill had destroyed hadn’t needed warriors to operate. Perhaps a scholar could operate such a device. Perhaps the Fallen had designed this place so it didn’t need warriors at all, only the machines they built. A way of war Joshua could hardly imagine.
…and he was growing distracted. They needed to get this platform moving.
“Aether should do it,” Joshua said.
“Then allow me.” Clive took over. It made sense, but to see his brother take the heavy lifting again when his clothes still bore scorch marks and scratches from his fight with the Fallen construct was rather galling. Joshua should be able to do something. Not for the first time, he reminded himself that he was preserving his energy, his health, for the fight against Ultima.
While Clive summoned a trace of aether - he never did use much, the efficiency suited for this sort of task - Joshua cast around for any control mechanism. “There,” he said. A deliberate irregularity in the design.
Clive channeled a tiny amount of aether into the platform and the entire thing lit in the cold blue so beloved of the Fallen. The platform shuddered slightly but then rose smoothly enough. As if it had only been a few months since the machine was last used, rather than years uncounted.
“This can’t be safe,” Jill murmured, looking not up but down. There was no railing, after all. Just a drop to the receding floor below. As she approached the edge, however, a barrier of blue aether formed before her, pulsing insistently. Jill reached out anyway and her hand met resistance.
“Why waste the materials on railings when you could just use aether?” Clive huffed.
Joshua thought back to the crystals below them. “I wonder if the Fallen truly relied on those dusk crystals,” he said. “Surely nobody would want to use something so fragile to power a device that lifted them in the air? There’s arrogance, and then there’s foolhardiness.”
The platform slowed as it approached the ceiling, then stopped as it came level with the floor above. Joshua looked up further and saw no obvious path for the platform to take. It seemed they would have to find a second platform. Or maybe some stairs. Good, reliable stairs. He might not enjoy climbing them, but he knew how to use them and what to expect.
Speaking of what to expect… as soon as Clive stepped off the platform, the lights turned harsh red and once again the alarm blared. The disembodied voice spoke again. Threat detected in Sector Two. All personnel evacuate. Initiating Omega Protocol. All personnel evacuate. Initiating Omega Protocol.
“Omega Protocol?” Clive shouted, in the ringing, painful silence that followed.
Joshua shook his head. The ringing in his ears shifted slightly but did not abate any more quickly. Founder, that was an awful sound. The lights shifted from blue to red. Aether shifted through the building wildly. He strained his senses, fearing that the tower was about to try and blast them into oblivion, or destroy itself and all the information contained within. He trusted Clive to defend them in the case of an aetheric attack (defence?), but losing the site would be something they couldn’t recover from.
This place was far too valuable to destroy. They had to disable the defences here so that others could come and learn from it.
“The aether’s travelling to the top of the tower,” Clive said. “Always up. Nobody can do anything at ground level, can they?”
“Wouldn’t want to make it too easy,” Jill said wryly. “Not for us, and not or anyone who ever worked here.”
Joshua struggled to imagine anyone working here - walking from their own homes to this remote tower, climbing who knew how many levels until they reached the floor they worked on, spending all day here and then making the trek back home for dinner. The whole thing colder and emptier than any scholar’s workplace he knew of. Even apothecaries and chemists, whose workplaces were clean of necessity (at least if they were any good at their craft), still tended to keep their benches in particular, personal order. This place was devoid of individual personality.
They started the search for another platform. If the aether was flowing upwards, they had to follow it. There would be time to explore all these corridors in more depth later. Right now they had to focus on not allowing the tower to blast them to oblivion, or blasting itself to oblivion.
Yet they had to pass through several of those halls searching for their way up anyway. Lit by the red aether light of the alerted security system - whatever that system was - the hallways turned ominous and oppressive. They were deep in the heart of the tower now, away from the windows. Some of the doors opened as Joshua or Jill approached. They did not budge when Clive did, panels above the door flashing red. The theory took further shape. Clive, too, noticed - and from his frown, he did not like the implications any more than Joshua did.
One room they passed was still lit in blue. Joshua couldn’t help but peek inside.
Within were rows of…bubbles, he supposed. Or glass cases. Something that was like both and like neither. Dark shapes were suspended within. Some looked suspiciously like worgens. Others like undersized, gangly chocobos, all beak and talon. The largest of the bubbles housed something that looked suspiciously like a couerl.
He had to qualify it as like worgens, undersized chocobos, and couerls, because no specimen of any of those he’d seen had claws or talons quite that long. This was definitely a research facility, as he’d been hoping, luck beyond anything he could have imagined for a last-ditch attempt to find something that would help against Ultima - but now he wondered just what the Fallen had planned. How they’d planned to do it. Clive stared at the shadowy, distorted shapes within the bubbles and shuddered. Jill rested a hand on his shoulder just briefly, and when they left that room - no platform within it, just the anomaly of blue lighting in this sea of red - both of them stopped to pat Torgal.
It turned out they’d gone exactly the wrong way to reach the next platform from the one they’d entered by. When they did find it, a pair of Fallen constructs leapt out to attack. Joshua and Jill took one while Clive fought the other. A routine fight, as far as it went. Yet Joshua could not help notice that both constructs focused on his brother.