[Beastborne: Voracious] (Book 5) Chapter 33

Chapter 40

That night, Hal lay in bed, unable to sleep. Noth was hogging his arm, using it instead of her pillow. He slowly, and with great care, managed to slide his arm out from beneath her and put her head upon the much softer pillow.

Rubbing some life back into his arm, he wondered about how his higher Vitality still didn’t seem to do anything about losing feeling in a limb when it was immobilized for so long.

Slipping out of bed, Hal tucked Noth in, got dressed, and headed out into the night.

“Havior be night-walking?” asked a familiar voice just outside in the bushes beside the cottage.

“Shouldn’t you be watching our new guests?” Hal asked.

“Psshkoh, is many eye-peeking them. Is no problem.”

“Really?” Hal asked, motioning toward the slim dark figure making no attempt to conceal itself as it walked away from the distant longhouse.

Lurklox performed a series of very unladylike curses in her native tongue and began to run after the Kinslayer. Hal put a hand on her small shoulder to stop her.

“You can come with us,” he told her. “But I don’t need your protection. If she tried to harm me, I could stop her with a thought. And by the trajectory of her path, I don’t think she’s trying to do anything nefarious.”

Yet, at least, he added in the privacy of his own head.

Now that he had some time to be alone again, truly alone with himself, he found himself not only getting used to it, but remembering just how nice it was to be utterly private at times.

He loved Besal as one can only love themselves, but it was just so damn inconvenient at times to have your thoughts picked up by somebody else.

I do hope you’re all right though, Hal thought.

His Khaeros, his Beast, as some called Besal’s kind, had been an inordinately stalwart companion. Sure, he didn’t fully understand Hal because he wasn’t human himself, nor was he mortal. But he was always an ally after… their little struggle.

Once Besal was on Hal’s side, though, he became integral to beating nearly every beast and major threat he had ever faced.

I’m not sure what I’m going to do without him,Hal thought. It was one of his main drives to fix his Kol’thil and improve himself. He no longer had Besal as a crutch to fall back on should things go wrong, which happened with alarming frequency as of late.

Hal set off slowly in the direction of the newly erected flimsy wall that marked the barrier of Brightsong from the majority of the bowl-shaped valley’s expanse.

He wondered if, now that he was without Besal, if he could even use his Beastborne powers properly, let alone take himself to the heights he was able to do with Besal by his side.

A concern that was easily put to rest when he Spliced Golem essence, picked up an errant stone, and crushed it into powder. It took more effort than he would have liked, suggesting something was off, but it was hardly difficult beyond the damage inflicted by that dreaded Hollow essence.

Soon enough, it would just be another bad memory. Like the Kol’thil Bleed.

This was new territory, but in a strange way, he had somebody to share it with. The other Kinslayer… the same person as him but for a changing of chromosomes.

She was also without a Beast, though their parting had been Hal’s doing, just as his parting with Besal had been hers. In a way, they had wounded each other.

It seemed oddly fitting.

Without Besal to use as an MP battery, I’ll need to be more careful. In fact, I’ll need to be much more diligent in my training. I need more essences, and before that, I’ll need to unlock the remainder of what I already have. I can’t keep going on like this, limping about and pretending everything is okay.

Fixing his Kol’thil Bleed was only the first step.

Now he had another tool in his arsenal. He could use it to fall back on while he rid himself of the corrupting Hollow essence which would unlock his remaining monster essences.

With that done….

I’ll finally be poised to see just how far I can take a proper Beastborne Class, instead of one that’s been hobbled and wounded over and over again.

It felt like many years had passed since he first experienced the debilitating effects of Kol’thil Bleed. It was hard to remember it was gone for good.

And to keep it gone, he’d need to work on using his Kol’thil regularly, so that he never ran into a situation again where his Gold Kol’thil was too weak.

Now he had both the Copper Kol’thil from Renthor, a Balesian Mage who had tried to kill him in the Abyss, and his own Gold Kol’thil. Together, they were greater than the sum of their parts.

Whenever he used the Copper Sigils, they felt… empowered somehow by his Gold Kol’thil, as if the two were mingling in some way he couldn’t quite put his finger on. It required more testing for sure, but for the moment he had a way of using his Sigils without expending Experience and that was a gift that he could not place a value on.

That alone was proof that he had been right to trust Tristal. At least as far as the gift of [Magicite]. He was certain, considering its description mentioned aether, that he would be able to refine or improve it somehow.

Perhaps with Bonecrafting or Aetherochemy?

The former he was well-versed in, though his power was still nascent, and the latter would no doubt require another trip to Hemel, the third—and smallest—moon of Aldim.

With a Memoria Crystal glistening like a beacon up there, he needed only to reach through the connecting crystal in the Fathomways that stitched Aldim together in a series of incomprehensibly large underground tunnels.

Besal, he was sure, was down there somewhere.

There wasn’t much reason for him to believe it, and yet he could almost sense him at times.

As the Kinslayer—he felt a little blush of guilt for not getting her name—neared the flimsy wall, she turned and paralleled it as if walking the perimeter. Hal was certain nobody would have given her the duty.

She looked over as he fell into step beside her, but said nothing.

Hal felt compelled to say something snarky, like, “Doing a bit of late-night patrolling?” which was obviously not the case, but he kept the words to himself.

They walked together for a while under the cold, diamond-hard light of the stars above. The sky remained clear all day after he had freed himself from his Kol’thil Bleed.

It still left a tingle all over his body. He had worried more than once that he might have made a mistake or harmed some other part of himself, but no, he had been immensely careful.

Unfortunately, the run-in with Hirash, then Tristal and the Kinslayers, had severely diminished his ability to take full advantage of his Kol’thil Surge. He had done an immense amount of work, but it was all quite rough.

You could see what he intended, but even with unimaginable power to cut stone, he wasn’t an artist or an architect. The best he could do was “rough out” the area. He couldn’t mold it like clay or will it into a shape. He had to use Carveas its namesake suggested, cleaving massive chunks of stone away.

Of course, that meant that if any of that stone was usable, they had a massive amount just outside the settlement.

Probably should’ve thought about how to cart all that into Brightsong before I got carried away….

He was prouder of the sheer walls on the outside of the settlement’s mountains, denying would-be assailants and greeting them with an incongruent sheer cliff that bowed out toward the summits of the sierras.

I bet from high enough in the sky, it looks like the mountains were now formed from a drop of water falling into a pool and being frozen the moment it splashed out.

He rather enjoyed the mental image.

Bardan assured him this was enough and that they could get started on actually constructing the spaces he intended, if that was his desire.

Athagan had pulled him aside and in conspiratorial tones had suggested, rather heavily, that if they found him a place to use Carve on, he could reduce the amount of time it took to construct the building by two-thirds or more.

While Hal wasn’t thrilled with the prospect of living in the mountains, quite literally, he wasn’t one to eschew the practical for aesthetics. At least not with winter fast approaching.

Moreover, there were a lot of little foothills and tumbles of boulders at the base of the mountains that made building almost impossible. Athagan had explained that to build that close to the mountains, they would have to carve out the land to make a level surface. Something Hal’s inelegant Carve could do quite well.

Hal was deep in thought, occasionally looking up at the dark peaks, wondering what it would look like if he had been able to finish his grand dream of turning each mountain into a home or palace.

Instead of jagged peaks, he would be looking at tall arching buildings, towers, colonnades, and all the other fancy things he didn’t have any further vocabulary for.

The center of this place would become a nature preserve or something entirely else. The mountains themselves would have more than enough space for everybody. Probably enough people in the whole of Fallmark. They girdled Brightsong’s valley, miles and miles of stone just sitting there, empty.

Okay, probably not empty, Hal thought to himself. Definitely full of stone.

But that could change.

Even if he couldn’t improve the [Magicite] given to him in any way, he could use it extensively in the Shiverglades due to the strong water and ice aether in the air.

The pair, with Lurklox somewhere behind in the moonlit shadows, walked in complete silence as Hal thought about what the future of Brightsong held.

There was still so much to do. For once, he was looking forward to tackling the issues once and for all. He even had the beginnings of a plan forming. One that would need to wait until morning.

Just because he was up didn’t mean it was right to go barging into Athagan and Bardan’s space and waking them up. Most of the dwarves not in the longhouses were making the tiny warren of tunnels in the rare softer stone sections of Brightsong’s mountains into something more than a temporary workshop.