Your Youth Is Gone

(9:1:3)

It was... dingy.

“...Ho...?”

Brei gingerly pushed at the door, letting a thin beam of light break through into the thick black soup of glittering dust motes and shadows that hadn’t seen the light of day in... ever, from the look of it. Since the roof had gone up, anyway.

Was there even anyone here?

She pulled back to glance around the narrow, rickety street formed from all the houses crowding up towards the jagged cliff to the north. Some old man lounging in his doorway was the only person to meet her gaze, his stare more than a little discomfiting. A few children ran around kicking an inflated piggle intestine, too, the smell of someone’s meal drifting on the breeze. But the place in front of her was dead silent.

She’d had to take a rail car to get this far, and if it was for nothing but letting some old man size her up....

Dad, I will strangle you the next time I see you.

Why they couldn’t just meet in Soulspace was anyone’s guess. Blowing out forcefully enough to send a stray strand of hair flying, she jutted her jaw out and pushed her way inside, a tickle prickling straight up her nose the moment she stepped in.

For just an instant when the old door creaked closed, all she could see were pinpricks from the gaps disappearing into the inky void. With a tap at her soulbind crown, she drove it back, a directional beam from secondary scalelets lighting up the passage, roughly-hewn stones extending back into the dark and hitting another, slightly more solid door.

Her sandals scraped the stone, and she pulled her arms in, doing her best to keep her sleeves from dragging on the walls and the dusty dirt that had built up, somehow. I am never coming here again. If they have faux-darkstones for decorations, I’m out. Finding her way into some doomist cult taking the inevitability of the end and carting off with it was not in her list of plans.

And this looks like just the place to find one....

Of course, when she tried the door, it wouldn’t open.

Her own sigh echoed back at her. Fantastic. Resorting to knocking again, more than a little annoyance leaking into her voice, she called out one final time, fully prepared to turn and march her way straight back to her house and mourn the money she’d wasted on this stupid trip. “Ho! Open your damn cult’s door!”

“Hoi stranger! Who goes?” A very unexpected, deep voice boomed back, muffled by the old wood.

...if she’d really been expecting a reply, maybe she would have omitted that last part.

Her hand froze, knuckles still half-lifted. “I... um. My apologies. I’m... Affahn’s daughter. I’m looking for a group he mentioned? Supposedly people interested in doing something about the Dark-kind blight?”

There was a pause. “Did he give you a word?”

Oh. Of course. She quietly rapped her knuckles against her own forehead. There she went, blabbing herself into an early grave when all she needed were a few words. “Reyrulf ak sutuhn—the Light-being sings.”

Why they needed verification and all of this secretive stuff was anyone’s guess. And another weight in favour of some sort of cult dealings.

“Perfect.” The door swung open to reveal a hulking man with a gap-toothed grin, a light flickering from somewhere behind him. “Come on in, pretty miss!”

If he hadn’t been quite so innocently enthusiastic, she might have been tempted to give him the side-eye. Nodding instead, she moved past him as he gestured her on, and stepped into what felt very much like a cellar, stairs running down along the wall to the floor below.

It was a plain room, filled with people and a few old barrels and boxes, lit rather badly by candles instead of Light stones. As she came down to the ground floor, she took in the members of the small crowd, half-expecting furs and pelts or something—jagged tattoos, questionable jewellery, that sort of thing—but they all seemed... normal.

And familiar.

She frowned as she caught sight of a boy with a mop of blond-ish hair and sharp features, and an older woman with a strong nose. The boy’s eyes widened when they met hers, a grin breaking across his face that matched the one he’d given her at the workshop. “It’s the construct builder! Ho, miss!”

Construct builder? She flicked him a little smile, narrowing her eyes as she glanced between him and the woman, along with the rest of them just in case. “I was expecting strangers, but it looks like I already know half of you.”

The woman raised one cultured eyebrow. “I see you decided to join ‘the cult’ after all.”

She refused to scowl, instead dipping her head to the rest of the group. “I am Brei, a trainee at Copax hospital, learning scalelet construction in the medical sector.”

A grizzled man next to the woman who’d been staring intently at her the entire time spoke up. “You’re Affahn’s daughter.”

“I’m glad the family resemblance is that strong.” She eyed the unused, dusty seating the others had taken and briefly considered remaining standing the entire time. One of them being pushed towards her by the man who’d opened the door didn’t give her much of a choice, though. Well, at least she could drop her clothes at a wash-house instead of having to do them by hand, now.

“Affahn’s a good man. It wouldn’t have been easy for him to leave you behind,” the man commented. “I’m Gedahr, or just Ged. He was one of the first to join.”

Not easy to leave me behind, she mused to herself, and mentally sighed. Well, he had done his best to try and convince her to go with him before she’d left for home. She’d been half-convinced he’d attempt to drag her along anyway with that last extended, bone-crushing hug.

She replied politely as the others introduced themselves as well, vaguely recalling Dais’s name when he mentioned it again, the woman—who was apparently Ged’s wife—giving her name as Lefei. An interesting bunch, altogether. What exactly they planned to do, however, intrigued her more.

“Well,” Dais slapped his knees with a sharp grin as the introductory chatter died down. “Now we’ve got a scalelet expert...

“It should be a lot easier to make our own constructs to help out Loh.”