PSTH: Chapter Thirty-Eight

Greed is a poison. Oh, certainly, everyone needs to have their needs met. More than that, people want to live well, not just to survive. But the creeping desire to have more and more and more, with no mind for the costs to the people beneath you on the ladder of wealth or power or whatever else there may be? That is a sickness. And for the life of me, I can’t understand why Pre-Arrival culture seemed to venerate that ideology as the greatest guiding light the world had to offer. 

-

Unknown

-

For the second time in my life, I stepped through a smooth, wide stone tunnel created by an essence heart. This time, however, there were several notable differences. For one, there were actually guard rails that had been attached to the walls, and several of the steeper portions had been cut to create stairs, like the ones at the entrance. Enchanted lights, simple ones that ran off ambient essence as it vented out into the air, lined the walls. 

It was easy to draw a comparison to the enchantments that the Obsidian King had created. After all, both were using the essence produced by essence hearts to power enchantments of a design. But for all that was tempting, the similarities were only surface deep. The King’s enchantments had circled the heart itself, forcibly ripping the essence out of the heart at the maximum possible rate. To do so meant actively causing pain to the heart, effectively torturing them. On the other hand, these light enchantments simply absorbed power as it left the heart at a natural pace. It was the difference between collecting hair as it naturally shed off a person and using a knife to constantly dig into the skin of someone to rip their hair out as soon as the follicles grew a tenth of an inch. 

I shuddered at the thought, and River shot me a confused look. I mumbled that I'd explain it later, and continued through the tunnels. As we moved, Gabby began to give the tour-guide talk. 

“So does anyone know why essence hearts spawn, or what the logic is to their appearance?” she asked. When there was silence, she laughed and continued. “Well, that’s good. If you knew for sure and could prove it, you’d probably win some sort of award for science. But while we don’t know exactly what causes them, or why they appear where they do, there are some general things we’ve figured out. The average distance between essence hearts spawning is about eight and a half miles. They tend to keep this distance, even if all the hearts in an area get destroyed, like in the war against… Oh, what was it? Way out west. Y’all know what I’m talking about.” 

She paused as a large coyote-like Primal trotted past us and into the world outside. Judging by the fact it was only level three, it must have just been spawned by one of the essence hearts. 

“Right, so hearts tend to like to keep some distance from one another. That’s what makes it so interesting when you get a double heart, an instance where two different hearts spawn close to one another. Now there’s a legal definition for what qualifies as a double heart and what’s just two close together hearts, but the crux of it, in my opinion, is if the tunnels created by the heart directly touch one another. Now double hearts are rare, and we think they’re something like twins, where one spawning heart somehow splits into two. We don’t know, but that’s our rough guess. If that’s the case, then this would be an instance of triplets! And the only known instance of a triple heart on this continent, mind you!” 

As she said that, we stepped into a large cavern-like room, one that was remarkably similar to the one in which the Obsidian King’s chained heart had been located, but much bigger. In fact, it was almost exactly three times bigger. Primals moved through the space, mostly commons and uncommons, but the occasional rare passed through as they made their way to and from the heart, cultivating the rich essence that was in the room. But my eyes were drawn to the essence hearts themselves, as well as the heart guardians. 

The King’s essence heart hadn’t had a guardian. The Obsidian King – or more likely, the people who had been forced to work for the King – had killed the guardian before implementing the terrible enchantments found in the room. With those enchantments taking all of the heart’s power, it wasn’t able to produce another guardian. These hearts, being hale and hearty, were more than up to the task.

An Ursaroar stood dominant over the most powerful of the essence hearts, and it watched us with wary eyes as we entered the room. The bear-like Primal stood nearly four feet tall, even while not using pneuma to create the shell that was its battle form, and it radiated strength close to level fifty. The sheer power rolling off the Ursaroar was enough to give me pause, and I was certain that back in the olden days, when people had destroyed essence hearts for the raw power and valuable materials that made them up, this heart would have been seen as incredibly difficult. 

A part of me was saddened by the fact it was an Ursaroar. If a legendary had simply been wandering around in the room, I’d have happily cast Bond Primal, but this was a guardian. And that meant something. A tether of pure white light ran between the heart and the Ursaroar, massively improving the density and strength of the Primal’s core, giving it a sort of weight unlike anything I’d ever felt before. 

“Why don’t you all use that spell?” River asked, gesturing to the cord of white light. “Seems like you’d supercharge your Primals if you learned how to cast it.” 

“We’ve never figured out how,” Gawain responded, sounding as if he was rattling off a textbook response. “In fact, a substantial number of people believe that it’s not a separate spell at all, but the result of essence heart’s unique ability to cast Bond Primal seemingly endlessly, without invalidating any extant bonds. The other schools of thought include…” 

I tuned Gawain out and continued to take in the room, blinking as I got a look at the heart behind the Ursaroar. It was significantly smaller than the essence heart that the king had used. Despite that one being lower level, it had taken up as much space as a human body. This essence heart was closer to the size of my torso. 

Did they get smaller as they got stronger? I’d never actually read much literature around essence hearts, beyond the basics everyone learned in school. Sure, they created Primals, but you couldn’t bond to a heart, so why would I? That would be like someone who liked playing poker learning about how trees were processed to create paper. Some people might enjoy it, but it was far from relevant. 

When my gaze settled on the weakest essence heart in the room and its guardian, my theory was immediately disproven. This heart was absolutely tiny, barely the size of the nail on my index finger. I could have crushed it with one thumb. Despite that, it seemed to be around level twenty, almost the same strength as the heart that the Obsidian King had used. Weird. 

Despite its level, its guardian was close to level forty, which I chalked up to the guardian’s ability to cultivate the additional essence put off by the other two hearts in the room. The more interesting thing, at least to me, was the fact that it had chosen a Shawk as its guardian. Was this one heart the one that had produced the ones all around us? I stepped closer, breaking from the group to enter the depths of the room, and peered up at the ceiling, and sure enough, there was a long shaft that led to the surface, at a slight angle to allow the bird-like Primals to make their way up and out. This heart definitely seemed to have an affinity for Shawks. 

Curiosity mostly satiated, I glanced at the third, middling strength heart and its guardian. The heart was massive, easily the size of two adults and a tandem bike put together, which only further complicated the idea of creating a cohesive size chart. It clearly wasn’t correlated to power. Were there other factors that did it? These were all in basically the same environment, so that really didn’t seem likely. Was it random? That would be weird, but I couldn’t figure out what other factors could correspond to size. I would have asked, but I thought Gawain would bully me for not knowing. The worst part is that I didn’t even think he’d have done it on purpose. He probably would have just said that it was basic knowledge everyone should know, or something like that, putting me down without thinking about it. Well, at least I got to look at another cool Primal guardian. That was a good consolation prize.

The guardian was a massive Cuprum, nine feet long from the tip of its serpentine snout to its tail. I was surprised the heart only used an uncommon Primal, but judging by the sheer amount of metal magic radiating off of it, the guardian had to be nearly level eighty. Perhaps it had traded off the strength of rarity for the raw power of levels? This essence heart was unlikely to be attacked, so it probably didn’t matter all that much, but it was interesting. 

I had begun to look at some of the more common Primals through the room, the ones that weren’t guardians, when a low growl cut through the room, and I turned to see that the sound had come from the Ursaroar. Gabby and the rest of the group had started to enter the room, and it had provoked a reaction from the powerful Primal. Next to me, the Shawk began to crackle, as tiny beads of lightning leapt from feather to feather, and a soft serpentine hissing emerged from behind me.

Gabby held up her hands as if to show she was no threat and began to move back into the tunnel with the group. As soon as they exited the large chamber, the guardians settled back down. I glanced around at the Primals, but none of them seemed to be too interested in me. A deer like Primal even tilted its head to the side and licked my arm, where I’d gotten salt from dry sweat. 

“Seems you’re an essence heart whisperer,” Alberton called out, his voice laced with mixture of amusement and nervousness. “What, did you save one’s life?” 

“I was part of a group that did free one, but so were Laurel and River. Maybe they should try and come in and we can test if tha–” 

“Sorry but no,” Gabby said. “I get that you’re curious, but these hearts are always docile. There’s a reason our tour goes through here. I don’t want to risk annoying them by running a bunch of experiments. We’ll just head out the way we came in.” 

I nodded and glanced around the cavern a few more times. None of the Primals seemed interested in a friendly fight with me, so I doubted any would want to travel around fighting all the time. With that done, I left the room, and we exited the area controlled by the essence hearts. The entire way, Gabby had a frown on her face, but she spoke up once we were outside. 

“We’ve got a short two miles to our campsite for the night. No horror stories tonight. This tour has been weird enough without anything else.” 

“How about you, Laurel, and River tell us how you saved an essence heart instead?” Isabella suggested. “That sounds like an interesting story.”

I considered the fact that the story involved the ghost of an ancient evil trapped within a house where the normal flow of the world was broken, and then that Gabby had told us not to tell horror stories tonight. Then, as if they’d had the same thought, River, Laurel, and I all began to laugh in unison.