Disclaimer: Don't own anything.
Author's Note: SeaWorld was awesome, as always. My brother is letting me borrow the first season of Lost. So far, not so bad. I can't remember anyone's names other than Sawyer, so I get made fun of for the nicknames that I give them. It's not my fault that one of them was a hobbit.
Just got through reading the new Artemis Fowl. Fantastic as always, though it felt considerably shorter. Maybe it's just because I've gotten myself in the habit of reading Lord of the Rings over the past year. Gonna start working on the new Percy Jackson (even if it's not actually Percy Jackson)
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"The inspiration of a noble cause involving human interests wide and far enables men to do things that they did not dream themselves of doing, and which they were not capable of alone. The consciousness of belonging, vitally, to something beyond individuality; of being part of a personality that reaches we know not where in space and time, greatens the heart to the limits of the soul's ideal."
-Maj. Gen. Joshua L. Chamberlain
-/-/
"Sir! They've found something!"
Yuan looked up at Alijah. "And what might that be?"
"They think they've found the dwarf."
Yuan is on his feet immediately. "Where?"
Alijah glanced back down at the hastily written copy of what had been on the screen. "In the mountains surrounding Hima and the Tower."
"Hiding right in front of their noses. Should've guessed." Yuan muttered. "Have you found a specific location yet?"
"No sir."
"Who's there now?"
"Botta and some of his team. They just sent the message in."
"Alright. Tell Kratos of any future updates and tell them I'm on my way."
"Yessir."
-/-/-/-
"The mountains surrounding Hima?" Anna repeats when Kratos tells her. "There are hundreds of mountains in that region."
"It's a miracle they've narrowed it down that far and they'll be fortunate if they can find the dwarf's living quarters. They're very secretive about that sort of thing."
"Can't blame them." Anna said, hefting the sword. Since she'd gotten strong enough, Kratos had slowly been teaching her how to use a sword properly. Not that she was much good at it, but she still wanted to learn. "Look what's happened aboveground." Anna paused with a new thought. "Would Yggdrasill put dwarves who wouldn't join him in the ranches too?"
"I don't know." Kratos answered honestly. "There were very few dwarves that didn't agree with him."
"I thought that dwarves and elves didn't get along. Why would they be working for an Age of Half-Elves?"
"Because they've been just as oppressed over the centuries as the half-elves. They want a chance at their own freedom, even if it took them centuries. They live almost as long as elves. They've learned patience."
"Didn't the dwarves have a land of their own?" Anna asked as she began her form. She does it slow, sure to make sure she does it properly. Kratos had told her numerous times that it was better to know a few moves very well rather than know many only slightly.
"Four thousand years ago, they did. But even then, the lands were scarce and ravaged by the wars. They weren't participants in the war, but they were affected nonetheless."
"Didn't you say you were stationed in an area near there?"
"We were, but the dwarves were very careful not to do anything to outwardly help the army."
"Why were you there?"
"The humans were trying to bottleneck our platoon, force down our rations and weed us out in general."
"Didn't work, I take it?"
"It almost did. The winter would have killed us had it not been for the dwarves."
"Guess I should be extra thankful for them then. I wouldn't have met you otherwise."
Anna thinks it's strange that she finds she can't imagine life without Kratos. She remembers what it was like, Before. The dark, cramped, damp cell, the countless experiments, the beatings. But that wasn't life. That was an existence, and barely one at that.
Kratos tells her to stop and adjusts the angle of her shoulders and shifts her legs so that they're planted a bit more firmly. They don't talk often during training. Their communication is almost entirely by touch. This is the only place that they've never felt awkward with each other, not once.
It's as they're finishing up that Hassan is jogging out to them. He'd shot up over the past year so that he was a good head taller than Anna, though he's still all gangly limbs and clumsy steps. "Yuan sent a message. Said he wants both of you, and about a dozen of us, over in the Hima mountains as quickly as possible."
Anna looks quizzically at Kratos. "Shall I prep the Rheairds then?"
Kratos nodded.
-/-/-/-
There aren't any mines in this part of the country, oddly enough. But there are caves. Many of them. The person waiting for them is Jayson, who'd grown up in the Meltokio slums. Anna had had guard duty with him a few times and found him fairly likeable. A little flirty, but likeable. He never meant the flirting anyway and he'd stopped almost entirely since he heard about her getting together with Kratos.
Jayson smiled at them. He'd cut his sandy blonde hair short since joining the Renegades and it made him look older. "Took you guys long enough."
"It took us less than an hour." Anna said.
"Yeah, to get here. It'll take another hour to get to the cave."
"Does it go that deep?"
"Oh yeah. There are miles and miles of caves down here. Yuan says its abandoned dwarf territory."
It takes Kratos a moment to make quick calculations, piecing together the separate worlds of Tethe'alla and Sylvarant. "He's right. One of their greatest cities was in this area. Garinval, the center of dwarven art."
"It shows." Jayson said, nodding to the walls around them. The flickering light of his lantern illuminates the etched designs.
Anna has learned very little dwarven, little more than their alphabet, and she can't piece the story on the walls together, so she tries with the images. She can only suppose that this is their history, their legends and she thinks that she'd like to learn more about these people.
They lose track of time as they go deeper into the caves. The long tunnels are perfectly symmetrical, the corner sharp and Jayson sometimes has to duck, being a good foot taller than Kratos.
They reach a large central cavern, with openings near the very top of the roof. The cavern is constructed in such a way that there is no need for lanterns, sunlight and moonlight angling inside.
Yuan looks up as he hears them approaching. "Good, you're here."
"What's happened?" Kratos asks.
"These caves extend as far south as Asgard. If Dirk is here, we need someone else who speaks dwarven and the tracking party didn't have enough manpower to be effective."
Anna leans forward to really see the map that Yuan's got spread out on a boulder. The map is yellowed with archaic script written in fading ink. "So here we are." She says, putting her finger on what she could only assume was the cavern they were in. "How far have we searched?"
Yuan takes a charcoal pencil and carefully shades in areas which are several miles down the tunnels branching out. "The problem is that the dwarves not only like to build out, they like to build up."
Anna looks up and sees that he's not wrong. The buildings are similar to the way Asgard had its buildings inside the cavern walls themselves. "Holy…how long did it take them to do all this?"
Yuan smiles slightly. "Centuries upon centuries."
Anna watches the two seraphim calculatingly. Centuries upon centuries, he said. Yet the dwarves had disappeared from the ground world for time immemorial. Had the dwarven cities already been this grand when Kratos and Yuan were children?
Kratos follows her eyes. He wonders if it's possible to feel slightly claustrophobic and too out in the open at the same time. "Has anyone searched up there?"
"Some of it. Some parts of it have caved in a little, or have crumbled to the point where we can't cross them." Yuan would have crossed those sections himself—large gaping holes in solid staircases were no challenge for one with wings—but he had sensed no living mana up there. But then, the flow of mana was different in dwarves than in humans or even elves.
At first, Kratos doesn't know what kind of damage could do things like that to dwarven architecture, but then he remembers that the worlds had been whole the last time he'd visited the dwarven cities. The splitting of the worlds had caused a great deal of damage to the geography.
Botta's voice comes out scratchy over one of the portable radios. "Sir, the north corridor is clear so far. We're about three miles in."
"Start heading back then." Yuan replied, glancing up. The construction of the cavern roof made it difficult to guess the time, but the pale moonlight and the absence of sounds from outside was enough. "We can continue tomorrow."
"Yessir."
-/-/-/-
By the time the others were awake, Anna had already been up for, roughly, two hours. Even as vast as this cavern was—their base could easily fit inside several times over—Anna didn't like the feeling of the high ceiling and the windowless walls. She knew she was free, that no Desians were likely to find this place, but echoes of her memories (nightmares) of the ranch still came to mind.
When she'd woken, the cavern had been lit by pale blue and purple glowing. It had taken a moment or two for her sleep-blurred eyes to focus on the source. She knows the blue almost as instantly as she recognizes it. While Kratos' wings weren't a familiar sight by any means, they were unmistakable. It takes her a moment longer to realize that the pale purple is the glow of Yuan's wings. She'd only seen them once, when they had told her the truth about Cruxis.
They both hear her breathing quicken, hear her steps echo as she crossed to the stairs that curved upward. She doesn't say anything for a while. She simple observes.
Where Kratos' grace in the air seemed like the one that training and discipline gave you, Yuan's made it seem like he belonged there. They don't speak out loud to each other—or if they do, Anna can't hear it—but rather they use gestures and expressions. Anna wonders sometimes if they communicated like that simply because they'd been friends for so long or if they'd always been like that, instantly clicking.
"Find anything?" Anna asks once they touch down. She'd found some salted jerky that she was chewing on. Being in this cavern was making her appetite go, but only a bit. She's sure that after a day of searching and digging that she'd be plenty hungry.
"Nothing so far." Kratos sat beside her, smiling his good morning to her.
Anna hummed in thought as she looked around. She couldn't see details—the lighting was too dim for that—but she asked, "The dwarves are skilled craftsmen and architects. Couldn't they make hidden passageways in case of an emergency?"
"I sense a problem with this plan of yours." Yuan tells her.
"And what's that?"
"If they did make hidden passageways, how, exactly, do you expect to find them?"
Anna thought about it for a minute. Her knowledge of technology and magic was fairly limited—as far as Renegade standards went. Compared to commonfolk, on Tethe'alla and Sylvarant both, she was a genius with it—but she'd been told she was imaginative before. "That see-through thing."
Yuan and Kratos both frowned at her in confusion. "What?"
She turned to Yuan. "You used it on me to see the Cruxis Crystal. You saw my insides."
"Oh. That's called an X-ray."
It was Anna's turn to frown. "Why?"
"Why what?"
"Why's it called that?"
Yuan turned to Kratos. "Well, Mr. Wealth-of-Useless-Information?"
"That's way too long. You need to shorten it." Anna told him.
"But it's true. Seriously, ask him how many different sounds a cat makes. He has an answer."
"Over a hundred where dogs can only make around ten." Kratos said absentmindedly. "And I've no idea why it's called an X-ray."
"See? Useless information." Yuan said, gesturing at Kratos. "But we're straying from the point. You saw that machine. It's the size of both of my hands put together." Yuan put his hands together to demonstrate. "It can only x-ray that small an area. It's impractically small."
"No way to make it bigger, I suppose?"
"With the technology we have with us, not soon enough. We're going to have to look through this the old-fashioned way."
Anna smiled at him. "You two must be masters of the old-fashioned way."
Yuan is caught between arguing and laughing. Anna usually affected him like that. He just shakes his head in the end.
The others slowly wake. After munching on the meager breakfast, they split up into teams to take each hallway. Four branch out from the cavern, not counting the several staircases that make their way up into the buildings that are part of the walls themselves.
They each took flashlights and a canteen full of water. The air down here is too still, almost suffocatingly so. And most of them are unaccustomed to steps and sounds echoing off the walls, so they jump often.
Anna's team is going down one of the tunnels already partially explored. It means about an hour of walking with little to do but look around at the detailed, blocky carvings on the walls. It didn't take long for Jayson, also on her team, began whistling.
The tune sounded familiar, like one of the tunes given to schoolchildren to help remember their lessons, but something sounded off about it. "What're you whistling?" Anna finally asks.
"It's an old song from the slums. We sing it while we work." Jayson smiles sheepishly. "It's annoying, isn't it?"
Anna shook her head. "It's not. It just sounded familiar."
Jayson looked her over. It wasn't the kind of lingering looks men gave women, but just one of a neutral observer. "You're not from the slums."
She smiled. "I'm not even from Tethe'alla."
He returned the smile easily. "It shows. Tethe'allan women are usually more…proper."
"Proper?"
"Oh yeah. My sister thought you all were kind of backwards when we came here actually."
"I didn't know you had a sister."
Jayson stuffs a hand in his pocket, the other playing with the flashlight. "There's a lot you don't know about me. Her name's Shera."
Anna tries to remember if she knew any Renegade named Shera, but she doesn't spend all that much time with the other women. "Does she look like you?"
"A bit. She's much prettier than me though." Jayson grinned. "I know, hard to believe."
Anna laughed. He was easy to be around and she didn't have to worry about something like what had happened with Alijah happening again. Jayson had told her in no uncertain terms that he was not willing to go against Kratos for her. And, he'd added winking, as pretty as she was, there were some men on the base that were better looking. "Yeah, you're not egotistical."
"Of course I am."
Anna was about to retort when she caught sight of something out of the corner of her eye. "Hey, hold on guys!"
Everyone turned back to her. Meredith—call me Merry—was the one who asked what she'd seen. Merry was a tall woman with red-brown curly hair and a strong country accent. "
"I think there might be a side path here." Anna said, carefully looking into the small opening. Something was striking her as wrong about it, but she couldn't put her finger on it.
The others gathered around. "It might be one, but none of us can fit."
Anna looked around. Merry was very tall for a woman and the men were all too broad in the shoulder and tall on top of it. "I could probably fit."
"Probably?"
Anna shrugged. "If I don't fit, then I don't. We can either open it up a little wider or leave it alone and keep going. It doesn't cost us anything to try."
"Go ahead. But be careful."
Anna nodded and had to crouch to get in. It was a tight squeeze—meant for dwarves, Anna thinks, but then, she doesn't know exactly how tall a dwarf was—and Anna felt a little claustrophobic. The smell of rich earth was strong here, one that Anna wasn't really accustomed to and yet she found it comforting. Anything was better than a mechanical smell.
Anna froze as she saw trickles of dirt coming from the ceiling. That couldn't be a good sign. She tried to go backwards, but she didn't have any room to turn around. So she held her flashlight in her mouth and began crawling forward as fast as she can.
-/-/-/-
"There's…been an accident." Jayson panted, looking right at Kratos.
Kratos doesn't need to hear more than that, understanding the look on Jayson's face. He sprinted out of the corridor, across the cavern. Vaguely, he can hear Yuan's familiar footsteps from another tunnel—he'd most likely heard either the trouble or heard Jayson's words; the caves had excellent acoustics—but he doesn't concern himself with that.
The first words out of his mouth when he gets to where Merry and the others are "What happened?"
"Anna found something that looked like a side tunnel. She was the only one that could fit through it, so she tried to get through. The tunnel caved."
"No word from her?"
Merry shook her head. Kratos listens carefully, blocking out the sound everyone's breathing, of the footsteps and of his own pounding heart. Then, very faintly, he heard a familiar voice.
"I know one of you can hear me, dammit!"
Kratos chuckles slightly, relieved. Anna wasn't so injured that she couldn't yell. But she couldn't hear them in return. "Come on. We have to open the tunnel back up again. Start an assembly line with the rocks and put them on the far side of the hall."
There was no question of obedience. It was slow, hard work, passing large rocks to each other to stack against the wall. Kratos and Yuan had to be careful. Oftentimes, they unconsciously used their superior strength to lift some rocks which the others couldn't hold once it was passed.
"There's a hole." Kratos reported before crouching. The tunnel had opened both wider and higher with the collapse and while it was still a tight fit, Kratos could at least get in. "Anna?"
"I'm alive." She called back. "But my arm's pinned."
"We'll get you out." He promised.
Anna laughed a little breathlessly. She knew that much already. Her arm was definitely dislocated, probably broken and it was damn painful.
True to his word, about half an hour later, Kratos' familiar face wasn't far above hers. She grinned a little weakly at him. "Took you long enough."
Kratos shook his head. Arm broken and half buried in heavy dirt and Anna was ever the smartass. Kratos had to maneuver himself a little awkwardly to get to the rock pinning her arm, but he managed it. As soon as he lifted it, Anna tried to move her arm out of the way, but her arm didn't feel like listening and her legs were stuck under dirt. She shimmied her body away from the rock as much as she could, but there wasn't much she could do in such a tight space.
"I'm going to have to put this back down for this to work." Kratos warned her. He didn't want to cause any excess pain, but it was necessary.
Anna gritted her teeth and nodded. Kratos set it down as gently as he could, but Anna still flinched. Kratos closed his eyes and focused, remembering his teachings. Mana was a part of everything and magic was the art of controlling mana. He knew that that was how the half-elves had begun making their bombs during the war. They'd create balls of clay and concentrate the mana inside them before throwing them to set them off. But he couldn't do that here. An explosion would only cause another collapse.
But he could use the idea. Science stated that everything was made of particles and if he could make every particle explode individually, then the rock would turn to dust without any damage to the tunnel or Anna.
Anna braces herself when she feels a shift in the air. She isn't sure what that shift was and she doesn't know what, exactly, she was bracing herself for, but the rock turning to dust right before her eyes was not it. The dust is uncomfortably cool against her skin and Kratos quickly uncovers her legs from the pile of dirt holding them down.
Anna carefully gets to her feet, her injured left arm hanging too loose in its socket, but otherwise, she was mostly alright. Kratos watches her carefully for any other signs of injury and when he didn't find anything more serious than a few scratches and a bruise, he kisses her on impulse out of relief.
Anna smiles into the kiss. "Not that I'm not loving this, but I'd like it more if it wasn't happening in a tiny tunnel when I have a dislocated shoulder."
-/-/-/-
"I can still help." Anna said stubbornly. "That cave-in was a complete fluke. I can still help search. And if not, just heal my arm. I know you can."
Sometimes, Yuan regrets the fact that Anna knows him and Kratos so well. But Kratos was staying out of this one. His excuse? 'You're leader of the Renegades, not me. This is your decision.'
"I've told you before that if your body is healed too much by magic that it doesn't strengthen itself and eventually, it'll stop healing itself. You're going to have to keep that sling on for at least a week."
Anna snarls at him, but knows that she really doesn't have the upper hand in this argument. She grabs a lantern, lights it and strides out of the cavern. There hadn't been any turn-offs on the way in here, so she's fairly certain she won't get lost. She doesn't have to look to know that Kratos is three steps behind her, just in case.
"You think he's right?" She asked, not bother to raise her voice.
"Not entirely." Kratos replies carefully. "But he's not wrong about using magic to heal everything."
"Not everything. Just this damn shoulder of mine so I can help with the work."
Kratos wants to tell her that she doesn't always need to help, that she could take a break sometimes, but then he hears the something extra in her voice. She'd been out of the ranch for a year and some change. Some would say that that was long enough to forget, to move on. Kratos would say that those people were idiots. Memories like that of the ranch didn't just disappear or fade away. He knew that Anna had asked him to train her because she wanted the nightmares to go away. And perhaps it worked. But that wouldn't stop the memories from creeping on the edge of her thoughts during the day.
So he doesn't tell her about not always needing to help. He lengthens his stride to catch up with her. "I'm sure there'll be plenty of work you can do one-armed back at the base."
Anna grinned sideways at him. "Tryin' to get rid of me?"
Kratos kisses her lightly. They still weren't very comfortable with each other around other people, but when it was just them, they'd fallen into a strange sort of rhythm. He smiles at her. "Not a chance."
-/-/-/-
Anna has taken to lifting some weights that she'd borrowed from one of the men to help build her arm back up to full strength. Turned out that on top of dislocating it, she'd broken her forearm and wrist.
It's when Noishe, lying a few feet away by the door and being the ever-vigilant watchdog—Anna still wonders how she ever bought the story, even for a second, that he was a dog—that he raises his head and his ears prick up that she knows that everyone's home.
Anna still wonders how dwarves, being as small as they are, could build the things she's seen in those caverns. The dwarf hardly reaches her waist, but his dark brown eyes are intelligent, his face nearly hidden by a rather impressive beard.
"Yer the lass that everyone's been talkin' about? The one who broke 'er arm?"
Anna smiled, unable to help it. "My reputation precedes me."
The dwarf looked slightly surprised, like it wasn't the answer he'd been expecting. He smiled and held out a hand. "Th' name's Dirk."
"Anna." She replied, shaking the offered hand.
Yuan draws Dirk into a different conversation and Anna feels more than sees Kratos come to stand beside her, close enough to almost but not quite touch. "Took you guys quite a while. Three weeks, not counting the rest of the time we were just trying to narrow it down."
"Dwarves are very good at catch me-find me." Kratos replied. He tried to study her injured arm without her noticing, but really, he should've known better.
"I'm fine." Anna insists. "It's a little sore and hurts if I twist wrong, but I'm okay."
Though she didn't protest when Kratos double-checked the arm for himself. "This healed very quickly." He said quietly.
Anna met his eyes. "It can't be the Cruxis Crystals, can it?"
"The entire point of the Exspheres was to enhance a warrior's skill to its full potential."
"And a Cruxis Crystal makes those skills incredible, like yours and Yuan's. Your senses are enhanced beyond belief. Does healing change too?"
"An Exsphere makes it easier for magic to affect the body, so it would make healing magics work easier, but that wouldn't explain it healing this much faster on its own."
"And I thought you said that the crystallization process was slowing down?"
"It was."
"…This is going to mean more tests, isn't it?"
"Hopefully, not as many. If the Key Crest doesn't have to be attached to the Crystal, then it'll stop the process almost entirely."
"Almost?"
"The Exsphere's evolution happens no matter what. But with a Key Crest, you can remove the Exsphere, can control it."
Anna smiled, hoping it looked a little braver than she felt at the moment. "Here's hoping my luck holds and it doesn't have to be attached."