“You aren’t fit to move. Your muscles haven’t quite atrophied, but the signals your brain is sending them, and vice versa, are having trouble making it through. As your Issi flows, you will return to normal within the hour. Then I will not stop you from leaving.”

“Not like I could power through a tyrant.” Elach sighed and planted his hands behind him to rest on. The desk was ice cold and slippery to one hand and warm with the grit of sandpaper on the other. Mixed signals indeed. What’s this about safe houses and connection points? Isn’t this your city?”

“Where we are now is my city. Where the wolf hunts and spreads its disease is what used to be my city.” The projection now showed what Elach knew as Hoalt, the twisted wolf that devoured whatever it pleased.

He shivered as he remembered coming here, walking the streets with the knowledge he could be killed at any moment and simply being okay with it. That was the risk of coming here to check out where his brother would be going to school.

“And you’re just… fine with that?” Elach asked in disbelief.

“Of course I’m not. But there is absolutely nothing I can do about it.” Hoalt sneered at the projection and the wolf melted into a golden puddle before it ran along the bottom and up into a crowd of obscured figures. “The wolf has his claws in every practitioner that has ever set foot in my city, so though the walls of the Gilded Night can fight away the eternal’s influence, the wolf can never be killed by anyone on our side of the veil. The eternals will register that he is alive, his corpse disappears, and he saunters back through the Cover of Night as if nothing happened.”

“The Cover of Night’s the big black dome?” Elach guessed.

“Yes. It is half of what allows the city to function with minimal interference from the eternals.”

“Alright. Go on.”

“There isn’t much to further speak on. You know where your comrades are, why they are there, and that I am not the tyrant you think of when you hear the name Hoalt. Now, I ask two things of you.” Hoalt paused, reaching into a drawer in his desk and placing something next to Elach. “This was left for you by Prisoner. He informed me it was a primitive communication trinket, and that it would only activate if you touched it while under no duress. Would you agree to signal him that I have upheld my part of the deal?”

Elach didn’t so much as move towards the crystal. “And number two?”

“A simple question, but one that I must preface with knowledge of my own. Were you aware that the Eternals can fall, Elach?”

“The Eternals can’t die.” Elach lied. “Everyone knows that.”

“Yes, yes, let’s skip this argument, shall we? You are bonded to Sentence, and I cannot even begin to imagine that that weapon would bond with anyone who didn’t hold the same hatred towards the Eternals that he does. I ask again; are you aware that the Eternals can fall?”

“Fine. I wasn’t, but now I am. Are you going to kill me now to ‘preserve what you’ve created’?” Elach asked sarcastically. He probably should have felt a little more fear, but as he was starting to notice, his emotions weren’t exactly in the right place. Probably a side effect from being on the other side for so long.

Hoalt smiled, rows of long and viciously sharp teeth showing through. “No, Elach. I’m not going to hurt you, not in the slightest. In fact,” Hoalt stood and pushed the crystal towards Elach. “our goals align almost exactly.”

“You’re damn sure you aren’t going to murder me?” Elach asked as he followed Hoalt down a hallway lit with torches, lighting up murals of simply drawn scenes surrounded by vague imagery. “Because this looks like a tomb to me.”

Hoalt chuckled. “I can see why you’d say that. If I told you it was The Vault, would that change your perspective?”

“No.”

“Then you’ll have to take my word for it.”

Elach side-eyed a mural of a dragon awash in golden flames, sitting on the ruins of what could have been a city. A grim reminder that Hoalt was a tyrant, no matter what he claimed. And that no matter what Elach wanted to do, he couldn’t even put up a token resistance if Hoalt decided to take him out. The whims of tyrants were notoriously fickle.

“So you’re sending me in after them. Why? Metea/Irric and Prisoner are way more powerful and useful than I am, and Sechen’s twice as strong as I am. What’s the point in sending me in too?”

“Insurance.”

“You think Prisoner’s going to cut and run on your deal? Leaving me here to fend for myself right after going through all that trouble to patch me back up?” Elach shook his head. “I don’t know the guy all that well, but I don’t think he’d do that.”

“Not for him. I’ve gotten word that some of those who recently entered the Pillar were outed as agents for Glasrime and Lavassil when I had tracers overlook their application processes. I don’t have reason to believe they’re going in to prevent your friends from upholding their end of the deal, but I also don’t have reason to believe they aren’t.” Hoalt turned and stopped a good twenty feet before the vault door at the end of the hall, instead turning to the wall where a painting of a being sat on a pile of gold, two slits of black for eyes the only features on their entire body. Hoalt reached up with what Elach thought was reverence, then tapped his knuckles against the wall twice.

“Vault? Do you have a minute?”

Through the thick stone, Elach somehow heard the clattering of coins falling to the floor and the murmurs of someone who should have been doing one specific thing panicking about being caught not doing it.

“Give me five… ten seconds! Don’t come in until I say you can.” A voice called with forced nonchalance through the wall. Hoalt gave Elach a shrug and a look that said ‘what can you do’, waiting patiently at this stretch of wall for this ‘Vault’ to finish up.

“You trapped a teenager in the walls?”

Hoalt grinned and let out a short laugh. “No, Vault is very much a fully grown manifestation. She is simply… how should I put this… protective of all she treasures. Her image included.”

“She doesn’t want us to see her messy room?”

“In extremely simplified terms, yes. But tell her that, and she’ll deny it all day and all night.”

“Okay, dad, you can come in!”

“Dad?” Elach muttered as Hoalt stepped towards the wall, the golden carving shifting to a large rectangle before splattering to the ground in a puddle of molten gold. “I didn’t know Tyrants could have kids.”

“Something they taught you in school? Or one of your assumptions?” Hoalt gestured for Elach to follow him.

“One of my assumptions, I guess.”

Elach stepped over the puddle of gold and into a room that was far smaller than he’d expected a child of a tyrant’s room to be. There was a raised stone slab in one corner with a person-shaped indent in it, a table and bookshelf that looked to have a hundred or so books split evenly among them, and a desk with what looked like jewelry appraiser’s tools on it. No person to be found.

“Vault, this is Elach. He’s agreed to deal with our little invader problem, but I need to find suitable payment for his services. Your opinion and help would be greatly appreciated.”

Elach looked around the room while he waited for Vault to reply. Silence. He looked over at Hoalt and raised an eyebrow, who shook his head and sighed quietly.

“I specifically asked her to stop making Issi alarms like this. One day I’ll be in a real hurry, the fate of the Gilded Night hanging in the balance, and I’ll arrive to the guardian of all our treasures absent from her post. I know you can hear me Vault, and if you are not here within the minute, I’m cutting your access to the archives to two books per week.”

Twenty seconds or so of awkward silence later, with Hoalt waving away Elach’s attempts at conversation, frantic footfalls could be heard off in the distance. They were quickly accompanied by laboured breathing, and less than five seconds later a woman whose skin looked as if it were made completely of molten gold skidded to a halt right in front of the entrance. A black spiky liquid was pulled back into a ponytail on her head, something Elach later learned was called ‘ferrofluid’, her facial features simple holes on her head with small floating marbles of iridescent gems colliding to create a bizarre sort of compound eyes.

“I’m here! Don’t take away my books!” Vault said without a hitch in her voice, causing Elach to listen a little bit harder. The footsteps and laboured breathing had not stopped with her arrival. “Oh, hey, new guy. Dad says you need something from me?”

“Please don’t do that anymore, Vee.” Someone wheezed from just beyond the wall. “You know I can’t keep up with you with my Issi.”

“Sorry, Jame. My stuff was in jeopardy. You understand.” Vault said without a shred of empathy. “And you can’t blame your Issi for all those donuts and milkshakes you keep sucking down. Or the morning runs you put off because you’re ‘too busy’.”

“Quiet, you.” Jame muttered as he stepped up and leaned on Vault, his face red and dripping with sweat. “Hello, Mr. Hoalt.”

“Jame.” Hoalt said with a nod. “Is my daughter’s presence interfering with your work?”

“She is, unfortunately, still an asset to our team.” Jame sighed. “But I promise you will be the first to know the moment her presence outweighs her usefulness.”

“Love you too, babe.” Vault said sarcastically as she leaned down and kissed Jame on the cheek. “What part of me do you need access to, dad?”

“The progression and symbiotic wings, if you’d please.”

Vault nodded, her eyes separating before rearranging themselves into two symbols; an upwards arrow, and a plus sign surrounded by a ring. “Access granted. You need me to come with you?”

“No, but keep your ears open for us. We might need you to release your hold on one of the treasures.”

“Will do, pops. Come on, Jame, let’s get back to it. That Issi stone isn’t going to identify itself.”

Jame groaned as Vault burst into a sprint, nodding goodbye before following her with short, wheezing breaths. Elach moved to leave the room, but Hoalt caught him by the shoulder and turned him around.

“If we have access to the Vault, we do not need to visit the actual location to peruse her treasures. We are not short on time, per se, but I would like to get you moving as quickly as possible. So I’m going to give you six choices of which you can pick two to keep. And that is in addition to all the supplies you would need to work through the pillar, which is standard issue to any who wish to learn here.”

Hoalt lifted a hand to the air, then plucked an item from nowhere. It shimmered and shifted like it was part of a dream, and Hoalt inspected it before setting it down on a golden table that had also appeared out of nowhere. Elach looked back at where Vault and Jame had stood, noting that the puddle of gold had mysteriously vanished. When he turned back, the table was utterly filled with what looked like far more than six things.

“All this is only six items?” Elach asked suspiciously.

“Two individual items, and four bundles of items. All progression aids are bundled together so that they may provide the optimal benefits.” Hoalt explained, running a clawed finger along the table to separate it into six pedestals. “The four bundles each work on prodding your Issi in a certain direction while also aiding you to generally become stronger. One shall put a focus on capacity, one on control, one on intake, and the final one on quality. Each has their own merits, and for a practitioner who is as–forgive me for saying–weak as your friends described you, they will prove an immeasurable benefit in the long run.”

Elach looked over each of the piles of supplements, elixirs, pills, and other consumables in turn, but none of them caught his attention. He kept being brought back to how difficult it had been to work with Flow’s transcendent Issi, and how these things might not provide him the advantages Hoalt thought they would.

“I’ll have to think on that. What about these?” Elach went to grab the canister on one pedestal, but his hand phased right through it. “What do they do?”