Immortal Ascension: Rise of The Forgotten Vessel

Chapter 6

The next day was a long one. Ethan had three water runs instead of the usual two because one of the outer training hall pipes had developed a slow drip overnight and the storage barrel had run short by morning, and the afternoon brought a delivery backlog that Hobb wanted cleared before the end of the week. He worked through it steadily and without complaint, the way he always did, but he was aware all day of the key sitting in his jacket pocket alongside the slip, the two of them together like a pair of questions he hadn't answered yet.

He thought about Seth while he worked — not obsessively, just the way you think about something that is waiting for you. What the old man had told him the previous evening had settled in overnight and now sat in his mind clearly, without the slightly overwhelming quality it had carried at the time. The array, the suppressed roots, the three thousand years of it. He had lived his whole life at Skyward Academy believing he was the broken one, the defective one, the boy the heavens had simply forgotten. He was still getting used to the idea that the story had been wrong from the beginning, and that the people who had told it to him had known it was wrong when they told it.

He wasn't angry yet, exactly. He thought he might be, eventually. But right now there was too much he still didn't understand to waste energy on anger.

By early evening he had finished everything on the work list and eaten a quick dinner, and he went to the second-tier path while there was still some daylight left in the sky. He wanted to hear the rest of what Seth had to tell him. He wanted to understand the next step.

 

Elder Seth's door was open.

Not cracked, the way it had been those two previous evenings with lamplight spilling out onto the path. Fully open, the door resting against the inner wall as though no one had thought to close it because there was no longer any particular reason to. Ethan stopped in the doorway and looked in.

The room was empty. The meditation mat was gone. The lamp from the desk was gone. The shelf of texts was bare, and the desk itself had been pushed against the far wall at a slightly different angle than before, the way furniture gets moved when a room is being cleared out rather than tidied. The floor was clean. There was nothing left to suggest that someone had been living here, studying here, sitting cross-legged on that mat and holding conversations he had waited years to have.

Ethan stood in the doorway for a while and looked at the empty room.

From further down the corridor came the sound of voices — two men, administrators by the sound of them, talking at a normal volume about practical things. He caught enough of it to understand: Elder Seth had passed during the night, and his quarters were being reassigned to a junior cultivation instructor who would be arriving from a partner academy before the month was out. The room would need to be repainted. Someone should also look at the window latch, which had been sticking.

The voices moved away down the corridor. Ethan stayed where he was a moment longer, then stepped back and pulled the door gently closed behind him and walked back the way he had come.

 

He had known, of course. Seth had told him as clearly as a man could without saying the words outright — come back tomorrow, there's more I want to tell you, I'd rather do it properly than rush it tonight. That was the speech of someone who didn't know how much time they had left but knew it wasn't much. Ethan had understood it when he heard it. He had just hoped the tomorrow Seth meant was an actual tomorrow rather than a way of being kind about the uncertainty.

He went back to the servants' wing, sat on his bunk, and took out the key and the slip and set them side by side on the mat in front of him. The key was plain iron, old and slightly worn at the edges. The slip was cool and smooth, the veins in it shifting the way they always did when the light caught them. Two objects that together contained more information than he could fully use yet, given to him by an old man who had spent years figuring out who to give them to and then run out of time before he could explain everything he'd meant to.

He thought about Seth — not about the things he'd been told, but about the man himself. The tired smile when he first opened the door. The genuine laugh when Ethan said that's not unsettling at all. The way he'd spoken about everything, steadily and without drama, like someone who had long since made peace with what he knew and was now just trying to make sure it got to the right place before he was done with it.

Ethan hadn't known him for long. Three evenings, and one of them cut short. It wasn't much. But Seth had been the first person at this Academy who had looked at him and seen something other than a servant or a null, and that was not a small thing, and he sat with it for a while and let himself feel it properly before he put it somewhere it wouldn't get in the way.

 

He found Mia after dinner, sitting outside the herb storage with her basket and a small oil lamp, sorting seeds into labelled pouches. She looked up when he sat down beside her and studied him for a moment the way she sometimes did.

"What happened?" she asked.

"An elder I knew died last night."

She was quiet for a moment, not filling the space with anything, which was one of the things he appreciated about her. "I'm sorry," she said. "Were you close?"

"Not really. I'd only spoken to him a few times." He watched her hands sorting the seeds into their pouches, steady and automatic. "He was a good person. He didn't have to be kind to me, and he was."

Mia nodded and didn't say anything more about it, which was the right response. After a while she offered him one of the seed pouches to label while she sorted, and he did, and they sat together in the lamplight until the oil burned low and the night got cold enough that going inside made more sense than staying out.

Back on his bunk, before he slept, Ethan put the key and the slip back in his jacket pocket and thought about what came next. Seth had told him not to go to the archive until he was strong enough to handle himself down there. He was currently not strong enough to handle much of anything, which meant the first problem was obvious enough. He needed to open the slip further, understand what the Sutra was actually asking him to do, and start doing it.

He didn't know yet how hard that was going to be. But he had been carrying water up a mountain since he was eleven years old, and he had never once left a job unfinished because it turned out to be harder than expected.

He closed his eyes and let himself sleep.