Once he was gone, Eithan ushered Yerin into a nearby meeting room. The tower was riddled with identical rooms, which Yerin had seen before; Skysworn used them for everything from interrogations to filling out paperwork to throwing parties.

Eithan shut the door...and, for a moment, actually looked a little embarrassed.

It was strange enough that Yerin wondered if she should draw her sword.

“If you recall,” Eithan began, “a long time ago, I promised to give you a present. It was something I picked up from the Desolate Wilds, and only recently has it become appropriate to give it to you.”

Yerin eyed him. She'd never expected Eithan to give her anything. Lindon had needed more of his attention, and they shared a Path anyway.

Eithan rubbed the back of his neck, looking sheepish. “Over the last few days, I have come to remember that I have not been a good mentor to you. You have your own Path and your own direction, so I allowed myself to forget that you need guidance as well. For that, I apologize.”

The Underlord actually bowed at the waist, pressing his fists together.

Yerin didn't know what to say. Seeing Eithan without his swagger was twisted and wrong. Like night falling at noonday.

“It's nothing worth getting all chipped about,” she muttered.

Eithan straightened up, beaming again. “Excellent! I intend for us to stick together until we're slapping Monarchs and juggling Dreadgods, so it would be a waste to fall to a misstep now.”

“Right, well, I intend to walk to the nearest gambling hall and win every game all at once.” She extended a hand. “Never mind. You've got something for me?”

She couldn’t hope for too much. Eithan liked to talk big, and sometimes he even convinced her, but in the end he was only an Underlord. Saying that he wanted to bring them all to the level of Heralds or Monarchs was like saying he wanted to pull the sun out of the sky and stick it in his fireplace.

She and Lindon could at least stick with him until he failed.

Eithan looked into her eyes and smiled at what he saw there, which irritated her all on its own. He reached into his outer robe and pulled out a small bag, which clinked as he tossed it to her.

She plucked it from the air and glanced inside. Three stones, smaller than her fist, each covered in scripts. Otherwise, they couldn’t have looked more different: one of them was a chunk of crystal, one looked like it was made of dull rainbows, and the third was a smooth scripted river-stone. She scanned them with her spiritual sense—lightly, so they didn't activate—to confirm that they were what she thought.

“Dream tablets,” Eithan said, which told her nothing about how useful they were. That was like saying they were 'books.'

“Two of them, I took from the Transcendent Ruins. One is from a researcher who examined the Bleeding Phoenix directly, and the other is from the man who would become the Sage of Red Faith. They're his experimental Path notes as he learned how to cultivate his Blood Shadow. The third I added myself: it's the Arelius family library's analysis on the uses of a Blood Shadow.”

Yerin narrowed her eyes. There would be a hook in this somewhere. That all sounded too good to be true.

Her spiritual sense slipped into one of the dream tablets, not enough to fully activate it, but enough to get a glimpse of what it contained.

She saw a drop of blood transform: into a tiger, a wolf, a woman, a sword. Now it joins a thousand other drops, ten thousand, an ocean...and that ocean spreads its wings and lets out a searing cry. The earth and sky are stained in blood.

She jerked her mind back, breathing heavily. Before Truegold, she would never have been able to process this dream tablet. A glimpse of it agitated her Blood Shadow; it took her a long moment to get it back under her control.

“You were just...hanging on to these?” Yerin asked.

“The Sage's tablet requires you to be at least Truegold and firm of mind to view it at all, and the other two contain techniques that are only useful once you have a certain spiritual strength and insight into your Blood Shadow.”

His smile brightened. “I hang on to a lot of things.”

Yerin hefted the bag, hearing the dream tablets clink. It excited her to think of everything she could learn from these, but she was still a little disappointed that this didn't have anything to do with the Path of the Endless Sword.

She didn’t want to rely on her Blood Shadow; she knew Lindon would use everything he came across, that was stone-certain. But her recent breakthrough in the Endless Sword technique had made her think that maybe she could follow in her master's footsteps.

“Looks like I owe you some thanks,” she said.

“Don't thank me yet,” he said, and winked. “Once you're a new Sage, then you can thank me.”

~~~

The underground chamber was cold and dark, lit only by the essence bleeding from a dying Remnant. Of all the prison cells Eithan had ever seen, this one ranked near the very bottom.

Eithan pulled a chair from his void key and sat down. As he waited in the darkness, he watched his students do battle over fifty feet above him.

His bloodline powers showed him the scene: Yerin and Lindon, both in their Skysworn armor, stood in the entrance of a shoddy bar. The patrons had scrambled to leave the second the Skysworn had shown up, some of them fading through the walls or crashing through windows. The place was now deserted except for the Skysworn and the half-dozen ragged murderers they had come to collect.

This small organization had taken advantage of the influx of strangers into the capital, drugging people in the bar overhead, taking them downstairs, and then killing them for their Remnants. Some of the Remnants they sold to local Soulsmiths.

Others, they had used for parts.

They had been very careful to only abduct those without any family or connections, so their operation may have gone unnoticed by the Skysworn had Eithan not passed by this street the day before.

Now, Yerin singlehandedly suppressed the room with the Endless Sword. Whenever one of them reached for a weapon, an invisible knife sliced across his skin. If one tried to move, chips of wood would fly up from a nearby table. Though she said not a word, the message was clear: she had them all prisoner.

Meanwhile, Lindon—his eyes blackened—instructed the criminals to stay quiet and to keep their madra under control. They were to be detained and brought to trial. Orthos loomed behind him, blocking the main entrance and adding weight to his every word.

Mercy, meanwhile, was perched on the building across the street. Her bow was drawn, a black arrow nocked, as she watched and waited for a fight to break out.

It would, Eithan knew. He could see the signs too clearly.

As the murderers shouted and threw themselves into the hopeless battle, he stopped paying attention. He reached back into his void key—by habit concealing it as reaching into a pocket—and withdrew a pipe.

He packed it and tamped it down as Yerin flew into the middle of the opponents, throwing them away from her with pulses of tightly controlled sword madra.

The Sword Sage had really stumbled across a buried treasure. If only he had survived, he might really have been able to pass on his unique Sage techniques to his student. Eithan would have to make sure he honored the man’s memory by serving his disciple well.

Though nothing ever went as smoothly as it should.

He’d meant for the dream tablets to be only one part of her gift. Nine or ten months ago, he’d commissioned Lezaar—the most accomplished refiner of the Arelius family—to craft him a very specific pill. But he had been ousted as Patriarch before the pill was finished, and hadn’t returned since. As far as he knew, the rare and valuable ingredients he’d put into making this miraculous elixir might have gone to waste. Or the pill might have been taken by someone who would never appreciate it.