Chapter 28

CHAPTER 28: Legacy

'Even in death, you still felt that you had to be alone.' He thought while kneeling beside her body.

All the tension in her face was gone, her skin paler than before as she grew cold and stiff. Arkyn silently wrapped her body in the sheets of the bed and left the painting still clutched between her fingers.

After that, he pulled out one of Kresha's personal notebooks. He was familiar with the one on mutating bloaters, but the one he grabbed this time was on her arrays.

An array was simply applying runes in a sequence that when looped into itself, it could repeat its function so long as a fragment of energy was imbued into the runes. Arkyn memorized three that Kresha had designed with runes involving the Air and Water Elements.

He shut the large doors to the master bedroom, using mana infused chalk to begin drawing the arrays against the surface. Not before he placed her red smoking pipe and wand inside the painting she refused to let go of.

The outer runes that made the first array defined the boundaries of the room, isolating the space to efficiently occupy it and avoid overextending, which would lose efficiency.

The array in the middle sucked air out of the room, creating a weak vacuum that wasn't that different from the one that sealed the compartments behind the bed.

Finally, the water based array in the center brought the temperature within the sealed room down to near freezing.

Once the arrays were ready, he placed a small mana crystal core that usually powered golems to the array. One pulse of his mana through the core box and arrays ignited the loop.

The two air arrays flashed yellow and the water array a deep blue for a second while the chalk evaporated, leaving no trace of his work.

Cold air leaked from the cracks in the door, indicating Arkyn's goal had finally been achieved. Kresha's body would be preserved so long as the golem core box was intaking enough of the surrounding energies to refill it.

Since the arrays were small and rather simplistic in design, the preservation would theoretically run till the end of time or if something were to externally affect the flow of energy between the battery and any of it runes.

Arkyn stepped back from his work and stood silently in thought.

'Now I wish I was completely human. At least then I'd know to shed a tear and had let her know I did care for her. Though if I am not the original, then it may not have mattered to her.'

Part of him understood Kresha was trying to make him more human, he just didn't know it was out of love for who he once was.

She blamed herself for making his life more miserable as a golem, but this life with her was perfect to him. He wasn't a hollow shell of a past life, simply something new, born from a dying mind.

Yes there were the strange glimpses of his past life, but they didn't make up his entire personality, they just helped him understand emotions as they appeared.

Now it seems he was going to have to deal with them and his curiosity about the world all by himself. He left to start the closing process Kresha told him around the same time she explained that she was going to start aging.

Arkyn began deactivating every golem that would pass him in the hallways. First disconnecting the mana paths that ran to the power sources and then taking the little boxes housing them out completely.

It only took a few seconds each and only a week to do it alone. The task gave him a purpose until the next time the Sky Keep was in position. He needed to call the rest of the Afflicted and let them know that Kresha had died.

Arkyn had checked the central room of the Ash keep and saw the next window for a call would not arrive for a number of days. The clock projected against the reflective stone, showing the date as well.

[ 22:45 16th of Winter-Spring 1263 ]

Odbrane had devised clocks centuries prior, using magic to actively count seconds, hours, and days. The kingdom of Odbrane then created a calendar based on the seasons and the transitions in between them.

The calendar started at Spring, then after a set number of days it would become Spring-Summer, Summer, Summer-Fall, Fall, Fall-Winter, and finally Winter. At the end of winter, once the renewal of spring began, the new year would come and pass.

Seeing the date for the first time made Arkyn consider the timeline of his life.

Kresha had been infected with the Coven virus over four hundred years prior on Kragshall, and it wasn't until a year after that she met the Afflicted. Ten years later, when she grew into an adult, they created Fangbell to stop the aging and transformations.

It wasn't until three hundred and fifty years ago that she and him met. The time they spent together was not very detailed, but it wasn't until three-hundred years ago that she managed to awaken him as a golem.

That alone took her almost half a century to design his body with metals and ingredients even she didn't fully understand, and then the rest of the time was spent learning everything there was to learn inside the Keep.

In all that time neither of them knew much what had happened in the world beyond their own. The only real event they knew about was annihilation of the Isle of Req'tosh, but they didn't even know the cause or reaction it had on the people of Odbrane.

Arkyn felt that after being spoon fed so much information about magic and magic creations, the idea of collecting new knowledge and experiencing the world was going to be difficult.

He kept thinking about what was left for him to do and decided to wait for Sky Keep's window to communicate.

Arkyn sat and read one of the first novels he had ever encountered when entering the library. It was one of many books written by Zel Demotriez, focusing on more superstitious lore and myths from a more older era of literature.

When the timer counted down to the last few minutes, He put the book down and stood within the boundaries of the projector.

A lone spotlight appeared beside him, leaving him no more chances to back out and delay telling the news.