TU17. Tartarian Slavery

After a short ride, Aurora discovered a muddy riverbank. The orbital bombardment that had gouged out the massive crater had violently altered the landscape, choking the river's natural flow. She followed the slithering current downstream until the murky water cleared just enough to reflect the sky, though it barely managed a trickle.

"This will do," Aurora decided, swinging her legs over the saddle of her divine steed.

She brushed her hand absentmindedly against the flaming mare's mane before dismissing the summon, sending the beast back to the aether.

Thanatos found a flat, sun-baked rock near the shore and sat down. He tilted his head, his dark eyes tracking Helios as the sun reached its zenith in a pristine, cloudless sky. The violent aftermath of their earlier battle had already faded into history.

"I'm going to wash up a bit," Aurora called out over the babbling water.

The daemon didn't bother looking back, merely waving a dismissive hand in acknowledgement.

Wading into the shallows, Aurora gasped softly as the chill of the river soaked through her under-suit to her skin. A dark ring of crimson grime, ash, and demon blood immediately began to bloom in the water around her.

She set to work, slowly scrubbing her hair. It took three meticulous washes to strip away the filth and return her locks to their natural, shimmering silver. As she gently cleansed the metallic plates of her armour, her attention strayed between her silent companion and the empty sky. The serenity suggested the demons had expended all their long-range warheads in the initial ambush. Even so, she kept a wary eye on the clouds just in case.

"You can never be too careful," Aurora muttered softly.

Finished at last, she rose from the river, crystal droplets cascading down her armour and skin.

"That is the first time I've ever known someone to bathe in full armour," Thanatos's voice drifted on the warm breeze, alerted by the distinct clinking of wet metal.

Aurora shot his back a helpless look. "I can't risk being caught unarmoured by the enemy, can I?"

"Fair enough." The God of Death chuckled. He remained seated, his back politely turned toward her, his dark, feathery wings folded neatly against his shoulders.

"Besides, the arc armour is sophisticated enough. Water won't be a problem." Aurora rejoined his side, absentmindedly adjusting the seals on her gauntlets.

"So, where to?"

Aurora found a long, sturdy stick in the dirt. "Are you keen on playing language teacher now?"

"Oh! About that... why not?" Thanatos pinched his chin and nodded nonchalantly.

The session began with Aurora using her stick to redraw the Protonic glyphs she had seen stamped on the inner plates of the fallen demons. Because there were only three lines of text, she replicated them flawlessly, along with three geometric shapes spaced equidistantly around the words.

For the first hour, Thanatos guided her through the basics of the lettering system and its grammatical rules. She soon realised that Protonic was likely the ancient root of the Hellenic glyphs, given their striking similarities. However, as eons had passed, the lettering system had grown vastly more complex to accommodate the additional sounds and dialects of branching civilisations. With Thanatos's guidance, she was able to read simple sentences and grasp their meaning in no time.

"Now, let's give these codes a try, shall we?" Aurora said, her voice tinged with bubbling excitement. A bright smile flashed across her face.

"I believe you now when you said you were a scholar first, and a warrior second," Thanatos commented.

"Oh? How so?" Aurora questioned, her mind still pondering the codes scratched into the dirt.

"Because you possess an insatiable curiosity and a frightening aptitude for digesting new information. It seems even a language barrier isn't going to slow you down."

He shot her a glance of mild disbelief. In response, Aurora simply arched an eyebrow at the Grim Reaper.

Thanatos offered no further reaction. Instead, he returned his gaze to the vast darkness giving way in the sky. It was already dawn, and the first ray of light had grazed the horizon. It was a rare moment of serenity in this demon-ridden world.

For a long while, the god of death stared unblinking at the sunrise, as if he were searching for something. No, he was longing for something that was lost forever.

"You remind me of my brother. Though he was a bit more of a dreamer than a practical doer," he chuckled, resting his chin on a clenched fist.

"I see," Aurora mumbled, her mind still reeling over the secret codes.

She knew the Protonic grammar and syntax now, as well as common vocabulary, which she considered more than enough to make logical assumptions — provided there was enough context. Despite that, she couldn't make heads or tails of these three lines. She was beginning to believe Thanatos's earlier warning that these might just be gibberish sentences to begin with, a ploy to waste the time of anyone trying to read them.

Noticing the uncharacteristically deep frown marring Aurora's otherwise pristine visage, Thanatos grinned. "It seems you love puzzles."

"Do I?" She puckered her lips and aggressively scratched the dirt with her stick.

Initially, the codes had seemed to be some sort of structural rearrangement of the language. But after dozens of attempts to reorder the syntax, she couldn't make it make sense. She finally admitted defeat on that front. Grabbing a large leaf, Aurora swept the dirt with a loud scrape, erasing the unintelligible lines to start anew.

"Ah..." As Thanatos was about to speak, he saw Aurora cross her arms and squeeze her eyes shut in deep concentration. He sealed his lips and let her work in silence.

The gentle breeze carried the faint tang of ash and sulphur, making Aurora wiggle her nose. She started by mentally laying out all the strange facts about these codes. In traditional Protonic, it was incredibly rare to see the '-ud' phoneme. She then triangulated the reasoning behind such a cipher. Why was it there? What could the purpose be? And who stamped it into the armour of the demons?

"Wait..." Aurora paused, her eyes snapping open. "This must have been made by the ones supplying them with these armours, ammunition, and weaponry. But who? If we're talking about the Age of Mythology... the Hekatons and the Cyclopes must have been the ones working the forges in Tartarus."

Aurora smiled triumphantly. "This wasn't meant for the demons to realise. It was meant to be decodable!"

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She immediately began dividing the strange words in two, separating every word that ended with the '-ud' phoneme.

Even Thanatos rose to inspect the fresh writing on the dirt. "What's going on? Are you onto something at least?"

"There's a pattern! Everything is in a binary, you see?" Aurora pointed out, circling each of the isolated groups. "Those two words are not in the known vocabulary."

Thanatos blinked. "Yeah, that still means absolutely nothing to me."

"Because this is a sort of ludling!" she declared, her pitch dancing up and down like an excited rabbit.

"A ludling?" He tilted his head.

"Have you ever heard of a Cant?" Aurora asked. "It's like a specialised language used in organised crime syndicates, like pirates, thieves, or some factions. In Montelia, there was a thing called Verlan, which was the rearrangement of syllables. For example, the word Bizarre would become Zarbi."

"Really?"

"Really. This is much more mathematical than linguistic," she grinned.

A bright spark ignited in her eyes. In that brilliant, sparkling moment, she looked no different from her one and only ward, Cartier Di Joy. The heavy burden of wars and battles faded to the depths of her mind; for a fleeting second, she felt like a little girl solving a riddle again.

"Okay..." Thanatos crossed his arms, looking completely incredulous.

She started to pronounce the fragments aloud. Then, she swapped the word positions within their clusters. Next, she transposed the phonemes. Finally, she realised that every single one of the groups had the sound 'lud' added to the front of it.

"But this is more complex than Verlan. Now, we discard the 'lud' affixation, and voilà!" Aurora quickly scratched the translated words into the dirt, transforming the once-gibberish lines into perfectly readable Protonic.

"That's... impossible," Thanatos murmured, his lips parted in shock.

Aurora began the translation. "We are the Hekatons and Cyclopes of Tartarus..."

She glanced back at Thanatos, who nodded grimly, confirming her earlier hunch.

"We have been imprisoned within the Forged Mountain to serve the demon overlord for eternity. We are not part of the demonic regime; this is against our will. There are millions of souls that have been wrongly judged and sent to the Forged Mountain for forced labour. We need your help. Seek us out..."

"Seek us out?" Thanatos exclaimed. "That's it?"

"It appears so," Aurora hummed. "But remember those three geometric shapes? Now that we've bypassed the ludling, we can arrange the translated words into those shapes."

The Empress used her stick to draw the words into a triangle, a circle, and a rectangle, assigning each of the three lines to a shape.

"Luckily, it's intuitive enough, don't you think?" she quipped, looking at Thanatos's hanging jaw.

"You're guessing. How do you know the first line goes into the triangle shape?" he challenged.

"A guess?" Aurora teased, a throaty chuckle escaping her. "The first line goes to the first shape. It's straightforward—nothing too convoluted like the Cant."

In Protonic, letters could be mirrored vertically or horizontally to alter their meaning. It was clear that the triangle represented an anchor point, the starting location. It described the mountain range to the east. The next shape, the circle, acted as a compass, determining direction. Due to the strange celestial motion of this realm, the Helios didn’t seem to start at the same spot every day, hence the reason for the specific method to find the direction of the north pole. The final part, the rectangle, described the destination, functioning as a highly summarised map with only a few distinct landmarks.

"This combined with the leather map we obtained earlier, we can navigate!" Thanatos suggested, his tone delight.

Frantically, Aurora spread the map next to the geometric shapes, "Right. So, judging from all this, we can assume we need to head south, then slightly east through that forest." She pointed at the edge of the rectangle. "C'thun Forest?"

"Cathun Forest," Thanatos corrected politely.

"Cathun Forest, then pass the volcanic mountain range—" She paused, pointing at the translated name.

"That is pronounced as the Drakon Mountains."

"Drakon, like dragons?" she asked, genuinely curious.

"I do not know. But perhaps." Thanatos shrugged helplessly. "Does it matter?"

"I don't think so. Anyway, we should be able to find a massive, pan-shaped valley just past the Drakon Mountains. The Forge should be located right in the middle of it. No wonder we couldn't see any billowing smoke from a massive forge; it's geographically shielded. And it explains why the demons seemed so well-equipped, even when I clashed with them on the Overworld previously."

"Hmm, you're right." He nodded in agreement. "So... what's next, my Empress?"

Abruptly, Aurora shot upward, aggressively brushing the dirt from her Ventiff cloak. "If we can liberate the Forge from this Tartarian slavery, we can save those poor souls. But not only that, we'll cut off the primary supply lines of the Helltides altogether."

"Sounds like a solid plan," Thanatos admitted. "They'll have nothing left but claws and fangs to fight this war with. Such a fate is worse than returning to the Stone Age." The Grim Reaper chuckled deeply.

"Exactly," she said.

Suddenly, Aurora stopped and glanced up at the morning sky. The distant shrieking of native crows rang out, breaking the morning silence. But her finely tuned senses picked up on something far more insidious. A faint rippling of arcane energy was hovering somewhere in the air above them.

"There's magic here," she mumbled. In truth, she had been noticing the subtle disturbance for a while now.

"Oh..." Thanatos gasped softly.

"You knew," Aurora said, keeping her face impassive to hide the bitter sting of betrayal. "But you didn't tell me about it."

"Come on, you also sensed it for quite some time, yet you did not act."

"Fair enough," Aurora grumbled, letting her mana surge freely through her body. She was well-rejuvenated and operating at full power now that she had rested.

There was a key takeaway here, she reminded herself. "I must not become reliant on the gods to solve all of my problems."

"It seems you understand the notion very well," the god of death noted, staring at her unfazed.

Hissing a breath of hot air from her nostrils, Aurora perked up. "Then, I shall simply destroy this place and whatever is watching us," she stated through gritted teeth.

A raging torch of magical energy erupted in her palm, radiating with blinding intensity. With lethal elegance, she raised it toward the sky. As she channelled the spell, a powerful gust of wind enveloped her, violently whipping her cloak and silver hair around her.

The very air molecules hummed with the sheer excess of her casting, generating beautiful, rippling waves of iridescent particles. The mana whirred deeply, sounding like a den of growling tigers. Vicious.

"Empyrion-Helios!" Aurora roared, curling her raised hand into a tight fist.

Blinding rays of light, containing the raw, condensed power of the sun, bled through the gaps in her fingers. She opened her palm, triggering the ignition.

A thundering boom erupted in every direction. The massive firestorm spread outward with incredible, blinding speed. The explosion devoured its surroundings instantly. The surveilling, many-eyed plumes of Argus were annihilated, along with everything else caught within the blast radius.

Reduced to atoms.

A towering mushroom cloud scraped the sky — a defiant, violent challenge to the Queen of the Gods and her omnipresent eyes.

When the raging light faded, the land had been turned to ash and billowing smoke. There was no trace left of even a single tree stump, nor the passing river where she had just cleaned herself. Only a massive, glassed crater remained at the epicentre, looking as though an extinction-level meteor had crash-landed.

One single spell had caused all of this. Aurora's strength was a force of nature on its own, and the utter destruction of this land was a stark testament to that fact.

With quiet awe, Thanatos gently fluttered his dark, feathery wings and landed beside the silver-haired elf. Aurora calmly dusted her hands before summoning her divine steed. She hoisted herself into the mount's saddle and secured her boots in the stirrups.

"A scholar first. A destroyer second," he remarked wryly.

There was no verbal response from the Empress. The steed neighed softly, venting a hiss of hot exhaust from its nostrils.

"Good girl," she murmured, brushing her palms against its flaming mane. Her brows straightened into a sharp line; her face grew determined, her plan solidified in her mind.

"Let's move." She flicked her head to the side, and the divine steed neighed fiercely. Its four hooves crushed the scorched dirt, stirring the fresh ashes into the air. Aurora felt the wind whipping against her arcane barrier as they sped out of the desolated wasteland. At her mount's top speed, the Cathun Forest was merely an hour away.