Felix stepped back from the excavated claw, as if that would help him take it all in. "This is just its finger," he muttered. "Insane."

Pit looked out over the hillocks and the Kingsap forest. "All of this is Etrionn."

Miniature Paxus swooped closer to the claw, the cutting of Abundance bending in his direction, as if tugged by unseen strings. "Yes, all of it should be the creature." He reached out a small hand toward it, but didn't quite touch the metal. "It's covered in Crescian bronze."

Felix winced, putting a hand to his temple. "That’d explain why my Crown is resonating so much. Feels like I’ve got a hive of bees behind my eyes.” He shook himself, trying to banish the sensation. “Crescian Bronze, though. Wasn’t this stuff extremely valuable? I think someone said my sword could have bought a city, back in the day.”

“More than one, and that just with the value of its materials,” Karys agreed. “This much metal is…I’ve never heard of so much in one place. Does it look like armor?”

“No. It looks like it’s made of it.”

“Impossible.”

Paxus made a noise in his throat, something between humming and coughing. “Not quite. This is Crescian Bronze, and it was not forged.”

Felix held up a hand. “Wait. I thought Crescian Bronze was made by the Nym? It has a Will worked into it, right?"

Paxus fixed him with a glance over his shoulder. "Where do you think the Will came from?"

Felix considered his sword, belt, even the crown, currently invisible upon his brow. "It all came from Etrionn? All Crescian Bronze in the world?"

"So it seems," Paxus said, his voice more hesitant now. "Crescian Bronze and its creation was a highly guarded secret, kept to only the most revered among the Nymean. I knew more once, I—"

"The holes are still there,” Karys added, a cloud of green-gold vapor rising from Felix’s hip. “I feel them, too. I knew more of Crescian Bronze, and seeing this…I feel that there is more, but I cannot remember.”

Felix grunted. The Ruin, it seemed, took the knowledge of even this from their Minds.

Pit chirped. "If this thing is dead, why is it still here?"

Felix blinked. "What?”

“Monsters dissolve into smoke when they die, right? That's how it works."

"Normally," Karys said, "Etrionn was not a normal creature."

“What’s that mean?”

Pit frowned at the sword, but for Felix, a few thoughts sparked a flame. The Title description for killing the Queen rattled through his recent memory. "From a distant shore, it said. Not this Realm. That's what it means, isn't it?"

Through the sword, he could feel Karys bow his head. “I recall that much, my Lord.”

"Keep digging, your Majesty," Paxus urged, gesturing to the hills around them. "If the Bell is anywhere, it will be upon Etrionn's vast back."

"Why keep digging?" Pit asked. "Why not just use Unite the Lost?"

"That’s…worth a shot." Felix put a hand out, reaching for the Skill that hung within him, untouched by Evolution. Unite the Lost.

Significance poured into the Skill, pushing its vibrations higher as its pattern sounded within his core space. It flourished through his pathways, rolling outwards through his hands and feet before it did…nothing. The Skill snuffed out before it ever left the area around his body.

Felix winced in pain as the Skill recoiled upon itself, deactivated and went quiet.

"Apparently, this is completely unaffected by the Ruin, even if the memories of its armor were taken.”

Pit huffed a breath. “I don't get it. What determines what the Ruin touches?"

"Perhaps the gods know," Karys said, "but it has always been unclear to us. Perhaps the Ruin decides for itself."

"A chilling notion, indeed.” Paxus hovered closer. “Might I suggest another method?”

Excavation took some time, but they weren't working with shovels. With shaping magic, Felix managed to open up a significant portion of the mountain in just a few hours, hurling tons of dirt, severed roots, and simple stone out of his way.

It wasn’t enough.

While its foot and parts of two legs were easily accessible, the rest of Etrionn seemed entombed in a high-Tier white stone threaded with deep green—a material that was frustratingly beyond even Felix’s ability to shape it. In fact, the stone actively rejected any foreign Will that tried to change it.

Karys and Paxus had many theories on why: it was a mountain metamorphosed by the bursting of uncanny etheric energies. A great and terrible cataclysm had clearly struck there, perhaps imparting a dire power onto the corpse’s shell. And, if the people of Korsk were to be believed, the very mountains themselves moved across the landscape. Any one of those events could have changed the very nature of the Mana and Essence that threaded the world. Whatever the case was, his standard shaping was not up to the job.

All was not fruitless, however. Despite Pit's protests, Felix kept the Crucible around his waist. Focusing on shaping magic while excavating had put him through the wringer in ways he had not experienced in a long time. It was more than just materials he couldn't handle. He was forced to withstand the agony of pushing his power through what felt like the eye of a needle.

It was difficult, to say the least. For once, when it came to shaping Mana, throwing more power at it was not the solution. He tried a number of times, but the Crucible forced his power through the restriction that it wrought on him and the Realms themselves. It was as if he were trying to drink from a cup while an ocean roared over him. He got plenty wet, but the contents of the cup were washed away.

He was, at long last, forced to focus on technique over sheer volume.

Felix had enough Mana to do most anything with his Skills, activating them ceaselessly in chains for long periods of time. But, by the nature of his short time on the Continent, he’d always lacked a refined technique. If the Crucible was to be believed, that was holding him back from truly advancing.

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He started punching soon after. Yet, despite his Strength and all but breaking his claws against the toughened layers of the earth, he didn’t so much as crack the marbled white stone. Perhaps brute force could accomplish the task, but it would take him days if not weeks of constant effort to even unveil a small portion of Etrionn’s bulk.

Frustrated, Felix returned to the basics. He focused on what he knew about shaping magic. Specifically, what had led him to forming his Sonata in the first place: by combining his individual shaping Skills, he’d made something greater than the sum of its parts. Fiendstone.

Weaving. Same as my Pillars. He whittled down his focus. His Intent and Will repeatedly honed inward, trying and failing to isolate pieces of his power.

More granular. Not separate. Whole.

Earth Mana was not specific enough. With it, he could shove about many things, but the white stone didn’t respond. Shadow Mana was there, in the crevices where the light couldn’t touch. The light, too, was a factor, a mere blush in the lightening morning, but still there the same as air. Water and force threaded deeply through the rock, along with a banked fire Mana that gleamed orange just beneath the dusty brown earth.

All of it was shifting, a pattern that changed with every inch he altered his focus. Depending on where he looked, the Mana had a variation to it that the simple types he'd learned of could not encompass. More than once, he wanted to scream in frustration, but he held it back. His Will was good enough for that.

Piece by piece, the world faded away. Sight beyond Mana vanished. Sound hushed. Even the sensation of his boots against stone was forgotten. There was only the shaping before him.

Sonata of Dominance is level 147!

When it all fell together, it was not some grand revelation; it was more akin to a blind man finding the right combination to a safe. Something clicked, and the stone shrouding a large piece of Etrionn fell away, parting just as his Intent dictated.

Finally, as the twilit gray of false night faded into the distant, peak-trapped fire of early dawn, Felix had found it: an expanse of Etrionn, clad in bronze scales the size of dinner plates, and his first indication of some structure. The rigid shapes of man-made things pressed up against those scales, as if there were a building inside the creature. Felix didn’t know what to make of it.

“I guess…we go in?” he muttered. At his side, Pit gave a shrug.

At first, Felix pried at the scales with his hands. His Strength engaged, thousands of points of it, enough that veins stuck out like cables across his biceps and neck—and yet it was fruitless. All he accomplished was to cut open his hands on the scales’ tapered edges. Neither blood nor pain stopped him, though.

He got out his sword.

Placing the Inheritor’s Will against the same scales, Felix pulled at the handle. The leverage gave him an advantage, and something deep inside creaked, so Felix threw all he had into the effort. He banished his boots, clawed feet gripping the corpse’s side as he put every ounce of his considerable weight against his sword. Pit even joined, pushing against Felix’s back with his broad, feathered head.

“I think…I think I feel it giving way—!” Felix gasped as the sword slipped free, flinging across the corpse as the pair of them crumpled to the ground.

Pit groaned. “I hit my beak on Etrionn’s dumb metal side!”

Felix sat up, arms thrown over his knees as he breathed. His sword was twenty feet away, embedded in the smooth wall of shaped earth and stone like it was clay. “We’re going about this the wrong way.”

Like his sword, the scales wouldn’t just break open. Crescian Bronze was too strong—on top of that, it contained its own Will. He was stupid for ignoring that.

Felix knelt, his sword abandoned for now as he bent over the edges of the scales he’d just tried to pry up. They were entirely unmarred.

"Listen to me," he whispered, shaping his Intent forward. His words struck the metal and bounced away, just as effective as if he’d shouted at a wall. “No. That’s not it.”

He changed his tactic. He listened, leaning on his Affinity and Alacrity. The metal was more than just a barrier. There had to be something he could grasp. A thread of dormant Will that could act.

Right?

Paxus had mentioned that the Will of the Crescian Bronze came from Etrionn—but could a Will exist even after death? His sword suggested as much, but that had been shaped and enchanted by Nymean magi thousands of years ago. As far as he knew, this corpse before him was untouched by any similar process. It hadn’t been forged, but grown.

Felix bent all that made himself forward. His Will and Intent, Affinity and Alacrity, and all of his other ill-used Harmonic Stats. Felicity, Might, Resonance. He flared them each in turn, trying to find some hold he could grasp.

"I am Felix Navarre, here to find the Exalted Bell. Can you help me?" The silence was deafening. "I am Felix, seeking the Exalted Bell. Help!"

This time there was a ripple. Faint, but present. The scales shifted, though there was no mustering of Will. It seemed to react to the Intent baked into his very words. He held himself tight, honing himself toward an edge.

"I am the inheritor of the Nym. Help!" The scales rippled again, stronger now, but there was again not a single murmur of Will answering his own. Frustrated, Felix banged his fist upon the thing's side. It clanged, his midnight against bronze, like a hammer and bell. "What more do you need? The Ruin is coming!"

Contact. Brief and dim, it was a startled awareness that merely brushed against Felix's Mind. He reeled. Strange and terrifying facets swirled through him, all encompassing and upending. Nothing made sense. The images clustered and broke apart, fractal patterns that split infinitely in every direction, emotions he had no name for, and images that bled through his thoughts like wounds. All of it thundered in his mind in that brief moment.

Felix forced himself to be still, to listen. It shook through him, pelting through his aspects, a Will so unlike his own held within the lifeless Bronze. Images fluttered, buzzed, broke apart in a buzzing Dissonance. Yet a cadence—a beat—thrummed through it.

Thump THUMP. Thump, THUMP.

The sound rippled outward, forging dimension as if carving it out of physical space. An image surfaced. Legs, strange and angular, pounded upon the earth. They were running.

Coward. The Beast's voice stabbed at it, forcing the Will to flinch. The legs slowed. The Ruin Comes. Face It!

The legs stilled. Stopped. The ponderous movement of something larger than mountains. It tilted toward them.

Felix focused through the wet heat that poured across his face and neck.

"I need the Bell," he said, the words coming strangely from his lips. They were loose and not forming right. "Let me find it."

The Will of it turned. A landscape rolled against Felix's Mind, something beyond anything he'd ever seen. Stars wheeled in black skies, and water rose up, filling the horizon with crashing waves against sparse rocks. The stone lifted, hexagonal and pitted, but flecked with gold that sizzled against the spray. That foam wriggled, scrawling a word upon the rock—a question—and more than that. It tugged at Felix’s Authority, as if searching.

"You know who I am.” His voice echoed, stern and unyielding. "Open."

The presence vanished. Felix returned to himself. And so did the pain. Soaked in his own blood, he realized belatedly that he'd bitten through his own lip. His eyes ached, and his ears rang as his flesh knitted itself back together, blood slick across his neck and cheeks, where he'd wept tears of it. He breathed, heavy and slow, pulling his midnight claws away from the crushing bronze scales, only to find them sliced open from their grip on the bronze.

"Felix! Fel—! You're awake!" Pit was beside him, a big golden eye looking at him with concern. "Where the heck did you go?"

"I was..." He coughed, and dark blood flecked his hand. "Talking."

"To what? The scales?"

"Yeah," Felix pointed. “Look.”

Across the way, exactly where his sword had been planted, the scales had lifted entirely on their edges like the outside of a dried pinecone. A section of Etrionn’s Body had split, revealing an expanse of desiccated flesh no more than five feet wide.

With a grunt, Felix took to his feet. Each movement was painful, but it hurt less with every step as his body healed. He touched the scales; they fell over, all at once. A faint Will pulsed, and Felix understood.

"Collect those," he muttered. "All of them."

Pit scooped them up and, with Felix's help, put them in his travel bags. That done, Felix stood over the gap, sword in hand. With a single, careful slash, he cut open the flesh. It ripped like tissue paper. Dust and ancient air rushed outward like an expelled breath.

It smelled unsettlingly sweet.

"I guess we go in."