Who Saw the Woven Wall Fall
Session: 2023-01-25
The journal next finds the crew at the foundry. A security team had installed locks there. The journal does not say how the crew came there from the House of Renewal, or whom the security team served.
Who came to the foundry, where new locks had been set.
— the Long Names, Zigu, 23
Twenty-five or thirty feet off, the crew attacked what Som called space jellyfish. He wrote that the thing was a variant of barathu, amorphous, and that its filaments were woven into the door and the wall.
Learn where it has taken hold.
Know whether it holds the door, or the wall.
Know that what is woven can be burned.
(Zigu, from his journal.)
— the Forms, Form 34, later additions
Beside the name he wrote a word I find in no other record: Daelns. I leave it as he wrote it.
Two lines stand on the page without a story around them: a serum of enhancement, with the word scientist, and a power source, modified, made into a trap. The journal does not say who held the serum, or who set the trap, or for whom.
Light carries what it carries. It does not promise to be read.
— the Cycle, I.10
The computer room. No filaments had reached it. Consoles stood at the west end, and two rectangular servers held the city's data, reached through consoles built into them. Of the northern one Som wrote This is the computer we need!
Who found the machine they had come for, and marked it.
— the Long Names, Zigu, 24
What is counted is kept.
— the Cycle, I.12
He marked it with an exclamation. He knew what he had come for when he saw it.
The system could be woken with a battery, one minute of power for each charge. A spell of recharging could keep a server running for ten.
A spark that flies is not yet spent.
— the Cycle, II.4
Light given is not light lost.
— the Cycle, II.5
The servers held all of the city's files, under protection. The southern one was shut behind a key code and a digital lock, and it sat on a grid that would shock whoever touched it. The crew got the admin key code. The journal does not say whose hands took it.
Who was there when the city gave up its key.
— the Long Names, Zigu, 25
Look at what a thing stands on.
A lock is not the only guard.
(Zigu, from his journal.)
— the Forms, Form 35, later additions
Then a swarm came on, writhers, plant-based. Som found no weakness in it. What troubles living flesh did not trouble it, and it had a swarm's defenses. One strike went home hard. The journal does not say whose.
Who stood against the writhing swarm, that had no weakness.
— the Long Names, Zigu, 26
Burn first. Count after.
— the Cycle, II.1
Then the tendrils crumbled from the building. The creature was dead. The wall it had woven itself into collapsed inwards. The journal stops there.
Who saw the woven wall fall inward.
— the Long Names, Zigu, 27
When the core goes dark, the shell gives way.
— the Cycle, II.8
He did not write who killed it. He wrote that the wall fell. The deed speaks without a name.