Ivle's Arc

Chapter 7 of 7

The wagon brought Ivle to a fortified bunker north of the quarry, built into the side of a hill and marked with the Crown's purple banner. Inside, the workshop was twice the size of his own, with shelves stocked full of minerals he'd never been able to afford. The Crown representative led him past rows of sealed jars and locked cabinets to a heavy door at the back. "Your workspace," the man said, and handed him a key. "The mineral stores are below. Take what you need." Ivle descended the narrow stone stairs into a vault lined with bins of ore, powdered compounds, and crystalline fragments arranged by type. He moved slowly through the aisles, cataloging what he saw—copper, tungsten, quartz, lapis lazuli—until he reached the far corner where the rarer materials sat under lock and key. He opened the nearest bin and froze. The minerals inside were glowing faintly, a golden seepage spreading across the gravel like oil. He knelt and touched the edge of the bin. The wood was warm. The seepage wasn't coming from the minerals—it was coming from below them. Ivle pulled the bin aside and found cracks in the stone floor, thin lines of light leaking through. Beneath the Crown's mineral stores, something ancient was reacting to the residue his serum had left behind. Ivle pried at the cracked stone with a pry bar from the workshop above, working carefully to avoid damaging whatever lay beneath. The fissure widened as he worked, revealing a pit below the vault floor. Twisted roots pushed up through the opening, thick as his forearm and pulsing with red light. They wrapped around veins of dark bloodstone jasper, the mineral shot through with corruption. A green fluid seeped from where the roots met stone, pooling at the bottom of the pit. Ivle recognized the smell immediately—his serum, transformed and concentrated. The roots had absorbed residue from his experiments at the quarry and drawn it here through the network beneath the forest. Now they were feeding on it, spreading it through the mineral veins like poison through blood. He backed away from the pit and climbed the stairs to find the Crown representative. The man was waiting in the main workshop, inspecting a row of glass vessels. "There's corruption beneath the vault," Ivle said. "The roots are reacting to alchemical residue. If it spreads to the other minerals—" The man raised a hand to stop him. "We know," he said. "The tower began showing signs two days ago. That's why you're here." He gestured toward the window, where Ivle could see a massive stone structure rising beyond the hill. The treasury tower stood four stories high, its foundation built from blocks the size of horses. "We've been moving the uncontaminated stores there since yesterday. Your task is to stabilize what remains before the entire network collapses." Ivle stared at the tower, then back at the stairs leading down to the vault. The Crown hadn't brought him here to finish his serum—they'd brought him to clean up the disaster it had already caused. The roots were spreading his work through the forest faster than he could control it, and now the Crown expected him to stop it before their supplies were destroyed. He had the resources he'd wanted, but the price was containing a reaction he barely understood. Ivle turned back to the representative. "I'll need samples from the contaminated minerals," he said. "And access to whatever records you have on the root network beneath this site." The man nodded and pulled a leather journal from his coat. "Already prepared." Ivle took the journal and descended back into the vault. The serum was transforming without him, and the only way forward was to understand what it had become.