“Oh, I’ve missed you, too, darling,” Gavin said. He walked to the wall, and pulled out the hellstone shard he’d taken from the tunnel.
“But time is different for us here.”
“Uh-huh,” Gavin said.
“Why don’t we talk about this?” the green dead man said. Was there an edge of fear in that voice?
“I think we’ve talked quite enough,” Gavin said, and he set the hellstone against the dead man’s third eye and began scratching the wall.
“You need your strength. Why don’t you draft some green?” the dead man said.
“Funny,” Gavin said. He was certain now about the dead man’s moving independently: the green reflection didn’t even bother to try to match his movements precisely. He spoke, and his mouth moved when Gavin knew his own wasn’t moving.
Part of the traps he’d laid for his brother had been dependent on his drafting. He’d thought the lure of drafting green would be too powerful for his brother to resist, and thus he would act wildly. Trapped like an animal, he would bite the bars of his cage, but never be able to gather the wits to do it mechanically. He had, unfortunately, underestimated how long the original Gavin would spend in blue, and how the blue would change him, make him more rational and cool despite his baseline hot temper and rebelliousness.
This green cell had held his brother only for a few days.
“So you’ve been lonely, huh?” Gavin asked, still scratching, scratching, scratching.
“You’ll never get out,” the dead man said.
“You really think I’d spend a year building a prison and never once stop to think how I’d get out if I were ever trapped in it myself?”
Of course that was only half-true. He’d planned how to escape—that was why he’d placed the hellstone chip for himself. But he’d not planned how to get out without drafting.
The hellstone would get him out of green. Yellow… yellow was another question.
“How much did Mot tell you?” the dead man asked.
“Mot?” Gavin’s only interaction with the god had been when he’d sunk the blue bane and run his skimmer over all the god’s foul wights, turning the water red. “Not much. I never bothered to chat with him.”
The dead man looked at him for a long while quizzically, then burst out laughing.
“We don’t remember much at all, do we?” the dead man said. “How many times did you—I mean I—use black luxin anyway? Do I remember? Because once shouldn’t have done this much to… me.”
Of course, Gavin was in green. Of course the dead man would try madness here. Try to make Gavin think he was already mad, that he remembered things that weren’t true and didn’t remember things that were. Of course green would try to make Gavin wild and fearful and uncontrollable.
When Dazen had made this prison, he must have figured that his brother would be particularly susceptible to the wildness of green. That questioning his very sanity would be a good way to keep him from formulating logical plans, would infuriate him.
But one thing this creation of his did do was remind him how much the black had taken.
And then the will-casting. It was always dangerous, he knew that. Utterly forbidden for a lot of good reasons that Gavin had naturally decided didn’t apply to him.
He’d been talking to the dead man here as if he were the same dead man in the blue cell. As if he were still Gavin, mocking himself.
The dead man was still a reflection of himself, of course, but Gavin suddenly understood something about his own design. He hadn’t cast his will into the prison as a whole—there was magic-killing hellstone everywhere down here. If he’d made the prison a seamless whole, a failure of part of it would be a failure of all of it.
So instead he’d imbued a bit of his will into each cell. This dead man was utterly separate from the first.
That was why he’d made this dead man ask what the last one had asked Gavin. He would have wanted to know how to torment his brother more successfully. There were two facts he could glean from this: this dead man didn’t remember anything he’d told the last one, and, more importantly, this one might know things the last one hadn’t.
Dazen had made the blue cell in a month. He’d poured everything into that, and he’d known that his brother was there and not making any progress in getting out for a long while. But Dazen had taken much longer creating the other cells, which meant he’d also crafted them later, when he knew more and different things.
So what did this bit of his will-cast self, this shadowy mirror of himself, know that Gavin himself had forgotten?
It was almost worth exploring.
Talk to a version of his old self that his old self had crafted purely to drive a prisoner insane?
Was he smarter back then, when he’d been cool and collected and healthy and patient, or was he smarter now, with all his experience and the wisdom of years?
He thought about it as he scratched at the wall. Here there would be no luxin seal that he could so easily find. He’d intended his brother to waste a lot of time—years, even—looking for that seal. He hadn’t crafted this cell that way. All the seals here were on the outside.
His brother had been ingenious and far more disciplined than Dazen had expected. Carrying with him the blue bread from the first cell—and thus defeating the hellstone draining out his blue luxin? That was brilliant, Gavin. And drafting a tiny bit of the spectral bleed blue put off under green light so he could draft in here?
Amazing, brother.
Gavin had thought his elder brother would have been terribly frustrated in here.
But that real Gavin had escaped because he could draft and he’d had a source and he’d had indomitable will.
Dazen had only the last.
After many hours, his hand started cramping too much for him to keep going.
The next day he continued. The green dead man heckled him, but he ignored him. They would learn nothing from each other, because Gavin wasn’t willing to give him more ammunition against him. Perhaps that was his wisdom, knowing that he couldn’t take much more, knowing that he was fragile.
On the third day—or after the second sleep, whichever—he’d broken through the green cell wall.
Then he followed the natural grain of the woody luxin a distance somewhat less than the span of his broad shoulders, and began again.
Four days later, he cut through again.