12 Miles Below VII: Path of the Mitespeaker, page 1
PATH OF THE MITESPEAKER
©2025 MARK ARROWS
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ALSO IN SERIES
12 Miles Below
The Frozen Realm
A House Reborn
Grand Design
The Mite Forge
The Warlock
The Icon of Stars
Path of the Mitespeaker
Book Eight
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CONTENTS
The Story Thus Far
Prologue
1. Rough Landing
2. On the Road (Again)
3. Communicating with Eldritch Entities
4. Don’t Be a Stranger, Bob
5. The War Within I
6. The War Within II
7. The Way Forward
8. H Is for Humans
9. The Odin Defense Force
10. This Tower Defense Game Is Broken
11. The Dragon
12. Aggressive Negotiations
13. The Convoluted Machine Scheme
14. In Which To’Orda Bullies Everyone
15. Cult of the Bob
16. Snakes
17. Force Multiplier
18. Wrong Side of the Bet
19. Giant Lizard in a Tiny City
20. Forceful Eviction
21. In Which To’Orda Fails to Take a Nap
22. A Glutton Appears
23. Person of Interest
24. Aztu the Wise
25. To’Orda the Less Wise
26. The New Boss
27. Reaching the Icon
28. In Which Two Vastly Powerful, Ancient Entities Squabble
29. Path of the Mite Speaker
30. Urs
31. Legacy of the Great Warlord To’Wrathh
32. Hostile Takeover
33. Freedom
34. Rise of the Empire
35. All the Dots Lined Up
36. Prophecy Restored
37. Relinquished Watches over You
38. A Trip to Visit Bob
39. Can You Say Hello?
40. Prepare for Trouble
41. And Make It Double
42. The Bell Rings for Thee
43. Chunibyo Delusions
44. Catching Up
45. Bait
46. Symphony of Destruction Gone Wrong
47. Aggressive Takeover
48. Wild West
49. Trust
50. The Icon’s Plan
51. The Dark Demon of Mankind
52. Loose Ends
Epilogue
Thank you for reading Path of the Mitespeaker
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THE STORY THUS FAR
The author recommends skipping this section if the reader is up to date.
BOOK 1:
Keith Winterscar, a scrappy youth and his father, Tenisent Winterscar, a past-haunted veteran, have survived an ordeal that would break most people. Trapped underground in a terrifying realm of murderous machines, they fought each hour for sheer survival.
Guided by the mysterious goddess Tsuya, a human who had long ago turned into an AI to continue the fight against the machine empire, they are brought through to safety and find the final resting place of the late elite crusader named Cathida Lann. Upon her dead body lay her weapons and armor, dormant and ready to be wielded once more by the next potential hero. And within this little treasure trove was an item of far greater importance to the goddess Tsuya: an item marked of the highest priority by Cathida’s highly secretive imperial chapter. Tsuya had guided both Keith and Tenisent here specifically to recover this old relic. All the weapons and armor that any surface clan would consider a national treasure were nothing short of expendable to the goddess. A fitting reward to Keith for passing along and moving the little device under the machine god’s notice.
Following in the pair’s shadow was a jilted monster. A machine spider, for whom defeat was unacceptable. She had marked the two humans passing by her domain as hers and found herself rebuffed by their resilience. Three times she stalked behind them, trying to kill the pair in smarter and more clever ways. She even brought a small army of machines to assist in her fight.
For all her effort, she only killed one—Tenisent Winterscar, already mortally wounded from the start. Little did she know that by slaying Tenisent, she had set him down a path that would turn the old veteran into the world’s most powerful warrior.
Ultimately, Keith overcame his own inner fear and stood ready to fight the same monster that had killed his far more skilled father. But being a budding rogue rather than a paladin or warrior, Keith had his own way of stacking the deck. Learning from the spider’s past behavior in her single-minded attempts to kill them, he abused her automatic reflexes, bypassing her defense where she was blind and striking a killing blow.
Keith continued the fight underground, unaware that his nemesis hadn’t given up, even in death. And he discovered she hadn’t been the only one who hadn’t given up against death. Tenisent Winterscar’s soul refused to evaporate into the ether. Instead, the father continued to follow his son, watching over him for as long as he could, simply to know that Keith escaped alive in the end.
This fortitude would come with an unexpected boon. When Keith ordered his father’s armor to generate a full combat engram of Tenisent, it opened up a small resonance between the armor and the errant soul floating around. Tenisent seized control, flowing into the armor’s soul and staking a home within it. He fought off Keith’s enemies before fading back into the background, waiting in safety within the soul fractal of the armor—a temporary home he could remain in as a ghost.
It wasn’t to last for long.
Reuniting with Lord Atius, the clan lord of Keith’s home, and Kidra Winterscar, Keith’s older sister, the full group of knights set off to continue the underground expedition, following a call that Lord Atius felt far above on the surface while traveling. It led to an ancient human bunker made by Imperials, the same chapter Cathida swore fealty to. Within it they found an ancient orb of power, a relic from an older time. Lord Atius, a centuries-old Deathless, recognized what this orb was and what it could do. But he kept that information to himself, only seeking to bring the orb back with him safely. Deep within that bunker, they were able to speak to the goddess Tsuya for the first time. Until an ominous figure of legend equally revealed herself: Relinquished, the goddess of all machines. A genocidal AI bent on killing all humanity, and the true architect behind the fall of mankind. Thousands of years later, she remains on her sole mission of eradication. With little trouble, she squashes the communication before Lord Atius could learn any more information from Tsuya.
An army of machines came after the team now, commanded by the violet goddess herself, to recover their heads and get all that Tsuya might have taught or told them. In an act of self-sacrifice, Tenisent Winterscar, who had been following within his old armor, transferred his soul into the dying bunker in order to reactivate its defenses and buy the team time to escape.
But Relinquished would have one final opponent barring the way—To'Aacar, The One Above All Challenge And Reach. His kind were the machine generals, built as a mirror to humanity and made to be superior to them in every possible way. One of Relinquished’s dreaded feathers, and one that knew Lord Atius personally.
To'Aacar was ancient, built as part of the second generation of Feathers, and designed specifically to seek out and battle strong foes. His old purpose long complete, To'Aacar had run out of opponents to fight, forced to battle with a handicap simply to keep things interesting enough. Lord Atius had been one of the few Deathless who gave him a challenge of any kind, and that single-minded fixation saw the Deathless forced to flee with his people to the surface, the only place To'Aacar couldn’t find him at.
The two fought like titans, with Atius striking a mortal blow against To'Aacar’s right hand, severing the very concept of a hand from his shell. Crippled, maimed, and reduced, To'Aacar was mentally vulnerable. In the final moment, Keith stumbled while carrying the orb away and it was recovered by Kidra, who was momentarily stunned as the orb’s power flared out, as if connecting to the young lady.
Keith and Kidra returned safely to the surface with the rest of the knights, now carrying relic armor, the coordinates of a hidden book given by Tsuya, and a strange device carried by the late elite crusader Cathida Lann, which her mission had marked as highest priority.
If only Keith had known the events that he had inadvertently set into motion. An ancient prophecy by the mites had now started beating once more, as a contender for their game had finally appeared after centuries: the machine spider Keith had killed.
BOOK 2:
Her name was To'Wrathh—the one who remembers and transcends her history. And she had history with Keith Winterscar.
Quite literally too angry to die, she refused to simply vanish upon her death blow. Her soul left her body and found shelter from server to server, cutting away parts of herself to stay alive, seeking an audience with Relinquished—the master of all machines. She had to complete her task of killing Keith and finishing what she had started. No one else could own his life but her.
On a whim, Relinquished allowed the spider to claim a Feather’s shell, an event that had never happened before in history. Her Feathers were grown in the digital sea, perfectly balanced predators in their training, and only then given a shell in the physical world. To'Wrathh had begun directly in the physical world, within a machine shell several orders of magnitude smaller in power. The newfound space and power of her shell would allow her to grow far more freely, unlike her more confined brother and sister Feathers. To lead her on the right path, she was given a mentor, To'Aacar, to help guide her forward. And for him to complete a task he had failed prior—securing the orb dropped from Keith’s hands, along with Cathida’s priority-one black box. As for Keith and Kidra? After being discovered and interrogated for whatever Tsuya had spoken to them about, they were to be executed.
In the meantime, Keith has escaped back home, following the coordinates given by Tsuya to uncover an old relic hidden on the surface—a copy of a book written by Talen, one of the three gods of the surface. Diving into the secrets of the book, he learned of fractals: symbols recognized by reality, only requiring a power source of some kind to channel through the mathematically perfect runes in order to ignite the power.
This would come just in time, as the returning heroes were ambushed by pirates looking for an easy lone airspeeder to raid. It turned terribly against the pirates, as a Deathless was not one to be trifled with, especially a Deathless accompanied by an entire team of relic knights.
Capturing the pirates, the clan lord took their armors. Desperate to recover those armors, the pirate leader gave news of a massive slaver invasion detected moving about, heading directly for their clan. In exchange for her and her pirates’ help with the infestation approaching, they would receive all three armors taken by the clan lord. But only after the danger had passed.
With news of dark tidings approaching, the small airspeeder finally returned with everyone into the safety of Clan Altosk.
And deep within the Winterscar Household, now being revitalized by Kidra’s takeover, Keith began to test his book of power and learn from it. Within these, he learned of the soul fractal—a rune that can safely house a human or artificial soul, and protect it the same way a body would.
The implications were deep—for this fractal pattern had been inscribed deep within the bunker. In panic, Keith dug into the family armor, hoping to find his Father’s soul inside. Instead, all Kidra and Keith find were remnants. A hole where his Father had been—he’d been left behind in the bunker.
They had to return underground and save him and bring him back. With this newfound goal, Keith went to work. He would come up with weapons of great power that used both his engineering skills and his newfound administrator access unlocked by Tsuya for his armor’s internal nano-swarm.
But his greatest discovery was the attempt to cheat speed out of his armor. By diving within the soul-fractal he’d inscribed following Talen’s instructions, he could leave his body in a semi-animated state that abused the armor’s movement prediction—allowing Keith to pilot the armor at the speed of thought.
For a semi-skilled warrior as himself, the advantage made him one of the clan’s top duelists. For a combat prodigy like his sister, the technique elevated her into one of the world’s greatest duelists.
Kidra would find a different use for the occult, weaving an additional layer into it that her brother couldn’t. Able to see the concepts of combat and movement she had dedicated her life to, she was now able to see an opponent’s planned movement the moment it came to their mind.
All this newfound power would come in immediate use as a convoy of refugees from underground arrived, asking for succor. They offered the clan everything they needed to fend off the slavers: weapons, shelter, safety. But in exchange, they must pledge loyalty to the machines.
These ex-humans, named Chosen by Relinquished, were a poison pill sent to demoralize the clan. Pawns in a larger game. Many in the clan wished to simply kill these interlopers, or exile them. But Clan Lord Atius was a Deathless with strict morals he could not breach. They would remain in the clan and be watched over, while a small political war for the heart of the clan began between the Deathless clan lord and the Chosen priest, Lejis.
With all the clan knights recalled to protect the clan, Atius wasn’t satisfied he had brought enough to protect the clan. Thus, he sends out Kidra and a small escort to travel down to the undersider city of Capra'nor, and demand debts he had earned from them long ago to be paid back.
Kidra’s use of the Winterblossom technique was mere rumor within the clan, kept secret by the clan lord as he debated the best course forward. This turned into his first error: his second in command, the first blade Shadowsong, grew paranoid. Unhinged from watching his daughter and two of her retainers be sent out, nearly untrained in comparison, to escort Kidra, the clan lord claimed Kidra, along with one seasoned veteran Winterscar, would be enough to handle any odds.
House Shadowsong have a long history with House Winterscar and Shadowsong Prime believed that, for once, the troublesome house of liars and thieves had managed to fool Lord Atius into believing their lies for clout. Such a thing would not trouble him if it were only Kidra sent out into the field. But his only daughter had been sent with her, and when Kidra proved herself unable to fight as she’d boasted, people would die for the lies of House Winterscar.
Enraged, in grief he challenged Keith to a duel outside the clan, seeking to force the young Winterscar’s hand into proving that their House truly had discovered Tenisent’s techniques or earned their right of combat. He needed to see firsthand what had convinced the clan lord. Keith, still new and unpracticed, struggled to trigger the full Winterblossom technique. The Shadowsong Prime nearly killed the boy as a result. Keith managed to trigger the technique at the last moment, fighting Shadowsong one on one with nearly even ground.
Understanding that his fears were unfounded, the Shadowsong Prime continued the fight now for tradition’s sake rather than to seek bloodshed. And, with the panache expected of House Winterscar, Keith won by a technicality, abusing the environment and everything possible to eke out a win. But a win was a win, and Shadowsong had his answer.
Ever since, the Shadowsong Prime took it as a personal mission to guard and work with Keith as atonement for his rash actions. Together, they worked to handle the Chosen incursion, baiting a trap by dangling Keith in the open. All the knights who followed the Chosen had been tasked with raiding the approaching slavers, but the pair expected these knights to return and make an attempt. It worked too well, as a completely different set of invaders came biting:
