Chapter 492: Let's Be Off
Tala and Rane hesitantly stood on a snowy mountainside, sharing a look that conveyed almost as much as the Archive-enabled conversation that passed between them. One thing about that portion of the situation struck Tala as funny: Tala stood atop the snow, and Rane stood in it, making them nearly the same height, but Tala didn’t let that distract her.
She didn’t even let the fact that this boy shared a name with Master Simon draw her thoughts away.
She and Rane agreed to take it slow and try diplomacy first before moving forward, toward the boy who was cradling Terry. Rane spoke for them this time, “Hello, Simon, I’m Rane. This is my wife, Tala. Is our friend there, Terry, free to leave if he wants?”
It was an odd first question to ask a random child found in the wild, but Tala didn’t begrudge Rane the wording. After all, it lined up with the trepidation they both felt.
Even without any visible magical aura or anything odd about him, the boy was… different somehow.
This child was alone in the wilds, at least fifty miles from any settlement, outpost, caravan route, or research station that they knew about. And yet he showed no fear, nor relief at being found by adults. Instead, he was seemingly making a barrel’s worth of ice cream… for himself?
He was too small to have carried the barrel by mundane means, and he was clearly pulling the candies from something like a bound dimensional space.
Moreover, both Tala and Rane had detected the minute flickers of dimensional magic when Terry had tried to move away—with the weight of both Tala and Rane’s magics behind him—and he’d failed to even budge.
Simon tilted his head to the side, his close-shorn white hair swaying in the breeze. “Oh, please no. I have use of him still…”