Broken Lands

“There ought to be some way to ask them questions,” Sophia muttered, then turned to Dav. “You still have that Spirit Cord, right? Do you think it would work?”

“Do we need to? It seems pretty obvious what they’re doing. They’re salvaging the lake.” Dav didn’t move to get the Spirit Cord out of his pack. While it would still work defensively in this area against most monsters, it wouldn’t work well against anything that could actually hurt him, so he’d long since put it away where it wouldn’t be damaged. It was still useful when they had to deal with ghosts and weren’t trying to kill them, but that didn’t happen often.

In fact, now that Sophia thought about it, it hadn’t happened for several months even back in the Maze. There was one encounter with a haunted mansion that turned into a rather fun murder mystery puzzle because he was able to talk to the ghosts, but that was one of the few times he’d used it in the past year.

“I’m not sure,” Sophia admitted. “They could tell us what they’re salvaging. I don’t know if that’s important. It’s pretty clear that joining them in the salvage is something we could try.”

“I’d rather look for something else,” Ci’an admitted. “I know we have underwater breathing alchemicals, but I’d rather find another Challenge. Something that doesn’t require going underwater.”

“That may be a good reason to ask,” Dav said confusingly. “There’s not much reason to ask if we’re going down there, but if we aren’t, maybe we can get an idea of what’s there and where else we can look.”

Sophia shook her head. It seemed backwards to ask questions about the place they weren’t going to go rather than gathering information about the place before they headed down, but she wasn’t going to argue against the questions. Maybe they’d be good enough to head underwater, but it was also fine if they weren’t. They didn’t have to take the first likely Challenge chain they saw; while that was what they’d done so far, that was simply because it meant they could stop looking.

It took Dav more than half an hour to convince the workers to talk to him instead of trying to get him to dive. Sophia guessed that was better than treating him as hostile, but it certainly didn’t help him figure out what was going on.

The answer about what they were diving for was equally concerning: they were after metal. The lake held the remains of several towns that were destroyed during the War of Two Mimirs and it was far easier to simply mine the remains underwater instead of trying to do so in a mine. Monsters didn’t form underwater, but most of the old abandoned mines held monsters.

There was probably a Challenge chain underwater, but Dav’s information meant that Sophia changed her mind on where they should head next. “We should go upstream and see if we can find the destroyed towns. Maybe even a city.”

No one seemed inclined to argue. Ci’an was already in the air, in fact, as if that destination was obvious the moment Dav figured out what was going on.

Okay, maybe it was.

The flight upstream took a while, even before they were attacked by a series of flying monsters that came out of the woods on either side of the stream. They weren’t the same monsters that attacked earlier; those were essentially manawarped beasts. These were mana constructs. They looked similar, but Sophia could tell the difference and that difference mattered.

Manawarped beasts attacked because they had a reason, just like any other beast. Some were irritable, others were territorial, and still others wanted food. A significant fraction were simply incapable of seeing anything different enough from their normal surroundings and without wanting to kill it.

Mana constructs attacked because they were ordered to. Something was controlling them. It might be the World Tree; that certainly happened in the Maze. It hadn’t happened in the World Tree yet, though. The shadow creatures back in the legend of bunnies and the lunar eclipse were a good example: something sent them.

That something seemed to be trying to keep them away from whatever was upstream, which made it even more important to get there. Unlike the visible memories diving for metal in the river, it was present in this region, too.

Which brought up another question. “When you were asking around about how to get through Challenges, was there anything about Challenges that span multiple zones? That’s what this seems to be, and the shadow lurkers were in a bunch of different zones because they followed us. The roc moved through zones, too.”

“I think the roc was its own zone.” Dav walked through the air as fast as Sophia could fly, unbothered by the height or the speed. His flight had changed the most out of all of them, from truly terrible when they started at the Arena to impressive and freeform, making him able to fight in the air as if he were on the ground. “So that was a zone moving through other zones. The shadow lurkers, though … are you saying these sketches of birds are like them?”

“Calling them sketches of birds is insulting to birds,” Ci’an objected. “They’re a collection of geometric shapes imitating a bird. Poorly.”

That was … okay, that was fair. Sophia would probably have said that they looked like low-resolution models of a bird done in matte black, almost like model that didn’t render right in a game, but sure. Ci’an wouldn’t know what that was. Geometric shapes poorly imitating a bird was fair. They certainly didn’t fly like real birds.

The World Tree called them Manaborne Avian Constructs, but it didn’t take Dav long to come up with a much better name for them: Glitchbirds.

The most annoying thing about them, by far, was that glitchbirds did not have feathers.

Fortunately, they were easy to kill. Glitchbirds weren’t very smart; once one glitchbird saw the group, all of the glitchbirds who could hear its alarm call converged. It looked impressive but it really just made them easier targets.

Like most things without a normal body, they were significantly weakened by Sophia’s True Death, and they were only second upgrade in any case. Sophia suspected they were weak for the second upgrade, as well, though a true second upgrade team might well struggle with them because there were a lot of them. That didn’t matter with Xin’ri at the third upgrade. She did ask Sophia to refill her lightning staff with mana every two or three hours, but that was easy enough.

They passed a number of ancient overgrown towns as they made their way upstream. They had clearly all been destroyed or at least heavily damaged by flooding and then never rebuilt, so the group spent a little time checking them before they moved on. Each town had a glitchbird population, which gave new meaning to the words “target-rich environment” without slowing the group significantly. The time investigating each town slowed them far more than the birds did, even though they didn’t find anything notable. They’d all been looted, but only the easily accessible stuff was taken.

It was midafternoon by the time they reached something different: a spire completely covered in glitchbirds. It was nothing like the rest of the architecture they’d seen on the way up the river, with its steep roofs and general pyramid-like building shape; instead, the spire looked like a single tower, possibly something like a small ancient castle.

It didn’t fit, which was an excellent reason to investigate it.

When they approached, the usual cloud of glitchbirds rose, but this one was thicker than usual, with three or four times as many glitchbirds. Worse, there were four birds that weren’t like the others. One was huge, at least fifteen feet long with a wingspan that was probably double that wide. A second one was tiny, with silver claws and beak. The third and fourth were a lot like normal glitchbirds, but one was green and the other was red.

Unsurprisingly, the big one wanted to get in close, while the small one wanted to disappear and turn up later with its beak buried in its opponent’s neck. The two colorful ones were probably mages, but the Flying Stars never actually found that out. Instead, they found out that they were fragile, just as fragile as the swarming glitchbirds that Xin’ri was quickly killing.

The oddly sized birds took longer. Sophia took out the small one, since she was the one who could find it, while Dav handled the big guy. Their efforts, as fun as they were, were over all too quickly. Sophia was only beginning to feel warmed up.

Xin’ri wasn’t even done.

They flew in through a window and found themselves in a huge room with several large tables. It looked like a dining hall to Sophia, or maybe a banquet hall, though she wasn’t certain of that. She only knew of rooms like that from movies, and that meant she didn’t really know what they were used for other than meals.

They searched the place and found that it was both ancient and filled with relatively recent magical traps when a hammer swung out of a wall and tried to take out Dav’s right knee. The hammer wasn’t real, but it was real enough; if he hadn’t jumped at the movement, they’d have had to stop while he healed his knee.

Fortunately, Sophia could see them easily; they weren’t hidden magically at all and the enchantments stood out once she knew to look.

The lower floors were all distinctly domestic and boring. It wasn’t until they reached the top of the Tower that they found the incomplete letter that was probably the point of the entire scenario.

The False Ones and their birds have once again rejected the True Mimir, the One who led us in our flight from the Wave of Death. They still claim that the Mimir is their false deity who closes himself up in his Hall instead of walking among his people the way the true Mimir does.

I do not understand how you can stay with them, Ramona. Can’t you see that we have to fight? We must tear the stolen projects out of their talons and give it to Mimir.

I don’t think we will move

The letter ended with a large ink blot. Sophia couldn’t tell if it covered any words, but even if it did she didn’t think they were likely to be significant. The partial letter didn’t really tell them much they hadn’t known, other than the fact that the tower probably wasn’t touched by the flood at all.

The letter fragment was held in place by a paperweight made of an iridescent stone with lines of black flecked with color wrapped around it. It was clearly magical, and the magic led up towards the ceiling.

When Sophia followed the lines up, she noticed something none of them had seen before: there was a door in the ceiling. It looked like it was intended to swing sideways, just like a normal door. What wasn’t normal was that there was yet another variation of the swirling air that meant they’d already found the way out.

They did have to solve a puzzle to open the door, but it was easy. The paperweight and door were linked; that was how Sophia found the door, after all. All they had to do was slide the paperweight into the slot in the door at the “bottom” of the rising air and the door shimmered and vanished.

They’d made it through the branch in a single day. Sophia was happy about that, and even happier that they were about to move on to areas where the fighting would be more interesting. She was tired of being done before it really got going.

“We have to be missing some cultural context,” Sophia noted as they made their way back to the inn where they’d left Leo. “I can guess that the divers were one zone, the glitchbirds were the second, and the trapped tower was the third, but what did they have to do with each other?”

“Do we care?” Dav asked practically. “Or, really, do you care? I’m pretty confident I don’t. The letter’s clearly related to the War of Two Mimirs the Prelate mentioned, but other than that I’m not sure any of it matters.”

They were still talking about it when they got to their rooms, where they did not find Leo.

He wasn’t there for dinner, either.

Nor breakfast the next morning.