Broken Lands

Sophia caught a glimpse of several actual doors leading out of the chamber along the spiral stairs as they flew past them, descending towards the base of the icy-looking pillar. She didn’t have much of a chance to look, but the wards were hard to miss, overt structures of mana designed to do something more than warn when someone stepped through them in the wrong direction. Sophia didn’t remember a ward like that on the entrance they used to reach the shaft, but she couldn’t discount it. They were moving faster then and she might not have noticed one that withdrew because Ivorha was authorized to bring guests.

The stairs dead-ended next to a door.

Sophia glanced up and finally got a better idea of the scale the shaft was created in as she turned to glance up the stairs. The only doorway she could see above her was less than a quarter of the way around the spiral and it was well over a normal story above them. They were on the basement level of a shaft that stretched up to the height of a skyscraper. The pillar that dominated the middle of the space had to be over fifty feet wide.

Ivorha tapped the door with his beak and it slid soundlessly to the side, followed by streams of magic that meant the ward on the door was disarmed. They were visible to the eye, even without magesight, which had to be deliberate. “Watch for wards like that; you don’t want to step on one and be wrapped up until I get you out. I don’t know how your brother got through them.”

Sophia shrugged and followed Ivorha into the space that took up most of the shaft they’d just flown around. “If they’re like the ward on the door, they’re looking for a token that grants authorization to bypass the ward. Those are pretty easy to bypass, usually. I’m sure Leo knows how.”

They were looking for something outside themselves and they had to know what that something was. There were ways to obscure what that was, but most ward enchanters didn’t bother. Either they didn’t know how or it was too difficult to modify the ward to handle the situation. In a lot of ways, Sophia agreed with them; it was difficult and most of the time it was far better to combine a less secure but far easier ward with some sort of secondary security. It wouldn’t stop the people who really knew what they were doing, but knowing your ward wasn’t perfect led to better habits. “It’s probably the right sort of ward to use if you’re just trying to keep foolish people away.”

“What?” Ivorha stopped. He sounded confused.

“It’s a compliment,” Dav reassured him. “You should hear what she says about theft prevention wards. Go on in, we’ll be right behind you.”

Sophia ignored the dig at her tendency to poke holes in the egos of anyone who got too proud of their wards. There weren’t many, even here on Arcatiz, who knew what they were doing with wards. The fact that a couple of shopkeepers placed bets with her that she couldn’t get through their wards and then got all huffy when she added herself to their wards’ authorized lists had nothing to do with it. She was pretty sure the shopkeepers just didn’t want to pay her the Suns they bet against her.

It did have the nice bonus that Xin’ri didn’t ask Sophia to go shopping with her anymore, at least. A smile flitted across Sophia’s face at the memory of Xin’ri’s exasperation. Sophia wasn’t entirely certain why Xin’ri was upset; they’d walked out of the shop with exactly what Xin’ri was looking for and the shopkeeper wasn’t even mad anymore after Sophia updated her ward system. It took a little longer than they planned to be out that day, that was all.

Sophia didn’t let the happy memory distract her from what she was doing. When Ivorha cleared the doorway, Sophia followed him in.

It should have been a huge empty chamber, and other than a few more extremely obvious wards near the doorway, it was … until you looked for magic. There was magic everywhere in the room. Most of it flowed in and around a twisted bundle of roots that wrapped around a central wooden pillar like extremely overanxious bark, but it leaked into the entire interior of the pillar, hung in the air like an aurora, and even arced from the central pillar to the outer wall.

No, from the cable to the conduit. It might be magic in a pillar, but that was definitely a transmission line carrying a lot of power in a protective conduit. Sophia’s guess was that the conduit was there more to protect the population than the tree, because it was more magic than she really wanted to get next to. A spell using that much power … well, it might not be able to melt a world but it could certainly move one.

And Leo stood unmoving in the center of the room, next to the wooden cable, with his hand touching the smooth wooden pillar between the roots.

No, it wasn’t Leo standing there. It was a wooden statue of Leo, made from the same pale, ice-white wood as the pillar and the roots. His clothing wasn’t wooden, which did not make her feel better.

“Leo?” Sophia called towards him. Leo didn’t answer, of course; that would have been too simple. On top of that, she was certain that someone would have tried shouting at him by now.

“Leo?” She called out, inside through the mindlink this time.

“Sophia?” Leo answered immediately. “What is it?”

“Are you all right? What do you need to … uh, fix things?” Sophia wasn’t certain what to ask, but he knew more about what he was doing than she did. At least, she hoped he did, because she was completely clueless right now.

“Everything’s fine, I’ll be home for dinner,” Leo promised as if she were checking on him without a real reason.

Sophia could admit that she’d done that a few times during the first few days after they got back from the Meteor Pillars Event, but this wasn’t the same thing at all. She sent him the visual of what he looked like, frozen into a wooden statue surrounded by mana leakage. “No, seriously. What are you doing?”

“I, er, that’s what I look like right now?” Leo sounded surprised, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t trying to deflect her.

“Yes,” Sophia confirmed. “Did you not know you turned yourself into wood?”

“I … well, there was a lot of magic and the tree said it could help and we were talking and … it really hasn’t been that long?” Leo tried to justify himself.

Sophia sighed. She couldn’t quite be mad at him for being stupid when she was so relieved that he was not badly hurt. “How long do you think you’ve been talking to the tree?”

“Ah, a few minutes? Fifteen, maybe? I should still have lots of time before dinner.” Leo sounded like he already knew that number had to be wrong.

Sophia grinned to herself as she told him just how wrong he was. “We were eating dinner when we found out you were here and had been here for at least an hour; they spent that long finding out who you were and coming to get us. Now, are you really okay or are you just pretending you don’t need help?”

Sophia could hear Inspector Ivorha talking about what they’d tried, and how everyone had to back off before they got more than about halfway to where Leo was. No one was willing to risk losing their Sphere for someone who had probably already lost his. They’d also tried magical solutions, but they were torn apart as they tried to cross the room.

Well, of course they were. There was enough magic eddying around the room to destroy any spell Sophia could cast; a ritual could probably survive, but Sophia didn’t know any rituals that would get Leo out. There were gaps, but they moved; with a little care, a person could get to him without much trouble but there was no way a spell would get there. The link to its caster would be broken, even if it was otherwise maneuvered through the turbulence well.

The only way Sophia knew to avoid that was to make a link that wasn’t spatial but was instead conceptual. That was far more difficult, though she’d achieved it a few times when her father taught her about the possibility. It wasn’t something she thought she could manage in an environment like this.

Dav answered Ivorha, telling him that they were already talking to Leo and that the boy was fine for now. Good; that meant she could ignore Ivorha and pay attention to what actually mattered: Leo’s situation.

Leo’s answer came slowly, as if it was something he didn’t really want to admit. “I think I’m okay. Well, I think I can be okay. But I’m not sure I can actually move.”

Sophia sighed. She suddenly had a lot of sympathy for Xavier; if this was what Leo was normally like, no wonder the boy jumped through an unstable portal. “How is not being able to move okay?”

“Well, Bunny wanted to talk to the World Tree - he calls it the Big Dungeon - and both Flame and Hail said they wanted to, too, so I figured I’d better arrange that. So when I went to see Reko this morning and he said Arvinn was sick and didn’t want to do anything so he was going to work on his magic I figured that was the perfect time to find out how to talk to the World Tree.” Leo rushed through the explanation as if talking quickly would make it make more sense.

Sophia guessed she followed him so far. Bunny, Flame, and Hail were the three dungeon cores he’d grown in the World Tree, and she could understand why Leo tried to help them. She’d need to check on Arvinn and Reko afterwards; something about that explanation didn’t quite work for her. She didn’t think Leo was lying, but it seemed likely he wasn’t told the whole story.

“When I got here, I found that nobody was supposed to go in to actually see the World Tree; all the doors were marked Staff Only. They had really simple wards, so I slipped past them when no one was looking and got to a huge room filled with magic and the … well, Bunny says it’s the core of the World Tree. It’s way too big to be a core, though, so I’m not so sure.” Leo sounded a little doubtful but didn’t stop. “It was pretty easy to get past the magic and get to the core; it’s always moving but it doesn’t really move all that fast. It’s just like doing one of Dad’s obstacle courses.”

Sophia glanced around the room doubtfully at that. While it was true that their father occasionally set up magical obstacle courses that were enough to challenge them and did use “invisible” magic as some of the obstacles, he never used anything close to the intensity of the magic she saw here. Getting around it would probably be far easier than the obstacles she remembered from home, but the consequences of failing would be far worse.

“I brought Bunny out to talk to the World Tree. That was fine, but I had to hold him against the tree or touch both of them for them to talk. I still had to move to avoid the mana spikes, so they kept being interrupted.” Leo grew quieter as he spoke, even though his words were in Sophia’s mind. By now, he was almost whispering. “So I figured, why not make myself tolerate the mana spikes instead? The wood handles it just fine. So I did, and uh, now I can’t move.”