Chapter 28. Agency
He'd healed the last of the injured about twenty minutes ago and confirmed there were no more Corrupted. The mine compound had settled into an exhausted quiet. People moved around him with careful steps, giving him a wide berth that was part respect, part fear, and part simple uncertainty about what to do with a mage who'd killed twenty-five corrupted individuals in the span of maybe ten minutes.
He ignored them.
His attention was turned inward, gathering mana from his core in quantities that would have made most mages pass out from the strain. The spell he was about to cast wasn't particularly complex, but it required range. A lot of range. And range meant power, which meant mana, which meant this was going to be slightly unpleasant for about thirty seconds.
[Advanced Analyze].
The mana erupted from him in a perfect sphere.
It started small, maybe the size of a fist, a translucent white bubble that shimmered faintly in the afternoon light. Then it expanded. Fast. The sphere grew outward in all directions like water filling a container, passing through walls and people and stone as if none of it existed.
Because to the spell, none of it did. [Advanced Analyze] didn't care about physical matter. It cared about magical phenomena, about the fabric of reality itself, and the places where that fabric had been torn or twisted or corrupted.
The bubble swelled to encompass the courtyard. The barracks. The mine entrance. The administrative buildings. It kept going, spreading out across the compound.
Sael could feel it all. Every inch of space the spell touched fed information back to him in a constant stream that his mind parsed automatically, sorting through the noise for what he was looking for.
Normal space felt like... well, normal space. Neutral and stable. The magical equivalent of white noise. But tears in reality had a signature. They felt wrong, like a discordant note in an otherwise harmonious piece of music.
The bubble reached the mining tunnels and poured into them, filling every shaft and chamber and cramped passage with that translucent white light. Above ground, people were starting to notice.
"What in the—"
"Is that him? Is he doing that?"
"What kind of spell is that? I've never seen anything that big."
"Should we be worried? That feels like we should be worried."
The spell kept expanding.
It passed beyond the mine compound entirely, spreading out across the rocky terrain surrounding the operation. A quarter mile. Half a mile. The bubble was enormous now, a dome of white light that covered everything for what had to be close to a full mile in radius, and all the information flooding back to Sael.
Most of it was useless. Rock. Air. Dirt. The faint magical signatures of enchanted equipment scattered throughout the compound. The lingering traces of the corrupted mages he'd killed, their tainted mana slowly dissipating now that the source was gone.
And then—
There.
Deep underground, maybe three hundred feet below the surface, in one of the older mining tunnels. A wrongness that made his teeth ache even through the spell's sensory translation. A tear in reality, maybe six feet tall and four feet wide, pulsing with that familiar sickly energy.
Found it.
Sael opened his eyes and released the spell. The bubble collapsed inward instantly, all that mana rushing back into him in a way that felt like being punched in the sternum by a particularly aggressive boulder. It was manageable though.
Around him, people were staring.
"Apologies for the disturbance," Sael said to no one in particular. "I needed to locate something."
He started walking toward the mine entrance.
Captain Dernwell appeared at his side within seconds, slightly out of breath as if he'd jogged over. "Sir? What was that spell? And did you... did you find what you were looking for?"
"Yes."
"And what were you looking for, if I may ask?"
"The source of the Corruption."
The captain's expression went through several complicated transitions before settling on something resembling dread. "You found it? You can close it?"
"That's the intention."
They reached the mine entrance. Sael didn't slow down. The captain followed, and after a moment's hesitation, so did several of the soldiers who'd been standing guard. Sael didn't tell them not to. If they wanted to follow him into the depths to watch him seal a tear in reality, that was their choice.
The tunnel system was extensive. Sael navigated it with certainty as he'd already mapped every inch through magical means, turning left where the tunnel branched, continuing straight where another passage split off, descending deeper with each intersection.
They passed the chamber where he'd killed the three mages. The bodies were gone—moved by the soldiers during their sweep—but the bloodstains remained, dark patches on ancient stone that no one had bothered to clean yet.
The tunnel narrowed past that point. The ceiling dropped lower. The walls showed signs of older excavation work.
Sael had to duck to avoid hitting his head on a support beam. The captain and the soldiers following him muttered complaints about the tight space, but no one turned back.
The wrongness grew stronger as they descended. Not Corruption, not exactly, but the presence of something that shouldn't be here. A hole in the world. The air itself felt heavier, charged with energy that made the hair on Sael's arms stand up.
Finally, the tunnel opened into a small natural cavern.
And there it was.
The tear hung in the air about three feet off the ground, suspended in space like someone had taken a knife to reality and simply cut. The edges rippled faintly, distorting the air around them in ways that hurt to look at directly. Through the opening, Sael could see... elsewhere.
A sky, if you could call it that. Purple, lightless, stretching away into infinite distance. There was no sun or clouds. Just that sickly purple expanse dotted with many stars. They didn't twinkle the way normal stars did. They pulsed, each one beating with its own rhythm like a diseased heart.
This was Corruption's domain. The place it came from. The space between spaces where it lived and grew and waited for opportunities exactly like this one.
Energy seeped through the tear in a slow, steady flow. Not a flood—if it had been a flood, the entire mine would have been consumed months ago—but a constant trickle of tainted mana that spilled out into the world and infected everything it touched.
Behind him, someone made a sound that might have been a prayer.
"Stone Father preserve us," Captain Dernwell whispered. "What is that?"
"A tear in reality," Sael said, stepping closer to examine it. "A wound in the fabric of our world that connects to... somewhere else."
"The Corruption came from there?"
"Yes."
Sael studied the tear carefully, noting the way the edges pulsed, the pattern of the energy flow, the stability of the breach. This wasn't a fresh wound. It had been here for a while. Years, definitely. Long enough to establish itself, to settle into a stable configuration that would persist until someone deliberately closed it.
His theory formed as he looked at it.
This had started as an accident. A random occurrence, the kind of extremely unlikely event that happened sometimes when you had an entire universe of magical energy pressing against the boundaries of reality. Then a weakness in the fabric, a momentary thinning, and then—crack. A tear. Small at first, barely noticeable, leaking just enough Corruption to affect someone who spent a lot of time near it.
Someone like a researcher. A professor, perhaps, conducting experiments in the old mining tunnels where no one would disturb him.
Aldric Eryndor had found this. Or it had found him. Either way, he'd been exposed to the Corruption long enough for it to take root, to twist his mind and finally make him see opportunity instead of danger.
And then he'd deliberately shown it to others. Carth, back at Orlys. Moss and his researchers. All of them exposed, infected and becoming vectors for further spread.
This was where it had all started. A random tear in a forgotten corner of an old mine, and one corrupted professor who'd seen it as a resource instead of a catastrophe.
Sael reached out toward the tear, not quite touching it, feeling the way the energy moved.
"Can you close it?" the captain asked.
"Yes," Sael said. "Though it won't be pleasant."
He stepped back, considering the best approach. Behind him, the soldiers watched in silence, their faces lit by the purple glow seeping from the tear.
Time to get to work.