Chapter 120 – Home
A dome of nothingness descends around us. Perhaps understandably, many of the Travelers begin to panic.
“Calm down!” I call, laying a hand on the shoulder of the nearest Traveler and giving them a reassuring squeeze. “Everyone, please!”
But my voice isn’t loud to begin with; beneath the raised voices of thirty confused and scared Travelers, I may as well be trying to stop a hurricane with an umbrella.
I nervously glance to where Rinviu is still unconscious and subdued by Noli’s magical vines. I can Check them, but I have no idea what state Lorata might be in. She could return at any moment. There’s no time to wait for everyone to calm down.
I activate an Emotional Radiance spell.
Calm. I focus on the emotion I want to cultivate in others, and magic spreads through the crowd. Shoulders slump, voices quiet. The spell affects me as much as it affects everyone else, and it isn’t until my mind quiets and my thoughts settle that I realize how much I’d needed it, too.
“Everyone,” I call again as the voices slowly peter out. Perhaps for the first time since entering this realm, anxiety is no longer discoloring my mind; I feel clear and sharp. Hans is watching me with wide, expectant eyes, and I offer him a reassuring smile. “I understand how disorienting this must be. I promise everything will be explained to you soon.” My gaze shifts to find Chidinma, who returns my look with a nod. All the other Travelers are watching me by now as well. Some still appear wary, but most seem strangely relieved; perhaps they were just waiting for someone to take charge.
“But in this moment, we need your cooperation,” I continue. “You all have been captured and imprisoned, and this may be your only chance at escape. If you choose to remain, we can’t guarantee you’ll have another chance at freedom. For everyone who wishes to leave, we need to move quickly.”
A message appears in my interface as I talk.
[Kanin: Thanks for that. Noli is making something for them all to hold onto. That should help move them through faster]
[Fyre: Good. Thank you.]
I gesture to the dome of black that’s settling around us. “Everyone needs to be connected as we pass through the portal. It is absolutely crucial that you do not let go of the provided rope—” I do a double-take as Noli enthusiastically holds up the coil of a glowing green vine. “Er, the provided vine—until we’re through the other side.”
Noli begins passing the vine around, and one by one, the Travelers take hold. They’re moving quickly, but every second presses at me. The Emotional Radiance spell prevents my anxiety from building, however, and I take advantage of the few seconds of reprieve to check my Contact interface.
The last message I sent to Blair still has no response:
[Fyre: Platitudes are not sufficient for this. If you are truly sorry, then it’s time for you to demonstrate it. It’s beyond time you did the right thing. No more sitting on the sidelines, refusing to commit to one side or the other. Help us free these people.]
I stand by those words. But I’m now beginning to realize I might have taken the wrong approach with Blair. I watch the Travelers as they follow my instructions, quickly distributing the rope and looping it around their hands for better security. It’s comforting to have an authority figure to turn to in times of uncertainty, isn’t it? Someone who seems more confident than you, regardless of what might be going on under the surface.
I send Blair another message.
[Fyre: I know you’re scared.]
I wait a moment, and when no reply comes, I continue.
[Fyre: It’s okay to be scared. This all feels so much bigger than you—too big for one person to change. And you don’t feel qualified to stand up to Lorata. Everyone else is so much more experienced than you, after all.]
Finally, a response.
[Blair: What do you know?]
I let out a sigh.
[Fyre: Enough. I Checked Rinviu’s age. But this isn’t about them. Kanin and I are leaving with the Travelers. Everything will change when we step outside the Sanctum, and this will be your opportunity to ensure that change is positive. We need your voice.]
I imagine her shaking her head.
[Blair: They won’t listen to me—I am still an outsider. Not experienced enough. I have no credibility. Especially when they learn of what Aquenno has done. In fact, it is likely Lorata will have me imprisoned.]
[Fyre: Then you better speak up before that happens. And if you fail, as you are trying to convince me will happen, join us in the Fortress. Our doors will always be open to you.]
Kanin hovers before me. He’s little more than a blob of shadows and broken glass after his encounter with Lorata, but it hardly seems to be slowing him down.
“I’m ready,” he tells me, using his translator. “And so are the Travelers. We need to leave now.”
“Of course,” I agree. He holds out the end of the rope, and I take it. “Lead the way.”
As I follow Kanin to the brink of reality, I send one last message Blair’s way.
[Fyre: The System labels you the God of Wards. I suspect that is no accident: you’re a protector, Blair, not a jailer. And you’re more capable than I think you realize. Fake your confidence if you must, but don’t self reject.]
If Blair sends me anything in response, I never see it, as at that moment Kanin gently tugs the vine forward, and we’re swallowed by the black.
That first night, Mirzayael didn’t sleep. She stayed on the throne, monitoring the Barrier spell, reading and rereading the list of names that the Monitor spell had populated. No new names appeared on the list, and Mura Tal and Teranu never returned. Fyre had said Shirasil had gotten rid of them, somehow, but she was not about to stake the fate of her city on the word of a god.
At the thought, she reached out to Fyre—or the place where Fyre’s mind should have been. Now there was nothing there. Just a void, a darkness that her mind couldn’t illuminate. The sensation made Mirzayael’s gut twist, and she tried not to think about all the other reasons their connection might be severed.
By morning the healers had finished patching Mirzayael up, leaving only a telltale scar from Mura Tal’s attack. She was glad it scarred, actually, and would wear the mark with pride. Not many could fight a champion and live to tell the tale. And it had been one of Lorata’s champions, no less.
“You’re still here?” Dizzi asked, jolting Mirzayael out of a daze.
She retracted the throne’s visor that allowed her to monitor the city’s spell network.
“Of course.” Mirzayael suppressed the instinct to yawn as Dizzi crossed the throne room. “Someone has to keep an eye on the Watchtower spells.”
The harpy shook her head. “Can’t imagine the watching is any good when you’re about to pass out.”
Mirzayael scowled. “Are you here to criticize your queen?”
“I’m here to take over so my queen can get some sleep.” She waggled her hands at Mirzayael. “Now go! Shoo! I’ve got it from here.”
Mirzayael held Dizzi’s gaze with a steady glare—one that the harpy appeared to be entirely impervious to. Honestly, she liked that about the girl. Not that Dizzi would ever have the satisfaction of knowing; Mirzayael was very well trained in controlling her facial expressions, and she had an image to uphold.
“Fine.” Mirzayael pushed herself from the throne, staggering slightly on her bad side. If Dizzi noticed, she didn’t remark on it, instead excitedly hopping up onto the throne to take Mirzayael’s place.
“If anything happens, send a guard to wake me immediately,” Mirzayael said.
Dizzi adjusted the head piece. “Mhm.”
“And don’t alter any of the Barrier’s parameters without my permission.”
“Sure, chief.”
“And if—”
“Mir.” Dizzi peaked out from beneath the crown’s interface to give Mirzayael a sympathetic smile. “It’s gunna be okay. Go get some rest.”
Mirzayael probably said something in response to that; it wouldn’t be dignified to take orders from one of her councilors. Yet, for the life of her, when she woke up ten hours later, Mirzayael couldn’t even remember how she’d managed to stumble into bed.
The next day was much the same. Mirzayael took up station at the throne as soon as she roused, only reluctantly handing the throne back over to Dizzi that night as weariness once more settled in her limbs.
By day three, Dizzi, Nek, and Torim held some sort of conspiratorial conclave wherein they decided the four of them would be splitting throne shifts—and Mirzayael was not given a vote in the matter. She didn’t like it, but their reasoning was annoyingly sound, and it gave her an opportunity to visit her guards on the wall.
The dome was even more impressive up close. The orange surface swirled with runes and spell circle designs, symbols rising and sinking like crests on a wave. It appeared as solid as glass, yet her hand could pass through it unhindered should she try to touch it.
“My Lord,” Salvia greeted as Mirzayael paced the city wall. She’d already done one complete lap and had been about to start another; Torim was on throne duty for the next five hours, and Mirzayael had half a mind to head back there now to relieve him. All this waiting was driving her mad.
“Captain,” Mirzayael replied. “Anything to report?”
“Yes, actually,” they said, surprising Mirzayael. She hadn’t actually expected anything to have changed in the last half hour. The harpy gestured outside the dome’s perimeter. “A scout just caught sight of an approaching ship.”
“A ship?” Mirzayael repeated sharply. “Which one?”
Salvia signalled for another guard, who quickly brought them a scroll. “The Westward Wind, according to the scheduled manifest,” Salvia reported. “A scholarly vessel from Valenia South.”
Mirzayael swore under her breath. A bunch of sight-seeing bookworms was not what she needed right at this moment. “Can we reschedule?”
Salvia grimaced. “We could send a messenger to speak with them.”
Mirzayael watched them. “But?”
“But we’ve already attempted to reach them with messenger wyverns and have received no response,” Salvia said. “I suspect our messages are being intercepted, and I would worry about the safety of any messengers we sent beyond the Barrier.”
Understandable. If a god or champion was involved in the disappearance of their wyverns, then sending people outside the city would be far too dangerous to consider.
But if a god or champion was interrupting their communications, the answer became: Why?
Mirzayael had not sent any letters asking for aid—who even was there to ask? The silence of the Heavens was bothering her, and this only made it feel all the more insidious. Why prevent them from sending visiting airships away? She thought the gods would want to stop anyone from helping the Fortress.
Something wasn’t adding up. Mirzayael removed a messenger spider from her bag and quickly sent it off to the throne room, then activated two more to search for Nek and Dizzi. The latter was probably asleep, given when her last shift ended. But the approaching airship made her uneasy, and she wanted everyone available who knew how to operate the Watchtower spells.
Nearly ten minutes later, as the approaching airship was finally approaching the Fortress’s barrier, one of Mirzayael’s spiders came scuttling back. Strangely, there was a blue rock haphazardly tied to it. Mirzayael picked up the gem.
“Hey, is this working?” Dizzi’s voice crackled from the stone.
Mirzayael very narrowly suppressed the instinct to chuck the possessed rock off the city wall. “What? Dizzi? What is this?”
“Hey! Alright! Sounds like it’s working afterall,” her voice continued. Mirzayael turned the stone over to find a tiny, complex spell network carved into the underside. “It’s a prototype, so I wasn’t sure if the sound would come through okay. I’ve been trying to figure out a way to improve on your messenger spiders for a while—faster communication, since we can’t all use telepathy, ha ha. But it turns out the answer was in some of the runes Kanin used in his Planar Linkage spell! I combined that with the base spell circle design used for translators in order to—”
“Dizzi,” Mirzayael interrupted. “Thank you for the talking rock.”
“Actually I’m thinking of calling them rocky talkies. Or maybe tele-stones. Or—”
“Dizzi,” Mirzayae interrupted again. “The name is unimportant. Where are you now?”
“Heading up to the throneroom,” she said. “So you can talk to Torim without the delay of messenger spiders.”
Good. In spite of Dizzi’s excitable nature—which Mirzayael considered her most prominent flaw—the girl had a sharp mind.
“The Westward Wind is about to pass through the barrier,” Mirzayael told her. “Tell Torim to keep an eye out for anything strange. Better yet, swap places with him. I want you working the throne.”
“Can do!” Dizzi’s voice briefly cut out in the middle of her words. “Oh, uh, by the way, I also have literally no idea how long the spell circles on these things will stay charged. So, tell the ship to hurry up a little maybe?”
Mirzayael snorted. She didn’t know why she expected any differently.
But telling the ship to speed up was unlikely to help things. It had slowed the moment it came face-to-face with the Barrier, and now it was gliding forward at an imperceptively slow rate, despite a handful of harpies on the inside of the dome beckoning them on.
As the airship’s bow finally breached the Barrier and began to inch forward, Mirzayael only grew more tense. This felt like a trap. What if the ship was marked with explosive spells? What if there wasn’t actually anyone on board, and this was merely a diversion. She glanced back at the thought, as if she might catch sight of a god sneaking into the far side of the city. A ridiculous notion, of course, but she couldn’t shake the paranoia. In fact, paranoia often served her very well.
“Getting some new names,” Dizzi reported through her talking rock. “I recognize some—a couple professors who visited before.”
At least the ship contained who they expected it to, but Mirzayael still didn’t allow herself to relax. She wanted to be interfaced with the throne so she didn’t have to hear all this secondhand, though Dizzi was the best person to be there, given Fyre wasn’t currently an option.
Fyre.
A wave of cold passed through Mirzayael’s limbs. Where was she? She’d been gone for days by now. Surely there was a good reason for that. Surely she was alright.
In the back of her mind, though, she’d been increasingly considering the idea of getting Dizzi to activate that Planar Linkage spell a second time so she could go after Fyre and ensure she was okay herself. Shirasil had advised directly against such a course of action, of course, but that only made her want to do it more.
Mirzayael bit her tongue, bringing her mind back to the present. She had more immediate problems to be focusing on. And while she couldn’t access all the information from the throne while out here on the wall, she at least had the next best thing.
Mirayael prodded the Dungeon Core’s mind. The fact that her connection to the Core still persisted gave her hope that Fyre was still alive, at least.
“Core. What can you tell me about the people on that ship?”
The Core’s mind turned her way with a curious, if not confused, look. People? What people? Ship? It didn’t understand these things.
Mirzayael frowned. How in the world was Fyre able to communicate with this thing? She said it was less about words and more about concepts, right?
Mirzayael tried to envision what she wanted. “Can you give me access to the spell systems from here?”
This much the Core seemed to understand. It showed her a tangled spiderweb of magic, pressing the network into her mind before she could object. It was complicated—far, far too complicated for her to understand even if she knew all the runes and spell designs. Mirzayael winced as the information cascaded through her mind, summoning a sudden and intense headache.
“Enough! Enough,” she thought, trying to pull back.
The Dungeon Core, confused, stopped sharing its spell systems. Wasn’t that what she wanted?
It was, actually, but she didn’t have the mind to make sense of it. “Can you do what I tell you instead?” she asked. “Activate a spell circle remotely?”
The Dungeon Core waffled at this suggestion. It could. But it wasn’t feeling very appreciated at the moment. And it was so hungry! No one had fed it in ages.
Mirzayael glanced at the rock Dizzi was using to communicate; if she built one, she could build more. “Sure. You can have this when I’m done with it.”
The Dungeon Core immediately perked up. A rock? A magic rock! Yay! Yes it could do any spell. Any spell she wanted!
Mirzayael smiled wryly to herself. She wondered if Fyreneth had made similar deals with the remnant, once upon a time. It wasn’t the hardest entity to barter with.
“Can’t check the contents of the ship from here,” Dizzi’s voice said from the rock. “Someone should check the cargo to make sure everything looks right. As for the people, they’re about what we expected. The captain, the crew, and a group of visitors; about half are repeat visitors. Some new names, but none that match any of the champions or gods Fyre had on her list.”
That was a relief. But it just left her more confused than before. She didn’t for a moment believe the gods simply let a ship through out of the goodness of their hearts. What was she missing?
Salvia met with the captain as the guests disembarked and the crew began to unload a few small crates of cargo. The city guards examined these as they came off the ship. So far, nothing suspicious, which was plenty suspicious for Mirzayael.
The scholars were chatting excitedly to each other, more than one gesturing up toward the dome. They probably thought it was a new addition to the city’s atmospheric pressure spells, or something. Typical. Scholars were always so—
One of them locked eyes with Mirzayael. An orc, average build, male. He wasn’t carrying a notebook, like the other scholars. In fact, it looked a whole lot like he was drawing a knife.
“That one,” she thought, drawing the Dungeon Core’s attention to the man. Her fingers twitched, eager for a fight. But without Fyre there to Check these people, she had no idea what hidden powers they might possess. Instead, she slowly backed away from the docks.
The Dungeon Core picked out the individual Mirzayael had scouted. What now? It could not eat the person. It was not allowed to eat people, and also, they tasted bad.
Mirzayael tabled several questions for later. “Can you access the Weapons system?”
Oh, of course! It could access any system.
“Dizzi,” Mirzaayel said to the rock, still maintaining eye contact with the orc as he made straight for her. He had a second knife out, now, and wasn’t even trying to hide it. That level of confidence could only come from being very powerful or very stupid. Perhaps both.
Mirzayael continued to back up. “I have an individual I’d like for you to add to the city’s Filter.”
“You do? Which one? Do you know their name? That’s all I’ve got from where I’m sitting.”
“Give me one moment.”
Mirzayael decided they were a sufficient distance away from the guards and scholars still milling about the dock. The orc was only about ten meters away by this point, and he was grinning. She returned her attention to the Dungeon Core. “Okay. Now.”
She had never seen the weapons system in action—Fyre had been too worried about collateral damage. Out on the city wall, however, pedestrians were few and far between.
A bolt of orange lightning cracked from the nearest center of the dome. It traced a jagged path through the air, but it struck its target with uncanny accuracy. The orc didn’t even have time to react.
With a flash of light and a burst of hot air, the man was blasted from the wall—along with a small chunk of the wall itself, to be fair, so perhaps Fyre’s concerns of collateral damage had been founded. Mirzayael caught the briefest glimpse of the orc ragdolling through the air and out of sight.
“Oh!” Dizzi said. “One of the new names just disappeared. Did someone leave the dome?”
“Yes,” Mirzayael said. “Please add the name of that individual to the Filter.”
“Oh, uh, okay.” There was a pause. “Um, I’m getting some indication that the weapon’s system was just fired?”
Finally, Mirzayael let herself grin. “Good job, Core.” She tossed the talking stone from her hand, and the Core snatched it out of the air before it could fall back into her palm, swallowing it in one gulp. Who needed the throne when she had the Dungeon Core in her corner, anyway?
There were a lot of raised voices coming from The Westward Wind and its passengers, so Mirzayael side-stepped the smoking crater in the wall to rejoin their guests and smooth the incident over. She typically didn’t like socializing, but at the moment she was in an unusually good mood.
Now she knew what the Heavens were up to. Now their actions made sense. They thought they could sneak their way in by hiding among legitimate visitors, did they?
That was just fine by her. The more, the merrier.