Millennial Mage

Tala felt a bit of sadness as she took Kit from the intricate, dedicated alcove that the sanctum had rested in for the last weeks.

She had learned all she could in her time in the city of Croi, though she’d basically never gone out into the city itself. Her time had been dominated by tasks and training within the hold, within the world-fragment.

There were so many things that felt subtly different within this place, and she’d gotten the impression that most higher-level magics functioned better within a world-fragment.

Magic was both easier and harder. It was more work for her will-power to enact the magics, but it seemed to linger longer, more stable after being formed.

Not that I used much magic within the world-fragment. It did seem like Kit was a bit more stable, but that was likely due to the sanctum being located off the hold.

One of the Eskau she had worked with most, De-arg, had occasionally made comments that implied his power was uniquely suited to the world-fragment. Though, she’d not really seen him use his power.

He was really, really fast and accurate, though. His training had been incredibly fruitful in improving her grounding and stability. I do wonder what concept he wields. Maybe accuracy?

-I don’t think that’s a concept that can be wielded.-

It’s no more esoteric than ‘corrosion.’

-Fair point.-

Terry had stayed within her sanctum for the duration of the stay in Croi. So, for his sake if nothing else, she was glad to be heading back to Platoiri.

And back to the acquisition of protian weapons. They had intel on a prime target for the eighth one and were seeking leads on the ninth and final weapon after that.

Then, Be-thric leaves with or without me.

-It’ll be without if we don’t do something about it.-

Yeah. She still had ideas, and she was running them down as best as she was able.

As she moved towards the exit of the hold, she looked down at her white, scalemail armor. She was quite used to it by this point, and it moved with her excellently.

The scales, themselves, were less potent projectiles than her siege orbs, but that was to be expected. They were intended for lesser targets. Even so, their blade-like nature gave them superior penetration to the tungsten orbs she had been using.

And the siege orbs are for things that could kill me with ease.

-For now.-

True. Things that could kill me with ease, for now. Tala found herself grinning. Even without a solid plan, she could almost taste her freedom, and she felt like every improvement to herself moved her that much closer.

-Soon.-

Kit and Flow sat as wonderful counterbalances to one another on her belt, while most of her bloodstar tools rested in the sheath on the back of the belt.

Only four bloodstars were out as she strode through the heart of the House of Blood’s power.

Three circled her head, and one rested near the base of her skull, just far enough out to not interfere with her braid. Together, the four gave her and Alat three-hundred-and-sixty degree perspectives of the world at all times.

Always wary.

-For we are in the belly of the beast.-

And it thinks we are of its flesh.

-That…is apt. Gross, but apt.-

She was pulled from her inner conversation as she reached the entry hall.

Gallof and Thron were already waiting near the open entrance to the hold, and Tala took a moment to greet them before glancing out into the city outside.

Directly across from the entrance to this hold were the gates to the City Lord’s manor. City Lady?

-CL? That would work either way.-

I think City Lord is better.

-Longer to say than CL.-

Yeah, but I can see it being confusing, and that’s beside the point. I figured we’d meet her on this trip.

Alat sent over the impression of a shrug. -I suppose we didn’t need to. We still have two days to get back to Platoiri before the collar triggers, after all.

-I think it’s tomorrow at sunset, actually?-

Oh… She did some quick calculations. You’re right. That’s less ideal.

They were going to leave nearly a week earlier, in order to allow plenty of time for a less hurried return trip, but Meallain had been insistent on Tala staying longer, even going so far as to procure the services of a specialized dimensional mage for a quicker return at her own expense.

The process was apparently painful, and even more expensive than ballistic travel, but it had quite a few other benefits.

The quickways in the underbelly of Croi were modeled on the same concept, so Tala was quite curious to see how it worked.

Meallain, Reidh, and De-arg had bid her goodbye the evening before, each giving her parting advice.

Reidh had implored her to focus on drawing strength from within herself, rather than from external sources or points of leverage.

Meallain had reminded her that the appearance of strength was often more potent than true, but unknown, strength. The elf also emphasized that the council had reasons for its decisions and that they should be honored.

De-arg had told her to be as stalwart as the sand.

That guy has so much wisdom he’s come back around to being obtuse, again.

-Sand does endure. Sure, it shifts, but it is always sand. It gets everywhere, never-ending.-

Huh. I suppose I can see that. Do you suppose that’s what he meant?

-I have literally no idea.-

Tala grinned, shaking her head.

“Eskau Tali?” Thron came to stand beside her. “Is everything alright?”

“Yes, just trying to parse what Eskau De-arg told me last night.”

Thron grunted. “I’ve never met the man, but I hear his advice is…odd.”

“That is a fair assessment.”

Shortly thereafter, Be-thric arrived with the former-candidate Eskau from the House of the Dark Abyss.

Oh, right. I forgot about him.

-What? How could you have forgotten? You were literally in the room when they decided he would come with us back to Platoiri.-

I didn’t say I didn’t know. I had to have known in order to have forgotten.

-Huh. I’ve never really thought of it that way. Okay.-

Tala grinned to herself as she greeted the boy, “It was Ganog, right?”

The young dragonling jerked slightly, clearly startled to be addressed. “Oh, um. Yes. Eskau Tali?”

“That’s right.”

He scratched the steel-gray scales on the side of his neck. “I appreciate the opportunity to leave with you all.”

The others greeted the boy, and they departed as a group.

There was no fanfare, no farewells. They’d each said goodbye to everyone they wished to say such to.

It was a cool, if not cold, day, but it was a stark contrast to the weather within the hold. Apparently, the world-fragment had been from closer to the equator than Croi was.

Huh, I didn’t really focus on the temperature when we arrived.

-You treated it like entering a building, and after you learned of world-fragments, that dominated your mind. Plus, you know, the weather doesn’t really bother you.-

That was true enough. Most of the arcanes around them were of a rank to be unaffected by the weather, but they did seem to be wearing a bit thicker clothing than usual.

Tala, Thron, Gallof, Ganog, and Be-thric didn’t stay on the streets near the city center for long. They had too far to go. Instead, they descended back to the quickway nexus nearest the hold.

With a short jaunt through the quickways, they arrived at the northeastern part of the city, near the edge. They came back up the well-traveled stairs into bustling streets.

The pedestrians made way for them, given that they all wore House of Blood colors, and Tala and Be-thric were obvious by their demarcations of office.

There weren’t many vehicles, either magical or beast-drawn, but those that there were, made way too.

It was a short walk to a middling sized tower, Tala only really noticed its height because it was the tallest thing in any direction towards the near edge of the city, like a lighthouse on a prominence.

I bet that factors into its functionality.

Their group made their way inside, where a servant greeted them and led the way up to the top.

At the top of the tower was a large chamber. Centered within the space, a truly massive ring of metal, the body of which was more than ten feet thick all the way around. The massive magical construction was set in what looked like nothing so much as a gyroscope.

A strange arcane, the likes of which Tala had never seen before, was scurrying around, quite literally dumping power from himself and a bundle of six founts that he carried with him. The magic was pouring very specifically into various parts of the contraption at his direction.

“Ahh! The House of Blood travelers, good, good. You are right on time, early, as you should be.”

Gallof called back up. “Where do you need us?”

“You are going to Platoiri, correct? If not, we might have a problem…” He muttered the last.

“Yes, yes we are going to Platoiri.”

“Wonderful! Your payment was received, and we are almost ready. Go up those stairs, the walkway should extend shortly.”

Tala, Thron, Gallof, Ganog, and Be-thric walked up a set of sturdy metal stairs off to one side, and paused on a wide platform, level with the small, six-foot opening in the center of the massive ring.

The power in the room positively thrummed.

Ganog, for his part, stuck to the center of the platform, clearly a bit overwhelmed by the level of power around them.

It was so thick and complex that Tala felt utterly lost when she attempted to parse it.

The little arcane resembled a three-foot, bald, old man, with huge tufts of white hair on either side of his head. Are those coming out of his ears?

-I think from behind them?-

It seemed to be both when she looked more closely.

He paused near them, examining them before muttering to himself as he continued his work. “Good, all Mature at least. Children can’t survive more than a couple dozen miles. Nothing fragile, of mundane make. Only a few founts, but enough that I’ll have to submit the path as compromised for the next few months.”

Tala frowned, not truly understanding what he meant, but she supposed it wasn’t meant for her, so that was fine.

He paused however, staring at Kit. “You have anyone in that dimensional storage, Eskau of Blood?”

Tala frowned, glancing down. “Oh! Yes, I have a pet Terror bird. There is also some livestock within the storage.”

“The livestock will be fine, even if they are magically imbued. That’s fairly standard for personal holds or extensive dimensional storages. The terror bird sounds interesting, though.” The arcane scratched his chin. “Mundane or arcanous?”

“Arcanous.”

Be-thric cocked his head to the side, then nodded. Tala heard him mutter. “Right, she said that he can teleport a bit.”

The small man twirled one of his tufts of white hair, muttering, “Animalist, not mundane…” He nodded, looking back to her. “What type of power?”

“Dimensional, I believe.”

“Really? That’s fascinating. I wish we had time for me to examine him. Unfortunately, this isn’t relevant. Unless you have a lot of founts that I can’t detect, or a few gated humans in there, there isn’t cause for concern.”

“Oh. Well, thank you, then.” She wanted to ask ‘Why?’ but the arcane was clearly busy and not interested in talking further.

And that settled that.

Tala returned her gaze to their surroundings.

The air was positively filled with dimensional magic.

She leaned over towards Thron. “Am I right in assuming that this utilizes dimensional compression, just like the quickways but to a much greater degree?”

The dwarf nodded. “Yes. The device makes a straight-line compression. It’s murder to walk through, literally if it’s too much for your rank, but it’s fast.”

Gallof huffed. “Ludicrously expensive. The practitioners are quite wealthy, even with their services only used a few times a year. Even so, there’s no magical resonance via this method, and it seems we need to be extra careful in that regard. That last monster…”

Tala shuddered and nodded, even as the hue-folk man shook his head. Yeah, I don’t want to fight another reality drake, or whatever that was. I may have improved during my time here, but that would still be beyond me.

-Well, you do have the siege orbs.-

She paused, then grinned. That’s true. I could coat the world in explosive ice.

After another moment’s consideration she nodded. You’re right. I could take one. It would be a pain to rebuild my stock after, though, so avoiding the possibility is preferable.

A couple of minutes later, all was ready.

Ganog was shifting from foot to foot, seemingly trying to make himself smaller.

This kid was a candidate Eskau?

-Maybe a newer one? Clearly he wasn’t that good at it, given how things shook out.-

That’s fair.

A metal walkway grew out towards the opening, and the magics around them came to a crescendo.

Light coming through the ring intensified and the large room became uncomfortably warm, the temperature continuing to climb.

“Have a nice trip!” The little arcane waved, even as his entire body seemed to be straining, magic being wrung from him like water from a rag.

They didn’t delay.

Tala went first, as was her duty.

As she stepped through the opening, it felt like trying to step through a brick wall that wasn’t overly well mortared.

She pushed with all her strength, and she felt the metal beneath her back foot tremble slightly as she slid through the thick air.

The experience was awful.

She closed her eyes and tried to suppress her hearing to bear through the overstimulation of her senses.

It felt like she was being compressed and stretched in one. Hey! It’s sort of like my dimensional anchor.

That was only true in the sense that a needle prick was sort of like a dagger to the heart.

She kind of missed that thing. It had been somewhat useful a time or two. I wonder what happened to it?

-Be-thric likely disposed of it, or sold it, or took it off of you and left it behind?-

Yeah…it’s not like we can ask him. It was obviously magical and obviously not bound to me, because of the inscriptions on it. I could understand him not wanting to risk it. She was distracting herself from the slow as molasses progress.

Finally, she pushed all the way through, her leading foot coming down on springy soil.

Her progress was still slow, but now she was pulling herself out.

At long last, she felt like she won through.

Her eyes snapped open, and she stepped to the side, so as to not be in the way of those following her.

Before her, the familiar skyline of Platoiri dominated the near view.

Behind her, she could see an oddly hard-to-perceive cylinder of dimensional power stretching off towards the horizon.

She was panting, drawing in air like she’d been underwater for a long while.

That was uniquely awful.

-We traveled a really long way, though.-

Yeah, I suppose… She felt something and glanced down, remembering what Thron had told her. Rust!

She slapped her hand onto Kit and dumped power into the pouch.

The short trip had highly strained Kit, even though she’d topped off its power as they were approaching the tower, it was almost empty when she began to refill it.

Now that she focused on it, all of her items felt…worn, like they had been dragged across some sort of magical sandpaper. That’s an awful metaphor.

She looked closer, the world-fragment and her studies into the Doman-Imithe making her think of the integrity of reality a bit more than usual.

With a pulse of power, she transformed Flow into voidform so that she could see the fabric of reality more clearly with her voidsight, and what she saw made her eyes widen.

There was a single, sizable gouge in the surface of reality beside a few much smaller ones, leading off into the distance, from the way that she’d come. That was the only way she could describe what she was seeing.

Be-thric began to appear, his foot first, then coming together just as she must have.

As he arrived, Tala saw four little scratches appear within the skin of the world near the gouges that she suspected came from her own gate and the founts she’d stolen from the guild-hold. The four founts he carries?

It was no wonder this wasn’t a common form of travel. And I stress it more than a handful of founts.

It was a sobering thought.

She let the voidform drop as Be-thric stepped to the side, fully reformed and grimacing. “That is highly unpleasant.”

“Well, we shouldn’t use that method very often then.” She smiled slightly, leaning on how Tali would have responded.

“True enough. In either case, we can’t as it is highly straining on…well everything. It is ill-advised to use such methods more than once a year or so. Though, emergencies do happen.”

In less than five minutes, the other three had come through, and the column of power had broken apart.

Tala cocked her head, considering. “What would happen if it deactivated while someone was inside it?”

Thron huffed. “Eskau Tali, it would spread them across all the intervening space, because that is where they would be without the magic holding the working together.”

“Ahh, yes. That does…make sense.”

Ganog seemed to somehow pale as he heard that, and he swallowed visibly.

I guess he didn’t know it was that dangerous?

Without further delay or discussion, they made their way into and through Platoiri without incident, coming to the district of doors barely before noon.

To their surprise, a messenger from the City Lord was waiting outside the hold’s main entrance.

Gallof scurried forward. “My apologies, messenger. One such as you should not have been made to wait outside of the hold. I swear that those responsible will be—”

The messenger held up his hand, silencing Gallof. “There is no need, Adjunct. I am right where I wished to be.”

He bowed and presented a slip of paper to Tala.

Tala took it with a muttered thank you.

The note on the page was simple.

The City Lord commanded her attendance of his person that afternoon, or if she could not be pulled away from the duties of her House, the following day could be acceptable.

The messenger did not wait for her reply, and he was already gone by the time Tala looked up.

Be-thric gave her an inquiring look. “What do you wish, my Eskau?”

She sighed. “I will go now. It is almost noon, and I don’t wish to be late.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. We have much to do in the next few days, and a half-day’s duty is lighter than a full one.”

He nodded appreciatively to that.

She turned to Thron. “Do you need me to place my sanctum before I depart?”

The dwarf smiled and gave a bow. “That would make my tasks easier; yes, Eskau Tali.”

That determined, they entered the hold, and Tala placed Kit’s entrance in a garden quite near the hold’s main gate.

Gallof and Be-thric quickly disappeared with Ganog into another part of the hold.

Thron thanked her and entered Kit.

Tala, for her part, stopped for a long moment, just feeling the hold around her.

Her budding knowledge of Doman-Imithe, alongside spending so long within the world-fragment, caused the fragility of reality in the hold to stand out starkly.

Now that she was looking for it, she could feel that Zeme lay somewhere between the two, closer to the world-fragment than the hold in solidity.

Why didn’t Kit feel this weak?

-It was likely because it was attached to the world-fragment, pulling stability from that anchor.-

She bit the side of her lip in thought. Maybe…

-Are you intending to start a new habit?-

Hmm?

-Biting your lip.-

She stopped. I’ve done that before. It’s not new.

-Yes, but you seem to be doing it more, recently.-

Huh. Might be so. She shook her head and set off.

Stepping out of the House of Blood’s hold and back into Zeme let her feel the solidifying of reality yet again. It wasn’t as precise as using her voidsight, but she was growing in her ability to sense what that form of vision showed.

It’s exactly like the books say. She’d not had time to review all the advanced texts she’d copied into her personal portion of the Archive, via Alat’s incredible perception and ability to grab the pages nearly instantly.

What she had gleaned made it clear that the feel of reality was the easiest means of determining where one was in the worlds.

The world-fragment felt like a sheet of steel.

Zeme was wood. In the most stable places, it was a hardwood that could almost be mistaken for metal; in the weakest, it was softwood, easily marred.

Holds were generally as paper, mere shavings of reality, shaped by cunning hands.

And the Doman-Imithe is a tight net: cords of flexible strength riddled with holes.

She shuddered.

Even her limited understanding of reality made the very idea…disconcerting. Not that I’ll get a chance to explore it.

She was waved through the City Lord’s gates and followed the same path up to his tower that she’d used previously.

Nothing seemed to have changed in her time away.

He even seemed to be wearing the same clothing, though she couldn’t actually remember him wearing anything else, so it was possibly magical clothing. Or he has multiple, identical sets.

“Eskau Tali. So, you decided an afternoon in my company is better than a full day?”

“When I have many demands on my time, City Lord? Yes, reducing my tasks is a boon.”

He huffed a laugh. “Still confrontational with your betters?”

Tala didn’t like the way the conversation was starting out, so she tried to change tack, “Are there any assassins you wish brought low? The bat-gargoyle, perhaps?”

“You mean Bruce?”

Tala hesitated, uncertain if he was joking. “You named your gargoyle?”

“Of course not, don’t be silly, child. The sculptor tried to name it ‘Fear,’ but that was ridiculous, and so I decreed that another name be chosen.”

“So…Bruce.”

“Would you have preferred man-bat?”

“I suppose not.” Why are we talking about this?

Before she could rethink her conversational choices, he reached to take a drink from a cup that wasn’t there.

With a barely contained sigh, Tala went to get his food and tea. It was going to be a long afternoon.

The time passed as she would have expected.

She attended the City Lord, and he largely ignored her.

Finally, when her service was nearly at an end, he turned to face her. “So, Eskau Tali. Your very being is resonating with a desire to ask something. It is getting…distracting.”

“My apologies, City Lord.”

He waved that off. “Don’t apologize. Ask.”

She swallowed. She had, in fact, been trying to find a way of bringing up her question. Well, this is as good a time as any. “My House is going to send m…Pillar Be-thric off on a dangerous venture without me.”

“That is not a question.”

She swallowed, straightening her spine and hardening her resolve. “Will you remove my collar when he is sent, so that I might follow him?”

The City Lord leaned forward, steepling his fingers. “Against the wishes of your own House?”

“Yes, City Lord.”

He tilted his head to the side. “Fascinating. Tell me why.”

Here goes nothing.