Kanin Fyre: Chapter 37 - Now or Never

We hope we’re not going to regret this.

“You’re lucky I was on this side when you called,” Shirasil’s voice echoes from the black. We’re able to pinpoint his location from that unsettling draw we feel toward the gods and remnants—it’s even stronger when our minds are merged like this—but we still can’t see anything. “But you’ll need to move quickly. Lorata herself might respond. We’ll know for sure in the next few minutes.”

“WHAT’S HAPPENING?” Ollie asks. “WHY CAN’T I SEE?”

“It’s okay,” we hear Dizzi tell him. “Just stay put.”

We’re more worried about Zeyaelid and Mura Tal. But neither have said anything, and as we sweep some glass in the direction where they’d just been, the only resistance we meet is a light breeze swirling through the square.

Noli finds a piece of our glass and squeezes it. We reach out to her and squeeze back. She stays close to our side, waiting in the silent dark.

“Shirasil?” Fyre calls. “What is the meaning of this?”

“Oh no, please, no need to thank me,” Shirasil says in a sarcastic, exaggerated tone. “You’re quite welcome. In fact, it was no trouble at all! I’m delighted that you reached out.”

“Reached out?” Fyre repeats.

[Fyre: Did you have something to do with this?]

Already starting to regret it.

[K̶a̵n̷i̶n̸: sorry]

“What’s the matter?” Shirasil asks. “Cat got your tongue? I must say, it’s fascinating to see you this way. I’d love to pick your brain if we had more time. But why are you all still just standing there? Hurry up!”

“We can’t see,” we say, the sounds coming particularly garbled out our translator. We’re not sure if signing would work any better.

“Oh!” Shirasil cries. “My apologies. I forget how dependent you all are on your sense of sight. Completely understandable for Noli, I mean, no disrespect intended. But honestly the rest of you should explore your senses some more.”

Abruptly, the light returns. Even though it’s little more than moonlight and a flame levitating above Fyre’s outstretched hand, it feels jarringly bright after the previous darkness. Those with eyes (that is, everyone but us and Shirasil) squint, blinking around the square.

Shirasil is perched on top of a broken wall in his godly form, eyes and hair wisping with black smoke, donning robes that seem to be made of shadow, swirling with opalescent silver details. Zeyaelid and Mura Tal are nowhere to be seen.

Noli lets out a small gasp when she catches sight of Shirasil.

“WHO ARE YOU?” Ollie asks.

Shirasil rests his cheek on his fist with a faint smile. “A family friend. I’m surprised Fyre hasn’t told you about me.”

Ollie narrows his eyes, then they go wide a moment later. “ECHO SAYS YOU’RE A GOD! I’VE NEVER MET A GOD BEFORE.”

“Well, I’m delighted to be the first,” Shirasil says. “You’re a very unique boy, do you know that, Ollie?”

The dragon shifts uncomfortably, shyly dipping his head. “OKAY.”

Noli gives me a nervous glance. “Is this really…”

“Yes,” we sign back. “Shirasil.”

We start to pull ourself back together—especially drawing our void out of the god’s magnetic range—while also prying our mind apart. Ink doesn’t resist, but the separation still feels… sticky, for lack of a better term, and when I’ve fully separated, I’m briefly overcome by disorientation. I shut off sight in many of the pieces of the glass that we’d been using to see through, and that helps, but it doesn’t settle our—my mind entirely. My mind had been split so many different ways that it’s hard to even think about it now.

Noli moves a hand behind my back and subtly spells out a question. “Is he on your side?”

Shirasil’s head turns toward Noli, and the light breeze in the square picks up, ruffling clothes and hair. “There’s no point in trying to hide your words, dear; my wind can see around corners.” As he speaks, some of the shadows peel away, forming shapes behind him. When they move, I realize he’s signing—much like my disembodied signing hands I sometimes use while my own are preoccupied.

Noli’s grip on my glass tightens.

“What do you mean we don’t have much time?” I ask Shirasil, trying to divert his attention. “Are you holding Lorata back?”

He laughs. “Absolutely not. I’m just accounting for the time dilation. How long has it been since those champions showed up?”

“A few minutes,” Fyre replies.

“How many exactly?” Shirasil asks. “Be precise.”

“Five and a half minutes,” Dizzi says, popping up behind Ollie’s neck. “When the dhampyr arrived. Three minutes for the arachnoid. Also, hi!” She waves. “Big fan! Don’t tell the other Fyrethians. I mean, I guess we’ve met before, technically, when you were Lisari. Um, almost six minutes, now.”

Shirasil grins broadly at Dizzi’s interjection. “Oh, the feeling is mutual, I assure you. But I’m afraid we’ll have to catch up at a later date. You all have perhaps four minutes to flee, and I’ll be leaving before then.”

“What?” Fyre says, bewildered. “How do you know? What happened to Lorata’s champions?”

Shirasil waves a hand in a bored manner. “I just moved them to an inconvenient place to escape from. They shouldn’t know it was me, and I’d prefer to keep it that way. And I know we have about four minutes because Lorata would have noticed the moment I displaced them. Time dilation between the Heavens and Lusio is sixty to one. One minute out here is one second in there. From Lorata’s perspective, she was probably notified that her champions were engaged in some sort of fight six seconds ago. And one second ago, they were removed from it. I give her another five seconds, before she comes here personally to investigate.”

A chill runs through my soul. “Here? To this very spot?”

Shirasil sighs. “That is why I’ve been telling you to flee back to the palace.”

Shit. She’ll almost certainly find my spell circle. And once she knows that I’m planning to sneak into the Heavens, I doubt I’ll get another chance.

“Noli, go back with Dizzi and Ollie,” I sign to her. “I’ll be right behind you. Fyre! Help me destroy the circle.”

“What?” Noli objects. “No. I’m not leaving you.”

“I’M SUPPOSED TO PROTECT FYRE!” Ollie adds. Dizzi also objects with the other two, but her voice is lost beneath Ollie’s translator.

Shirasil tips his head. “Circle?”

I look down at the circle Dizzi and I created over the last couple weeks. The black lines are not exactly subtle, but they’re chiseled into the surface only a fraction of an inch. He can’t see it.

Which means I have to admit I was trying to create a portal behind his back.

“Er,” I say. “It’s not—”

“It’s a Planar Linkage spell,” Fyre says, gesturing to the ground. She looks at me next. “And the Dungeon Core’s range doesn’t reach this high, so I’m not sure what I can do. Shirasil, if you are here to help, now is the time.”

For a moment, the god looks genuinely stunned. Then he leaps down from the wall and lands in a crouch, running his hand over the nearest lines and rune.

“Hah! What’s this? You were going to break in without me? I can almost respect that level of arrogance. But how would you link it to the Heavens?”

I guess the jig is up. Reluctantly, I remove Lisari’s hairpin from my Inventory. “This would have been the focus.”

In a flurry of shadows, Shirasil is before me, snatching the pin out of my hands. Ink’s void ripples at the god’s proximity, the magnetic pull almost too much to ignore. It’s stronger than the pull we’d felt with Blair. Why is that?

Noli also appears disturbed, taking two steps back before she stops herself. After a moment of hesitation, she grabs my coat, tugging me a half step back as well. Then she moves back to my side, holding her bow down but with one end between me and Shirasil, like a shield.

Shirasil laughs again. “I admire your bravery!” he says to Noli. He nods to me. “And your audacity. I feel a bit less bad about nabbing one of your glass shards, now.”

“What?” I say.

With a flourish, a piece of glass appears in his hand. Our glass. Annoyed, I pull it from his grasp (or, more accurately, he lets me take it). I’m quite sure Shirasil never felt bad at all for taking it.

Then again, the same could be said for us.

“How do you think I found you so quickly?” The god grins, vanishing the hairpin back into his shadows. “I suppose that makes us even. Now, are we going to activate this circle?”

I can only stare at him. “You’re not mad?”

“Mad?” He laughs. “Why, if you’d told me this plan from the start, it would have significantly simplified things on my end! Now there won’t be a way to trace the portal activation to myself. But really, if you still want to recover that Traveler remnant of yours, you need to move quickly. After what just transpired with Lorata’s champions, security is about to get tight. I won’t be able to let you into the Heavens as planned. It’s now or never, and we’re running out of time.”

I can’t believe he’s actually willing to help. Maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised; I’d underestimated Aquenno’s altruism as well. Blair even told me the gods aren’t a monolith.

But can you blame me for being suspicious of the god of chaos?

“I can’t,” I say, Checking my mana reserves. “I used up too much of my magic in the fight, and we destroyed one of the arcana containment cubes I needed to activate the spell.”

“It’s magic you need, is it?” Shirasil taps his lip thoughtfully.

“Null mana, specifically,” I clarify. “The Drifting Isles is a source of storm arcana, which I can’t manipulate.”

“Well, today is your lucky day.” A breeze stirs around us as Shirasil reaches for my chest. “Wind and null just so happen to be two of my specialties.”

Ink’s void spikes, and at the same time, Noli steps in front of me. I have to catch Ink’s void, wrestling it back, to keep it from stabbing into Noli’s back on accident. It’s extremely agitated, unsettled by the pull of the god, anxious he will try to damage our core, and angry, angry at Shirasil for a reason it can’t even explain.

I’m not thrilled to have him this close to my core, either, but I doubt any of us could stop him if we tried. I resist a very strong (and, in my opinion, justified) instinct to step back. Instead, I put a hand on Noli’s shoulder, drawing her attention.

“It’s okay,” I tell her. As much as it makes me nervous, as much as I still suspect Shirasil has something else he’s planning, it’s an offer I can’t refuse. Shirasil was right: if we want to retrieve Anika’s refiner and attempt to free any of the other Travelers, it’s now or never.

Noli grimaces, but she steps aside. “Alright. I trust you.” She signs the next words to Shirasil. “Please be gentle with him, he’s very fragile.”

“Hey,” I object.

Shirasil chuckles. “All mortals are fragile.”

The god’s fingertip lights with purple magic as he taps it to my core. Warmth spreads through me, along with an intense jittery energy—Ink steps in to help regulate the mana absorption, preventing my soul from being overloaded. My Bonus Mana begins to skyrocket.

In a matter of seconds, Shirasil gives me the same amount of mana it took a week for Dizzi and I to collect. I guess that’s what makes him a god.

“Is that enough?” he asks.

I watch as my Bonus Mana reaches more than double the mana requirement needed to activate the spell. Even so, I wait an extra second or two. “That should do it.”

The light goes out of Shirasil’s finger, and he withdraws. “Best hurry, now. Perhaps three minutes left.”

Now that I’m here, in this moment, now that it’s really happening, nerves wrack through my soul. Am I ready? Is this a fool’s errand? I can’t fuck this up like I did before. Even with Ink on my side this time, we’ll be facing even more dangerous foes. And I’ll be doing it alone. I desperately wish Zyneth was here, even if he couldn’t come through the portal with me.

But I can’t dwell on any of that now. I’ll just have to make it back. I’ve disappointed my friends too many times in the past; I won’t do so again now.

“Step back,” I tell everyone, retreating to the edge of the spell circle myself. “And no one try to use the portal without me. I’ll be bringing us to the brink of the Between.”

I swear I hear Dizzi squeal like an excited child as I sweep glass and void over the circle, trying to clear as much of the debris out of the square as I can manage. It was a good thing she and I decided to chisel the circle into the stone; we’d done so to withstand the rain and weathering storm arcana of the Drifting Isles, which luckily resulted in it surviving the battle with Lorata’s champions as well.

Fyre retreats to Ollie’s side as the dragon shuffles back, and Noli moves behind me, standing at my back like a guardian. Only Shirasil remains in the circle, moving to its center.

“I’ll serve as the focus,” the god says. “Your hairpin plan was clever, and would have worked, but it was unlikely to have placed you in The Sanctum. I’ll direct the path of the spell so it opens somewhere more convenient.”

“Er, thanks,” I say. It really was a mistake to withhold this plan from Shirasil. He’s being surprisingly—almost suspiciously—helpful. It feels different from the scene at the tea house when he’d presented as Lisari, in a subtle way I can’t quite articulate. Is this just normal for a god of chaos? Or some kind of mood swing?

Maybe I can ask him about it later. Assuming there is a later and I don’t just end up in one of the cells I’m about to break open.

Best not to think about that.

Focusing on the obstacle before us, Ink and I pool our void out into the spell circle, and the grooves appear to fill with quickly-seeping tar. Once every rune and line have been traced, I push mana into the circle, feeling an electric energy leave my soul in a rush.

[Planar Linkage spell activated,] Echo reports.

The air rips open. Much like Shirasil’s darkness spell, the stars vanish as the tear in space consumes the square until all that is left are the observers and the stone beneath our feet. We activate a Locate spell next, establishing Shirasil as the focus.

[Locate spell activate. Locate spell modified,] Echo says.

We sure hope that second part is Shirasil’s doing.

Noli puts an uneasy hand on my back, and Ollie nervously shifts his paws as Fyre gives him a reassuring pat. Dizzi is looking around in fascination.

A pinprick of light appears in the distance. It races toward us, growing to nearly fill the dark. This isn’t like when I tried to access Earth; it had taken more effort to find it, and even then, the opening back into L.A. had been small and fuzzy. I wonder if Shirasil is the difference—or if it’s because accessing the Heavens works differently from accessing another planet. Either way, a white, marbled room appears before us, so close and vivid it seems like it would only take one step to reach it.

I remove my hands from the spell circle and stand up, staring into the realm of the gods.

Okay. Here we go.