Book 3, Chapter 44

With limited time left before we hit our self-imposed deadline, I roughed out a cave with a series of transmutation spells focused strongly on compressing the earth and stone or reshaping it into metal. That part of the process only took about half an hour, but I spent another three hours properly warding the place. These weren’t the simple protections against scrying that I’d used in the past, either, though a strong scrying ward was part of the set up.

The best-case scenario was that no one and nothing would ever notice the entry hole to begin with, but if they did, our first line of defense was an attention redirection ward. If something saw through that, I had a proximity ward to let me know that it was getting close to our new base camp so I could come back and deal with it personally. Behind that was a kinetic barrier ward similar to the one my home village used to keep monsters out, and hidden inside our new home were scrying and teleportation beacons to make it even easier for me to assess and take care of the problem from a distance.

The best part was that all of this was powered by ambient mana, meaning the ward stone would last indefinitely and was big enough to bank enough mana to hold the kinetic barrier against practically anything for at least twenty minutes. I spent a considerable chunk of mana getting the ward stone set up, but once it was done, it was easy to start cycling in mana to replace what I’d lost.

Once things were set up and Senica was hard at work drawing in as much mana as she could, I left to go survey the area. Scrying was all well and good, but it had limitations I couldn’t yet overcome that made in-person exploration the more attractive option. For scanning the local geography, I was fine with what I’d learned, but I really wanted to know more about those sealed and guarded buildings in every town.

I gathered more mana while I flew, a task made somewhat difficult by my still-new technique of lossless casting. Between that, dumping the mana into crystals held in my phantom space, and deploying a basic camouflaging ward to keep me from being instantly noticed by anyone who looked up, I was bumping up against the limits of my ability to multi-task.

Most of that was from the lossless casting, admittedly. It was difficult to shift habits I’d formed over many, many centuries, and thus required more of my concentration than most other tasks. But it provided an advantage too potent to give up. Even in the old days, it was easy to spend mana faster than it could be regenerated. Now, being able to cast practically any spell almost for free made the technique invaluable.

That was what allowed me to land in the town undetected, my body wrapped both in a spell of invisibility and one to redirect attention as extra insurance. I was about a block away from the building, mostly so that I could study its defenses before I approached. My magic wouldn’t prevent the ward from detecting me if it had contact triggers, for instance. Or, if it was sophisticated enough, it wouldn’t care about my invisibility spell.

Interacting with unknown wards was a delicate process, but as my mana reserves had grown, so too had my options. A few close-range ward scanning spells gave me my initial impressions of the building, which were that it was relatively impressive compared to anything else I’d seen in the last decade or so, but nothing special in the grand scheme of things.

I knew a magically crafted building when I saw one. The normal houses were wood, likely drawn from the local forests, but this one looked more like my own construction efforts. It had a stone frame reinforced with sheets of metal, possibly steel, that was carved with runes. Those were in fact decoys, or perhaps decorations of some kind, since they didn’t link together to actually do anything. That wasn’t to say there was no magic in the building—there certainly was—but that it didn’t come from the visible runes on the outside walls.

The building itself was a simple cube, forty feet to a side with a pitched roof slapped on top to let rain water run off it. Senica would probably have found them strange, as rainfall was so rare where we came from that our own homes were flat-roofed things, but for me, they were nostalgic. I could remember huddling under an old, tattered blanket while I listened to the rain hit a slanted roof and roll down to splatter against the dirt. I remembered the water building up until it started coming in through the door.

Maybe it was better to have flat roofs after all. Those hadn’t been in any part of my first childhood.

I brushed that stray thought away and returned my focus to the building in front of me. The wards weren’t anything that was going to stop me, but it would take me a little time to get through them. More importantly, there were at least two people guarding the building. One was a mage standing in front of the entrance, which was itself a double door wide enough for a wagon to roll through. Perhaps those pilgrimage caravans drove right onto the platforms when returning to the Sanctum.

Though I didn’t see another mage, I knew there had to be one inside. The wards they were using were what were known as active-monitoring wards, which meant that they had to let someone know if they detected anything. I’d dealt with wards like that before, for example the old tattler wards I’d sometimes found guarding Wolf Pack repositories of knowledge and raw materials.

Theoretically, these wards could be tied directly to the guard outside, but I doubted it. If that were the case, they would need to go through an awkward and lengthy process to shift who the wards reported to every time there was a shift change. Since I doubted they did that, both because it took some measure of skill and because it would strain the ward’s integrity to change them constantly, and since it seemed very unlikely that the guard never, ever left, that meant the wards were almost certainly tied to some sort of interface inside the building.

That interface would need someone to man it, though technically speaking, that person did not need to be a mage themselves. But considering that these teleportation platforms were the metaphorical gates to the kingdom, it seemed likely to me that the people keeping the locals away from them would be powerful mages. That meant there was certainly one more mage inside, but it didn’t exclude the possibility that there might be multiple mages there. Unfortunately, the wards blocked my life sense spell from getting a reading, so I was left with nothing but speculation and logical deductions.

If at all possible, I preferred to avoid killing these people. It would put the city on alert, which would do me no favors later. Though I was well-hidden, that didn’t mean it was impossible for someone to use some temporal divinations to get a look at me, and they’d have plenty of time to investigate if they tried. I was only going to be here for another day before I had to go back home, and I had no idea how long I’d be stuck there dealing with the brakvaw issue before I could come back.

My ward scanning spells told me most of what I needed to know, but I really did want a look inside before I left. I wasn’t willing to waste too much more time here, mostly because it would be too conspicuous to cycle ambient mana while I was trying to hide. That was as good as sending up a signal flare at my location to anyone with the slightest ability to sense mana, which I had to assume most people here could.

I circled around to the back of the building, dodging a group of three locals walking down the street as I went. I was pleased to see they still spoke Enotian here, though the accent was strange to me. From the signs on their shops, I’d been worried I was going to have to learn another new language, but it looked like this place was another victim of the curse that had obliterated all knowledge of written Enotian. I had my theories about what had caused that one, but no definitive proof yet.

My best guess was that had been done in an attempt to bury some very dangerous knowledge sometime after the world had been broken. I’d used Enotian myself in many of my own research journals, and stripping away the entire world’s ability to read those words would have created a considerable hurtle for new generations seeking to grow their own knowledge of magic.

If I’d had to guess who might have done something like that, I was ready to lay the blame squarely at the bony feet of my former-apprentice-turned-undead-monster. I had no proof whatsoever, but it wasn’t like he was around to defend himself and it didn’t really matter if I was right or not. For whatever it was worth, the Wolf Pack mage known as Keeper had agreed with the broad strokes of my theory when we’d discussed it. Either way, the world had long since evolved past the need for written Enotian, though I did find the workarounds they’d come up with cumbersome.

I finished my analysis of the wards protecting the building and, for perhaps the first time since I’d been reborn, felt somewhat stymied. I didn’t think I could get through these wards without being detected, not in the time frame I had available to me. If I wanted inside, my best option was to strike like lightning, cutting off the wards’ power and hoping that they didn’t send any sort of signal back to the Sanctum of Light.

It would probably be fine; the city was miles and miles away from here. But ‘probably’ was the best I could do in this situation. It would be a risk to force my way in, one I wasn’t prepared to take at this moment. Once I came back, it would be a different story, but for now, I’d learned all I could and there was nothing more to be gained.

Silently, I launched myself back into the sky and flew west toward the Sanctum itself. Once I was far enough away, I switched out my invisibility spell for the simpler and cheaper camouflaging one, then positioned myself as close to the edge of the cliffs as I could. An empty void loomed up in front of me, endless miles of stone dropping forever into a darkness that writhed with mana.

The tower rose out of that darkness, seemingly unaffected by all the mana I could feel down there. And it had to be a lot, for me to still sense it from so many miles away. I had my suspicions that the interior of the tower was safe from mana contamination, that it was probably the easiest way to make it down to the bottom of the chasm to find out what was really down there.

That would come later, though, after I found a way to sneak in, and after I finished harvesting the ambient mana here to make my new mana crystal. That project was coming along nicely, but I hoped this would give me the final push I needed to complete the crystal and allow me to sever the connections to my current stock.

I pulled the shrunken bolder from my phantom space and let it return to its full size. It was bigger than a house, and I was practically salivating at having such a massive reserve in a single crystal. All I needed to do was put in the work.

I pulled ambient mana in until my core was full, then wove the next ribbon of mana through the stone. Then I repeated the process, which only took about ten minutes, and wove another ribbon through. Again and again, until night fell and it was time to get some sleep.