The Fusionist Book 5 -- Chapter 3

Chapter 3

The western part of the Kingdom of Androthe, at least where Larek and Nedira had entered it after leaving the desert environment of Lowenthal, was relatively empty of anything – be it vegetation, people, or monsters. That only lasted for an hour or so of travel, however, as the dry, arid land quickly morphed into fields of tall grasses and small streams of water, brought forth from the rolling hills in the distance.

With the resumption of visible life came the appearance of people, and inevitably, Apertures. It wasn’t until he’d traveled through the Sealance Empire and even the depths below the desert of Lowenthal that he discovered that the locations of the Apertures coincided with the presence of people nearby. It wasn’t the same as when the Scissions used to open in proximity to towns and cities, as Apertures were more present in the countryside than near populated areas, but if there was a higher density of people in a general area, then there would likely be Apertures nearby. It was the reason he hadn’t sensed any Apertures immediately after emerging from the tunnels beneath the desert, as there weren’t any concentrations of people nearby.

However, that changed when they got close to the border city that acted in the same capacity as Day’s End back in the Empire. Although neither of them could remember the name of the city they were approaching, they both knew it was there as they felt the presence of two nearby Apertures, one a bit further to the south, while the other was directly to the east in their pathway. It had been decided after Larek had determined to visit his family that they needed to at least stop at this first city for a couple of reasons.

The first was to learn more about what was going on in the Kingdom, if such news was available. With the way Nedira’s memory had been negatively affected by her recent possession, and with Larek being gone for years, they were essentially going into the Kingdom blind. Once they figured out the current state of affairs, they could then travel to the northeast toward Rushwood, where the former Logger could ensure his family was as safe as possible during these turbulent times.

The second reason they needed to visit someplace was to restock their supplies. While he’d been able to secure another week’s worth of food from the Drekkin, who didn’t have a lot to spare after everything that had happened to them with the monster attacks and the Umbral Demons, his leftover supplies from the Empire wouldn’t last much longer than that.  If they were going to travel overland toward his home, they’d need more to last them the entire distance.

“We can go around the Aperture—” Larek began to say once he sensed the one blocking their way to the city, already turning the Air Skimmer.

Nedira turned her head around from where she had been standing near the front of the Skimmer, looking at him as if what he just said was nonsense. “It’s Surging, Larek. Can’t you feel that?”

He had no idea what she was talking about. Sure, he could feel the Aperture ahead of them, which felt relatively strong now that he concentrated on it, but he couldn’t feel any difference. “What do you mean? Surging?”

Understanding suddenly dawned upon her, and her expression became more understanding. “I’d forgotten that you’re a few years out of touch. I’m assuming that you didn’t encounter any Apertures in the Empire that expanded after they were left open for too long?”

That wasn’t entirely true, as he remembered closing a few Apertures that were larger than when they first formed, most notably the Shadow Rats that had caused the local population of brand-new Mages and Martials some difficulty due to their nature. “I did encounter a few, but what does that have to do with this?”

“That’s good to hear, at least,” Nedira replied, before answering his question. “Surging is what we call the actual process in which the Aperture expands its territory,” she explained. “It’s a bit of a transitory time in between its previous territory state and its new one, and it’s also the point where it can be the most vulnerable.”

“Why is that?”

“Because it hasn’t started to populate its expanding territory yet, and the monsters that already exist are spread out, leaving an easier to navigate pathway to the Aperture. The risk lies toward the end of the Surging, as when the new territory stabilizes, it will immediately begin to produce additional monsters to fill it up. If you can catch it before this happens, the monsters guarding the territory are much slower to respond and therefore make the Aperture easier to close, but the risk that you arrive at just the wrong time makes it dangerous.”

Larek was learning something new. He hadn’t seen anything like that in the Empire. In fact…. “How is it that you know this?”

“It’s,” she began, hesitating a second before continuing, “ingrained in my knowledge, I guess? Like how I know about Scissions, Apertures, and monsters; it isn’t necessarily a memory, more like knowledge of how to talk or write. It’s common knowledge in the Kingdom, but I assume it wasn’t that way in the Empire. At least, not yet.”

He nodded. “I see. How can you tell that it’s Surging?”

“Easy. Do you feel how the strength of it is pulsing slowly, fading in and out?”

It took him a few seconds of exploring the sense he had of the Aperture before he felt it and nodded again. It wasn’t very strong, and he wouldn’t have noticed it if she hadn’t pointed it out.

“That’s an indication of the Surge. The weaker the Surge, the more recent it started expanding its territory; if you detect an Aperture with an intense pulse, then that means it’s nearing the end of its expansion and you should retreat until it has populated the entire territory. It’s too dangerous, otherwise.”

That still didn’t exactly explain what it was he wanted to know. “That is great information, but why does that matter? Why can’t we go around it? Does the expansion make it dangerous for some reason?”

Nedira shook her head. “No, we need to close it.”

He waited for a moment for her to go on, but that was all she said as if it should be obvious. Speaking slowly as he tried to figure out what she was talking about, he tried to reason with her. “I’m sure it might be beneficial to close the Aperture, but I’m sure there’s some nearby SIC members that could take care of it without our help. I didn’t come back to simply close Apertures; if you remember, we’re on our way to see to the safety of my family.”

“But we need to close it. We can’t let it expand any more than it already has.”

Her tone sounded strange, as if she was repeating a phrase she’d said over and over to the point where it didn’t have any meaning anymore. Her eyes also had an oddly fervent but vacant look that frightened him a little.

“Nedira, what’s going on? Why is it so important to close this Aperture—”

“We need to close it! Hurry, before it’s too late!” she suddenly yelled at him, and he stumbled backwards at the extreme level of panic written all over her face.

“Whoa! Calm down, there’s no need to—”

Before he could finish his statement, Nedira turned away from him and moved to literally jump out of the Air Skimmer, despite it floating high off the ground. It wouldn’t necessarily hurt Larek to jump down from that height, but she also didn’t have the Martial stats that he did.

Thankfully, he was able to grab her before she threw herself out of the Skimmer. She struggled like a wild animal in his arms as he held her close to him, but he was strong enough to contain her without worry that she would hurt him – or herself. What has gotten into her?

She began screaming for him to let her go, and while he didn’t really feel comfortable keeping her trapped like this, overpowering her with his strength, he didn’t want to risk her injuring herself if she jumped off the Skimmer – let alone race into the territory of an Aperture by herself. Sure, Larek might be able to do it and survive, at least if it was a relatively weak monster, but Nedira didn’t have the same advantages as he did. He hadn’t even had a chance to add Fusions to her robe like she had before, because she was obviously wearing a different one than the one he had created for her. He now wished he had insisted on completing those Fusions before they left, but she hadn’t wanted to prioritize his time if it meant they could leave sooner.

Granted, Larek hadn’t actually had a chance to ask her about all the spells she knew now, which would likely make her more powerful than she had been when he knew her back at Copperleaf Academy. But with only the offensive Fusions on the staff she was borrowing from him, which had fallen to the side in their tussle, it was too dangerous to attempt to close an Aperture on her own.

“Nedira, what’s wrong? Why are you like this?” he asked her, but she seemed to completely ignore him as she struggled with all her strength. When she didn’t even seem to react to his words other than to fight harder, he had a suspicion that, somehow, the Umbral Demon wasn’t completely gone.

With a flex of his Pattern Cohesion, he created a thick block of his Pattern and passed it through her body starting from her feet, which made her pause for a brief second as it touched her. The struggle didn’t increase in intensity, as he thought it might if she was still being controlled by the Demon, and it passed through her without encountering even a trace of the entity. It was as it had been when he had first brought her back from her possession, as the Demon had been essentially wiped from existence. Of course, it had taken some extra effort to bring her back through the use of his—

Dominion magic? Is that what this is? But I thought all of it was removed?

While keeping her pressed up against him with only a modicum of strength, Larek began to look closer to the woman in his arms. The hated portion of himself that contained his recently discovered well of Dominion magic flared as he considered applying it to Nedira to get her to stop trying to free herself, but he dismissed that thought immediately as anything but a last resort. However, his recent connection to it, as well as his practice in manipulating his own Pattern, gave him a bit more insight than the normal person into the affects of outside influence on the body – and the mind. Therefore, as he looked closer at Nedira, he began to search for any evidence that there was still any lingering Dominion magic affecting her in some way.

He immediately peered into her head, and while he couldn’t read thoughts or even make sense of what he saw there, he immediately saw what appeared to be an… absence of some kind. Tentatively investigating it, he immediately sense an impression of Dominion magic, though it was more of the lingering traces of it. In his mind’s eye, this absence felt similar to Chinli, and he instantly knew that it was the removed section of Dominion magic the Gergasi had used to make Nedira forget about Larek and that she’d even seen her. The combination of her possession and the application of his own Dominion magic had removed everything but a hint of what was there, leaving only the impression that it had existed in the first place.

Thatfaint trace of Dominion magic wasn’t causing whatever what happening to her.

No, it was the strange, transparent blanket of Dominion magic that laid over her entire mind that was the issue.

It was so faint that he wouldn’t have noticed it if he hadn’t been looking for any type of anomaly. The magic almost seemed designed to avoid detection, as it was so subtle that at first he almost passed right over it even after catching a glimpse of it; the feeling was as if he had seen it out of the corner of his eye but dismissed it as a figment of his imagination.

But the more he searched for it, the more he could concentrate on actually identifying it. He tried to connect to it in some way, using his own Dominion magic, but quickly found that it was completely incompatible. It was actually refreshing in a way, as it showed that his own Dominion magic was different from the Gergasi, but it also made it impossible to know what it was designed to do.

The only thing he got from it was an impression that it wasn’t created by just a single Gergasi, but by many; it was almost as if they had all gotten together and used their Dominion magic on Nedira, weaving their energy to create an effect like this. But that didn’t make much sense for them to do something like this, because it seemed like a lot of effort for a single person.

What if it wasn’t a single person? What if everyone in the Kingdom’s SIC has this strange… compulsion?

Pieces started to click into place as he considered that angle of thought. To work something like this compulsion on the entire population of SIC in the Kingdom would take an enormous amount of Dominion magic, which was impossible for the Gergasi to create – unless they eliminated their slave-like control of thousands of Nobles, of course. At that point, he could see them being able to do something like this; a subtle order to compel any member of the SIC who felt a Surge in an Aperture to immediately try and close it. That would explain a lot of what Nedira had described had happened, but it didn’t answer the biggest question.

Why?

Why was this compulsion on all the members of the SIC?

Larek had an idea, but he couldn’t really know for sure until he was able to find out more information on the current state of the Kingdom. For now, though, he had to figure out how to prevent Nedira from hurting herself by rushing off to close a Surging Aperture.

Although the blanket of transparent Dominion magic was a powerful compulsion, its very nature proved to be its downfall. With deliberate care, Larek exercised his own Dominion magic and spread it all over the foreign substance within Nedira’s mind, letting it sink into the blanket, ensuring that every piece of it was covered. The relatively frail construction of the compulsion began to break apart like it was salt being dropped into a bowl of water, dissolving bit by bit until there was nothing left.

As this was occurring, Larek felt her begin to relax in his arms, the struggle to escape drifting away with the compulsion. It took about 15 minutes for it to disappear completely, and by that time the worked-up woman had basically slumped in exhaustion until he was basically just holding her from collapsing on the floor of the Skimmer.

Putting her down on one of the supply bags, he expected her to be unconscious, but she was still alert enough to look up at him with tired-looking eyes. “Thank… thank you.”

“Do you feel better now? Why was there Dominion magic on you?” he asked.

She closed her eyes for a moment but opened them a few seconds later. “I feel like a dish rag that just got rung out to dry. That being said, I do feel much better – and it’s all thanks to you.” She paused for a few more seconds before she went on. “We really do need to close that Surging Aperture, though.”

Worried that he had somehow missed some of the compulsion behind, he started to reach out to her again, but she waved him off. “No, it’s not… whatever that was,” she assured him. “Instead, when you got rid of it, it revealed a bit about why it was used on us, and—hold on, I’m still trying to make sense of it.” She tiredly held up a hand to stop any other questions he might have, and he kept himself from speaking. Finally, after a few minutes of her closed eyes searching back and forth behind her eyelids, she opened them again and sighed. “Wow. I didn’t realize it was that bad.”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“Do you remember how I mentioned that some of the Apertures had grown to the point where they couldn’t be closed anymore?” At his nod, she went on. “Well, apparently, it was done that way deliberately by some members of the SIC for exploitation of the monsters inside, or more accurately, the material that the monsters provided upon their deaths. Seeing a way to ‘harvest’ these materials for their own benefit, they allowed them to grow too large, to the point where they were unable to close them even if they wanted to.

“Now, this is only an assumption, because I don’t know it firsthand, but I believe that the Gergasi caught wind of this happening, and seeing that disaster would befall their slaves if they did nothing, they added this compulsion to all the SIC members to ensure that if they felt an Aperture expanding, they would immediately try and close it rather than let it get bigger so that it can be exploited.”

Larek tilted his head slightly to the side in confusion. “But that sounds… beneficial. Why did you say it was bad?”

“Because the worst Apertures aren’t just large, they’re enormous. As in, they cover hundreds of square miles, and they’ve incorporated other nearby Apertures into their territories. From what I’ve been able to piece together, there are now around 5 major Apertures in the Kingdom, located roughly at the northwest, northeast, southwest, southeast, and central areas, and they are the major reason that there have been so many problems with food sustainability.  The major farming lands are now within the territory of these Apertures, and without being able to access them, farmers have to make do with whatever plots of land are accessible and not under threat of being overrun by monsters.”

Larek shivered slightly at the mention of Apertures that were hundreds of square miles in territory size, as they likely rivaled if not exceeded what he had seen beneath the desert of Lowenthal. Overall, it wasn’t a good situation, but that still didn’t stop him from wanting to get to his family. If anything, it made the need even more urgent.

“If we don’t close any Aperture going through a Surge, then it could grow large enough to join the territory of these mega-Apertures, expanding their size even more. If they grow large enough, they might even interact with each other, and soon enough, the entire Kingdom – followed by the whole world – will be inside their territory.

“At that point, no one would be safe, and life as we know it would cease to exist.”

Larek chuckled weakly. “So, no pressure or anything, right?”

She smiled tiredly back at him, her energy slowly returning. “Exactly. I’m not sure why no one has closed this Aperture yet, but we can’t afford to let it be. Once we close it, then I’d love to go meet your parents.”

“Fair enough. As soon as you’re recovered enough, we’ll take this thing down.”

No more than 5 minutes later, she jumped up, ready to go.