Zenith of Sorcery - Chapter 5: Sixth Manifold

Chapter 5: Sixth Manifold

“First things first,” Marcus said. “How long has it been since the gateway opened in the palace?”

The three of them had moved underground, into a specially secured underground conference room, at Titus’s insistence. Lucius, although clearly not particularly respectful of Titus, did not argue the matter. All three of them understood how serious of a matter this was.

Something wasn’t right about this, however. There was no way the royal emissary had known that Marcus would come back to the Great Tree Academy any time soon. Why was Lucius here, waiting for Marcus?

“More than eight months ago,” Lucius said, sounding depressed. “There have only been a few incursions since then, thankfully, but they’ve taken a heavy toll on us. We don’t have the resources to keep something like this contained.”

“And… you’ve been waiting for me all this time?” Marcus asked curiously.

“Yes,” Titus confirmed, giving Lucius an unhappy look. “He’s been here for the past six months or so, taking up space and straining our hospitality. Refused to say anything about all this until you came along…”

“The king has the right to assign an observer to the academy at any time he judges it necessary, and you have the obligation to house him and tend to his concerns,” Lucius said, completely unapologetic. “You should take it as a sign of trust that he usually doesn’t do this, rather than getting upset when he exercises his royal right in justifiable circumstances.”

Marcus sensed these two were on the verge of another, lengthier fight, so he quickly moved to shift the conversation to a more productive direction.

“Let’s put that aside for the moment,” he hurriedly said, gesturing towards the two in a placating manner. “Why have you waited for me to come back instead of going to Great Sea for help? They are your regional overlord. They’re supposed to help you with important matters such as these.”

“We have already gone to them and pleaded for help. They have… yet to truly respond,” Lucius said evasively.

“What do you mean?” Marcus frowned.

Rifts in reality were a really serious matter. They were, to his knowledge, all gateways to some other world or reality. Usually the abyss, since that was the place most proficient and interested in invading other places. There was absolutely no way the Great Sea Academy would allow such a major source of danger within their territory.

“What I mean is that they said they would send someone to close the rift as soon as they were able,” Lucius said. “It has been eight months since then, and we are still waiting for that Great Sea expert to come and help us.”

“Ah,” said Marcus. That was still very strange, though. Academies could be slow about tackling problems, but for such a critical matter, eight months was far too long. Great Sea wouldn’t let things fester for this long. At the very least they would come to assess the general danger level of the rift.

He looked at Lucius, studying his expression. He wasn’t a particularly masterful judge of character, but the man didn’t seem like he was lying to him. What would even be the point of that?

“What about other options?” Titus asked.

There were no other options, Marcus thought to himself.

“There aren’t many,” Lucius said. Marcus was worried the man would start with the insults again because it was Titus asking things, but Lucius decided to be polite this time. “Other great academies don’t want to deal with us, for fear of offending the Great Sea Academy. We’re under their authority, and they wouldn’t like other great powers meddling in their territory, even to help.”

Especially to help.

“As for minor powers, only a handful have the skills necessary for closing rifts,” Lucius continued. “It’s not a widespread or popular skill – one has to be pretty powerful to even learn the spells necessary, and then not every mage has affinity with them. Most mages who learn such magic join the great academies at some point.”

“That said, we did find a few. Two looked at the rift and claimed closing it was beyond them. One talked a great deal and kept periodically demanding more money to deal with the issue until we grew tired of him and sent him away. The final one suggested we collapse the royal palace on top of the rift and seal it that way.”

Unsurprisingly, the king of Elora didn’t like that suggestion. It was a drastic action, and it might not even close the rift for good. Depending on what kind of things were crossing over from the other side, a bunch of rubble might not stop them. Plus, there was also a matter of reputation and money – the Kingdom of Elora was not so rich and powerful that it could demolish the entire royal palace and continue without issue.

“Eventually, I was told to come here and wait for you, no matter how long that took,” Lucius finished. “The king sent a number of people like me to other places he judged you might return to, and told them to wait there as well. He considers you the most likely person to be able and willing to resolve this.”

“Why not just wait for the news of my return and then send a messenger?” Marcus asked. “You already waited for eight months. Surely a month or two extra would mean little?”

“You heard Titus earlier,” Lucius said, shaking his head. “So many important people want to talk to you. Powers far more prestigious and influential than the king of Elora. When would you find the time to answer the king’s call? There was a very real fear that if your attention wasn’t caught the very moment you come back, we wouldn’t be able to catch your attention at all.”

That did make sense, Marcus had to admit. He wouldn’t intentionally snub the king of the country he had grown up in, but if he had to prioritize…

Nobody said anything for some time, so Marcus leaned back in the heavy wooden chair he was sitting in, staring at the rough stone ceiling of the underground chamber as he thought about what Lucius had told him. An explanation for the Great Sea’s silence soon presented itself to him: the academy was probably overworked. Or more specifically, its rift-closing specialists were.

As Lucius had said, the magic for closing rifts was difficult to learn and not terribly popular. Even great powers like Great Sea had only a small number of experts capable of casting the necessary spells. If those experts were busy with other, more serious rifts, it would explain why they had left the situation in Elora alone for so long. The Eloran rift sounded relatively safe and not abyssal in nature, so it made sense to put off dealing with it if you had more pressing problems to tackle.

Of course, this was a worrying explanation, because it implied there had been so many new rifts opening lately that Great Sea were forced to prioritize them instead of just closing them all immediately.

For a moment, Marcus instinctively tried to connect this to the divine vision from earlier, but the timeline didn’t match. The visions of doom were a recent thing. If his speculation was true, then this surge in new reality rifts had been going on for a year or more.

The conversation continued for a while after that, but Marcus felt he found little of use from it. Lucius had been stuck here at the Great Tree Academy for the past six months, so he wasn’t exactly well informed about the state of the rift at the moment. Furthermore, he did not have any first-hand experience with the invading creatures, so he couldn’t tell Marcus much about what he would face if he went there.

“I’ve seen the corpses,” Lucius told him. “They are all some manner of beasts, though none that I recognize. Big horned lizards are the most common things to cross over. They are tough and have a nasty bite, but they shy away from bright lights. If they were the sole danger from the rift, the king would not be so concerned. Unfortunately, they are not.”

“Are they an army?” Marcus asked. “Or just wildlife wandering into the rift? Did the king send someone to the other side to see what’s out there?”

It would be strange if the rift was being used by random magical creatures instead of an organized force, but not unheard of. It was rare, but sometimes rifts in reality just kind of… appeared on their own, without anyone having made them. These often didn’t lead to anywhere special.

However, he heard these ‘natural’ rifts also tended to mend themselves really quickly, so having one last for so long would still be highly unusual.

“Surely you joke, Master Marcus,” Lucius told him. “Who would dare step through that thing? This is a rift in reality, not some orderly portal. In any case, I fear I will be of little help to you in answering these questions. As I have already said, I did not participate in the fighting myself. All I have are stories from the soldiers stationed near the rift, and they tend to make up and exaggerate to make themselves look more impressive.”

“I understand,” said Marcus. Clearly there was no point in questioning Lucius further.

He told the royal emissary he would go speak with the king about the rift, but that he couldn’t promise anything. He didn’t mention that he had only ever closed one rift before, and thus hardly had any experience with this to begin with. Regardless, Lucius was pleased he had achieved his goal here and was eager to set off towards the capital.

Marcus told him to go on without him. He didn’t intend to travel with the royal emissary. For one thing, he would be faster if he traveled on his own. He would probably reach the capital before Lucius did, despite starting later. But secondly, the man didn’t exactly give him the best impression.

He didn’t want to pretend to be friendly to him along the way.

The moment Lucius was gone, Titus was immediately upon him.

“Don’t tell me you intend to cross over to the other side?” Titus demanded.

“What makes you think I would do that?” Marcus asked curiously.

“Don’t play dumb with me. You know how dangerous that is,” Titus said. “There could be anything there. The air itself could be toxic! The rift might destabilize as you pass through it and leave you stranded! You could be shredded in transit by the dimensional stress!”

“I won’t cross over,” Marcus assured him.

“You’re lying,” Titus accused, narrowing his eyes. “I know you.”

“I’ll just send a summoned scout to check what’s out there,” Marcus said.

Titus was about to say something, but then paused.

“That could work?” he asked.

“So long as the scout can think and talk, they should have no problem reporting what they saw there,” Marcus said. “Summoned spirits don’t actually die when their forms are disrupted here on the material plane. They just get sent back to their home plane. So they shouldn’t have any concerns about stepping through that rift.”

“And if they report something interesting?” Titus asked suspiciously.

“I still won’t go,” Marcus assured him. Not alone and not without major preparations, at least. “I just want to satisfy my curiosity a bit, that’s all. You must admit this is a very strange incident. Don’t you want to know more about this?”

“Tsk. Of course I want to know more. That’s why I suspect you’ll do something stupid. If even I’m tempted, who knows what an impulsive guy like you is thinking,” Titus responded irritably. “Honestly, just how many new rifts have opened if Great Sea is fine with ignoring something like this?”

“I had the very same thought,” Marcus admitted. “Have you heard anything about this?”

Great Tree Academy was just a small vassal academy, but it was still a local power that tried to keep itself informed about important matters.

Then again, an open rift had been inside their territory for almost a year and they hadn’t found out about it until Marcus came along, so maybe he was overestimating their abilities.

“No, nothing,” Titus said, shaking his head. “I heard about a big new rift opening somewhere in the Harpy Archipelago a few months back, but I thought nothing of it at the time.”

New rifts opened up all the time in the Silver League, because it was close to the Lament Spire. Chaos storms also sometimes tore through the dimensional boundaries in certain places where they were weak. Hearing that a new rift had been found wasn’t that notable, unless you were the one that had to deal with it.

“I also heard about the rift in the capital, but I thought the king was trying to exploit it, not that Great Sea is too busy to help them,” Titus continued.

Marcus was taken aback. “You knew?”

“Why do you think I didn’t want you to meet the royal emissary?” Titus asked. “I didn’t want you to get involved with this. This is Great Sea’s responsibility. Let them earn their tribute.”

“There is no harm in me closing the rift,” Marcus pointed out. “I’m even an elder of the Great Sea, so they can’t complain that an outside influence is butting into their business.”

“Yes, if I knew the king wanted you to close the rift, not explore it, I wouldn’t have been so unfriendly. I thought they were just fools,” Titus admitted. He gave Marcus a knowing look before simply shaking his head and turning to walk away.

“Don’t die before making the legacy tablet,” he told Marcus. “That’s all I ask of you.”

* * * *

Marcus slowly circled the reality rift in front of him, studying it intently. It was an ovoid black shape with irregular borders, its surface trembling and rippling with every passing moment. Thin, needle-like spikes erupted from it periodically, only to recede into the central ovoid shape just as quickly. The whole thing seemed to float in the air, unsupported by anything.

If Marcus had to compare it to something, he would describe it as a big, floating, spiky, black eye. He kept imagining it suddenly blinking open and staring at him. Of course, no such thing happened.

“Can you do it, Master Marcus?” an anxious voice suddenly said behind him.

Although somewhat annoyed at the interruption, Marcus turned around to face the source of the voice – Gordianus the Third, king of Elora and his current… employer? Did it count as a job if he wasn’t getting paid for it?

Marcus liked Gordianus. The king was a middle-aged man with a short, neatly-trimmed beard and thick eyebrows, who did not put on airs in front of Marcus, nor waste his time on excessive pleasantries. He had simply politely welcomed Marcus when he had arrived, and then immediately led him into the underground portion of the royal palace, where the reality rift had suddenly opened up one day.

Although outwardly respectful and gracious, it was clear to Marcus that Gordianus did not fully trust him. He had a pair of guards standing at his side at all times, both of them covered head-to-toe in enchanted metal armor and yellow heraldic markings. Additionally, a severe-looking man kept trailing behind the king, modestly dressed and looking like a servant, but clearly a mage of some sort. All three of them were utterly silent, never saying a word to Marcus, and clearly watching him like hawks for any hint of aggression.

Marcus did not take this against the king. Gordianus had had no dealings with him until today, so it was natural to be cautious. Marcus would have done the same thing in his place… if he had any subordinates.

“This rift is different from the ones I’ve dealt with in the past,” Marcus told him. The only other rift he had had to close was abyssal in nature, and involved several people fused together in a mass of screaming flesh that stabilized the rift into a bigger, more traversable portal. “However, I don’t think that will be a problem. This doesn’t seem to be an invasion portal.”

This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

Unless one was dealing with something truly exotic, the hardest part of closing a rift was dealing with the efforts of the opposing side to keep it open. If there was no enemy that would counter his methods, Marcus was confident that closing the rift was just a matter of time and patience.

“You can tell that just by briefly looking at it?” Gordianus said, sounding baffled.

“Reality rifts are usually stabilized by some kind of device or structure when created,” Marcus said. “Without that, the universe will gradually start mending the rift on its own, causing it to slowly disappear. I can see the beginnings of the natural repair process in action here, which means it is not anchored in any way on the other side. That’s not what an organized invasion looks like.”

“Well that’s a relief. You’re saying it will eventually disappear on its own?” Gordianus asked, immediately perking up.

“Yes, in a few years,” Marcus confirmed.

Gordianus immediately deflated.

“That’s too long,” he told Marcus.

“Don’t worry, I’m not saying this as an excuse to leave,” Marcus assured him. “I know you’re eager to get it closed as soon as possible so the monster attacks can stop. I will do what I can to get rid of it.”

“Since you mentioned the things pouring through the rift, how does that relate to what you said earlier, Master Marcus?” the king asked. “Is that not an invasion?”

“Well, kind of…” Marcus admitted. “But it doesn’t sound like they are an army.”

The king made an indecipherable throat sound and said nothing. Marcus didn’t think his reasoning impressed Gordianus much.

He turned around to study the rift again, thinking of the best way to tackle this, when the rift suddenly became more active and started to warp and undulate. A low humming sound filled the air.

The two armored guards immediately stepped forward and placed themselves in front of Gordianus.

“Careful!” the king shouted at him. “They’re coming again!”

Marcus did not bother to respond, his eyes fixated on the shifting rift in front of him. He quickly cast the stone skin spell and circulated his mana through his body, hardening his skin and muscles as a basic precaution against unexpected attacks, but otherwise did nothing but observe.

A group of five dark green shapes soon tumbled out of the rift and fell into a disorganized tangle of limbs and tails, hissing and pushing against each other in an attempt to regain their balance and orient themselves.

They looked vaguely lizard-like, just like Lucius had said. Quadrupedal, with four short legs that ended in vicious claws. Dark green scales covered most of their bodies, and a long whip-like tail trailed behind them. However, the head was strange. It was triangular and narrow, and covered in white bony armor that made it seem like they wore their skulls on the outside of their body. Two pairs of long, straight, lethal-looking horns jutted out from that bony head plating, and several rows of thin but pointy spines grew out of their back in scattered clumps.

Activating his Keen Eyes ability, Marcus studied them in great detail, noting that they seemed to have beaks instead of toothy maws.

The creatures in front of him were nothing Marcus was familiar with. He knew they were magical, because like all magical creatures they possessed a bloodline – something akin to an in-born spirit – which was easily detectable to anyone who could sense logos. However, they seemed more like enhanced animals than some noble beast.

They were just starting to gather their bearings, tasting the air and turning their bony heads towards Marcus, when he decided not to risk things. These were no threat to him, but if something happened to the king of Elora while he was around, he would never hear the end of it. He pointed his finger at one of the horned lizard things and cast the chain lightning spell.

There was a bright flash of light and a jagged beam of lightning instantly passed through all five of the creatures, connecting them all with a lethal web of lightning filaments.

They died instantly, their bodies still twitching mechanically for some time afterwards. The smell of burnt meat filled the air.

Before Marcus could say anything, the rift once again began to warp and churn, this time even more violently than before. A mass of thin, blood red tentacles emerged from the rift, grasping at anything in the vicinity as they seemed to drag in, with some difficulty, the main body of the creature through the rift.

The silent guards that flanked the king seemed to recognize the creature, because they spoke for the first time, shouting at the king to get away and pushing him back. The ‘servant’ from earlier, quickly cast some kind of force field spell, blocking the emerging creature from the rest of the palace basement… and trapping Marcus inside the rift room.

Well, it wasn’t like Marcus actually wanted to escape with the king and his men.

Marcus didn’t try to attack the creature before it actually emerged from the portal – he was curious about the stronger types of creatures that came from the rift – but he did strengthen his defenses a little more. It took only about fifteen seconds for the creature to squeeze itself through the rift, but in that time Marcus was surrounded by a transparent shield of force and there was a multitude of water orbs circling around him in lazy orbits.

The enemy was… almost elemental in appearance. The main body looked like a rocky sphere, covered in multiple layers of heavy stone plates. He knew it was multiple layers, because the surface layer moved, entire plates floating away for a moment or shifting into another position, revealing further layers of rock beneath. Emerging from this central sphere were dozens upon dozens of thin red tentacles that the creature used to grasp at things and move. These tentacles were gelatinous and rubbery, and seemed to stick to surfaces when they connected to them.

At first, the creature didn’t seem to notice him, blindly flailing around with its tentacles in search of something, anything in its surroundings. All furniture and items had long since been removed from the rift room by the king and his men, so there was nothing to find except Marcus.

This lasted until one of the tentacles swung too close to where Marcus had been standing, and he stepped aside to avoid it. The tentacle sphere immediately zeroed in on his location after that, hurling itself towards him with tremendous speed and force. Marcus was surprised at the sudden attack, but not surprised enough to get hit. In an instant, he expanded one of the circling water balls into a thin wall of water in front of him. Despite the barrier’s delicate appearance, the creature bounced off it without causing so much as a ripple on its smooth, mirror-like surface.

However, from that point on, the tentacle creature always knew where Marcus was, and never let up its assault. Marcus had plenty of experience with earth elementals, so he understood what was happening – the tentacle sphere had no eyes. It perceived the world through the vibrations in the ground. He was extremely still at first, so it did not register his presence, but now that he was forced to move and react to its attacks, he was creating lots of ground noise that it could use to locate him.

He tried to repeat his earlier trick and fired a chain lightning spell at the densest mass of tentacles emerging from the sphere. This successfully evaporated a whole bunch of them, but the stone sphere simply regrew them a few moments later. It did, however, approach him much more cautiously after this, retracting most of its tentacles so he could destroy fewer of them at once.

He felt this was a workable approach, that destroying the tentacles was still hurting it… but it would take a lot of time and mana to exhaust the creature with a tactic like that, and it still wouldn’t kill it. He was sure that, once he inflicted enough damage, the tentacles would retract deep inside the central stone shell, and the creature would refuse to emerge until it felt the danger had passed.

After a while, its attacks grew predictable – it couldn’t make its tentacles stick to Marcus’ water barriers, and it couldn’t break them by ramming itself into them – and Marcus decided he had found out everything he could from it. He took a cheap gemstone out of his pocket and cast the crystal lance spell. The gem immediately lengthened into a needle-like projectile and began to glow with a rainbow-like light.

Marcus hurled the crystal spear at the left side of the sphere. He had noticed the armor was strongest there, because the creature frequently kept rearranging its stone plates there to keep it thickly covered at all times. Thus, he assumed this was its most sensitive spot.

The glowing crystal spear hit the stone core of the creature and pierced straight through it, seemingly without any resistance. The heavy, magically-reinforced stone armor did nothing at all to impede the spear, which then lost its glow and embedded itself deep into the wall of the rift room behind it.

The red tentacles trembled for a moment, and then went slack. The stone core stilled, then fell apart into a pile of individual stone plates. Red, gooey substance seeped out from the cracks, pooling itself on the floor around the pile.

After watching it for a few seconds to confirm it was truly dead, and that nothing else was trying to get through the rift, Marcus dismissed all his defensive spells, dispelled the protective barrier on the door left by that mage pretending to be the king’s servant, and stepped out to find Gordianus.

He found him just outside the barrier, behind an entire squad of well-armed warriors and several mages. They had formed a defensive formation just outside the rift room, and seemed to be very nervous as they watched Marcus emerge from the room.

“I killed the tentacle sphere and nothing else seems to be coming,” he told them. “You can relax.”

The king nodded to one of the soldiers, which was apparently a signal for him to go and check out the rift room and confirm things, because the soldier proceeded to do just that. He came back just a moment later, confirming Marcus’ story.

“It’s not just dormant,” the soldier said. “It’s really dead. Reduced to a bleeding pile and everything.”

Marcus was confused for a moment, before he realized – when the king’s men fought against the tentacle sphere, they must not have understood that the creature could just retreat its tentacles into its core and stay dormant until a danger passes. They must have let it recover in peace and were blindsided when the ‘dead’ creature suddenly came to life when their guard was down.

“Tackling one of the rock jellyfish all on your own and killing it without sustaining any injuries… you are just as impressive as the stories tell, Master Marcus,” the king praised.

Rock jellyfish? He liked his name for the creature better…

“This may be a little brazen of me, but I think it would be best if you and your men retreated from the palace basement for now and let me work on closing the rift on my own. I’m in little danger from these creatures, and my attempts might agitate the rift and incite more attacks,” Marcus suddenly suggested.

As a bonus, that would leave Marcus alone and unsupervised, letting him do a little scouting without letting Gordianus and his people know what exactly he was doing down there…

Surprisingly, it wasn’t hard to convince the king to go along with this idea. Seeing Marcus take down the… rock jellyfish… seemed to impress the king immensely, and he agreed to withdraw everyone from the palace basement while Marcus was working on the rift.

It was time to get to work.

* * * *

Although what Marcus wanted to do was kind of risky, there was being risky and then there was being foolish. Marcus intended to scout the other side of the rift to see if there was anything interesting there, but before he dared to do that, he wanted to set up everything needed to close the rift as soon as possible. That way, if things went awry or he attracted the attention of something too powerful for him to handle, he could close the rift before it could cross over.

Hopefully.

For the next couple of hours, Marcus laboriously carved a complicated magic circle into the floor of the rift room, with the rift itself floating just above the center of the circle. This was hard, because this room had been the site of many bitter battles during the past few months, including the one Marcus had just fought. The floor was a mess, and first had to be smoothed into a uniformed surface that he could draw on.

Thankfully, Marcus had always been fond of spells that shaped the earth and stone to his desires, and had become very proficient in them over the years. The circle was still difficult to make, however, because Marcus had never been a particularly gifted artificer. Alas, unless a mage wanted to commission someone else to make their spellbook for them (they didn’t), they had to have at least basic knowledge of magic item creation, warding, and so on. And as they rose through the ranks, the level of basic artifice required for them to use their abilities to their full potential and advance in ranks also steadily rose. So like it or not, Marcus had to become at least decent at it.

Once the magic circle was done, he placed five more cheap gems around the edge of the ritual grounds and cast a simple warding formation that would inhibit creatures trying to cross over through the rift. It wouldn’t stop an opponent that could threaten Marcus, but hopefully it would at least slow them down.

After that, he sat on the edge of the magic circle and cast a summoning spell. This time he didn’t call for Chompy, his loyal earth elemental friend, but instead sent a call to the other spirit tribe he was contracted with.

In a puff of smoke, a large human-sized butterfly with white wings materialized in front of him.

If it weren’t for the surprisingly human-like set of hands, and very unusual eyes, the butterfly would look like any other insect-type magical beast.

“It’s been so long, my human friend,” the white butterfly said in a girly, unnaturally distorted voice. Her eyes, although multifaceted like those of an insect, had black spots in them and were surprisingly expressive and humanlike. They were currently staring directly into Marcus’s own. “I was beginning to think you forgot all about me. I know you’ve gotten powerful, but that’s no excuse to forget your friends.”

Unlike Chompy, Celer was very intelligent and could speak. This was both a good thing… and a bad thing.

“You are not some minor spirit, Celer,” Marcus told her. “If you wanted to talk to me, you could have contacted me at any time.”

“Summoning material beings to the outer heavens is a pain,” she said petulantly, waving her wings and scattering white glowing dust everywhere. It made Marcus’s nose itch and eyes water. “It’s much easier to call a spirit down here. You should have called instead!”

“Alright, alright,” Marcus said, holding his hands in a placating gesture. “I don’t want to argue. I called you here now, didn’t I? I need your help.”

“Of course you do,” she said, scattering more dust around her with her wing beats. The dark spots in her multifaceted eyes performed something reminiscent of an eye roll. “You only ever call me when you need help.”

“That’s not true,” Marcus pointed out. “I used to summon you just to talk when I was younger. I even listened to your terrible attempts at poetry.”

She slapped him in the face with one of her wings – a move that didn’t hurt in the slightest, and instead felt like the gentle caress of silky fabric, but which threw so much glowing dust in his face it immediately induced a sneezing and coughing fit in him.

“You deserve it,” she told him. “What do you need help with?”

He was too busy coughing his lungs out to answer her immediately.

“I need you to go through that rift, look around for a bit, and then report back what you saw,” Marcus said when he recovered, pointing at the ominous black eye in the center of the room.

Celer turned slightly, glancing at the open rift like she had only just noticed it. Marcus knew she hadn’t. Those big eyes of hers weren’t just for show – aside from a few small dead angles, she could see practically everything around her at all times. There was no way she had missed something like that.

“Oh my, an ownerless rift,” she said, flapping her wings a few times so she could do a lazy circle around the rift, studying it. “At least you called me for something interesting.”

Her eyes drifted towards the magic circle carved into the ground, and the five gems on the edge of the room.

“Of course you couldn’t be truly impulsive and exciting for once in your life,” she complained. “You had to make plans and preparations, and blah blah blah. Humans are such boring creatures. You never just listen to your heart and do things.”

Marcus’s lips twitched into an abortive smile. It wasn’t often that he was criticized for being insufficiently impulsive. Before he could say anything, she suddenly dove into the rift and disappeared.

Marcus hurriedly sat down on the ground again, closed his eyes, and searched for his connection to her. He quickly found it and tugged at it, causing his vision to be instead replaced by the amazing all-around vision of his butterfly summon.

She was in a large underground chamber. It was dark, but not pitch black. Some kind of immense metal machinery was embedded into the walls, producing deep clanking sounds and producing enough light to give the space some dim illumination. Enough illumination for Celer to see with relative clarity. She flew in a spiral pattern around the rift, which seemed to be situated in the exact center of the chamber, studying the sights.

As he initially noted, the chamber seemed to be covered in massive machinery. The sheer amount of metal used in the construction of this was mind-boggling to Marcus. Even if all the ironworks in the Silverleague pooled their resources, it would take them years to supply enough iron and other metals to build this… and that was not even mentioning the crafting skill necessary to build something like this.

What was not covered in machinery, however, was roughly hewn rock. It was bizarre that someone went to the trouble of making something this expensive and complicated, and then didn’t even bother to smooth out the walls. The floor was also very rough, and in some places there were shallow depressions filled with water.

There were no furnishings of any sort present, no tables or chairs, no real sign of habitation. It was as if the place was abandoned during construction… but who would ever abandon all this metal? Not to mention the machinery still seemed to be working.

In one corner of the chamber, lying on his back in the center of a big magic circle, was a male humanoid corpse. The corpse was pale and bloodless, but undisturbed by the scavengers and showed no signs of rotting. Its eyes seemed to have melted straight out of its sockets, with bloody trails running out of the now empty sockets and down its cheeks and sides of its head.

“He doesn’t reek,” Celer said, seemingly to the air. She was speaking to Marcus, of course – she knew he was sharing her senses. “I don’t think he’s undead, either.”

Celer did a slow, lazy circle around the massive chamber one last time, before moving on to the connected chambers. There were a number of tunnels branching off from the massive chamber where the rift and all the strange machinery were located, but most of them were empty and looked more like a natural cave than some kind of deliberate construction.

The horned lizards that attacked earlier seemed to live in these caves in big numbers. One of them tried to attack Celer, but she coated him in multicolored dust, putting it into a stumbling hallucinogenic stupor.

The other horned lizards nearby them immediately fell upon the one Celer incapacitated, tearing it to pieces. They were apparently cannibals, and had no compunctions against eating their own kind.

Celer watched intently as the lizards killed one of their fellows, clearly fascinated by the grisly sight. Marcus really, really wanted to tell her to move on already, but she couldn’t hear him.

And probably wouldn’t care, even if she could.

After that, she made a beeline for the rift and returned to the basement of the royal palace, where Marcus was waiting for her.

Marcus continued sitting on the floor, thinking about what he had seen through Celer’s eyes. Based on what she found on the other side… this was an invasion after all? There was no doubt that the rift was deliberately opened by someone on that side. There was no way the rift accidentally led to the center of an underground chamber lined with complicated machinery. But then, why was it abandoned after it was made? There were no signs of a major battle, and while there was a corpse, it was merely one body.

“Man, the way those lizards tore into their downed friend like that… that sure was something, wasn’t it?” Celer suddenly said, flying lazy circles around Marcus’s head.

He gave her an annoyed look.

“It was the least interesting thing about this,” he said.

“Eh, the rest was just an oddly-preserved corpse and abandoned machinery. You can find that in lots of places,” Celer told him.

“I need you to do me another favor,” Marcus said.

“Back through the rift?” she guessed.

“Yes,” Marcus nodded. He took out an ocher-colored cylinder covered in a complicated network of carved lines and patterns and handed it to her. She took it in her thin, delicate-looking hand and looked it over. Although she looked like she would have trouble carrying the heavy stone cylinder while staying airborne, in reality she seemed to have no trouble at all with taking it from his hands. “Hide this cylinder somewhere on the other side.”

“I love hiding things,” she said happily. “I can put it anywhere, yes?”

“Sure. Just make sure it’s somewhere out of the way where you think no one will find it,” Marcus said. He didn’t actually care where she placed the cylinder, so long as it was on the other side of the rift. He would be able to find it no matter what she did. That was the whole point of the item.

“Be right back! You’re not allowed to look!” she told him, and then immediately dove into the rift.

For a moment, Marcus had a feeling he had just made a terrible mistake… but no, he was overthinking things, she couldn’t really bungle this up. The cylinder was very sturdy and couldn’t be damaged easily. It would survive whatever abuse she put it through.

He did, however, grow concerned when it took her more than two hours to return from the rift. That did not qualify as ‘be right back’ in his book. He really hoped she didn’t just dump it into a lake or something equally stupid…