The Third Step: Chapter Ten

Dusk shook her head and called out with the sound of water burbling in the riverbed, saying that this was Edgar’s quest, and she thought that trying to take it for ourselves would be a phenomenally bad idea. I nodded in agreement, and I felt some sort of tugging at the winds. 

Jinwei eyed me skeptically and shook her head. 

“I think you’re barking up the wrong tree. It led us here, it’s ours to take.” 

“You’re only here because you were invited,” I pointed out, shifting my eyes to look to the left, where I suspected the fox woman’s real body was. I wasn’t able to prove it, but I thought I could sense the barest trickles of unusual mana and energy flow there. 

She faded back into visibility. I’d been slightly off, off enough that if I’d tried to strike with blademoss, I’d have missed, but it was still close enough that I was mostly looking at her. 

Ivy stepped next to me, and Meadow arched an eyebrow at her. 

“Fine,” she said, letting out a sigh. “I can see that I’m clearly outvoted and outnumbered. I think you’re being a bit superstitious, but… fine.” 

I stared at her, wondering how someone who had one, maybe two, deep mana imprints could genuinely think we were being overly superstitious. We stared at one another for a long, awkward moment, before Edgar pushed his nose into the dirt and began to cast his digging spell. I reached over and grabbed his tail. Kene grabbed onto me as we started to dive down, and Ivy grabbed Kene and Jinwei, and Meadow took a few steps back. 

I let out a whoop of delight as we shot down, and Edgar pulled to a stop in front of the rift. I studied it curiously as Dawn floated down through the stone without problem, and Dusk began to wander over to the time catch. 

Dawn opened her jaws, and golden crystal began to flow out of them. It looked rather like her harvesting crystals, but instead of drawing in mana, they seemed to connect to Dusk as she drew the power of the catch into herself. Dawn’s dominion blazed bright gold, rushing through Dusk, and she reached out. Golden and rainbow light flowed together, drawing the sphere of flickering temporal mana into her.

Time seemed to stretch and compress strangely for a moment, and then the world seemed to snap. Dusk’s power blazed out around us, and then settled down. I paused for a moment, taking a deep breath, but Edgar was the first to speak. 

“How did you do? Did you get them?” 

Dusk waved her arm and opened a passage into her realm. The golden rimmed portal looked out over a small familiar looking room, the containment for the Mantle Estragon eggs, and where I’d also briefly placed the assassin. 

The enchantments that Ivy’s father had once laid into the wall to keep the magmatic eggs safe had long ago been deactivated, but now a new set of enchantments were laid into the walls. Even I could tell that these enchantments were ancient and out of date, as well as strangely simplistic, bathing the room in a mixture of mana to help the eggs grow. 

And there were eggs. Each of them was the size of a watermelon, and had a shimmering, opalescent sheen. They were roughly oblong and ovular, like any egg should be, but unlike the eggs of chickens or ducks, these eggs were faceted with hexagons, like a tortoise’s shell or like the pattern of my own Beastgate. 

Dusk put her hands on her hips and proudly whistled that she’d managed to get seventy three eggs, and Edgar let out a sigh of relief. He was too large to fit into the containment room, but Dusk patted him on his massive head and told him that she’d be willing to open a portal to here anytime. 

“That may well be necessary,” Meadow said, stepping into the mouth of the tunnel that Edgar had rapidly dug. “Edgar, if you don’t have an effective method of keeping the eggs in an environment like this, it may actually be safest for you to take Dusk’s new gate stone and travel to Elohi, if it is alright with Dusk.” 

Dusk whistled her assent, and then snapped the portal shut. It was only then that I’d realized she’d opened the portal right into the room for egg containment, rather than into her vault. Given the egg room’s location was hidden, it meant even if someone broke in, they’d have a hard time finding any of the eggs, and there would be a negligible chance that they’d find them before Dusk could arrive.

“Were there any other upgrades?” 

Dusk waved her hand, opening another portal, and this time, it spread out near the cottage. It had expanded slightly, adding a two-story circular tower onto one of the ends with an open air patio or pagoda on top of those two stories. The attached one story cottage had expanded out some, clearly adding a couple of new rooms that lengthened the entire thing. She put her hands on her hips and proudly announced that she’d been able to take a lot of the building material and construction magic within the mage’s tower and use it to expand where I lived. 

I looked the building up and down, then let out an impressed whistle. It was big – bigger than the house I’d grown up in, to be certain. Jinwei looked mildly interested, but not as if it were anything shocking. To her, it probably wasn’t.

“You’ll have to give Kene and me a tour,” I said.

Dusk agreed readily, then shut the portal. I eyed her curiously, suspecting that she was holding back something major, something probably not suitable for the eyes and ears of Ivy, Edgar, and Jinwei, but didn’t say anything.Instead, we gathered our will as one, and I began flooding spatial mana into the air. 

We had left Dusk’s mobile gate stone back on the boat, in my room, which meant we had an easy trip back to the boat. While it was possible someone had stolen it and pawned it off, I doubted they would, and even if they had, we’d just wind up wherever they’d sold the stolen stone. 

It took more effort than it should have to punch open the portal, more akin to forcing the way open to Mossford or Crysite than the comparatively close by ship, but all that really meant was that it took time. Expanding it to fit Edgar took even more effort, but within a few minutes, our combined effort had opened a shimmering golden portal large enough for everyone to pass through. 

I stepped through first, emerging out onto the floor of my room, where I bent over and picked the stone up, then teleported onto the top deck, where Edgar could emerge without utterly destroying the cramped cabin. 

After they were all out, I tossed the stone to Edgar, who caught it with surprising gentleness in his massive jaws. 

“I must be going now,” he said. “The Healer is in Elohi, along with the preserve where we can best raise these turtles.” 

I stepped up and hugged him, doing my best to wrap my arms around his massive neck. Dusk let out a small cry and threw her own arms around him, while Dawn gently booped the tip of his beak with her own nose. Kene stepped over and hugged him as well, taking a position opposite to me. We pulled away after a second, and Jinwei gave him a respectful nod, while Ivy gave him a bow. Meadow tapped him on his shell. 

“I will go with you. I know the Healer, as well as Atsila and Ama, and I can vouch for your good character. Malachi, I can meet up with you when you arrive in Obsidian Forest.” 

That timeline didn’t make sense – Obsidian Forest was relatively close to Mossford and Delitone, actually closer in distance to my home than the further south Suntorch, while Elohi was fully on the other side of the planet. That had to mean that either Meadow could create a simulacra in Obsidian Forest, which I doubted given her previous comments, or that she could create one close enough to travel there before our ship arrived. It was strange to think about copies and clones like this, and it made my brain feel all sorts of wobbly, so I immediately decided to stop thinking about it, and just nodded my agreement. Instead I turned to Edgar. 

“You have my communication mirror’s ID, right? Dusk keeps it in herself, but we open a portal to get calls every evening.” 

That brought an idea to mind of creating a tiny portal next to the mirror, one large enough for the flow of knowledge energy to pass through, but not large enough for anything else to pass through. Maybe one that was warded by the bwbatch to stop invasive animals from escaping or entering Dusk? 

That was probably a project beyond either of us for now, even working together. Claiming land’s difficulty might scale in response to how much land Dusk needed to claim, but there was a base level of investment required that meant claiming the territory for a hand-sized portal would be very costly. Not to mention, I’d never stress tested how long we could hold portals open for, and I didn’t know if that would put additional strain on Dusk. Or on myself, for that matter. 

I realized that I’d zoned out a bit and did my best to focus on what Edgar was saying.

“...contact you as soon as I arrive, and I will keep the stone safe. Can it be stored inside of another spatial storage?” 

I glanced at Dusk, who let out a goat-like bleat, confirming that it could. She couldn’t open a portal into a spatial pocket, but the stone wouldn’t stop working, and if the stone was in a demiplane or astral plane, she could probably force her way through. 

“Excellent,” Edgar said, and the stone vanished into his shell with a ripple of space, time, lunar, death, life, and creation magic. I glanced at it, and a craggy smile split his face.

“Not worth it for you. It is a fifth gate spell from a hollow-squirrel that creates a private pocket for storing food. You can accomplish as much with your human magic, at a far cheaper mana cost, and with a much larger capacity. The number of spells that create pocket spaces that Hudau mana can cast is quite low – there is a reason I do not foxstep around like you do.” 

I nodded to him. Hudau mana was deeply complex, to the point simplifying it down to nearly pure spatial and temporal mana didn’t work. It shouldn’t have surprised me that he had to go to such lengths to manage something I could already do, though it did make me wonder why he didn’t just use a spatial ring. Well, that wouldn’t fit on his big tortoise feet. Maybe a spatial necklace? Or some sort of attachment to his shell? 

I yanked myself out of the wandering train of thought, waving to Edgar as he and Meadow disembarked, walking down the ramp and over to buy new tickets back to Mossford, where they could then take a ship to Elohi. Once they wandered out of sight. I gave Ivy a polite nod, then turned to head into the ship. Kene, Dusk, and Dawn followed me, and I flicked a hand to tear open a portal for us to step into Dusk. 

The moment we were all in, I closed the portal and turned to face her, arching an eyebrow. 

“Are you ready to show us whatever it was that the others weren’t supposed to see?”