The Third Step: Chapter Seven

I stared at the door, then let out a sigh and stepped through. There was no sense in not at least checking, but I also needed to balance my own health. If I thought I could easily take it on, great, but I wouldn’t push myself. 

I cycled Mantle Dragonfyre, then stepped through the door. On the other side was a large, ape-like creature, radiating mid-fourth gate power, a blend of abnegation, spatial, physical, temporal, and tinges of life, knowledge, and lunar. A bit of an unusual mix for an ape – most of them evolved to take advantage of their innately powerful might. I had a moment to wonder what sort of environment its species might have evolved in before the ape pounced at me, swinging its thick arms. 

I tilted out of the way, only for the arm to strike anyway, leaving a long slash on my chest that dripped blood. I tried to Foxstep behind the creature and unleash my dragon breath, but as my spell activated, a spell of the ape’s own kindled to life. My teleportation was slammed down by a might equal to my own, and I felt the physical might of the ape pinning me in place while its magic bound my teleportation. 

Normally, in contests of teleportation, I had a pretty strong advantage due to my built up spatial energy. It was a lot more than most other mages of my own advancement, and I could channel Foxstep faster and stronger than most other teleportation mages due to the unique blend of factors going to improve the spell. The fact it drew on my body to assist in my teleportation, for example, was helpful, as was the fact it was also partially moving me through time, not just space. 

That wasn’t to say my teleportation was unbeatable or unblockable. Just because my spatial energy made me like a boulder rolling downhill didn’t mean there weren’t mages who could bring that boulder to a dead stop without issue. Punching through Arcanist or higher level wards wasn’t easy, but even for spellbinders, I’d been lucky enough to never fight someone who used wards in a prepared area or other tactics that could easily counter me.  

That luck had apparently just run out. For all the spatial energy I had, the ape had just as much, and his was more intense than mine thanks to his higher advancement, and I thought he might actually have built up more time energy than I had. Foxstep drew on my ability to run, which might have helped me punch up, but the physical mana in the spell combined with the ape’s own body was enough to counter me without issue. 

In my shock, I mistimed the release of my Mantle Dragonfyre, letting the magic unleash halfway through a cycle, and rather than a tight beam of devastating power, a puff of hot air and raw mana rushed out. The ape wasn’t surprised, though, and used some sort of haste spell to slam its hand into my chest. 

If not for all of my bone strengthening, and the organsheild crystal, that would have been the end of the fight then and there. As things were, though, I cast Combat Echo, and my clone lashed out with a mix of frozen pitcher plant acid and blademoss, burning and scoring on the thing’s back. It spun its arm, somehow rotating it around like it was double-jointed, but my clone was already fading, and I managed to slip the power of one arm. 

I combined Enhance Forcing, Fungal Armor, and my ninelight morels, then let the thing’s attacks wail on me for a bit. The adaptive armor grew some within my spirit, though not as much as I’d hoped. After all, it grew to protect me from magic, and a lot of this ape’s attacks were just fists.

Once I was confident I’d gotten as much adaptation as I reasonably could, and my mana was guttering almost to nothing, I drew one last trick from Dusk’s garden. This potion was powerful and dangerous, but also shockingly easy to make, and it could get me out of here. I’d created it with Kene, a distilled mix of my soultoad’s seat mushrooms, some spores from the ninelight morels, leaves from my blueshade, a leaf from my blood carnations, and an entire mercurial lotus. 

All of their components had been bound with bindingroot and hastened with quickleaf to unify and instantly take effect in my body, but that had been the only real bit of alchemy needed to create the magic. Other than that, all I needed to do was boil it down to concentrate its effect. 

I drank the vial and died instantly. As my body crumpled to the floor, I snapped awake in my room, holding the glass orb. Just like with my waterbreathing potion, my deadly poison wasn’t actually used when I drew on it within the orb, and none of it actually entered my system. The poison was incredibly fast and entirely painless, which made it much better than dying at the hands of an enraged ape tearing me limb from limb. 

I stood and stretched, then checked the time. It was getting pretty late, so I’d check on Dusk and Dawn one more time, just to make sure they were okay, then I’d turn in for bed. I extended my senses through Dusk’s realm, then teleported over to the duo. Aerde was there as well – it was a touch disconcerting that a ninth gate spirit could be hanging out a quarter of a mile away from me, and I had no idea, but I at least trusted Aerde wouldn’t try to kidnap either of my familiars. They would probably be scanning for every possible bit of information, but that was fine. It wasn’t like I could stop Orykson. 

Dusk whistled like a bird as she greeted me, Dawn thrashed her body in mid-air to say hello, and Aerde’s brightly colored nodes flashed in a welcoming pattern rather like a handshake. I nodded to all of them. 

“Can I finally know what you’re doing? Or is it still secret?” I asked. Dusk zipped up to me, holding her hand up, and whistled that it was good that I had come, because we needed to test it. 

“Indeed,” Aerde said, their calm, neutral voice carrying a note of minor interest. “We have entered the testing phase.” 

“Sure, what do I need to do?” I asked, glancing around. Dawn opened her jaws, and it was only then that I realized she’d had a small stone in her mouth. It was a smooth blue, streaked with white, almost like larimar stone, and ovular in shape. It was a bit too large to fit comfortably on an earring, but it could have made a good centerpiece for a necklace. 

The stone pulsed strangely with Dusk’s magic in a way that almost reminded me of what it was like when she sacrificed land to incorporate a part of the physical world, and also when she chose someone as guardian of her entryways. There was a considerable amount of my own mana, and from a few other things within Dusk’s realm, most notably rubyworm mana, spirit lanterns, and some of the remnants of the gifts of the ghosts I’d taken off the Isle of Crysite. Most of those ghosts had been ungated or first gate spirits, so none of their gifts had been anything worth mentioning on their own, but they’d seemingly been melted together into a greater whole. Finally, the entire stone was suffused by Dawn’s magic. 

I didn’t sense anything directly from Aerde, but given that they were a magi, I suspected that I would struggle to find anything they didn’t want me to. I turned it over in my hand, knitting my eyebrows together and trying to sense what exactly it did. 

“A dominion amplifier?” I asked. It was the only thing that made any sense with the rest of the magic, though it definitely wasn’t what Dusk’s own power was doing. “Maybe… one designed to help the person with the stone draw on your dominion to activate your portal network?”

Aerde’s nodes flashed in surprise, and I sensed them looking at me more curiously. 

“It’s an artificial, mobile gateway,” Aerde said. “Normally, such a thing would only be possible once Dusk had completed her Authority Tower upon becoming an Arcanist, focusing her Dominion and allowing it to manifest itself, rather than simply .” 

“But worldspirits already bend the rules, and she’s tethered herself more than most worldspirits of her age,” I said. “On top of that, my magic’s letting it adapt to the changing spatial weave and keep it anchored, Dawn’s dominion is adding itself to Dusk’s to help it manifest, and the ghosts are being used to act as the physical manifestation, taking over for what an Authority can do?” 

“Indeed,” Aerde said, a hint of approval in their voice. “A tricky bit of magic, only possible because Dusk intentionally limited her internal growth at fourth gate with the intention of creating several more gateways.”

“What’s the interaction between Dusk’s guardians and the rubyworm magic? I don’t get that part.” 

Dusk puffed out her chest and proudly explained that rubyworms were highly territorial, and the battles between worm colonies could wage for centuries. Their magic had been used to key the stone so that it could only be used by someone she’d chosen to mark as one of her guardians. That way, even if someone stole the stone, they couldn’t use it, and we could potentially summon it back to ourselves. 

“Clever!” I said, then channeled a bit of mana into the stone. 

Nothing happened. 

Dawn projected an image to me that was utterly incomprehensible. My eye twitched, and a bit of blood dripped from my nose as I tried to focus on it, and in a moment of panic, Dawn rapidly altered the mental projection. Breaking this one down was still hard, but it wasn’t nearly as bad – the stone was an artifact designed to create a passage from other… something… to this… something. Those somethings were…

My nose started bleeding again. 

Aerde’s power reached out, and I blinked as Aerde’s explanation settled in. The stone created a gate to a specific point in Dusk’s realm from Ddeaer, but that was it. It wasn’t a teleportation stone or gate stone, it was a passageway. Trying to open a passage into Dusk’s realm from inside Dusk’s realm was like trying to enter a room you were already in. 

That explanation made sense, but for whatever reason, I couldn’t shake the idea that what Dawn had been trying to say was more accurate, and possibly more important, while also being something that I fundamentally didn’t have the knowledge base or words to understand. 

I emptied my mind of the thought. That might be true, or it might not be. Either way, Aerde and Orykson were far more equipped to deal with the incomprehensible nature of Dawn’s existence than I was. 

I flicked open a portal to the room, then teleported to the top deck. This time, instead of opening a portal to Dusk’s realm myself, I channeled my spatial mana into the stone. The stone sucked it in greedily, and I was forced to draw on the Transivy to restore my mana. It didn’t take as much as opening the international portals did, but it still took far more than the nothing that just snapping into Dusk’s realm with our bond would have.

After a long moment, a golden portal bloomed to life. I stepped through, emerging in the mushroom ring in Dusk’s realm, and held it up. 

“It works!” 

We spent a while longer testing the limits of the stone. I even opened a gate back to Mossford, then focused on the stone and opened a gate directly back to it, much like how I’d transported Liz’s grandfather’s guild directly to and from Crysite and Mossford. By all appearances, despite the stone moving locations throughout the boat, I could consistently open gates to and from. Even Kene was able to open the gates through using a stone, once they were taken as a guardian, though it drained their mana-garden entirely empty to do so only once – converting life and solar mana into the heavily spatial and forest mix that the stone used was terribly inefficient. 

But eventually our testing wound down, and I prepared myself for bed. After all, tomorrow should be a visit from Orykson, then it would nearly be time to visit a time-catch.