The Third Portal: Chapter Fifty-Six

It didn’t take too terribly long for me to fill Kene in on the fight, and by the end, he was shaking his head.

“That cut it pretty close to the edge,” they said. “I think you should have fled when you saw you struggled to hurt it.”

“I was planning on doing a fighting retreat, but I felt Ivy coming, and knew his dragon breath could hurt the thing a lot more effectively than my own attack.”

“That’s not how magic works,” Kene objected. “You can’t just use solar magic to counter lunar magic. They coexist all the time.”

“Sure, but forest dragon mana’s got a different solar in it, more tuned to light than to heat, which countered the shadows,” I said. “They might co-exist, but light still drives off shadows.”

Kene grunted, but nodded his head, and glanced at Ivy.

“I’m surprised forestroot armor could handle a blast like that. Mal’s Fungal Armor would have been toast.”

“It’s been well fed by my legacy,” was all Ivy said in response.

Though it was a bit on the early side, we decided to break for camp to let Kene treat the burns that my regenerative spell and potions didn’t handle well, as well as to let my mana restore itself. Ivy, apparently, was still at around the two thirds mark in his second and third gates, almost full in his first, and hadn’t even touched his fourth gate.

It was rare for me to feel weaker than someone relatively in the same stage as I was, and rarer still for me to feel like my mana reserves were small. The Idyll-Flume had done a lot to push me to the level of the best of my peers, letting me compete with someone like Liz. In fact, if it came down to a true life or death fight between the two of us, I even thought I might win six or seven times out of ten, though her powerful destructive capabilities would probably let her land some serious injuries.

Ivy…

Well, there was no accounting for freakishly powerful draconic legacies. He had more raw power than even the assassin, and unlike her, he wielded it with deadly precision.

Which was a part of why Kene and I spent a good amount of the time during our break with him laid out on the floor, while we sketched and studied the way he’d outlined the arrays of his spells and woven them throughout the body. While my senses were stronger than Kene’s, they had some second gate medical diagnostic spells that I didn’t.

“Why do you have the abnegation aspects of most of your spells winding around your brain stem?” Kene asked. “Does it assist in preventing mental intrusion?”

“And why isn’t your spatial energy aligned with the weave?” I added. “It’s running counterclockwise. Increasing your resistance to spatial effects, maybe? But it would also increase the mana costs for Forest Dragon’s Stride.”

“I don’t know, I was just told that they needed to be woven there,” Ivy commented, shifting so that his horns were more comfortable on the floor. “I mostly learned this from my mom, with some input from my dad.”

I nodded and jotted down some theories on the notepad. Eventually, it grew late, and we went to bed.

The next two weeks went in a somewhat similar fashion, with us scaling up the mountains, drinking our bottled breath potions, and flying between two different mountains when we could. We were attacked several times by slaughter spirits, mostly third or fourth gate ones, but occasionally by Arcanist level spirits.

The weaker fifth gate ones we fought, killing three of them and escaping from a half dozen more, but when we encountered an early sixth gate tempest spirit, we were forced to take refuge in Dusk. Thankfully, even with its higher power, it had no way to tear the portal back open, so once it could no longer sense us, it left, and we fled at speed.

It was a stark reminder of just how much stronger than us the world could be. Even someone with a legacy that automatically increased their mana density, strengthened their spells, and burnt away mists, couldn’t always reliably strike up that far.

By the end of the two weeks, we were about seven miles up, a good part of the way, and Kene wasn’t able to walk with us, even using the bottled breath potions. The magic allowed them to breathe enough to not be at risk of death, but their body was struggling to keep up with Ivy and mine.

By the eighth mile upward, and who knew how many miles switch backing through the wilderness, even Ivy and I were starting to have to slow down. Foxstep relied on my physical abilities, and with the air so thin even with the potions, it took a toll on me.

The strangest part was that the power in the air started to feel more… active. It wasn’t quite mana, but it was definitely more of an active-state energy than the locked, passive energy that I was used to. The solar energy of the sun, and the lunar energy of space, beat down on us.

This seemed to start to take a toll even on Dusk, but Dawn seemed to enjoy the sensation. Her swimming through the air sped up, her mana felt richer, and even her dominion felt more potent, despite the fact that she hadn’t advanced.

By the nine-mile-high mark, Dusk was having to draw on her own Dominion to shield her from the power of the solar and lunar mana that was beating down from space, and I was increasingly certain that it was mana, and not energy.

As we kept trekking upward, my senses began to go slightly haywire. Internal Pocketwatch was struggling to connect with the world’s time, and the weave of space around me seemed strangely bunched and warped in some spots, while oddly smooth and almost empty in others.

There was almost no life in the air, but the flows of life energy in all of our bodies felt… changed. I didn’t know how, my senses flickering oddly, but I knew that it was changing, somehow. Death seemed to change within the food we ate as well, and Kene, Ivy, and Dusk all reported feeling similar changes in the environment, with only Dawn projecting the sense that things seemed normal to her.

Stranger still, the temperature started to rise until it was warm enough that we didn’t need the warming potions, though it was still far too cold to forgo the cold weather clothing.

As if that wasn’t odd enough, there was the fact that my winds of resolve and fortune, as well as Ivy, Dusk, and Dawn’s wind of destiny, grew more intense. They whipped around in our spirits like wild, without seemingly any sort of direction or focus. Kene, who had thus far neve been able to sense the winds, fell into a stupor when we opened the portal, and emerged with the winds of resolve, and with their Nascent Truth transformed into the Truth of Aid, a somewhat broader and more powerful Truth than succor.

I suspected that they’d been right on the edge of it for a long time, given their near-endless struggle against the hag, but had simply had trouble manifesting it, perhaps due to the fact that they’d accepted the hag as a part of them for so long, rather than fighting it. Being up in a spot like this must have tipped them over the edge.

Strangest of all, however, past that point we didn’t encounter a slaughter spirit. Not a single one.

We continued up, despite all of the oddities mounting. Each day, we were forced to end slightly earlier, as the brutal conditions slowed us down, but after a period of time that I didn’t completely understand, nor did I think I ever would be able to understand, we approached the summit. The entire Isle of Crysite was spread out around and beneath us, divided into five great sections by rivers that encircled the mountain, like the spokes of some great, turning wheel.

When we finally came to the summit of the mountain, it was rather abrupt. One moment, we were practically scaling a sheer cliff wall, using Immovable Lock, dominions, and flight spells respectively, and the next we were in a small, shallow bowl at the top of the mountain.

In the center of the small basin was what looked to be a massive metallic meteor, roughly the size of my body. Even in my warped and changed senses, I could feel that it was… strange. I didn’t have words to describe it.

There seemed to be spellforms or runes on it, but when I focused on them, they were barely there at all. Except they were absolutely there, and always had been, and always would be. They were written in a language I couldn’t understand, which was odd because spells weren’t a language at all, and these weren’t a language either, but spell forms powered by magic.

In the center of the meteor, there was a small sapling of what had to be a crossbreed of the purestar, hollowvoid, and lushloam trees. The sapling was small, crumpled, and weak up so high, but the power it projected was immense. It was weak, and yet not weak, and I did not know how it could be that way, but it was.

I studied it for a moment, and I perfectly understood everything about this… Something. Something, because the moment I stopped studying, I no longer understood any of it.

Dawn, on the other hand, seemed to understand all of it perfectly. She shot to the meteor and dissolved inside of it. Her dominion flowed out, lightning up the strange spells on its surface, and I wondered if maybe her second, full-gate spell was designed not for getting into people’s souls, but for getting into this meteor. It was a baseless theory, and I thought I was missing a sizeable chunk of the truth, but I couldn’t shake the idea entirely.

As the meteor began to glow, so too did the tree. Light began to shimmer and shine along its sparse leaves and roots, and the entire meteor and tree together lifted up into the air, levitating on seemingly nothing at all.

Then Dawn emerged from the tip of the tree, and the power hit us.

Power, not mana. Not energy. Not anything I knew or understood, though the closest thing I could compare it to was the sensation that drops of deep mana gave off, but even that wasn’t entirely correct. It was the same power, but in a different form, like looking at a grocer who you’d seen a few times at the store wearing a suit and mingling among high society, recognizable, but not exactly the same.

Whatever it may be, it crackled down from above, flooding into the meteor and the tree

Dawn sent me an impulse, and I quickly pulled out the intense shards of mana from the starfall that I’d collected for her, alongside the ordinary stones she insisted were needed for her advancement. She consumed them, and then the power blasted out from the meteor.

It struck all of us, but not evenly. The vast majority of it was flowing into Dawn, with a much smaller amount trickling into me. A smaller still amount flowed into Dusk, Kene, and Siobhan, equal for each of them, and a tiny string flowed into Ivy. It took me a moment to realize that it was going by advancement level, seemingly inversely proportional.

Dawn broke into third gate in an instant, and started rapidly advancing through it.

As it ran through me, I felt my spells falling into place, one at a time, perfectly advancing in a way I’d never experienced before, even when I’d taken the most potent of advancement elixirs.

Then I felt the winds of fortune stirring in my spirit, connecting to the deep mana imprint in my eyes. I saw my connection to Ed, and to my surprise, to Liz and Octavian as well.

They were in danger. All of them.