The Restored: Chapter Twenty-Five

Precision casting was difficult. I’d never been the best at shaping the super fine details of metals. I could manipulate metallic threads into general shapes well enough, but the stitching was held together more by wishes and aura than by any actual skill at weaving. 

Which was why my plan was probably enormously stupid.

I was working on creating a field of metallic dust that had been dulled enough to cover my presence as I floated along the copper of the city, while also relatively matching the colors of the soot-stained walls. It was quite a difficult bit of magic to create a cloud of such fine particulates that still had their original soot on them, move them around me to keep me obscured, and ensure that none of it got into my lungs. 

Luckily, copper and brass weren’t horribly toxic, so if I did breathe in a little bit, I’d probably be okay, but I’d prefer to avoid the risk entirely. 

Once I’d accumulated a large enough cloud, I coated myself in it and began to creep slowly but surely up the wall, and around the bend into the view of the constables. Each time they turned to look in my general direction, I froze and flexed the cloud of copper shavings to stillness, mimicking the wall behind me as best I could while leaving a few small holes to breathe and see through. 

It was painfully slow going, but I eventually reached the air duct where I’d sensed the unusual opening, and floated my way inside, detaching the ventilation grate with a simple metal spell. If I’d been in a normal vent in the street or overcity, I’d have struggled to fit in the ventilation shaft, but the undercity, being underground, required a huge amount of airflow and enchanting work to prevent its air from going stale. 

I floated by the enchantments until I found a small alcove, probably the spot I’d sensed, and there, huddled in the center, was Jessica and her husband. Her husband was laid out, muttering to himself, his head clearly altered by some sort of spell. Jessica had the slightly distant look in her eyes that suggested that her demon was disjointing her mind from the biology of her brain, but she still lit up when she saw me. 

“Axel!” she said. “I thought you were… Well, I don’t know. I suspected the worst.” 

“What’s happening?” I asked. “I checked up on you, and your wards were disabled, so I broke in and got a call from the Arenamaster, so I created a simulacra…” 

I trailed off as she shook her head and told me to slow down, so I did, starting from my work with Devi to break into the Arenamaster’s vault, meting with Hadiya, visiting her apartment, getting a call, and sending a simulacra in my stead. 

After I’d finished, Jessica ran through an abridged rendition of her own capture, ritual sabotage, killing the demon escape, and explained that she’d been working on trying to create a ritual to safely levitate them up to the street city and detach the grate, while also wrapping them in a veil to avoid any watchers that the Arenamaster might have left. 

“Smart,” I said. “I can handle the levitation and the grate, but my copper veil was iffy just getting here. If you could handle the rest… Did you sabotage the draining array that was being used?” 

“No, I didn’t know which parts had been altered, and which were relevant to airflow to the underground. I didn’t want to kill someone by accident. Also, I didn’t have a good way to destroy inlaid magic like it,” Jessica explained. “But hearing what the Arenamaster is up to, regardless of if it’s un-sundering a Sundered Throne, or trying to take control over the Throne of Greed, let me review.” 

I nodded and paced into the room, Jessica following me to study the ritual. I was no master ritualist, but I’d taken a few courses as a part of my degree, and in my career as an airship engineer, I’d had a good bit of time working with rituals. There were definitely parts of this array that reminded me of the lights and air flow enchantments used in airships, but there were vast swathes of the magic that were completely different, with meanings so esoteric that I couldn’t even guess at them. 

It was complex magic, with three different circles that were all nested inside of one another, anchors to the Wandering Path that resembled the one on the Arenamaster’s throne, and more. The metal of the spell was a half dozen different types, each one likely carrying its own, unique meaning. 

But one thing that was obvious was the brightly glowing knot of twisting red magic in the center of the room. 

“You never mentioned that,” I said, pointing to it. 

“Mentioned what? The chair I was tied to?” 

For a moment, I thought she was being sarcastic, but when she was like this, that tended to take a lot of effort. Besides, I couldn’t exactly see her making jokes in a situation as serious as this one.

“Can you not see the magic?” I asked. “The red knot with lines arcing off in different directions?” 

“No,” Jessica said, sounding troubled. “Is it possible the Arenamaster cast a spell on you?” 

“It’s definitely possible. We spoke and met several times. Do you think she knew that I’d disobey?” 

“You were always the uppity one. It’s likely. I was drugged. Fallen Void, now I wish I’d kept the demon alive to get information out of them. No logic in regret. Let me analyze the spell.” 

I stepped back and let her work, until she stepped toward the circle and beginning to point specific spots. 

“Destroy these.” 

I nodded and cast a pair of spells. The first was a little more complex, melting and fusing my cloud of copper back together, but the second was a simple metal movement spell. 

The biggest issue with witches and ritual magic as a whole is that it’s delicate and complicated. That’s why Jessica and Hadiya both carried enchanted items to fight, and even the Arenamaster had used them in the White Rooms. Ritual magic is too slow and delicate to use in a fight.

This array might be a complex work of art, one that required months to charge, thousands of thin panes of components, and the work of an expert to create. 

But all it took to break it was a big stick. 

A crowbar of copper smashed into the cheap paneling of the floor as the lines of inlaid metals in the indicated area were ripped from the ground and crumpled into a little ball. 

Bit by bit, Jessica walked around the circle, leading me to the points that I needed to destroy in order to mess with the Arenamaster’s plan without destroying the airflow, lightning, and heating enchantments. 

It was when we were about halfway through that I noticed something beginning to happen. The entire building we were in trembled, ever so slightly, as if the anchoring enchantment had flickered. The lights in the hall suddenly began to glow brighter, and Jessica frowned. 

I was a little distracted, though, as the anchor that I’d connected to the simulacra was going haywire. My aura had started flooding into the connection, more than enough to drain me dry in a few seconds. 

As if that weren’t strange enough, the hole in my aura that was stealing power and returning it began to react as well. Its own drain shot upwards, and so did the amount of power it was pouring into me. The connection stretched, pointing near the center of the city, and it almost felt as if my aura was crackling through an entirely other point in space. I couldn’t feel it or shape it, and yet I could, almost like the connection I shared with Odril.

Was this related to the Arenamaster? Was it the magic that she had cast onto me? 

Questions for later. Right now, the intense drain and intense return flow had mostly leveled out, with it only draining a touch more than it gave. With my heavy investment in aura regeneration from my own recharge, as well as my third arch-star, I’d be fine. 

But not if my simulacra kept draining me like this!

I reached into my aura and gazed through its eyes as I worked to shut it off, and what I saw made my breath catch. 

All across the city, lights were going out, while other lights were blazing brighter. The lights began to burn out, and suddenly they became solid beams of light, aura reflecting into one another to form a massive, five pointed star. 

And I was one of the points. The blazing bundle of burning red light in my chest was one of the points of the star, and it was taking power from me. 

Then I felt it starting to shove something else in. Like the worming, writhing sensation of a parasite cutting a hole in my skin, burrowing into my flesh, and laying eggs that would hatch into more of its spawn and continue the cycle, something was coming into me. 

“Axel…?” a sleepy, feminine voice said. A voice I hadn’t heard in years. 

Odril.

It was almost enough to convince me to let the burrowing magic seep into me. Almost. I heaved, and flexed my aura, splitting my mind to shaping out two spells

The first was the spell to slag metal, which I sent through my simulacra, melting all the metal in the area. That would probably cause some of the building to crumble, but it had already been largely destroyed in the attack, and I needed to get rid of whatever rituals the Arenamaster had laid here. 

The wave of magic exploded from my simulacra, and I cast the second spell, the one that shattered my connection to the magical automaton. The last thing I saw before the scrying spell fading was airships being forced to make emergency landings. All save for two: the Malapert, the crown jewel of elucidite labs. And a lightly armored cruiser that looked familiar.

I snapped back to my own body, then reached inside me for where I’d heard Odril, for the briefest of seconds. Nothing. Odril was as sealed as ever.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered to her, unsure if she could hear me or not. Then I straightened. I still had a job to do. 

Jessica, who had been in the circle, indicating the spots I needed to destroy, was trapped in the same wave of magic that I’d been caught in, so I yanked her out of the circle with the metal in her belt. She blinked, then turned.

“You okay?” 

“Yes,” she said. She clearly wasn’t, I could tell that much, even through the magic letting her move. “Scrap it all except for those two portions.” 

“Are you sure?” 

“Those are the emergency backup portions. I thought we had time to do this right, but the emergency systems will have to do for now.” 

I flexed my aura and spun it into a spell, then ripped all the lines of magic from the circle. There was a small explosion of red light that left me blinking away stars from my vision. 

When it cleared, there was still some red light flowing through the emergency systems, but the nest of red light that had been the Arenamaster’s orb was gone. Jessica patted me on the shoulder.

“Go,” she said. “Stop her.” 

“I can’t lea–” 

“You aren’t,” she said, and her smile turned wicked. “The Arenamster left me with a sympathetic link to her entire circle. I’m going to be doing what I can to stop her. But without any enchantments, I’m not a combat mage. You are. Go. Kill her.” 

“I will,” I said, pulling my sister into a quick hug, then striding to the vent. I shot upward into the air, ripping through the grate as I soared into the street city.