The Third Portal: Chapter Fifty-One

Meadow, Kene, and I bantered a few names back and forth, before Kene suggested someone that surprised me. 

“What about that forest dragon? The one whose mom we worked with for the mantle estragon eggs? You mentioned that he was powerful, right?” 

“Ivy? Yeah, in terms of raw power, he’s an absolute beast – no pun intended. The only person I’ve even met who came close was the assassin, and her legacy literally let her take the size from, steal parts of, and break down the mana-gardens of others for power.” 

“I do worry about the fact that the boy’s been born here and now,” Meadow said. “If he had been born in the territory of Vivian the Death Queen, he easily could have been a critical member of the resistance.” 

I gave her a curious look, as did Kene. 

“This is the second time in a short while that someone powerful has mused about Vivian,” Kene said. “Is something happening with her?” 

“I’m not sure. What I can see of destiny has become increasingly cloudy and confusing.”

I bit my lip. Considering Meadow’s speciality was in the reading of the winds to let her counter the movements of other Magi, that was more than a little concerning. After a few moments, Meadow waved her hand, as if to physically brush the subject aside. 

“Well, regardless of all that, I think it is a good idea to invite Ivy. He needs more friends. Being born in a draconic form with more power than any of your peers can be quite lonesome.” 

I agreed, and we turned the topic to lighter things after that. Kene and Meadow gossiped about the space race, and the fact that Aergarde had managed to get a life support pod to hang outside of Ddeaer’s atmosphere for three hours before recalling it. I listened with only half an ear, since I wasn’t overly concerned with the political posturing of other countries. 

I did wonder how my grandparents were doing though. My grandmother in Elohi had sent a card to the bakery for my birthday, including a few sketches of some of the artifacts that she was looking into, focusing on a particularly old artifact that had supposedly been one of the first known instances of industrial farm enchantments. 

Her ex-husband in Aergarde, on the other hand, hadn’t done anything, as per usual. Honestly, he could have been killed in one of the corporation battles, and I wouldn’t have even known. 

After finishing dinner, we headed to the site where the massive empowerment ritual had taken place and began to clean up. 

The first things I noticed as I entered the clearing were the faded forms of Arthur and Hannah, who tiredly met us with a wagging tail and a wave. As beings made up of mana, donating that much power to the array in the end had taken a toll on them, and I began pushing death magic through my tethers to both of them, restoring what I could. Both of them slipped into my body, not wanting to waste the energy to manifest fully right now. 

Where the ghost of the enchanter who had helped me to construct the massive magical array had once been, there was now a manifested twisted ball of energy that resembled a binding-knot, though it was certainly distinct from a normal one.

I felt a mix of emotions upon seeing it. On one hand, the fact that the ghost had felt that her purpose was fulfilled, and that she didn’t have any other reason to linger in the world was a good thing. On the other hand, it was the passing of someone who I had spent the last several months working with. 

I bowed my head over the knot and released a flow of death mana, murmuring my thanks to the passed on ghost, as well as the ones that had passed on in my journey back to Mossford, though none of them had been powerful enough to leave something like this. 

I didn’t know if the spirit of the long dead enchanter could hear me. Even Orykson wasn’t sure what happened to a soul when it passed out of Ddeaer. But I liked to think that wherever they were, they could feel my gratitude for her help.

I raised my head after a few moments of silence, and lifted the knot-like structure, turning it over in my hands. It felt mostly neutral, like ungated mana, but it was clearly complex and layered like an enchantment or natural treasure. 

I held it out to Meadow and Kene to see what they made of it, and Kene was the first to speak. 

“I think it’s a growth untangler?” they said, glancing at Meadow, who nodded for them to continue. “It’s a minor enchantment on a malleable natural death treasure that absorbs mana to stand in for one of the components needed to upgrade a growth item to the next stage.” 

“That’s a thoughtful gift,” I said, nodding my thanks one last time. “Between it and some of what I looted from the desolant hive, I’ve got two thirds of the components to upgrade my runelight lens.”

I cast Transport Item, abusing my status as guardian over Dusk to warp it right into her vault, and then we shifted to cleaning up the aftermath of the ritual. 

Most of the components had been reduced to nothing more than death and desolation energy rich ash as the instabilities had reached critical levels and disintegrated them. 

That made them completely useless to any enchanting work, but great for alchemists. If we used a cauldron to separate the death from the desolation, we could create incredibly rich mana-water for the two types of energy. 

According to the rambling that Kene told me as we sorted out all of the stuff, the death mana-water had a hundred and one different uses, ranging from enhancing and improving fertilizer, to creating death magic advancement resources, to being used in some specific digestive aids. 

The desolation mana-water, on the other hand, might not be quite as useful for Kene, but to a combat alchemist like me, it would be a nice little boon. I could mix it with the components from the popping ash willow and firecreep to restock my supply of alchemical bombs, or mix it with some of the acid-drip creosote and the pollen of stillfield asters to create bonemelt acid, great for clearing out any more of the undead. 

Removing the metals that had been strung as wiring from spot to spot, and ran through the ground was a bit harder, especially since a metal mage wasn’t there to just wave their hand and extract it, but I hadn’t cultivated a physically powerful body for nothing. Shovels still worked just fine, and we were able to dig everything up and heap it into piles within the plain, unenchanted cauldrons, so that we could sell everything as scrap metals. I didn’t expect to make much for it, but it was best to recycle this sort of thing, especially since the copper could throw off the soil’s composition. 

Once we had cleared out everything that we could, Meadow threw some clover seeds around the clearing, and all three of us used Mass Enhance Plant Life to bring a huge surge of greenery back to where there had been bare dirt. 

Removing the standing stones that we had used as component shelves and guidance for the power of the alchemy in the cauldrons wasn’t within our current abilities, given that they were quite literally just massive slabs of rock, but I honestly thought that they looked kind of cool. I took a cutting of some pointer moss and placed it atop some, mixing in some transivy, and the reedy shieldstalk grass, and I flooded it with power to help it grow.

The moss and ivy readily accepted the power, covering portions of the stones. I felt like it gave the entire clearing an somber feel, like it was the site of some ancient ritual to direct the powers of the natural world. I supposed in a way, that’s what it had been, but that felt like stretching the meaning of ancient. 

With our work done, Meadow pointed back to the cottage. 

“Back to bed with the both of you,” she said. “It’s already late enough, and you’ll have plenty of running about to do soon enough.”

After sleeping for days in a soul-strained haze, I didn’t expect to be able to go back to bed quite so quickly, but to my surprise, I found that the physical exertion of taking apart the array to be quite the impetus for a quick nap. 

Despite Meadow’s words, we didn’t leave the following morning. After passing out for so long, Kene had worried Alice and several of the other members of his village, and spent some time with them, reassuring them that nothing terrible had happened. Kene also used the time to gather the potions that they were planning to sell in Port Ruby for points. 

During this time, Dusk and Dawn both woke up. Dusk’s form was still smokey, strained by the effort she’d put into pulling all of the power together, but Meadow reassured me that she would be fine with time. 

“I’m frankly not entirely convinced you can kill a worldspirit with something so mundane,” Meadow said, shrugging. “They’re rare, and it’s not a theory I care to test, but it seems inordinately difficult.” 

“What about Idyll’s destruction?” I asked curiously. “She would have died.” 

“That was a rather extraordinary circumstance, where they attempted to sever her spirit from her realm. Dusk and the world around her are one – separating her spirit from her realm is like attempting to sever your body from your spirit.” 

I remembered the way I’d paced at the portal to the astral realms Idyll’s realm had been reformatted into, waiting for Kene to emerge. Had that all been pointless? 

No, I had felt those cracks in space. They were strange, deep, and maybe even dangerous. Except, spatial magic wasn’t supposed to be able to hurt people. I couldn’t teleport a rock in half, let alone kill a person by teleporting their head off their body. 

“If you sever the connection between a pocket space or demiplane to Ddeaer, what happens?” I asked Meadow. “Is that different for astral planes like Dusk or what Idyll once was?” 

“Pocket spaces, demiplanes, shadow realms, and even time catches simply spill their real contents out into the world. Astral planes are the only thing I know of that doesnt. They also have the highest possible planar membrane stability, roughly the same level of stability as the membrane of the real world, which leads to a few major theories.” 

I raised my eyebrows, impressed that she knew so much. Then again, hadn’t she told me she’d done a lot of research into spatial and temporal magic when she’d decided to take me on as an apprentice? 

“The first theory is the destruction theory,” Meadow continued. “The idea that an astral realm, severed from our world, is completely destroyed, along with all of its contents. Planar stability of that level being completely removed from our realm somehow triggers a reaction that no other spatial mana can manage.” 

“That seems… somewhat reasonable, but also a bit of a stretch,” I admitted. “I mean, if it were just a matter of stability, then attacks with spatial mana seem like they’d be more feasible than they are.”

“That’s the biggest issue with the theory – it proposes a completely emergent trait of spatial energy, and assumes it creates distraction. Which is why the second and third theories exist: doorless room theory and universe theory,” Meadow said, pausing to take a sip of her tea before continuing. 

“Doorless room theory suggests the membranes being so thick it’s like building a wall between our world and the astral plane, with the anchor serving as a door. When the anchor is destroyed, the wall fills in the gap. The astral realm is still out there, but it's separated by a wall, like a room in a house with no door to access it. If a spell was ever created that could find the rooms and drill holes into the membrane, you could theoretically make a new door.” 

“That… does make some sense. It would also explain the danger I felt from the cracks – my spirit was warning me that I was about to get trapped behind a wall, like the Cask of Vinopaen Vintage story.” 

“Exactly. Universe theory is similar, but different. It posits that instead of being like a house, our world is more like a bubble. When an astral plane is created, it’s another bubble adjacent to ours, and if the anchor is broken, it simply floats off. Some proponents of this theory suggest that’s how our universe got its start – a continually growing speck of a realm that eventually grew to its current size.” 

“Huh. I suppose that would also make a bit of sense, though it’s hard to properly visualize the nothingness between universes. My brain keeps jumping to darkness, but that’s lunar energy, not true nothingness. Do you know which theory Orykson believes in?” 

“Universe theory,” Meadow said. “He and the Spatial King have had a few debates over it – one time, they even hosted an open floor debate between the two theories at, oh, I believe it was Starspear College? Plus they’ve both lectured at Lledrith about it. But we’ve gotten pretty far afield…”

I laughed my agreement and apologized.