The Restored: Chapter Fifteen

It took us the better part of half an hour to fill Kelly and Rhys in on everything that had happened during our escapade, and when we finished, Kelly leaned back in the metal chairs around the dining table and closed his eyes. 

“Wow. That’s… What was she doing with a copy of the city?” 

“That’s the part you focus on?” I asked with a frown, but to my surprise, both Rhys and Kelly nodded. 

“Sympathetic principles are some of the most foundational concepts in ritual magic, and are even used in some sorcery spells. Mind sorcery, like the kind Kelly uses, is particularly steeped in the concept,” Rhys said. “While it’s possible she had created a scale model of Elderglass due to her being a hobbyist, do you really think that’s likely?” 

“No,” Jin said. “The only hobby I ever saw her engage in was business meetings, ritual magic, and spending time with Alyphize behind closed doors. I burst in on them once, but they were just doing more ritual magic. Boring.”

Kelly arched an eyebrow in confused, then realized what Jin meant, and his face flushed. I shook my head at the both of them in faint amusement, while Rhys shot Jin a somewhat disapproving look. 

“Anyways, no, that really does make me wonder exactly why she’s got one,” Kelly said after a moment. “How accurate did you say it was? It’s not just a map.” 

I looked at Jin for an answer. She and Devi had been the ones to look over the model, not me, so she’d be able to answer better than I could. 

“Fairly accurate overall, but spookily and uncannily accurate in a few specific spots,” Jin said. “It even had parts under the table that represented the undercity, and had been updated to show off all the spots that she’d targeted. Zone’s gro–” 

“Jessica,” I said. “Your name is Jin. My name is Axel. Her name is Jessica.” 

“Jessica’s grocery store,” Jin corrected. “It was modeled in a lot of detail, down to the shape of some of the burn marks.” 

“I don’t suppose you’ve formed the perfect memory arch-star?” Rhys hoped. 

“No.” 

“Kelly, could you pull the image from Jin’s mind and show it to all of us? And if you can, then Jin, would you be willing to let him?” 

“Sure, it’s easy,” Kelly agreed. “It will only be as good as her memory, so the details might be wrong. Memory’s really not that good, despite what most people think.”

Jin’s jaw worked for a few moments before she nodded. Kelly raised his hand, flexing it back and forth a few times, before an image popped up in the air before us. 

Just as Kelly had said, the image was actually pretty bad. There were towers that represented the hundreds of tall buildings in Elderglass, but the number of towers was indistinct, and focusing on any building in particular caused the whole image to blur. 

There was the underground section beneath the table, but the tunnels were a hazy mess, all save for Cipher Nightclub, which was… also kind of a mess, albeit one that was filled with char, smoke, and ash. The symbols made of ash and smoke were definitely there, but trying to focus on them made things even hazier, and after a moment, I heard Kelly reprimanding me. 

“Stop focusing on the parts that are blurry! It’s straining the spell.” 

“Sorry,” Rhys, Jin, and I all said at once. 

Well, maybe he wasn’t just reprimanding me. 

I studied the scene, letting myself grow cross eyed for a moment, which actually helped. Blurring my vision allowed me to take in the scene as a whole, without losing anything to the lack of detail. 

As I thought over it, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something looked… familiar about it. Again, much like when I’d seen the Contractor’s throne or his summoning circle, there was just…

My eyes snapped into focus and I looked at Kelly. 

“Put Elucidate Labs in the center, then light up a huge ring around the city that runs through with Zone’s grocery to the south-west, the White Rooms to the west-north-west, the hotel dead-on to the north, and Cypher Nightclub to the Southeast.” 

There was a moment of silence, then a glowing ring appeared, running through the intersection of all the points that I’d mentioned. 

“The Arenamaster, each time she appeared, had this ball of light, with strands of light that trailed off into the distance, and there were more strings each time,” I said, my heart starting to sink. “Can you connect those four spots with lines?” 

Shimmering red light traced between each of the points, and I let out a low, slow, loud curse. 

“Put one more point in the southwest this time, and connect it with all the others.” 

Lines of light traced out from a random spot in the southwestern part of the circle, and I was left looking at a familiar symbol. It wasn’t perfect, Kelly’s rough estimations for the lines and the location of the final spot making it a little bit off kilter, like a child had drawn it quickly on the back of a math test while daydreaming about their future as an ultra powerful mage. 

Even so, the symbol was utterly unmistakable: a five pointed star, bounded by a circle. One of the oldest and most powerful symbols in druidic magic, the symbol of summoning used from the Land of the Giants in the far north to the southernmost tip of Vyrma. 

A moment later, the illusion wobbled and vanished, and Kelly rubbed at his eyes. 

“Augh. Creating that much detail in a mental image taken from someone else who didn’t even have that image in her head is too much. Sorry, I can’t hold it any longer.” 

“It’s fine,” I said, patting his shoulder. “You did well.” 

I looked up at Rhys and frowned. 

“A city wide circle. How much power would that collect? She’s taken in dozens of aura sparks from the attacks too, maybe hundreds.”

“I’m assuming that it’s draining everything it can, any power from loose aura sparks, from aura generators, from ambient aura, the ley lines, and from… Everything. Fallen Void, I don’t even know. Millions of aura units? Tens of millions? Hundreds? Calculating on that sca…” 

He trailed off as his eyes went wide. 

“No…” 

“What?” 

“The center of the ritual is the center of the city, which we were thinking of as Elucidate Labs,” Rhys said in a rush. “But it’s not just the labs. Most major government buildings are in that region too, including the Central Bank, and its secondary branch…” 

He took a deep breath. 

“The Central Aura Depository.”

“But that’s all locked up,” Kelly said. “It’s stored in massive aura crystals, and most of it’s not even in the bank itself, right? I learned that in school, the storage is all around the city, in secured facilities.” 

“Absolutely,” Rhys agreed. “But they’re all connected to the Central Aura Depository. After the northern wars resolved, we were gifted a set of crystals that can store over a mega-unit of aura for our contributitions in overthrowing their regime. Paerús’ mines are historically quite significant, and ot’s actually suspected tha–”

“We don’t need a history lesson,” I interjected. 

“Right. The gifted crystals serve as the main reserve nodes, and while they are scattered across the city, alongside dozens of other smaller aura banks and mass generators, they’re all linked. It’s one central power grid, with some self sustaining portions like airships that run on their own aura generators.”

“That’s all well and good, but the power is stored,” Jin said. “It doesn’t matter. I can throw an aura crystal into a spell a witch built, but unless they build a specific circle to drain the aura out of the crystal, it won’t do anything.” 

“That’s true, normally,” Rhys agreed. “But two things. First, there’s only a handful of precedents for nationwide arrays. In the northern wars, the founding of the Ulacto empire, and Vyrma’s treehomes. Each time they’ve been used, the scale has been so big that it’s seemed to break the rules.” 

I knew where Rhys was going with this, and he was speaking so fast that he looked like he was going to turn blue in the face from the lack of air. I took pity on him and finished the second point. 

“And second, are you really telling me that the Arenamaster wouldn’t be willing to break into a bank in order to inscribe a draining array to power her mega-spell?” 

“True,” Jin conceded. 

Kelly sat back in his chair and let out a long curse. I just nodded my agreement, and even Rhys didn’t shoot us a dirty look this time. We all just sat there, processing, for a long moment, until Rhys was the first one to break the silence.

“Well, I suppose this answers the question of why, at least a little bit. We knew there had to be more to it than siphoning aura sparks to grow Alyphize. Do we think that she’s trying to create a new Throne?”

“No,” I answered immediately. “The Thrones are really complex and delicate pieces of magic. We saw the Contractor’s, and his had thirteen circles in it, not just one big one. She’s gathering power for something, but…” 

“She’s claiming a Throne,” Kelly suggested. 

“Going after the Throne of Greed?” Jin followed up.

“This almost seems like overkill, but… It could be?” 

Kelly’s eyes widened, and he looked at me seriously. 

“Hey. You said there are eleven big Thrones, then lots of little ones that serve under the big ones or else are small, independent ones, right?” 

“Sure,” I agreed. “Pain, Pride, Greed, Love–”

“Right,” Kelly said, cutting me off. “But you also said that there were two Thrones that used to be a part of the big wigs, a part of the elven, but got broken.” 

“The Sundered Thrones,” Rhys said. “No… She wouldn’t. She’s not that stupid. Would that even work?” 

“Keliathri, Jessica’s demon, said that the Throne of the Gambler had been sundered by the Throne of Pleasure at one point in the past, but that Alyphize and the Arenamaster had fed it more power than it had seen since before its sundering.” 

I knew I was paraphrasing, but for the life of me, I couldn’t remember the exact phrasing that Keliathri had used. 

“She’s run arenas in Elderglass and Saxum at least, and judging from those papers, probably at least one other country,” Jin continued. “She fed it enough power for the Throne to have a good standing as a serving Throne to the Throne of Greed.” 

“And she had her entire arena set up as a method to funnel power,” I said, remembering the horrible mistake I’d made in killing the man disassembling her large scale spell array. “Meaning she knows better than anyone else that the method to bring a Throne from a sundered, broken state back to full operations is to feed it power. And if this ritual would have anything, it’s power.” 

“What does she get out of it?” Kelly asked. In response, I pulled out the sheet of paper containing the details on the experimentation she’d done on the kids she’d adopted over the years.

“We’ll need to go through this in more detail, because I suspect it has some of the answers, but look at the top sheet. There are five names listed: Firefright, Mist, Zone, Deepwater, and Soulwitch. Soulwitch already has a checkmark, though. She calls them the five enforcers. Enforcers might not be a demonic title in the same vein as Throne, Heir, Aspirant, or Impartiate, but it seems obvious to me that these were the five servitors.” 

“But why?” Jin said. “I mean, do you think Alyphize is the Soulwitch? I guess that makes some sense, but she’s more of a probability mage, to my understanding.” 

“No,” Rhys said grimly. “I don’t think Alyphize is the Heir to the Throne of the Gambler. I think she’s an Aspirant of this Sundered Throne. And Alyphize isn’t the Arenamaster’s familiar – the relationship is the other way around.”

Jin still didn’t seem to get it, so I explained.

“The Arenamaster is Alyphize’s familiar. Her pet elf, her mortal agent.” 

“Oh.” 

And that about summed it up.