The Restored: Chapter Fourteen

Sorry about the delay, I thought I'd scheduled it, but it hadn't gone up.

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“What do you mean, is there somewhere else in Elderglass?” I demanded, crossing my arms. 

“And by the Thrones, what was that?” Jin followed up. “You just… Was that even safe?” 

“Safe is a relative term,” Devi said dismissively. “It was safe for me. Standing by it was safe for you all. If you’d shoved your hands in…” 

She made a so-so gesture. 

“Even odds that nothing would have happened or that you would have lost an arm. I lost a fingertip the first time I tried it, but not the second time, and that was before I had containers to help me capture the power.”

“You still have all your fingers,” Jin pointed out. 

“Irrelevant,” Devi said. 

I sighed, rubbing at the bridge of my nose. She thought she was being cool and mysterious, but honestly, she’d probably just had a healer re-grow it. Regrowing limbs was hard, but children could already re-grow the tips of their fingers naturally, and even a mortal healer could regrow them on adults. 

“Can you really spit us out anywhere in Elderglass?” I asked, trying to drag the conversation back on track. “I thought the vault’s real world geographic tether was in Saxum?” 

“It’s somewhere in the mountains between Elderglass and Saxum, she was stretching in both directions, but yeah, it was. And I can get us most places in Elderglass given a few hours to walk and set up the ritual. Any serious warder takes steps to prevent portals from being opened. If you’ll let me make a suggestion, though, you still need to kill Abraham. He likes to visit the Yuan Opera House, and while they’ve got great wards on their booths, they’re not nearly as strong in the performer’s places. You could slip in there, kill him while the performance is on, and get out.” 

Jin perked up at the mention of the mysterious man who had met with the Arenamaster before.

“We should try and get some information out of him before we kill him, though,” Jin said. “He’s probably got a better idea about what’s going on than anyone, short of the Arenamaster herself.” 

I grunted, then shook my head. 

“First of all, both of you are too casual about killing a man. I don’t like him, and he’s a scourge on the city and the life of the innocents, but I’m not exactly chipper about an execution. Second of all, we’ve just loaded the bags with information about the Arenamaster, and haven’t even had a chance to go through it yet. I know I need to kill Abraham, but I also need to stop the Arenamaster and Alyphize.” 

I rubbed the bridge of my nose for the second time in moments, wishing that I could stare at something, anything, in this world of endless gray void. Having a nice painting on the wall to distract me. 

“I can drop you off near your boyfriend’s apartment, but I can’t imagine that you’re going to have another good opportunity to acquire my services,” Devi said. “It’s better for you to take the chance to get out somewhere strange. Or…”

Her eyes flickered around and she conjured a ball of purple light, then tossed it into the air. It melted into a dome of sparkling light around us. 

“Basic privacy dome, it will vanish entirely if something pushes through it to listen in on our conversation,” she explained. “It won’t stop them, but we can shift the topic. Anyways. If you’ve put more thought into my offer, I could really use your weird wardbreaker skills.” 

“What offer?” Jin asked.

“I want to kill Nexus,” Devi responded casually. “They’re a blight on the city.” 

“Sure, but that won’t intrinsically create a better system,” I argued. “It will just kill the people who are currently running it without actually fixing anything.” 

Jin made a humming sound. 

“Cancer,” she finally said. “They’re like cancer, right? Eating up a bunch of resources from the body, without actually helping anyone or improving things at all? You cut out a tumor before you can use healing magic on it.” 

Devi suddenly looked shifty at that, and I resisted the urge to rub my nose for the third time in what felt like as many minutes. 

“Well. They’re not helping enough,” she said. “Sometimes they help, but only when it’s advantageous for them to do so. They’re trying to get their hands on some stuff to increase the amount of ambient aura in the city. But they’re also basically forcing me and Axel and others to work for them, so we don’t just go to prison for life.” 

“What? Why do they need to increase the ambient aura?” Jin asked. “I noticed my aura doesn’t recharge nearly as fast here, but…” 

A part of me felt bad that the ambient aura was the part Jin had honed in on, rather than the fact that they were manipulating people via blackmail, but I couldn’t say I was too surprised. She had been raised by the Arenamaster, after all. 

“How about we don’t have this conversation in a soul-crushing void of nothingness?” I asked. “We’re getting off on a tangent every thirty seconds. One thing at a time – let’s deal with the Arenamaster, then we can see about doing something about Nexus. I agree that Nexus has to go, but this isn’t the place, nor the time.” 

“Alright, whatever,” Devi said, rolling her eyes at me. 

I had the urge to tell her to take this seriously and not to roll my eyes at me, but tamped down on it. I wasn’t going to make any progress at all by trying to act like the parent that Devi didn’t have, especially given how half the reason she wanted to kill Nexus was so nobody would have her on a metaphorical leash. 

Devi turned and gestured for us to follow her as she walked down through the endless gray. As she did, the purple light of her dome followed her. Jin and I quickly moved to catch up with her – not an especially hard feat for us, given how much taller and longer legged I was, and that even Jin had a bit of height on her.  

“I can get you into Rhys’ apartment, orr I can get you on the same floor as it, if you don’t want to be creepy,” she said. “And by the way, you should tell him that relying on his candle array only works if he uses different types of candle. Using only beeswax means that I can circumnavigate it with a bit of randomization and time.” 

“Noted,” I said, though I had no idea what she was talking about. “Go ahead and just bring us to the door, though? Teleporitng in is, as you said, somewhat creepy.” 

We walked for almost a full hour, wandering back and forth in a strange zig-zag pattern in one spot, turning around backwards for another, and even jumping. We didn’t jump to another, higher bit of ground, but rather jumped in place. Eventually, Jin broke the silence with a question. 

“How does its geolocation lock work in a place like Elderglass, which has buildings that are dozens of stories tall?” 

Devi perked up at getting to show off her knowledge, and turned to Jin with a grin. 

“It works because the entirety of superposition principle of the Wandering Path,” Devi said. “The path is flat, right? But the world isn’t. Not only that, but it’s all hyper-condensed on all five axes, and overlaid within said superposition. You can usually determine a superimposed part of reality by the mild grayshift. And this means…” 

As she droned on, I caught the words “Equirectangular projection”, “planar meridians”, “ universalist leyline principal”, “spatial metamorphosing”, and a bunch of other words that were probably incredibly exacting to her, as an expert in the field, but meant nothing to me. 

“And this doesn’t even begin to touch on the cross-planar theory, or 

I also caught the absolutely starstruck look of adoration on Jin’s face as she listened raptly, trying to absorb every bit of information that she could from the other woman. I snorted, and both of them turned to look at me. 

“What?” Jin snapped. 

“Nothing, just… reminiscing,” I said. 

I knew full well that I’d had a similar look on my face when I’d been Jin’s age, listening to Deepwater talk about the application of conceptual pressure via faerie magic. 

“Well, we’re here,” Devi said, stretching as she stopped walking. Her tattoos began to writhe and twist, gray light that barely stood out against the background of the plane. She began to spin and twist them around, drawing shapes in the air that hung in suspension, all while flicking her other hand into lines and shapes. 

Purple light flew through her fingers, then a ruddy red light, followed by green, then pure white. I wasn’t even really able to guess which realms magics she was using, or what specific boons she was using, but I did take notice when she manifested a dagger in her hand and ripped downwards. The air in front of her parted, opening smoothly into a portal that looked out onto the halls of Rhys’ apartment complex. She’d gotten uncannily close, appearing only two doors down from Rhys’ front door, which… Frankly made me a bit worried about Rhys’ safety if Nexus decided he needed to die. 

“Why was the portal earlier opaque, but this one transparent?” Jin asked.

“No,” I started to say, but Devi was already answering.

“That’s easy – last time, I was having to route the portal through a series of relays, but this time, I’m reshaping the Path on a semi-local level and directly–” 

It was the last I heard as I stepped through the portal, not willing to listen to another hour long lecture. Well, if she said it was easy, then maybe twenty minutes. Either way, I wasn’t subjecting myself to it. 

Now that I was back on the world of Cré, rather than the Wandering Path, I took in a deep, long breath of air. The air in the Path was perfectly breathable, but it was completely, perfectly bland, in the same way that the temperature was neither hot nor cold, neither dry nor humid. Here I could smell the copper of the city in full force, hidden only slightly by the must of the carpets beneath my feet. I glanced around, happy to see the painted brown walls, and the faint spots where the paint flaked away to reveal the copper. 

It was such a stark relief from the nothingness of the Wandering Path that I was tempted to hug the wall, but I resisted, turning to look at the portal in the air. I sat there, tapping my foot, until Devi reached out and took Jin’s wrists for a moment, pressing her thumbs into Jin’s forearm, and then let go. A moment later, Jin stepped through the portal, holding the bag that Devi had put everything in, and the portal shut behind us. I gave her a smile, then we walked to Rhys’ door and knocked.