The Third Portal: Chapter Thirty-Three

I nodded my agreement to Hannah’s statement as I stretched out my limbs, shaking myself off. Throwing that much power into a spell had left me feeling wrung out in both body and spirit. It was unusual for my life energy to get so depleted these days, but powering something that far above me had been more than enough. Magister’s Body was already churning to restore me, but with my mana so low, it was working on dregs. 

Dusk let out a huff and shook herself, conjuring her cloud, only for it to vanish and for her to fall. I barely managed to snag her before she fell, and she grumbled at me that she shouldn’t have had to drain so much atmospheric power for it. 

“I’m sure you’ll be up and flying within an hour or two,” I reassured her.

Dawn drifted over, somehow managing to fly through the air with her spiritual body, despite the fact that she seemed equally wrung out. She slid into my mana-garden, where she curled around the beastgate and took a nap. 

Kene and Siobhan were the next to emerge from the portal, and despite the fact their mana was clearly dry, they actually seemed much less taxed than Dusk, Dawn, or myself. I supposed that made a sort of sense – both Dusk and Dawn had poured their dominion into the gourd, while Kene had just provided mana, and Siobhan had guarded the entryway to Dusk’s portal. 

Liz, Ed, and Kerbos were the last to emerge, also looking tired, but otherwise healthy. Dusk focused, and in a burst of movement, floated to stand in between Kerbos’ draconic shaped metal horns, where she flopped down to sit. 

“Is everyone okay?” I asked, glancing around. “Nobody’s hurt, right?” 

Everyone took a moment to check themselves over, and while Ed had a few scratches on his arms from his stone breaking, and Liz had some on her legs from when she’d ran across the grass, neither one was bad enough that they were in any real danger, and Kene gave them a thick cream to put on the cuts. It wasn’t as strong as a proper healing potion, only really rated for scratches, but it also had very low mana toxicity. I needed some on my back, where a few of the missiles had perforated my defenses and left me scratched as well. 

“Depending on how long it’s been holding onto the territory, there might be some interesting things built up here,” Liz pointed out while Kene spread the cream on my back. “Slaughter spirits kill people and animals with wanton abandon, sure, but they typically don’t just destroy mana sources or natural treasures. By driving off the animals that would normally consume them to advance, there might be a decent surplus.” 

“How long could an Arcanist have really held it, though?” I asked, only for Liz, Kene, and Ed to all give me a funny look. 

“What?” I asked. 

“How common do you think Arcanists are?” Liz asked. 

“Fairly common?” I said. “I mean, if you count false ones. True Arcanists are less common, but they’re still not…” 

“I think you’ve been spending too much time with Meadow,” Ed said. “They’re rare. Not unheard of, but definitely rare.”

“In Mossford, only about two percent of the population are Arcanists,” Hannah provided helpfully. “Though I don’t know what the statistical difference is between one who forced an ascension and one who didn’t.”

“That’s still one in fifty,” I said, shrugging. “No–”

“It’s even rarer in the wilds,” Liz pointed out, interrupting my statement before I could get going. “In Mossford, we have a whole society, and industries dedicated to creating advancement resources. For a lot of history, an Arcanist was on the level of a duke, or even a monarch of a small nation. Not only that, but when it comes to slaughter spirits, most animals and natural spirits won’t engage, since the slaughter spirit will try to kill them, even at the cost of its own life.” 

“Okay, yeah, I get it,” I said. “It could have been here a long time. I still don’t think it– ow!” 

Ed had thrown a pebble at me, so I kicked some dirt at him. 

“Stop moving,” Kene ordered. 

When everyone was metaphorically bandaged up, we all cast our mana senses out as wide as we could. While we did so, I knelt and placed a hand on the grass. My temporal mana hadn’t been drained too much in the fight, since I’d mainly used it for Material Echo and Foxstep.

I cast Lesser Psychometry on the grass the slaughter spirit had been hovering above when we’d entered, and let the memories flow into me, pairing it with Internal Pocketwatch to measure the flow of time in the memories. 

First there were flashes of patience, the spirit just hovering there for days, weeks, months, years. The other spirits and animals knew to keep away from the spirit, and it was abandoned. The memories kept stretching. A decade. Two. Three. Occasionally, there were flashes where the spirit left to kill something, but it always returned to the wound where it had been born. 

Seventy-eight years, six months, fourteen days, twenty-two minutes, and seventeen seconds ago, there was a burst of violence and fundamental… wrongness… as the world warped, magic inverting and creating a powerful spirit that went on a rampage. 

I could only see the memories of this specific spot, so I couldn’t see its full rampage, but I caught flashes of violence and power thrown around. 

Before that, the heavy death mana flowing through this area had drawn other creatures. Some of the natural undead shambled from spot to spot, while dark furred bunnies with horns of bone that dripped shadows hopped from spot to spot, drawing in the rich death mana left by the array.

More decades passed, the wilderness thinning, the ruins around me pulling themselves back together. Hundreds of years back, there were people. This had once been a street, and there were people walking, bustling, fleeing the city. The Song that had always filled the air, protecting them from dark things and shadows, keeping them loyal and strong, had vanished, and they had to leave. 

Time kept moving, and I saw the normal lives of people here, their clothes out of date, their carriages unenchanted. A duel had once happened right here in the street, when a horse had struck a mage’s son, and he’d called down lightning on the man, causing the Song to buzz louder in the air, granting a burst of its spring power into the man. It was Occultist magic that felt largely like forest mana, though with a slightly different orientation and focus to the blend. 

Then the roads vanished as the city shrunk in. In time, the Song of Spring arrived, a powerful spirit who resonated through the whole island, and…

My mana ran dry, and I was yanked back into my body, where I shook my hand out. 

“About eighty years,” I said. “Primes, there’s something… wrong… with slaughter spirits. I felt its creation, and it was…”

I cast about, looking for a word other than ‘wrong’ to describe it. 

“It was like the weird feeling you get when you see a wound that’s festering, and you can’t look away, no matter how gross it is,” I finished lamely. “But on a brighter note, there used to be bunnies that lived here!” 

“Awwww,” Ed said, smiling. “What sort?’ 

“Dunno, but they had bone horns. Very cute little buggers.” 

We began to pick our way through the ruins of the city, and what struck me more than anything else was just how eerie it was. I’d walked through forests back in Mossford, through the lands of Idyll’s plane, and along abandoned hiking trails in the dead of winter on the longest night of the year. 

But there was something wrong, on a deep level, about the slaughter spirit’s lands.

It wasn’t silence. I had heard people say that no forest was silent, and to an extent, it was true. Even the Beastgate Trial Trail hadn’t been completely silent, since wind had moved the trees, and clumps of snow had hit the ground. But there were similar noises here, with the occasional bursts of wind and the like. More, in some ways, as there were insects buzzing about, apparently so far beneath the slaughter spirit’s notice that they never bothered to kill them. Either that, or insect populations were too resilient, and it had been a cost-benefit analysis. 

“Probably that one,” Hannah whispered into my head. 

“Don’t read my thoughts,” I sniped. 

“Don’t let me into your head,” she pointed out. I just rolled my eyes and continued walking. 

Even if the lands were silent, there was still an unnatural stillness and lack of motion from anything larger than an insect, and something deeper than either of those, tickling at me. I did my best to push it down and focus on my senses. 

Aerde’s spell flickered and split into six, pointing out in slightly different directions, so I called a halt and explained the situation. 

“If your description of the array was anything to go off of, it probably covered between ten to thirty square miles, but it makes sense there were six key nodes where the array was stored, and it projected out,” Ed said. “It’s ultimately a fusion between enchanting, wardcrafting, and alchemy, right? So those are probably the ‘cores’ that the spell used for power and encode its instructions.” 

“Do we split up?” Liz asked. “We could cover more ground, and we are on a timer.” 

Dusk let out a bird caw, stating that we shouldn’t. Not only did I have the only spell to search for them, but we also might have attracted a predator with our fight, and it was better to stick together. 

“I can’t argue that,” Kene agreed, and I nodded. I raised my hand and cast about, then began turning left. 

“This way’s the closest.” I said. 

As we began making our way through the long-ago sunken streets and half-collapsed stone buildings, we found ourselves pausing every couple of minutes to pick up a mana source or two. Most of them were just death mana sources, but there were a few telluric, tempest, and some physical. Most of them were shelved in Dusk’s vault for resale and use in creating mana restoration potions. The prices we’d be selling them at were low, since we wouldn’t be putting them up as a private seller like the Glowing Soil Guild had, and we would be splitting them between Ed, Dusk, Liz, and myself. Even so, points were points, and I wasn’t about to turn them down for no reason. 

As we kept moving, the buildings became increasingly dilapidated. More wood had been used in their construction, and rotted away without the maintenance needed. I felt a source of death energy along one of the sunken streets and stepped over to find the ghost of a young boy floating over a half buried skeleton. The ghost stared at me blankly, then tilted his head. 

“I need to leave the island,” he said. “Mom and Dad and I are leaving, but there are so many people.”

I knelt and cast Lesser Psychometry on the bones. As I had suspected, the child had gotten separated from his parents while they were leaving the poor residential area, and caught under a crowd undergoing mass exodus, had been crushed. 

I gave him a said smile and spun a bit of death mana into a Ghost Tether, extending it to the child. 

“Here,” I said. “I can take you off the island.”

“I need to leave the island,” the ghost boy repeated, but he took the tether and slid into me, going dormant almost immediately. 

I felt a hand on my back, and Kene gave me a sad smile as I turned. 

We continued through the poor quarter, picking up several mana sources as we headed to the array. I stopped several times to honor the dead. For some of the ghosts, that was all they needed to find peace, while others, like the boy, needed to leave the island. None of the spirits were strong, or the sort that would increase my combat power, but that was alright. I just wanted each of them to find peace.

Eventually, though, we came to the ruins of what seemed to have been a tower, and I followed the searching spell, which pointed straight forward, pinging wildly. We were close.