[Hlaeth] Ch 32 - A Lens to Another World

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“FREEZE!”

            I injected every note of command I could into my voice, and it was enough to make the marching dwarves in their heavy armor halt in place instantly.

            “Don’t move!” I hissed, waving my hand, and erected a Holo over something.

            The greenish Aura played over a circle over ten feet in radius, half of it unseen below the surface. It was literally an inch from the noses of two dwarven warriors, almost touching their beards. Their polished eyes glittered as dark pupils got very large indeed.

            “Back it up. Carefully. Get away from it, don’t touch it,” I said grimly, stalking towards it. The dwarves were plenty happy to do just that, shuffling rapidly away from it. “Go around it and wait up there for a moment,” I continued, stalking towards it. “Just watch, because you should know anything I learn, too.”

            I wasn’t trying to hide anything here.

            The Aperture had literally popped up out of nowhere. We were only two hundred yards from the Mountain Ward, and it had just swirled up and blared the shit out of my Detect Dimensions when it did.

            The dwarven soldiers hurriedly marched around the Aperture, giving it a wide berth, reforming ranks on the hill thirty paces behind me and watching morbidly as I approached it.

            It was actually still invisible, the Holo was there just to show them where it was.

            Most worryingly, it did not react at all to the vivus around me at all. Whatever was keeping it open either wasn’t magic, or was so powerful vivic reinforcement, however casual, just wasn’t having any effect on it. No power leakage, either.

            Vivus ignited on Mortus Dius strongly, and I extended it out slowly toward the Aperture, testing, testing…

            The edge of the mistflame hit it, there was a spurt, and my Staff was flung back hard enough to make me retreat a step to keep hold of it.

            “Well, it doesn’t like the touch of vivus.” The Holo had a metaphorical hole in it that managed my sense of the opening, but as I regarded it, it was slowly pushed back open. “Very powerful effect, Leutnant. It’s overcoming the seal of vivus against Veil-breaking within moments.”

            “How bin ye make it appear?” he asked reasonably, the black-bearded officer only ten yards behind me and watching closely.

            “I didn’t. I overlaid it, like throwing flour on something invisible,” I replied calmly, letting the Holo drop, and nothing remained in the air. “It’s remarkably similar to the rare souls who have Second Sight and can see spirits and the like naturally, playing with layers of reality so the visible eye has nothing to reference. I think it works because there’s nothing actually there unless you break the plane of its existence, and the lock on the Veil means it can’t actually fully open at all here.

            “If the Veil wasn’t Sealed and the gods Sealed away from us, this would now be a wide-open Portal to… somewhere. And something would probably be coming out of it.”

            I considered the whole horizon to the south, populated with these things.

            “The reason we can’t call the gods is to contain whatever is making this,” I stated with absolute conviction. “If the planes were open and these Portals were, too, there wouldn’t be anything mortal left alive on this world.”

            Quiet rumblings and curses sounded behind me as I probed at the unseen dimensional skein in front of me.

            Second Sight, then?

            I had to go Ringdiving for the proper spell, as seeing the Spirits wasn’t exactly something I was normally capable of. It was a powerful and feared Talent… feared by those who had it, as who wanted to be seeing the dead and the spirits of the land all the time, who were always eager to find someone who could look back at them, acknowledge them, and so forth?

            A bit different from the Shugenja who linked up with spirits, which was generally on a friendlier basis and more empathic and ‘hearing’ them than anything else.

            I pulled out the spell and Cast it, two small ovals of light materializing in front of my face like extra spectacles, and promptly stepped back in surprise at the sight in front of me.

            The mass of tentacles with eyeballs was pressed up against the Aperture, looking straight at me and trying in vain to reach me. It wasn’t pressured against the Aperture, but it wasn’t extended through it, either, so I assumed there was some danger or repulsion involved.

            The earthen coils of ropy tendrils slithered around when it realized I could see it, although I had no eyes to meet its gaze. The various jaws, gaping open in flytrap-style jaws at the ends of the thicker tentacles, opened and closed slowly as it tracked me, clearly wanting to come through and devour me.

            “Huh.” I flicked up the Holo over it, and all the dwarves actually jumped in shock when they saw what I was seeing, breaking out in curses and oaths.

            “Elemental Earth bias. Aberrant bias,” I announced, striding to the side and around the other side, looking within.

            It wasn’t there on the other side, or at least the main mass wasn’t. It had some longer tentacles extended out the other side, watching me as I came into the view there, more popping up as I stared at a sky like the inside of a broken crystal, riven with cracks and flaws, and some dark and unholy blackness beyond. “Bordering on planar instability. A Realm of Mythos,” I judged, taking it in before circling back around to the other side. I spared the creature one more glance, and then dropped everything and turned away, a thin wall of stone rising up from the mountainside to block its view of us.

            “Let’s get up behind your Mountain Ward,” I said, and the dwarves almost broke into a sprint at the Leutnant’s prompt command, heading for the safety of the ancient magic of their kingdom’s border.

----

            I tossed the rock through the Aperture. It was just a piece of base mountain rock of no particular significance. But when it came out the other side, it had bulging pustules on it, was a mottled black and yellow hue, and was plainly no form of igneous rock native to this world.

            I touched it to the vivic flame on Mortus Dius, and watched the surface coating flake away to white dust, taking about ten percent of the mass of the stone with it before revealing the unblemished interior… although that cracked and broke into five pieces in my hand, its integrity compromised.

            Leutnant Hrimgol watched it all with me, his gleaming eyes grim and steady.

            “Energies of Earth and Nightmare,” I said softly, dropping the stone down as I considered the Aperture there. “The magic there would twist any who walked through into something from dark dreams, dominated by the things that dwell there. A fell fate,” I murmured softly.

            The Leutnant scowled ferociously. “Canst du close it, Magos?” he asked directly, glancing at the foul thing.

            “Yes. But that doesn’t mean it will stay closed, or stay here. It is obvious the Apertures open and close, or move about. It will shift positions or reopen, and then have to be closed separately once it does.”

            The Interdiction was small and focused, more a Seal Portal than a broad defense. The silvery Ray struck the Aperture, and instead of just strengthening the Veil and squeezing the opening shut, the window to another world shattered like glass, the shards of it dissipating as the Veil came in and wiped away the remnants.

            “Huh,” both I and the Leutnant said, staring at that. I smiled slightly, he huffed, and I waved my hand. “Unfortunately, Leutnant Hrimgol, I cannot tell you if that or any other Aperture will appear there, or nearby, or anywhere. I have nowhere near enough information for that.”

            “But du bin able to see them, Magos,” the dwarf said heavily. “That bin something powerful itself, nei?”

            “Truth,” I admitted. “Do you have spellcasters among your people, Rockborn? Earthmages, Diviners, Priests?”

            He gave me a strange and reluctant look. “Bin these exist among dwarves du know, Magos?” he asked warily.

            “Priests were very common. Earthmages and Diviners worked on a different basis than humans do, on account of the earthpower going through you. They were forced to use powerstones for their mana supply, as they were burned trying to retain arcane energy in the face of the earthpower that grants you resilience against magic and harmony with the stone.” He drew himself up slightly as I vocalized that, his expression showing it wasn’t something commonly known by non-dwarves. “Earthmages were limited to manipulation of geomana and to a minor extent, pyromana. Diviners worked exclusively in rock and stone, looking through crystals, polished metals, and so forth and so on, things your natural stonecunning works with, instead of against.”

            He blinked at me in some astonishment. “That bin unknown to mein kin, Magos,” he murmured in some disbelief.

            “I don’t own any powerstones, or I would be happy to demonstrate the concept to you, Leutnant. But I’m sure your priests throw auguries of dice or stone, and peer through crystals to see the inner truths of things at times? Magically, it is little different from wearing a set of spectacles or doing back-of-the-hand math calculations with an abacus.”

            “Ah!” His expression cleared up. “This bin true. But the magic ov der priests bin not what it once bin. Only der most minor ov spells bin still viable ven called upon by them…”

            “Returned Faith, yes. The Silence of the Gods is indeed a terrible thing to those who live in communion with them, Leutnant,” I reassured him calmly, patting his armored shoulder. “I will see what I can do to lift it. I don’t want to be denied by it, either.”

            I sat down on the Disk that spun out of my Masspack, at the same time Shaping up the first of several slates of stone in front of him, leaving him blinking again with how readily I did so.

            “I’m going to first give you a slate of a simple prayer that can be used to see the Apertures at short range, then a Meta that can be used to extend the range of the spell so your Priests can use their higher Valences more effectively.” If they used Valences, but they seemed to, here. “Then I’ll make a few slates on the basics of using geomana, pyromana, and divination magic in the arcane style in a manner they should be able to employ.

            “These do come with the mandate to disseminate them as widely as possible among your people, however. Do not hold them to your clan. This deals with the future of all your kin and kind, and is given freely in the spirit of being given freely in return. Allow them to be copied and studied by scholars of all your clans, be they friends or rivals, that all of dwarf-dom might prosper.

            “Do you understand this charge, Leutnant Hrimgol?” I asked him sternly.

            “Yes, Magos Aelryinth. Knowledge given freely, to bin given freely in return, to better all dwarfkind. I so swear this bin done, on mein blood und clan und honor!” he stated firmly.

            “Excellent.” And to the Leutnant’s obvious surprise, I began writing in High Denthek on the slates, mostly by just drawing my fingers across them.

            I’d run into dwarves before, on that trip through Shadow, and if they’d been dead, they’d still spoken in their language and left examples of it laying around. The rune-tongue of Dwarves was to them what Human was to us, and it changed nature and intent on any world magical enough to tolerate the Rockborn, or whatever genetic variation of them was true in that world.

            High Denthek was an engineering language, of all things, and an extraordinary one. Human actually borrowed a bunch of words from it to describe edge cases, like the particular sheen of bronze of a particular mixture polished to perfection, and there were a LOT of edge cases, very specific references to alloys and treatments, and the vocabulary for Gearmages to wield in pursuit of their mechanical fun times was extremely broad and complete.

            Engineers and mechanics read Denthek like poets and singers read Elven.

            Earthpower magic and stratiform prayer weren’t that hard to render in High Denthek, and if the concepts were a little puzzling, well, they were meant to be. If you couldn’t handle those concepts, you weren’t going to be wielding the magic!

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