Broken Lands

Rensyn moved his attention from the arena where the swordsman and the shifter fought to the one where a young woman tried to understand her abilities. Another pair of nearly invisible projectiles zoomed from Sophia’s hand and knife towards a target that was little more than a hay bale. It was one of the fragile but cheap targets that the Registry kept on the field; anything better had to be requested and potentially paid for, but this was clearly enough for Sophia’s practice.

“You’re certain she’s a spellcaster?” Rensyn turned to the man who sponsored the odd new pair of Called. “Those don’t look like spells to me. Martial Abilities seems more likely, and she is a spellblade. Most spellblades aren’t spellcasters.”

Arryn chuckled. “Those are spells. They glow with mana. If you’d seen the siege spell I saw, you wouldn’t doubt it.”

Rensyn shook his head. He didn’t see what was so special about the pair. In his opinion, they were a lot like Amy, with Spheres that disposed them to violent solutions and few options. That could be useful, but it was best when paired with Spheres that could cover their shortcomings. The Quinn twins weren’t perfect for that, but they were the best he could find in an evening. He’d originally intended to tap Dougal for the team, but Dougal was still happier taking missions on his own or joining a team for a single mission; that made the Quinns a better choice for now. “Why are you so interested in them, anyway?”

Arryn didn’t have an immediate answer. Instead, he stared out the window next to Rensyn for a long minute. “Hope, I think. Peaches likes them. Do you know how rare that is in people he hasn’t known for years?”

Rensyn shook his head at the old former Registry Master. He knew Peaches, of course, but he’d never thought of Peaches as a particularly good judge of character. He was pretty sure the draft sloth liked anyone who either fed or groomed him and disliked anyone who disturbed his naps.

“It’s also that spell and the way she explained it. She said she modified it to move water instead of dirt.” Arryn paused for only a moment. “You know what that means, of course.”

“That she’s lying,” Rensyn said as he shook his head sadly. It was obvious; he’d never heard of anyone who could modify a spell successfully. Doing it in minutes or even hours and to a siege spell? No, there was no other conclusion.

“She wasn’t.” Arryn said the words with absolute confidence. “She spoke the truth as she knew it. She has enough knowledge to modify siege spells, which explains how she’s doing wordless casting. She doesn’t even realize how difficult that is; she seems to think it’s normal.”

Rensyn turned to look at Arryn instead of the practice happening below them. There was no sign that the former Registry Master, now a Professional who seemed to have more pull with the Casterville’s Registry Master than any non-Called should, was saying anything other than the truth. “The last person who could do that is more of a legend than a real person, and it’s said he learned it at the feet of the Lady of Magic. How could a Level One Called be as capable as the Archmage?”

“She isn’t,” Arryn agreed. “What she has is knowledge; I want her to gain the power to go with it. She’s eventually going to want to go home.”

Rensyn frowned. What did that have to do with anything? “So?”

Arryn tilted his head to the side and seemed to flick it out the window towards Sophia. “I’ve never seen anyone like either of them and from what she says and knows, she’s from a very, very long way away. I think they’re from beyond the Gateway.”

“No one can get through the Maze. Not since the Broken Lord broke it,” Rensyn protested. The Gateway was behind the Maze and no one had made it past the Maze in centuries. “There might not even be anything beyond the Maze anymore. There’s certainly no reason to go looking for a way to get past it.”

The Broken Lord had his reasons when he broke the Maze. The Broken Lord’s lands were being overrun with monsters and no one could be everywhere. Rensyn wasn’t Hallowed, nor did he aspire to be, but he did know his history.

“If she came here from beyond the Gateway, it was without going through the Maze,” Arryn half-agreed. “She hasn’t said much about how she came here; as far as I can tell, she went through a portal that was damaged or destroyed while she was inside and it spat her out in an unexpected place. Portal links that bypass the Gateway seem unlikely, since no one’s ever found any, but she got here somehow and it was based on her people’s knowledge of magic, not our own. I don’t care how we reach the other side.”

Rensyn wasn’t sure he agreed. The Gateway was little more than a myth, despite its presence in history.

The next morning started too early. Sophia couldn’t exactly judge the time, but “an hour and a half before dawn” sounded an awful lot like “might as well just call it 5 AM” to Sophia. Whatever time the clock might have said, it was too early.

It was also as late as she could possibly sleep and still be able to gear up, grab a quick bite to eat, and meet the others in the Registry lobby an hour before dawn. She probably should have grabbed more food than she had, but she just wasn’t that hungry in the morning and especially not when she had to get up early. She had snacks she could carry with her instead.

Despite how horribly early it was, Sophia and Dav were not the first of the group to arrive; instead, they were last. The other three were seated at a table, which indicated they’d been waiting, but they didn’t seem impatient. They mostly seemed tired.

That must have lowered Amy’s defenses a bit, because Sophia could see that Amy was watching Rae with a half-smile. It wasn’t the gaze of someone worried about an attack; it was far friendlier than that. Sophia’s mind flashed back to the night before; had Amy paid more attention to Rae than to anyone else?

She wasn’t sure. It was possible.

Sophia shrugged internally. That was their business, not hers, as long as it didn’t affect group cohesion. She waved slightly, then coughed to actually get the attention of the tired trio. “Hey guys. Ready to head out?”

“Yeah,” Moti said with a large yawn. “Who has the map?”

Sophia’s attention turned to Amy just in time to see her thwack Moti with a rolled-up piece of paper. That had to be the map.

Amy grinned at Moti’s offended expression. “I do, of course. If you were paying attention last night, you’d know that.”

The map was really more of a sketch than anything else, as far as Sophia was concerned. It was a copy of a map of Casterville with a route drawn from the Registry building to the West Conservatory. Sophia had no idea how accurate the map was, but it ought to get them there as long as nothing had changed in the last decade.

Sophia didn’t have much hope that it would be that easy, but at least the Quinns knew the part of the city near the Registry building. That would make it easier.

When they got outside, Sophia expected it to be quiet and empty outside. There was no street lighting like a modern city, so Casterville should wake at dawn, shouldn’t it?

That wasn’t true at all. There were a surprising number of people out and about, though they all seemed to be going somewhere. It was actually busier than when she and Dav arrived in town with the villagers from the destroyed village. Was she seeing a sort of a morning commute, people who needed to be somewhere before the sun rose?

They had to cross the city from the northern edge to the western edge. It was faster to use the city streets than to try and go around, which took them into the bounds of the Casterville Nexus temporarily. Sophia didn’t notice anything herself, but both of the Quinn twins seemed to relax a little when they passed the clearly marked line on the street that was probably the Nexus boundary.

They made their way across the city with no more than a couple of wrong turns that Rae Quinn quickly pointed out. The portion of the city inside the range of the Nexus didn’t seem to have changed much since the map was made.

Amy stopped suddenly. “This is the edge of the Nexus,” she hissed. “We could be getting close.”

Sophia eyed the red circle inked on the paper as Amy held it up for inspection. It wasn’t a perfect circle, which made her wonder if that reflected the actual shape or if the map-maker simply wasn’t entirely certain where the edge was. Sophia leaned towards the second option. She let her aura seep out of her body a little ways to try and see if she could sense anything, but there didn’t seem to be anything there to sense. “Let’s keep going. I haven’t seen anything worrying yet.”

It was an absolutely inane statement, since there shouldn’t be any problems for several more blocks based on the reports and the fact that they were still theoretically within the Nexus, but it got everyone moving again and that was all Sophia was trying to do.

A few steps later, Sophia paused. She thought she’d noticed something with her aura. She took a step backwards, then a second, then moved forward again. Yes, she definitely had noticed something. The fact that there was an abrupt, if small, change in the mana level at or near the edge of the Nexus’s protection wasn’t a surprise. What was a surprise was that it was lower inside. That was backwards, at least by her Earth’s standards; a nexus was the intersection of at least two ley lines, which led to a higher mana level.

“Did you see something?” Moti sounded worried.

Sophia shook her head. “No, I think this is the border of the Nexus, but why is there less mana inside?”

“The Nexus keeps mana out,” Amy answered with a puzzled expression. “That’s one of the ways it keeps monsters out and part of why Called are less powerful inside a Nexus. It also prevents Warping from ambient mana. Of course the mana levels are lower.”

What. The. Hell.

“Why would you want to keep mana out?” Sophia shook her head. Amy had just said why they wanted to keep mana out. The fact that none of the explanations were particularly convincing to Sophia didn’t mean she was going to get a better answer by asking again. It did, however, make her wonder if the other part of how the Nexus protected against Called was by draining the mana pool; that could happen naturally in low mana areas. It was one of the few reasons she had to be glad that she was only a half-dragon instead of being a full-blooded Essence Dragon.

“Never mind. It’s different at home.” A lot of things were different at home; the different attitude towards mana (in a city named after spellcasters, no less!) was only a piece of the picture. “Which way did we need to go to get to the West Conservatory?”