Vacant Throne

The time had come. With the ritual having come to an end and no pressing research or other problems bearing down on anyone, it was time to head out. Irulon wanted to get back to the Observatorium to look through their library on a whole variety of matters. Mostly on the topic of new ways to cast spells. She had plans to research how the formation of spell cards came about, despite knowing their general history, and wanted to make advancements toward more complex spell patterns that couldn’t be represented on a flat, unmoving card.

Companion wanted to introduce herself to the Pharaoh. Judging by the sly smile on her face when she stated her intentions, the Pharaoh was probably going to react in an… interesting way. Especially because Companion hadn’t used the word pharaoh. She had called him dad. It made Alyssa wonder if the dragon wasn’t going to try something. If she was trying to claim that, as a slightly monstrous version of Irulon, she was supposed to be within the line of succession and then claim that she was a dragon that was older than the Pharaoh, she might be thinking she would be first in line to the throne.

Alyssa had a feeling that such a plan would absolutely not work, but from the small smile Companion gave her when she asked, she doubted that it not working would stop Companion from trying.

As for Brakkt, he didn’t have any pressing need to return to Lyria right away. Since he still wanted to interact with the monsters a bit more, he wasn’t going to be returning—along with Trik, who would remain behind as a representative from Lyria monitoring the demonic situation. But that wasn’t such a big deal. Not so long as Alyssa could do her own job properly.

Technically speaking, it might be more along the lines of Tenebrael’s job, but Alyssa was having to do the grunt work of it because of Tenebrael’s restrictions. Standing out in an empty stretch of land east of Illuna, Alyssa couldn’t help but be a little upset at that. If, through a request, Tenebrael was going to do everything anyway, she should just do it herself. Alyssa would much rather make portals on her own.

Unfortunately, that just wasn’t possible at the moment. Understanding the Nth dimension rules needed to fold space in only a localized portal framework was so far above her head despite Tenebrael definitely dumbing down a mathematics lesson for her that she had doubts about ever being able to simply conjure up a portal between to places on Nod, let alone back to Earth. Even Irulon and Companion hadn’t been able to discern most of what Tenebrael had been talking about—Alyssa had used her phone to record an impromptu lesson for their later viewing. If those two super-geniuses couldn’t grasp the concepts, Alyssa had no hope for herself.

Luckily, with their work on Fractal magic, Alyssa didn’t think she would have to operate Tenebrael’s magic to that degree to get back to Earth.

Still, she wanted to. With all the other things she had done personally with Tenebrael’s magic, using it that way just felt… right. Now that she wasn’t spending all day and all night working on a body for Companion—or the research required to create said body—she had the time to pursue more personal projects. Her current project was to watch just about every tutorial video on the internet regarding math. She needed to build up her basics before she would even attempt to watch the video she had recorded of Tenebrael again.

Mind flooded was a good term to describe her current state of being. Alyssa didn’t consider herself academically inept. She had gotten good grades in school and, later, college. But she had never had any aspirations that needed extremely advanced classes to achieve. She hadn’t ever taken calculus or advanced physics classes. Trying to learn it all from videos on the internet now was a bit much. Especially when she couldn’t even post questions and get responses or clarification unless someone else had asked the same question.

A part of her really wanted to take a trip to Earth just to post the video she had taken of Tenebrael. While she was sure that it would get a lot of comments solely related to the angel’s appearance—it was the internet, after all—surely some people would notice that she was talking about mathematics at an insane level. Maybe even too high of a level. It would probably get ignored as some kind of fantasy nonsense even though Alyssa was pretty sure all the concepts she talked about were real things, just at too high of a level for most of humanity, if not all of humanity, to understand with their current understanding of math.

But that was more of a prank on humanity than anything serious. Irulon and Companion had been able to at least partially decipher most of the advanced mathematics videos that Alyssa had showed them, and that was without having gone through twelve years of useless public education. Since they could understand calculus but couldn’t understand Tenebrael’s lessons, there might be something fundamentally different about how angels did math.

Regardless, that didn’t actually matter as far as creating a portal back to Lyria was concerned. At least not this portal.

Martin had been skeptical of the whole thing. Both that she could make a permanent portal and that a permanent portal would be a good thing to have. He and his son—the actual ruler of Illuna, his father was just acting as a regent—had been sending Messages back and forth with Alyssa having to sit around and answer questions. Eventually, she got Martin’s son to go to Teneville through the other portal she had made, just to get over the part of the argument where they didn’t believe it could be done. That portal, since its opening was in the palace stables, was apparently being kept a secret. Only a handful of people at the palace actually knew about it.

Incidentally, argument by way of Message spells was the absolute worst thing. It was hard to describe just how bad it was that they could only send a sentence or two at a time. Shorter responses, such as a ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ were avoided as much as possible simply because it was a waste of good spell cards to only say one word. Even still, they burned through around fifty cards each before finally giving Alyssa the go-ahead.

So now she was standing a good mile outside Illuna, trying to remember exactly what she had done to get a portal up and running between Lyria and Teneville. It probably didn’t matter, there was a lot of intent that mattered, and Tenebrael had outright hijacked a prayer that one time to cause a giant symbol of herself to appear above Lyria, distracting the Astral Authority long enough to talk. That was the real problem with forming a request to Tenebrael. She had a lot of leeway in what happened compared to if Alyssa were just doing things on her own.

But she didn’t really want to spend weeks traveling. More, it would help out Brakkt and allow her to visit Iona or the monster village almost whenever she wanted. Depending on how good of time they were making, she might even beat her mother back to the city. She had been a bit bogged down at the time, but she probably should have spared a few hours to do this before they left. In fact, they might not have left at all if they knew this was coming. For Oz and company, the portals were likely completely unknown unless Lisa had mentioned them.

In fact, there probably wasn’t much need to leave for anyone anymore. If the Pharaoh and Martin allowed public use of the portal network, Illuna and Lyria might well be the same city. The portal wouldn’t be quite big enough for highway-like traffic, but for most aspects of mercantile life, there probably wouldn’t be much of a different. Socioeconomic changes that might result from this portal had been mostly absent from Martin’s Messages to his son, but there were bound to be many. Many was an understatement.

But socioeconomic problems were absolutely not Alyssa’s responsibility. As long as a portal wasn’t going to cause untold death and destruction, regulating their use was up to the Pharaoh.

“Alright, I’m going to start,” Alyssa said, wishing she could be alone for this. Unfortunately, both Martin and Volta wanted to watch. Given Volta’s recent troubles, both had several more guards with them than she had ever seen otherwise, save for when Martin first greeted the monsters. Irulon and Companion were both standing just to the side of where Alyssa expected the portal to materialize, ready to analyze its formation from multiple angles.

If she hadn’t known better, she might have thought that they split apart just so that they would have more hands and more eyes for any given project.

“Tenebrael,” she said. She almost stopped, noticing her fingernails turning black. She had almost forgotten about that. It didn’t happen when using divine magic on her own. Only when Tenebrael acted through her. And she hadn’t done anything like this in a long while. Not since cutting their connection before dealing with the Astral Authority. Shaking her head, she kept going. “Grant me a boon.” Which was what she had said last time. “A gateway between this fair city and the outskirts of Lyria. A permanent portal so that your servants might traverse the land swiftly and safely.”

The black and white light swirling from her fingertips formed together into a truly massive mystic circle. Large enough to encompass a semi-truck lengthwise. Enochian script twisted and turned, interwoven with the geometric patterns. The warmth of Tenebrael’s light flooded over everyone. Though Alyssa was squinting to keep from going blind, she could still see the way everyone else straightened at that—which was a bit off putting given her so-far-unsuccessful efforts to replicate the effect. Irulon and Companion were the only two who didn’t. Both were casting various diagnostic spells to try to better understand exactly what was happening.

Hopefully they got what they needed. The swirling of the mystic circle reached its peak. It moved so fast that it was just a blur. Alyssa couldn’t make out a single character of the Enochian script. She couldn’t discern any unique shapes anymore. It was all just a big blur of light and dark a few feet in front of her fingertips.

Starting from the center, that blur slowly spread apart. Through the hole in the middle, Alyssa could see a sight that wasn’t the distant hills east of Illuna. It was the golden fields of wheat that surrounded Lyria, the Lyrian wall, and, most prominently, the palace. The hole continued to spread until it reached the very edge of the swirling mystic circle. There, it stopped growing. The whirling continued, spinning into a blinding beam of razor-thin light that bordered the portal.

The view was a familiar one. She hadn’t been specific, which might have been a problem, but the portal’s location appeared to be from the direction of Teneville, looking down on the city from up high near the road. A good thing. She hadn’t even considered that ‘outskirts of Lyria’ probably contained everywhere around the city, including up north where the city looked over the desert and, more importantly for the context of this concern, the far-off Juno Federation.

Next time, she would have to remember to specify a more specific location. Maybe ‘next to the portal to Illuna’ or something similar. That would probably work.

For the moment, Alyssa let her arms drop to her sides, noting that her fingernails were back to normal. With that, she first looked to Companion and Irulon. They had already seen a portal like this before, but Irulon hadn’t been casting a bunch of spells to try to understand what was going on last time, missing out on that. She had probably been a bit more mystified by Tenebrael at the time. While Alyssa wouldn’t doubt her faith at the moment, some disillusionment had to have set in. It was one thing for a god to remain hidden behind the mystique of the unknown. It was another thing to have a god give a classroom-style lecture.

On the other side of things, both Volta and Martin looked absolutely floored. At least they were standing. A few of their guards had dropped their weapons and knelt down… not at Alyssa, thankfully, but at the portal itself. Still, if word of this got back to the rest of the town—which it would; gossip in a tavern spread far—Alyssa had a feeling that she wouldn’t be able to walk around quite so freely. Which was a shame. It had been nice while it had lasted, she supposed.

Maybe she should head off to some other new place. Somewhere that people didn’t know her. Though that was probably a moot point. Lyria was big enough that most people wouldn’t notice one person walking around with sunglasses on. Besides that, it had been a few months since she was last at the large city. About the only people who would remember her would be Tzheitza and Oxart.

Hopefully.

“Is that…” Volta trailed off.

“Lyria.” Martin actually stumbled back. “It’s been years since I last visited. I’m older now, never thought I would see it again. Travel is a bit rough for one my age.”

“Well, you don’t have to just see it,” Alyssa said, taking a few steps forward. The first portal, the one back in Teneville, scared her. The edges of the portal looked like they might chop of an arm if touched wrong. Besides that, it was a portal. Who knew how it functioned? Tenebrael. That was it. They had started out being careful, tossing a few experimental rocks through before shoving an arm through. Kasita had been the one to offer an arm, given that it wouldn’t actually hurt her if something went wrong. Knowing now that she could stick her hand into the Endless Expanse, Alyssa wasn’t sure that using her as a guinea pig was a good idea for these kinds of things, but she had offered. Only after a few hours of poking and prodding at the portal had Alyssa actually tried to step through.

Here and now? She knew what to expect. The edges of the portal were harmless. They actually felt a bit like water. She wouldn’t leave a foot behind if, when stepping through, she didn’t pick up her leg high enough. It was an instant transport. Aside from a small change in air pressure that somehow didn’t result in wind rushing through the portal, it didn’t feel much different from walking into a different room.

There was a bit of a chill, Alyssa noted. Not with the portal, but just a cold day around Lyria. There was a whole lot less moisture in the air as well. Going from the humid climate around Illuna to the dry deserty air in Lyria mid-breath actually made her cough. But it was just a slight thing. Everything worked. She turned and waved.

Irulon and Companion stepped into view of the portal almost immediately. They didn’t speak a word to each other, but whatever connection they shared let them get around that. With Irulon starting up some more diagnostic spells, Companion stepped forward.

Thought occurring just in time, Alyssa closed her eyes and focused on their soul connection. Oddly enough, while both were on the other side of the portal, she couldn’t see their souls despite them appearing to be right in front of her. If she oriented herself properly, she could probably find them by looking across the world. The soul-vision didn’t have a range limit, but everything got muddled as the distance increased. But Irulon and Companion were different from everyone else. They had a fairly distinct soul.

But it was too late for that. Companion stepped through.

Instead of her soul being tethered through the portal, it swerved around, stretched thin as it raced off toward where Alyssa assumed Irulon was. However, Alyssa didn’t keep watching to observe the effect. Companion stumbled forward.

Alyssa immediately moved forward, catching her before she could fall. The former dragon gripped Alyssa’s arm, tight enough to make her wince. “It’s a good thing we didn’t give you those claws,” Alyssa said, trying not to sound too strained at the biting nails digging into her skin. “Are you alright?”

“Apologies.” Companion breathed heavily as if saying a single word had been equivalent to sprinting a full mile. “We expected some… discomfort. But clearly, we underestimated what we would feel.”

Glancing up to the portal, Alyssa frowned. Irulon had just about fallen as well. Fela provided the princess with a similar service as to what Alyssa was offering Companion. For a moment, Fela tried to usher Irulon to the portal, but the princess shook the hellhound off, returning to standing on her own two feet.

Companion was getting back her balance as well. Her grip lessened, though she kept a hand on Alyssa’s elbow to keep herself steadied.

“You two have to remain next to each other? Should we take you back?”

“No. And no. It was the sudden distance that caused the problem, we think. If one of us traveled by horse or draken while the other stayed behind, we wouldn’t even notice. Already, the loss of strength is fading.”

“So no portal travel?”

“If we held hands and crossed at the same time… but if one of us has to go through, we have decided to ensure that the other is aware and not doing anything dangerous should they lose strength.”

“I see…” As long as it wasn’t permanent… They probably shouldn’t go through portals too many times regardless. Alyssa didn’t know how their souls worked. She wasn’t even sure that Tenebrael really knew. Their tie to each other was similar to a rubber band, able to stretch and shrink. But while a rubber band could stretch and shrink many times without issue, too far would snap it. Sometimes, a small weakness in the band would snap it even when it shouldn’t otherwise break.

They might, individually, be fine should that happen. Alyssa didn’t know that they should take the chance.

Irulon and Fela stepped through the portal a few moments later. Kasita stayed behind, talking to Volta with a bit of input from Martin. Alyssa couldn’t hear her from this side of the portal, but both were gesturing to the portal. Eventually, Martin stepped through. Volta didn’t approach.

Alyssa didn’t take long to wonder why. She had probably watched Irulon and Companion’s reaction and decided that it might be risky to step through, even though she was always in contact with her body double. Kasita, noticing Alyssa’s gaze, shrugged her shoulders and mouthed the word ‘later.’ That practically confirmed Alyssa’s suspicion.

“I can’t believe it,” Martin said, words oddly breathy as he gazed at the city and the land surrounding it. Alyssa wondered if the sudden dry air was affecting him as well.

“Tenebrael is capable of anything,” Irulon said softly. “Instant transport is the least among it all. But, we can offer our awe to Tenebrael another time. My father will likely wish to know the location of this portal so that he can station guards or build a structure or both, in time. Shall we head into the city, Martin?”

“Yes. Yes, I think we should. My son will be waiting for us. And I haven’t seen the Pharaoh in many years. It will be good to see him again.”

“I just hope he doesn’t make a big event out of our return,” Irulon said.