Chapter 465
Chapter 463: A Cage of Light
CECILIA
My impatience stung like nettles under my skin, but watching the surge of effort from the Instillers and their Wraith protectors was a balm to my nerves. The last two weeks had passed slowly and with increasing frustration, but it was finally time. Everything was in place within the Beast Glades. Although complicated by the dragons’ increased patrols and taking over the flying castle hovering to the east, we were ready.
Under a shroud of mist that hid our signatures, swallowed the noise of our passage, and obscured us from view from above, my people moved into place.
There were at least fifty Instillers, Agrona’s most trusted and knowledgeable servants, all carrying a plethora of dimensional storage devices. I flew above while they marched in jagged lines like many ants below. Ten full battle groups of Wraiths flew around us, keeping to the cover of the drifting cloud of thick mist so their signatures wouldn’t be noticed by any dragon guards.
I could neither see or sense any dragons—not nearby, anyway. A patrol of guards was passing over the encampments built by the defeated Alacryan soldiers to the north, and a few blurred together within the flying castle some way to the east. N0v3lTr0ve served as the original host for this chapter's release on N0v3l--B1n.
Just above us, suspended in the sky a hundred feet or so above the trees, a very different sort of mana signature seemed to simmer just beneath the surface of what was normally detectable to the bare senses. There was no visual distortion, at least not from within our misty cloud and beneath the canopy of thin, half-dead trees.
It was fascinating, really. Although we’d been calling it a “rift,” it was more like the mouth of a waterskin, and through it—within the waterskin—was all of Epheotus. The magic required to bend space in this way, forcing a piece of our world to bulge out into some other realm, was incomprehensible to me. But the mechanism by which it remained hidden, that I now understood.
The presence of the rift, or rather the intense pressure of the mana flowing into and then back out of it, caused distortions that rippled out for a hundred miles in every direction. When the inward flowing mana—which was being drawn into Epheotus—was balanced with the mana being projected back out of it by the asuras, that equilibrium disguised the rift’s real location in the midst of all that disturbance happening elsewhere. It required only a bit of effort on the dragons’ part to bend the light so that there was no physical manifestation of this.
Once found, though, it was now impossible for me not to see. Neither Nico nor any of the Wraiths who had already been here could sense it, no matter how specific I was or how much they stared, but when I looked beneath the surface of what was shown, I saw the cyclone of mana beneath, simultaneously being drawn in and expelled.
I indicated exactly where the rift was, and the Instillers got to work. Spreading out, they began to rapidly withdraw equipment from their dimension artifacts, assembling large devices in a circle around where the rift hovered high above. The mist spread as they did, creeping across the hard ground and between the crooked and dying trees that dominated this section of the Beast Glades, ensuring they remained obscured and undetectable.
As I watched the Instillers set about their work, I thought of Nico, hoping he would be safe. Dicathen’s defenders had been busily scuttling into strongholds across the continent. As Agrona had anticipated, Grey seemed to have vanished, going underground, but the information from our spies was conflicting. Even his own people seemed convinced that Grey was in multiple places at once.
My lips curled into a sneer. As if Agrona would be fooled but such a weak attempt at a diversion.
The closest location was the Wall. As I waited, I expanded out my senses. It took time to go so far. The feedback was weak—a dim cluster of distant signatures. I could feel Nico and Dragoth, as well as a bright spark of mana that must have been a Lance. It was subtle, but beneath the undercurrent of everything else, there was a small distortion in the mana, like an opposing force pressing against it.
Grey and his dragon companion? I wondered, trying to parse what I was sensing. I’d tasted the dragon’s mana, and there was a hint of it there, but it felt as if they were shrouding themselves somehow. Surely it won’t be so easy as that...
My eyes snapped open and my thoughts wrenched back to my own task. The ring of artifacts was half in place. It was time.
First, I felt for the edges of the spell distorting light to wrap around the rift. Though powerful, it relied largely on the swell of magical energy to disguise its very presence. Once I had the spell in my grip, I dragged it aside like a curtain over a window. Unexpectedly, the spell resisted, as if there were someone standing on the other side holding it closed.
I pulled harder, and the spell ripped, pulling apart in a visible shower of pure mana. White light sparkled out in every direction to rain down on my people, and a sickening twist of mana seemed to churn the air inside my lungs.
The white sparks burned brighter, hotter, as they fell, and I realized the danger almost too late.
“Shields!” I shouted, waving my hands to conjure a protective barrier over the Wraiths and Instillers. Wherever the white sparks settled, they burned against the shield, mana crackling and popping against mana.
After a second of surprise, the Wraiths began to conjure their own barriers, buttressing mine against the intense potency of the falling sparks.
Above, the rift was now fully in view, a gash in the sky, the air seemingly to fold around it at the edges, like flesh opened by a sharp blade. The sky beyond was a slightly different shade of blue, just alien enough to conjure gooseflesh along my arms and neck. Inside the ripple in space, three distorted figures floated.
The Wraiths burst into action, four battle groups remaining at ground level and focusing purely on defending our Instillers, without whom everything would fail, while the other six broke and flew away, maneuvering around well outside the shower of sparks and flying high, encircling the rift.
I floated upward after them, moving the mana barrier with me, warping it to envelope the remnants of the strange burning-spark spell, the opposing forces grinding against one another like two tectonic plates. As the sparks failed and faded, the shield broke down, and I absorbed the remaining mana; it was tinged with a draconic attribute.
The three figures flew free of the rift, and the atmosphere—the very fabric of reality itself—seemed to tremble at their presence. Inside me, Tessia stirred in response. She was afraid.
They spoke as one, three voices echoing over and under and through each other. “This holy place is under the protection of Lord Kezess Indrath. To attack it—to affect it in any way—is sacrilege of the highest order. The punishment for your presence here is immediate death, reincarnate.”
I smirked up at them, enjoying the theatricality of it all. They were even dressed like they were in some kind of play and not on the field of battle, their ceremonial white robes gleaming with golden embroidery the same color as their golden hair. “The bravery of your words is only just a little bit spoiled by the fact you were cowering behind a spell to keep you hidden from me. You know who I am, but maybe you don’t know what I can do. If you did, you would have turned around and flew right back where you came from.”
Mana rippled in the way it did around Arthur and his weapon, and the three dragons blinked away, appearing outside the ring of Wraiths. Their amethyst eyes lit from within, and violent purple beams of light blazed between them, creating a triangle around us all, with the rift at its center.
Panic surged up from deep within me, sudden and visceral and so certain. “Attack!” I screamed.
The sky transformed with dozens of spells as six Wraith battle groups unleashed their full offensive power on the three targets.
A cage of light spread from the beams of what could only be aether, spilling down to the ground and closing over our heads. The Wraiths’ spells burst against the inside of the cage, sending soft waves undulating across its surface. The sound of hissing acid and crashing thunder and blood iron shattering against the aether made my ears ring, and the smell of toxic water and scorched ozone burned my nostrils.
On the other side of the barrier, the three dragons seemed in a trance. They did not blink or flinch as so many powerful spells crashed into their conjured barrier. They didn’t chant or gesture with arcane meaning. Except for the breeze blowing through their gleaming golden hair and white robes, and a subtle pulsing inside the brightness of their glowing purple eyes, they were motionless.
My heart hammered inside my chest as something clawed up at me from my guts. There was a feeling of wrongness within the cage, a sense of inevitable ruin. The Wraiths fought through it, but the Instillers on the ground had ceased their work, paralyzed by the oppressive force of the aetheric spell.
Something was growing inside the cage with us—an empty nothingness, like a hunger that couldn’t be sated.
Reaching out with desperate claws of mana and pure force, I ripped and tore at the inside of the aetheric walls, willing the mana to dissipate the aether. The aether rippled forcefully, but it didn’t break.
The Wraiths continued to bombard the walls as well, and I could sense my own desperation bleeding into them as they grew first uncertain and then panicked, but I struggled to rein myself in.
Abandoning my attacks, I grasped for the mana on the other side of the barrier, but I couldn’t reach it.
And still, the three dragons were cold and emotionless. No glint of victory reached their eyes, no grimace of strain bared their teeth. They were like three frustrating statues emanating their aetheric spell. Even as I thought this, though, all three sets of eyes shifted slightly, darkening and focusing on the rift. My own gaze was pulled slowly along behind theirs.
Black-purple light began to emanate from the rift, which was within the cage with us. The something that was being called, that I had felt from the instant the cage appeared, was coming through, closing in on us. I felt hunger gnawing at me, the bitter coldness of it gripping my bones in teeth of fear.
I stared into the void, conjured through the walls between the worlds to swallow us whole. It spilled from the rift like a dark cloud, like blood from a cut, like fetid breath from a rotting mouth.
Reaching out, I took hold of as much mana as I could and condensed it around the rift, a storm of ice and wind and shadow. The void consumed it, dragging the mana into itself, where it was snuffed out. And I suddenly understood. The void would spread throughout the cage, devouring all within. It was a trap from the beginning.
My fear gave way to anger and frustration. I slammed a wall of mana into the void, attempting to disrupt it or push it back into the rift, but the emptiness only swallowed my mana, and my efforts only seemed to speed its growth.
I needed to subdue it, delay it—anything to give myself time to think. How did one stop nothing?
I vacillated rapidly between wanting to keep attacking the cage in an attempt to break free or focusing on the growing black-purple darkness.
“You, you, and you, bombard the barrier! Focus on a single point—make a dent, a crack, anything!” I ordered, gesturing to three battle groups. “All the rest, hold your positions!” I finished, watching breathlessly as the cloud of purple-black nothing spilled down from above.
All the beautiful blues, greens, yellows, and reds of the atmospheric mana dissolved to colorless nothing as the cloud crept down the sky. Soon, there would be no mana left inside the aetheric cage with us at all, and then...
I wondered, very briefly, who these three had been. How long had they labored to learn the aether arts they had performed today? I could only imagine the heights of their presumptuous arrogance as they accepted the task their lord gave them...and the depth of their regret and despair as they realized that they’d failed.
The woman coughed up blood, her body spasming with pain, then relaxed, unfurling across the ground to stare up at me. The weight of millenia settled on me beneath her gaze. All that life...and I have undone it. This thought was met with pride and confidence, but also...something deeper and harder to identify.
I shook it off and kneeled beside the dragon. Her throat bobbed as she swallowed with difficulty. I thought perhaps she would say something, beg me for life or admonish me for my service to Agrona, but she was silent.
Reaching out, I gripped her mana and began to siphon it away from her, absorbing it fully. Arthur’s companion had only given me a taste, but it hadn’t been enough to really gain a sense of the dragons’ magic and abilities. I needed that insight in order to more fully counter their mana arts.
She fought me—she could hardly do anything else, I imagined. It was instinct, like clawing at hands wrapped around her throat. But she was too far gone, and her efforts were feeble.
I braced myself for whatever might come with the mana, afraid but also tantalized by the opportunity to see her memories. However, it seemed as if that part of the process was something unique to the phoenixes—or, I realized somewhat uncomfortably, perhaps even a purposeful effect by Dawn in the moments of her death—because all I experienced was the power itself.
The particular aspect of dragon mana—pure mana—unfolded in my mind. No lesser core had ever clarified mana so brilliantly, even my own. It shone like snowflakes on a cold, bright midwinter morning. In some ways, it was the opposite of basilisk mana, which was dark and twisted, resulting in their decay-type mana arts—or perhaps because of them. I breathed it in, reveling in the energy and power that suffused me.
The asuran woman shivered, her flesh collapsing inward as the mana-suffused tissue beneath it was wrung out. Her eyes faded to a pale lavender, her skin grayed, and her hair thinned. Her handsome beauty, like her strength, left her. And then...she was dead.
I sucked in a deep, fortifying breath, the infusion of draconic mana crackling in my muscles and behind my eyes, undoing some of my fatigue.
And then my eyes snapped open as I felt the distant movement of similar mana signatures. Similar, but less, I noted. None of the dragons I could sense had the strength of these three, but eight—no, ten—dragon mana signatures were approaching rapidly from the north and the east.
“Quickly, complete the arrays!” I snapped, shooting up into the air.
Below me, the Instillers hurriedly continued the process of setting up the equipment. I scanned the horizon, but the dragons were still too far off to see. Can the remaining Wraiths and I hold off so many? I asked myself, but I knew the answer. It had never been the plan for me to fight all the dragons on Dicathen at once.
As I watched the Instillers finish their work, my mind turned inward. Frustration flared as the adrenaline of battle wore off and I was able to consider the fight that had unfolded. That the dragons would be protecting the portal was obvious, but that spell, or combination of spells, or whatever the hell the dragons had been doing...
My fists clenched, and the mana around me warped outward. I knew I couldn’t have escaped this trap on my own. Without the Wraiths, without Wrastor’s team’s sacrifice, I would have been dissolved within that void, everything that made me me just gone.
Bile rose up the back of my throat, and I tried to push the frustration—the cold and sickening rage—back down deep. I was the Legacy. I couldn’t just...lose—just die. And I shouldn’t need anyone to save me, I thought desperately.
Needing something else—anything else—to focus on, I turned my smoldering ire on Tessia, who had been silent throughout the battle, but whom I had felt writhe in disgust as I drained the dragon dry.
No scolding, princess? I asked bitterly. Aren’t you going to tell me what a terrible person I am? How evil and irredeemable? How blind?
‘It appears there is nothing left for me to say that you don’t already know,’ she replied, her voice dim, distant, and empty of emotion.
I scoffed but couldn’t come up with a reply. I wanted to argue with her, to fight her. I needed to defend myself, to make someone understand.
Clenching my jaw, I tried to shake off the childish impulse. There was nothing to defend. I was doing my job...what I had to do. That was all.
Below me, the last of the devices was assembled, and the power emitters—like antennas that collected and stored atmospheric mana—were being placed and connected.
Struggling to be in the moment, I did the mental math. The Instillers were working too slowly.
On the horizon, I could now make out five dots growing quickly larger from the east.
Cursing, I dropped down. The array was all connected together, it just lacked the power it needed. Steadying myself, I pressed both hands against the first of the mana crystals. I envisioned mana traveling through me, then through all the wires and cables, filling each device and letting it fulfill its purpose.
Thought became reality, and the huge circle of artifacts began to hum with energy, each one emitting at first only a soft glow. This light radiated outward, slowly at first but with building speed and intensity until, with a sudden rush of mana, a dome of protective force curved over us to surround the rift, cutting it—and us, off from the outside world.
Only moments later, a missile of pure mana crashed against the side of the dome, which trembled under the force. I pushed more mana, and then more still, thankfully swelling with it from absorbing the dragon. Another spell, and another collided with the barrier rapidly. Cracks ran across its surface, and the shield emitters began to whine.
“Get the rest of this mana battery up and running,” I said in a low, strained voice. There was a frozen moment as no one reacted. When my gaze swept over them a second later, the Instillers jumped and hurried to comply as more spells impacted the side of the dome.
I needed more power—more mana—to rapidly bring the emitters up to their full capacity. If only we’d had just five more minutes!
My searching gaze settled on the rift above me. Little mana was being drawn into it now, but a significant amount was still pouring out. Tethering myself to the crystal with mana, I launched myself off the ground and flew into the middle of the distortion, not quite entering the rift but floating in that same in-between space the dragons had occupied before the attack. There, I drank deeply from the wellspring of that mana, but I did not hold it within myself to be purified. Instead, I pressed it downward through the tether and into the array, which pulsed with energy as the projected shield surged and thickened, visible ripples of light pulsing along its surface to collide at the very top.
The dragons arrived, their spells and breath and claws battering the barrier.
I grinned, relief draining the fear out of me. The shield held.
NICO SEVER
I fidgeted as I watched the light show happening to the east. It was too far for me to know if it was working or not. Although the shielding technology had been designed by Sovereign Orlaeth to hold back even High Sovereign Agrona, and I had seen it stop even Cecilia from breaking through, it still seemed like it was asking a lot for it to hold up under constant attack by who knows how many dragons.
And then there was the disruption technology we’d developed based on the prototypes Seris left behind in the Relictombs. With it, we would interrupt the ability to travel through the rift, so Lord Indrath couldn’t send dragons through from the other side. Like Seris had done on the second level of the Relictombs, we would cut the two worlds off from one another.
“Are we doing this or what?” Dragoth asked, scowling as he loomed over me.
The rift was Cecilia’s task to complete. I had my own.
“The other teams have confirmed everything is in place?” I asked, more to get my head back in the process than because I worried they hadn’t.
One of the handful of Instillers who accompanied us snapped out a nervous, “Yes, sir.”
I checked my timekeeping artifact, which had been synced with several other Wraith teams now spread out across Dicathen. “Power up the teleportation frame.”
The Instillers began activating the twenty-foot-wide teleportation frame. I watched them with a mix of trepidation and pride: it was an artifact of my own design.
While Cecilia had been searching the rifts, I was scouring dungeons in the deepest parts of the Beast Glades in search of a complete djinn teleportation relic. The long-distance portals they developed still held up and were used throughout Dicathen and, to a lesser extent, Alacrya. They could even reach from one continent to the other, as they had been used during the war.
But Agrona’s Instillers had never learned to replicate them. I figured it out.
The frame emitted a low hum, then a curtain of energy spilled down within the large open rectangle. I checked the timekeeping artifact again. “Complete the link.”
The lead Instiller programmed in the directions to a portal frame in Alacrya. The mana shifted, gaining clarity. A moment later, it rippled, and a row of soldiers stepped through. Behind them, another row stepped through, and then another. I knew that our forces were pouring out of identical portals all across Dicathen, set up by teams of Wraiths moving near-invisibly.
Apprehension filled me.
Despite the effort that went into this moment just to allow these soldiers to step foot on Dicathian soil, I knew it was the easy part. As rank after rank of men filed through, I steeled myself for what was to come.
No stone unturned, no village unburned...those had been Agrona’s words.
Clearing my throat, I turned toward the Wall, less than a half-mile distant. And so begins the second invasion of Dicathen...
“Dragoth, you know what to do.”