Book 3, Chapter 51

Understandably, the silver-feathered brakvaw didn’t trust me to just randomly teleport her across several islands to the mana-rich environment outside the Sanctum of Light. I couldn’t even hold it against her for not believing me when I described it. The old kingdom of Ralvost was so far away, the countries it had shattered into following its fall were beyond the reach of the brakvaw waypoint network.

That necessitated a spell I hadn’t yet had occasion to use in my new life. Teleportation was all well and good, but portals were superior in every way, including range. They also had a superior mana cost to go with them, and were significantly more difficult to maintain.

It took me ten minutes to set up the portal while the brakvaw’s new leader silently watched. I could sense apprehension rolling off her in waves as more and more mana built up in the air, all of it tightly leashed to my will. The portal spell was extraordinarily difficult to cast and actually required me to manufacture several physical anchors on the spot, all of which I had to manually inscribe runes into. I made a mental note to fabricate a true portal frame with my crucible later, but the crude version I built would do for now.

Eventually, an oval of pale blue light appeared in the air. After a few moments, the light started to pull back to the edges until it was an oblong ring. Inside that ring was a stretch of forested land with the immense silver spire of the Sanctum of Light behind it.

“I hope you’re able to shrink down like I’ve seen other brakvaw do,” I told the giant bird. “I’m not equipped to widen this portal at the moment.”

Wordlessly, she reduced her size until she was only nine feet tall. “How long can you hold the portal open?” she asked.

“Indefinitely, as long as I don’t walk away from it,” I said. “To make one permanent and free-standing would require more resources than I’m willing to devote to a demonstration.”

The brakvaw stared at me with those piercing gold-ringed eyes they all had, no doubt trying to figure out if this was some sort of trap. The truth of it was that I didn’t need to do anything this elaborate if I wanted to kill her, and I suspected she knew that. Still wary, she fluttered her wings and hopped through the portal.

“There’s… so much mana,” her voice came back to me. “How is this possible?”

“Long story,” I said as I stepped through to join her. “But the important thing is that with all the mana, there are many, many monsters and other creatures living here.”

The brakvaw took off into the air and did a quick scan. I watched her fly a slow circle around me for a minute or so before she landed next to the portal again. “I am convinced that this is a good hunting ground,” she said, “but there is nowhere for us to build our nests.”

 “Mountains can be made,” I said. “Though a few caves in the cliffs to the north would be easier to create.”

The brakvaw peered speculatively at it. “Would that not be close to your human settlement here? I thought the whole point of this proposed relocation was to separate our hunting grounds from the humans?”

“No, no. I don’t care about those humans in the slightest,” I said. “You have my blessing to hunt as many of them as you like.”

That got me a strange look and a squawking cackle from the brakvaw. “Very well,” she said. “I will speak to the rest of my flock. You will be able to provide the transport to this land again for us?”

“Easily,” I said, which was only partially a lie. It was certainly expensive, but the mana was so dense here that I’d reclaimed everything I’d spent making the portal already.

“How convenient,” the brakvaw remarked. “It is a shame your magic requires you to be nearby to hold it open. We would not have had to split from the main flock if we had these portals at our disposal.”

“Huh… That’s a thought,” I muttered. “I understand that a lot of the disagreements were over hunting grounds and prohibited areas.”

“It depends who you ask,” the brakvaw said. “Many of our elders were used to having to answer to no one, and they chafed at Grandfather’s increased supervision. Their hatred for you burns quite fiercely. But for those of us just trying to survive, being restricted from our ancestral hunting grounds became an intolerable burden. It was too hard to find enough food in the limited range we had, and too hard to make the flights back and forth to where our prey still lived.”

“And so you stopped listening to Grandfather about where you could and could not hunt,” I said.

“Exactly. He was… displeased to find it so when he returned to us.”

“If you had a permanent portal from Eyrie Peak to this hunting ground, that would have solved a lot of problems for you?”

The brakvaw hesitated for a moment. “Perhaps,” she said finally. “Not all of them, certainly, but some. There are many who simply did not wish to have our lives controlled anymore.”

“Is your current flock among those?”

“Speak plainly. What are you thinking?”’

“That I could create a permanent portal between your home and here,” I said. If I made this side the anchoring point, I could probably even get it running on ambient mana, too. It wouldn’t stay open every second of the day, but there was enough mana to maintain the connection. With the appropriate anchors on Eyrie Peak, they could feed mana into the portal frame to access it at will.

For security reasons, I’d need to key the portal to only accept brakvaw. The last thing I needed was a regiment of battle mages passing through. Several thousand miles of distance between my home and the tower I was probably going to antagonize in the very near future was a good thing.

“Discuss the idea with Grandfather next time he reaches out to you,” I offered. “I’m sure it’ll happen any day now. I’ll open a permanent portal at Eyrie Peak for you, or a temporary one to relocate your flock here permanently.”

“And if we decide to do neither?” she asked.

I just gave her a cold, stony stare before turning to walk back through the portal. After a moment’s hesitation, the silver-feathered brakvaw followed me.

  *

Grandfather was overjoyed at my proposal. Neither of us expected it to bring back every single brakvaw, but with the elders who’d fought against his leadership gone and a solution to their hunting grounds at hand, it seemed likely that a significant portion of them would return.

What effect this would have on the ecosystem around the tower, I couldn’t begin to guess. Nor did I particularly care. The important part was that it resolved the brakvaw problem in my backyard, because I was beyond sick of dealing with them. As soon as I explained the concept and laid out how much mana it would cost him—both in terms of how much was needed and how much extra I planned to collect for my labor—he latched right onto it. Without even talking to anyone else, he gave me the go ahead and directed me to a location to set up the portal.

I’d already shaped the frame and ran it through my crucible before I went north to speak to Grandfather, so it was just a matter of getting everything set up. The framework was sized to let an adult brakvaw through without them having to use their magic to resize themselves, though it wasn’t big enough for them to fly. Their wingspans were ridiculous at full-size, so they’d have a bit of work bringing their kills back through.

I was sure they’d figure something out.

It took me three hours to set everything up, which included scraping out a huge section at the base of a cliff to set the portal into. We’d decided against having the frame free-standing in the open air to minimize the risk of damage to it, and embedding it into a wall was the obvious solution.

While I was working, Grandfather made contact with the various flocks that had broken off, and got six of them to send representatives to view the portal and the lands beyond it. By the time I was ready, I had an audience of gargantuan corvids watching me work while chirping and cawing at each other.

I activated the portal, let them through to explore, and settled back to wait while Grandfather slowly filled one of my storage crystals. His mana core might have only been at stage one, but he was so huge that his regeneration speed still beat mine. It would take him half a day to pay back the mana I’d used, and while he worked, I went over the finer details of portal management.

“The big thing here is that every brakvaw is going to need to be individually keyed in,” I said. “This is mostly to prevent anything that’s not a brakvaw from coming back through, including any mages capable of shapeshifting into one. It’s a pain now, but it’ll give you peace of mind once it’s all set up. You don’t want a doorway that strange things can come through right next to your home.”

“I agree,” Grandfather said. “Walk me through the process of keying someone to the portal.”

“Have you given some thought to a successor?” I asked. “Maybe they should be here for this, too.”

“Unfortunately, most of my possible successors are dead or missing,” the old bird said. “It’ll be a few years before I find someone else, I imagine.”

“Ah. I see.”

“Yes, it’s too bad they’re not here to witness this portal magic of yours.”

“Do you think it would have made a difference?” I asked.

Grandfather sighed and shook his head. “We’ll never know for sure, but no, probably not.”

“It looks like the exploratory team is coming back through,” I said. “Once you’re done talking to them, we can keep going through the portal management spells.”

Though there was plenty of space, all six brakvaw shrunk themselves to a more reasonable size and huddled together in a semi-circle. Grandfather’s own projection shifted to bird form and he flapped his wings once to kick into the air, a completely unnecessary movement since projections moved by force of will, but perhaps it helped set the other brakvaw at ease.

I stepped through the portal while I waited and spent the time filling the rest of my mana crystals up. Due almost entirely to their size, it was a lengthy process, but I was eager to speed up the creation of my new crystal, so any opportunity I got to harvest some ambient mana was one I was quick to exploit.

I kept an eye on the portal as I worked, and an hour later, the six brakvaw flew off in individual directions. Since Grandfather’s projection was unable to come to me, I reluctantly put a pin in my mana harvesting and stepped back over to Eyrie Peak. One look at Grandfather’s expression was all I needed.

“They’ve accepted?” I asked.

“They have,” he told me. “You managed to do what I could not, Keiran.”

“Well, not for free,” I reminded him. “I’m being well-compensated for the work.”

In truth, I probably could have obtained more mana myself in the time I’d spent on this, but if it got the brakvaw away from Ghalin and my family off my back, I was happy. It didn’t hurt to be in Grandfather’s good graces, especially since I’d removed the disruptive element from his society for him. Whatever political repercussions that led to would be his problem to deal with.

“Alright, let’s get these lessons wrapped up,” I said. “Now, this part of the framework is what handles identifying someone attempting to cross the portal…”