Book 3, Chapter 12

Whatever else the eyrie might be, it wasn’t abandoned. Sitting under the eaves on the top of the tower was a knot of mana woven to point in a specific direction. It even had faint streamers of magic trailing off through the sky that gradually faded out of my perception after a few hundred feet or so.

There was no way that spell had been sitting up there undisturbed and running for even a decade. I needed a closer look to be sure, but I was betting the current spell would last for a few months, tops. Then again, there was something going on with the tower itself. Either way, it bore investigating.

“Do you see any monsters?” I asked Senica.

She shook her head and tucked her hair behind her ear, only for the wind to immediately catch it and blow it across her face again. “Nothing,” she said, pulling her hair back out of her mouth as she spoke. “Damn it. Can you do something about this wind?”

“Language, dear sister,” I said. My own hair was cut short now, barely an inch long. Other than the bracing chill of it, something I wasn’t much accustomed to living in a desert wasteland, the wind didn’t much bother me.

“Seriously. I don’t have anything to tie it with. Tell me you’ve got a piece of string I can have?”

“I have no string.”

“Damn it,” she muttered again.

“Has anyone ever told you that you’re spoiled?” I asked her.

“Just you. Frequently.”

“That’s because it’s true. Give me a minute.”

Transmutation spells were rarely fast, and this one was no exception. It actually took closer to five minutes, but I used stone shape to create a thin, delicate comb, then transmuted the stone to silver. I wasn’t much of an artist, but I gave it a few decorative whorls. “Here,” I said, holding it out.

Senica took it, twisted her hair up how she wanted it, and jabbed the comb into place to hold it. “That’s so much better. Thank you, Gravin.”

While I’d been working on correcting my sister’s planning deficiency, I’d also been feeling out the eyrie with a series of divinations. Specifically, I’d been looking at the mana running through it, like some sort of pseudo-enchantment. It was a strange thing, definitely not human-made. Every time I’d run across something like this, it was always the product of a race of magic-wielding sapient monsters.

That could be a good or bad thing, depending on what they were. Monster as a technical classification just meant the creature couldn’t survive without mana, not that it was necessarily a man-eater. That fact was often forgotten since so many monsters did get their mana from eating other creatures, but it didn’t mean that was the case with whatever had made this tower.

In fact, if the old timer from the village was to be believed, the owners of this mana beacon were a race of giant birds that frequently killed other monsters for their sustenance. They might even just be animals, though I doubted that. There was a level of magical sophistication displayed here that animals almost never reached on their own, even if they did have magic.

There was no entrance to the eyrie on the ground. While I was sure I could force my way through it with a sufficient amount of mana and determination, there was no reason to be rude. However, when I went to climb the wall, I immediately found out that it rebuffed any and all attempts to stick to it, even with magic.

“Well, that explains why there’s nothing living inside,” I told Senica. “The only way anything is getting in is to fly.”

Since it was at most forty feet, it wouldn’t be a huge burden to levitate to the top. Senica and I cast the spell in unison, and I smiled a bit at her perfect diction as she chanted the runes. She really wasn’t ready for a spell this complicated, but levitation  was so useful that I’d taught it to her anyway. It’d be another year or so before I actually started teaching her the full intermediate set of runes, but she could use this one single spell.

Perfect pronunciation aside, silent casting allowed for faster spell completion and made it harder for an opponent to predict what spell was coming their way. It was an invaluable skill to any mage fighting against fellow mages, which happened fairly regularly back in my time. The number of total mages in the world was way down now, but that wouldn’t be true forever. Learning to cast without incantations might one day save Senica’s life.

The hardest part of our levitation was holding steady against the wind. The spell didn’t provide much in the way of movement outside of going up and done, but external forces could and did still act on us, and the wind was quite strong up here. Considering how close we were to the mountain’s peak, I suspected this wasn’t unusual, and that we might even have gotten lucky with a relatively calm day.

As we passed under the canopy, a thing of shaped stone that looked somewhat similar to those little well roofs I used to see when I was young the first time, I noted a series of runes scratched into the stones. They were faint, so faint in fact that I immediately realized the runes weren’t really there. They were actually light waste from the spell in the shape of the rune, which supported my sapient monster theory.

Carving runes into stones took a lot of precision, which was a quality that creatures which didn’t have thumbs generally lacked. Tracing the runes with mana itself was an alternative favored by monsters without hands who still wanted to make pseudo-inscriptions, monsters like giant birds, for example.

From the top of the eyrie, I could see the streamers of mana going out in two opposite directions. They faded out of the range of my mana sense within a few hundred feet, but I was sure they kept going past that, possibly for miles. A monster with excellent vision and a complimentary ability to see mana could probably follow those streamers the whole way.

“It’s a rest lodge and guide post,” I said. “I bet those birds that used to come through here are migratory, and they built places like this the way people plant signs at intersections in roads.”

“You think so?” Senica asked as she peered down at the balconies lining the interior of the tower. There was no way to reach any of them other than by flying, and given that none of them had a railing, I was already mentally reclassifying them as nests. Considering the size of them, if I assumed one bird per nest, they probably grew to prodigious sizes.

It wasn’t hard to picture a flock of eight- or nine-foot-tall birds with twenty-five-foot wingspans roosting inside the eyrie, though that didn’t quite match that old-timer’s description of them being the size of multiple houses crammed together. The locals had said the birds hadn’t been seen in decades, which didn’t automatically mean they were extinct. Something had come through and activated the magic of this tower, after all. The question was who, or what, had done it. And why?

I shook my head. That wasn’t right. The real question was what I was going to do about it. I had little doubt that this beacon was emitting enough mana that monsters sensitive to it could feel it from miles and miles away. Breaking the magic of the eyrie would almost certainly prevent even more monsters from finding their way to Ghalin.

I could do that, and close the book on this investigation. I did have my own projects to get back to, after all. But this was the first sign I’d seen of a magically-competent civilization since my reincarnation. Maybe some of the most experienced members of the Wolf Pack could have set up something similar, but I doubted it. They’d only ruled Derro through the power of their cache of artifacts from the Age of Wonders, a cache I’d confiscated and destroyed once I’d confirmed that the tools wouldn’t do anything I couldn’t already do on my own..

No, this tower was beyond anything else I’d found in the wastes, and I was curious to find out more about where it came from and if I could follow those streamers myself to meet the species that used it. Giant birds were new to me personally, but I’d befriended several species of sapient monsters before. I could do it again.

On the other hand, if they were hostile, a fight with dozens or hundreds of birds bigger than I was sounded unpleasant. It might be better to put a pin in this for a week or two, or to at least make a trip back home to top of my reserves first.

“You’re being quiet,” Senica said. “What are you thinking?”

“That I want to know more,” I told her. “I do think that shutting this tower down would alleviate Ghalin’s monster problem, but if I do that, I lose the ability to follow its mana to the next one in the line, or to wherever it ends up leading me.”

“Well, how long would it take to do that?” she asked.

“It depends how far I’d have to go, I suppose. But that’s a good point. I could just follow it to the next stopping point, then come back and shut this one down.”

“Do you think anyone would get upset with you for breaking this place?”

There was something I hadn’t considered. Whoever had activated the eyrie had done so for a reason. Even if they weren’t a threat to me personally, they might return to take it out on the nearby village. Assuming these bird monsters were the true owners of this place, I needed more information before I made a decision.

“We should go back to Ghalin,” I said. “As far as I’m concerned, we’ve learned what we needed to here. Even if the beacon stays up, Ghalin has the ward stone now and a group of our mages helping them thin out the monsters. They can survive a week or two while I look into this more.”

Senica nodded to me. “Okay. How do we get down?”

“How do you think we should do it?” I asked.

“Strong winds, heading in the right direction. I think a weight reduction spell and maybe a bit of levitation to get us going, and we’ll just drift down toward Ghalin.”

“What are you going to use for a sail?”

“I was hoping you’d have something,” she said.

“My phantom space isn’t filled with things that are convenient for you,” I said. “If you want to haul that kind of stuff around, you should learn to make your own.”

“Come on, that’s not fair!”

It wasn’t, not really, but neither was life. “Let’s assume for the sake of this exercise that you have access only to what’s on you. What do you do?”

“Use up all the mana in your storage crystal flying home, then lie and assure you that it was incredibly necessary to escape all the monsters out here.”

I felt my eye twitch, just once, before I regained control of my expression. “Try again,” I told her.

“Weight reduction and drift down as far as the wind will take me, aiming for the trail below, then walk back while keeping an eye out for monsters,” she said sullenly.

“Off with you, then.”

I watched Senica cast the spells and leap out into the open air. Her magic carried her down—perhaps a bit faster than I would have preferred—safely to the ground below. Then I pulled out the sheet that I’d stashed for just such an occasion after watching Senica do the same thing a week ago and leaped out, doing exactly what she’d wanted us to do before she’d jumped off.

Her indignant yelp from below brought a smile to my face as I manipulated the wind to steer my makeshift parachute. Without it, I’d have dropped just as quickly as Senica, but with it, I could glide all the way back to the village.

“You come back here!” Senica screeched at me.

She ran after me, chanting a spell, and burst into the air. I could have dodged her, but that would have meant leaving her behind, something our parents would no doubt be unhappy about. So I let her tackle me mid-air and used my own magic to keep us stable as we glided away from Eyrie.

“I hate you,” she hissed, still clutching my waist as we drifted on the wind.

“No you don’t.”

“I do!” she insisted.

“Fine, find your own sail.” I started wiggling to shake her loose.

“No! Stop! I take it back!”

“You’re just saying that because the ground is far below us.”

“What? Never. I love you, my sweet, wonderful, generous brother.”

“Okay,” I said. “You’re laying it on a bit too thick now. You can stop.”

We floated in silence for a minute, then Senica said, “How long is this going to take?”

“Sshh. Just enjoy the view.”