Book 2, Chapter 78

I used my own scrying magic to find my way after confirming Keeper’s information. There were a bunch of ways to get there, and I suspected there’d be traps in all of them. If Monarch was smart, and this base was as permanent as it appeared, those traps had been laid prior to me being born. I didn’t have any indication of which way would be the best, but to be fair, if they were magical traps, I was going to break them and steal the mana.

If Monarch had been using a ward stone, I wouldn’t have been able to do what I did. But I knew she wasn’t, because it was practically impossible to hide the mana from them. Shielding the stone itself did nothing since it still had to reach out to power the wards. Turning it off could hide it, but that defeated the purpose.

One by one, the wards fell to me. There were a few spots with mechanical traps, but those were not capable of hiding from my scrying spell. I triggered or bypassed them as needed, all the while keeping an eye on Monarch as I progressed.

“Even in that child’s body, you are dangerous,” she said to me through the scry. “Watching you work reminds me of my great-grandfather. He was a force of nature. Intractable. Unstoppable. Perhaps it was only because I was a child back then—barely older than you are now when he finally succumbed to age—but in my mind, he’ll always be the man who reached out to grab hold of the stars. He would have succeeded, too, if not for the betrayal.”

I ignored her chatter and focused on ripping apart the delicate apparatus hidden in the walls that would launch six-foot-long spikes from either wall when the victim stepped into position. This one had been cleverly disguised, having both a magical proximity trigger and a physical, three-foot-wide pressure plate that spanned the entire length of the hallway. Without taking a running leap, I couldn’t have avoided it.

“He was a mage general in Ralvost’s army when Ammun broke the world, you know,” Monarch continued. “If those fools hadn’t turned their backs on him, he could have held the kingdom together. But no, they wanted to chase after Ammun’s scraps, and my family was exiled here, to this desert in the far corner of the world.”

“Sounds like a biased account to me,” I said as I stepped past the broken trap. Whatever else she might be, Monarch was confident in herself. She’d made no effort to flee.

“You wouldn’t know. You weren’t there. I did some digging, Keiran. At first, I only knew you as Ammun’s master, an archmage in your own right, but from a time before the Age of Wonders. How powerful could you possibly be? Your work served as a stepping stone for Ammun’s own spells, but if you’d had his kind of power, history would have been very different.”

It wasn’t that I couldn’t have done what those idiots did. I just wasn’t that stupid. Besides, if I was being honest, the last three or four hundred years of my previous life had seen the majority of my focus on fending off my own mortality. When it became obvious that I couldn’t achieve true immortality, I’d shifted to my reincarnation project.

There’d been some complications, but in truth, I’d been striding into the darkness and blazing my own path. My soul invocations had worked far better than I’d had any right to expect, even considering the amount of research and testing I’d done. I couldn’t truly know if my predictions were accurate without actually dying, but the fact that I was standing here now was irrefutable proof of my abilities.

“My grandfather remembered Ralvost,” Monarch said. “I was raised on the old stories of the empire that had grown from the ashes of Ammun’s Folly. I was raised to hate them for what they’d taken from my family, but the truth is that I could never feel a connection to a lost kingdom. It fell a thousand years or more before I was born. This desert has been my home for the last three centuries.”

“Why are you telling me this?” I asked as I paused at an intersection. My scrying revealed no traps either way, and the circular design of the Old Ground meant that both would eventually curve around and have intersecting passages that ran to Monarch’s position in the center.

As my scrying spell traced the hallways, I found a collapse in the left one. That would be another drain on my mana if I tried to bypass it. Monarch had probably known what my decision would be if I came this way, however, and I expected more traps in the right tunnel that I wouldn’t see until I approached them.

“How often does one get to speak to an archmage out of legend?” she asked. “You… fascinate me. For all your murderous intentions toward me, I’m happy you’re here. I’ll admit my reasons are selfish. The knowledge locked away in your head… the greedy part of me wants all of it. Would you be willing to strike a deal with me as you’ve done with some of my cabal?”

“I might have been, if not for that trap you tried to catch me in,” I said as I walked. The mana drain on this scry was entirely on Monarch, and if she wanted to waste it talking my ear off, I wasn’t going to stop her.

“In all fairness, you brought this fight to me. We didn’t attack you. You can hardly blame me for fighting back, for trying to decisively eliminate a threat. But that was before I delved deep into the histories and realized how much I’d underestimated you. That reminds me; I’m curious. You use your old name openly. Why?”

“Why not? Hiding is for people who are afraid.”

“How very arrogant of you,” Monarch said.

In response, I ripped apart another ward, this one designed to ignite in a burst of flames that would fill the hall a hundred feet in either direction.

“I’ve been accused of worse.”

“I could say the same,” Monarch said. “Not by anybody still living, of course.”

“Since you’re feeling talkative, tell me about my idiot apprentice, Ammun. When I died, he was nowhere near the level of archmage. How’d he manage to get strong enough to mess up the entire world?”

“I would have thought you’d already know.”

“I’ve been busy,” I said.

“Yes, killing my staff and ruining the operations I’ve spent decades setting up.”

“You’ll forgive me if, as a victim of those operations, I’m not feeling any repentance in my soul for my actions.”

I was getting close now. With every step, I kept expecting Monarch to launch the surprise attack she had so much confidence in. I assumed the trapped tunnels were meant to wear me out, to force me to burn my mana. Obviously, the Wolf Pack had never figured out how efficiently I was able to drain mana from wards, which seemed like an oversight to me. If nothing else, they should have recognized it from the broken ward stone I’d left behind in Velvet’s castle.

Monarch’s prattling was probably a distraction, but if so, she’d done it in a clever way. The truth was that I was interested in learning more about the history of Ralvost. Speaking to someone from a mage’s line with a direct connection to the events only three generations back was about as likely as I was going to get to a first-hand account of what had happened. It was all too easy to keep the conversation going, to split my mind between advancing on her and listening to her talk.

Maybe she also thought of it as a way to hedge her bets on her own victory. Would I be willing to kill such a valuable source of information in the event that I won? Simply put, yes. Yes, I would. Unless she happened to know exactly what Ammun and that splinter faction of mages had done to break the world so badly, the rest of the information was just a curiosity.

Truth be told, I didn’t even need that information from anyone else. I didn’t know the specifics, but I had a general idea of exactly what research had been plundered to serve as a basis for the magic in question. It wasn’t a direction I’d wanted to take it in, which was why I’d used a lunar convergence of all six moons to power my reincarnation ritual instead, but I was sure I could engineer the necessary steps to create my own hypothetical world-cracking catastrophe.

At least, I could if I could get my hands on a literal mountain of mana. It would take me decades to generate the mana needed to replicate the spell now. Unfortunately, my budding theories about how to fix it would cost even more. To put it simply, I was visualizing something like an enormous mystical patch on the world core followed by a process much like a normal person’s ignition.

The amount of mana needed, not even counting the spells to keep it moving and under control, would be a life quest just to acquire. My initial calculations had not been encouraging, but there was no point in thinking about it until I saw the damage for myself. It would be years before I was ready for that journey.

Monarch was silent as she watched me rip through a series of interwoven wards separated by about twenty feet of physical distance. They were set up to be an unbreakable trap, each one setting off an explosion if either was breached. The theory was that I could disarm one at best, but even if I did, the other would go off. I bypassed the first one, then broke the connection from the inside, rendering both wards inert. Then I took the mana from them and continued walking.

“Clever,” Monarch said begrudgingly.

“Are you going to answer my question?” I asked.

“Ammun… I’m afraid I don’t have an answer for you. He was already a lich by the time Ralvost was founded.”

“He transitioned into a lich?” I asked, truly surprised for the first time. “How foolish of him to break the world core then. I can’t imagine he survived his own mistake by more than a few years.”

“I suspect you might be correct,” Monarch said. “His disappearance supposedly heralded the fall of Ralvost.”

Liches required an incredible amount of mana just to survive, though not as much as I had by the end of my first life. That wouldn’t have been a problem in a world still ripe with mana, but it was an immediate death sentence in today’s environment. All the mana the Wolf Pack gathered from this entire island on a daily basis might be enough to keep a lich from crumbling to dust, but there wouldn’t be a lot left over to do any actual magic with.

That didn’t truly mean he was dead, though. A large enough reservoir could maintain a phylactery for a few thousand years, one that had much more manageable needs. Without someone around to repair the world core, though, there wouldn’t be much practical difference. Life as a rock hidden away in a box was death with another name.

 Some of the things I’d read contradicted Monarch’s own words, but there was nothing surprising about that. Scholars speculated on events they had no knowledge of, and their words were taken as truth, twisting history in exactly this way. It was inevitable, and also largely irrelevant. As long as Ralvost and its descendent nations were well and truly gone, digging into them served no purpose beyond satisfying my own curiosity.

“Ah, it seems you’ve arrived after all. This has been a most enlightening display of the weakness of my defenses,” Monarch said.

I stood in front of a double door about twelve feet in height, its surface covered with runes of all sorts. A series of physical locks barred entry, and in fact, the only reason I could even see past it right now was by using the link Monarch’s own scrying spell provided to sneak around the defenses.

It took me eight seconds to break the inscriptions. I didn’t bother with the locks. Instead, I blew the doors off their hinges and walked into Monarch’s sanctum as the echo of them toppling to the floor announced my arrival.