Measureless Magic 1, Ch. 18 & 19

Two more chapters! Lots going on this week, though - it's Thanksgiving in the USA - so I might have to skip the next update. Apologies in advance if that ends up being the case.

19 ends on a bit of a cliffhanger. You've been warned. Sorry!


Chapter 18

If you spot a humanlike figure in the sky, immediately contact your superiors. Contact with any humans outside of Marynth has grown less frequent over time. The opportunity to exchange information - or seeds of magic-tolerant plants! - is of immense value. We cannot risk scaring a potential ally away. 

• Handbook of the Guardians of Marynth

Things went well as the trio drifted forward through room after room, learning to manipulate magic into more and more detailed configurations. 

The only moment of disquiet came at the end of the first day. Ravel, as tactfully as he could, suggested that his companions switch to a change of clothes and wash what they were wearing under the faucet, so they could leave it out to dry overnight. 

Dee had looked embarrassed and hurriedly stepped into the restroom, while Koby and Ravel changed in the main room.

“You have a tattoo?” Ravel blurted, surprised.

“No? Why would you-” Koby paused, his clean shirt halfway up his arms, to look at Ravel. “Wait. You have a tattoo? And you say- Oh, skies. I do have a tattoo!”

“What?” Ravel said the word, more than asked it. He looked downward. A delicate design sat above his sternum, a series of circles partitioned into sections. It was only an outline, mostly-empty with only a few scattered dots inside the innermost circle. He lifted a hand and ran his fingers across his chest. The skin felt perfectly normal.

“The… the castle must have put these on us?” Koby said. “I don’t remember my skin hurting. Tattoos hurt, don’t they? When do you think it happened? Today?”

Ravel shook his head. “I don’t know. Maybe? This is only the second time I’ve changed my shirt. I didn’t notice it before, but I can’t promise it wasn’t there. Maybe the castle didn’t even do it? It could have happened anytime between a minute ago and the moment we got on the bus.”

“It wouldn’t have happened on the bus,” Koby said. “I’ve gone swimming with my older cousins and parents plenty of times and I’ve never seen anything like this. It isn’t something that happens to everyone when they graduate.”

“Oh, yeah, that’s true,” Ravel said.

“What’s true? Oh, the tattoos. You have them. Thank goodness it’s not just me,” Dee said, opening the bathroom door.

“Why would that be a good thing?” Ravel asked.

Dee hunched a little, looking away as she pulled her arms tight around her bundle of dirty clothes. “Well, the old lady had one, and she was… well, I was worried it was a label of some kind.”

“Because you’re both girls?” Koby asked.

“Because our bodies don’t work right,” Dee snapped.

“Being a little shaky isn’t the same as not being able to breathe,” Koby said.

“Well, maybe she started like me or something,” Dee said. “I mean, probably not, but when I saw the symbol, I got worried. There’s… there’s just too much we don’t know.”

Ravel nodded slowly. “I wonder why we have them. I feel like ours aren’t quite like the repairwoman’s, but I admit I wasn’t really focusing on her tattoo.”

“I don’t know.” Dee shivered, then twitched, almost dropping her clothes as her left arm spasmed. “I don’t like it. What else is it going to do to us?”

“At least it didn’t hurt?” Koby said.

He said the words weakly, as if even he didn’t find it comforting.

Ravel shrugged his shirt over his head, covering the tattoo. Out of sight, out of mind? 

It didn’t really work, but he managed to get to sleep eventually, and the trio continued onward the next morning, carefully not talking about the unwanted brands. 

They focused on the tasks before them, puzzling out what the castle wanted and doing their best to fulfill its wishes. Eventually, the pools of thick magic disappeared, and they had to learn to gather it themselves, condensing the diffuse magic in the air. In later rooms, they had to learn to inject the magic into premade runes.

It became more difficult to predict when they would succeed, which made it harder to stick together, but they managed, waiting patiently when one of them - usually Koby - lagged behind.

Ravel was the first one to successfully complete a chamber - either the 47th or the 48th, Ravel hadn’t been counting and Dee and Koby didn’t agree - duplicating and powering a complex set of pragmatic magic runes well enough to produce a drop of water. 

The methods of taking them from one chamber to the next varied, and Ravel was relieved to see the silvery boxes fold up around him. Slides might have been fun on the playground when he was smaller, but sliding in a random direction with little warning was just stressful. The rooms with doors or archways where he could walk from one to the next were best, but he didn’t really mind having the castle carry him around like this.

The squares folded back, and his relief vanished.

Doors.

Multiple doors! And not closed ones, like many of the previous chambers had. Open doors, each surmounted by a command in the strange writing: GO FORTH.

As Ravel took a step toward one door - not to go in, not immediately, but just to check it out more closely - it scrolled closed, sliding down from the top like a windowshade, cutting off his path to a small but extremely fancy sitting room with blue walls. The door stayed closed for only a few seconds, then slid away to the left. 

The cozy room and its overstuffed chairs had vanished, replaced by a vast red-lit chamber filled with machinery.

“I hope you had fun completing the Marynth Manor Qualifying Course!”

“What? No.” 

The voice was strange in more than one way. It was oddly accented, and reminded Ravel of the way an actor or a poet might speak on stage. Beyond that, it was too… Ravel wasn’t sure what else to call it other than too big. He couldn’t place the speaker, and when he finally found the person, the sense of oddness only increased. A tiny woman in an ornate dress, perhaps half the height she ought to be, was trapped behind a pane of glass or crystal. She didn’t react to Ravel’s exclamation, continuing on as if he hadn’t spoken.

“Now that you’ve demonstrated basic competency, the fun is really about to start! Marynth Manor is taking the changes our world has experienced and turning them into something truly magical: a one-of-a-kind larger-than-life experience created by a collection of the finest puzzle experts from across the globe. A lot of work and care has gone into designing every room, so be sure, while using your magic, to consult and obey all the posted rules! For the integrity of the manor and the safety of our other guests, we have to be very strict about this.”

The image suddenly fuzzed, and the tiny woman was replaced by an equally short man. Unlike the woman, who looked poised and elegant, the man seemed frazzled and unkempt. His skin, a light yellow-brown, was dark and and purplish under his eyes, like he’d been going without enough sleep for far too long, and his clothes were clearly designed for utility, not beauty. 

He was already speaking.

“-on? You’re recording? Already? Right.” The man straightened, then ran a hand through his hair and looked directly at Ravel. “Welcome to the defense force. Thank you for volunteering. As you know, our situation is dire: the attacks continue and we’re losing more mages than we’re gaining. We recently made the difficult decision to pull many of our experts off of training and onto active duty, but we must have more mages. We believe that utilizing Marynth as a sort of boot camp may allow us to make that happen.”

He hesitated. “That said, I urge you to be watchful. Marynth Manor was not designed for this purpose, and with Seltonda and Mikros away, our control over it is… imperfect. If you have the slightest concern, please let staff know immediately. We-”

A hellish rhythmic noise interrupted the man’s speech, rising and falling in pitch repeatedly. He broke off mid-sentence, eyes widening in alarm as he turned and dashed away. “How many? Where-”

Ravel stared at the crystal pane, confused and stunned by the suddenly-empty room and the unnatural noise. Then the image of the room fuzzed, and the calm lady once again appeared. She gave the camera a bright smile. “In addition to all the rules posted in each room, there are two universal rules: do not damage the manor and don-”

The woman froze, her mouth slightly open.

Belatedly, Ravel put the clues together. The frozen woman disappearing and reappearing, the tired man coming out of nowhere, the weird sounds: this was an illusion. He’d seen those before. No one could do magic in the Nurseries, but they could in the rest of the city, and if you sat on the rooftop or a balcony, you frequently saw magic being done. Occasionally, a troupe of performers would come by and put on a show outside the Nursery for the kids to watch from within. 

Guardians had illusion enchantments they carried with them on-duty, too, devices they could flood with magic to call down a beacon on their location if they were injured or in danger.

But those devices were, well, simple. They made things like giant circles or columns of light or, at most, spiraling lines or arrows.

They didn’t make real-enough-to-believe moving images of human beings. Performers could come close to this sometimes, with the special effects for shows, but there was a mage actively controlling those effects.

If there was a mage here, where were they? And more importantly…

“What’s the second universal rule?”

Ravel’s voice echoed loudly.

There was no answer.

Chapter 19

The other reason we urge you to reach out to your superiors is for your own sake. Not everything that looks like a human is one. The more humanlike a monster is, the more danger it tends to be. 

• Handbook of the Guardians of Marynth

Dee arrived not long afterward, and the message played again. Ravel didn’t try to speak to her, taking the opportunity to watch it again and look for more details.

When it stopped again, exactly as it had before, Dee spun to look at Ravel. “Wait… what’s the second rule?!”

Ravel shook his head. “That’s what I want to know! The castle killed that Marat kid for breaking the first rule. But… the message stopped right there for me, too!”

Dee frowned, glancing back at the screen. “Wait… so it was the same for you? Exactly the same?” 

“Yeah. I was watching closely and all the details I remember hadn’t changed a bit.” Ravel shook his head in disbelief. “Do you think it could be an enchantment?”

“Something that detailed?” Dee couldn’t hide her skepticism. “Seems unlikely.”

“So you think someone’s watching us?” Ravel said. He walked over to one of the doors and peered inside. A complicated fountain dripped three different colors of water, surrounded by walls filled with cubbies each of which held… a tiny statue of a smiling monster? 

No people, though. 

“I don’t know,” Dee admitted. She sighed. “Maybe it’s just ancient technology? Not magic? My dad used to tell me about electric devices that could show pictures and sound. They even have a lot of examples, but no one’s ever gotten one working, so a lot of people are convinced the idea is a hoax or a legend. Dad thought it was real, though.”

“Ancient technology?” Ravel said. He left the door alone and went to touch the crystal pane. It was smooth and cool, which… didn’t tell him anything. He had no idea what an ancient device or an enchantment would feel like. He wasn’t even sure which of the three options felt more implausible: a pre-magic artifact, an enchantment beyond anything he’d ever seen, or a wondermage who could create such a perfect illusion twice in a row.

Although… 

“Do you think someone would have used such impressive technology to display a message like this?” Ravel tapped the wall next to the crystal panel. “That was a mess. None of it made sense.”

Dee bit her lip. She looked up at Ravel, but only one of her eyes was tracking properly: the other looked slightly askew, like it had back when they’d first been trapped. Did it happen more when Dee was scared or stressed?

“Hey!” Dee said.

Ravel realized he’d missed something she said. “Sorry. Thinking. What was that?”

“I said, however that message was made, I think was created during the Missing Years - you know, the time right after magic arrived, the ones history class doesn’t say much about? Keb, my brother, always complained about how few records we have from that period.”

Ravel tried to push his memory back to history class. As with most of his other lessons, he hadn’t excelled in history - it just wasn’t that interesting to him - but he hadn’t been a terrible student. “Marynth Isle was under attack then, right? We know that much. So that makes sense.”

Dee nodded. “Yeah, although records seem to disagree on what we were attacked by. Some records mention monsters, and others mention people.”

“Why can’t it have been both?” Ravel asked. “We’ve been attacked by people from other islands in the past, right? A long time ago? And we get attacked by monsters all the time.”

“It could be,” Dee admitted. “It probably was. But Keb was convinced that what happened at the end of the ancient world wasn’t a bunch of disconnected problems. I can’t tell you why he thought that. He tried to explain his reasoning a bunch of times, but all his evidence was really… niche. Things like a normal word choice in one particular woman’s diary that was supposedly unusual for her.”

“And you… think he was right?” Ravel asked, skeptical.

“More like I’m not going to say he’s wrong. It might sound crazy to me, but what do I know? I haven’t studied what he has. Anyone who knows a lot about a field will have things they find obvious that make no sense to an outsider. This could be something like that.” She paused, then shrugged. “Or it could be my brother’s wild daydreams.”

“Does it matter?” Ravel asked.

“Maybe?” She waved a hand toward the screen. “It seems to have something to do with why we’re here. Maybe if we figured out what went wrong, we could figure out how to escape.”

“That’s true,” Ravel said, thoughtfully. “What that recording said… it seems like us being here is some kind of mistake. I didn’t volunteer for anything. And we’re definitely not joining some kind of defense force. Marynth Island has its Guardians. My- I know a lot of them. None of them ever mentioned anything like this. And everyone knows they go into the castle at the end of their career. They don’t come out of there.”

“So you’ll help me figure it out?”

“If we can,” Ravel agreed.

Dee smiled, maybe the first real smile Ravel had ever seen from her. “Great! You said it played again when I came out? Maybe it will do the same thing for Koby. I’m going to get my journal out and take notes on what I remember it saying. I can correct them when he comes through. Do you mind looking at the other rooms? It would be good to plan out where we want to try going, so we’re ready when he arrives.”

“Sure,” Ravel said. “I don’t know if they’ll be the same when he gets here - I’ve seen at least one change - but more information is good.”

Dee got out a slim book bound in green and a pencil and began writing carefully as Ravel began his circuit of the room. 

There were six doors available right now. The first held the weird fountain he’d looked at before: he didn’t want to go there. He had no idea what was going on with that thing. After that was the red-lit chamber full of gears and machinery. I don’t think so, Ravel thought, peering through the door without stepping inside. I don’t know what any of that stuff is. If we had to know how it worked to get through, we’d be trapped there forever, unless Dee could figure it out. Maybe she could. Didn’t she say her Dad liked this kind of stuff?

The next doorway led to what seemed to be an empty room: big, but empty. A possibility, Ravel supposed, but not a tempting one. They could be asked to do almost anything in there. Or it might just be a passageway to somewhere else! They might just be able to turn around if they didn’t like what was in there, but… the door to the weird fountain had already closed. He expected that, like the first door, the room he’d seen previously would no longer be there when it opened again. 

Hoping to be able to backtrack was one thing, but he’d be a fool to plan on it being possible.

“What was that name the guy said?” Dee called. “Sellonda?”

“I… don’t think so,” Ravel said. “Seldonta, maybe?”

“The other name was Mikros, though,” Dee said. “I’m sure about that.”

The door after that led to a room dominated by a large, circular table painted with odd patterns, which Ravel mentally marked as his current top choice. He was sad the cozy sitting room and its overstuffed chairs had vanished the moment he saw it - they’d been by far the most comfortable-looking things he’d seen in days - but he’d take the comforting normality of a table over the weird fountain, the bewildering gears, or the intimidating emptiness. 

“How’s it going?” Ravel called.

“Almost done,” Dee said. “Sorry. I write slowly.”

“There’s no hurry. I’ve still got two more doors to look at.”

The fifth door held something really interesting: plants. Pots and pots of plants. 

Some of the pots were round - like the ones kept on windowsills and balconies - and some were rectangular, smaller versions of the huge herb beds on the nursery roof. 

I don’t recognize those, though, Ravel thought. They’re not any of the herbs I’m familiar with, or any of the cozy plants people keep near their windows or on the balconies. 

Plus, there’s definitely magic in that room. 

Have we been eating those plants? The thought alarmed Ravel. He’d been a little nervous to carry the food with him from room to room, even in the low magic levels, but he hadn’t seen an alternative. He’d still been hoping that they’d been grown in magicless areas. He scanned the room. He didn’t see anything exactly like the stuff he’d eaten, but there were definitely some flowers and fruit-like things evident.

I don’t like that. Maybe it’s okay? The magic level here is pretty low, supposedly. I can’t even power a rune without a lot of effort. 

He peered as closely at the plants as he could without crossing the threshold. I don’t know a ton about plants, but I still want to go in this room. I want to know what we’re eating. I guess they could be just a tiny bit magical, but still safe to eat? Grandelions are magical, after all. These are probably a lot less magic than those. I’ve been looking into the room for over a minute: I can’t see any of the plants growing, and only the ones in the back left have moved.

Actually, that wasn’t right. Those plants were still now, and the leaves were bouncing gently on a bush a few feet from the door.

Why had that plant suddenly started-

Ravel sucked in a breath, realizing: it wasn’t the plants that were moving at all. 

He took a step back. “Dee! I think there’s something alive in here!”

“Another person?” she asked.

Ravel glanced over his shoulder. “They haven’t-”

He had just enough time to see Dee’s eyes widen in fear before he felt an impact against his side and pain flared in his right arm. He looked down to see a nightmare.

Some thing had latched onto his arm and stomach, dark, hairy, and utterly unfamiliar.

Ravel reacted, bringing his free arm across in a slap. To his relief, he knocked it off of him. The monster tumbled to the ground, giving him a clearer view.

Not that he could make much sense of what he saw.

Where a face should have been, there were two curving claws or fangs in front of an opening, but nothing he recognized as eyes. It was a little bigger than a chicken, but with four legs and far too many joints. The legs flipped around at crazy angles until the creature levered itself off the floor and hissed at him.

Whatever it was, it definitely wasn’t friendly.  

It lowered itself, and Ravel realized it was going to leap. He spun aside and the monster missed him narrowly.

Unfortunately, it landed on its feet this time and barely touched the ground before launching itself at him again. 

This time, Ravel failed to dodge.

The monster landed on his left leg. One taloned foot closed around a slat of his armored tunic and the other sunk into his lower thigh. 

Ravel formed his right hand into a fist and punched the little thing as hard as he could, tearing it free.

It flew farther this time, but he could still see its legs flipping around. 

It wasn’t dead.

Was it even hurt?

How could he hurt it?

He didn’t have anything like a weapon; the closest thing he owned were the grandelion-stem slats, which were of dubious strength and nestled deep within his backpack besides.

“Ravel! Over here! Quick!”

He didn’t dare to turn to see why Dee was calling him, but he backed toward her voice as quickly as he dared, keeping his eyes on the monster. 

He was ready the next time it pounced, stepping aside and sending it skidding away with a fierce kick. Then, he dared to turn and see why Dee had called him over.

One of the doors was sliding shut.

Ravel glanced at the monster, then at the door, understanding: if they couldn’t kill this thing, maybe they could at least escape. 

The door was moving slowly, but it was already more than half-closed. Ravel ran the last few steps, his feet strangely heavy.

“Hurry!” Dee said. She was waiting by the door and grabbed his arm. He let her pull him through the doorway, feeling oddly dreamy. “Ravel, move!”

“‘M gon,” he mumbled.

The floor was covered with something strange, soft, and bumpy. He laughed.

It looks kind of like a field of grandelions, he thought, amused. Why’s it coming toward my face?