Everyone at the table was staring at me. I stood in the doorway, nonplussed, and stared back. After a few moments of silence, Senica said, “Go on, then. Let’s see it this time.”
“See what?” I asked.
“How crazy powerful you are now compared to yesterday.”
“There...
2024-07-06 12:40:38 +0000 UTC View PostIf I’d been limited to a single workstation, it would have taken me months to make all the potions and elixirs I needed to transition to stage five. As it was, I’d been doing the prep work on these transitions for years. I’d already made everything I needed that I could trust to remain stab...
2024-07-05 12:06:18 +0000 UTC View Post“This… is incredible,” Averin said. “How did you ever find this?”
“A lot of patience and scrying magic,” I told him, somewhat grumpily. I’d only gotten a few hours’ sleep before his courier had arrived with those books. I’d passed the message back up that I’d discovere...
2024-07-04 11:38:31 +0000 UTC View PostAverin was faster than I’d given him credit for. Barely eight hours had passed before one of his messengers arrived at the safehouse to let me know that the connecting platform was in place and ready for use. We both stepped onto the one at our location, I activated it, and a moment later, we w...
2024-07-03 11:21:14 +0000 UTC View PostNobody bothered to ask what I’d been up to, and I didn’t go out of my way to volunteer. They were more interested in the teleportation circle I’d built in their safehouse. Specifically, they wanted to know about how it cut through the tower’s interference and allowed for inter-floor telep...
2024-07-02 11:57:19 +0000 UTC View PostNobody had returned to the safehouse to check up on me by the time I returned. I was not surprised, given the location and the obnoxious amount of work it took to move between floors. Every five floors, there was another checkpoint and a long walk to a different drop shaft. It took hours to get f...
2024-07-01 12:07:51 +0000 UTC View PostThe good news was that I was completely right about the incorporeal monsters in the tunnels being mana fiends. The bad news was that there were already fifty of them flooding into the maintenance passages and coming our way. As a final bit of good news, it looked like their ability to pass throug...
2024-06-30 11:57:34 +0000 UTC View PostThe safehouse on floor one was sparsely furnished and in what I supposed they probably thought of as a bad neighborhood. Everyone had an ignited core, at least everyone who walked within a few hundred feet of where I sat in an old chair with torn upholstery, hidden away from view. I couldn’t be...
2024-06-29 12:08:58 +0000 UTC View PostAverin sped through the options on the interface, growing more and more excited as he went. “This is fantastic,” he muttered. “There are so many possibilities here the normal interfaces are missing.”
“Care to share?” I asked.
“Huh?” He looked up and blinked in surprise...
2024-06-28 12:09:35 +0000 UTC View PostThe tunnel was short, barely ten feet long before ending with a locked door. I examined it thoroughly to confirm there were no magical traps, then stepped aside to let Averin do the same. Our third wheel just lurked in the back, mostly peering out into the tower to make sure no one had noticed us...
2024-06-27 12:42:22 +0000 UTC View PostWe didn’t go to the platform that had the Breaker spy stationed there for the simple reason that the rest of the crew wouldn’t be so willing to overlook a strange group appearing. The operator, if no one else, was likely to realize that someone had appeared on the platform. Then there were al...
2024-06-26 11:53:00 +0000 UTC View PostSenica looked at the glass orb I’d handed her. A little ring of brass floated inside, its surface covered in tiny runes. “What does it do?” she asked.
“It’s your emergency escape tool,” I said. “Three temporarily accelerated teleportation spells that will cast instantly if you...
2024-06-25 13:16:10 +0000 UTC View PostThe sentinel manning the interface for the ward system probably wasn’t supposed to have a chair—none of the other facilities I’d been to did—but that hadn’t stopped her. I wondered where she hid it when important people came through who’d disapprove of a lowly platform operator having...
2024-06-24 12:41:17 +0000 UTC View PostThe dims might not have understood what it meant to be rendered invisible and silent, but Nelgith and his partner mage were both giving me disconcerted looks. The mass versions of those two spells were significantly more expensive to maintain—though less so than casting ten individual invisibil...
2024-06-23 12:26:13 +0000 UTC View PostThe reaction was immediate and violent. Spells exploded into the air from both mages, one casting some form of force restraint designed to latch onto me and hold me still, the other a long, spinning shard of ice with enough speed behind it to punch through armor and skewer a man.
The dims w...
2024-06-22 12:23:15 +0000 UTC View PostThe cave I’d excavated and warded for use as our base camp had gone undisturbed the entire time we were gone. As soon as we teleported in, I started going through the wards to ensure they hadn’t degraded or been tampered with. Senica didn’t appreciate me roping her into an impromptu lesson,...
2024-06-21 12:25:52 +0000 UTC View PostUnderstandably, 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...
2024-06-20 12:54:42 +0000 UTC View PostMagic could do a lot of interesting things, including grafting properties from one type of material onto another. But I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to make Hyago’s idea work. Living stone made mana and draw stone ate it; merging them together didn’t seem feasible to me. Of course, wh...
2024-06-19 12:01:04 +0000 UTC View PostI found Hyago down in the valley floor taking mana measurements off our sample trees a few hours later. He glanced up at me as I flew down through a gap in the canopy and said, “Hey, boss. I didn’t know you were back.”
I’d literally dropped in on Hyago too many times for him to be s...
2024-06-18 11:40:42 +0000 UTC View PostFather looked up from the kitchen table in surprise when I opened the door to our house and walked through. “Gravin! I wasn’t expecting you back so soon. Did everything go well?”
“A bit of a stand-still, for the moment,” I told him. “Grandfather wants one more chance to convince...
2024-06-17 12:58:39 +0000 UTC View PostI watched six brakvaw wheel around the village up in the sky. They were too far away to hear, not that I could have understood their strange screeching language anyway. There was no doubt in my mind they were arguing over their next move, with the scorched, still burning corpse of their leader in...
2024-06-16 12:22:29 +0000 UTC View PostIt only took me an hour to fly to the meeting point. We were using the same empty peak we’d used the last time we talked, though we hadn’t set a meeting time. I trusted Grandfather to sense when I arrived and respond accordingly.
After ten minutes of waiting, his projection appeared in ...
2024-06-15 12:48:34 +0000 UTC View PostWe stepped off the teleportation platform at Sanctuary and were met by a small crowd of people. Our father was there, along with Ryla and a dozen of her traveling merchants. I spotted Juby lurking in the background, but I was sure it wasn’t me he was waiting there for.
Senica froze beside...
2024-06-14 12:15:22 +0000 UTC View PostWith limited time left before we hit our self-imposed deadline, I roughed out a cave with a series of transmutation spells focused strongly on compressing the earth and stone or reshaping it into metal. That part of the process only took about half an hour, but I spent another three hours properl...
2024-06-13 11:23:47 +0000 UTC View PostAs we got closer to the Sanctum of Light, I got a better look at the landscape. It sloped upward like a puckered wound in the planet itself, rising in height to over a mile as it curled up around a hole that was easily thirty miles wide. That hole had no bottom, not that I could see, at least. In...
2024-06-12 12:51:43 +0000 UTC View PostWe flew relatively low, only a few hundred feet over the ground. It didn’t make a lot of difference to our overall speed, but this way, we could scout out everything living in the area. I managed this primarily through my ability to sense mana and the various monsters and animals not caring at ...
2024-06-11 14:13:32 +0000 UTC View PostWith a firm direction in mind and Senica’s endurance steadily increasing, we stopped moving randomly across the landscape. Miles rolled away beneath us as we flew without stop. When night finally fell and, more importantly, Senica couldn’t go any farther, we landed and made camp for a few hou...
2024-06-10 12:14:40 +0000 UTC View PostOur projections stared at each other, neither speaking while we gathered our thoughts. There was no fight to be had here, not as far removed as we were from each other. My own preparations kept my real body safe from the projection being used as any sort of conduit, and my limited mana budget pre...
2024-06-09 12:11:14 +0000 UTC View PostI wasn’t exactly sure what the normal sleeping hours were for a giant, magical bird, but most of the work I’d done with Grandfather had been in the evening. Since it was already evening right now, that meant I didn’t have much time to put things together if I wanted to be sure he was still ...
2024-06-08 12:13:23 +0000 UTC View PostOur typical pattern of flying around looking for interesting places, had served us well for months, but now we were starting to see small towns popping up all over. Even though I deliberately steered us away from the roads, there were enough isolated villages that only ever got news of the outsid...
2024-06-07 12:58:31 +0000 UTC View Post