“Master, I am not sure this is the wisest idea.”
“Neither Evestani nor the Duke are making any obvious moves. That surely won’t hold out. This may be our only chance for a long while.”
Arkk stood atop the wall in the Underworld, looking out across the deserted wasteland. He couldn’t see the shadowy tower that Priscilla and Leda had discovered. Priscilla wasn’t the best at estimating distances because of her blindness and Leda had been too frightened to keep her eyes open for most of the journey. Savren, after calculating the speed at which Priscilla could reach the nearby village and the total time it took for Priscilla to reach and return from the tower, estimated the tower was a good seven to ten days away by horse-drawn cart. About as far as Cliff was from Smilesville Burg.
Teleportation portals didn’t work in the Underworld. The ambient magic levels spontaneously activated ritual circles which, for teleportation, caused unpleasant complications. That meant there were only two ways to reach the tower.
Unfortunately, Arkk didn’t think he could vanish from Fortress Al-Mir for two to three weeks—there and back—for a full expedition on foot. Things were just too precarious with the war. Ilya, Rekk’ar and Olatt’an, Vezta, Zullie, Agnete, and all his other main staff could handle some things on their own, it was true, but there were some things that only the master of Fortress Al-Mir could accomplish.
Despite being unable to venture far from Fortress Al-Mir for an extended period of time, he couldn’t help but agree with Vezta’s concerns. The harness he had on, made up of several straps of thick leather and metal hooks, felt secure against his body. That said, he weighed a whole lot more than a small fairy.
Priscilla stood atop the wall, looking out with blind eyes and a scowl on her face. The dragonoid looked confident. She still stood a head shorter than he did. The idea that she could pick him up, let alone fly with him… Well, he supposed they would know whether it was possible soon enough. If they jumped off the wall and crashed to the ground, at least Vezta was standing by to help patch him up.
He wished Vezta was coming with him. Her input could be handy if this was a whole other intact fortress. She suspected that another Keeper would be able to access the tower and had given him instructions on how to do so. If anything unexpected popped up, he would have to operate on his own intuition.
But Vezta was the only one other than him who could give orders to the lesser servants. If something did happen during his absence, she could direct the fortress almost as well as he could.
Shaking his head, Arkk looked back out over the wasteland. There was one other problem. Ever since Priscilla and Leda’s scouting trip, the Protectors had been moving more and more. They shifted around, rearranging the positioning of their vigil over the portal and its surrounding defenses. It still didn’t look like they were about to attack but…
Arkk had ordered a full guard contingent on the walls until further notice. Everyone who could cast even a single lightning bolt without collapsing. Arkk didn’t want to head out and find the mother lode of old books and magical artifacts at this tower only to return to find Fortress Al-Mir inaccessible because the Protectors had taken the portal.
“Are you ready?” Arkk asked, looking at Priscilla.
“Been waiting for you, human.”
Arkk shifted at the tone in her voice. That was another thing. Despite agreeing to work for him and the link forming properly, he held no doubts about how much Priscilla liked him. He wasn’t sure how much he liked the idea of heading off alone with her. Nevertheless, this tower couldn’t be ignored. It was very likely the thing he had felt off in the distance—some power calling to him.
With one wan look at Vezta, Arkk stepped over to Priscilla and linked the metal hooks of his harness into the rings on hers. It was… uncomfortable being so close to the dragonoid… for several reasons. Aside from her prickly personality and obvious distaste for humans, she was cold. Not as cold as the ice marble but still cold enough that he doubted he would enjoy this flight even if everything else went perfectly. Then was her height, it just felt… awkward. She was a full head shorter than him and yet here he was clinging to her. He didn’t know where to place his hands or how to keep his legs.
Now, if Ilya had giant dragon wings, he could get behind that…
“Alright,” he said, looking to Vezta. “You know what to—”
Arkk didn’t get to finish before Priscilla leaned forward, picking his feet off the ground. She hopped up to the crenellations as easily as he could hop up a step. With one thunderous downward swing of her wings combined with a powerful leap, they were in the air.
Flailing with a startled yelp, Arkk wrapped his arms around the dragonoid’s neck and his legs around her waist. Pounding, beating thumps against the sides of his chest had him trying to shift to one side or the other, but neither made it better.
“Don’t touch my wings!” Priscilla snapped over the rush of wind. “Unless you want to go crashing to the ground.”
Arkk grunted as another thwack of her wings smacked him in the side. He made himself as thin as possible, trying to angle his body as best he could. There was no other option. He could feel the sweat rolling down his skin despite the cool temperature Priscilla’s icy body emitted.
The ground below was really far away. Arkk tightened his grip. His feelings of awkwardness vanished into his fear over the height. He would be as accommodating as possible to her wings, even though he knew his ribs would be sporting heavy bruises by morning.
This… might not have been the wisest idea.
By the time the shadowy tower came into view, Arkk felt like he had been taking Larry’s meat-tenderizing mallet to his chest for the better part of the day. At this point, he was fairly certain that at least some of the beating he had taken was intentional. It was hard to say. He was just a little too broad in the chest to properly move out of the way.
Priscilla, whether she hated him or not, did listen to his directions once they were close enough to land.
The tower was… massive. Arkk wasn’t even sure that he would call it a tower. It was at least as large as Elmshadow’s keep—and shaped roughly like it, with several blocky segments jutting up into the air, peaked with tall turrets. Many of the turrets had large circular tubes jutting out of them at all angles. Some kind of defensive spikes? Arkk wasn’t sure he wanted to meet whatever needed such large tubes as defenses.
The most interesting aspect of the tower was its base. Rather than sitting on the ground, six massive legs jutted out the bottom in a radial pattern. Each leg started as a vertical shaft coming out the bottom of the tower with a sharp bend at the bottom that angled back upwards, roughly diagonal relative to the rest of the tower. A third segment to the leg, angled back down, made contact with a large circular platform that connected to the ground below it.
Like a giant spider, minus a pair of legs.
With a building sitting on its back.
On the ground again, Arkk could not disconnect his harness fast enough. Even though he was taller than Priscilla, it still felt like he dropped down a short distance to the ground once the last hook was off. He was not looking forward to the return trip.
Priscilla didn’t seem to notice him. Her wings folded back behind her back, shrinking to an impossibly small size compared to how large they had been during their flight. Her eyes, milky and iced over as they were, still stared up at the tower above them.
A step away from her, Arkk felt the ever-present heat of the Underworld warm him back up. He took a few deep breaths, brushed off his clothes to shake off the bits of ice still clinging to the cloth, and stepped forward alongside Priscilla.
“How does something this large even move?”
“Magic,” she said.
Arkk frowned at the one-word response. He figured it was magic but had been expecting something a little more… Well, if they could get Zullie or Savren out to it, he was sure he would get more than he asked for. For now… “Don’t suppose you noticed an entrance when you were here the other day?”
“No,” she said, making Arkk frown all the more.
“Alright,” he said, trying to keep his irritation out of his voice. “What—”
“The fairy and I only stopped on the roof. Once I realized its magic was active, I doubted I would be able to gain access on my own and returned.” Priscilla paused and angled her head downward. “One of the legs should have an access hatch.” She paused again and looked toward Arkk—without quite looking in the exact right direction. “Happy?”
Arkk pressed his lips into a strained smile, not that she would be able to appreciate it. “Thank you, Priscilla.”
Every step closer he took, the larger the structure looked. Which, he was aware, was how perspectives worked. Still, it just felt too large. Fortress Al-Mir was larger, of course, but it was immobile and buried underground, spread out far and wide. For something able to walk around, if those legs worked, it was mind-boggling.
And once they got fully underneath…
“The hatch won’t be immediately obvious,” Priscilla said as they circled the second leg of the building. “Look for a section of the brickwork that doesn’t mesh perfectly with the rest. It will also likely be on the inside of the legs, underneath the tower itself, rather than on the outside where invaders would have first access.”
“You seem to know a lot about this place,” Arkk said as conversationally as possible as he stopped at an odd section of the tower’s leg.
“Naturally. I used one.”
Arkk snapped his head back to Priscilla, eyebrows raising. He knew she had been a Keeper at one point. His discussion with Vezta after meeting the dragonoid had been enlightening. Though they didn’t know when or where, Priscilla bore definite scars of someone who had ended up destroying her own [HEART]. A lesser being would likely have been killed outright. It was only thanks to her dragonoid physiology that she continued to draw breath.
“A mobile fortress? In our world?”
“They used to be common. Every Keeper used at least one. Hard to wage war when you’re sitting in your bunker, waiting for the enemy to amass enough of an army to overwhelm whatever defenses you’ve got.”
Arkk nodded his head. He had been feeling that as of late. Still…
Vezta hadn’t mentioned mobile fortresses before. According to her, Fortress Al-Mir, damaged as it was because of the Calamity, couldn’t support the creation of a mobile fortress so she had simply neglected to discuss them in depth. She then had the gall to insist that she had mentioned it upon their first meeting when she called Fortress Al-Mir the Ultimate Defensive and Offensive fortress.
It wasn’t her fault the fortress was broken.
Reaching out to the suspected hatchway, Arkk snapped his hands back as a spark jumped from the shadowy bricks to his outstretched fingers.
“Active defenses?” Priscilla hummed, more to herself than to Arkk.
Arkk frowned, looking at the blackened mark of burned skin on the tips of his fingers. “It has defenses,” he said, tone flat.
“Of course. You don’t want the enemy taking the stairs up.”
“You could have mentioned that.”
“I thought it would be obvious,” she said, sliding Arkk aside. She clawed her hands and planted her palms against the shadowy bricks. Lightning crackled over the backs of her hands, melting ice into clouds of steam. “Flood it with your magic,” she said, her voice straining. “As much as possible.”
Hesitating only a little, Arkk placed his hand up against the brickwork. A few small sparks jumped out at him but with Priscilla taking the brunt of the defenses, it barely tickled.
It was like a ritual circle. As soon as he unleashed his magic, he could feel it flooding through hidden magical pathways and channels. Mentally mapping his magic, he started to get a picture of what the circle was designed to do. With that, he directed his magic, forcing it down certain paths while pulling it back from others.
With a hiss of differing air pressure equalizing and a cloud of orange dust, coating both him and Priscilla, the shadowy bricks retracted into the leg, folding into themselves as they slotted into the walls.
Priscilla stumbled when the wall disappeared but looked toward Arkk with an appraising look. “Huh.”
“What?”
“I thought we might have to destroy the bricks. How did you do that?”
Arkk just shrugged. “I’ve had a lot of experience working with ritual circles and figuring out why they go wrong.”
“Huh.” She said again, then motioned a hand into the dark opening. “Shall we?”
Arkk took one step before pausing. “How likely are there to be other traps?”
“Extremely.”
“Why… don’t you go first.”
“I’m blind.”
“Yes, but if the walls crush together, I’d rather have someone who can probably survive that ahead of me.”
Priscilla hesitated. Was she scared? Were the traps inside so deadly that even a dragonoid stood no chance? Arkk considered calling this whole thing off until they had a chance to come up with some ways of disabling the traps only for Priscilla to take one step into the opening. Then another.
She tried to take a third only for her foot to knock against the base of the first stair. Hands in front of her, she caught herself on the next few steps and slowly righted herself. Arkk watched as she hurriedly straightened her back in a way that he might have suspected embarrassment on anyone else. She promptly knocked her foot into the next step, making her stumble again.
“Frost,” she swore, “I hate stairs.”
Despite Priscilla grumbling about non-winged creatures and their need for stairs the entire time, they did successfully end up ascending the staircase to reach the tower proper. There wasn’t much to the legs of the structure beyond the stairs. No real rooms or spaces for people. Just traps.
Lots and lots of active traps.
Priscilla, implacable dragonoid that she was, plowed through them all. Some, Arkk had to help disable. Priscilla triggered the rest, allowing them to ascend before the trap reset.
If there was one thing Arkk was learning on this trip, it was how best to make traps around Fortress Al-Mir. Already, he had directed some lesser servants into the long tunnels stretching out of the fortress to start making way for a few new additions—in particular, Arkk was interested in the darkness trap that made it impossible to see more than a step ahead and a particularly nasty fireburst trap, which was the one thing that gave Priscilla pause—all of which would be magically activated. Here in the tower, the traps were constantly powered because of the ambient magic but a few of the smaller glowstones should be able to keep magical traps active back home.
Arkk was fairly certain that he had figured out how to make the traps activate only when someone not linked to the [HEART] of Fortress Al-Mir entered its range. Considering that the current defenses in Fortress Al-Mir consisted of pitfalls and ballistae that had to be manually operated and did not discriminate, he was fairly pleased with even this much.
Now, in the tower proper, he hoped to find even more.
The first few rooms they passed through, occupying much of the lower levels of the tower, weren’t all that interesting. There were guard rooms all around the staircase, providing space for minions to stand and wait for any intruders that made it inside. Slits for shooting arrows outside the tower adorned nearly every exterior wall. Armories, containing intact ancient loot and gear, provided a buffer between the operational areas of the lower tower and the living quarters. Living quarters, made of the same magical room that provided Al-Mir’s residents with their dwellings, occupied a massive chunk of the tower.
At full capacity, Arkk could easily imagine this place could carry thousands of soldiers. Not just carry, but support.
Above the living quarters were places for creature comforts, including canteens, baths, and food production. All roughly the same as what Fortress Al-Mir had. Even though the walls and floor were all made of the same shadowy bricks, it was easy to spot the similarities.
“The towers move surprisingly fast for buildings of their size. Most people don’t expect buildings to move at all, I suppose,” Priscilla said as they made their way through an empty dining hall. “That gives two options if, for example, you’re assaulting any regular walled town. Either you send out raiding parties from the tower ahead of the walking structure itself, using it as a base to support and retreat to, or you march the whole tower on the town, which will often have evacuated before its arrival.”
“Seems you could do both,” Arkk said. “Use your army to encircle a town but without fighting. No danger. Eventually, the tower arrives and you can stomp over everything without any chance of reprisal.”
Priscilla shook her head. “And what are you going to do with a bunch of dead farmers and crushed rubble? The point of it all is to take assets for yourself. Entire towns.” She paused and dipped her head, slightly. “Now, if you’re assaulting a castle or someplace with important people who you don’t want escaping to cause trouble later, that idea works well enough. Except for one problem.”
“Oh?”
“People get desperate. Between an army sieging them and the inevitability of a tower like this, people feel backed against a corner. Then they start taking drastic actions.” She scowled, letting out an angry noise from the back of her throat. “A human with nothing to lose will do their best to screw over everyone around them in the most spectacular ways possible. I’ve seen magical detonations the likes of which have reshaped mountains and carved valleys, meteors called down from the skies to flatten everything, and even… demons.”
Arkk stared at the dragonoid, part in awe, part in disbelief. “I’ve never heard of such magic. Except demon summoning.”
Priscilla waved a hand dismissively. “I came into my power just after the Calamity, before the full ramifications of what had happened became apparent. Magic then, magic before the Calamity—and just after—was stronger than it is today.”
Arkk hummed. At least he wouldn’t have to face that kind of power.
Then again, the rays of gold unleashed by the golden-eyed avatar were destructive enough on their own. The bricks comprising this tower and Fortress Al-Mir were reinforced magically, so he wasn’t sure if those golden rays would do serious harm, but he couldn’t underestimate them.
The upper quarter of the tower was where the more interesting aspects of the structure were located. An alchemy lab that occupied an entire floor of the tower was filled to the brim with all kinds of equipment that Arkk couldn’t even name. His middling adventures into alchemy had proved useful on occasion but he wondered what kind of concoctions he could make with a place like this. There were books as well. Not many. If this structure had been used in conjunction with a stationary fortress, he imagined most important books would be located there. The ones here were probably just for reference. Most were written in the same ancient script that was in the salvaged books from the original fortress library. For every ten like that, there was one that looked a little more readable. Not quite modern books but the writing was close enough that he felt he could decipher it given enough time.
A library and magical laboratory chamber, smaller even than the one at Fortress Al-Mir, did hold a few books. More of these were in the ancient script than the ones in the alchemy lab.
“I know you’re blind but can you read?”
“I’ve had a lot of humans ask stupid questions—”
“I mean in the past. Could you read? A lot of books are written in an ancient script—including some at my fortress. Nobody I’ve met so far can read them.” Not even Alya. It was one of the few things Arkk had been willing to ask her about. “But you said you know the old ways. If you could translate even a few bits that we could use to translate everything else, it would help.”
“I’ve been blind for a thousand years. I don’t know anything about modern writing.”
“Anything you can do would…”
Arkk trailed off. Exiting the library and entering yet another stairwell, he felt it.
A thump. A pulse. A beat in the shadowy stone around them.
It was faint. Distant. Yet, somehow, felt very close. He craned his neck upward, staring through the shadowy stone. Opaque though the bricks were, he could see the beating heart of the tower just above.
Arkk skipped the next two floors, barely peeking into the rooms adjacent to the stairs. One was filled with gold, likely what was used to power this fortress and transmute food for the kitchens. The other might have been used by the owner of the tower or one of their favored subordinates, looking like extremely fancy living quarters.
The floor above, near the top of the tower, had a heavily reinforced door blocking access. Like the entrance to the tower, it took him and Priscilla working together to get it open. This time with a little more emphasis on her strength as she dug her frozen claws into the metal to give herself leverage.
The chamber beyond was unlike the rest of the tower. Where every room prior could have been found in his own fortress, this room was a massive chamber that ate every speck of light that came in from the slit windows in the stairwell. Conjuring up a light spell did nothing to help. It was like the darkness trap from before except intensified a thousand times over.
Yet, Arkk could feel forward. There was something ahead of them. A pedestal made from shifting and flowing darkness.
A thump.
As Arkk drew near, the light hovering above his open palm siphoned off into the distance, encircling a small glass-like sphere that hovered above the pedestal. It greedily drank the magic from his spell, pulsing.
A beat.
Priscilla was saying something behind him. Arkk couldn’t hear her. The rhythmic thumps pounding through the shadowy stone were growing in intensity. Vezta had said something about this. She had given him instructions. Told him exactly what to do.
Every one of those instructions faded. He couldn’t remember a single one.
Instead, Arkk operated on pure instinct. He reached out a hand, planting it on the cold glass sphere. Just a trickle of his magic leaked into the orb. Pulled from him a little bit at a time, then a little bit more until he was flooding it with magic, faster and faster.
Its pulse shuddered, the thump jolting like an electric shock struck it. The entire tower shook and quaked.
But Arkk didn’t so much as stumble. His awareness expanded, moving to encompass everything within the tower.
The [HEART] let out another beat. This one in perfect timing with Arkk’s heart and the [HEART] of Fortress Al-Mir.