Fruits of Research

 

“This is based on the protective spell I developed before leaving the Cliff academy,” Zullie said, pacing back and forth in front of a large board of arcane diagrams. “The difference between your old spells and modern magic appears to be the source of that magic. Modern magical incantations, translated, often equate to something more akin to prayer—beseeching a higher power to act on your behalf. Old magic are more like commands. Edicts given out to magic itself to manifest servants or fire lightning bolts.

“I’ve not managed any success with command-type magic, but the difference between the two gave me ideas. Unfortunately, I’ve only managed limited success myself with those ideas but I have hope that your increased magic capacity can power through inefficiencies in the incantation and… Arkk… Arkk? Are you paying attention? Hey!”

Arkk blinked as a thumb and middle finger snapped in front of his nose. He blinked again and found himself staring through a pair of rectangular glasses and into the violet eyes of his lead researcher.

“I was listening,” he said, automatically.

Zullie planted a hand on her hip, cocking an eyebrow at the same time. “Oh?”

“Old magic is like an edict, modern magic is like a request.”

She pressed her lips together, glaring as hard as ever. Instead of continuing her lecture, she sat there, probably thinking up unspoken complaints about how his answer was just a lucky guess. Arkk left her to her thoughts.

The longer she sat there thinking, the more he could pay attention to Walking Fortress Istanur.

The walking fortress was more… alive than Fortress Al-Mir. It felt like a lesser servant, if more limited. He could direct it around and tell it what to do with a thought. It couldn’t do much. Walk, mostly. He could open and close any door at will, much like with Fortress Al-Mir, as well as interface with all its traps.

It… needed some repairs. Luckily, a small force of lesser servants, left behind before he and Priscilla had returned to Fortress Al-Mir, were quickly running through the tower, fixing everything they could.

And they had just gotten the walking part of the walking fortress operational.

It was nerve-wracking. He and Priscilla had carried back several books but there were plenty more left behind, not to mention all the alchemical equipment and gear in the other rooms. If the tower toppled and collapsed into a heap of rubble, all that might be destroyed.

Yet whatever lesser servant-like intelligence that occupied the tower was reporting that all its systems were functional. It was ready to move. It didn’t want to move but lesser servants didn’t want anything.

Arkk told it to pick up one leg and set it back down.

From a distance, Arkk could perceive Walking Fortress Istanur much like he could perceive Fortress Al-Mir. He could check in on any individual room like he was scrying into them or view the entire structure from a short distance away like any minion in his employ.

Watching the tower pick up one of its massive legs, each of which had the footprint of the entire Langleey Village courtyard, sent shivers down his spine. He almost jolted out of his seat when the other legs bent and the main tower started tilting to one side. He thought the whole thing was going to come down then and there.

It didn’t. It was just shifting the weight above to compensate for the change in balance. Like any human—or spider—might do when asked to lift their legs.

Interestingly enough, a round glass phial sitting on the corner of one of the alchemy lab tables didn’t so much as shift. Even when the leg came down again, shaking the ground it stood upon, the phial remained right where it had sat for who-knew how many years.

Arkk did jolt out of his seat when another pair of fingers snapped in front of his face again.

“Arkk?” Zullie said, lips pulled into a tight smile that didn’t reach her cheeks, let alone her eyes. “What did I say this time?”

Eyes darting back and forth between Zullie’s eyes and the board covered in arcane scrawl, Arkk grimaced. “Uh…”

“Please pay attention!” Zullie said, clapping her hand to the table. “I know you just got a new toy but what I’ve been working on might help us with our little golden problem.”

Arkk straightened his back, clasping his hands together on the table in front of them. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I just…”

“I know. I’m excited to peruse the books you brought back. Maybe we can make this spell better with some of the information within. But until then, you might be our only defense from those rays of gold.

“Now, admittedly, I haven’t seen them in person—thank the Light—but I was scrying on you while you were in Gleeful. So I have a general idea of how it worked. To demonstrate, I… Well, I asked for that flame witch’s help. She hasn’t shown up.”

Arkk shuddered. When Agnete had come to him earlier in the day and told him that Zullie wanted her to throw fire at him, he had been worried that there was some kind of coup attempt going on. It hadn’t been a very big worry. Zullie had effectively one sole desire in life and he was fairly certain that he was fulfilling that desire more than anyone could—especially with the new books he had brought back from Istanur—but still…

“Why don’t we see if the spell works before we take it to a live fire exercise? Or, if fire is a must, let’s use regular fire. Not fire projected through the avatar of a fire god.”

“That it comes from an avatar is the point,” Zullie said before letting out a small sigh. “But I do concede that getting the spell working is a must. So, as long as you’re paying attention this time, I’ll explain it again.”

With a nod of his head and a wave of his hand, she did. In far too many words. Enough that Arkk found himself lapsing again. After testing all six of Istanur’s legs, he set it to walking.

It was… a terrifying sight to see, even through his detached perspective. He could almost feel the phantom trembles as each leg touched down, sending quakes through the ground. Although faster than any other building he had seen, he couldn’t call it swift. Each step seemed to cover the distance of a small village’s width, thanks to the long spider-like legs. He would have to do the calculations later but, if it didn’t change speed and didn’t run into any insurmountable obstacles, he guessed it would be at least a week before it arrived at the portal.

Arkk wasn’t quite sure what he would do with it once it arrived. At the very least, it could serve as a more fortified outpost in the Underworld. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t fit through the portal.

Maybe it could be dismantled once it arrived?

He would have to speak with Vezta and Priscilla on the matter. Until then…

Arkk caught Zullie’s fingers before she could snap in front of his face for a third time. “I am paying attention,” he said honestly. “You and Savren dismantled the lightning and lesser servant spells into ritual circles, modified those ritual circles, and now have built up an incantation from your modifications that acts as a request and edict combined.”

“That… is the essence of what I said, yes,” she said, looking pained to admit that. “You’ve skipped all the details.”

“You’ve been talking for over two hours, Zullie. You could have stood to skip a few of the details yourself.”

“Fine! Fine. Since you’re so interested in the fruits of my labor and not the research that went into it—”

“I’ll read your book when you finalize it.”

“—We’ll get into the meat of the work. Incantation: Boun-daries, b-b-b-barriers, blocks and blocks and blockades, ward-d and sheheld. The pauses, sputters, and odd pronunciation are important. In something of a cross between old and new magic, you’ll need to focus on an element but you do not need to gesture. The element is wall.” She promptly repeated it three more times, making sure that Arkk knew it forward and backward.

“Even with the stuttering, isn’t that… too understandable to be a spell? All the other spells I know are strange languages.”

“Without more samples of your spells, I can’t infer enough of the old language. Which is also why the incantation is odd. Need to get the magic flowing in the right tempo to make up for the lack of proper words.” Zullie scowled, likely at the poor incantation for the spell, before adding, “I haven’t yet had time to analyze the spells Priscilla taught you from her era. Perhaps they’ll have a clue that will help me shorten this.”

Arkk nodded along. Priscilla was trying to put what she knew about the old language to paper at the moment. Since she could speak well enough to be understood by modern people, she was able to write out the symbols and describe what they meant to some of Zullie’s new apprentices. That would give them some kind of foundation for translation.

But she didn’t need to write to teach him new spells. Those were just a few short words. There weren’t many, unfortunately. Priscilla wasn’t a spellcaster by trade. During her time, she utilized her brute strength and gifts with frost breath rather than spells. Nonetheless, Arkk had picked up a few tricks from her.

For now, Arkk drew in a breath and started the incantation. “Boun—”

“Hold it! Stop! Stop!”

“What? What?” Arkk asked, suddenly alarmed at all the shouting. He snapped his head around, half expecting that golden-eyed boy to have popped right into their midst.

Instead, he found Zullie swiftly backing toward the door. “You stay here and just hold tight,” she said, opening the room’s door. “I’m going to be in the next room over, watching from that small slit in the wall.”

Arkk followed her finger to find a small gap in the brickwork of the room, just above one of the violet glowstones that adorned the walls. Arkk hadn’t directed any of the servants to do that. Despite her having distilled the lesser servant spell into a ritual, they didn’t take many commands from others. Vezta must have made it, likely on Zullie’s request.

“Why over there?”

“No reason!” Zullie said, ducking out of the room.

The heavy, reinforced door slammed shut. Most rooms didn’t have reinforced doors. A quick scan through the fortress revealed only three rooms. Agnete’s bedroom, the [HEART] chamber, and the treasury. More of Vezta’s doing?

He had wondered why they had come out to this random room instead of doing this someplace like the library or even the meeting room. Now, he started to get a creeping feeling all down his back.

“Alright!” Zullie’s voice, muffled through the crack in the wall, sounded strained. “Whenever you’re ready.”

“Is this safe?” he said, glancing back to the reinforced door.

“Oh sure it is! I mean, there’s just a little… It’s probably not a problem. Probably. Everything is perfectly within acceptable bounds.”

“Zullie…”

“You told me you were used to all that magic you tried exploding in your face!”

“Those explosions didn’t need reinforced doors.”

“You blew up the orcs’ old chieftain.”

“That… was intentional.”

“So is this! Trust me, you won’t get hurt. It is everything else that needs worrying about.”

“That isn’t the reassurance you think it is,” Arkk said, taking a deep breath. Even though the room was empty except for the one table, chair, and board with Zullie’s notes, Arkk sent them all away, leaving him standing alone. “Boun-daries, b-b-b-barriers, blocks and blocks and blockades, ward-d and sheheld.”

Focusing on a wall, he felt his magic flow.

It felt wrong. He realized it immediately. Electro Deus felt directed and targeted. The magic he unleashed for a lightning bolt did exactly as he expected—as it was supposed to. It didn’t at all feel like forcing too much magic through a pinhole or like globs of ooze and slime dripping between his fingertips.

Bright flashes of unbound magic sparked in the air around him. The glowstones on the walls doubled in intensity before cracking with enough force to send shards flinging around the room. The magically reinforced bricks didn’t care about the chaotic magic, thankfully remaining fully intact.

“Keep going!” Zullie shouted through the wall just as he was about to cut off the flow of magic. “Chant the incantation again.”

It was clear that the spell wasn’t working as intended. But aside from the bright flashes popping into the air all around him, making him wince, none of it had harmed Arkk so far. He followed along with Zullie’s directive, keeping up the flow of magic while repeating the stuttered and awkward spell.

As he did so, he started to notice a change in the magic’s flow. It didn’t improve. If anything, it felt stickier and even more disgusting. Nevertheless, the air around him started to change. The flashes of light grew more frequent, flashing together at points, merging. All at once, like the string of a bow snapping back into place, a violet dome flashed into place around him.

It dripped and oozed. Like he had taken one of the lesser servants and stretched them out into a thin, nearly transparent glob around him. Small spackles of light still darted around, reminding him again of Vezta and the lesser servants. Their eyes, specifically.

Although it had clearly stabilized, somewhat, he still didn’t think the spell was working quite right. The shield, if it could be called that, didn’t look like it would stop a tossed rock, let alone an arrow or golden rays. Even if it could, it had taken ten minutes from when he started to now. It couldn’t be cast in an emergency and, judging by the flow of magic out of him, nobody else in the entire fortress had the capacity to maintain it for more than a few seconds. Even he, with all the power of Fortress Al-Mir’s [HEART] at his back, felt like he could keep going for no more than ten minutes more before it drained him.

All-in-all, modern magic or old, Arkk felt the spell was a failure. Hopefully, Zullie had learned something from it.

Arkk cut the flow of his magic, only to gasp as his magic flooded out, ripped from his body like someone had sliced open his stomach. The laceration, pulled from his chest, cut into the dome of ooze. It didn’t feed the shield spell. It sliced open a gap directly overhead.

Above, he didn’t see the vaulted ceilings of Fortress Al-Mir. It was like a slice of the night sky had fallen into the fortress. It wasn’t the usual sky. Familiar, yes, but a version of the sky he had seen only once before.

The Stars shined through, like eyes twinkling and watching. Unintelligible whispers circled around him, calling out words in a tongue no mortal could comprehend. Fear crept up his spine. No normal fear for his life or that of others, but an existential type threat. That feeling of inconsequence. That nothing he was, nothing he could ever do, nothing anyone could affect anything compared to the watchers above.

Vezta had said that those Stars couldn’t interact with anything in this world or any other. The shattered sky kept them apart, unable to do anything but watch.

Yet they spoke. He could hear them. He had heard them in Vezta’s body too. If they couldn’t do anything but watch, why did their words reach down to the world?

Something shifted in the Stars as Arkk gaped up at them, unable to move. They slid away from the gap carved in the ceiling, making room for something else.

Arkk caught a split-second glimpse. A violet-hued moon rolled through the aether above, slowing to a stop in the center of the oblong slit. The now fully-formed eye twisted and rotated, its gaze falling directly on Arkk for a mere instant before it swiveled again, aiming at the wall of the room.

The last of his magic, ripped from his chest, allowed the eye an instant of a glimpse. A bare second. Yet time stretched on. The eye spent an eternity judging, an eternity measuring, an eternity weighing.

The spell collapsed around him. Black, charred ooze slopped to the ground around Arkk. The [HEART] of Fortress Al-Mir, drained of magic, seized. Glowstones across the entire fortress flickered and winked out. Every minion Arkk had in his employ collapsed as one. Lesser servants winked out of existence without the magic there to sustain them.

For one brief moment, the world closed in around Arkk in a way that he hadn’t felt since before contracting with the fortress. He couldn’t see any other room. He couldn’t check in on any of his minions. Even Walking Fortress Istanur vanished from his view.

He stood alone.

With not a scrap of magic remaining in the entirety of the fortress, the moon and Stars above Arkk faded as the slit in the ceiling sealed once again.

A resounding thump-thump echoed through Fortress Al-Mir’s corridors as the [HEART] beat once again. Another beat followed, stronger and firmer. The light of the glowstones blinked, flickered, and started a dim, steady glow that slowly brightened with every subsequent thump. The employees of the fortress slowly started to rouse themselves, picking themselves up.

He could see them again. Them and the rest of the recovering fortress. Panic coursed through many, some fearing an enemy attack, others just confused. The refugees, although not linked to him or the fortress, were obviously ill at ease. All the lights shutting down must have spooked them.

The lesser servants did not return. How many had there been? A hundred? More? He would have to summon them all over again.

Yet, Arkk couldn’t find it in him to move. His fingers tingled with an uncomfortable numbness and his legs felt weak. He wasn’t sure how he was still standing.

Dry eyes finally made him blink and, when he did, whatever stupor had come over him shattered.

Arkk teleported into the next room over.

Zullie sat, curled in a ball under the observation slit in the wall. Her arms shook. Her lips, blue like she hadn’t taken a breath in minutes, twitched and moved like she was trying to speak. No words made it out of her mouth. At her side, her glasses sat on the ground with a large crack running through both lenses.

And her eyes, normally violet and intense, were wide and…

empty.

There was no blood. No gore. Just empty holes where her eyes should have been. In the back of those empty holes, a sliver of starlight gleamed through in tiny sparkling dots.

Arkk stared at her, swallowing his demands for an explanation. There would be no answers for now.

He teleported both himself and Zullie to the infirmary. Hale joined them, her eyes hazy and confused but fully intact. She looked up at him, likely about to ask what had just happened, only to catch sight of Zullie.

Rather than look disgusted or concerned over the witch’s lack of eyes, she looked interested, leaning in to get a better look. That was probably concerning behavior but Arkk didn’t care enough to question it at the moment. He needed to sit down for a long few minutes. Perhaps a dunk in a cold bath would help.

“Magical accident,” he said as his only explanation. “Help her if you can. I… need to go.”

“But—”

Arkk didn’t have the words to contend with Hale. Much as he wanted to sit down, he had to make some kind of announcement. Let everyone know that things were fine. Just perfectly fine.

Before he could even consider what to say beyond fine, he got a tug through the employee link. Arkk teleported straight to the source in the scrying team’s room.

Luthor was on duty at the moment. The reptilian beastman didn’t look as bad as some of the others Arkk could see through the link. In fact, most beastmen didn’t. Possibly because their magic was different than that of demihumans?

“Everything is fine,” Arkk said, trying to inject as much emotion into his voice as he could.

His fingers still felt numb. His lips tingled.

“Uh… S-Sir,” Luthor said, pointing at the crystal ball. “I… thought it w-would be a g-good idea to check on priority targets after… w-w-whatever happened. The Elmshadow Burg Keep has bright golden lights streaming through its windows. I… I don’t know what that means.”

“Perfect,” Arkk said. “Just… perfect.” He almost teleported away, only to stop and remember something Alma had said to him. “Good work,” he said, clapping the chameleon on the shoulder. “Keep an eye on them.”

“S-Sir,” Luthor said, sitting straighter in his chair.

Arkk teleported to the war room. In an instant, all of his advisors were with him.

They immediately broke out into a cacophony of noise.

Arkk planted his hands on the table, taking as much weight off his legs as he could without outright collapsing into his chair. “Everything is fine,” he said, speaking no louder than a whisper, forcing the room into silence if they wanted to hear him. “Everything is… just fine.”