Lost

 

“My plan worked,” Arkk announced to the silent darkness. “The avatar is dead.”

Zullie turned away from her work, lifting an eyebrow. “Your plan?”

Arkk let out a small sigh. “My plan, you and Sylvara’s efforts in making that effigy, Lexa’s efforts in actually getting it to the avatar, and Savren trapping the avatar’s mind solely in the host he was inhabiting. Whatever you want to call it, it worked.”

“Permanently?”

“I’d hope so. I think Savren is trying to check.”

“Shame I wasn’t there to see it,” Zullie said, leaning back over a large scrawling ritual.

The Maze, their best guess for where they were, wasn’t something to be taken lightly. Not if half of what Vezta had told him was true. Thus far, no one had left the command floor of the tower that had come with them. Using tunics, belts, curtains from the windows, and even Arkk’s trousers, they had fashioned a lengthy rope that looped around everyone’s waists, tied off at Arkk and Luthor at either end.

Ideally, they wouldn’t have to venture into the Maze at all. Zullie thought she could weaken the boundaries between here and home just as she had done from the other side to create the spell in the first place. Arkk was somewhat less optimistic.

The appearance of the Fickle Wheel in the Al-Mir temple had him on edge. It felt like everything they did was now being watched by a god known for random whims and false balance. The avatar being dead was a good thing. That only made Arkk worry that something unpleasant was going to happen to counterbalance that.

The increasingly frustrated looks on Zullie’s face weren’t reassuring.

Arkk closed his eyes momentarily, first scanning over the continuing battle, helping where he could, before moving to the lesser servants. He had summoned dozens of them, giving each orders to venture off into the Maze. If they could find a portal, they would have a much easier time getting home than hoping Zullie could recreate a magical accident intentionally.

The Maze was a strange land, he decided. When he had first heard of it, he expected walls, narrow passages, random dead ends, and a labyrinthine layout that was impossible to navigate. Instead, it appeared to be almost the opposite.

A bright light spell, thrown high into the air, provided illumination for the transported command chamber and its surroundings.

The command chamber sat in a vast, open plain that appeared simple enough. Grasses made of shimmering silver swayed in a gentle breeze. As the lesser servants traveled, the ground itself shifted, altering the landscape. Hills rose and fell, streams redirected their courses, and even the sky changed at seeming random from night to day at a whim, despite the light not changing elsewhere—whether that be for Arkk or other lesser servants searching the land.

More than once, he had sent a lesser servant off with orders to travel in a perfectly straight line, only for them to end up right back where they started a few minutes later. Yet, ordering one of the distant lesser servants to return ended in failure. He could feel them approaching yet they never actually drew near.

Three of his lesser servants made it beyond the plains. One reached a forest whose trees seemed to be made from liquid, all in the same silvery color as the grasses. One lesser servant had gotten itself trapped on a series of floating islands. They seemed to look down upon the plains, but the servant had managed to reach them without climbing or flying through the air.

The last lost servant wound up in a cave of sorts.

It had died. Nothing attacked it. It simply had been traveling forward when, in the span of a single step, it aged. Arkk could feel the centuries passing even though he was fairly certain that he wasn’t aging himself. At least not beyond the usual rate.

Above all, Arkk wanted to avoid that cave.

“Light,” Zullie started to swear, only to stop and shake her head. “This is impossible.”

More bad news. “We got here somehow. It should be possible to return.”

“Yes, but I can’t even draw a ritual circle. Look,” she said, scooting a step away from her work area. With a long piece of chalk in one hand, she dragged her arm in a perfectly straight line.

Arkk didn’t see anything wrong.

“Of course it works when I try to show somebody,” Zullie said with an annoyed click of her tongue. Her face brightened. “Observation? Maybe my lack of eyes is ruining things. Come, all of you, stare at me working.”

Arkk glanced around. The three members of the scrying team weren’t far away—they couldn’t be with the limited length of makeshift rope they had. He doubted they hadn’t been watching, but everyone still complied, squeezing a little closer to Zullie. She promptly started her work once more.

As she worked, Arkk started to notice discrepancies. Where she looped her hand in a wide, sweeping arc, a truncated line would appear. Where she marked down a cross, a ring would appear. In one case, she drew her arm along in a straight line and a straight line appeared, but it appeared on the opposite end of the circle from where she held her chalk.

With a snarl, Zullie flung her chalk across the room. Parts of it broke off as it bounced along the floor. The rest of it came around and struck her in the back of her neck.

“A-Are we trapped here?” Luthor asked, watching Zullie furiously rub at the chalk staining her cloak.

To be reassuring was to be a liar, at least in this situation. Arkk doubted they would be forever trapped. He had allies both here and at home who could work to bring them back. Unless, of course, the battle turned disastrous. With the avatar dead, the undead and Mags’ forces causing chaos in the Evestani army, and the machine lifeforms joining in the fray, using their power tools to dismantle the Eternal Empire’s invulnerable armor, things weren’t looking too poor at the moment, so he was cautiously optimistic.

At the same time, being stuck away from the battle, unable to directly assist, was concerning. There were still those airships. At some point, they stopped their repeated assaults. They were planning something, he knew. If they thought the battle was lost, they would surely have retreated by now, pulling themselves and their army back to rally for another attack.

There was still the matter of the Eternal Empire’s missing forces. They had marched across Mystakeen with only a few thousand less than Evestani, yet only about two thousand of their soldiers were assailing the tower. If the Fickle Wheel had anything to say about the matter, they would make themselves known at the worst time.

“I might have something,” Harvey said, looking up from his crystal ball. The others of the scrying team had mostly been fretting, but Harvey kept up with his duties. He waved Arkk over, showing off something in the crystal ball. “I can’t get a better view of it. Something is blocking the way—or maybe it is just this place—but that right there looks familiar, doesn’t it?”

The liquid-like trees of the forest his lesser servant had stumbled across dotted the crystal ball up to about the halfway point, where the land changed to octagonal pillars of stone, jutting up from the ground. Despite being equally sized on all eight sides, the columns of stone managed to fit together perfectly. Each face of the eight-sided stones matched the face of another eight-sided stone.

Harvey’s padded paw touched the scrying ball, drawing Arkk’s attention to a small gap in the stone columns. A golden crystal, covered in an iridescent sheen, just barely peaked out through the gap. Like someone had grown those stones in an attempt to hide the crystal only for the ravages of time to have worn away part of its facade.

“A portal,” Arkk said. The yellow crystal matched with every other portal they had seen. The full archway wasn’t visible, just the base of it on one side. Even if the rest had been destroyed, just having access to that crystal could be enough to get them home. After all, Zullie had already perfected portal construction while trying to get Agnete out of the Anvil. The only thing she needed was the material. “Do we know where it is in relation to us?”

Harvey looked up, giving Arkk a flat stare. “Does relation matter in this place?”

“Good point.” Arkk frowned, glaring into the crystal ball. “It exists, thus there must be a way to reach it. Something beyond stumbling about randomly and hoping for the best.”

Arkk waited a moment, looking around. The others were paying attention, but no suggestions came forth. He… really only expected Zullie to have ideas in a situation like this. The others, while good at their job, weren’t exactly idea people.

“I can summon more and more servants,” Arkk said. “Maybe have them all link together so they can’t get lost. Then if one finds the portal, we can just follow the trail of servants.”

“That could take an eternity,” Zullie said with a frown. Even without eyes, she fiddled with her glasses as she stared at the crystal ball. “Maybe some kind of… anchor? From my brief experience here, I would say that Xel’atriss, Lock and Key, and Unknown, the Enigma, are diametrically opposed gods. You and I have a deeper connection with the former. Though we would have to fashion some kind of spell without a ritual circle.” She shot an eyeless glare at the hodgepodge scrawls on the floor. “That’s right out.”

Arkk closed his eyes, rubbing at his temples. Verbal spells were much more difficult to craft than rituals, requiring the compression of all the scribbles and circles and symbols down into a few sounds. To the best of his knowledge, Zullie hadn’t crafted a single verbal spell since the disaster that took her eyes—though she had worked a little to safeguard that spell. But creating it in the first place had taken weeks if not longer. Its first use had turned out… poorly.

If rituals were out, that meant that that was the only spell either of them knew that had any connection with Xel’atriss. They couldn’t sit around for weeks, waiting for Zullie to cobble together another spell.

“You aren’t suggesting…” Arkk trailed off, glancing toward the scrying team.

They still didn’t know why Zullie had lost her eyes. Perhaps she saw something she wasn’t supposed to or something she couldn’t process, or perhaps Xel’atriss simply didn’t like being observed—Vezta had shielded Arkk’s eyes upon their encounter with Xel’atriss, presumably to prevent him from going mad upon witnessing something mortal minds simply weren’t capable of processing. But if Zullie was suggesting they repeat that incident, would having the scrying team close their eyes be enough?

Or would they wind up like Zullie, albeit lacking the drive and ambition to uncover magic’s secrets to keep themselves sane?

“If you—any of you—have better ideas, I’m waiting,” Zullie said, turning her head slowly over everyone else.

To Arkk’s great surprise, Luthor raised a hand. He waited to be called upon, acting as if he were a young boy attending a Suun lecture, until Arkk nodded his head.

“We’re all tied t-together,” he said, lightly tugging against the rope around his waist that was tied to Arkk’s trousers. “So linking together works in this place.”

Arkk nodded along, encouraging him to continue. They had done a few experiments shortly after realizing where they were. Two lesser servants walking side by side would eventually, and randomly, drift apart from one another even if they always tried to keep the same distance. Two lesser servants doing the same while touching each other didn’t.

“Rope. A rope of lesser servants. Send them out, all connected to here, and have them sweep over the entire place. When they find the portal, we put a hand on them and follow the rope.”

He didn’t see why that wouldn’t work. It sounded sensible, logical, and didn’t invoke a god to help get them out of this. Arkk looked over to Zullie, giving the woman a questioning tilt of his head. She looked… frustrated, scowling down at the complicated mess of a ritual circle that she had drawn out. He could almost see the thoughts flitting through her head as she tried to find a reason to reject the plan. It wasn’t complicated enough for her, not enough moving pieces, not enough things to go wrong.

Crouching down, Zullie picked up the broken piece of chalk that had hit her in the back of the head. She pressed it against the cracked tiles before spinning fully around, though she did have to stop and navigate the makeshift rope around her waist before completing her circle.

Except it wasn’t a circle. It wobbled, more like a bean despite her circular movement.

“It is possible that, even if line up an infinite number of lesser servants and send them about in a complete circle…” She jammed the chalk down on the odd bend in the bean-shaped circle. “We might still miss the portal.”

“But we might not,” Luthor said. “I… I don’t know what you two were referring to a moment ago, but if Arkk is hesitant, that means it is risky. This seems low risk, so why not try it? U-Unless I’m missing something,” he finished with a nervous look at his fellow scrying team.

“The only thing it will cost is time,” Arkk said. Lesser servants did press on his magic ever so slightly. He wouldn’t be able to summon an infinite number of them, but a few hundred would be fine. Malleable and amorphous as they were, one could stretch a great distance, reducing how many he would need to cover a larger area. “While we don’t have unlimited time, Zullie would need time to fully think through her plan anyway,” he said with a pointed look at the witch.

He was done with half-baked plans from Zullie. Capable though she was, genius though she might be, she was too interested in the creation process and not interested enough in perfection. If she spent a little more time to truly finalize one idea before the next one carried her off, her success rate would skyrocket. Arkk recognized that he was part of the problem, moving her from project to project especially as of late, but the problem still existed. Once they were out of their situation—the threat of the Eternal Empire and Evestani, that was—Arkk fully intended to recruit some more casters. An entire team he would have dedicated to nothing more than going over Zullie’s designs and ensuring they were finished, not half-baked.

Although Zullie bristled at his quip, she nodded her head. She sat down. Lacking eyes, she had grown adept at thinking about things without writing them down. Possibly another reason why her successes lately were few and far between, but useful in a realm where writing was forbidden.

As she began her ponderings, Arkk began summoning. Lesser servant after lesser servant warped into being, as if they oozed out from a tiny hole in reality. He had never possessed more servants than he did now, including those at Fortress Al-Mir, the tower, and now here. Idly, as he carried on the monotonous task, he wondered if they would ever deplete. They weren’t created from nothing, but drawn from the Stars.

The lesser servants scurried forth, all connected to each other. As one manifested, the line mushed forward. Although he could tell where one servant ended and the next began, he couldn’t see it. The oily, tar-like bodies they possessed merged together in a long, thin strand of mush, squirming forward like a snake crossed with a caterpillar.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” Camilla whined.

“When I first found Fortress Al-Mir,” Arkk said between summonings, “I didn’t want to conjure them up at all, off-putting as they are. But they are necessary to run the fortress and, even outside that, useful.” He gestured to the long line of servants stretching off toward whatever horizon existed in this strange place.

“Still think I’m going to be sick.”

Arkk just chuckled as he continued summoning. “Vezz’ok is still at Fortress Al-Mir. I’ll move him to the portal room to have him assist the servants in reconfiguring the portal.”

“Won’t help unless we find the portal here.”

Two of his lonesome, earlier exploratory servants had found the liquid forest where the portal resided. Neither had set off in the same direction, but he still had them—and all the other servants out there—patrolling around, trying to find anything stable enough to resemble a landmark.

At the same time, he kept his eye on the continuing battle. A full tenth of the Eternal Empire’s army was lying dismantled in the mud, with Shieldbreakers and the Black Knights’s assistance. The rest had been pushed back from the base of the tower. A good thing too. When the disaster in the command center occurred, the Maze of Infinite Paths protecting the tower legs, and keeping the enemy army out, had failed as well.

The portion of the Empire’s army that had been inside the tower’s legs hadn’t returned when the spell failed. They accounted for a significant chunk of the army, so unless they randomly reappeared, that was one benefit to the spell failing.

Maybe the Fickle Wheel really was on his side after all.

Time would tell.