“Well, that looks good.”
Arkk snapped his gaze to Zullie, raising his eyebrows. “Why do you sound so surprised?” he asked.
The witch stood atop a freshly drawn ritual circle. One that he would rather not have had inside the command center if at all possible. They had a whole sealed room specifically for these kinds of rituals. The dangerous kinds. The Maze of Infinite Paths was beyond dangerous to the point where Arkk didn’t want it inside the tower at all. Yet, in a situation like they were in, compromises had to be made. Zullie didn’t have the time to figure out how to get it working from afar and did not want it down on the lower levels with the other maze ritual which was protecting the tower legs. The interference between the rituals could prove catastrophic, in her words.
Thus, she had set up in the command chamber.
He opened his mouth to say more, ready to berate her for experimenting in the middle of battle, only to brace himself as another volley rained down from the cannons overhead.
He didn’t feel a thing. The tower didn’t shake or tremble from an impact. He watched using his fortress-localized omniscience as each of the incoming projectiles hit the wobbly barrier Zullie had just erected. They warped, stretching into long, thin versions of themselves while looping about the air, bending at odd angles, and splitting into a hundred separate projectiles. After a few sections of the warping, they emerged from the field, aimed in completely random directions. Mostly random, anyway. They avoided the most important direction—toward the tower.
“Oh… That does look good,” he said, moving to the scrying team to get a few different perspectives on the situation.
Plenty fell down upon the army amassing for a second invasion, Arkk noted with some satisfaction. Some went right back up at their attacker, forcing them into an evasive movement. Unfortunately, most of the volley scattered randomly throughout the surrounding forest, not likely to do any immediate damage to the things he wanted to immediately damage.
“Can we aim the rebounding…” Arkk started, only to trail off as he felt a tingle on the back of his neck—his hair rising.
Having felt that before, his eyes widened. He immediately tried to move the tower. The legs were still trapped but it could lean.
A spear of golden light, aimed far too high, swept downward toward the tower. It wasn’t as large or as powerful as some he had seen the avatar use. That didn’t mean he wanted to take his chances. But with the tower trapped and the movement of the beam, there was no avoiding it.
Just before he teleported everyone in the tower down to the tunnels below, the ray crashed into the protective membrane around the tower.
Dazzling golden light filled Arkk’s vision, both inside the crystal ball and from his omniscience. It cut off almost immediately, but the brilliance of it all forced Arkk to blink several times. He busied himself inspecting the damage to the tower while he waited for his eyes to recover.
Except, the tower wasn’t damaged. Not in the slightest. A few lesser servants who had been out there at the time were still going about their tasks, repairing the damage to the tower without any sign they had even noticed the attack.
A drawback to his localized omniscience was that it focused on his fortress and its inhabitants. He couldn’t simply turn his head to see a different view. But what he could see on the edges of his vision was gold. Lots of thin gold streaks drawn across everything. The soldiers down below, trees, even the airships overhead.
“Report!” Arkk shouted. The command chamber was mostly empty. With the majority of the tower, including Rekk’ar, down managing the defenses of the tower from the army—just in case the protections on the tower legs failed—it was just him, Zullie, a Protector, and the three members of his scrying team. Hale, having finished her work on his arm and eye, was back to healing everyone else who ended up injured in the infirmary.
Camille and Harvey were both still blinking away the spots in their eyes, but Luthor heard him and took control of the crystal ball. Images flickered across its surface.
Arkk focused on the crystal ball with Luthor for a moment until he noticed something slightly more concerning.
“Damn, damn, damn…”
Arkk blinked away the last of his blindness to find Zullie rushing about the ritual circle. This one used a combination of the natural magic generation of the fortress to keep the ritual stable and glowstones to account for spikes in magic draw. At the moment, three of the six glowstones were smoking—a hissing and sputtering filled the air, accompanied by odd sparks. Black lightning-like streams of magical energy crackled over the ritual’s surface as it flickered and pulsed.
He felt a sudden uncomfortable reminder of the Duke’s party and the glowstone-based bombs Evestani set up in the throne room’s chandeliers.
“Don’t teleport us!” Zullie snapped as if she could sense what Arkk had been about to do, pointing a finger directly at him. “If this fails without being properly shut down, the entire tower will—”
The glowstone she had been reaching towards let out an enormous spark, shooting motes of magic directly into her face as she recoiled. She swiped her hand forward, knocking away the glowstone’s debris as she planted her own hand in the spot it had once occupied.
The ritual circle stabilized. The flickering in the ritual array steadied out, still oscillating but in much smoother, gradual pulses compared to the erratic pulsing from a moment ago. Zullie’s lips twisted in concentration as the lightning-like surges of magic still coursed around between the remaining glowstones, but even those were dimming and steadying out.
Arkk let out a small sigh of relief. He quickly started moving people about, resuming his management of the battle. The airships were dropping more eggs and they needed dealing with. He could figure out what had gone wrong with this ritual in a few minutes, once everything stabilized and returned to the status quo.
Except, that moment never came.
He heard a groaning in the stone around the room. The groan quickly shifted to a scream of stress. The air vibrated with the deafening sound of the fortress tiles cracking under pressure as arcs of energy lashed out, ripping through the command chamber. One struck the chair Arkk used. Another careened just over the heads of the scrying team in their depressed pit. The map and the entire table it was on took the brunt of one of the arcs, throwing it through the room as little cuboids of white matter trailed in its wake. The table slowed down abruptly, leaving it floating in the air with all the tiles and tokens they had used to mark positions drifting in the air around it.
A cataclysmic pulse erupted from the ritual circle, radiating outward in a wave of blinding magic.
It all happened in an instant. Arkk had no time to react.
The heatless shockwave struck him, knocking the breath out of his lungs. He felt his feet lift up off the ground, picked up with those same cuboids of white drifting in the air around him. The walls of the command center buckled. A ripple ran through them as if the stone were liquid. After an instant of a delay, the reinforced walls of the tower exploded outward, drifting a short ways before the cuboids and arcs of magic locked them into place in the air.
The cubes began to change. Their surfaces rippled and began to hollow themselves out. Tiny square-shaped voids appeared on each face, as if a sculptor was carefully carving away the solid material. Yet the cubes didn’t diminish. They became more intricate, more complex. And they grew. The material hollowed out from the smaller voids spread outward, building up more of the cube, only for more and more hollows to appear.
Chunks of the map table vanished as one of the cubes near it grew into it, eating away small hollows just like the source. The table didn’t break. Splinters didn’t go flying through the air. It was a lot like Purifier Tybalt’s abilities, simply removing small square chunks of the table as the cubes grew through it.
Arkk tried to teleport himself. That same locked-in feeling that stopped him from teleporting while trapped in the inquisitor’s ice blocked him. He tried to teleport Zullie, the Protector, Camilla, Harvey, and Luthor.
Only the Protector made it, being the furthest from the ritual circle.
The cubes didn’t stop growing. They didn’t stop spreading. They closed in on him, chunking away bits of his body. He tried to scream. It didn’t hurt, but the sensation was anything but pleasant.
One of the cubes spread in front of his face, hollowing out as it grew more and more, closer and closer. It closed in on his face and—
Darkness enveloped Arkk.
But his awareness didn’t cease. He couldn’t see, but the tower was still there. One of its walls had blown out from the explosion, but some part of it was still connected. Somehow. The sponge-like magic cubes slowed their growth about halfway through the floors above and below the command chamber. Arcs of magic tethered the stones, keeping them from falling to the ground below.
“Damn, damn, damn.”
It took Arkk far too long to realize that he was intact. Hearing Zullie’s voice in the distance, swearing up a storm, brought some level of comfort. He patted himself down, feeling relief with each touch of fabric and skin and hair. His vision was still gone, but not because his eyes had been removed by those expanding cubes. It was more like someone had simply snuffed out the lights.
“Zullie?” He tried calling out.
“I’m not an idiot,” she snarled. Arkk didn’t get the impression that she was angry with him, but at herself. “I planned for that.”
He tried looking in on her through the employee link, but he only got darkness there. Other employees were fine. Rekk’ar was still organizing the defense, Lexa was making her way through the Evestani army, and Ilya was rapidly approaching the Evestani capital. It was just Zullie, Camilla, Luthor, and Harvey. And himself. The five of them were somewhere trapped in utter darkness.
“Of course we were going to be hit by something the avatar could throw out but the ritual couldn’t withstand. I deliberately designed a weak point in the ritual that would fail if overloaded first, saving the rest.”
“Zullie? Can you hear me?”
“I’m not an idiot!” she shouted again.
Fingers clutched at Arkk’s tunic, yanking him through the darkness. He stumbled only to stop abruptly as a head thumped against his chest.
“I planned for that.” She ground her face into his chest, still clawing at his tunic. “It was just… too weak of an attack to overload the failsafe component but too strong for the ritual to withstand. Pure luck. Nothing else.”
That Fickle Wheel appearing in the temple hovered in the back of Arkk’s mind. He didn’t know if that god had anything to do with the current situation, but he was starting to dislike the Fickle Wheel despite that. Of all the Pantheon, the Fickle Wheel might just be his least favorite.
The light, squeaky voice of a terrified fairy called out into the darkness. “Is someone there?”
Arkk pursed his lips, disappointed. “Camilla?” he called out, gently resting a hand on Zullie’s back. The construction of a failsafe implied she knew this was a possibility. She had neglected to warn him of it, likely because of a supreme confidence in her own work. “Camilla, can you hear me?”
“I hear you. I—”
“Wh-Where are where?”
Luthor was out there as well. Harvey too.
“Follow the sound of my voice,” Arkk shouted. He tried to teleport them, but there was no nearby destination. The tower itself felt distant and far off. “Gather together.”
This was partially his fault. As much as he could blame Zullie, they had secure chambers for a reason. Compromising by having her set up in the command center was entirely his fault. He could have denied her, hastily built a new containment room away from the others, or just not have her set up inside the command room but a floor below.
“Gah!” Harvey grunted after a slight thump echoed in the darkness. “There’s some kind of wall here.”
“Wall?” Arkk asked. “Just a minute.”
If they were safe, he had other things to focus on for a moment.
He could still see the tower. It was distant, yes, but still his. It was like looking in on the tower from the Underworld. Moving things and personnel about was doable as well. He tested on a few lesser servants, moving them to try to repair the damaged command chamber. The whale ships, seeing the weakness for what it was, tried launching another volley of their eggs.
Several splattered against the walls of the tower. Arkk simply moved Agnete to the furnace room, opening the vents for her to blast her flames up along the walls of the tower. He could send her out to take care of the few that she would inevitably miss afterward.
Though he would have to be careful.
The sponge-like cubes looked like they had stopped growing. The entire top portion of the tower looked disconnected from the rest because of them. But that couldn’t be the case because he still had control over the territory both above and below the command room. Some connection existed.
The eggs that crashed down near the command floor didn’t quite make it. Lashings of magical arcs scattered through the air, pinning the eggs in place just as Arkk had been stuck. The cubes didn’t continue spreading to the new victims, however, leaving the eggs and their tendrils squirming helplessly in the air. He would have to teleport Agnete out there, though at a distance.
The lesser servants he sent to try to repair that chunk of the tower ended up stuck and floating as well, just like the eggs.
As a test, he tried to teleport one directly into the command chamber, only to… fail. It was like the command room wasn’t there at all. It was probably broken apart, hidden behind the endless cubes, but there should still be something there. He could sense it.
But he couldn’t see it.
Raising an eyebrow, he slowly let go of Zullie, lightly patting her on the back in some form of reassurance. Kneeling, he felt the floor.
It was made up of stone tiles. Familiar stone tiles engraved with a faint maze-like pattern on their surface.
He was still in the command room. It was just…
Not in the tower?
“W-Where are we?” Luthor asked, sounding much closer than before.
Arkk tried a small light spell, murmuring the incantation.
It didn’t so much as light up the room as the darkness pulled back. Either way, he could see. The large seat he used was toppled on its side, cracked and broken. The map table had finally crashed into the floor. All its pieces and markers were scattered about. A few steps away, down in the scrying pit, Luthor’s nose poked up above its edge.
Zullie still clung to him, though she had loosened her grip enough for him to move. Anguish and distress lined her face. It wasn’t hard to imagine what was going through her head. More than a couple of her projects failed, many quite catastrophically. To have one that started out so promising end up like this? Arkk was angry with her for several good reasons, but he still felt a pang of sympathy somewhere underneath.
“Everyone alright?” Arkk said, earning a frightened nod from Luthor. He stepped toward the pit. Rather than have them try to navigate toward the stairs in the inky darkness, Arkk extended a hand. At the same time, he teleported Agnete around the exterior of the tower to handle the straggler eggs. “Let’s get you out of there.”
Luthor accepted his hand without reservation, practically clawing his way up Arkk’s arm like it was a rope thrown down an oubliette. Harvey and Camilla, being much shorter as a flopkin and a fairy, forced him to kneel. On the plus side, they were much lighter and easier to help out of the shallow pit. Harvey even had the wherewithal to grab hold of the crystal ball on his way out of the pit.
“Where…?” Harvey asked, trying to look around as he found his feet.
“A very good question,” Arkk said, trying to keep his voice calm and reassuring. The last thing they needed was panic. “Zullie. You can be angry with yourself later. I’ll even join you in your anger—”
The witch wilted, making him regret his words before he finished his sentence.
Nothing to do about it now. Words couldn’t be unspoken. Unless you were Savren and could wipe minds. “I need you to focus. Where are we?”
“Where?” she asked, turning her head this way and that. “We’re… likely in one of two places. One bad. The other worse.”
“Lovely,” Arkk bit out. “Where?”
“It would be better if we were in the domain of Xel’atriss, Lock and Key. The Maze of Infinite Paths utilized her boundary magic to try to weaken the barrier between our reality and other planes, just enough to warp everything. Like a portal without the portal itself providing structure. Chaotic and wild.”
“We’re in another plane?” Arkk said, feeling a sudden chill down his back. No wonder it felt like controlling his tower from the Underworld.
“Yes,” she said before a sudden look of worry crossed her face. “I hope we’re in another plane. Let me rephrase my earlier answer. We’re likely in one of three places, one bad, one worse, and the other… disastrous.”
“Disastrous being?”
“Between planes. I… Planes are accessible through the portals. But if we’ve somehow ended up between planes—No. It couldn’t be. We wouldn’t be alive. It has to be one of the two planes… yes. Definitely.”
Arkk let out a sigh, not feeling reassured in the slightest. “We’re either with Xel’atriss or where?”
“The plane the Maze of Infinite Paths is designed to weaken barriers between is… well, the Maze. We could very well be in the domain of Unknown, the Enigma.”
That chill down Arkk’s spine turned to a cascade of ice. The one domain that Vezta had warned him against entering, fearing a single step would see him lost for eternity, and he had somehow found himself there.
Arkk swallowed, lips pursed into a thin line. “Lovely.
“Just lovely.”