Book 3, Chapter 65 (Patreon)

“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 discovered something I wanted his opinion on, and he’d shown up an hour later.

We’d taken the teleportation platform straight down, so Averin wasn’t exactly aware of how far I’d gone past the maintenance sublevels, but he didn’t seem to care. He just stood there, gushing over that stupid door and its impenetrable wards while I waited for an explanation.

“I can’t be sure until we get it open, but if I had to guess, I would say this is the master control room for the entire Sanctum of Light,” he said. “If we could get access to this, we could take the tower from the Great Houses and force the changes through that would allow the citizens of the lower floors a chance at a real future. And we could do it without shedding a drop of blood, too.”

That was great for them, really, but I was far more interested in how Ammun had made the tower in the first place. Maybe there were some answers behind that door, but I suspected I was setting myself up for disappointment. I didn’t need the ability to control the weapon-turned-habitat. I needed to know how it had been designed as a weapon originally so I could figure out what damage it had done to the world core when they’d used it.

“Can you get it open?” I asked.

“Not without the ward keys,” he said. “But I’ll work on figuring out what they are. One for each Great House, probably. Hopefully they’re physical objects and not something like bloodlines that would require us to abduct someone from the main family branch. Though, truthfully, it might be easier to abduct a foolish and spoiled noble’s brat than to break into a heavily warded and guarded vault to chase after an object we have no way of even identifying.”

“I suppose I’ll leave you to it then,” I told Averin. “I have other obligations to see to, and this appears to be a dead end for me.”

If I couldn’t get to the bottom of things inside the tower, my next step was to visit the outside. To do that, I needed to shift priorities to completing my stage five advancement. The mana was too deadly to survive otherwise. I had most of what I needed to make it happen, but not everything. Hopefully, Hyago had been doing a good job maintaining the green houses and herb gardens, because I was going to be raiding them heavily over the next few days.

Averin gaped at me. “You’re leaving? Now?”

“I’m really not as excited about this as you are. It’s not what I came here to find,” I explained.

“I… I suppose that’s fair. It’s just… you’re witnessing history in the making, and you don’t even seem to care.”

“I’ve seen plenty of history being made already. It loses its appeal after the first few times. Mostly it just means headaches and clean ups.”

“Very well, if you’re sure…” Averin trailed off. He glanced over at the teleportation platform and asked, “Will you leave us the platform for easy access?”

“Yes. Though be careful to keep it charged. There’s practically no ambient mana around here, and the enchantments are liable to break if you use the mana stored in it recklessly.”

“I understand. Thank you for everything you’ve done. You’ve been a huge help,” Averin said. “I’ll keep looking into the tower’s history for you as well as seeing if we can figure out what the ward keys are for this door. When do you think you’ll be back?”

“I’m not sure. Soon. Maybe a week or two.” It really all depended on what materials I had to work with on hand when I got home.

I made my goodbyes to the Breakers who were down there with us and used the platform to shorten my cast time, though I did use my own mana to power it.

  *

Senica was hard at work when I appeared in our base camp. “Time to go,” I announced.

She twitched at the sound of my voice and looked up. “I hate when you do that,” she said. “Some kind of warning that you’re arriving would be nice. And what do you mean, ‘time to go?’ Are we in a rush?”

“Yes and no. I need to go take care of something back home, and the faster I do it, the better. I don’t trust the group I’m working with inside the tower not to do something stupid while I’m away.”

“So you’re going back home. Why do I have to go?”

I raised an eyebrow at her. “Do you think our parents would be happy about me just leaving you here?”

“What difference does it make? I’ve been on my own for weeks anyway while you flew around doing whatever you wanted.”

The bitterness in her voice was not subtle. I hadn’t realized Senica missed me so much. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I should have made more time for you.”

“It’s not about that, Gravin. Yes, it would be nice to see you more, and yes, I wouldn’t mind some help with some of the stuff I’m working on figuring out, but it’s about how worthless you make me feel. There’s seriously no way I can help?”

Oh. This. I’d seen this before. Usually I resolved this with an empirical display of the difference in power between myself and the angsty teen mage with the inferiority complex to help them understand exactly how far below the scale I was working on they still were, but I got the sense that Senica wouldn’t handle that so well. And since I actually cared about her feelings, I’d need a gentler approach.

“You are helping me,” I said.

“No, I’m not. I’m sitting in this cave stockpiling mana, which it turns out gets extremely boring extremely quickly, by the way, and struggling to figure out how to put together a mana lattice, something you did when you were three!”

“Okay, first of all, I wasn’t three. You know that. Don’t compare yourself to me as you know me now. You’re thirteen. You know where I was when I was thirteen? I’d just had my core forcefully ignited by an explosion of mana at a local magic academy. A rival school tried to commit an act of sabotage, screwed it up, killed about five thousand people, and I happened to be lucky enough to be just close enough to the edge of the blast radius to not get disintegrated outright while simultaneously being drowned in mana. I was twenty-five by the time I got to where you are right now.

“Second, yes, you are helping me. No, you’re not doing anything that’s going to solve this immediate problem, but I’m thinking long-term. I am going to fix this broken world, and I am going to need help to do it. Fifty years from now, you’re going to be an archmage yourself, and I’ll expect your full cooperation on what will probably be one of the most ambitious undertakings either of us ever pursue.”

“That’s your argument?” Senica scoffed. “You’re investing in my future?”

“Not just yours. Why do you think I teach people magic to begin with? Why do you think I helped ignite cores and shared how to do it? You know me well enough to know that I certainly don’t like these people. I’m banking on a few of them eventually becoming strong enough to help me fix the world, and to be willing to do it because they’ll see how much it benefits them.”

“Well, I’ll grant that you don’t like people, and I always wondered why you helped everyone learn magic,” she said.

“Purely selfish reasons, I can assure you.”

“What about me?”

“Also selfish. I want my family to be better than anyone else.”

Senica laughed and shook her head. “You barely managed to talk Mother into igniting her core, and even that was only to help out the rest of the village. You’re never going to turn her into an archmage.”

“I think ‘mother of two archmages’ is a good start,” I said. It might even be three, if I had my way. There was no way my family wasn’t going to be a dynasty of mages, and that meant our as-of-yet unborn sibling had lots to learn.

“Okay, okay, fine. Sorry I was so whiny.”

“It’s normal to have some moments of doubt along the way,” I said. “That being said, we really do need to get going. I have a ton of work to do, and I cannot return to Sanctuary without you. Mother and Father absolutely do not ever need to know that I left you unsupervised for so long. They think there’s a monster lurking behind every rock waiting to kill you if I’m not there to keep you safe.”

“They’re not far off with this place,” Senica pointed out.

That was fair. The number of monsters surrounding the tower was actually higher than what I’d expected for the mana density in the area. That was probably just a case of my old, outdated standards not accounting for the amount of monsters who had no choice but to live here. Anywhere else would see them starved and dead quickly enough.

“I’m sure the brakvaw are doing a fine job of thinning out the ranks,” I said. “Those birds can put meat away by the tons. I’ve been tempted more than once to measure just how much mana they need to stay in the air after a meal.”

We got everything packed up and stowed away in my phantom space and prepared to leave. It didn’t take all that long, but Senica hesitated when it was time to go. “Will you bring me back here with you again?” she said. “I know I’m getting close to figuring this lattice out. It’s so much easier here with all the extra mana.”

“I… don’t know,” I said. “It should be safe, but I’ve got a feeling things are about to start going wrong. The Breakers are gearing up to make their move against the Great Houses as we speak, and depending on how poorly that goes for them, I might have to step in. I’ve got a few other avenues to explore if things don’t work out, but I’d rather not cut off any of my options before I have to.”

“But how does that affect the camp here?”

“It doesn’t, as long as nothing goes catastrophically wrong. But they’re looking at messing with the master controls for the tower itself, which is probably the weapon that shot a moon out of the sky. I’m a bit leery about having you in the general vicinity, just on the off-chance they vaporize everything within a thousand miles of this tower in the next month or two.”

Senica’s eyes widened slightly and searched my own for any hint of amusement. I wasn’t joking, though, and she could see that. “If it’s that dangerous, maybe you shouldn’t come back, either. Keep an eye on the place from afar and let them all kill each other. We can sift through the wreckage to find what you’re looking for after.”

I shook my head. “It’s not that simple. I need the tower intact so I can study how it works and figure out what it did wrong. If they destroy it, I don’t know if it’ll be possible to learn what I need to know.”

“Then why are you leaving at all?” she asked.

“Because I need to make preparations to drop into that chasm to get a look at the tower’s foundations.”

“The… uh, the one you said would kill us if we fell in from mana overload?”

“That’s the one. It won’t be a problem for me in a few weeks.”

“What are you going to do?” Senica asked.

“Advance to stage five. That’s why we need to go home, so I can finish my preparations. Are you ready?”

Nodding resolutely, my sister joined me on the teleportation platform.