July 24th, 5AC
Timothy walked through the door to the Green room, rubbing a towel through his wet hair. His muscles nice and loose from the bath. Not just his muscles either, he felt lighter. Less like the world was looming over him, demanding he catch up right this second. For all he had too much to do, it wasn’t a waste to take a sanity break every now and then.
With a final stretch he folded the towel and tossed it onto a table against the wall. A meal, a bath and some conversation... Worth it, but they were still distractions. No matter how pleasant. It was time to get back to his true love.
Magic!
He didn't have time to go full head down. Such binges could last days, but he could at least get a taste.
A bit of time for himself, before he had to get back to those pesky responsibilities, family and Hold.
He snagged a large sack from beside the door and hefted it onto the table. Digging through it for a bit, pulling out a series of labeled wooden boxes and stacking them to the side. Finally, he let out a pleased grunt. “Iron Pyrite, Mana class 4, Sun Aspected.”
He'd look through the rest of the stack later, there were more than a few interesting labels, but the story from earlier had tickled his curiosity.
Walking over to a large stone slab in the middle of the room he placed the box beside an etched isolation and verification circle. Or rather set of circles. The geometric inlays included a larger outer circle inscribed by a hexagon further inset by a six pointed star made from two overlapping triangles. What some called a star of David, though he'd done his best to excluded religious influences.
A very useful trick, otherwise the sheer history and massed belief inherent in a major religion would bias the hell out of the results. And it wasn’t like he could just avoid the related paraphernalia. One religion or another had claimed nearly every shape, form or phrase at one point or another. Often to contradictory purposes.
Like the swastika. It was a Hindu symbol for well-being long before it became a symbol of Nazi sin. Or something like that at least. He wasn't exactly an authority on Hinduism. The problem was, if he ever wanted to use those symbols, he might need to be.
The legends from the Indian Sub-continent were in-depth, plentiful and powerful. The symbols were likewise potent. But trying to use them without understanding their history and provenance was suicidal.
He wondered, for a moment, what would happen if he wrote out the old Coexist bumper sticker down. Would that many contradictory symbols explode? Snickering softly, he made a note to try it some time. From behind several feet of spell reinforced essence stone.
A stab of guilt hit him even through the laughter. A religious upbringing could do that to you. Either way, he'd worry about it later.
Reaching below the table he pulled out a drawer and sifted through its well-organized contents before deciding on twelve symbols. Each was inscribed on small circular stone tablets. A match in size and shape for six empty holes gracing the points of the star and another six sets for the empty spaces between them.
It took him very little time to carefully place a dab of white paste made from distilled glue vine around the edges of each hole. A single pass with an enchanted card removed any excess glue while a second insta-dried what was left. Leaving each symbol a solid part of the circle.
Carefully set such that each was oriented with the center of the circle as down. Starting with the standard four elements in their most generic form. A safe, if boring starting position. Light and darkness, two less common options, finished out the outer non stared points.
For the primary directions of the star, which with six points was only north and south, he filled a dazzled eye above and a golden coin below. For secondary directions he chose a Radiant Sun (not the same as elemental light at all!) and Full Moon apposing one another at north north west and south south east respectively. To round out the last two he somewhat uncertainty tossed out a set of environmental symbols. He'd considered the entire set, Prairie, Jungle, River, Ocean and Mountain but ended up sticking with Prairie and Mountain for the first pass.
He opened another drawer and removed a set of thin but heavy stone tablets. Essence stone, he made the stuff himself in job lots. It was cheap and incredibly durable. A bit on the heavy side, but you couldn’t have everything.
More importantly it was magically indurate. That made spells carved into it suffer where speed was concerned, but that was less of a problem with rituals and not at all an issue for taking intent-heavy notes.
When he fully finished this experiment, assuming the results were worth his time, he'd copy his results onto Tier 2 vellum. But that was far too expensive for everyday use.
Using two thin granite rods plated with an even thinner layer of silver, Timothy opened the sample box and fished out a single piece of pyrite. Marveling for a moment at the way it glinted and shined without an external light source. The box held another 9 samples he noted with approval. Ten was about perfect for a sample set. Enough to see if further experimentation was worth his time.
He closed, sealed and moved the box to a warded cupboard then pulsed the circle active. He scribbled away, carving small neat notes into the stone. Earth, fire, and light were reacting, but with at a very low intensity. Water and Air didn't react at all.
The primary points were a bit more of interesting. The Sun blazed in approval, though not quite as bright as he expected, while the Moon turned her face away. The Dazzled Eye flickered fit to give seizures while both Mountain and prairie faintly pulsed, less then the base elements, but both showed a reaction. Surprising when they were often placed in opposition to one another.
He looked down at the results, tapping his lip lightly with the pen. The Sun aspect was definitely as advertised. But the Radiant Sun wasn't perfect. He looked through the drawer and pulled out a small stack of new stones. Rising, Dawn, Noon, Sunset and Setting Sun aspects. He doubted Rising or Setting had anything to do with it, but he’d check anyway.
He tapped his lip again looking at the elements. Fire and earth hmm. What minors?
Removing the hardened glue around the non-reacting symbols he deftly fished them out and replaced the stared points with the six Sun aspects. Leaving the Radiant in place to make up the set. Earth and Fire he removed and replaced with three sub-aspects for each. Dirt, Metal and Stone for earth. Lava, Flame and Heat for fire.
He slowly refined the mix over the next hour. He could have done it much quicker by guessing at what the final aspects would be and working backward. But belief and expectations could heavily screw results. Instead, he retreated to his Mental Palace and sealed much of his mind away. Cramming as much of his prior assumptions and expectations as he could into a neat little box. Exiling them for a time to let the results speak for themselves.
Results that, once the tests were done and he could unpack that box, weren't too far off from what he'd expected. Not too far, was still off.
The illusionary dazzled eye was linked to the Glinting sun. A subset of both rising and setting suns that held a transitional twist. Not the directly overhead Radiant or Noon Suns, but the two suns that stood at the 9 and 3. Though the three o'clock version was a hair stronger.
The hottest time of day where the light reflected at odd angles across the horizon. The Fire aspects of Heat being so strong surprised him. Like the heat waves in a desert mirage perhaps?
It was a bit of an odd set of aspects either way. Sunlight was more often portrayed as pitiless and truthful. The bright light of day erasing the shadows and bringing the truth to light.
But bright lights could also hide their own secrets and sins. Shining so brightly that the truth disappeared in the dazzle.
The base Pyrite blended Greed and Gold together in an orthodox manner, but tied in illusions, deception and false hope together in an innovative way.
Fun stuff, if limited. Its power was tied to strongly to specific times of day and would fall off considerably outside of them. Still, if you accounted for that… Oh yes. There was potential there.
He Walked over to a section of wall covered in elegant engravings. Uncolored and not terribly detailed, they managed to evoke a grand battle scene between a hippo and a full pack of hover crocs without using more than a line or two for each beast.
Timothy admired the images for a few moments, then reluctantly waved his hand over a small portion of it, pulsing runes hidden inside the limited lines of the piece to life. Then reached through the rippling wall, fished around for a second, and pulled out a massive tome. He tried not to think about how much the damn thing had cost.
Then again, even half finished it was already worth more than 10 times as much. Not that he’d ever sell it. Knowledge was power, hard-earned as it was, he wasn’t about to give up that advantage without a real need.
A heavy leather cover, covered in protective runes but unlabeled, stared back at him. Secured with four stone essence straps and six spell locks, two each for bottom, top and the open side, it looked like something fit to hold a demon.
A pass with his hands and an invocation of his bloodline brought the runes alight. Then six pass phrases combined with hand gestures released the locks. The cover opened more like a box then a book, with the leather touching on all sides when closed, but leaving a deep pocket filled with thick velum pages in the center.
The work of years, and hundreds of experimental materials. Each sheet held accurate hand drawn pictures of the material surrounded by a set of appropriate aspect symbols and even smaller runes linking sets of materials together where appropriate. He wasn’t an artist and the images suffered somewhat from that lack, but he did have a fine eye for detail. They weren’t beautiful, he couldn’t trap the essence of an image in a few lines like his wall mural, but they were at least accurate. His embedded intent would have to fill in the rest.
Because like Jenney’s herbal, there was no text. Each image held his thoughts and understanding.
He waved a hand, above the stack, holding an image of unaspected iron pyrite in his mind while gesturing and triggering a simple link search. A page slid out of the stack into his waiting hand a few moments later.
He poured over the page, mentally sifting through the information it contained. Cross-referencing the new with the old. The magical with its more common compatriot.
What was already a massive grimoire, might be moving into ludicrous ranges if he had to include a separate sheet for each elemental variant, Timothy mused.
Eventually, with a sigh, he replaced the page in its case, locked it and hid it in the wall again. Sitting back in a chair he leaned back and stared at the ceiling. Fun things indeed.
Enchanting was an art form. Any fool could bind a thought construct to an object, and as long as they didn’t exceed the material's limits, it would work.
Just like any child could draw.
That didn't make it a good drawing.
You had to move beyond stick figures and macaroni for the real world of enchanting to open up.
Each material was like the grab bag from Scrabble. Dozens of different letters and potential words but not in any order that meant anything. To hunt and peck through that mess looking for a cohesive story was a real chore. Hell sometimes with contradictory concepts, it wasn't even possible. The trick was to mix and match between multiple bags to tease out something useful. Reinforcing some words by repetition and canceling out others by matching them with their opposites.
And that was still just the kiddy pool. The big boys took it a step farther. Incorporating environmental factors. The makeup of the local Field during specific times of day, phases of the Moon, planets ascendant or hidden, weather conditions, seasons and the emotional overtones brought out by holidays or good/bad news.
Life in other words. Every bit of it could be leveraged to empower or cripple a given spell.
Most never noticed. Sure a fire spell might be slightly more powerful at noon on the summer solstice. But without designing it to channel that factor, it wouldn't be by much. And if you did design it that way, then it would be nearly useless any other time.
And as you couldn’t depend on the beasts to attack you only on that one day and time, it wasn’t a bad idea for most to stick with something a bit more general. Memorizing a spell for every day of the year just wasn't practical. Not when a well-practiced generic spell was probably more potent anyway, just from using it more often.
Enchanting though. That was a different matter. Enchant your solstice-specific fire spell into an object on the summer solstice, and the spell might be 20 times more powerful. Information combined with materials and the proper timing made for helacious effectiveness. Extra work, extra hassle, but a big payout.
Most of the time, it still wasn't worth it. 100 crapier wands of fireball enchanted on any old day would still defeat 1 masterpiece. Unless you couldn’t afford to take 100 people with you into the jungle, and suddenly extreme spending started to make sense. It was a way to concentrate power at the expense of, well, expense!
Especially with something like the Threshold Wards where every last bit of efficiency mattered. And even there he had to compromise.
He hadn’t gone cheap and mass production style on them, but with how many the Union needed, he hadn't been able to wait for a perfect alignment of conditions either. That set of solar and weather conditions happened far too rarely and lasted for such a short period of time that it just wasn’t possible.
Even if it was just one set of wards, there was no way he could manage to carve all the minor scepters and link them to the command rod in a single night. Much less when that night might only occur once every couple years!
So compromise. For the minor scepters he used the isolation enchantments built into his heavy ritual rooms to block out negative influences. He didn’t get the good day benefits, but at least he avoided something directly antagonistic. He'd leveraged the materials to the best of his ability, and opened the wards to allow in beneficial conditions as they occurred.
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But for the Keystone of the wards, the main scepter, he'd waited for the best alignment he could find inside a six-month range. He wanted a slightly overcast night, hazy rather than full cloud cover with a barely visible new moon, sometimes called the dark of the moon, peaking through. Preferably with a visible Jupiter ascendant. Invoking Jupiter's aspect of the guardian, the aspect of the lost from a dark, overcast night with no navigable stars visible, along with hope for a new beginning in the deceptive dark of the new moon.
His patience had been tested, but he'd held out. Waiting with several sets of wards mostly done and just missing the keystone. Then he worked himself to a frazzle finishing them all in that single night.
The final touch was to link them together. There he'd had to compromise again. Not the most optimal, but the best he could find that could be reliably predicted since he needed to arrange for a set of other Origins to be present.
Each step was a compromise, a best he could get for the given time scale. And within those compromises stood some pretty antagonistic relationships. The dark of the moon had an affinity for the Black Bog Wood but not so much for Soul Pearls. A pearl is often a stone closely aligned with the moon, but unless it’s a black pearl, which he didn’t have access to (dammit!), the alignment was for the full moon, not new.
Past that, pearls are aquatic, if they’d been ocean pearls he would have tried for a high tide, which happened at full and new moon phases. Perhaps even a spring tide where the sun, earth and moon aligned to create an even higher tide.
But they weren’t ocean pearls.
If they had been river pearls then the spring runoff would have been an excellent opportunity. A raging maelstrom of water to twist and twirl invaders about. Power and confusion in a nice tidy pair.
But they weren’t river pearls either.
They were from the lake that bore their name. None of the lunar, tidal or seasonal aspects were useful! He’d had to exclude them. Just merging guardianship with darkness was difficult enough. One of Jupiter's other aspects, a byproduct of the Romans apparently, was justice. Justice and deception were hardly best pals.
Not in anyplace he wanted to live at least.
That was an advanced enchantment in a nutshell. Invoke the needed aspects while excluding the contradictory or just plain chaotic. But never, ever ignore them.
He sighed, writing notes on the plaque in front of him. What made it worse was he knew he was just dipping his toes into the kiddy pool here. From seasons, weather, stars and the complicated religious history of humanity, he knew so very little compared to the sum total of human history and experience. It would take a lifetime (or multiple!) to even make a dent in that well.
In the meantime, he made do with a smattering of astrology derived from the mythology of a dead world. How would these things change when none of it was written down? Where memories were fallible and legends twisted to fit the teller's tastes?
What would happen when the new world claimed its own thoughts and legends? Would all that he knew now still hold water? Which aspects were natural laws and which were byproducts of common beliefs that would change with time?
The deeper he dug, the less he was sure of.
He stood up abruptly and walked over to an elaborate orrery. Nine carved planets, a generic comet, the moon and the sun sat in individually sized pockets surrounding a small but intricate model of Runehold. Caressing the elaborate and artistically carved wooden Venus, the hollow iron sphere of Mars and the multi-colored and multi-material rings of Saturn brought a smile to his face.
It was a gift from the Father of Astrology, AKA that-nerd-Kevin. An offering from one hardcore astronomy nut to an enthusiastic amateur. He hadn't planned it that way, never much cared for star gazing frankly, but with how much the stars were interfering in his work Timothy couldn't be anything else.
For Kevin, though it wasn't just a tool he was forced to learn. The man volunteered his spare hours at the observatory, owned more telescopes than cars and took his vacations around eclipses or planet passes. This was his life. His passion. And now, his Magic.
And despite some powerful incursions, his Hold had survived. Largely because of his hobby turned superpower. When you knew the first beast wave was coming a week ahead of time, it made it much easier to prepare for. He saw sickness coming and flash boiled and steamed the Hold out. He foresaw many things, and after he was right a few times, people didn’t argue. They acted.
Despite his successes, it was a subject surrounded by far too much fraud for people outside his hold to put much faith in it. Foretelling the future? Sure, pull the other one! So when Timothy came asking, the man had been almost pathetically happy to share. Not just handing over a calendar/map of upcoming astrological events for the agreed-upon price, but going further and enchanting this object so he could do his own checks in the future.
His love wasn't just some gypsy BS. Not merely an occasionally useful tool, but a full viable Path of its own. And a powerful one at that.
And it was that. But powerful or not, it wasn't Timothy's path. He respected the skill and passion, but making any greater strides in that area would require time and dedication. Things he was already short on.
Which was a pity really. Being able to divine the future was pretty far up there on Timothy's list of ways not to die. Even if Kevin was the last person to push that perspective. Oddly so considering his highly successful track record. He really could foretell the future from the interactions of the planets, stars and the Mana Field.
He just didn't see it that way. To hear him tell it, the stars and planets didn’t necessarily foretell the future, but they did affect the present and would affect the future as well in predictable if complex, ways. But it might as well be magic when Timothy, one of the premier minds of the league when he wasn’t being humble, couldn’t follow the map of cause and effect. His eyes had glazed over somewhere between inevitable strain points and coalescence of indicative causality.
He had, once, gotten Kevin drunk enough to dumb it down. Grimacing and complaining all the while. The world was filled with beings who held free will. Controlled by individual choice. But those choices were guided by environmental influences. An ascendant Mars behind a bright summer sun magnified existing aggression. If that ‘event’ happened when a beast wave was imminent, then it would trigger the 'event.'
It wasn't reading a possible future. It was reading what was already decided. A beast wave would happen. But the celestial and environmental influences could indicate when because they were the cause.
It was like weather forecasting. You didn’t need to look in a crystal ball, what would be was determined by what was. A high-pressure front means the wind would blow. On a less chancy level, dry weeds in the fields, hot dry wind, and thunderstorms coming? You don’t need to be Nostradamus to know a fire was coming.
Timothy took a few minutes focusing, then fed a significant chunk of mana from his bracers and a great deal of his willpower into the planetarium. That was the big negative of course. No understanding meant it was extremely expensive. The incredibly complicated thought construct spun the planets to life, twisting them up and out to their proper positions. The eight non-earth planets, with moons and a stylized sun aligned themselves above, below or just around the castle.
It was not to scale (of course!) but then, that wasn’t the point. Neither did it show a belief that the earth was flat or that the sun revolved around the earth. That wasn’t the point either.
It was an accurate representation of the heavens on this particular day at this particular location. With a much heavier investment, he could push that day forward several months. It wasn’t needed now, but it was a damn handy trick when he was trying to plan out a major working. With a bit of preparation, he could even measure the aspects and attributes that date would bring. To a point of course. Without the weather and any local Mana Field fluctuations, it was just an approximation. But a helpful one.
Today, as was normally the case, the current aspects felt like a muddled mess. Nothing strong enough to leverage so no point there either.
No point besides beauty.
But did there need to be? Inspiration was hard to deliberately seek, but beauty was as good a place to start as any.
And he desperately needed that inspiration right now. He sighed. The Iron Pyrite had been a nice, and productive, distraction. But even a productive distraction was still a distraction.
Timothy sat down and leaned backward, staring at the slowly shifting orbs. The lack of low Tier transportation outside of riverboats was becoming more than just critical. It was becoming a potentially destabilizing issue.
The irony was, he wasn’t so sure there should be a Union. Oh, trade and an agreement not to kill each other were great ideas. But he was a big proponent for variety. Both in magic and in government. Having options wasn’t a bad thing.
Despite that, he was pushing more and more to solve a problem that might drag them all closer together.
Why?
Mostly for the next generation. It was a logistical and practical nightmare to only allow children to be born in the river Holds.
But there was an extra arrow as well. He might not be a fan of large governments, but he was a fan of individual people. And many of those people, good people that he knew and respected, asked for his help. Including family, and if he was a fan of people, he was a bigger fan of family, and Regi too needed a hand.
So here he was, smashing his head into a problem that so far refused to yield. He wasn’t merely treading water, he had a number of promising ideas in the works, they just stumbled short of the finish line.
Sometimes a long way short of it.
With a snap of his fingers the Orbs gracefully fell back into their holders and Timothy stood up restlessly. Stalking through a doorway and down a short hallway into a larger domed room split into three large walled and gated alcoves surrounding a small central area dominated by a standing table. In the middle of the opposite wall, a massive 12-foot round and 40-foot-long tube extended through the wall beyond his sight.
Timothy looked to his right and snaped his fingers, causing its simple wooden gate to open upwards like a portcullis. The revealed walls, ceiling and floor were densly covered in engraved spells. Isolation and containment for the most part. But with a considerable amount of effort spent on concentrating the ambient mana.
Another snap and the alcove to the left opened, revealing a few simple isolating circles surrounding two pedestals toped by large shallow bowls.
A third snap opened into something of a junk room. Three dozen projects in various states of repair graced full shelves and numerous small tables. Damaged tables in some cases and with similarly cratered, burnt and discolored sections of floor or walls to go with it.
Between the first and third room, was the black stone pipe. A door in its capped end also tielded to a snap of his fingers, revealing nothing. The darkness within refused the entrance of light, refusing to show how its length extended most of the way though Timothy’s bedroom behind that wall.
He couldn’t see it, but he knew. And damn, but he wanted that to be done and over.
Stepping into the entrance and closing the door behind him he pulsed a command. The two doors, one behind him and one unseen at the other end became part of the walls. Another pulse caused a narrow panel to rise, revealing a few familiar blue glowing mushrooms. There were far to few, and of the wrong kind to cast any light, but the glow made them the only visible feature. Islands of sensory input in a lake of nothingness.
He merged his will with the intricately runed threshold stone and twisted his mind and body into tune with it. The world, what little he could see of it, faded away. What was light glowing blue and nothingness transitioned to a complete monochrome. Unrelenting black and pure burning, blinding halos of white. White and black, but no gray. Where one was, the other was not. Between the two hung infinitesimally thin curtains of destruction.
'Here' was something of a relative term in this place. Though he certainly wasn’t anywhere else! Dimensional travel rarely made sense to senses designed for the original 3. Four he guessed, if you included time.
Here he was thought and mana, not physical flesh. Which wasn't to say that harm taken here wouldn’t affect that flesh. Or worse.
If he looked down, which he tried not to do, he would see no body, no nothing. He was merely a point of view. A spec of black shadow indivisible from the rest.
A state he could not maintain for long. This was not his place. He was not a native and he felt the lack of welcome. Focusing his will he traced a connection, a thread of mana that existed outside the monochrome, but barely. A Field of its own, if one considerably different from what he was used to.
The connection didn’t move through the space, but merely connected two points inside of it. The stone that granted him entry, and its twin that would grant an exit. Only the length of the tube away in the real world, something else entirely in the Shadow.
With a small flex of his will, he darted forward, unable to travel the Fields non-Euclidean paths, he could still maintain the connection and use it to find the endpoints. In an instant, he was standing beside a glittering curtain that promised pain and destruction.
A shadow was an absence. An absence of light but if approached correctly, an absence of space. Without space how far could one step take you?
He wasn't entirely sure, but so far anywhere in the same shadow. That just left the light and unfortunately, it wasn't a barrier he dared to cross. With a tired mental sigh, he turned back. Hopping along the link to the doorstep and with a twist, back into the real world.
Not today. He'd suffered enough heavy burns and destroyed clothing already. Repeating the same mistakes wasn't going to get him anywhere.
The worst part was that it did work! He could cover distances in a single step in the absence of light. In the absence. That was the problem. Outside of lab conditions, that absence wasn’t a thing. There was always some light. It wasn't always noticeable but even caves had glowing mosses. The very dirt held glowing mushroom spores.
He'd dreamed of playing hopscotch through the jungle. Stepping between travel stones a mile apart in a single instant. A path from Hold to Threshold that couldn't be traveled in minutes instead of a day.
And yet here he was, stopped by fucking nightlights! He let a few swear words leak out as he stared resentfully at the tube.
With a final, frustrated sigh, he turned away. Leaving the tube and closing the door behind him. He wasn’t surprised at the concept. The Shadow Snakes he'd stolen the idea from were extremely vulnerable to strong lights. But strong lights were not a few freaking mushrooms!
He'd considered creating a perfectly black channel to walk through. An underground pipe of stone perhaps then spelling it to stay dark. A Herculean task if he’d ever heard of one. Not just to dig but to force out all light? No.
He sighed and walked to the first alcove. Touching a bare foot to the runes he willed them to life. A thick haze shot in a steady stream from those carved shapes and soon filled the room to the brim with opaque white clouds. Taking a deep breath, Timothy took three steps into the room and froze. Waiting the ten seconds the mist lasted and looking outward as visibility steadily improved. He was facing towards the right front corner now and about 3 foot from the wall.
Nowhere near where three steps forward should have left him. It was the same effect a good confusion ward caused. If you were lost, you were lost. Not anywhere else. And like that oft misunderstood and overmentioned cat, potentially many places until the box was open and it collapsed to one.
He walked back to the opening and snagged a small piece of chalk from a shelf. Then walked to the back left corner and drew a simple x on the ground. Walking back to the entrance, he spun a complicated mental construct to life. Leveraging Confusion, Lost, All mists are one and lastly, Desire.
He wanted to find that x.
Triggering the mist again, he waited several seconds, then walked forward again three steps. When the mists faded again he was in the right back corner. What he wanted didn’t change what happened.
Lost might be a condition that included many places, but by its very nature, it wasn’t one that encouraged finding.
Despite that, he wasn’t willing to give up on the idea. There was something there, he could practically feel it tickle the edges of his conscious, the tip of his mental tongue.
And if he ever grasped it, it would be so wonderfully convenient. Just wander aimlessly into any untracked location. Be it a forest, jungle or beneath the prairie grasses. Don’t try to find your way, don’t look for landmarks. Just wander in. Then after a time, wander back out wherever you want to be. Or at least the nearest trackless bit.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t there. Not yet. He could do the lost part. He could control the options to an extent. Blocking in a set of possible locations where you could end up. Hell he could even travel randomly to them. He just couldn't control where he ended up.
With that as a problem, he'd never dared to try it outside. He still wondered if an explorer wandering his way through a deep jungle might pull a Tam Lin and come out somewhere and perhaps even somewhen completely different.
Perhaps it would even happen in a Thresholds wards, stepping in at the sea shore and out in the mountains. Then again, with the beat of the Mana beacons pulsing against your senses, you were only mostly lost.
With a sigh he gestured a flat negation, twisting the mist into nothing even as the runes settled back in inactivity.
He walked over to the second alcove and almost paused. It really wasn’t worth even trying but… Ah well, might as well go for completion. With a sigh, he snagged a fist sized rock from a pile of such against the side wall. He walked over to the first pedestal and placed the rock inside a beautifully carved basin. That at least he could be proud of. The story of Jonah stood out, carved channels filled with crystalized whale's blood and gemstones. He traced the images as they walked through the portion of the story where Jonna was swallowed and lived inside the wale. With a sigh, he moved his hand away and resigned, pulsed his will to trigger the enchantment. The image of the whale extended out of the carvings in spectral 3D to swallow the stone, then dropped flopped backward and sideways, its head twisting an ark before falling through the other basin leaving a fine pile of grit behind. Grit in the second bowl, nothing in the first.
The stone was transported, but didn’t survive the process. And nothing he'd tried changed that. Physical matter could travel the hidden paths of the mana Field, but it couldn’t do it intact. The forces involved were powerful and chaotic.
Of the three methods, it wasn’t one he had any confidence in. Magic and the mind could travel those routes if you had the skill, but surviving it physically just wasn’t happening.
At least it made an effective weapon. That was something.
He sighed and dug out a box of wooden plaques. Maybe somewhere in his extensive notes, he'd find a clue. Something to break open this logjam and get him moving again.
Just something!
*Thump* *Thump-Thump* The battle drums beat the call to arms in the background, the minor call, he identified, meant for trainees. A chance to give them some on the walls before they headed out into the deep end.
Though, as he finally fell asleep later that night, the drums beat echoed through his dreams, leading him to another time and another set of youngsters stepping up for their first real fight.