Excerpt from ‘The Tenets of House Deepstar,’ author unknown.
“53. When lost in the deepest caverns, call upon your allies, seek your guiding lights, and stay calm. There is no challenge insurmountable alongside stalwart allies.”
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The return of Yenna’s fellow expedition members did wonders to quell her anxieties. No longer did it feel like she was one slip-up away from dooming everyone—even an introvert like Yenna understood the value of having back-up in a tense situation. Still, there was one problem.
“What’s our next move?” Narasanha looked to Yenna for guidance, and the mage realised she didn’t know how to give it. Having pulled them out of their frozen state, and ostensibly having a better idea of what was going on, Hirihiri and Narasanha were waiting entirely for Yenna’s command.
“I, um…” Yenna’s eyes flicked about, feeling the pressure of unexpected leadership.
“We’ve got to go find Tirk!” Hirihiri insisted, her loudness startling Yenna. The mage was a little surprised to see the old yolm like this—all of their interactions thus far had been warm and friendly. Hirihiri had worry written plainly on her face, and Yenna would be lying if she said she wasn’t worried too.
“Th-then…Hirihiri, see if you can open the door to this room. Narasanha, um, if you wouldn’t mind–”
“Command me, and I will obey. Hesitation gets us nowhere.”
The bodyguard crossed two arms and put two more on her hips, evidently annoyed. Yenna could almost believe the woman would glare a hole right through her if she was made to wait any longer.
“I-In that case, I’d like to see if you could pull the priestess out of harm’s way. Assuming that this place maps onto corresponding facets of reality—which, I might add, there’s no reason it shouldn’t—then when time’s flow is restored, or we leave this place, then she will not be harmed…Oh.”
By the time Yenna had finished explaining, Narasanha had already accomplished her task. Steadying the priestess with all four hands, she had gently dragged the kesh back and away to safety. Without waiting for further instructions, Narasanha also moved Eone out of the path of the swinging claw—just far enough away to avoid harm, but not enough to prevent the captain from striking back at the beast.
“Yenna! Could I get a hand?” Hirihiri shouted from behind—her voice from over by the door sounded impossibly distant and Yenna briefly wondered about the mechanics of speaking through temporally halted air. The cook was pushing against the door to the room with a shoulder, throwing her entire weight into it. The wooden door was heavy, but not that heavy—it should reasonably have given way with the amount of pressure the cook had been applying, but refused to budge. Yenna trotted over and found some purchase for her own hands, shoving the door with all her might. Not enough, as it turned out. With the duo’s struggles the door had been forced to open halfway, but notably pushed against their strength. As any attempt to pass through would involve lessening the push on the door, it would inevitably slam shut before either of them could gain entry. Yenna backed off, turning behind her to look at the strongest member of their group sheepishly.
“Narasanha, could you open this for us…?”
The bodyguard sighed. “Move aside, both of you.”
Shuffling out of her way, both Hirihiri and Yenna watched as Narasanha placed four hands on the door and shoved. For a moment the door was halfway open, the bodyguard’s muscular arms tensing with effort. With a grunt, she let it go and stepped back. There was a frustrated look on Narasanha’s face, and Yenna tried to smooth it over.
“Can’t get it open either…? It’s fine if you can’t–”
“No. I can get it open.”
Suddenly, Narasanha dropped to a knee. Yenna’s eyes went wide as the woman’s musculature tensed all at once, like a viper ready to strike. Then she burst forward, slamming into the door with the force of a cannonball. The wood cracked and buckled, the hinges snapped—Narasanha, along with the door, landed on the floor beyond with a muffled thud. She stood, dusted herself off and gestured to the room beyond the doorway.
“Door’s open.”
“I, um…” Yenna eyed the battered remnants of the door. “I hope we don’t have to do that for every door.”
Yenna tried to recall everything she knew of the manor’s layout as she made her way out of the room. From the sizable living room, the door opened into a wide hallway. There were a handful of doors in the hallway, with the end of the passage leading back into the manor’s foyer. The side doors were a mystery to her, but the foyer had a set of stairs heading up to the second floor, as well as the door leading outside. In the hallway, a servant had been heading towards the living room with several refreshments held up on a tray—frozen in place, he resembled an impossibly perfect sculpture.
Yenna moved into the foyer, noting the glass nullifiers shattered to pieces. They had evidently done their job—a spell circle had been forming on the carpet at the base of the stairs, now smeared illegibly. A shiver ran down Yenna’s spine as she turned to her companions to share her findings.
“That beast-man must have an ally, possibly more. The spell circle it employed to arrive here was too complex to repeat simultaneously. My best guess is…well, they all tried to teleport in at once.”
“A shock-strike.” Narasanha frowned. Seeing blank looks, she explained. “It’s a technique employed by warmages—teleporting a squadron of soldiers directly into key places, or simply behind enemy lines. Plays merry havoc with defenses, ignores structural chokepoints and defensible positions. I’m surprised you didn’t know, mage.”
Yenna crossed her arms, disdain written clearly on her face. “I majored in Arcane fundamentals and theory. There are very few mages that focus on the dreadful arts of war-magic, and thank goodness for that.”
At that, Hirihiri smirked. “The kesh distaste for war does clash rather fiercely with the facts of Aulpre’s expansion. But, I won’t dredge up history—we’ve got things to do. Now, where could that little scamp have gotten to?”
“Captain Eone sent him somewhere, though it wasn’t clear why.” Yenna looked around the room. Apart from the door out of the manor and the staircase up to the second floor, there was another hallway opposite the one they had just come from as well as a couple of closed doors behind the stairs. “I can’t imagine the captain would send Tirk alone to find his way through the manor. I imagine she might have sent him to check on the others.”
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
“In that case,” Hirihiri pointed to the front door, “I’d wager he’s gone out to the stables. A manor like this would keep its stables around the side, and it’d be the only place large enough to fit Chime. Mayi and Jiin might be there too.”
“Ah, right! I need Mayi!” Yenna felt silly for forgetting. She quickly explained to the pair her plan—retrieve the doctor and put her close enough to do something about the injuries to the other kesh priest when they leave this place. Having no better place to check, they resolved to head outside.
Rather than burst through the front door, Narasanha instead used her axe to destroy the hinges. The already chipped axe was looking far worse for wear by the end of it, but it meant that all Narasanha had to do to keep the door open was to push it out. After a bit of effort, the heavy wooden door surrendered to the pressure and clattered partway to the ground—freezing again just before hitting the stones outside. With the door open, the group could finally see outside.
The first thing that caught Yenna’s eye was the sky, the cloudy day having turned into an extremely starry night. Dominating the sky was the moon writ large, taking up a quarter of the darkness above. The town was bathed in silvery moonlight, giving everything an eerie, ethereal quality.
“Fascinating! I mean, the moon is not entirely unexpected, but still fascinating.” Yenna tapped her chin in thought as she stared upwards. Looking too closely at the moon hurt the eyes, especially through the lens of the magical sight spell, so she turned back to see her comrades’ confused expressions. “If the priestess truly is responsible for this, and she is a priestess of the moon and stars, then the ambient field-imagery is affected by thaumic representations– ahem, the big moon isn’t too odd.”
“Mage nonsense aside,” Narasanha waved the comments away, “Look, at the edge of town. There is an end to it.”
Sure enough, there was a clear boundary to this place. The night sky extended downwards like a dome, the star-studded black canvas reaching to touch the ground. As far as Yenna could tell, the centre of the dome was the glass-roofed tower she had spied on her way in. The edges of it looked to barely contain the manor, cutting off access to the houses at the far end of town as well as any way out of the town proper. Once the group rounded the manor, they were relieved to find that the boundary included the stables as well—if only just barely.
The stables were a large building made of the same dark wood as the main manor. Two doors wide enough to pass a pair of carriages side by side sat open, to Yenna’s considerable relief. Inside was a variety of differently sized stalls, with a handful of fine horses¹ visible behind slatted gates. Notably, a wider area likely used to help with the process of untethering carriages was being taken up by the bulk of the silupker Chime. Right by their head was an unusual shadowed spot—a pitch black shadow being cast by nothing, leaving an unsettling blank in the air. Mayi and Jiin were nowhere to be seen.
The shadow radiated a certain coldness, but also an unnatural allure. Yenna could feel the need to study it closer itching at the back of her head, an urge tempered only by the alarm bells of her naturally cautious demeanour. Even from the entrance she could tell that there was something wrong with the shadow, a familiar dread sending shivers down her spine. Gazed at through her magic sight, it was a complete blank—exactly the same as the black book. Demvya had been safeguarding it, and by extension Jiin, so Yenna could only assume that at least the stonecarver herself was in that void. The way it reacted to this still realm was unusual, to say the least, but everything about the book was unusual—Yenna just hoped that Jiin was okay in there.
“Hey, over here!” Hirihiri’s sudden shout caused Yenna to jump slightly in surprise.
The cook pointed to one of the stables where Yenna could see a small figure curled up on the ground surrounded by a variety of shining symbols. When her eyes adjusted to the gloom, she could tell it was Tirk. To her immense surprise, the boy was moving—slowly, as though viewed through a half-remembered memory of a dream, but moving all the same. Hirihiri ducked forward to reach for him.
“Wait, stop!” Yenna surprised herself by calling out.
“He’s crying! What’s wrong with him?” Hirihiri protested, stopping a few steps away from the boy.
“I…don’t think there is anything wrong with him. But if you get closer, you might disrupt what he’s done to protect himself.”
Yenna pointed towards the symbols on the ground. They were simple lines in the dirt, presumably drawn with the tip of Tirk’s finger, glowing with accumulated magical energy. They were each Av runes—the basic, magic-repelling symbol Yenna had taught him—which made the fact that they were glowing all the more concerning. Tirk had somehow sensed that something was coming and had set up an extremely rudimentary anti-magic zone to protect himself, though its power was limited and fading quickly. By repelling the spell that had sent them all here, Tirk appeared to be stuck partway between the physical realm and this realm of stillness.
Narasanha and Hirihiri recognised that this was an issue for a mage to deal with. The bodyguard wandered off to scout around the area, leaving the old cook to stand by and watch anxiously at the rescue process. Tirk looked up towards Yenna, wiping tears out of his eyes with glacially slow movements as he too watched. Yenna knew of two methods that would release him—simply letting him be taken by the stillness to be recovered after the fact, or enhancing his protection and bolstering it with the coin-mark to allow him to move freely. Glancing at Hirihiri’s worried face, the mage was assured that she wouldn’t be able to get away with the easier former option.
In that regard it didn’t look like it would be particularly difficult to release him, just tedious. The magic around him was already active and Yenna could assume the coin’s magic would accept him given its previous interactions. The tricky part was balancing the clearing of Av symbols, which required that Yenna build her unfreezing spell in pieces in between the symbols’ gaps. If she tried to put the cage down too early, the Av would simply scatter it—too late, and the stillness would rush in the gaps and freeze Tirk with a vengeance.
All in all, the process took about twenty minutes by Yenna’s reckoning. Slowly removing the Av symbols and replacing them didn’t take too much concentration, so it gave Yenna time to think about their predicament. The mage’s unfortunate conclusion was that she was well out of her league, dealing with a spell magnitudes greater in power than she was used to, that operated on a magical syntax entirely foreign to her.
She sighed. “Just another day with the expedition, I suppose.”
“What was that?”
Yenna nearly fell over—Narasanha had once again appeared at her side. Hirihiri was nowhere to be seen.
“D-Don’t frighten me, I’m trying to concentrate! …Did you find anything? Where’s–”
“She went to see if she could find the rest of the crew,” Narasanha gruffly interrupted. “The boundary of this area is as solid as stone. Broke my axe, borrowed a new one.”
Narasanha held up a finely crafted hand-axe, one which Yenna noted had a price tag still hanging from it. She pretended not to notice, and Narasanha grinned a frightening grin. Eager to avoid staring at the warrior’s sharp teeth, Yenna turned her eyes back to her work—not that she needed to, as most of her attention was focused through her magic sense.
Within his slow bubble, Tirk had stopped crying and was watching with interest as Yenna worked to free him. His bubble had diminished dramatically in size, but he didn’t seem afraid in the slightest—it was almost concerning how implicitly the boy trusted her. As the final piece of the spell fell into place and the stillness was fully dispelled, Tirk leapt up and tackled her with a heavy hug.
“Master Yenna, you’re amazing!”
“Oh, Tirk!” Yenna put him down, beaming ear to ear. “I think you’re the amazing one here. Now, how about we go and find Hirihiri, and compare notes, hmm? Want to ride up on my back?”
The boy wiped one last little tear out of the corner of his eye and nodded emphatically. Yenna helped him up, her mood reaching a high thanks to the improving situation. Now all she had to do was make sure no one else was in mortal peril, devise a plan to stop the beast-man and their allies before they could cause any more harm, and restore the flow of time.
“Hah…nothing to it. Let’s go!”
Far above, the sliver of darkness down the side of the moon shifted to form a pitch black crescent.
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¹ - Another inexplicable constant of material realms is the horse, or at least creatures akin to it. Yenna’s world shares many similarities regarding animals with your own, dear reader, and for any notable variances I have elected to use the most evocative names possible over the local vernacular.