Interlude XVI – Space and Time

Raum

An elven mage of unparalleled power loomed over the coliseum. His hands spread wide, he conducted the invisible song which allowed this sacred tournament to thrive. To his left and to his right tens of thousands of men and women of every race and class packed themselves into the enlarged stands, a number only possible through his own delicate craft. As he inhaled, the space between each individual expanded, and with each exhale it contracted. In the dirt far beneath them all two mages fought, the crowds above only protected by the inches he stretched into miles. A spectacle only possible thanks to him and him alone.

It was an intoxicating amount of power. Something that any lesser elf might have lost himself to.

Luckily, Raum von Weldtraumstadt was an incredibly humble elf.

“We’re getting destroyed down there.”

Now if only his fellows would allow him to work in peace.

Raum glanced idly at the woman lounging next to him. Elia, if he remembered correctly. Joined the guild some ten years ago and made a name for herself fighting the Woman-Serpent down in Riposa. She hadn’t done much since, though he was aware he wasn’t in a position to judge.

“Indeed we are,” he hummed, understanding her annoyance. If she’d gone down she could have defeated the girl in an instant. “But we aren’t at risk of losing. The guildmaster’s plan will make certain of that.”

“’The guildmaster’s plan,’” she scoffed, rolling her eyes. “I’m not worried about us winning. I’m worried about being able to show my face down at the local bar in the coming months without someone talking about how we lost half our number to some damn upstarts!”

Raum simply shrugged. Though he was still technically a part of the guild, these days he was more of a contractor than a real member. Whatever consequences would come of this day weren’t his problem.

Even if he privately agreed with her. Their new guildmaster was… fine. He was fine. So long as he wasn’t put in charge of anything which required strategy, or combat, or thinking…

Well, perhaps that was a bit harsh. The man was a politician, same as their last one before he left to sit on the Signora. That the new one spent most of his time rubbing elbows with the other administrators and guilds within the Famiglia was only to be expected. It was how he’d made it this far, and how he’d make it further still.

The issue was that the man was far too used to thinking as a politician rather than the military captain he currently was. Under normal circumstances this wouldn’t be an issue, since he had a legion of advisors and allies who worked to keep their bloated guild running smoothly. He even listened to them half the time, which was a marked improvement over the last one!

But today those competent men and women were not here. Only the guildmaster, an untested and panicking politician who only half understood the mess he was creating.

Granted, even Raum had been surprised that Zeitn had been knocked out so quickly. Lightning, who would have thought?

But that loss drastically changed the trajectory of their plans for the tournament. They’d been aware of the plot the upstart ‘Firozzi’ Famiglia had been brewing—obviously, they were corrupt not stupid—but they hadn’t considered them a true threat. After all, what were even a dozen lesser Famiglia to the great Rodina Adventurer’s Guild?

Dangerous, apparently.

It burned at him to consider them so, but after today there was no other choice. Only ten adventurers in and yet they were chewing through what should have been their equals like a pack of nymphs through a fat deer.

Seeing this, the guildmaster had come up with a simple—if controversial—plan. Rather than send out their strongest adventurers to fight and potentially lose against the powerful upstart guild, they’d send out their low-to-mid-strength adventurers and wear them down through attrition. That would give their best easier victories to more than make up for the losses suffered against the Firozzi.

In theory, his plan was sound. In practice, the humiliation they were currently suffering would likely offset any potential gain from victory.

“It’s certainly turning into quite the problem,” Raum hummed lightly, shrugging his shoulders. “Good luck sorting it out!”

“Bastard,” she groaned without any heat. “Goddess above, why don’t you go talk some sense into the guildmaster? He’d listen to you.”

No, he wouldn’t. He thought Raum a threat to his faction in the guild. He was right, of course, which was also why the elf didn’t bother correcting this misplay. “I doubt that. And besides, don’t you know how hard this is?” he slumped against the railing dramatically. “Why, if I look away for a moment I could—shit.”

Elia gave him a look. “What just happened? Why did you say that?”

“Nothing happened!” he chuckled, hiding his racing heart behind a bit of poorly timed humor. “Nothing at all! Just wanted to give you a bit of a scare, that’s it. Everything’s fine.”

“…If you say so. Just don’t break anything while we’re inside the arena, will you?” She didn’t look convinced, but she let it slide. Which was good, because he really didn’t want to reveal the stupid mistake he’d nearly made, one only possible due to the boy currently fighting.

Johan’s magic—or, well, his ‘Anti-Magic’—was quite dangerous, but easy enough to avoid if you knew what you were doing. And it was something he’d made sure he knew how to counter, even going so far as to mentor the boy himself!

Well, him and a dozen others in the guild. ‘Anti-magic’ was a lost art after all, and getting to study it could be a once in a lifetime opportunity. Even if it was in the hands of a newbie with a hero-complex.

But he digressed. Once he knew the ‘magic’s’ weaknesses dealing with the anti-magic field was easy enough. The field was projected in an invisible bubble around Johan’s body, one which he could only extend so far. So as long as he kept a good buffer between the warped space and the boy’s maximum range his own spells would be unaffected.

And like an idiot in his poor attempt at a joke he’d nearly sent his own magic straight into that anti-magic field.

He was lucky Elia was a meathead. If anyone competent had noticed he’d simply die of shame.

Calming his racing heart Raum turned his focus back to the arena, making certain everything was working correctly and that he wasn’t about to accidentally twist anyone into a pretzel. Keeping track of the whole coliseum was precise work, but he had over a century of experience running such events. Beyond his minor slipup everything else was working smoothly.

Letting out a quiet sigh of relief, he took a moment to glance back down at the arena. The newbie was fighting the Dominae girl, who from his limited knowledge of the guild was fairly new herself. It was, on paper, an even matchup.

Idly, he wondered if she’d been in Iscrimo with her guild when the recent political mess had gone down. He dismissed the thought, though. Even such an upstart guild wouldn’t bring such young blood with them to court unstable foreign powers like Iscrimo. Lady Johanna of the Winter Crusade was more likely—

Wait, no. No, she’d be much worse to bring along.

Raum hummed, amusing himself for a moment imagining that slovenly elf freezing over the volcano those pompous bastards so loved to harp on about.

In the midst of doing so he noticed someone approaching. Tilting his head, he raised an eyebrow as Zeitn reentered their private section. The elf looked exhausted, though he seemed to have already been fully healed of his injuries.

Such wasn’t surprising, considering the skill of the healers their guild had access to. What was more curious was that he decided to come back up rather than rest. Good healers or no, electrical burn scars weren’t the kind of thing someone just walked off.

“Huh?” Elia followed his stare, perking up as she noticed who he was looking at. “Oh, hey, Zeitn! Back already?”

No no, please don’t call him over. Things had been awkward enough this past decade without the two of them having to speak face to face. Especially now that he’d started wearing that awful mask. Really, with all the black he was wearing he looked like some Iscrimo noble! Did he have to waste his beautiful complexion on such an awful wardrobe!?

Where was he? Ah, yes, Zeitn. And he was coming over. Shit.

“You really got your ass kicked down there, huh?” the woman laughed, her crude joke momentarily distracting the other elf. Which was excellent, truly, since it meant they weren’t looking at him. “You and that dwarf got beef or something?”

Zeitn stared at her.

He continued to stare at her.

He continued staring to the point even Raum was starting to feel bad for the meathead.

Then, slowly, he turned his head to look at—Goddess damnit man, look somewhere else!

“Ah, Zeitn,” Raum smiled pleasantly. “It’s always a pleasure to see you again. Have you been doing well?”

Obviously not, he was painfully thin and clearly exhausted. He’d also been using his magic too much recently, if the extra wrinkles beneath his eyes were any indication. Elf looked like he’d aged half a century since he last saw him a year ago.

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Raum waited politely for Zeitn to reply, only for his smile to grow ever so slightly strained as he continued to remain silent.

Zeitn’s eyes locked onto his. There was… quite the mix of emotions burning in them. Anger, glee… remorse?

What in the world was going on—?

“Guh—!” Raum gasped, his hands rushing up to his chest. Blood pooled against his fingers as he grasped Zeitn’s dagger, the wicked blade pierced straight through his heart. “—What—why—Zeitn—!?”

The elf tore the blade straight from his chest. Everyone around them jumped to their feet in shock, Elia herself lunging at Zeitn to restrain him—

She fell back, hands rushing to where a second bloody smile had been carved across her throat. Her eyes bulged in agony as she choked on her own blood.

Screams and shouts erupted from their part of the stands. Other adventurers around him—many of them powerful in their own right—also attempted to subdue the elf—

But the time-mage was already gone, blurring away to another part of the stands and leaving him to his painful death. The bastard.

Someone was trying to help him, Raum blearily realized. People were surrounding him, trying to stem the flow of blood, trying to save him after Zeitn yet again destroyed his heart.

Raum tried to laugh, though all that came out was a wet cough.

No. No, no, no, he shouldn’t be thinking like that. The shock was subsiding and now only terror replaced it. He was probably going to die here. No, he was going to die. Him, Raum, the only person keeping this arena from reverting back to its original shape and splattering everyone against each other in a non-Euclidean mess was about to die.

He needed to focus. He couldn’t afford to think of anything else. He tried to speak to warn them, to tell them to flee, though nothing but a wheeze reached his lips.

Okay, fine. Fine. He had only minutes, perhaps even seconds, but that was enough. It had to be enough. He shut out the noise and the chaos, focusing inward on his own heart, on his own blood. He knew a little bit about biology. Not as much as a healer, but enough to keep himself alive. Maybe. Hopefully.

Gently, delicately, metaphorical fingers grasped his own veins. A dozen more reached out to grasp the space between those thin red lines, crafting tunnels to allow blood to once more flow properly. It did nothing for what he had already lost, and he wasn’t sure how much time it would buy him, but every second counted. Wrapping his own heart in a cocoon of eternity he then began to force it back into place, his sight blurring as he barely managed to keep the ruined organ together. It worked, if only just, and the relief he felt at that moment was unrivaled.

Still, he couldn’t help but feel he was forgetting something…

Then he felt it. The spells he’d cast over the arena, the faint threads of warped mass he’d woven across the coliseum. He’d stopped consciously maintaining them as he worked, knowing they’d hold well enough so long as he lived. In any other time, with any other competitors, it would have been fine.

But currently, in the center of his web of magic, the bubble of an anti-magic field gently caressed the edges of his grand spell.

Ah, Zeitn, you always knew the best time to strike.

Resigned terror was the only thing he could feel as everything around them unraveled.

--

Johan

It started with the screaming.

Well, that wasn’t very specific. There were many people screaming—this was a tournament after all—but those screams were of a different ilk. The roaring of a crowd was not the same as a cry of despair.

And Johan had an unfortunate amount of experience hearing the latter.

He didn’t get much time to dwell on such, however, as the space between himself and his opponent began to shimmer.

Both him and the girl—Palmira was her name—stared at it in confusion. Neither of them knew why it was there, and neither of them were sure what it was.

He only managed to connected the dots a moment later, and by that point it was too late.

The space between him and Palmira expanded infinitely. Johan suddenly found himself alone in an endless desert, each grain of dust as thin as a pinprick and as long as a dragon. Then, in the next moment, they were beside each other again, and more of instinct than anything else did he manage to grab her arm before she was splattered against the wall that was suddenly behind him.

“What’s going on!?” she yelped, her voice warbling and crackling from the distorted space between them. “Are you doing this!?”

“How the hell would I do this?” he snapped back, grimacing as he pulled her closer. “And I don’t know, something must have happened to Raum! If we can find a way up to him, maybe we can fix… whatever this is!”

He clenched his divine spear tighter in worry. If something had happened to his mentor—!

Not that it would be easy. It was impossible to see outside the protection of his anti-magic field, a kaleidoscope of colors painting the barrier as everything beyond was stretched in ways no mortal mind was capable of comprehending.

“What’s going on up there?” Palmira whispered, her voice quieter than he’d expected her capable of from the five minutes he’d known her. “Is… could anyone survive that?”

“They should be fine,” he reassured her, even if he had no idea himself. But a Hero had to always be brave, and he wasn’t about to let his divine spear—Vita—down by acting cravenly now.

“I don’t know,” said spear hummed, seemingly unconcerned. “I don’t think the sky’s supposed to have that much red in it.”

“I can’t believe I’m saying this,” Palmira’s staff dubiously countered. “But you shouldn’t listen to her. Reality is subjective, and we’re currently staring into a warped mirror from the eye of a hurricane. They probably aren’t dead. More likely just having a very bad time.”

Palmira’s hand tightened against his shoulder. “I swear, if you Rodina bastards just killed all my friends I am going to set you on fire, ‘anti-magic’ or no.”

That was unlikely. No magic had ever managed to pass through his barrier. Though he was smart enough not to say that out loud. At least not this time.

“We need to move,” he told her instead. “Like I said before, Raum must know what’s going on. If we can get to him he should be able to fix this!”

“And if he did this on purpose we can cave his kneecaps in!” the staff agreed cheerfully.

Johan considered arguing, before deciding it wasn’t worth the effort. Instead he pulled the other girl as close as he could—being mindful not to put his hands anywhere indecent—and took a small step forward.

This turned out to be a mistake.

See, Johan had forgotten a fundamental difference between what his barrier normally did and what was currently going on. Before he stepped forward reality had been stretched taut like a thin strip of rubber, held in its unnatural shape only by the will of the mage controlling it. This meant that the space around them was currently in an ‘unnatural’ state.

And his anti-magic barrier returned the world to its ‘natural’ state.

He took a step forward, and what he had once thought was a safe haven turned out to have been more like a small bubble of safety which had miraculously survived the collapsing building above it. A bubble he then unknowingly ‘popped.’

Reality broke again. Stretched and condensed and twisted, he and Palmira found themselves everywhere and nowhere at once. Up and down, left and right, apart and together, They were every direction at once and then in some liminal space between. The stone walls of the arena confined them, their bones creaking in protest, only to then be suddenly alone, his eyes unable to comprehend the endlessness he was witnessing. There was laughter and screaming, faces he both recognized and didn’t flashing past, a kaleidoscope of relentless colors blinding him as they tore at his flesh—

Then suddenly it was over. Reality was normal again. This was good.

What was less good was the fact they were now several hundred feet in the air.

Palmira was staring at him from where she was pressed against his chest. Her brown eyes were wide with terror, her lips moving as though she were trying to tell him something only for the roaring wind to steal the words away.

“—urn i—ff!”

“What!?” he shouted back, just barely able to hear his own voice. “What did you say!?”

“Tur—off!”

Tur… turn it off? Turn what off, his—his anti-magic barrier, right!”

He shut off the field and instantly flames ignited across her body. He winced at the sudden heat, being made all the worse by her proximity, though she kept the worst of it away from his body. Instead she let go of him, and he had to scramble to keep a hold of her as she thrust her hands out beneath them.

There was a much greater burst of heat and the roaring of fire behind his back. It was even more painful, though he realized a moment later they’d somehow begun to slow down!

Not enough, though perhaps that hadn’t been the intention. He felt the flames jerk them to the side, and rather than splatter against the hard city cobblestones they instead slammed back-first into the Rozzi, the river barely managing to break their fall.

It still hurt, but he wasn’t dead and Johan counted that as a win.

Disoriented he managed to blink the stars out of his eyes, before quickly righting himself. With one hand held tight around Palmira he pulled himself to the surface, the girl more a hindrance than a help with her own pitiful flailing.

They broke the surface with a gasp. Injured, disoriented and likely concussed, but alive.

Goddess be good, that was the closest he’d come to death since he fled his father’s castle.

“What the fuck was that!?” Palmira gasped, the water boiling around her. “What did you do!?”

“I didn’t do anything!” he groaned, trying to adjust for her weight. It barely helped. “It was whatever the hell’s going on up there that did it!”

She hissed, a small gout of flame darting from between her teeth. But she didn’t argue, likely understanding this wasn’t the time. Instead they both turned toward the shore, paddling their way out of the river.

Or, at least, they tried to.

“If you can’t swim just grab onto my back, it’ll be faster,” he told her after her flailing nearly capsized them again.

“I can too swim,” she snapped back. “I don’t know why its not working right now though!”

“What in the world does that mean? Either it works or it doesn’t?”

“Well, it normally works in lava just fine!”

“How would that in anyway translate to water!?”

“I… Shut up!”

Finally, after far longer than it really needed to be, the two of them dragged themselves onto dry land.

Johan fell onto his back, gasping for breath. High above a warped aurora painted the sky with the earth as whatever reality-bending mess was going on in the arena erupted into the heavens.

He realized with a start that they’d been launched much further than he’d expected. The arena had been on the northern edge of the city, but just down the street he could see the tip of that giant dragon skull peaking over the rooftops.

“I thought we were going to die,” Palmira gasped, tendrils of fire wisping about her body. “Morte, when this is over, remind me to learn how to swim. In water.”

“Sure, sure, I’ll add it to the thousand other things you need to learn. Right below comprehending the machinations of space-time but just above learning how to use a flail.”

‘Disagreement. Learning to use a flail is much more important for Our Lady to learn.’

“Both of you just… shut up,” she groaned, planting her face in her hands. “For five minutes. Please.”

Johan watched their byplay, before turning to look at his own spear. No, Vita.

“…What?” she asked, before perking up. “Oh, wait, do you want me to criticize you as well? In that case, you really should have some plan for falling from great heights. A little girl isn’t going to be around to save you every time that happens, you know!”

Johan sighed, shaking his head. He wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting. He trusted the spear with his life, but having seen even briefly how Palmira acted with Morte… he felt it didn’t go both ways.

Whatever. That was a problem for another time. When his mentor wasn’t in danger and the world wasn’t falling apart at the seams.

Rising to his feet, the half-elf barely held back a groan as his whole body protested. He’d be feeling this in the morning, but so long as he could still move then maybe not all hope was lost.

“What are you doing?”

Johan blinked, before turning back to the girl. The flames had already dried her off, though her hair was now a poofy mess from the heat. She looked resigned, as though she already knew what he was going to say.

“I’m going back, obviously,” he told her, before turning back to the arena to continue walking. “Whatever’s happened today, someone needs to put a stop to it.”

He heard footsteps behind him, and the girl was quickly by his side. She didn’t look happy about it though. “And let me guess, that someone is us?”

Johan raised an eyebrow. “You don’t have to come. Whatever the case may be, it was my guild which set this up, and so it’s my guild’s responsibility to fix it.”

“Screw off,” she scoffed. “My friends are still in there. You can play the hero for all I care, I’m just getting them out and booking it after.”

He felt his lips quirk into a small smile. It was a small weight off his shoulders, knowing he wouldn’t be going into this alone. “Thank you, Palmira.”

“Don’t thank me until it’s over, you arrogant bastard,” she grumbled, glancing away from him. “And if you die I’m taking your spear!”

Well, now that was something he absolutely couldn’t do. He’d made a promise to Vita, after all. One he hadn’t yet seen fulfilled.

And so, mage and anti-mage marched their way back into the hell they’d just barely escaped. This time to put an end to it, whatever that might be.