With no Wagon, punching the Shoreward on the Eastham shore and powering east was easy and impromptu. I crouched on my Disk tied to Princess Kristie as she Skated along above the waves, slicing through the things a third again as fast as we had on that run to the Vesayans over six months ago now.
A Rantha couldn’t ever gain too much Karma, there was always more to pay. Kill an Elder Avatar or something like I had? The Karma could be gone in minutes just paying for her racial upgrades. She had gone to utterly superhuman lengths on Ithaenc in the Quiddity Dungeon to maintain positive Karma flow, just because she needed so damn much of it. If that meant being in the dungeon without paramount oversight and backup early in the wee hours, then that was what she had done.
Also, a bored Rantha tends to start things, being the physical types they are, so hours and hours of slaughter was like stress-venting meditation for her.
I had the Detects up and was watching forward and back as we shot across the waters. Mostly forward, as warning would be important if Kris had to swerve out of the way, backwards was mostly visual.
Which didn’t make the sudden appearance of that dorsal fin over twice my height, even arched backwards as it was, coming up out of the water behind us any less ominous.
The water getting out of the way of the creature bearing said fin was cutting an impressive wake. It had to be at least forty meters long.
Kris saw it with only a flicker of thought from me, glancing back out my eyes from the Detect display ahead of us, which had plenty of Aquatics, but nothing of great size or danger. “Big fellow,” she murmured, but didn’t increase her speed.
That was because it wasn’t actually closing in on us, although it was trying to.
“A distraction?” was all I said, while she listened to the calls it was making, some form of whalesong, so not a shark.
“Possible. Coming in from the side or below?” The range of my Detect wasn’t affected by either, but there wouldn’t be a whole lot of warning.
“I’m guessing below, as from the side they’ll break the surface and warn us.”
“Ho, I just heard a reply, but I couldn’t tell the direction,” she murmured, but was looking down and ahead. “It’s going to have to move fast at this speed…”
A mile in thirty seconds didn’t give much time for a five mile channel crossing. I was actually surprised one was in range to do anything about this. Both of them?
Whoops! “Below.”
A huge form had just came into range of my Detect ahead of and under us, and was rising with great speed on an intercept at the surface.
“Eh.” Kris cleared her throat as the Whiskers of the Wild popped upon her cheeks. “Hey down there. Yes, I can see you. No, you’re not going to surprise me. Save yourself the effort, you’re not going to hit me, you can’t move fast enough. I’ve got no bad intentions for the owner of the island, and I’ll even let you know how he’s doing on the way back.”
The rising submarine coming up faltered as her voice echoed through the waters, and the one pursuing us abruptly slowed down, shocked that it could understand Kris as well.
“There you go. Patience, elders. I’ll be back shortly and let you know what is going on.”
The second leviathan surfaced well behind us as we scooted towards the island, and we could feel their attention on us as we zipped in towards the Shoreward, breached it without effort, and were past and onto Asheron’s Island.
--------
“Huh. Would you look at that.”
We coasted into a short and sandy beach, pristine and clean, perfect for sunbathing and reading a book with a nonsense tropical drink on hand.
It was very near the ‘normal’ historical landing spot for those Portaled here from Eastham, the only historical way to get here in the past.
A short distance away was a popping, fizzing, broken, and burned-out device that had dimensional magic wrapped about it, the ‘quick Teleport’ up to Asheron’s Castle, located atop the severely-sloped hill to the north of us.
We were at the base of Mount Empyrean, the other steep hill that formed the island. Both it and Mount Asheron were about a thousand feet high, extremely steep as mountains went, more like mounds of rock than natural formations.
Once inside the Shoreward, something had changed drastically.
Elementals that we couldn’t see individually before were all over Mt. Empyrean, and the top of it was dancing with multi-elemental flames spewing up out of what looked like a massive gash or cleft into the inner side of the hill. I could see Elementals of all sizes and hues, including mixed Elementals, and some of them were much, much larger than any I’d seen in person here before, bringing to mind some of the Greater Elementals and Elemental Monoliths Aelryinth had seen in certain places before.
Still in the Empyrean Mold, however, not the Four Elements of Alchemy.
Opposite it, on the hilltop where Asheron’s Castle was… the same kind of fires were there, but they were dancing in the air above the castle, instead of dominating the whole hilltop, and were clearly visible doing so from Eastham.
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A spiral path wound around Mount Asheron, a long path that would have been absolute murder to have to siege and attack, exposed to fire from above for basically the full distance.
And indeed, there were at least hundreds more Elementals roving about that path, seeming a bit agitated, but none of them in conflict with one another despite their opposed natures, and more pointedly, they weren’t even harming the vegetation.
“What are your Detects telling you?” Kris asked, her expression flat and pale violet eyes not blinking as she took it all in.
“Not to trust what they are Detecting,” I frowned. “I’ve only got Det Magic at V, and See the Invisible. Everything else is from Valence. I could bring up Detect Illusion if you want me to spend the Valence…”
“That would be an excellent idea for you.”
Behold the Waking Dreams, Detect Illusion at V, was promptly spun out from me, and settled across my eyes.
I’d seen the massive amounts of magic in the air, so much so that it had obfuscated much of its nature. With Detect Illusion, however, it was made plain that a whole crapload of it was meant to do exactly that, saturate the sky and make it impossible to read the manafield and see what was really going on.
There was a lot of now-blatant illusion magic swimming in the air, a terrain-warping display of both illusion and phantasmal power, playing on the senses and mind together.
The island’s landscape was not green and fine. It had largely been melted, blasted, charred, dissolved, and frozen down to the stone by the Elementals wandering about it and removing anything impure.
The Castle itself far above us had been blasted open along its south-western corner, the white crystalline wall blown completely out and away by rampaging Elemental energies. The crystal white of the stones were all charred and seared, anything but pristine, and the plumes of Elemental energies reached all the way down to the tops of the walls and towers, melting and fusing them there as residual Wards kept them at bay.
That gash and crack in the ground leading up to the top of Mt. Empyrean also had some familiar and unnatural energies wound through it.
“Those are virindi dimensional manipulation energies,” I stated in no uncertain terms, pointing at the gash. “It looks like something tore open the ley line connection between the two hills, and really disrupted something.”
“The entrance to that castle is supposedly on the north side,” Kris said slowly, still studying everything.
“You can see through the illusion?” I asked rhetorically.
“Succubus True Sight becomes available to purchase at Rantha Eight. I bought it with my Tou-Tou Glory Award. First time it’s actually come in useful.”
“This is a bloody massive Hallucinatory Terrain. Ritual-class and backed by a lot of magic.”
“Oh, copy that. Somebody broke something really, really big here. Can you identify the energy signatures?”
“I would dearly love to, but there’s massive thaumic fog here, all the magic is blending in to one another. With my Detect up, I can see the illusion, but its still overriding normal results, so it’s at least an VIII Valence effect.” Since with Earth Spell and my feet on the ground, Detect V was at the power of a VI.
“Not a lot of people who can Cast illusions at VIII hereabouts,” Kris noted dryly. “What if we got closer to that gash?”
“You want to see if Martine did it? That’s fine. But… you probably don’t want me Casting if I can help it.”
“Whatever did this illusion wove some sensory perception into it, eh?” She was unsurprised.
“If I have it right, the closer you get to it, the more realistic and concealing it is. I bet if we started walking up to the Castle, all those Elementals would look like rabbits or peafowl or something.”
“Nothing wrong here, walk on in, said the spider to the fly?”
“That sums it up pretty nicely as to what I think is going on,” I agreed.
“Half-tempted to fall into the trap just to see what the heck is up there.”
“Just do the latter half and I think we’re fine. I’ll come along if you want, but if I start pulling at the magic, I have the feeling we are going to be attracting the very much wrong kind of attention.”
“The kind that might, say, throw every single Elemental on the island after us?” she theorized blandly.
“Miz Sherlock, you are doing fine, fine, in your chosen profession,” I replied loftily. “And yes, I can track your thoughts with your eyeballs and it would indeed be a fine amount of Karma, however…” I pointed at the crack running down the side of Mt. Empyrean, “that’s likely the respawn point, and I don’t know how much vivus it would take to Seal that. Furthermore, until we know what’s going on here, I’m not actually certain that we should.”
“You think something’s going on up thar in that thar Castle, huh?” she drawled at me.
“I think something went down on Mt. Empyrean to stop it, too, and that’s where the crack came from. It looks like someone opened the ley line up to vent the energies it was conveying, probably at the exact wrong moment for something else.”
“It is spewing a LOT of Elemental energies, that is true,” Kris noted. “Also, note the Elementals are wandering on Mount Empyrean, but not around the Castle.”
It was true. The ones on the spiral ramps below the Castle were basically holding positions like Summons, while the ones on the slopes of the mount and its lower ground were wandering slowly and organically around, only keeping an automatic distance between one another.
“So, there’s a controlling force in the Castle, but the ones down here are outside of its control.” That wasn’t ominous, either. “That sounds more and more like a certain mad Empyrean obsessed with the old fart who lived here.”
“It does, doesn’t it.” She turned to glance at me. “You want to come along, or to remain here?”
“Your judgment. Basically the only thing I’m going to be useful for is the quick escape and maybe flanking for you.” Which I could do perfectly well, of course, I just wasn’t a devoted melee… and I wasn’t going to be pumping any Valences through Crown during a fight, either.
“I think that might just be enough,” she agreed after a moment’s thought. “The mount first, I trust?”
“That would be my choice.”