Cling! Clang! Cling! Clang! The warning bells tolled ceaselessly throughout the human city, screaming out the portent of doom in their tintinnabulation.
And yet, no one hue-and-cry could be heard. Not one speech was given. No announcements or calls to action were made; not to shelter, nor to rally, nor even to evacuate. What good would it do? Everyone already knew what had happened, and no one could find recourse from it. What safety was there from the very laws of the world, the foundations of all societies, changing without warning in the span of a single heartbeat?
In the blink of an eye, the system itself had gone out.
In the city’s heart, a young man clad in ivory burst through the war room doors. “Captain General!” he addressed with a salute.
A wizened knight regarded him as he arrived. “Sir William, good. I take it you’ve noticed?”
“It was hard not to,” Sir William replied. “I don’t suppose you know why the system isn’t working?”
“No,” the commander answered. “We’re going to have to work with our best guess. Right now, I’m concerned with how the other nations will react.”
“Other nations? The problem is that widespread?”
“We don’t have any way to confirm that, but if it isn’t then the Vulpes have managed a ritual magic on a scale I’ve never heard of. If you look at it from the others’ perspectives, however, the people with the most motive to disable the system…” the Captain General left off.
“… would be us,” William finished, earning a nod from his superior.
The system had given certain bonuses to the abilities of the various sentients that lived within it. Faster growth in certain stats, racial skills, unique magics. Every group had been given certain advantages.
While this was true of the Humans as well, it was far less so than the others. Better stamina improvement through cardio, and a modest bonus to projectile accuracy were all they had been granted. Everything they had was a struggle, biting, clawing, and scraping to carve a place for themselves in this world.
If that playing field had been leveled, that would make them the primary suspects as far as the other races were concerned.
“We had nothing to do with it though, right?” the young man asked.
“Of course not!” the Captain-General scolded. He curled his lip and twirled his grayed moustache. “The system is a divine construct beyond human understanding. No, this was someone else. As I said, we’re going with our best guess.”
“What’s that, sir?”
“The best ritualists are the Vulpes,” he said, raising a finger. “They’re possibility one. If this is targeted at us, that leaves no other suspects. I doubt that’s the case, though. Their ire has been aimed at the Wolven for the last twenty years, and the fact that our commands aren’t working at all leads me to believe this is far worse than a jamming ritual.
The second possibility,” he explained as he raised another finger, “is the demons. I’m not sure how they’d manage it, but if the system really has been destroyed, there is no other race with a penchant and a knack for destruction on such a level that it could damage the system itself. Of course, I doubt any mindless brute would be able to do such a thing. ”
William swallowed hard, fighting the urge to bring his hand to his shield to combat his unease. “So, the nobility?”
“Not the ordinary nobility, no. The only ones that could pull this off are demon gods,” the Captain-General answered. “A lesser god might have the power to destroy the system if that god had an affinity for destruction. There are two types of monsters born from destruction, the dragons and the demons.
"The Dragons deny there being lesser gods among their number. As such, I believe we are looking at the work of the Three Devils: The Marquis of Cruelty, the Baron of Fire, and the Marquis of Fate.”
William placed his hand on his chin in contemplation. “Couldn’t the problem be temporary, sir? If not, then you might be on the right track. The Devils might be able to pull this off. The Marquis of Fate is the most likely of the three, but I don’t know. I don’t see the motive for Laplace, and I’m not sure I agree that De Sade or Richthofen have the power to do it.”
The young man grimaced, looking up at the commander. “I think we need to consider the worst-case scenario, sir: not a lesser god, a true divinity.”
“Be very careful with your words, paladin, lest you fall,” the old knight warned. “Regardless, if that is the case then either the greater gods want the system gone, in which case the system is at its end, or the gods have gone to war, in which case the world is in trouble.”
“A grim thought,” William agreed. “What are your orders, sir?”
“For now, we must scramble to get our defenses back up, in case this is the first stage of an attack. You let me worry about that. I want you to find the underlying cause of this, hero. Track the demons’ latest movements. Even if this wasn’t their doing, there might be a clue to find there.”
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“Is there no other way, mother?” a young woman asked.
This was a hasty decision. Too hasty, perhaps, but the situation demanded urgency. If they dawdled, the entire city-state of Mirage could be blown to dust, quite literally.
A legendary illusion magic, affecting every sense and turning any stranger away, kept the city safe, or it was supposed to. They said the magic was a ritual devised by their peoples’ god of trickery, who fooled the great god of order into giving his people the control of it. If so, then that trickster was no longer there to answer questions.
Some said he was dead, slain in a conflict with another deity, perhaps that very same god of order. Most, however, believed that was a deception, and that he had faked his death long ago, as the master of illusions he was.
To ask the Vulpes, while their patron may have taken inspiration from the fae, only he could have come up with fueling such an illusion directly from a leyline. Monitoring and maintaining it was a simple matter for the fox therianthropes, the foremost experts of ritual magic.
Or, at least, it was.
“We’ve lost the system, Cadmea” the voice of the head of the ritualists’ clan reminded her daughter through. “We no longer have an interface to check the mana flow. Every moment we linger, we run the risk of losing control of it. We live over a wind leyline, and wind magic, above all other kinds, likes to move freely.”
Cadmea swallowed hard. Any moment could lead to an irreversible cascade failure that could raze their nation. Even in the best-case scenario, their land’s only strategic defense would be stripped from them; Mirage didn’t even have walls, for pity’s sake.
Stolen novel; please report.
Time was of the essence, she knew that, but by its very nature there was no predicting how this ritual would turn out.
The ritual itself was crude, to say the least. The runic arrays were slapdash, made by dragging her tails through the sand in an exceptionally rough “circle” that she could barely make out in dusk’s light. The incantation was unusually short and sounded like an elder asking a favor using outdated slang while baby talking. For crying out loud, the ritual’s focus was a “sandwich” that didn’t even fit the definition of one!
And of course, the intended result itself was unpredictable, and had potential to be far more disastrous than the swift ablative end the leyline would bring.
It was a wild guess, but they had to take it.
“Okay,” Cadmea said. With that, she tossed “sandwich” onto the mound of sand off-center of the array with a splat. For a moment the young ritualist felt she wouldn’t mind a swift death by leyline rupture; it would be better than dying of embarrassment. She spoke the words.
“Yo, Tetra, god ob magic, pwease put yo ears on” she loudly announced. Her cheeks flushed. “It would be gwoovy if could ya pwease do us a sowid and hewp us out, ya dig, home swice?”
“Wow, you actually said all that?” a voice rang out over the dunes.
Cadmea looked around and saw nothing. Something was wrong. No, if by some miracle this ritual had actually worked, then…
She brought her hand up to her ear. “Mother, I think it worked. What do I say?” No response came through the enchanted earpiece.
“Ah ah ah!” the voice laughed. “No speaking to mommy dearest now. You thought yourself significant enough to summon me, so you can speak for yourself. I’ve gone ahead and jammed that little trinket of yours for now. Understand, mortal?”
The vixen nodded, sweat dripping down her brow. “Y-yes. I thank you for allowing me to summon you.”
“Oh, you didn’t summon me, I was already in the neighborhood checking something… interesting. Ooh, speaking of interesting, thanks for the offering.” A hand reached out and grabbed the Frankenfood monstrosity from above the podium. Cadmea looked up around to a short, strange woman floating in midair.
She looked strange, like a cross between a human and a wingless pixie. She was short; 86, 87 centimeters. Her hair shimmered with every color of the rainbow and more; her eye colors shifted unpredictably from moment to moment.
She wore a multicolor robe and carried an ornate staff on her back. It was tipped with a glowing violet crystal, and on its base rested a blade. Cadmea could just make out the handle of a wand on her hip.
The way she materialized was sudden, like she’d been there all along, but the vulpine woman hadn’t been able to recognize it.
“What… are you?” Cadmea asked, only for the entity to give her a crooked grin.
“Oh, I’m a lot of things. The Force of Chaos, Tetra the Fourth, the Goddess of Magic, a rule breaker, a 3D projection, an eldritch abomination, part of a web novel, a reality warper, on and on and on. If you mean my appearance, I’m an elf, but not a high elf. This is what my original form looked like,” she answered. She took a large bite out of the slope in her hand.
“Mm, that’s good for mortal fare! Jackfruit, cave-aged cheese, cucumbers, peppermint, and tomato sauce!” she observed, then took a bite of the handful of slop. Cadmea fought to restrain her turning stomach. “So,” Tetra asked with her mouth full, “what exactly do you think you deserve my help with?”
Cadmea took a deep breath to settle her nerves. Despite the chills running down her spine like a parade of spiders, she had to stay calm. There was no predicting this… woman anyway, so she may as well get straight to the point. Waffling about just wasted time and increased the chances for things to go awry.
“We need your help controlling the leyline tap we use to fuel our city’s grand illusion spell. If you could-“
Tetra shoved a messy finger in her face. “I’m going to cut you off right there and say ‘no,’” she said. “I’m sure that stick-in-the-mud Tri’s got you thinking magic is something to be harnessed and follows your little rules and regulations, but again: no. Magic doesn’t follow the rules, it breaks them! Otherwise, it’s just boring old natural law! Physics and math! Yuck!”
The elf’s smile grew unnaturally wide, ear to ear. Suddenly, a teal flash lit up the sky. Cadmea wheeled around to see a colossal pillar of light shooting up out of the sands and into the sky, growing wider and wider at the speed of sound, ripping the land apart. “NOOO!” she screamed as she helplessly watched the magic engulf the city. She fell to her knees. She was too late.
There was no surviving that, no matter how high your level was. There was no barrier they could create. How could there be? This was a leyline, a flow of magic so powerful that it took physical form. And they’d been trying to harness it?
“Well, look at that! Such is the hubris of mortals,” Tetra said as the magic raced to meet them. “Magic is chaos! Imagination given force and form! It wants to be as free as the wind!”
Cadmea squeezed her eyes shut and braced for the end…
… but the end didn’t come.
“I think I’ve made my point,” Tetra declared.
Cadmea slowly opened her eyes. There in the distance stood Mirage, like nothing had happened. “W-what?” she asked, hyperventilating from fear.
“What, did you think there was only one way to use an illusion like yours? Oh, but don’t think that wasn’t real, think of it as a preview. So, now you know I have all the leverage in this little negotiation you want from me. So, what do you think you can offer someone like me?”
“I-I don’t-“
“Of course you don’t. You’re one person living in one city in one reality out of an infinite number I could hop to, and an infinite number of them could use my help more than you. This is a nexus world, sure, but that doesn’t mean you yourselves are important,” she says. “Normally the answer is ‘absolutely nothing,’ and I don’t answer your little plea in the first place.”
“So… why did you?”
“Ah, that’s the right question!” Tetra replied. “Like I said, I was checking something interesting. Two somethings. So, what is your name?”
“C-Cadmea.”
“Well, Cadmea, I’ll make you a deal.” Her tone became ice cold. “I’m not going put any kind of monitor on your little magic power source, or automatically regulate it for you. I could, but I won’t.
“I will, however, give you, specifically, the ability to sense its flow from any distance so you can know how wide your figurative valves should be from day to day. In exchange, I’m going to have you do a series of tasks for me.”
The elf reached into her pocket and pulled out two polished orbs, one slate grey and the other jade green. “I want you to bring these to the fairy kingdom. Ask for the nightshade twins and deliver these to them, it should be clear who gets which. Wait there for further instructions.”
Cadmea nodded, still shaken. “Okay, I accept,” she said. “But how will I tell my people how to adjust the magic?”
Tetra sighed impatiently. “Give me your earpiece,” she said. Cadmea did as instructed, handing it to the short woman, who pulled the wand out of her robe and tapped it to the implement before handing it back. “There. Unless you bumble into an absolute antimagic field, that should let this communicate with your mother’s copy anywhere in this multiversal supercluster.”
“Multi-what?” Cadmea asked.
“Everywhere, it works everywhere you’ll ever go. Ask the grey twin if you want a detailed explanation,” the goddess said. Her eyes rolled in her sockets, then kept rolling until they fell out. She caught them in her hand and put them back in, magically none the worse for wear. “You can say your goodbyes through your earpiece. You depart in… now.”
A noise came from beneath Cadmea, who looked down and saw a magic portal open beneath her feet. She only had time to yelp before she fell through. She landed in a heap in a rose bush on the other side. “Ow,” she whined, looking back up through the portal at Tetra, who gave one comment before closing it.
“Oh, and welcome to Albion.”
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King Finvarra watched as Rocket and the two fairies flew off into the forest. “My king?” a salmon-pink haired fairy asked as he flew up from below. “We’ve moved the wounded to the ground for treatment.”
He nodded. “Tell me, Vera: was the evacuation a success?”
“You mean to ask if we missed the two newblooms, your highness?” Vera asked. “I don’t think so. The gray one, Liandan, said they appeared from their flowers twenty minutes ago. That was after the evacuation was complete. They must have bloomed during the fire itself. Perhaps their mother flowers sought to save them?”
“Indeed,” Finvarra agreed. “And did anyone call me by true name after they arrived?”
“They are small and came in quietly, but I don’t think so.”
“So then,” the Fairy King questioned, “how did they know it?”
“That’s… a very good question, your highness,” Vera admitted.
”What a strange pair,” Finvarra thought. It was rare for a flowering plant to create a fairy in its lifetime. Rarer still would one give rise to siblings. Twins? It was practically unheard of.
Furthermore, understanding English, the common tongue created by the angels, was nothing unusual for a newbloom. Speaking it was an entirely different matter. It took months for a fairy to learn how to make the proper sounds, and yet Liandan was speaking it with total fluency.
And then there were their colors. Belladonna’s name pointed to her mother flower easily enough, and like all True Fairies her colors matched. Her twin, though, was born an ashen gray. Given when she appeared, he could only think of one cause.
“Like a phoenix, born from the ashes,” he mused. He’d suggest that for her false name later.