“Two meters forward… left 81 degrees... mark. ‘SIGHT’.”
Cadmea had always fancied herself a ritualist of high caliber. Just last week she’d managed to make it to Level 111. She was no living legend, but between that and her intensive training in her Ritualist class, she had always been under the impression that, given time, there were few who could match her skill in the magical arts.
“Right 99 degrees… two meters forward… left 81 degrees… mark. ‘TRUTH’.”
And here she was, doing a task as part of a deal with the most powerful magical entity in existence, in order to preserve the most powerful illusion on Earth, by somehow getting though the second-most powerful illusion on Earth. She kicked herself for it having come to this to understand a simple lesson her mother had scolded her about.
There was always someone better.
“Right 99 degrees… two meters forward… left 81 degrees… mark. ‘REVEAL’.”
In theory, it shouldn’t be too dissimilar to their Mirage’s namesake enchantment. The Mirage was supposedly an improvement upon this very same enchantment.
While she wouldn’t have a prayer of actually breaking the enchantment and the illusion it generated, not while alone and racing the clock before the fey started toying with her, she might have a chance of creating a key and bypassing it.
“Right 99 degrees… two meters forward… left 81 degrees… mark. ‘SOUND’.”
Challenging this phantasm alone was far from ideal.
If possible, it would be a better idea academically to use one hundred ritualists on each middle point of a precisely drawn three-layered hectogram, itself etched cleanly into smooth stone, else drawn evenly with ichor or at least dragon’s blood, and chanting for a full day, preferably ending at the center of an eclipse, to force it wide open. No defense on Earth could hold against such a spell carried out to completion.
But such a ritual was a luxury, requiring precision instruments, powerful reagents, planning, time, money, and colleagues she did not have right now. She had to make do with her own senses: dragging her feet through the foliage, counting her steps, eyeballing the distance, carving the words into the ground with her knife.
“Right 99 degrees… two meters forward… left 81 degrees… mark. ‘REALITY’.”
The Fourth’s boon had proven invaluable. Through her earpiece, she could tell when the enchantment tried to deceive her sense of hearing. After her mother had set up ticking clock on her end, she could tell whenever her sense of time and position had been askew and reorient herself whenever the ticking was inaudible or off-tempo.
With this, she stood a chance to draw an accurate array even with her senses deceiving her so she could deliver the orbs to these “nightshade twins.”
“Right 99 degrees… two me-AH!“
She darted back along her trodden path. Out of nowhere, an axe flew past where she would have been; a miss, else a warning.
A voice boomed out. “You near the heart of Albion at an ill time, outsider. Know that your next actions will decide whether you leave and never return, or never leave again. State your intention. Now.”
The voice dripped with barely restrained rage. This was not the reception Cadmea had expected.
From what she had heard, fairies were hardly xenophilic, but their contempt was supposed to be kept to toying with other races. Pelting them with pinecones, splashing them with mud, luring them into skunk burrows, peppering them with pollen, putting insects in their food or spiking their drink with revolting substances. Spiteful and harassing, certainly, but largely harmless.
This was her first encounter with an Albion native, but something wasn’t right. Were they this affected by the loss of the system?
“I come seeking the nightshade twins!” she replied.
“Oh?” the voice questioned. Cadmea saw something move above her. She looked up to see a fairy floating above her. He was huge, every bit of two meters tall: a Great Fairy, an exemplar of his race. “To what end?” he asked with a scowl.
“I was given something to deliver something to them,” she answered. “Two orbs, though I do not know their purpose.”
“And who gave you these orbs?”
“That’s-“ Cadmea paused. What was she supposed to say here? That she’d gotten them from a goddess of magic whose very existence was a state secret of Mirage? Even if it wasn’t a national security risk to even mention, would this man believe her? The greater gods were the stuff of myth and superstition. Mortals were beneath their notice; Tetra herself had said as much.
Retreat was a non-option. If she went back on her word, the very least she could expect from someone as powerful as that strange goddess was the revocation of her ability to sense the flow of her homeland’s leyline.
She readied herself. If he didn’t believe her, she would have to defend herself. She went down the mental checklist of what items she had on her.
A ritual knife. An iron talisman of true sight attuned to The Mirage. Her divinely-enchanted earpiece. Vellum talismans of thunder, lightning, wind, gravity and healing, two each. A vial of earth elemental ink, a calligraphy pen, and five blank vellums.
She swallowed hard. She couldn’t see any other options. “A goddess of magic. Tetra.”
The Great Fairy snorted, almost laughed. “Really, now? Somehow, I’m not surprised. And yet…” He held out his hand, and his axe flew from the ground to his hand. “… that is not enough for me to trust you, little fox. Your ilk worship trickery, and I know all too well how close that is to deceit!”
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He flew down, bringing his axe down as she leapt to the right.
”Stay in the icosagon,” she thought. It was the only point of navigation she had. If she got any more lost in the illusion, it would put her at a hopeless disadvantage.
She rattled off the geometry in her head. 20 2-meter sides, that’s 20 cotangent times pi twentieths. About 125, no, 126 square meters. Not a lot of room when your opponent isn’t limited by gravity, much less area, but not painfully confined.
The fairy’s axe whiffed through the air, but before she could blink it changed course, turning into a horizontal sweep aimed for her chest. She leaned back, the axe sailing close enough to graze her robe, and transitioned to a backflip, springing into the air with her hands.
She grabbed a Wind talisman and hurled it down at the man, who had already readied his weapon with unnatural speed. Her heart skipped a beat when she saw it miss entirely, flapping to the ground like an ordinary paper. She realized, to her horror, that she had always used the system to guide her shots. She might not need it for the talismans to function, but she had no hope of keeping this man at range.
She landed on her feet, slamming another talisman on the ground as she did. She scrambled backward the man flew forward as swift as the wind. Before he could get near, he plummeted to the ground, catching himself on one knee. The gravity talisman had done its job.
She charged at him before he could get his footing. Her hand sought her knife, but she hesitated. Tetra’s words echoed in her mind.
“Wait there for further instructions.”
No. Self-defense or not, if she killed this man, she would never be allowed to stay in this place. She’d doom her entire nation in a single moment. She reached inside her robe once more, pulling out another Gravity talisman before reaching him, thrusting her arm past his face and slapping it onto his back.
But the first talisman had slowed her as well. Too late did she realize he had swung his axe when she had reached past him.
The heavy axe collided with her side with a sickening crunch, sending her sprawling to the ground. In horror she looked down at her wound, but she could see no blood. He had slammed her with the back of his axe. Her breath pained her, and she swiftly pulled out a healing talisman and slapped it on her side. There was no way to know how much HP she had just lost, so every injury had to be treated.
“Cute,” he remarked. “Shall we get this over with, intruder?” He began walking towards her. She took a step back, only to notice she’d just stepped over the edge of her array. She was backed into a corner.
“Tch,” she grunted, pulling out another talisman. In response, he waved a hand, and talisman was ripped out of her hand by an invisible force. Before she could ready another, he swept her legs out from beneath her, sending her face-first into the flowers. He brought his axe’s head to the base of her skull. She could feel the cold stone as it lightly cut the back of her neck; she felt its weight, held aloft by the Great Fairy that held her life in his hands.
That was checkmate. It was over. He was faster than her; if she so much as twitched, he could sever her spine before she knew what happened.
“Any last words, vixen?”
Fear. Utter, incomprehensible fear gripped her. She was scared to die. She was scared everyone else would die.
“Please!” she begged. “Please, I can’t die here! I mean you no harm! If I don’t do this, we’ll lose control of the leyline! We can’t control it without the system otherwise! My entire nation could die! Please!”
“Hmph,” the man said. “Okay, that’s good enough for me.”
She felt his axe lift from her neck, and a hand grab her by the collar. She was yanked to her feet.
She turned around, breathing heavily, and saw the fairy sling his axe onto his back. “I am sorry, but I had to be sure. I find there’s no surer way to test an outsiders character than to give them an opportunity to kill and see if he or she takes it.”
Cadmea stared at the fairy. She struggled to catch her breath as she tried to process what just happened. “This was- this was just- just a test?” she panted in disbelief.
“It was necessary,” he said darkly. “This was a dark day, stranger, and trust is a luxury we can ill-afford even on the best of days. I would spare my subjects further suffering from foreign pillagers, kidnappers, and slavers.”
“Your subjects?” she echoed. “That means you’re-“
“The Fairy King, yes. You can see why safeguarding this land is my concern. Its peoples are precious to me, and I would not see them harmed.”
“I would never- do such a thing,” Cadmea declared.
“And yet, it’s all too common. There is a reason for our apparent xenophobia and isolationism. You’re a user of ritual magic, so tell me: do you know what happens to fairies that are kidnapped?”
“I- sometimes?” she admitted. One reagent she was familiar with crossed her mind. It was highly illegal, but despite countless crackdowns over the centuries and better alternatives, there was a black market for it all the same.
“That was rhetorical,” he said pithily. “What happens is that they are treated as test subjects or commodities, not people. They are tortured, vivisected, ground into reagents whole, used to test poisons or drugs or spells. Wings are plucked, hands are cut off, and they are kept in cages. Fairies born outside my kingdom seldom know the dangers your kind pose to them before it’s too late.
“I have lead dozens of crusades against this practice. You’ll forgive me and my people if trust is something you find in short supply here.”
She had no words for that. How could she, it was true. The races rarely got along well, but spirits, elementals, and monsters were considered apart from the mortal races.
Most would find a wild fairy to be a cute if mischievous oddity, and very few people held any real hatred for the race. However, the fact remained that even their adults ranged from one to fourteen inches tall, barring the man before her. As the smallest of the sentient, sapient races, Fairies were often seen as the most vulnerable, and ever there were those who preyed upon the vulnerable.
“I take it you see my perspective here,” he said. She nodded. “Good. Here is what will happen. I will be confiscating that device on your ear, and I shall take you past the Phantasm of Wandering to Floria Grove to deliver items to the nightshade twins. You will be closely watched at all times. Once you leave, you will be escorted beyond our borders.”
Cadmea nodded. “May I make two requests, fairy king?”
“Two, mortal? Yes, and I may deny them both.”
“Tetra, the goddess who tasked me with this, instructed me to wait there for further instructions,” she said. “I also need my earpiece to tell my people how to control our leyline tap. She gave me the ability to… sense its flow, and enchanted my earpiece to work at any distance so I can tell the others what to do.”
“And how often would you need to do this? I’ll not have you spying on my kingdom from within and relaying it to your people.”
“I’m not asking for that,” Cadmea denied. “Five, no, ten minutes at most, once a day. You can watch me the entire time.”
“Hm. What is your name, mortal?”
“Cadmea, daughter of Cadmus.”
“Very well, Cadmea. You may stay as our guest on the condition that you bring no harm to my people, do no malicious damage to our fields, and promise to tell me exactly what instruction you receive from this goddess of yours.
“You may use your device to speak to your people for up to fifteen minutes, for up to two times per day. It shall remain in our possession at all other times.
“Should you break this promise, you shall forfeit your right hand, your left eye, and your firstborn child. Do you agree?”
The King of the Fairies held out a hand for her. This was no contract magic that would take its toll on its own. This was his declaration that he would seek vengeance upon her, and her bloodline, should she break this vow.
But what choice did she have? She had no intention of harming the fairies, and this was the only way to safeguard Mirage.
She took his hand and shook it. “I agree.”
“Excellent.” He pointed a finger at his back, then drew it into his hand. Cadmea’s gravity talisman flew into his hand. He waved it between two fingers with a smirk. “Welcome to Albion.”