That first night, the four of them camped just far enough away that the turtle city they’d just left was little more than a bulge on the darkening horizon and roasted a bunny the size of a large dog for dinner. Even without any of the centaurs to accompany them, they made better time after that.
Intellectually, they knew that the war was still raging around them on a variety of fronts, but somehow, it was like they’d been excused from all of that, at least for a moment, and each day on their strange trek held a new adventure. One night, they stayed in a miniature underground city where they were hosted by prairie dog-kin, and another, they stayed in a giant, well-feathered nest that that had been long abandoned in a tree that was so lonely that nothing but grass could be seen in any direction.
They only had to resort to combat on a single occasion when they were swarmed by anthropomorphic grasshoppers half the size of a man. Arrows were of limited effect as they lept back and forth through the thick foliage, but ice held them in place long enough for them to be shattered or crushed. Emma didn’t even need that advantage, though. She moved so quickly now that the things might have been paused as she cut a bloody swath through the tiny predators.
“Why do you think they attacked us?” Matt asked that night around the campfire. “Every other creature in this whole area either gets the hell out of our way, or they help us. Why would some bugs take issue with that?”
“Because I was getting bored of walking and needed a real workout,” Emma said with a laugh before anyone could offer up a serious answer.
“Who knows,” Raja answered. “Maybe they were hungry. Maybe they were summoned from another world by rune magic like us. There’s no way to know for sure.”
Benjamin just sat there quietly for almost a minute before Matt’s steady gaze from across the fire finally goaded him to. “It could be like the Wolven, where not all of the throne’s neighbors are happy about it,” he guessed. “I think it’s more like… not everyone is on the same side. I doubt that half these groups will still be working together when the Rhulvinarians are no more.”
“No?” Matt asked. “You don’t think it’s all one big happy family?”
“Well, we know that the court of the Arboreal Throne has some fault lines, but this…” Benjamin paused for a moment to consider. “You remember what the centaur said about the deep valleys? There could be whole insect kingdoms out there. There are certainly sea kingdoms and probably bird kingdoms too.”
He almost told them what the Throne of the Sky Sea had said about how the grasslands could contain infinities in a finite space but decided against it. It was complicated and not particularly relevant. Still, he thought about it quite a bit in the days that followed.
Some days, they pushed through grass taller than their heads with nothing to go by but the internal compass built into Benjamin’s status spell, and other times, they found paths made by something large like the buffalo-ish things that they occasionally saw in the distance. Somehow, despite the fact that they didn’t know where they were going, they didn’t get lost.
When they finally saw the low triple-peaked mountain in the distance that pretty much had to be their destination, his friends debated how they could have possibly gone straight there on the first try without a road or map. To Benjamin, the answer was obvious, though. The grass sea was a distorted place. It probably had more in common with the Bermuda Triangle than the Great Plains.
They were probably stuck going pretty much exactly where the Throne wanted them to go for as long as they were here. Hell, if they decided they wanted to be difficult, she could probably light brush fires and start stampedes to steer them more directly. That realization suddenly made the Rhulvinarian roads make a lot more sense. If the world could become a maze whenever you got lost, then you never wanted to step off the path.
There was no path here, though. It had taken just over a week to reach the mountain, but it took another half a week just to find the entrance, which turned out to be a secret door carved to look exactly like a boulder.
“How random is that?” Raja asked as he gathered everyone up and explained that he’d been taking a little rest break, and the whole thing had slid aside.
“Hey, at least it wasn’t locked,” Emma said. She’d been growing crankier by the day as they walked around this mountain with no idea precisely what they were looking for.
“Well, maybe next time they should lay out the welcome mat for us, just in case,” Matt said gruffly. “Don’t they know we’re in a hurry?”
“Maybe?” Benjamin said as he used lesser illusion to create light so they could go further down the tunnel. It wasn't what it was for exactly, but if you created the illusion of fire, the light it cast was still very real. “I’ve given up guessing who is talking to who about what in this place, you know? I just know that these might be the only people in the world who can help us with what we need, so be nice to them, okay?”
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“Maybe doesn’t sound promising,” Raja said, shaking his head as they went deeper. “Do you have any idea what these guys are supposed to look like?”
“All I was told is that they were children of the Jade Throne,” Benjamin shrugged. “So that means, what? Dwarves? Gnomes, something like that.”
Emma sighed. “How could you not ask for more than that? They could be snake people or literal moles?”
“Right?” Raja smiled. “Nothing in this place is screaming Snow White to me, you know?”
Benjamin didn’t really get the reference, so he ignored it. Instead, he focused on their surroundings to try to intuit what they might find ahead. The passage they followed was a very shallow slope deep into the mountain, and though it lacked lights of any kind, it was perfect in all other respects. The floors were smooth, and the walls were always perfectly square to both the floor and ceiling. It was a stark contrast to both the primitive conditions they’d dealt with up until now and the melted, irregular passages of the Rhulvinarian buildings.
He wasn’t surprised when they found a stone door at the base that was so well-balanced that it pushed open with the lightest of touches or a large antechamber at the bottom dotted with several braziers adding the flickering orange light of their coals to his pure white life which he quickly extinguished out of respect for the inhabitants.
He was slightly more surprised when they found a guard in that room and that they towered above them as the eight-foot tall shadow of a woman who was wielding a crossbow the size of a ballista.
“Halt right there, intruders,” she said with a voice that echoed strangely off the walls and made it hard to tell much about her from it.
“I was told to expect four manthings, but I’m in no ways sure that you are them.”
When the Throne had told him that they needed to seek out the Jade Throne’s stone children, he’d assumed that it was a metaphor for dwarves or something closer to his experience. The last thing he’d expected was an underground giant, and he found the very idea more than a little unnerving.
How is someone with fingers thicker than my arm supposed to help me with metal forging and precision engineering? He asked himself as he raised his hands in a gesture of surrender.
“Easy now,” he said cautiously, “The Throne sent us to—”
“You’ll answer my questions, or you can turn around and leave right now,” the voice boomed, interrupted. “Now tell me, what did you come here for?”
“To build the weapons we need to defeat the Summoner Lords,” Benjamin said quickly. “We’ve been fighting them for months now and—”
“We know very well what’s happening on the surface,” the guard answered. “That’s the only reason you’ve been allowed to come this far. All we want in life is to murder those who hold our mistress captive. I know who sent you, and I know you want weapons, but before I let you waste anyone’s time, I want to know what weapons. Specifically.”
Benjamin looked to his friends, and they looked back at him uncertainly. This wasn’t playing out how any of them thought it would.
“I don’t know how well versed you are in the constraints of mana engineering and—-” he started to say.
“We practically invented it,” she said proudly, “but go on.”
“Well, then you should know that what I need more than anything is high-purity metals, preferably gold, silver, and bronze. Probably a couple dozen pounds at least to form the core for an enchanted object that can handle at least 15 mana a second for a series of flexible algorithms I’ve created. 20 would be better, though.”
“Is that all?” she asked flippantly, looking at him like he was a moron.
“Gems, too. The larger, the better. I have some other things I want to work on, too. They’d be like bombs, sorta, except—”
“Fine,” she interrupted, lowering the crossbow as his answers seemed to finally placate her. “This won’t be a complete waste of our time. We’ll help you, but only because you get us one step closer to freeing Mother.”
“Mother?” Raja asked. “I mean, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but how do you know she’s still, you know…”
“You manthings know nothing at all about the way the world works, do you?” the giant statue did the most unexpected thing then. It didn’t step out into the light or turn and open the door. Instead, it began to shrink.
Benjamin instantly whirled on his heel to find a much smaller shape than he expected, walking out of an alcove behind them. The guard wasn’t an eight-foot-tall giant. She was a three-foot-tall child, and even as she approached them, she was lowering a beaten copper megaphone from her lips with a mischievous smile on her face.
“What?” she laughed. “Not quite what you were expecting?”
All of them shook their head mutely, unsure of what to say. It was clear to Benjamin at least that children of the Jade Throne were more than a little paranoid, though he was not yet sure why. They lived in a secret home deep beneath the earth and used tricks to hide even their size.
“I guess not everything is as it seems,” Benjamin said, for lack of anything else to say.
“That’s an understatement!” Raja quipped. He was the only one that laughed at his joke, though.
“I am Feldsparia, and all of you should feel honored,” she said as she pushed open the door in front of her to give them the first glimpse at the tiny little half-scale city beyond. “You are the first, the last, and the only manthings that shall ever be allowed in our refuge. Welcome to Lasthome.”