Sage hums to herself while picking a path through the city’s ever present rubble. She chooses each step carefully, wary of any unstable footing that could twist her ankle in the darkness of night. She’s gotten enough of those exploring ruins as a kid.
“Humm, hm hm hm~, Traveler Traveler guide our way, Traveler Traveler what do you say?~”
She knows all of the songs told to the children of her village—even considered becoming a minstrel for a while! That is, until she tried to pick up an instrument. The only one she was even half good at playing was the flute, and that meant she couldn’t sing and play at the same time, which completely ruins the whole point of an instrument! Music is all about singing, about audibly expressing something beautiful while traveling and letting the song carry you to your destination. It’s far too boring to stay silent.
Sage peers down another street block, scanning the rubble and side streets for any sign of movement. Not that she expects danger, but better to keep the habit up. Stories of villagers devoured by beasts don’t leave the mind so easily when those villagers are your relatives.
Spotting nothing out of the ordinary, she picks her tune back up and keeps walking. A slight risk of discovery rarely keeps her from singing for long.
The buildings cluster close together and shoot tall into the sky. Not as tall as some other buildings in the ruined city, but far taller than any building the woman usually encounters at her home. She has to lean back to see the uppermost level of the buildings, five rows of windows up. Looking at the left side of the road doesn’t lend to the same sight, however. Many buildings on that side of the road are just rubble. Past them reveals a view of utter annihilation until you reach the coast.
Sage always thought the juxtaposition of the ruins and the sky had a strange beauty to it. The grandeur of nature and the oddly sad feeling of civilizations and history lost before it… She pauses to take in the view, her eyes then tracing from the horizon up.
Large iridescent planetary rings dominate the sky. Stars glitter beyond, but pale in comparison. The sun’s light reflecting off the rings is more than enough to see by. Directly above her is a large, mostly spherical celestial body in the sky. It leaves a trail of empty space in the rings, and nothing else is as large and brilliantly white as it.
“Hello Traveler, I hope you’re doing well! Thanks for keeping these ankles of mine untwisted!”
She waves at it, and admires the view while talking to the sky for a moment before resuming her walk, more carefully than before. Staring at the Traveler tends to ruin her night vision if she stares too long. The rings too, for that matter, but she rarely stares at those if the Traveler isn’t passing by.
Soon she stops in front of a building beautifully carved from stone that looks largely indistinct from the other buildings in the row, beyond being less rubbled than most.
The sight of these buildings took her breath away when she first saw them.
“Alright Sage! Time to get that artifact!”
She unhooks a lantern by her side and lights it with a match. With that, she marches into the open doorway. She picks up another tune.
“Inquisitor, oh inquisitor, what do you bring for me? Inquisitor, oh inquisitor, bring glory and set us free~”
The stairs to the second floor are made of stone, unlike the ones to floors further up. This is enough though, since her target is on the second floor. Sage goes down a side hallway, and her steps get bouncier when she sees the softly glowing white light coming from a room at the end of the hall.
“Eeeeeee-“ She hops from one foot to another before getting to the doorway. “Inquisitorialship, here I come!”
She steps into the room with a smile.
A woman, pale with brilliantly shining golden eyes, sits cross-legged frozen in the center of the room. On the floor around her is a pristinely clean circle. In front, beneath her hand, is an hourglass with sand filling the top bowl, defying gravity’s command to fall.
That’s only the least interesting part of the scene!
In the air around her floats spherical bound patterns, all interconnected and glowing with that soft white light. They sparkle with some indescribable meaning, and seem to have encased the woman and object in a zone of frozen time.
A quick glance around confirms Sage’s memories. The room looks like any other ancient abandoned bedroom; a heavily moth eaten bed and other various furniture. Heavy curtains hang in front of the window, somehow still intact, despite their age. Like countless people before her, Sage already picked through this room for any valuables and came up empty handed.
She approaches and tilts her head, trying to figure out where to start.
“Sorry about this mystery lady, but I’m gonna be taking that artifact now. I sure hope it frees you too! But if not, I promise to come back for you later!”
Sage reached through the light sphere to pat the frozen woman on the head. Moving her arm through the bubble made it feel heavy and slow. From her experience when she found this place, the longer she left her arm within the light, the slower and heavier it would get. She doesn’t want to see what could happen if she left it there for too long.
Sage set her lantern and pack down a short distance away.
“Alright Mr. Hammer and, uh, Mr. Spike, time to bust up some floor!”
Sage has, of course, tried to jostle the artifact from beneath this woman’s hands on numerous occasions before, but found the miraculous powers of the artifact to be holding the gold-eyed woman’s arm firmly in place. But it does wiggle ever so slightly against the floor. Hence the hammer.
Sage places the large spike, a “railroad” spike is what her brother called it, pointing downwards a few inches from the hourglass, yet still within the sphere of light. With her other arm she rears back and swings downward with all the force she can muster.
Crack
The blow reverberates through her arms and into the rest of her body. Small shards of rock detach themselves from the floor, creating a tiny divot beside the artifact.
A small chip of rock shoots straight up, shows, and only makes it halfway to the floor before freezing mid-air.
Sage shakes her hammer wielding hand and gives the floor a dubious look.
“Sheesh… This is gonna take a while, huh? Wellp! That’s why I brought snacks!”
With that, she gets to work.
Several times during the process she has to sweep away chunks of rock that froze in the air. The moment they leave the radius of the sphere, they drop to the floor.
She continues chipping away at the floor until space starts to open beneath the artifact. After that she begins trying to jostle it loose after each swing, finding more and more wiggle room with each attempt.
When it finally comes loose, she doesn’t even have time to celebrate when light consumes her vision, and her only thought is the idle observation that she’s falling.
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
—
Jin always prided herself on being calm and collected, even under stress.
This is perhaps in part due to her mother’s protective charm. It’s an intricate piece of golden metal work and a central gem that seems to absorb both light and attention, but that’s not the important part of it.
Its defensive enchantments are better than just about any amount of money can buy you; it can recognize most hostile spells, or at least the spell’s overall intent, and then adapt its own enchantments to dispel the hostile effect. It can recognize non magical effects just as well, if not more effectively. It can halt momentum and freeze the strongest flames before anything can lay a scratch on the wearer. Magic enchantments like this can only exist as a result of generations and generations of mages passing down both items and the secrets of their machinations to their children, and those children improving on them one after another.
With protection like that, it’s hard to fear much.
When the enchantment holding time still around her collapsed, the magical backlash disoriented and fuzzed up her senses. She instinctively begins channeling the wayward magic out of her own system. While mana isn’t inherently dangerous per se, it can definitely cloud the mind in high enough concentrations.
Except… the ring she uses to channel magic wouldn’t respond to her. No matter, classical casting requires more focus but still works well enough. Her sight is still spotty from the burst of light.
Her mind is unusually fuzzy, but background musings still push through. Her spell formula should have been perfect, but it’s always possible that one function that should do one thing works slightly differently when combined with another… Actually this backlash is rather tame. No explosions or anything! Not that an explosion was likely.
She rubs her eyes with her hands. Her magic works independently of her appendages, fortunately. She feels clarity return to her mind as she channels away the mana. She opens her eyes and finally sees the scene in front of her. There’s a… girl? Not one she recognizes, fallen forwards onto her lap. Jin blinks and looks around the rest of the room, mouth gaping.
The room is still dark, despite a nearby lantern, so Jin idly tries to conjure up more light. Except, her ring that normally handles most light spells is missing. And all her other rings. She feels her blood run cold; Jin’s fingers flutter to her throat and feel nothing. Her mother’s amulet, it’s gone.
Where is it?
It’s gone.
It’s gone?!
Her eyes snap to the girl who’s fallen onto her lap, who now moans in pain. The part of her mind concerned with spell casting starts channeling the mana out of this person too. Is that what made her pass out? An excess of ambient mana? Stray magic shouldn’t be enough to affect any mage with a lick of training like that, who is she?
Frantically Jin looks around, as if the amulet could have fallen off. She also notices that none of her enchanted items are with her. None except for the hourglass that’s half buried beneath the other woman’s cloak. Jin, almost gently, shoves the other woman off of her.
What what what?! What the hell is this what the fuck what the fuck what the fuck what-
The variety of words in her inner monologue is sparse.
Almost unconsciously she channels magic into her eyes glitter with arcane symbols as she channels magic into them. Ambient mana lights up to her mind’s eye. She quickly scans the room, eyes first landing on the stranger. The only other point of magic is the overturned hourglass, whose sand is slowly seeping from the filled half to the empty one. The magic there is much weaker than it should be, but she doesn’t stop to consider this yet.
She doesn’t spot any signs of any of her enchantments in this room. No enchantments, and certainly no amulet.
Jin shoots to her feet and walks a quick circle around the room frantic nervous energy.
Focus focus. What does she know right now? Her bedroom is in ruins and is… disgustingly old looking. All her shit is missing. All of it. Her bookshelf is empty and she predicts her desk drawers to be the same. Or, almost all of it is missing. Jin passes her tongue over a molar. An “accident” from her youth left her with a broken molar, which also brought opportunity for an enchanted gold alloy tooth to replace it. It only has spell amplifiers on it though, which are great if you want a stronger spell, but useless without a spell to cast in the first place. The woman on her floor, who now is pushing herself onto her arms and mumbling something.
Amidst the stream of questioning the fuck, Jin suddenly notes the absolute state of this other woman’s hair. It’s a massive bush of curls and are those matts in it?? No, not important.
Jin shakes her head and groans, pressing her palms into her eyes again.
The other woman matches her groan and starts shifting into a sitting position. Jin removes her hands and eyes the other woman critically. The woman has… what should be curly dark reddish hair, but is more of a fluffy tangled mess right now, and tanned skin. Her nose and cheeks are splattered with freckles.
Jin’s face twists into a mix of a snarl, grimace, and panic. She swoops over to the other woman, placing one hand on her shoulder and the other waving in front of the woman’s face.
“Hey, HEY, look at me.” She snaps right in front of the woman’s nose. “Focus! What the FUCK is going on here?!”
“Bwuh..?” The woman blinks slowly, but her eyes start to focus on Jin’s fingers and frowns.
“Ts…” Jin’s lips purse, but she starts again, speaking slowly. “You are in my room…” Jin’s eyes flit sideways at an overturned chair. “All my shit is gone, and you passed out onto me. What. The. Fuck. Happened?”
The woman slowly lifts a hand to lower Jin’s, which still hovers in front of her nose in snapping position. She clears her throat.
“I’m here treasure hunting. I uh, this hour glass is all I’ve seen. Sorry if I fell on you, I dunno what happened! Sorry.”
Jin glowers. “That’s not what I mean!”
She stands up from her crouch, exasperated, and paces another lap around the room with her arms outstretched.
“I’m talking about this! I’m talking about—“ Struck by a thought, Jin pulls her curtains aside.
She freezes.
Jin was well educated growing up. A good student, too. She’s no prodigy, but her family’s financial support and bloodline magic was more than enough to gain her access to one of the most prestigious academies in the world. While she has little passion for the subject, she paid attention in astronomy classes and is well aware of all the planets in their solar system, the nearest star, their local galactic group, and more. She even remembers going far out into the ocean on a sailboat her best friend stole to stare at the sky, far away from the lights of the city. Only out there could you see the arms of the galaxy their tiny little planet resides in.
Except now, the city has no lights outside of the giant fucking rings in the sky. Jin has seen pictures of planets with rings, and even conceptual art of what it would look like from the surface if a planet had them. She always thought it would be cool if she lived on a planet with rings.
Until now, anyway. This is no picture, after all.
The other woman stands up slowly, testing her legs. She stomps the floor twice. “I’m Sage, by the way. Um, I dunno how to answer that really. This city’s been in ruins all my life. I came here for uh,” she pauses and taps the hourglass with the toe of her boot, “For this thing, the hourglass artifact, and you kinda. I found you here a few months ago.”
Jin isn’t showing any signs of hearing her, so Sage casts her eyes around the room, shifting from one foot to the other.
Uncertainly, she picks up her tools and puts them into her pack, then after stealing a glance at the other woman, places the hourglass into her pack as well. She slips her arms into the straps and picks up the lantern as well.
More uncertainly this time, Sage walks closer to Jin, who still stands in front of the window. She lifts her hand part way, but a choked sound comes from Jin’s throat and she suddenly falls to her knees. Her hands move to cover her face. Sage blinks, then quickly bends down next to Jin. She places a hand on the other girl’s shoulder.
Jin stiffens at the contact, but relaxes. Several moments pass while Jin just shakes silently.
She straightens her back and, almost violently, rubs at her eyes. She turns to look at the stranger in her room who just claimed that her city’s been dead for over a lifetime. Wet lines trace down her cheeks, and her eyes are red and glitter with more unshed tears.
Her voice breaks as she speaks. “What the hell happened to my world?”