Jin considers the fact that if she realized she would be visiting literal dwarven fucking ruins, that she would have at least brought enough food and water to spend the night. Maybe even enough to last a few days.

Then, Jin considers how she really needs to find better spell structures for transportation. Sage has her left arm in a vice grip and is standing very, very still. Jin tries to flex her arm to keep blood flowing, but winces at the sudden increase in pressure from Sage. She lets out a hiss of pain to hopefully alert the other girl to the issue. When that doesn’t work, she tries speaking. “You don’t have to clench my arm so tightly.”

Sage very slightly shakes her head. Her eyes are the widest Jin’s seen, and rapidly flick between their destination—the large central building below—and the barely visible ground even further down.

The two girls are standing on a modified version of Jin’s ‘miracle chair’ that’s significantly larger than the original at about 5 feet in diameter. Jin had to make the force circle opaque before Sage was willing to get on. She also had to dispel her swarm of lights in exchange for three to illuminate themselves, a midpoint, and their destination. Maintaining focus on two spells is easy enough… If you have enchantments to do all the heavy lifting for you. Jin wasn’t at her limit, per se, but better safe than sorry; especially with Sage rather distractingly gripping her arm tighter as they fully pass over a bridge.

Jin winces harder this time. “Sage, you’re hurting me.”

Instantly the pressure lets up and a somehow more horrified expression sprouts on Sage’s face. Yet, she still stands stock still and hardly moves her head to eye Jin sideways. “Sorry!” Instantly her eyes return to the ground below them. Jin sighs. If she knew Sage was this scared of heights she would have followed the stairs… She changes the direction they’re going from a beeline to the central building, to the closest bridge that has a connection to it. Sage’s response to a change in direction is instantaneous and she starts gripping Jin’s arm tightly again. Jin silently grits her teeth.

Finally, she lowers them down onto the bridge and Sage rapidly hops off and gently falls to the stone on her hands and knees, gasping out several deep breaths. Jin dispels the force circle and steps slowly over to her, concerned. “Are… You ok? You didn’t act like heights were a big deal when I brought the idea up, but…”

Sage takes a slow deep breath in, releases it, then quickly jumps to her feet with a smile. “I’m okay! Perfectly fine!” She rests her hands on her hips and beams toothily at the other girl.

Jin responds with a flat look and crossed arms. Sage’s smile slips briefly, but she forces it back on bigger than before. “I’m not scared of heights! Haha, just, moving… heights… I’m okay! It’s ok, we’re good. Everything is good. Haaaaa…” She peers over the edge of the bridge railing, then steps carefully back towards the middle. “Wow it’s dark down there. Yep. Mhm! I’m good. All good now! Let’s keep walking!” She turns on one foot and starts marching towards the central building.

Jin frowns, but decides not to push the issue. Sage recovered quickly, at least. She rubs her possibly bruised arm and follows after the girl who’s definitely not scared of heights.

The girl in question slows her march forward to look over the rails again. “Whew… You know I don’t think I ever walked on these bridges before.”

“I can’t possibly imagine why.”

“Yeah! Because I’m not scared of heights, haha.” She backs away from the rails again. “For totally unrelated reasons I think we should take the roads on the way back.”

Jin snorts. “Feel free, but there’s no way you’re getting me to walk up those stairs.” She gestures to the massive staircase a distance behind them that leads to the cavern floor. Not that it’s particularly visible from this far away.

Sage nods agreeably. “Yep yep! Perfectly ok with me. Miracle chair all the way up. You can, I mean. I… I like stairs. Stairs are good.” She laughs unconvincingly and starts walking towards the central building again.

Jin lets a smirk pass by and keeps walking.

Sage is strangely quiet as they walk, and keeps peeking over the rails, as if to see if the ground has finally come to meet them yet. Jin isn’t sure why. After the fifth time Sage looks over the edge Jin figures she may as well ask, “Why do you keep looking down there?”

“Because it gets a little easier every time I do it.” Sage stares into the darkness below them intently. Her hands tighten on the rail, then release and Sage steps back to the middle of the bridge again. Then she puts one of her smiles on and says, “I’m not scared of heights, to be clear.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Really, I’m not! I’m… I love climbing and perching myself high up on a hill or in a tree. It’s just. It’s so… dark, down there. And when we were on that miracle platform? I… I don’t know. The light helped but everything around us was still so dark. Which is fine! Dark is ok, uh, in moderation, but when we were up there? …I felt so, untethered. Like we were in some… endless darkness. Falling to a ground I can see is scary, but I can at least see that, you know? But down there? I know there’s stone, but it feels like I could just fall and fall and never stop; like the whole world has been taken out from beneath me.”

She walked back over to the rail and started staring downwards while she spoke the last line. Jin walks over and looks down too, but only sees darkness. She looks back up at Sage. “You don’t have to keep doing that, you know.”

After a moment, Sage shakes her head. “I think I do.”

Jin frowns. She doesn’t know how to respond to that, so she doesn’t. Instead she leans back on the rail and says, “Let me know when you’re done.”

Sage nods, but keeps staring downwards.

Lacking anything else to do, Jin closes her eyes and starts recalling basic formulas. Then she changes tracks and starts thinking up efficient spell structures to transport a person. The best ones all rely on enchantments, unfortunately, but she should be able to make something better than a circle of force.

Several minutes later Jin hears a large release of breath and opens her eyes to see Sage stepping away from the rail again. Sage’s smile looks real this time. “Okie dokie! I’m done with that. Phew. But! I think I numbed myself good and well to the idea of falling, into… darkness. Haha...” The smile slips again.

Jin raises an eyebrow that Sage ignores. The curly haired girl skips further down the bridge to avoid it. “Alright! I wanna get inside that building!”

They make progress much more quickly without Sage stopping every few paces to look over the rails.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

The bridges connect to a circular platform around the pillar above the large central building. Surprisingly, there are no visible doors on the pillar, despite being distinctly large enough to host a few rooms. But there are connected stairs going downwards. Jin forms another platform and follows Sage down in a slow descent. She keeps an eye out for any but… Jin can’t spot any other doors on this building, other than the large stone gate-like doors at its base. Odd.

Eventually they make it to the ground, and stand before two sentinel statues at a staggering thirty feet tall. Jin checks and double checks them with her mind’s eye, but doesn’t see any sign of enchantment. The doors, on the other hand…

Enchantments can usually be spotted by residual mana hanging around them. This is especially true of any built with a battery, where you will usually be able to see mana coiled up and spiraling with no release. This also means that old or disused enchantments are difficult to spot, lacking any of that identifiable mana. However, if you were to probe your surroundings by channeling mana outwards at a slow controlled rate, you can see if it’s drawn towards any location. The method is unreliable for discovery purposes, but tends to be successful if you’re checking if a very specific item is enchanted. Such as these doors.

Jin rests a hand on them and focuses, snaking just a bit of her mana towards it. Suddenly the enchantment lights up to her mind’s eye, and she studies it briefly before taking her hand off the doors.

She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. Then another. Then a third…

Sage keeps her tone light-hearted and curious, but there’s an undercurrent of worry. “What is it?”

Jin takes one more deep breath and opens her eyes. She turns to Sage.

A strange look that passes through a dozen emotions is on her face, and then a wild grin takes over and she starts laughing. Loudly. Almost… manically. She tries, she tries to explain, but can’t get the words out in between her gasps for breath.

Jin has to support herself to keep the laughter from bringing her to her knees. It’s just—It’s fo fucking hilarious—

Sage gets increasingly worried for this possibly delusional cleric until the massive stone doors start slowly grinding inwards. She gasps and starts rapidly looking between the growing opening and convulsing companion.

“Jin? Jin what’s going on? Are you ok?”

Jin keeps laughing for a few moments more, tries to speak, laughs, and then finally chokes out. “Dwarven enchantments.” She laughs more, but the temporary mania that consumed her is dying down.

“What? What about them? I’m so confused.”

“Hooo…” Jin sits on a stair leading up to the doors. “Dwarven enchantments. I can’t believe I was such an idiot, hahaaaa…” She leans back on her arms and finally looks over at the more than mildly worried looking Sage to explain.

“Dwarves are an ancient people, and haven’t been around for literally thousands of years.”

Sage nods slowly, confused.

“It took us a while, but eventually humans got their hands on dwarven knowledge. And a growing number of mages have been around for thousands of years… Excluding recently, of course.”

She laughs more, but ruefully this time and it ends quickly. “This means enchantments have been evolving from dwarven knowledge more and more at an increasingly faster rate. The knowledge of how various spell structures and enchantments work gets passed on more and more until you have a population that knows wildly more complicated spell structures than where they started from. Structures that sometimes even need multiple people to have a chance at being cast. Most of those weren’t developed until my recent history. Ah, relatively recent history, anyway. It took the age of information to kickstart it. You know, we figured out how to make magic do intellectual tasks for us? We called some of the first enchantments that could do that—ah, I’m rambling. But do you see where I’m going with this? See… I managed to forget this, somehow. I forgot that technology advances. Ha! Funny, yeah? Here I was standing before the remnants of a people I always deeply respected, and quite nearly revered for their advancements in the field of magic, and… And their spell structures are so rudimentary. These are some of the most basic enchantments I’ve ever seen! Fuck, their defense system; the work around for it is so old as to be defunct now! They—Ha, damn it’s such an oversight, they don’t even prevent formula budding.”

She holds an arm up to the doors that are fully open now with a lopsided smile plastered across her face. “I was an idiot for thinking dwarven enchantments would be anything but bad.”

“Um…” Sage doesn’t know what to think. “That’s… Funny?” she tries.

Jin grins. “Ha, not really, I guess.” She stands up and brushes herself off, only slightly wincing from the bruise on her hip. “Let’s go see what other garbage might be lying around this dump, eh?” She laughs again and glances up into the darkness above them before shaking her head and striding through the doors.

Sage giggles nervously to try and lighten her mood and follows.

Two of the three light orbs Jin kept around spread out to illuminate the room. Jin recognizes it as a throne room that doubles as a banquet hall. Multiple open doorways line the sides of the long room, the two largest of which are the first two doors to each the left and right. After budding some amplifiers onto the spell, the two further light orbs brighten significantly and banish the deepest shadows of the room. The spell can’t be directly looked at anymore without discomfort.

The colors of the room are mostly faded to nothing, despite an obvious lack of sunlight. Residue seems to stain the stone in roughly rectangular patterns, perhaps the remnants of decayed cloth. At the end of the hall is a throne carved of a strangely shimmery stone. Two rows of long stone tables dominate the room, and a few scattered stone chairs are all that remain of furniture. The ceiling of the room has the same geometric honeycomb pattern as the cavern roof on a smaller scale.

Having already used up her emotional capacity for the near future, Jin doesn’t react much to the scene. Sage on the other hand seems to be lost in thought.

Jin glances almost nervously over at her. She was… maybe a little unhinged. Not a good look for someone who exists in the ‘possibly delusional’ category.

She doesn’t have to worry for long, since Sage pipes up. “Oh! I get it now. Sorry…”

“…What?”

“Well, I’m guessing you don’t normally start laughing like… that over things, and um. You were expecting something totally different than what you found, yeah? And… well, things have changed some for me… But, your whole world has changed. That’s a lot. That must be scary. I’m sorry, is all. I think… Yeah I think laughing is probably a good response! Especially since sometimes people get angry and aggressive when things go wrong, instead. It's scary when that happens! One time when I was a kid—”

“Sage.”

Sage stops. She tries to discern what kind of feelings those gold eyes are hiding. There’s that undercurrent of skeptic disbelief again, but it looks like Jin is successfully masking most of her emotions for once.

“You are ridiculously kind towards people.”

“Thank you..?”

Jin isn’t smiling, though. She looks… concerned? Then she sighs. “I never thought I’d agree so strongly with a priest.” She lets out a quick huff of amusement and smirks.

“Come on Sage. Let’s see what all we can discover together.”

And so they did.