Chapter 89 Shunted
“I, Karthen Eidi’Diasta, meant no disrespect, Lord Darkness, it was a bad habit from a younger, less mature, time. I apologize, I beg your forgiveness just this once.” Karthen said with his head bowed. It took everything the wizard had to keep his knees from buckling while he bowed low. The pressure didn’t lighten in the slightest and Karthen risked a glance up from the ground. What he saw was the woman next to the man, who was brazenly acting as a beacon for every Tunnel Horror within a hundred miles, gently placing her hand on his arm.
“Isaac, I think he understands.” She told Isaac casually while her hand and half of her arm bathed in the power that felt like it had Karthen’s heart in a vise.
“I am not the one you need to apologize to.” Isaac told Karthen coldly.
“I greatly apologize for any offense given, my Lady.” Karthen said through teeth grit with effort to maintain his horizontal bow.
“As long as it does not happen again, we are fine.” Lenna replied calmly.
At Lenna’s words the pressure started rapidly dying down. Within ten seconds there was only a phantom shadow of the feeling that had once threatened to give the ancient wizard a heart attack. “Your magnanimity knows no bounds.” Karthen praised her and straightened as much as he could. His shoulders were still slumped with exhaustion and his entire body felt sticky from the cold sweat still covering it. “I thank you and reassure you that it will not happen again.”
Lenna nodded in acceptance of his apology and then casually turned to regard Alexander. “Alexander, dinner?” She asked the court mage.
“Of course, Lady V’Nova.” Alexander replied and walked towards her with the picnic basket. “I do not believe I have asked this before but would you rather be addressed as Hellfire, Lady Hellfire, or Lady V’Nova?”
Isaac had elected to completely ignore that Karthen was there unless he specifically needed the wizard for something, or vice versa, so he was already digging into the basket for their meal.
“Either is fine.” Lenna replied to Alexander’s question. “It is going to take me some time to get used to being addressed as Hellfire directly.” She confessed. “Starting now might be good preparation for when we are traveling the surface.”
Alexander nodded. “It is often difficult for adventurers to adapt to having a title bestowed upon them, it is a good thing that the Guild Master simply reaffirmed the one that Darkness has given you.” He said as small talk while the portions of fish soup and fresh bread were divvied up.
“Yes.” Lenna agreed. “While we eat, why don’t you introduce Karthen Eidi’Diasta, was it?”
“It’s quite the mouthful.” Isaac commented.
“It is an old name.” Lenna informed him. “Light elf surnames tend to get shorter over time.”
“As Lady Hellfire has said, I am from a long line of advisors that dates back to just after the first dragon surge after, The Fall.” Karthen explained with a hesitant glance towards Lenna. When she hadn’t reacted to his mentioning of the fall of the dark elves he seemed to inflate a little. “I am the first of our line to have mentored humans directly. I learned immediately that their politics changed far too quickly for me so I elected to limit my interactions to only things that I was truly an expert in.”
“Spatial magic.” Lenna surmised.
“Just so.” Karthen affirmed. “I was the one who created the original teleportation network three hundred years ago and I am the one who continues maintenance on it.”
“We have yet to use it ourselves but we have had others use it in our stead.” Lenna explained. “It saved us a lot of time but cost just as much.”
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“That was intentional.” Karthen explained. “There are a lot of humans whose livelihoods come from transporting goods. When king Ekzecken set the toll, he chose it with that in mind. There was a human nation a few millennia ago that brought itself to an economic collapse by making trade too easy. The sudden loss of a million jobs forced ten percent of the country to banditry.”
“That was a smart move.” Lenna complimented the long dead human king.
“I believe so as well.” Karthen agreed. His eyes drifted to the nine breaches in reality as another skeleton toppled out of it. This one rose to its feet with only one pauldron missing. Before he could even mention the rising skeleton, a spear of solid shadows materialized above Isaac’s shoulder and launched itself at the skeleton’s head with ruthless precision. The spear blasted through the rusted steel helmet and shattered the skeleton’s skull. It toppled back onto the ground in an inanimate heap. “Would you mind if I begin my work?” Karthen asked.
Lenna looked to Isaac for direction and Isaac nodded. “That’s fine.” He said and continued stuffing his face with Leo’s amazing cooking. Lenna looked back at Karthen and nodded to him to go ahead.
“Thank you, it is not every day that I get to witness an event such as this.” Karthen replied and pulled a pair of glasses out of his pocket. He put the glasses on and the glass turned violet. Emerald lines appeared inside his glasses denoting things that only he could see.
“You found an expert quite quickly.” Lenna commented to Alexander. “How did you get a Grand Magus here in two hours?”
“He is the one that taught me teleportation magic. He teaches at the college every now and then. I was just lucky enough to be there at the same time as him.” Alexander explained. “The only person better at teleporting in the entire world than him is Space himself. I actually consulted him about what happened with Mister Nobody. Apparently he already knew of a way to teleport without maintaining contact with the person but it was deemed ‘crude, barbaric, and rough on the fabric of space’ so I was told to let it go.”
“I don’t know about the rest but the part about being rough on the fabric of space is a good enough reason to let it go.” Isaac agreed. “Teleporting and messing with space in general is something that unnerves me on a subconscious level. It just feels like a bad idea.”
“I have seen you teleport.” Alexander commented.
Isaac shook his head. “It looks like teleporting but that is where the similarities end.” He explained to the wizard. “I am entering the shadows and then leaving them. It’s hard to explain but there is no space magic involved at all.”
“If it walks like a pecurke, and talks like a pecurke…” Lenna began.
“I’m pretty sure the saying is with ducks.” Isaac commented.
“It is with chickens.” Alexander replied.
“Where on Gia’s green ass is it chickens?” Isaac questioned.
“Altesia.” Alexander said. “I have always heard it with chickens.”
Lenna hummed in thought. “Is it because there aren’t any ducks or pecurke in the mountains, nor ducks or chickens underground?”
—
“I am about to close all of the breaches.” Karthen said after three hours of tinkering with magical recording instruments and half an hour of drawing a massive magical ritual circle, with a dozen pieces of chalk that seemed to move on their own. “Is everyone ready?”
“Other than them all vanishing, what is going to happen?” Isaac asked and appeared next to him as if he had always been there.
Karthen flinched but tried to play it off as if he hadn’t. “Twenty three percent of the demidimension will be shunted out into real reality at the centerpoint of the ritual. Specifically, the twenty three percent closest to the breaches. The breaches will also be part of that so everything inside the ritual will be subject to their instability. Once that has finished I can begin the ritual to open a proper gate to the rest of the demidimension. That should anchor it here for at least twenty four hours if I am using chalk, which I will be. If for some reason the gate needs to be maintained for longer then I will close the first one and make another in its place out of copper or silver.”
“How long will copper and silver keep it open?” Isaac questioned.
“One week and two months respectively.” Karthen replied.
Isac looked back at Lenna and Alexander. “We are ready when you are, Karthen. Just one last question: How far do you think a Tunnel Horror is going to feel it?”
Karthen gulped involuntarily. “Far. Very, very, far.”
Isaac cracked his neck and Lenna put on her helmet. “Begin.” Isaac told the wizard.
Karthen focused power into the massive ritual circle. All of the white chalk began to glow with power that continued building for a minute straight. After exactly sixty seconds space seemed to quiver inside the circle. The first breach exploded out like a window hit by a thrown stone. Mana rippled under the assault for a hundred miles. Every other breach was hit by at least one fragment and shattered in turn, sending out more and more ripples through the magic that permeated all of existence. A thousand shards of fractured reality exploded outwards into an invisible wall of stable space created by Karthen’s ritual. A second after the explosion everything stopped as if frozen in time. A second after that, everything inside the ritual circle pulsed before it was suddenly overlapped with a section of the demidimension of the exact same dimensions. Bones, rust, rotted wood, and at least four still animate skeletons exploded into dust and debris as the space they were thrust into was already filled with air, stone, and the inanimate corpses of the fallen and failed escapees. The pulse of mana rippled out far farther than the original nine.
There was no physical shockwave from either of the explosions because everything was entirely contained within the ritual. A few seconds after the final explosion the chalked finished breaking down and died out. Only scarce remnants of the magical chalk remained in a perfect circle that surrounded total destruction. As soon as the barrier vanished from the ritual, a wave of dust shot out in all directions. Lenna turned her head away from it, Isaac made a wall of shadows that directed it around him, and the two wizards were forced to weather the choking dust cloud. Neither wizard was going to waste mana on keeping the dust off of them when there would definitely be at least one Tunnel Horror on the way. It was only a matter of time and they all knew it.