It was impossible for me to narrow down where Ammun’s mages would set up their staging point, but that did not mean I didn’t spend a fair amount of time using the various scrying beacons I’d seeded around Ralvost to snoop for any useful information I could find. And while I did find plenty of interesting things, like a few towns that had managed to ignite all their cores and were busy inventing some basic combat conjurations, I didn’t stumble across what I was looking for.
I was very deliberately keeping an eye on the caravan routes I’d projected Ammun would send replacement parts for his machines on, hoping to destroy the shipments, but there was nothing. Whether that was because the caravans simply hadn’t departed from the tower yet, or because Ammun had managed to ward them so thoroughly that I couldn’t find them, I couldn’t tell.
Unfortunately, my assault on the eight facilities had caused someone to go over the security of all of them. They’d discovered the air vent in the trash disposal chamber, which I imagined had probably resulted in at least one execution, and repaired the gap in their defenses. Even if I’d been willing to brute force the wards to get a look inside, Ammun’s designs were so thorough that I couldn’t do it from thousands of miles away through a relay chain of scrying beacons.
Despite my best efforts, all I could do was wait and prepare. I overhauled the wards. I stockpiled mana. I tested new defenses. I built staves, wands, athames, bracers, amulets, rings, and belts with various spells worked into them, then distributed them to mages in New Alkerist who probably still didn’t have a chance of repelling an assault, but who could at least buy some time now.
I even helped Querit build a few new frames, including a research frame designed specifically to help map out the Astral Realm near my demesne. It was surprisingly complicated and involved redesigning a section of my crucible to allow for greater flexibility in rune combinations, but we got it done. Preliminary explorations were promising, and Querit was more than satisfied with his new tools.
The one thing I couldn’t do was stockpile any meaningful amount of potions or salves. I suspected a lot of people would need some amount of healing if and when New Alkerist came under attack, but I just didn’t have the reagents to mass produce anything. And, unfortunately, my tour of damn near every village on the island hadn’t turned up any sign of Hyago. Wherever he’d settled down at, it was apparently out in the middle of nowhere, far away from civilization. Knowing him, he was probably completely self-sufficient already and never going to set foot on a paved street again.
I also made good on my promise to deliver a few lectures to the New Alkerist magic classes, which went about as well I’d expected they would. Every time I went there, I internally cringed at how bad a shape the building was in despite being less than a year old. I wanted to tear it down and rebuild it, but doing that would be as good as guaranteeing it would be the first place to get flattened if the town actually was attacked, so I reined in the impulse.
Finally, almost two months after I’d slain the behemoth sand worm and claimed a shard of Amodir’s moon core, something happened.
* * *
“It’s ready,” Querit told me through the scrying mirror. “How’s the ritual coming along?”
“Twenty minutes,” I replied, not looking up from where I was carving runes into a granite pylon thirty feet tall. Three more, identical except for the completed rune structures on them, stood in a row nearby, waiting to be transported to the ridge Sanctuary had been built on before I’d evicted everyone to New Alkerist.
“Got it. I’ll keep everything updated in real time. I think we’ve got about two hours before the divergence ratio gets too high to continue.”
“Plenty of time,” I said.
The mirror went blank, and I finished carving the rest of the runes into the pylon. I would have preferred to build them ahead of time, but the rune structure was dependent on the current conditions in the Astral Realm’s mana flow. If I’d made them yesterday, they’d have been junk today.
I pulled all four of them into my phantom space, then teleported across the valley. Hopefully, that wouldn’t disturb the Astral Realm too much, but it was a necessary risk. The crucible was the only way to make the pylons fast enough, and moving it up to the top of the ridge would have placed it too close to the ritual site.
The pylons went into the ground, into holes I’d already bored in the stone. The bottom ten feet were buried, leaving only the top two-thirds visible. I stone shaped the final runes into the ground in a circle around each pylon, then pulled out my mirror. “I’m good to go here,” I told Querit. “Give me the final numbers.”
Images appeared on the mirror, looking somewhat like an elevation map, except one that was constantly shifting. I reached out and mentally activated each pylon, manually manipulating the mana rushing through them to reach out and alter the mana flows to match their counterparts in the Astral Realm.
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“Not enough mana in section nine,” Querit reported.
“I know. I’m trying to siphon some out of section four without twisting everything between them.”
“Pull it over at once and smooth out the damage after,” the golem advised.
“If I do that, we risk the Astral Realm twisting too far for us to match.”
“If you don’t, there’s no chance at all of getting things lined up before things naturally shift away from the current map.”
As annoying as that was, he was right. His idea was the only way to level out the mana flows properly, even if it was going to cause a bunch of work fixing what I damaged in the process. I was already controlling sixteen different spells at once, with Querit handling another nine from his position a thousand feet away.
Adding four more spells to the mix taxed me to my limits, both mentally and mana-wise, but I managed to hold it for the thirty seconds I needed to make the changes and fix section nine. “Shit, I’m losing sections one through three,” I said.
“Reinforcing now,” Querit answered, and I felt some of the strain ease up as he stepped in to handle that portion of the ritual.
It was easy to see why this was something that twenty or thirty mages collaborated to do. The construct was absolutely massive, easily on par with my most advanced spells. It was draining a master-tier spell’s worth of mana every few seconds, and we weren’t even trying to recover any of that. The added variables in the enchantments alone would have put the ritual out of our reach, never mind trying to calculate the effect lossless casting might have on the mana flows.
Slowly, painfully, things started to come together. One piece slotted into the next, and the connections were forged. Mana started flowing according to an infinitely complicated pattern as I made minute adjustments to match Querit’s maps of the Astral Realm.
With each piece I solidified, the strain on my mind eased just a bit more. It never went away entirely, of course. Even just holding things in place without making further adjustments was difficult, but Querit was able to take over more and more of the ritual once I got everything into position.
Finally, the last section snapped into place, and the ritual pulsed. “We’re going to lose it!” Querit yelled.
I pushed mana into the pylons and snarled, “No we’re not!”
A second pulse rippled through the delicate mana flows, threatening to destabilize the whole thing and cause it to collapse. “Sections seventeen through twenty-one are diverging. We took too long to get everything put together,” Querit said.
“Update the flow maps,” I demanded. “I’ll fix them in real time.”
The golem didn’t say anything, but he did what I wanted. I spun out new spells to twist the mana flows and started working backwards, fixing each piece to resync it to the Astral Realm and making new connections to the other sections.
“Seven and eight are diverging now.”
The hell they were. Two more spells went through the pylons. “Hold onto the framework,” I said. “I’m losing it.”
Querit’s mana shifted to reinforce the part I’d directed him to, giving me just enough leeway to finish fixing section seventeen and turn my attention to the two new problems. For a moment, I was worried that my assistant was right, that the failing sections were going to cascade out of control, but when I finished reweaving seven and eight, everything held stable.
“Resonance forming!” Querit yelled. “Get ready for the pressure wave.”
Despite everything we’d done already, this was the part of the ritual with the highest chance of failure. The very act of forming a resonance point had a large chance to alter the mana flows and rip the entire ritual apart. At this point, there was nothing to do but hold everything in place through sheer willpower, something that would have been a lot easier to do with a dozen more assistants.
Mana flashed through the pylon, coming down the wrong way from the emerging resonance. As the mage at the back end of those pylons, there was nowhere else for the mana to end up but in my core. I desperately pushed it out into my body and gritted my teeth against the pain. I just needed to hold on for a few more seconds, then I’d discharge the mana into my demesne without fear of altering the mana flows at the last second.
An explosion of mana ripped through the air as the resonance point fully manifested in the sky fifty feet overhead, spaced perfectly in the center of the four pylons. With that, the ritual shattered. I was too exhausted to hold it together even if I’d wanted to, but I didn’t think it was necessary.
“Keiran?” Querit asked. When I didn’t answer, he added some urgency to his voice. “Keiran! Are you alright?”
“Fine,” I croaked as I slumped down to a seated position. “Things… hurt.”
“I imagine so,” the golem said. He displayed some tact there and didn’t remind me that he was incapable of feeling pain, even from mana overload. Still, I imagined he’d be repairing some stuff over the next few days, too. “The resonance point appears stable.”
“It does,” I agreed. I flopped onto my back and stared up at it. Completely invisible to normal senses, I could nevertheless feel it as a sort of knot of mana, half from the physical world and half from the Astral Realm, all twisted up on itself and forming a bridge between its two sources.
“How’d we do on mana usage?” I asked.
“Um…” Querit paused. “Not as bad as we projected, honestly. Not great, but the ritual only took twelve minutes.”
“Twice as long as it was supposed to,” I said.
“If we had a full ritual circle, yes. It shouldn’t be possible at all with just the two of us.”
I grunted and didn’t reply. However much it had cost us, it was complete. And that meant I’d be advancing my core to stage seven as soon as I recovered. The next step was to use the resonance point to form an astral body that would mirror me from the Astral Realm, which would drastically increase not only my ability to store mana, but how fast I could channel it. What I’d just done would have only been half as difficult if my astral body had already been formed.
“I’m exhausted,” I told Querit. “Give me six hours to recover and we’ll move on to the core advancement.”
As soon as I said that, the valley’s wards flared to life, and an explosion of light and fire filled the sky.