“What did you do with the diviner?” I asked.
“Didn’t seem like you wanted him left unsupervised at the valley, so I brought him with me to New Alkerist,” Querit told me.
I wasn’t thrilled about the idea of a captured enemy combatant in my family’s town, especially with neither of us there to keep an eye on him. In Querit’s defense, though, it wasn’t like he knew why I was keen on protecting the town. And he was right; I didn’t want anyone in my demesne without me being there.
“Are you sure you want to stay involved in this?”
The golem shrugged. “You’ve done a lot for me. I can do a bit more to help you out. Besides, we still need to finish figuring out lossless casting on enchantments and inscriptions.”
Left unsaid was the fact that outside of Ammun’s tower, there was nowhere else on the planet that was likely to have workshops and labs as well-equipped as mine were, or anywhere with ambient mana. Querit had seen a few places out in the world now; he knew that I hadn’t lied to him about the mana all being gone.
All things considered, I probably wouldn’t get a better ally than Querit. He was far more competent than any mage outside of a few of Ammun’s elites, and even though his base magical abilities were somewhat lacking in variety, the frame system he’d been built to utilize fixed that. I had some hopes that he’d start free casting more spells rather than relying on a prebuilt rune structure to make the magic happen, but that wasn’t a priority right now.
If he wanted to stick around and keep helping me, then I’d let him. Other than getting tagged with that enchantment that had allowed Ammun to spy on us, he’d been nothing but helpful. And even that had worked out in our favor in the end. More than half of Ammun’s diviners were dead, and his scrying hall was completely destroyed.
Hopefully, that would be enough of a setback to keep him occupied for a while, as long as I could trash the summit, too. That job had a short clock on it, and Ammun knew I’d be coming. I wouldn’t be launching any surprise attacks this time.
That meant I needed to advance my core to stage seven and form my astral body, which would take a few hours. The question was whether or not I actually had that much time to waste. I could be at the summit inside of twenty minutes, but it wouldn’t matter if I was too late to stop Ammun from seizing control of a moon and raining fiery destruction down on me from the heavens.
“Collect our traitorous diviner and meet me back at the valley,” I said. “I’ll go ahead and see if I can get a look at what Ammun’s doing. We only lost an hour or so, so there should still be time to spare.”
* * *
When Querit caught up to me ten minutes later, I was standing in front of a mirror the size of a wall that showed Ammun’s fake mountain. The golem took one look at the mirror and said, “That’s not good.”
“Not at all. And it looks like teleportation inside is being blocked by wards.”
Curled around the peak of the mountain was a familiar-looking skeletal dragon. Already, pieces of it were regenerating, including the front claw I’d disintegrated during the opening moments of our first battle. It wasn’t completely restored yet, but considering it had been less than half an hour since the monster had retreated, that was still impressive.
“So how will you get inside?”
“The old-fashioned way,” I said. “A lot of explosive magic.”
Querit studied the mountain for a few seconds. “I don’t think that’ll work.”
“Not by itself, no,” I admitted. “Whatever faults he might have, Ammun does good work when it comes to warding stone. I know the wards are incomplete, however, which means there are some weaknesses I can exploit.”
“And how do you know that?”
“Because if he’d done it right, we wouldn’t be able to scry inside.”
Ashinder stood behind Querit, keeping quiet and out of the way. He was clearly out of his depth, but I suspected he was more than willing to help if he could. Destroying Ammun was what he wanted, after all. He frowned at the mirror and opened his mouth like he was about to speak, then paused, shook his head, and closed it again.
“Something to add to the conversation?” I asked without turning around.
“I’m probably wrong,” the diviner said. “But I think there’s a tunnel that leads inside.”
That could be helpful, but every last inch of it would probably also be trapped. That was something we could check for, if the tunnel existed and if we could find it. Even if I had to fight my way through a deadly hallway, it might still be faster than destroying that dragon so I could break into a hollow mountain.
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“Why do you think that, and where do you think it is?”
“The diviners would come and go by portal for our shifts, but no one else ever used the damn thing. I put a recording divination on it myself and observed it for over a week. No supplies ever came through. No food. No raw materials. Nothing. Whatever the engineers have been using, they didn’t get it through that portal, and I just don’t believe it was all fabricated onsite.”
“It wouldn’t be the first time Ammun had pieces physically transported,” Querit said.
“Right. The collar we broke had the same problem. Makes sense. But he’s less than a day away from completing this, so it’s entirely possible that he’s already gotten everything he needs delivered and has sealed up the tunnel.” I swung the divination around to circle the whole mountain a few times, looking for clues, but nothing jumped out at me. “So, where would this hypothetical tunnel be?”
“I don’t know,” Ashinder told me. “I can’t even say for sure if it exists. It’s just speculation because I noticed only people were using the portal."
"I developed a few surveying spells to help find things underground," Querit offered.
“You did? When?”
“I started working on them when you got obsessed with digging for that moon core, but I couldn’t ever get them to work with the kind of range you needed. If we’re just looking for a tunnel ten or twenty feet below ground level, though, they should work.”
“It could be deeper,” Ashinder argued.
“But the entrance has to connect to the surface at some point,” Querit said. “Even if the tunnel itself is out of range, we could find where it exits to the surface and trace it back.”
“Not with that dragon sitting there we can’t,” I said. “Even if it left, could we do it fast enough?”
We were coming at this from the wrong angle. Instead of trying to find an entrance that could be anywhere in a few square miles around the mountain – and even that was assuming it existed in the first place – a better idea would be to map out the interior of the mountain. If there was a tunnel, I could find where it ended and follow it back to the beginning.
Or rather, Querit and Ashinder could do that. I had something else to go take care of. I outlined my plan to the golem, who nodded thoughtfully and gestured to Ashinder to step up and help. “You’re going to…” Querit started to say to me before he trailed off.
“Yes. We’ve delayed too long, and I need the boost to my offensive capabilities anyway. It should only take five or six hours.”
“We’ll work on this. I’ll come get you if it looks like we don’t have enough time.”
If we were lucky, we hadn’t been delayed so much by Ammun’s attacks that he could finish his moon weapon in the next few hours. Losing my demesne would be bad enough; losing the resonance point before I could advance to stage seven would be a disaster.
I left the two of them to work on scrying the interior of the summit, hopefully without Ammun detecting their scrying spells again. As long as he wasn’t actively interfering, I doubted the wards would slow them down much now that I’d gotten the spell past the outer layer. It had barely been an hour since our last attempt, not nearly enough time for Ammun to do any upgrades.
The resonance point looked exactly the same as I’d left it. I teleported myself directly underneath it and studied it for a minute, just to make sure nothing had been damaged during the fight with the invading mages – not that I thought that was possible. If a resonance point broke, anybody with the barest hint of the ability to sense mana would know it.
It was unharmed and still holding the local mana flows in shape to mirror the Astral Realm. With everything perfectly matched up, I reached into my core, my own personal gateway into the Astral Realm that supplied me with mana. Doing this was an incredibly difficult task that I would have preferred to take on while completely fresh, but Ammun had put too much pressure on me to wait any longer.
My mana wasn’t excluded from the resonance point, meaning that on the other side of that internal gateway was a perfect replica of my mana core. All that was left was to build an astral body around it, something that would be tied to me and move where I moved, only on the other side of the border between the physical world and the Astral Realm.
Forging that connection was somewhat like tying puppet strings to my body. They connected to every part of me and threaded back through my core, where my astral counterpart was slowly being woven together from those very same threads. It was a slow, delicate process, each individual thread taking only seconds to create, but I had to do it thousands of times. Every muscle, every bone, and every organ needed dozens of threads, sometimes more.
It wasn’t something I could have done without extensive knowledge of my own anatomy or, more easily, divinations to help me look inside myself and ensure I was connecting everything correctly. Honestly, it was probably both facets that allowed me to do it at all, let alone as quickly as I did. I sat there with my eyes closed, focused entirely inward, and took a process that should have taken a day at minimum and did it in a quarter of that time.
It wasn’t until I was done that I allowed myself to truly feel the change. It was hard to describe how it felt, to be connected to an astral body again. My movements had weight to them, like I was underwater. Currents of mana were dragged along behind me, a sort of resistance that didn’t really exist. Trying to explain it to someone who hadn’t experienced it for themselves was a waste of time, and it had been so many centuries since I’d felt it for myself that I’d all but forgotten the sensation.
Hopefully, I wouldn’t have much time to get used to it. Stage eight was all about detaching my astral body from myself so that it could function independently as a mage’s shadow, but until that time, I could look forward to a massively increased flow of mana into my body, as well as the strength of all my spells more than doubled.
“Let’s see how that dragon stands up to me now,” I said. My mana was almost completely drained now, but it took bare minutes to refill my core and my mana crystal. I’d expended all the resources I’d stockpiled to fight it during our first encounter, but I was still more confident in the rematch now that I’d formed my astral body. My entire being was a conduit to the Astral Realm now, not just my core. The fight would go very differently this time.
I teleported back to my scrying room. Querit glanced up at me, then did a double take. “Wow,” was all he said about the subject, though.
“Tell me what you’ve found,” I ordered.