The main silo of the summit was undamaged by my attack, but was just as empty as everywhere else. Theories whirled through my mind, one after another. Was this whole site a decoy? Everything Ammun had thrown at me had been a long series of distractions, and I’d made assumptions as to the purpose. Maybe Ashinder was the world’s best actor, one who’d willingly sacrificed dozens of his coworkers to pull off the con.
Or maybe I’d been trapped in a mental illusion, like that one mage of Ammun’s had used on me back at Eyrie Peak. I doubted it, especially since none of the telltale signs were there and I’d already tested that theory to confirm there was nothing to break out of while I was exploring. If this was some sort of mind cage, it was the most powerful one I’d ever seen, something that I doubted Ammun could create even with help.
There was one explanation that I didn’t like, but which I thought was probable. The summit was a true base: an expensive, long-term project with thousands of man-hours and an incalculable amount of mana put into it. It really could reach the moon from the surface of the planet.
And Ammun had already finished it. But if so, what had he used it on? And how had he done it without us noticing? I found one of those answers in the top chamber of the ritual silo. It was carved into the wall with some sort of spell that had literally melted the stone away. The remnants were a viscous puddle on the floor and I could still feel the heat rising out of the runes.
It was a clever bit of counter-divination that caused anyone scrying on the location to see something else from the recent past. Ammun must have made it as soon as he’d sent out his dragon to keep me busy. Querit’s scrying probably revealed what had happened hours ago, set to loop over and over again, and he’d never noticed.
The ward also prevented anyone from looking anywhere else in the past, but that at least I could bypass through the simple expedient of destroying it. Force magic hammered the wall repeatedly until the stone finally cracked and gave way. I made a mental note to study the ward schema reinforcing things around here; my own methods were durable, but this went beyond even that. I suspected I knew how Ammun was doing it and that it was too mana-intensive for casual use, but I wanted to confirm my theory when I had time.
With the temporal redirection ward broken, I started scrying into the past to see exactly what I’d missed. Had Ammun completed his project? If so, what were the results? And where had everyone gone?
It started normally enough – diviners took their positions on every floor and worked in conjunction to feed the ritual. I skipped past Ammun’s delivered threats, having already seen those in real time, and moved to what happened after he’d sicced his minions on me. The ritual started pulling mana from the banks stored in the mountain, enormous amounts of it, from what I could tell. One floor at a time, the diviners activated their portions until the entire center of the summit was lit up with magic.
Ammun stood at the top floor and worked his own magic, something that his counter-divinations obscured from me. I spared a brief moment to wonder how I was even getting this much of a picture, given how strong I knew those wards were, but soon enough, the answer was revealed to me.
The wards were draining, and Ammun’s mana was too tied up in what he was doing to keep them going. Or perhaps they were just interfering with the divination aspects of the ritual and he’d had no choice but to let them fall. Either way, as things went on, it became clearer and clearer around him.
About three hours after he’d sent Averin to keep me distracted, the diviners established a link with Yulitar. That was a sight to behold, a new frontier to magic being pushed right before my eyes, but I couldn’t appreciate it. All I could feel was dread at knowing it was too late.
I kept watching anyway, hoping against hope that I was wrong, that this was just a step in the plan and there was still time to stop it. Maybe Ammun had to build some sort of targeting infrastructure to harness the moon core into a weapon. If not, then I wasn’t sure how my demesne was still in one piece, since I’d obviously been too late to stop all of this.
Then something unexpected happened: Ammun vanished from the top of the silo. Some of the diviners got excited about that; others merely slumped down in exhaustion. It was a rather mixed reaction that only served to showcase exactly how many people had been forced into helping their undead overlord.
I wondered if there’d been any serious attempts at destroying him when he’d first woken back up, and, if so, if any of them had succeeded. It was easy to picture a group of rebellious mages fighting back against an archmage lich, breaking his body, and celebrating their victory while mourning their losses, only to have Ammun show back up the next day like nothing had happened. That was the kind of tactic that broke spirits and led to the despair I’d seen in some of the diviners.
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From what I could see, it looked like the outcome of the ritual was a known factor. Nobody looked surprised or confused, at least. Whatever had happened, there had to be clues in the ritual. Unfortunately, the farther back I tried to look, the harder it was to see what the actual beginning of it looked like. I could study the symbols carved into the floor, but that wouldn’t show me the active part the diviners were responsible for.
In my temporal vision, mana surged down through the silo, hitting each floor in sequence while the diviners screamed in terror. It reached the bottom, then snapped back up to the top, taking every single person with it. I blinked in surprise and pushed my sight back through time to see it again.
When I still couldn’t figure out what had happened the second time around, I decided I had no choice but to ask some questions. I pulled out my mirror and contacted Querit. When his face appeared, I asked, “Do you still have Ashinder with you?”
“Yes,” the golem said. “I was just about to… Never mind. You need to talk to him?”
“I do,” I said. “Ammun’s gone. The diviners are gone. Whatever he was trying to accomplish here, he pulled it off. But I don’t think it was what we theorized, based on the fact that he hasn’t vaporized us already.”
The diviner came into view as Querit manipulated his mirror to expand my field of view outward. Ashinder was standing nearby, his back to the golem while he spoke to a few people I didn’t recognize. “One moment, let me get his attention,” Querit said.
I watched him walk away for a second, then something else caught my eye. A man walked through the background, probably a hundred feet or so away from the mirror. He stopped and eyed the scene curiously, which wasn’t unusual. It wasn’t often a big mirror floated in the air, completely unsupported by anything but magic.
“It figures,” I grumbled. “I should just be happy about it, I suppose.”
“Happy about what?” Querit asked as he walked back over.
“That man behind you wearing the green vest,” I said. The golem looked over his shoulder and spotted who I was talking about. “His name is Hyago. I’ve been looking for him for a while now. Can you keep track of him for me until I’m done with what I’m doing here?”
“Does it matter if he knows I’m keeping an eye on him?”
“No. In fact, you should just go approach him openly. He used to work for me, helped create the petrified forest, actually. I have a job offer for him, mostly the same stuff he always did, but he moved while I was distracted with other stuff and I lost track of him.”
“I’ll let him know as soon as we’re done here.”
“I can maintain the link,” I said. “And this is going to be a long conversation. Go ahead and catch up with him now.”
“It is?” Ashinder asked. “What are we talking about?”
“We need to go over the technical details of what Ammun had you doing. This ritual obviously doesn’t do what we were originally thinking, and I need to know more about the active portion the diviners had to control to figure out what its actual purpose is. Let’s start with these ignition runes on the bottom floor…”
* * *
“Incredible,” I muttered. “It actually works. It’s insane, but it works.”
This whole silo, multiple floors of runes, hundreds of thousands of them on each individual floor and powered by more mana than the valley could produce in a month, served one singular purpose. It was a damned teleportation platform with a single destination: Yulitar itself.
Ammun was actually up there, standing on the surface of a moon. It was possible that he was looking down on Manoch right now and laughing. He’d done something that should have been impossible, and for some reason, he’d taken a hundred or so people with him. That part didn’t seem voluntary to me, but that didn’t make it any less incredible.
It also meant something incredibly important. If Ammun was on the moon, he had to have his phylactery with him. There wasn’t enough mana on the planet to stretch a tether that long. Or if there was, it would run out long before he accomplished anything useful. The only logical conclusion was that he’d pulled his phylactery out of hiding.
That meant that if I could replicate this ritual, I could get up there, kill him, and claim possession of his phylactery. I just needed to figure out how. The mana usage wouldn’t be a problem, at least. As far as I could tell, the massive amounts of mana had been because Ammun had felt the need to take his whole entourage with him. I would be going by myself, meaning I needed a small fraction of what they’d used the first time.
The more I studied the design, the more I was sure that the diviners who’d bridged the gap between Manoch and Yulitar had just followed Ammun’s orders without any understanding of what they were powering. Now that I knew how the active portion of the ritual worked, or at least the singular fragment of it that Ashinder had been responsible for understanding, I could already see how little of it was actually necessary if the spell wasn’t transporting a group.
I could make this work. It would be expensive, but presumably, Yulitar’s moon core was intact, and I’d be able to harvest new mana once I got there. There were some risks, but that was true of any plan that involved confronting Ammun. The difference here was that this might be my single best chance to catch the lich and put him down permanently.
I powered the ritual, one floor at a time. It was difficult holding it all together, but compared to the mana resonance point, it wasn’t the hardest thing I’d done recently. At the top, I stood in the center of the circle, right where Ammun had. The rooms didn’t glow since I didn’t need almost any of those pieces, and with a sudden pulse of mana as the spell completed, I felt myself pulled upwards in defiance of gravity for just a moment before everything went black.