Once I really started pushing, I found four different diviners willing to admit that they’d spied on Ammun using wide-area scries that wouldn’t be passively detected. None of them knew where he’d stopped, but they all independently confirmed which direction he’d set out in. My own brief divinations centered in that area showed me that it wouldn’t be too difficult to track him, if for no other reason than he was maintaining his temporal scrambling wards. It was easy—but expensive—to sweep an area with a temporal scry and follow the trail of where I couldn’t see into the past.

That left me with the problem of what to do with the diviners. They were all low on mana from the ritual, but recovering rapidly. The ones who’d attacked me were more or less completely tapped out, which meant I wouldn’t get a better opportunity to slaughter them all without resistance. That was certainly a possibility, but I preferred not to leave a pile of corpses in the area when I was about to engage in a battle with a lich.

I could burn them, but that seemed like a short-sighted plan with the most likely result being suffocating myself and leaving a partially charred pile of bodies behind for Ammun to find when he got back. The lack of air certainly wouldn’t hurt him if the runes hadn’t regenerated it by the time he returned. The only thing I’d accomplish was stranding him up here.

There was an idea. Ammun obviously didn’t need these people to do whatever he was up here to do. As far as I could tell, he’d only brought them along because the ritual he was using was designed to pull a large group of people with him. Its mana costs and complexity were reflections of that fact. What could Ammun do if I simply took his mages and left him here?

Well, he could do whatever he’d come here to do, which could very well include tapping into Yulitar’s core and firing catastrophic mana beams down onto the surface of Manoch. At the very least, I’d need to stay behind to interfere with Ammun, but sending his minions back to the planet was a good way to get rid of them without leaving potential weapons for him to claim.

“Alright,” I said. “You’ve all been poking around this place just like me. Who knows where the ritual silo to get us back home is?”

“In the center,” one of the leaders of the group said. Most of the diviners had justifiably shied away from having anything to do with me, but a few of the stronger ones had either volunteered or had the responsibility foisted on them. “It’s the only place with enough height to set it all up.”

I hadn’t found it myself, but I trusted it was where they said it was. It also explained why Ammun had locked everyone in here. He didn’t want them trying to go home without him. “Right, we’re heading there. Everyone on your feet!”

A wave of fear rolled through the assembled mages, probably at the thought of their leader punishing them for disobeying orders. Protests started coming at me from every angle, but I silenced them with a burst of raw mana. “This isn’t a debate,” I said. “If you don’t want to die here, get walking.”

They were hesitant. They dragged their feet. They tried to come up with excuses to delay. But in the end, they obeyed. I walked along at the end of the line, my very obviously placed divinations keeping track of everyone I couldn’t physically see. “And no magic,” I announced as we filed out of the room. “Focus on recovering your mana reserves so we can cast the ritual to get everyone back home.”

I was almost surprised to see no one fighting me on that, but not once did I detect any stealthy telepathic messages between them. No one was casting out scrying spells to look around, or attempting to contact Ammun. Though, when I thought about it, that part made sense. That would essentially be telling on themselves if they let him know I’d moved them. Sure, he might reward whoever did it. Or he might show back up and kill a few people.

Unlike back on Manoch, there were no mana banks to draw power from here. The ambient mana of the moon was enough to make the ritual work, so all we were waiting on was the mages I’d forced into participating to recover enough of their personal supplies to play their parts. While they did that, I set the leaders of the groups to organizing each floor of the silo. Roughly seventeen mages occupied each ring, with three of them at the very top platform where I stood.

The rune structures were slightly different, mostly to account for the more diffuse power source and the fact that this silo was designed to send us back to the planet. The differences were minute enough that I was comfortable making a few on-the-spot modifications to suit my purposes, ones that I was reasonably certain none of them could understand well enough to spot.

Eventually, I got them moving and took my place—Ammun’s place—at the top of the formation, surrounded by my three chosen diviners. “This is going to work a bit differently than the ritual you used to get up here,” I told them. “As far as I can tell, this has a locked location that I’m just going to assume doesn’t exist anymore, so we’ll be redirecting that to some empty space outside the tower.”

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

“That’s this part here that we’re bypassing?” the diviner on my left asked.

I glanced down at the rune structure carved into the floor panel and nodded. “And also this section over here.”

That was a lie. Both of those pieces locked onto what I was mentally referring to as the ‘bridge’ target. That was supposed to be me. The spell functioned by pushing that one person first and using them as a relay beacon to drag everyone else along behind them. I’d cut the mana costs on my own version by simply severing everything after the bridge portion. There was no need to build something that allowed everyone else to cross if I was the only one going.

In this case, I didn’t want to go, so I was redirecting that role onto these three guys. If I could have trusted one of them to play the role of the ritual director, it would have been even easier, but since I still had to do that, splitting the bridge amongst three other people was the best way I’d come up with to make the ritual work on short notice.

We got started, and the mana slowly built up in the silo. Seeing it through temporal scrying was one thing, but experiencing it live was an entirely different experience. The amount of mana going into this ritual was, frankly, incredibly dangerous, and there were far too many potential points of failure for me to be comfortable here. I honestly wasn’t sure I’d survive if things went wrong.

I worked hard to make sure that didn’t happen, which included reaching out multiple times to correct bad mana flows on various levels. Nothing catastrophic occurred, and it was clear that this group had practiced this ritual more than a few times. Most of the errors came about in the parts that were different from what they were used to. That was a small portion of the overall ritual, and within half an hour of starting, things were ready to go.

Light flashed up and down the silo, grabbing the three diviners I’d stationed around me and transporting them back down to the planet. A second later, a second pulse of light snatched up everyone else, leaving me alone on the platform strung up at the top. Perfect. Unless Ammun could figure out how to modify the ritual, he was stuck up here. The only other way he was getting home was if I was wrong about him bringing his phylactery with him.

The real question in my mind was whether or not I could get home if I destroyed this silo. I wasn’t willing to die up here just to cut off another potential escape route for Ammun, especially one I was relatively certain he couldn’t utilize on his own. But it would be prudent to make sure I understood long-range teleportation well enough to pull it off without this silo, if only because fights between archmages often had collateral damage, and it was entirely possible he’d target the facility just to keep me trapped here with him once he realized what I’d done.

I was very capable of multitasking, however. While my divinations scoured the surface of the moon to track down Ammun, I started working on adapting the long-range teleport into something I could use as a personal spell instead of a ritual that required equipment to set up.

I started by gutting all the components that made it suitable for large groups. While it made sense that such a monumental feat of translocation would want to move as many people as possible at once to offset the enormous mana expenditure, that wasn’t what I needed it for. Without all of that, I was down from a silo of multiple ringed balconies to a single room, at most. With a bit of time to refine the design, I was confident I could reduce it to something similar to my current teleportation platforms.

Mana efficiency was my next concern. The long-range scrying portions used to target the moon devoured mana, and that was with them being streamlined to connect to a specific point. A free-targeting teleport spell that could cross this much distance was prohibitively expensive for a single person to use, even if that person was an archmage with a full demesne backing them.

That alone was probably going to stop me from ever being able to cast this spell without some sort of equipment. I would have to choose a specific destination when designing the rune structure, which would at best give me a teleport-from-anywhere-to-one-spot spell. That wasn’t necessarily useless, since I could rebuild the spell to take me directly to my demesne, and it wasn’t like anyone besides me was ever going to use it, anyway.

I continued to break down problems and redesign the spell one step at a time. Outside the base, my divinations followed signs of disturbance in the dusty surface of the moon or resorted to eliminating variables via temporal scrying when no other signs were available. It looked like Ammun was heading for lower elevations, possibly to remove as much physical distance between himself and the moon core as possible.

I arbitrarily labeled Ammun’s direction as north, since I didn’t have a frame of reference for what actual north might be. He’d already gone at least a hundred miles, though I thought he was moving very, very slowly for some reason. As soon as I found him, I planned to be ready to teleport there and force an immediate confrontation. With any luck, I’d destroy his physical body, recover his phylactery, and put an end to his plans before he could bring them to fruition.

The part where I destroyed his physical form was the sticking point. I just wasn’t sure I could do it, even with access to my astral body. If I failed at that, confirming his phylactery was up here and leaving him stranded was an acceptable alternative, as long as I could break this silo down first.

In order to do that, I needed to finish refining my own version of the teleportation ritual so that I no longer had to reference the rune structures here. I floated in the middle of the silo, going up and down as I checked various parts against my own designs and smoothed out flaws where I found them.

It was too bad that I wouldn’t have the opportunity to test this first, but life was full of risks. What was one more?