We’d tested plenty of smaller enchantments, measured their efficiency and their output, and confirmed our theories. Everything worked as expected – they had higher initial mana costs, but then they recycled all but the tiniest fraction of their expended mana, increasing their lifespan by near a hundred-fold what the old method granted.
Small enchantments were fine, but there was the possibility that our predictions would fail on something this massive, so Grandfather was approaching the procedure with a noticeable amount of trepidation despite our safeguards. I didn’t expect any issues with scaling things up, but his concerns were understandable.
“You’re sure you’ve accounted for everything?” he asked again.
“Yes. And if something does go wrong, either of us can manually take over the spell. Stop worrying so much and stop pestering me,” I said. “Look, Querit’s in position. It’s time to start. Get out of the center so you don’t disrupt anything.”
“How quickly can you get this online?” Grandfather asked. “As soon as I move out of position—”
“I know,” I interrupted. “Just move. We’re ready to go.”
Maybe I could have been nicer about it. An objective part of my mind noted that I was still angry about failing to plant all the mysteel generators thanks to the unexpected resistance of thousands and thousands of golems, but that wasn’t Grandfather’s fault and taking it out on him wasn’t fair.
Before I could say anything, the old grayfeather broke the spell that was holding the island aloft above the clouds and sped out of the ritual circle with two flaps of his huge wings. His bulk landed behind me, shaking the ground slightly as he settled into place. I ignored that and started the enchantment.
A huge surge of mana chased the retreating trail of Grandfather’s magic up into the sky, steadily gaining on it until it overtook it completely. The first step had gone off without a hitch, and the island would maintain its altitude uninterrupted. If anything, it might rise up a few hundred feet before settling back to its current position.
Mana raced through the ritual, both mine and Querit’s, as it provided the initial spark to get things going. We had about three minutes before the temporary surge abated and the enchantments were forced to hold the island up. If things weren’t ready by then, someone would have to step in and the whole ritual would be ruined.
But, for a change, everything went smoothly. Querit did his part of the ritual and I handled mine. The enchantments flowed into place smoothly, each one locking around its fellows to create a unified whole that powered a massive feat of long-distance levitation. It was backed by the inscription array, but that was a failsafe, not a necessity. That had enough mana in it to keep things in the air for an entire day if the enchantments somehow failed, more than long enough for someone to step in.
They wouldn’t, I knew, not unless some flaw started a cascading reaction that burnt out the mana powering the enchantments before anyone could correct it. And I doubted such a flaw existed, but I understood why Grandfather would be concerned. This was an island he’d spent centuries holding up, and now he was trusting it to the workings of a man who wasn’t even brakvaw.
“And we’re done,” I announced. “I imagine you’ll want to hang around here and reassure yourself that nothing’s going to go wrong. Feel free to do so. You can move through the center now that the ritual is complete. As long as the runes aren’t physically damaged, the safeguard system will stay intact, though it will need regular infusions of mana if you plan to keep it operational.”
“The mana batteries we buried under the stone are holding steady as well,” Querit reported as he walked up to us. “At the rate they’re draining power, I would say they’ll need to be recharged once a month, just to be safe. They should last three months without maintenance before the backup has to take over.”
“We will keep an eye on them,” the gestalt added, their feminine voice seemingly coming from nowhere. “It is no trouble for us.”
“I appreciate that,” Grandfather said. He peered down at the cluster of crystalline ants that had observed the ritual. “Do you think it will all hold?”
“If Keiran says it will, then we believe him,” they said. “He has not misled us, so far.”
It was good to see the brakvaw and the gestalt getting along. I’d sort of dumped the ant colony in the eyrie with no warning and Grandfather had been justifiably upset about that. Creating this enchantment to free him from his duties as a living channel for the massive levitation spell holding their graveyard up in the sky had been a sort of apology for that.
Plus, it was the perfect test to confirm massive enchantments handled the lossless modifications before I risked any of my own demesne’s enchantments trying it. No sense in making sweeping changes to my own setup without checking to see if they worked first.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
“Speaking of things that work, I also have your new scrying… orbs,” I said. They weren’t really orbs, but they might as well have been at a casual glance.
“Excellent. We will show you where to place them.”
“You guys alright up here?” I asked. “Fine if I go take care of other things?”
“We’re good,” Querit assured me. “Everything is working correctly.”
“Perfect. In that case, I’ll be on my way.”
I followed the stream of ants as they scurried down the side of the mountain. The permanent portals I’d built for the brakvaw were stationed on a vertical cliff face that had been magically smoothed out, and the gestalt’s lair was right below that. It had expanded its caverns considerably and the stone now looked more like smooth volcanic glass than the rough granite that existed here when the gestalt had first moved in.
My own access point was a bit grosser than the ones the gestalt used. They simply crawled through the thousands of cracks in the stone, filing in one after another, but I had to use the feeding hole, a fissure opened in the ground that brakvaw dropped whole carcasses in as part of the deal between them and the gestalt. It watched over the portals for threats, monitoring all of them at once, in exchange for what was barely a snack for the average brakvaw once a day.
The hole was not regularly cleaned. Bits of fur and meat were stuck to the walls. To say it was an unpleasant passage would be an understatement.
But I could fly and my shield ward protected me from actually coming into contact with any of the remains, so I didn’t complain about it. Instead, I floated through the air to the main chamber, where a massive stone tree grew out of the ground. Somehow, it was even bigger than the last time I’d seen it, despite the fact that stone generally couldn’t grow.
I pulled the three orbs out of my phantom space and held them in the air with telekinesis until I felt the gestalt’s own magic pluck them out of my grip. Each one was a thousand-sided polyhedron, its facets so small as to make it appear to be a sphere. To anyone other than a gestalt entity, it would be an utterly pointless device.
For a collective consciousness composed of millions of ants, each orb would let them look at a thousand different places at once. Getting the spellwork small enough while keeping it functional had been quite the task, but I’d been working on them diligently for months now. Much like the enchantments I’d designed to take Grandfather’s place, there was no way to be sure the scrying orbs would work without actually testing them, and I couldn’t do that with my singular mind.
But a colony of magical ants that specialized in divinations could. The orbs held themselves off the ground, only an inch or two, and the ants climbed up and swarmed them so thick that I could no longer see the mirrored surfaces. Only the fact that mana swept through them told me that the gestalt had activated the orbs, and even that wasn’t enough to confirm if everything was working properly.
“Well?” I asked after a minute.
‘The design is functional,’ the gestalt projected into my mind. Without Querit—a being that had no mind to connect to—here, there was no need for them to use physical words. ‘With these, we shall see farther than ever before. Soon, there will be nowhere that escapes our sight. Wherever invaders think to hide, we shall find them.’
“Good. That’s exactly what I need you to do.”
Ammun himself was trapped up on one of Manoch’s moons right now, but that wasn’t stopping the people running his army from continuing his campaign against me. Of course, they were a lot less threatening without their lich overlord, but there were still thousands of them. Keeping them off my island was high on my priority list, especially with them knowing where my family lived.
“Any movement up on Yulitar?” I asked.
‘This being that you claim is up there continues to block all attempts to scry on it,’ the gestalt sent. ‘We know of its movements only in the places we cannot look, and while the ultra-long-range scrying mirror you gave us works, a single mirror is not enough to keep track of the entirety of the moon’s surface. Nor would we have the mana to scry so much land so far away.’
I frowned. “I’m still working on it. We probably won’t ever be able to pierce Ammun’s scrying wards, but I think I can streamline the cost with these new lossless enchantments.”
Surprisingly, the gestalt had proven completely incapable of mastering lossless casting. Something about the way their mana functioned as a collective consciousness ran counter to the technique in a way that we hadn’t quite been able to figure out. Whenever they’d tried to use it, any ant involved in the spell had been disconnected from the gestalt. That had caused several splinter consciousnesses to form that the main entity had needed to excise.
It hadn’t taken them long to deem even practicing lossless casting too dangerous to continue, despite the potential gains. As inconvenient as that was, I couldn’t blame them. If I’d been forced to cut out part of my body every time I cast a spell, I would have stopped, too.
“No signs of anything new being built up there?” I asked.
‘Nothing in any area we’ve been able to see.’
That wasn’t a ‘no,’ unfortunately. It was entirely possible that Ammun had set up underground where we wouldn’t be able to physically see him on top of using a standard set of archmage-level scrying wards. For that matter, it was possible that he’d figured out how to modify the ritual he’d used to get up there and was already back down on the planet, though I didn’t think that was likely. If Ammun had returned home, I’d never have gotten away with placing my mysteel generators in his tower.
“I’ll keep working on something else to make that easier. Thank you for doing your best with the tools I’ve created so far.”
The gestalt brushed off the gratitude. ‘It is little enough trouble. We are well supplied with mana and food and a single mirror takes an insignificant portion of our mind to direct.’
“Still, I feel better knowing you’re keeping an eye on things.”
I left then, stopping only to check on the peak once more before moving on to my next errand. Everything was still operating smoothly up there, much to Grandfather’s delight. It would probably be a few more weeks before he felt comfortable enough to truly leave the caldera unattended, but I knew he was looking forward to seeing the rest of the world in person for the first time in centuries.
My work on Eyrie Peak was done for the day, so I returned to the teleportation platform and headed off to my next destination.