I used every bit of mysteel I had left to make the cage surrounding this room. There wasn’t enough to make solid walls of it, nor did we have that kind of time, but the cage was possible. I wrapped divination and teleportation wards around it, sealing Querit and myself inside, then I systematically rooted through his golem core for days.

In the end, as he knew I would be, I was convinced of his sincerity. This was going to happen, and if I didn’t survive it, Querit would be trapped in a mysteel cage forever. As a golem, he didn’t even have a mana core, let alone a way to modify it. Without some sort of frame to augment his abilities, he lacked the raw power needed to break through mysteel.

For the moment, there was enough mana inside the cage that he could probably find a clever way to escape, but that would get used up during the ritual and I was sealing the whole room off to block ambient mana from leaking in. What we took in with us would be all the mana we’d have to work with, and Querit couldn’t generate new mana on his own. The only way he was getting out was if I let him.

With the threat of our mutual destruction assured, the true work began. Two-inch thick sheets of granite went up inside the mysteel cage to give us space to write on. Elaborate ritual designs inscribed every wall, inlaid in gold, silver, cobalt, rubies, and pearl. Simple steel caps were inserted, temporary plugs designed to be pulled at the appropriate time, and more enchantments were laid down to keep me from suffocating inside an air-tight box.

With two weeks remaining until Ammun’s predicted arrival, I was ready to begin the process of advancing to stage nine. If I was successful, I would double my power. If I failed, the world would be left to Ammun uncontested, and I pitied the fates of those still alive at that point. Perhaps I would be reborn again in a few thousand years and could challenge Ammun for control of Manoch, but I doubted I’d be successful if he was given millennia to entrench himself.

“Are we ready?” Querit asked, drawing me out of my musings.

With a final look around, I nodded and we both took our places. The old way to do this required two archmages capable of using heavy mana while the ascending archmage delved into the Astral Realm. They would alternate roles, with one of them serving as the anchor and the other as the beacon. The anchor kept me from merging into the Astral Realm and becoming a being of pure mana, forever lost from the material world, and the beacon guided me back home once I’d completed the modifications to my core.

The anchor couldn’t take a break to sleep. Any slip up in their job, accidental or otherwise, would cast me adrift forever. The beacon, on the other hand, could simply cast out their signal at regular intervals and, eventually, when I was ready, I could follow it back. The two archmages would pass off the anchor role to each other so that they could rest and recover.

In this case, there was only Querit. As a golem, he didn’t need sleep, food, or to go to the bathroom. He didn’t get tired, his concentration wouldn’t waver, and he wouldn’t slip up. He was probably the only person in the world capable of serving as an anchor for the entire ritual. That having been said, being the anchor wasn’t an easy job. He’d have to contend with the shifting mana currents of the Astral Realm to ensure that the connection wasn’t distorted and snapped.

“Keiran,” he said. “Thank you for trusting me.”

I snorted. “We’re just holding the knives to each other’s throats. There’s not much trust to be found here.”

“No, I don’t think so. I don’t know everything that happened to you, but I know you have good reason for your paranoia, and that sitting here with me isn’t an easy thing for you to do.”

“It’s necessary, though. You’re right that without reaching stage nine, Ammun might well be impossible to contend with.”

That wasn’t to say I’d been planning to fail, just that the odds of success were a lot lower if things didn’t play out the way I was envisioning. With my core at stage nine, I could correct problems in the moment when Ammun deviated from my predictions. Going through this ritual was the smart move, assuming I was successful.

“Let’s begin,” I said.

Querit and I both drew from our sources, his being the quartz pedestal and mine the chunk of obsidian I’d fetched from my titan core. I’d installed it in the ceiling of the room, nothing more than a ribbon of gleaming darkness overhead that fed mana into the cage. Unless things went horribly wrong, it would be far, far more mana than I needed.

The anchor rune circles lit up around Querit and reached out to me. Instantly, the connection formed, binding part of my mind to this room. With that accomplished, I reached into my mana core and pulled it inside out until it enveloped my entire body. Then my shadow and I slipped fully into the Astral Realm.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

* * *

The first time I’d done this, I’d lost hours just drifting on currents in a world made of pure mana. It was somewhat like being underwater, but that was a wholly insufficient description of the sensation. If water was made of lightning, but the lightning invigorated instead of destroyed, perhaps that would accurately reflect the reality of the situation. Then again, perhaps not.

This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and I would have liked to enjoy it. I didn’t, for two reasons. First, and most obvious, was that back in my own world, time marched on and Ammun’s return drew ever closer. Time spent luxuriating in the Astral Realm was time wasted, and I couldn’t afford to pay that price.

The second and more immediate reason was that the Astral Realm wasn’t empty of life. They were somewhat similar to mana wraiths in a superficial sense, and every bit as hostile toward me as their counterparts back in the physical world were. Thousands of years ago, I’d arrived in the Astral Realm at the equivalent of shallow, beachfront water.

This time, I was in the depths.

My shadow swept out, carried away on invisible currents as it searched for threats, and I got to work harnessing the raw mana of the Astral Realm to shape it into a mirror of me. The amount I’d used to create my shadow at stage eight was a pittance compared to what I alone needed, and that was only half the equation. My shadow needed to create its own reflection, then we needed to join all four of us into a braided existence before following the beacon back.

For centuries, I’d considered this process and wondered if it was truly the way to achieve stage nine. Supposedly, we were one step removed from immortal at this point, a being made more of mana than of flesh and blood. Everything a mage did as they advanced in strength moved toward this ideal. Our mana cores were inflated in size, then our bodies were turned into living crystals. We wove mana into our very shadows and breathed life into them.

The popular theory had been that the reason we still aged and died at stage nine was that a quarter of our body was still mortal, even if it had been finessed into being a living mana crystal. If we could just find the next step, advance to stage ten, then we’d be truly immortal. If that was the case, I’d never found a way to move forward, and I’d started to wonder if we’d erred in our assumptions all the way up the ladder.

My reincarnation was supposed to be an opportunity for me to go back and experience it all again, so see it with fresh eyes tempered by thousands of years of experience and knowledge. I’d thought I’d find something we’d all missed the first time, some hidden route to true immortality. In that, I’d been disappointed.

Even now, at the cusp of molding my body into something that was more mana than man, I couldn’t see a better way than the one I’d come up with before I’d even started my journey. I was set to live for at least three thousand years this time instead of two, maybe even more, but it still wasn’t true immortality.

I reflected on that as I built my simulacrum out of raw mana, stopping occasionally to switch places with my shadow so it could do the same thing. Mana entities drifted past us, some ambivalent to our presence, others hungry to tear us apart. We killed what we had to and ignored what we didn’t, always mindful of our link back to the anchor. At long as that stayed firm, we wouldn’t drift off into the Astral Realm.

Time had little meaning in this state. I was aware that it was rushing by, but without the need for sleep or sustenance, it was difficult to keep track of it. It was on perhaps the third day, judging only by how many times Querit had pulsed the beacon, something finally took notice of us. It was long and sinuous, a sea serpent of unfathomable scale, so large that I doubted we even registered to it on its initial pass.

I watched it drift by warily, a body miles and miles long carried on the great currents of the Astral Realm. I’d never seen the likes of it before, and with any luck, it wouldn’t show back up again. Though the threat of astral entities was well known, fighting one that big was sure to be problematic. At the least, it could unravel all my work and force me to start over.

Of course, I’d never been a lucky man. The serpent returned a few hours later, this time swimming against the current to circle around us. Distance was a funny thing in the Astral Realm, but I got the distinct impression that just because it seemed miles away didn’t mean it couldn’t reach us in moments. Those eyes, each one fifty feet wide, peered at my shadow first before shifting slightly to look at me.

For long minutes it studied us while my shadow worked. We couldn’t afford to pause our weaving, not if we wanted to keep to our schedule, so I shifted myself between my shadow and the serpent’s gargantuan face. Watching its mouth drop open in a toothy grin was among the most terrifying things I’d ever seen.

The serpent let the current drag it away as it coiled in on itself to reorient its direction and I breathed out a metaphorical sigh of relief. Fighting something like that would have been disastrous, but it had apparently merely been curious. Hopefully, we wouldn’t see any more of the Astral Realm’s leviathans before we finished up.

It wasn’t until a few hours later that I realized the truth. We weren’t a curiosity to be observed. We were a meal whose location had been marked. My mistake was in assuming the serpent wanted to eat us itself. Why would it? We wouldn’t even be a morsel for such a being. Besides, in this state, we were just blobs of mana clumped together in defiance of the Astral Realm’s natural flow, no different than scooping up a mouthful of mana from anywhere else.

The serpent had no interest in us personally, but that didn’t mean we weren’t a valuable find. Maybe we were a good challenge, or just something of interest. Whatever its reasons, it became apparent that the only reason it had left us alone was to allow its offspring to challenge us instead – all hundred of them.