People were shouting, spells were flying – mostly detection spells, but also attacking spells.

What kind of idiot was letting loose attacking spells?!

Then there was a resonating clap, and a surge of powerful mana rippled over the room. Everything twisted and spun.

Was… Was that Bohn?

To my surprise, the massive spinning and ripping effect actually helped. Sure, for a moment, it made everything more chaotic, but once the spells that people had been firing off were done, they were spinning too much to keep attacking.

“No attack spells!” roared a voice. That was definitely Bohn.

Reality reverted, and I glanced around, blasting all of my sensory spells at full strength.

I was immediately assaulted by the aura of several hundred mages, none of whom were weak.

Blood was filling the air, those who’d been caught up in the attack spells released.

Powerful abnegation mana charms on those from Delitone, with their vault in the back.

And…

There, for just a moment, I caught the flickering of a spatial distortion, then it was gone.

“I’ve got to help,” Kene and I said at the exact same moment, before nodding to one another. I teleported in the direction of the warp, and then Maylee stepped into my path.

“You’re a diviner, can you find the thief?” I asked, stretching my mana senses as far as they could go.

“No,” she said. “He’s using some sort of cloaking device. But you shouldn’t go after him, he was able to steal from Kamal twice now!”

“No time,” I said, teleporting out of her way. I heard her cursing behind me for a moment, but I was chasing the trail of spatial distortions.

The thief had done something similar to my trick that had let me flee the drakes, setting up a trail of retreat points, but they hadn’t used spatial anchors. These were something else, something I hadn’t encountered before, and if I hadn’t been pumping power into both Analyze Space and the lesser-known Sense Directionality spell, I never would have been able to pick up on them at all.

The thief’s strange magic might have let them set up an escape trail, but their teleport was still limited to roughly thirty feet per jump, with the odd instance of a hundred or so.

I was gaining, slowly but surely.

Then a black cat strolled out of the crowd, and shadows exploded through the hall. The shadows flooded the entire area with lunar mana, and worse, some sort of knowledge-based spell effect seemed to be dampening my mana senses as well. Even with power flowing into my spells, it was dampened.

Several people let out muffled curses – including me – and then there was a fumbling as a few light spells appeared, but were snuffed out by the darkness.

Then there was an overwhelming explosion of light from someone filling the entire space, so bright that it forced me to shield my eyes. When I opened them again, the darkness had evaporated. The cat was gone now, too, as if it had been a very part of the darkness itself.

Even as I blasted my spells at full power again, looking for the trail, I realized that I’d seen it several times before. It must have been the bond mate of the thief!

Worse, whatever darkness spell the cat had used, it had wiped out the anchors I’d been following.

Dusk clambered out of my pocket then, peeping sleepily, and asking what the commotion was about.

“Did you seriously sleep through that?” I asked, and she shrugged. I shook my head. All of this was a distraction, and I didn’t – couldn’t – want to deal with it.

I didn’t love Kamal or anything, but the thief had targeted several people, including the entire stock of rice on the ship here, and their cat had watched me several times.

If they tried to kidnap Dusk…

Then I felt it. There was the faintest tilting of space, the blanket of reality tilting upwards, towards the roof.

Of course it was the roof.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

I tried to teleport up there, but the dense stone was far too much for me to teleport through. With a curse, I whipped my head around wildly, looking for a stairwell.

There!

I Foxstepped over to the stairwell, then looked up to the first landing, where they changed direction.

Teleporting platform to platform let me blast up all three stories in moments, but the spatial magic on the roof was growing more intense. It wasn’t enough that my normal mana senses could pick up on it, but it was probably being detected by those who also had Analyze Space now.

Sure enough, a moment later, I felt people starting to run up the stairwell.

I appeared on the top floor and looked around wildly.

No ladder, not anywhere I could see. Primes, why wasn’t there a ladder?

Then I looked out the window and had a devilish idea.

Teleporting through solid matter was difficult, almost impossible for me right now.

But one Pinpoint Boneshard later, and I suddenly wasn’t needing to teleport through solid matter.

I teleported into the open air, caught myself with Immovable Lock, and then teleported up onto the roof.

I looked around, but I couldn’t see anybody. I poured mana into my sensory spells, looking for a flicker, but then there was a surge of knowledge and lunar mana, and my spells started to distort and warp, the feedback they were giving going completely chaotic.

It was probably the thief’s cat again. At least this time it wasn’t mixing in a dome of shadows…

“I know you’re here,” I said. “Just come out and we can talk about this.”

There was an increased freneticism in the building of the spatial warp, a stretching of the power as the veil began to flicker that I could sense even through the disruption in my mana senses. They were trying to complete their spell before anyone got here.

I wasn’t sure how long this spell took to cast, but given the way the mage had been building power for over a minute, this had to have some degree of ritual to it.

Then Kamal soared out of an open window, wings flaring out behind him, traced with a burning crimson light. He held out his hand, and feathers danced above his palm, then they flooded the air around the entire roof. Burning life-fire feathers swirled in every direction, and even as I conjured my Briarthreads to slash them apart and defend myself, I felt the feathers biting into the power of the spell in return, sapping away at my life mana.

“Can you not?!” I shouted at Kamal as the feathers continued to land on the roof.

“Just leave!” Kamal shouted as his feathery firestorm continued to spread across the roof. They’d managed to get even stronger from the time we’d sparred on the boat, and I had no doubt he’d broken through to third gate as well.

But why in the name of the sealed primes was he attacking me?!

I took a moment to breathe, and realized it was actually obvious. He was looking for the thief by searching for the area his feathers couldn’t touch, since the thief would presumably have defenses set up on their own.

A scorched earth policy, and if I got caught in the crossfire, it was my own fault for being stupid and not running.

The same moment I had that thought, the entire roof was swamped in shadows again. Kamal shouted a curse, and cut off his barrage of feathers.

“Primes,” I swore under my breath, though a part of me wondered if this was actually a blessing in disguise. If Kamal’s assault had kept up, I wasn’t sure how long my defenses would have been able to hold out. I didn’t want to become a barbecued Malachi.

Dusk let out a soft wind-in-trees noise, and I felt the flowing of a complex spell. Her mana composition shifted, changing to that of a pixie’s, and then light blossomed around her. Literally, blossoming in the shape of a flower, like a prismatic rose of ten thousand colors.

The petals swirled off the rose as if carried on a windstorm, and the darkness abated ever so slightly around me.

I cut off the power to my sensory spells – they were taking too much power for too little benefit, with the mana sense disruption spell up – and focused all of my power and focus on a single spell: Vampiric Senses.

With the surge of sensory enhancement, and the light of Dusk’s rose petals, the pitch-black sphere of power around the roof transformed, becoming more akin to that of a murky, yet moonlit, night.

“Kamal!” I shouted. “Light it up!”

“I don’t have light spells,” the prince shouted.

“With feathers!” I said.

“Those barely glow!”

I cursed.

“Just cover the roof in feathers!”

Kamal complied, blanketing the area in broad, fiery feathers that pushed the darkness back slightly, but not as much as it should have.

But it was enough for me. I spotted it then, a tiny gap in the feathers where someone had to be.

Overcharging my Briarthreads and clutching my defensive aura pin tightly, I sprinted at the space. As I arrived near it, the air turned to jelly, but Dusk shouted and released a sphere of her own energy, warping and pushing the effect back, not unlike when she’d countered Bohn’s power, or that of a spirit’s.

It was enough. I lashed my hand out and landed it in the space, and there I felt the surging and roiling of space, a spell almost entirely completed.

My eyes widened, and I did something very stupid.

I forced a spatial anchor into the person.

It wasn’t easy, and I wouldn’t have been able to make it permanent if I wanted to. It was far too hard to cut through the resistance possessed by another person, and it was made worse by the fact they were a stronger spatial mage than I was… But I was just barely able to force a temporary anchor into the space of the thief’s body.

Then, as the thief’s spell came to a close, and I felt space beginning to fold around their body, I cast Foxstep. Instead of targeting a location with my distorted mana-senses, however, I focused on the one thing that I could feel and sense – the spatial anchor that I’d just implanted into their body.

Space warped, and the nearly instantaneous warp seemed to stretch on for a thousand years.

My body screamed with pain. I felt like I’d run a dozen marathons without a break. Even with the effects of my harvesting spell and magister’s body, my life energy was drained, my second gate spatial and temporal mana totally tapped out.

A pressure built in them as they required more mana and energy, and I felt Dusk flow her power into mine. That alleviated the pressure, and I touched onto the pointer moss, the transivy, and the emperor’s tree.

I drew on all of them for power, hoping that it was enough. The moss ran dry first, and I was forced to draw more from Dusk as she emptied out her third gate to create more second gate mana.

The pain grew worse as my body cannibalized my life mana, all feeding into the Magister’s Body to repair itself.

Then the warp ended.