Tiro hustled Oliver deeper into the house, hand on his shoulder. As they went deeper within the mana suffusing the air around them in a yellow tint grew in intensity. Wherever it was coming from, it was within the house, and they were drawing closer to the source.

"What's going on? Who's on my trail?" Oliver asked, as they walked.

"The Empire, who else?"

"How did they find me?"

"I don't know. Maybe you gave yourself away when you reached out to the university. Stupid move for somebody trying to lay low, by the way," said Tiro, with uncharacteristic savagery.

Oliver didn't quite know what to say to that. "I barely said anything," he responded instead. "I just said that I have a new theory."

They passed through several hallways. "The Empire has ears everywhere, and they're listening intently at the moment," Tiro was saying. "Or they might have somehow discovered and tracked your mana signature. They have a hound on your trail, after all. That's unusual."

A half-flight of stairs led to a partially-sunken lower room with steps lining all around the room leading to a small flat area in the bottom. It reminded Oliver of a conversation pit, and probably that was what it was.

They passed on through this room until they reached a second kitchen—an awfully expansive house for such a poor-looking neighborhood, Oliver realized—with a pantry at the back. Tiro opened the door to the pantry hurriedly, and yanked aside a couple of crates and a barrel to reveal a small door about three feet high with no handle, only a keyhole.

"Either way, we can't risk them finding you here. In you go."

He withdrew a key from the necklace at his neck which seemed perfectly ordinary and had no mana emanating from it. He inserted the key into the keyhole, turned it, and opened the door.

There was an intense pulse of amber mana from the keyhole which radiated out into the ambient yellow mana almost like ripples into a pond. The door opened to a dark space that absolutely couldn't have fit in the back of the pantry. An extra-dimensional space? How much mana did that cost?

Oliver stared.

"Get in," Tiro said, tension in his voice.

"Will there be enough oxygen? Enough air?"

"What? Just get in. It's perfectly safe. Hurry!"

Oliver crawled in, felt around and didn't feel a light switch on the side of the wall—but of course. Medieval world. No light switches.

"I can't see," he said, turning back to look at Tiro, who was preparing to close the door. The ambient light faded as he pushed the door closed.

"There's a torch in there somewhere," said Tiro in a rush. "And gods' love, don't cast any spells. The hound might smell them. And if they catch you, it'll be the rack for all of us, if we're lucky. And you won't be lucky."

And with that, Tiro slammed the door shut, leaving Oliver trapped in the pitch black in an extradimensional space with nothing but his own thoughts. It was quiet. Very quiet. He heard nothing but the thudding of his heart in his ears and the faint whine of his tinnitus.

Then he realized he hadn't had his system disabled again in the rush. He almost, just nearly cast the Spark spell just for a little light, but held himself back at the last moment. Whatever a hound was, if it could smell magic cast in an extra dimensional space, he didn't want to risk even the tiniest spell until he could be sure.

It wasn't that he didn't want these people to be given up. It was just that he felt like he knew what they wanted with him a little more than he felt like the Empire wanted him, and his opinion of them was plummeting precipitously as time went on.

So instead, he felt his way around cautiously, moving slowly on his hands and knees and feeling around him before he committed to any movements. He had a sense that the space was perhaps six by four by five feet tall, definitely not spacious by any means and not enough for him to stand.

There was nothing else in there with him, despite Tiro's assurances of a torch. The floor and walls did seem to be constructed of wood blessedly, the rough texture sparing him the disorientation of a sensory deprivation that had accompanied his trip through the void when he arrived.

At first it nearly got the better of him, the sheer closeness of the confinement, but after a few moments Oliver called up his system. It failed to shed any light on his surroundings, but it did give him something to look at, and he found that with a little experimentation he could command it to anchor itself in one place instead of following his gaze, giving himself something against which he could orient himself.

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He sat there for some time, watching the mana tick up and trying not to think of whatever could have been going on out there.

After perhaps twenty minutes had passed, he created a new timer entry to track how long it had been since he was shoved into this place. He had no way of getting out, so it was pointless since there was no way he could act on the information, but it gave him something to do and felt better than wondering how long it had been.

Oliver wondered how long the air in here would last. He tried to recall how many cubic feet of air an average adult male breathed in and calculated the rough cubic feet of the room, using his system spreadsheet as a calculator, but found that he couldn't come up with any numbers beyond somewhere between three and ten hours, assuming there wasn't magic at play.

After finishing that little bit of fiddling, he found himself staring at the mana column in his spreadsheet, watching the decimal number at the bottom of the column slowly ticking up. Apparently it only went to a new row when he cast a spell or gained mana; or, perhaps, other significant events which warranted a log entry in the corresponding row. Otherwise, it would remain displaying the last row and simply modifying the display.

It was moving up very, very slowly, relative to how much mana he'd just spent that day.

If he couldn't improve the rate at which he collected mana, it seemed he had two options, neither of which was necessarily mutually exclusive: steal mana from others—perhaps even the Empire directly—or find a way to use his mana more efficiently.

Would it be possible to cast the Spark spell in a tighter way if he somehow focused on twiddling the atoms to increase their rate of vibration, and thus the temperature of the area? What about simply lighting something on fire that already existed?

Eh. The latter was likely an optimization the people here'd already made. Spark wasn't exactly a fuel-intensive spell. A little flammable gas went a long way.

His ruminations carried his mind away from his predicament, and he allowed it to flee gladly.

—

Myrddin: the name flashed into his memory just under two and a half hours into his waiting, around the same time he was beginning to feel nervous about the air quality. The air seemed to be becoming a little tinny. Or was that just his imagination?

Myrddin was another name for Merlin, the more traditional spelling of the wizard from the legends, who was said to have finally died after being trapped in a cave deep beneath the rock by his student, Vivien. Or so one version of the legends claimed.

The irony of the situation was not lost on Oliver; at present, they shared a predicament.

Myrddin had another name in more modern retellings of the legend, of course: Merlin.

The more he thought of it, the more unlikely it seemed that the name was a coincidence. Either the system was choosing names for him from the cultures with which he was familiar that matched with names from this world, which he doubted, or there was a Myrddin in this world and a Myrddin in his own.

The more he thought of it, the more he felt like they might be the same person. It made a certain sense; there was nothing saying cross-dimensional travel had only just begun in his time. It could have been occurring for hundreds or even thousands of years.

He felt a smile creep across his face at a memory the legends brought back; Joanna was the mythologist, not him. She had books upon books of myths from all around the world; Japanese, Native American, Welsh, Chinese. It was she who'd first told him the story of Myrddin, during a night out on the town before they'd gotten married. They'd been engaged for nine or ten months at that point.

She'd been so enthusiastic. Her joy in things that were so completely impractical as lost stories of dead cultures drew him like a moth to a flame. It wasn't even so much as what she was interested in as just how passionate she could get about it.

There were many qualities attributed to the Merlin of legend, stories which seemed like pure flights of fancy until Oliver looked at them through the lens of his experience of magic. Myrddin, Merlin, could speak fluently from birth, it was said; possessed of the knowledge of demons; he was a shapeshifter. He aged backwards, born as an old man and growing younger over time. There were many tales and, as legends are wont to do, they often disagreed with one another.

The smile his memories had drawn to his lips had fallen away as the implications filtered through his mind. Most of the the legends agreed on one thing: though he was a man of great personal and magical power, Merlin confined much of his actions to influencing early British and Welsh politics, actions which would certainly potentially affected much of the political structure that became the foundations of European and ultimately western civilization.

But that was wild speculation, fantasy run rampant. Right?

—

At the four hour mark, the door opened again, revealing Arlo crouched before the door. "Coming out?" he asked, reaching out his hand to help Oliver crawl out.

Oliver did took it, pulling himself out of the tiny door, squinting as his eyes watered in the sudden light. Though he'd been looking at his bright white system for most of the time, apparently the light it created hadn't actually been physical optical input and his pupils hadn't been involved at any level.

By now, his nerves were frayed and his patience stretched to his limit.

"All clear?" Oliver asked. "What was that about?"

"There was a mana hound sniffing around," said Arlo. "We needed to insulate you in case they requested access to the manor."

"A mana hound?"

"You ask a lot of questions, eh?" said Arlo. Perhaps due to unfortunate manner of his initial acquaintance with Oliver, which had primarily been by means of Oliver's knee, he didn't like him and took no pains to conceal his resentment. Or maybe it was that Oliver's presence was endangering his friends and family.

"Need to know what we're up against," Oliver grunted in response.

"You go ahead of me here, we're heading back to the courtyard." Arlo paused, then went on. "A mana hound's a kind of mage whose path is based around tracking mana. Usually have to give up a sense or two to do it, too. Nasty pieces of work. You got to have something seriously wrong in the head to pull your own eyes out."