[A picture of the same starry sky from the Font page, but with more colored lights randomly scattered on the planet.]
N is for the New Fonts, though they may be quite old, they range from the Wind to metals like Gold. We’d discovered the Fonts created by gods, but compared to those these seem at odds.
-Sally Rider’s ABCs of Magic
—
The illusion remained active for ten minutes before fading, the strand of control Kole had over it degrading until it fell apart in his mind.
They spent that ten minutes fruitlessly trying to pry open the door, as spiders came and went. There had been a noted loss of coordination among the spider hive, but this loss seemed directly tied to the size of the spider.
Smaller spiders roamed aimlessly, fighting each other if they got in the way, while the dog-sized spiders and up were still obviously searching for them.
In the first ten minutes, three hand-sized spiders—the smallest they seemed to come in and a particularly horrifying size on a visceral level for reasons Kole couldn’t articulate—roamed into the illusion, thinking it a pile of rocks they could build a web on. Each froze momentarily after failing to contact the expected rocks, and a quick boot stomp from the nearest hiding student was quick to end them.
Two larger spiders came in as well, crawling along the perimeter, searching for them, but not bothering to inspect the stone pile in the center of the opening.
When the first illusion failed, Kole recast it immediately and judged he would be able to cast it six times total, giving them an hour.
Why might they need any hour? Well, Zale was still unable to open the door to the Dahn. They all tried their hand at it, but no one could so much as make it budge. They even gathered the strong silk of the spiders, bundled it into a cord, and wrapped it around the door handle with everyone giving it a pull, but still, it held.
Three casting of what Kole had dubbed “Silent Image” later, Zale was ready for another attempt.
She looked around at her friends before gripping the handle, braced her foot on the pillar of stone Rakin had pulled from the ground to provide some leverage after some of his Will had recovered, and heaved.
The door moved every so slightly, and the sound of frantic discussions filled the otherwise silent ledge.
A sound, that would quickly draw attention.
Kole ran up to the door and looked through the crack to see Tigereye, Lonin, Underbrook, Donglefore, and some other faculty Kole recognized by face but not by name.
“Help us!” Kole shouted. “The doors stuck!”
Kole grabbed the webbed cord that was still tied to the handle and began to pull, joining in the effort with Rakin and Doug who jumped to it.
They felt a deep thud as the bulk of one of the professors joined the effort, pushing. And, slowly but surely the door swung open.
As soon as it was open wide enough for a person to squeeze—a non-Tigereye person that is—Rakin dove to the ground in front of the opening and raised the stone up to prevent it from swinging shut on them.
Zale kept the door in a death grip, sweat pouring down her face, and Kole moved to drag the unconscious mystery girl in through the doorway—though her identity was no longer unknown to them after sitting by her form for half an hour. Zale had recognized her as Shalin, the missing Space primal from their PREVENT class.
Once he had her in, Kole collapsed to the floor, exhausted.
“Spiders!” came Zale’s shout through the door.
While Tigereye couldn’t fit out the opening, his arm could, and as soon as Rakin had dragged Runt within his reach, he pulled the girl into the Dahn as if she were a child. Amintha came next, and Tigereye pulled her in just as quickly.
Doug followed next, having to duck his antlered head at an odd angle to maneuver through the opening—though the motion had a well-practiced look to it. Rakin dove in next, and then Zale vanished into motes as a spider lunged into view.
“Zale!” Kole shouted in alarm, thinking for a moment the spider had caused her to vanish somehow, even though he immediately knew the folly of the thought.
She reappeared a moment later in front of the door, just as the stone ledge holding it open gave way. The slamming door smacked her backside with a damped clang as it struck her armor, and sent her flying into the room to land atop of Kole.
“Ow,” they both said in unison and then broke into a joint laughter.
As soon as the door had shut, it vanished. The handle was all that remained, and it kept it its momentum as it flew across the room to strike a neatly dressed woman in the leg.
“Sorry Kelina,” Zale said from the ground, saying the name of her mother’s personal assistant.
The woman gave a long suffered sigh.
“Your mother has done worse, don’t worry. I’m just glad you’re alright.”
Kole didn’t think the woman sounded particularly glad. If he had to place a bet as to whether or not she’d ever been glad about anything, he would have put his money on ‘no.’
It was then that the professor noticed the identity of the first girl to pass through.
“Shalin?!” Tigereye said, “Runt?!”
“Two Amaras?!” Professor Donglefore exclaimed.
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“That’s my sister Amintha,” Amara said triumphantly.
“They need medical attention!” Zale shouted, her mind back on the matter at hand. “Mage slayer spiders had them held like Hawktalon!”
Two of the watching crowd closed in and started to tend to the trio.
“We must get them to the Glade,” the halfing male of the duo said. “Assuine’s power is weak here.”
Tigereye ran to a door on the wall and pulled it open to reveal a small closet. He pushed through the hanging clothes and the door beyond, to reveal a nondescript cabin.
“This is in the Glade!” he said.
The halfling gave a disapproving look and ran through. Tigereye and others moved to help bring the injured students out and into the forest beyond the cabin.
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Once they were all once more in the healing cabin in the Glade, Zale gave the professors a summary of their exploits, starting with their theory that the dungeon was connected to the incursion after learning the scalequines had continued to arrive while they were missing in the plains dungeon.
At this, Underbrook put his face in his palms and ran them down his face, “Oh gods. I really should have noticed that.”
Grand Master Lonin shook his head disapprovingly at him.
Underbrook caught the gesture.
“Hey, it’s not just on me. I’m pretty sure one of those reports you make me fill out had the details of the dungeons outlined in them,” he defended himself.
Then it was Lonin’s turn to look embarrassed.
“Ah, yes. Those,” he said. “I may not have kept tabs on the progress of the PREVENT class as closely as I should have.”
“Anyway,” Zale said, feeling no shame in interrupting the teachers. “Amara improved a tracker to find her sister.”
They recounted their failed attempts to find the door.
“We think that incursions were occurring all over the Dahn, basically all the time,” Kole said, jumping in. “Each time, a new path to Amintha opened up, and the tracker couldn’t handle it. But not every path resulted in an incursion—or at least, the Dahn dealt with most of them.”
“Explain,” Lonin said, jumping on the last statement,
Zale then explained the room with the soldier ants, and how they believed them to have been trapped inside until they starved—ate each other—and then starved once more.
“Then,” Zale continued. “Kole realized the doors must have been opening to common locations, so we placed a stationary tracker there and waited.”
She went on to describe their mad dash from breakfast that morning and then provided details about the camp Kole hadn’t realized she’d even picked up on.
“It sort of reminded me of the Midlian castrum camps,” Zale said, after detailing all she had seen to an interested Tigereye and a group of now very bored mages and artificers.
“The rampart, the tent layout, even the side. It was almost exactly two thousand feet across.”
“Did you see any signs the ant people were creating these portals?” Lonin asked, bringing the topics back in line with what he judged most important.
“I think these portals are appearing and congruences between the Material Realm and that strange place where we found the spiders,” Kole explained. “Whether or not it’s a natural effect or a deliberate one, I don’t know, but these ant people are trying to use them. We had the ice people show up in a freezer. And the scalequines used up no campus.”
“What does a dormitory have to do with a field?” Underbrook asked.
“That, I think, was the Dahn,” Kole said. “We never saw where the door opened to when the ant people came out, but when we went through, it was just outside the camp. I think the Dahn opened the doorway for us, and put it somewhere close. It probably opened inside one of the barracks tents. A barracks is, after all, a lot like a dormitory.”
“So,” Underbrook said heavily, “An enemy is mobilizing around potential portal locations. The prophesy is true then.”
“Prophecy?!” Kole shouted.
“Oh stop being dramatic,” Lonin chastised Underbrook. “It was a warning from Chancellor Mason. “When the first incursion occurred, and the adventurers were brought in. Zale’s mother—rather cryptically—gave the staff a warning that a large-scale battle might occur in the city in the near future.”
“That does sort of sound like prophecy, right?” Underbrook asked, turning to the students for support, where he found none.
“Let’s discuss this after we hear the whole story,” Lonin said.
Zale went on, explaining the raid of the road, and the gnolls raid on the caravan. Then, Kole described the transition point between what they thought was the dungeon and this other Realm.
He described the floating islands as best he could and the flaming orb within them. Then Zale took over again, describing the search, rescue, battle, and subsequent chase in a far more positive light than Kole felt the experience deserved.
“You say the illusion fooled the spiders?” Underbrook asked Kole when he described his new spell.
Kole nodded.
“Astounding! There must be some mental component to it since spiders do not rely heavily on sight.”
Finally, they reached the end of the tale, and the professors asked if there was anything else they thought important before they left to give them rest—with the promise that they’d have to write down their recollections later on the magic paper.
“I think I might have something,” Kole said before he could think better of it. “I think I know why all this was happening—the spiders at least, not the ants.”
When he received only looks of interest and not the dismissal he expected, he continued.
“I think the spiders were capturing primals for their connections to the Fonts. Each of the missing students was set up on some sort of bed with webs drawing Will from them. Amintha is from the Font of Understanding, and the spiders in that mountain seemed to act more like ants than arachnids. Shalin is a Spatial primal, and we saw the spiders teleport. Hawktawlon, and then Runt, are Bond primals, and—I don’t know—maybe that was the glue holding the whole thing together.”
Tigereye was nodding along at the explanation, and when he didn’t dismiss Kole’s theory at the mention of his own Font, he took that as—if not confirmation—proof it was plausible.
“I think you might be right,” Lonin said, after he too looked to Tigereye and received a nod. “But that is a topic for another day. We have much to deal with already. Before we go, do you have any questions for us?”
“Any news from my mother?” Zale asked, with some fear in her voice.
“No,” Tigereye said simply.
“But, I wouldn’t be too worried about her” Underbrook jumped in to soften the words of his hulking friend. “There is the prophecy and all.”
Grand Master Lonin sighed, and then said in a long-suffering tone, “It is not a prophecy, but… you are correct. I suspect she will be okay.”
“Why?!” Zale asked, desperate for any scrap of hope.
“Well…” Lonin began, and then turned to the other staff, hoping for one of them to answer in his stead.
When no one did, Kelina stepped into the group, from where she’d been standing on the side taking notes.
“When your mother told everyone about this… foretelling, she told the school to prepare for an attack but she said, I quote ‘But don’t try too hard. I have it on good authority that I’ll arrive at the head of a mighty army and save the day.’ End quotes.”
Kelina spoke in a precise and clipped manner, but when she quoted Zale’s mother, she did an impeccable imitation of her cocky and flippant tone.
Zale smiled at that.
“Well, that does sound like her,” Zale said, and visibly relaxed.
Kole resolved then and there to press Zale for details on this ‘prophecy.’
She must know something about it if that was enough to ease her worry over her mom.
“Anything else?” Lonin asked.
“So, I’m guessing we missed our last finals,” Kole said, in equal parts jest and desperation.
The room grew silent, and then Underbrook spoke in an uncharacteristically serious tone, “You’ve been missing for five years.”
“What?!” Kole and all his friends shouted in unison, just as Underbrook shouted “Ouch!”
Tigereye had smacked the smaller professor on the side of the head, and from the sound of the impact, not gently.
“Now is not the time,” Tigereye scolded him.
“I’m just trying to lighten the mood,” Underbrook said. “Finals were delayed, due to most of the staff having to partake in a search and rescue operation. So, good news! You get to compete tomorrow!”