As the waters rose, the dwarves continued their work, keeping just ahead of the rising water at times.
-A Brief History of the Flood by Albert Moonsuckle
----------------------------------------
Kole lay on a couch in the study hall room while his friends trained around him. While to a casual observer, it appeared as if he was napping, he was actually hard at work. Amara had come through and provided him with a runic shield bracelet that morning and given him the emerald gem with the runic intent within for him to copy into his vault.
Copying the intent, which had the complexity of a first-tier spell was an easy task compared to the work Kole had been doing in replicating spell constructs from what at first glance appeared to be the mad ramblings of long dead wizards but were in reality highly complex ideas forced into the inelegant medium of language.
As such, he was nearly done when someone slammed a sheaf of paper on his chest.
“Wake up!” Runt said, sitting on the other end of the couch from him.
“I’m not sleeping,” Kole defended, sitting up.
“Sure,you aren’t. You’re ‘studying’ right?” Runt said, making air quotes for the word.
Kole gave up trying to convince her otherwise, partly because he was pretty sure she was just giving him a hard time.
“What’s this?” he asked instead.
“A report on Corbyn,” she said, “Also some more reports of weird incursions, another missing primal human, and some missing phase spiders.”
She gained everyone’s attention at that. Zale was sitting next to Doug, eyes closed trying to sense his Font as he too fumbled about mentally trying to access it.
Rakin had been in the sand pit, working on exerting control over the small particles from a distance.
“Where?” Amara demanded, from where she’d been tinkering on another device.
“The Hollow Peak—for the spiders. Orinqth, for the people,” Runt said, “There’s an Air primal missing, but people go missing there all the time, and it could be unrelated. There was, however, also an appearance of weird smokey vulture things. They were setting fire to the plains around the city and feasting on the charred animals that couldn’t escape the flames.”
“That’s horrible,” Doug said, “Did anyone stop them?”
“I don’t know,” Runt said, unconcerned.
Kole looked over his friends’ reactions to the news. All acted as expected—Amara eager, Doug worried about the animals, and Rakin a little bored—but Zale seemed off. Her brow was slightly furrowed in some internal contemplation.
“What’s wrong?” Kole said.
Zale bit her lip, debating one final moment, then said, “We could probably go there. Like, right now.”
“We can?!” Amara asked.
Zale nodded.
“I know of a door to Orinqth,” Zale said.
Now it was Runt’s turn to look excited, “You were holding out on me.”
“Obviously,” Zale said, dismissing Runt.
“Well? Let's go!” Amara demanded, walking towards the door back to their home.
“Wrong way,” Zale said. “Follow me.”
Zale led them out a side door of the room, through a seemingly random series of doors and short hallways.
“The space is weirdly compressed now that the Dahn pulled everything back in,” she explained at the absurd layout. “It’s easier to reconfigure it later if it keeps the same general layout but makes everything really tiny,” she explained.
Kole was only partly listening, instead focusing on the emerald in his hand. He was almost done copying the shield bracer intent, and as they were about to go somewhere where that might prove very necessary, he was keen to finish it. Unfortunately, he’d had to make a decision to make room for this ability in his mental vault. In the end he’d decided to remove Shield. He’d considered removing his blasting rod, with only space for four spells or rune patterns, it was best he not have two of the same functionality.
Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.
The barrier this bracer produced would be less of a hemisphere than Kole’s Shield spell, and the kinetic force of any stopped attack would be transmitted through the bracelet into Kole’s arm. Amara had modified her bracelet design to fit instead on a bracer to better support this transference of force, as her original designs had caused cuts on her arm as the bracelet had dug into her arm.
After what felt to Kole like a hundred doors, Zale stopped them.
“Finally!” Runt said. She’d been taking notes on their passage to better find her way to this door again in the future, and Kole suspected that Zale may have taken them the long way around.
“This will take us out into the cellar of a seedy tavern,” Zale told everyone.
“Do they know they have a portal to the Dahn in their basement?” Kole asked.
Zale shrugged.
“Can we wait a minute? I almost have this done,” Kole said, holding up the emerald.
Everyone agrees, and a few minutes later Kole said,
“Someone punch me.”
Rakin and Runt immediately moved to do so, and Kole had to jump back, empowering his bracer with the intent he’d just copied.
A foggy white translucent barrier appeared before him, slightly less transparent than his Shield spell, but far more repeatable. Runt and Rakin’s fists both hit the barrier at the same time, and Kole stumbled back as the joint force of their blows passed through his arm.
“Ow,” Kole said, rubbing his wrist.
“Aye,” Rakin agreed, rubbing his own knuckles. “I shoulda reinforced me hand.”
“Well, I’m glad you didn’t” Kole said.
Amara had told Kole the bracer would take about 4 Will to conjure, and he judged that to be right—not that he doubted Amara when it came to runes.
“Let’s go,” he said.
They stepped through the door into a dark room, Rakin and Zale taking the lead with weapons drawn. Zale had her rapier with her, but no shield or armor, while Rakin was essentially always armed and armored.
“Light,” Zale said from within the portal.
Kole conjured an orb of light into his hand, using the cantrip Glow, having left his new light rune device in his room.
The globe illuminated a wedge into the room beyond, showing a seemingly abandoned cellar. They made their way to the stairs to find the trap door up stuck. Exploring more, they eventually found a cellar door to the outside. This door too was stuck, but Runt, Zale, and Rakin together were able to force it open.
They all filled out and found that the seedy tavern that had once housed this cellar was now a burnt out husk, the building having collapsed in a fire and now was slowly being consumed by vines.
No one noticed their emergence from the cellar. The buildings on either side hadn't been spared from the fire, and they too looked abandoned.
“This way,” Runt said, seeming to know where she was, and where they needed to go.
She led them out of the alley, and out into a bustling market street, populated primarily by orcs, with hues from dark gray to light red. The buildings were all wood or mud brick, none around passing two stories, but looming over them all in the distance was the fabled Arena of Orinqth, temple to Ganik, the orcish demigod of competition.
The arena itself was massive, and unlike everything around it was constructed of black stone. To Kole’s disappointment, Runt looked briefly at the arena, using it as a landmark, and then walking the complete opposite direction from it.
“This way,” she said once more.
They followed her through the streets, the condition of the homes and quality of the wares on sale steadily declining. Kole began to sweat in the heat as the sun began to reach its zenith overhead.
They stopped only briefly to buy something to eat at a market stall. Eventually, the buildings began to thin. Dirt roads replaced cobblestone, and then tents replaced the wooden buildings. Contrary to what Kole expected, the quality of the surroundings improved. The tents were massive constructs of bleached hides, decorated elaborately with scenes of battles in vibrant color. Where the orcish people in the city wore modern clothing of woven fabrics, the little clothing the orcs of this area of the city wore was made of hide, leather, and bone.
They made their way through this area, and as they walked, the tents once more grew smaller and smaller, but they didn’t grow any less elaborate in their decorations, until finally, they could see the endless plains before them.
“What now?” Rakin asked, turning to the three girls.
Runt shrugged, gesturing at a burned patch of grass in the distance.
“The bird things were over there.”
Amara had out her latest version of her tracking device and was staring at it in thought.
“It doesn’t have a signal,” she said.
“We could wait,” Zale suggested. “Find a tavern broadcasting the hardball match and see if anything comes of it?”
No one protested, and Runt led them back into the city. She led them through the tents, and into a district where the ratio of orcs to non-orcs suddenly flipped.
“They aren’t going to be showing an amateur hardball match anywhere in Orinqth proper,” Runt explained. “They have standards.”
“Well, this is familiar,” Zale said as Runt led them to a tavern with a familiar sign of a griffin sitting in a nest.
They tried to walk in, but a human man at the door stopped them.
“Sorry. Adventurers only,” he said politely but firm.
“We’re students in the adventuring program at the Academy of Illunia,” Zale said.
“Then why are you here?” he said, not believing them.
“We’re on an adventure!” Doug said proudly, earning a smile.
Zale took a deep breath and blew it out slowly, reluctant to do what she was about to.
“My mother’s an acquaintance of Gimble in Edgewater,” Zale said, “Shalia? You know her?”
“Aye, I know of her, but I also know of her daughter, and you very clearly aren’t her.”
Zale let the illusion drop disguising her as a part elven girl, revealing her true coloring.
“Oh, Flood,” The man said, stepping back suddenly, but not reaching for his weapon.
“Can we go in?” Zale asked, “Are you showing the student matches? Our friends are competing.”
The bouncer looked inside quickly and then nodded.
“Of course, go on in,” he said quickly. “You aren’t gunna...”
“I won’t say anything to mom,” Zale assured the man, stepping past him.
The man visibly relaxed, wiping away sweat that had suddenly appeared on his brow. And once more, Kole tried to rethink his feelings towards Zale.
Is she worth dealing with and risking her mother’s potential wrath? he wondered, but as he watched her walk into the tavern in full voidyness, completely unconcerned with the looks she attracted he couldn’t convince himself otherwise.