The native Illusian population of Basin was predominantly orcs in the east. The center of the Basin had been arid scrubland. A great chasm sat at the center, and the few small rivers that formed from the accumulated rainfall disappeared into its depths Once the ocean levels rose enough to flow over the low points left in the mountains, great rivers formed, quickly rejuvenated the land. The chasm filled with water, creating the Great Plume Lake at the center. The Great Plume, a mystery until only recently, formed by the Avatar itself, trapped deep in the bowels of the chasm by the Hardune.

-A Brief History of the Flood by Albert Moonsuckle

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"That..." Amara began, looking at Doug. “Didn’t go super well for them. You four did much better.”

She then looked to Zale, holding her hand up to shield her mouth from Doug and attempted to whisper, “Are they not very good?"

“Hah!” Zale laughed, and Doug joined in. “They did great! I wouldn’t want to face four of Assuine’s Blessed in a forest.”

Amara didn’t seem to believe Zale and looked to Rakin and Kole for confirmation.

“Aye,” Rakin said reluctantly. “Those animal kids might as well of turned into blind moles for all the good they did with their shapeshifting.”

“They should have just grabbed the ball and ran,” Zale said. “Leaving three behind to delay. They didn’t know who they were up against, but they should have known no other group could have matched them in that environment.”

Doug nodded.

“I couldn’t have caught up to any of them, and I don’t think anyone in the class can fly,” he said.

“Not well enough to get through those trees,” Zale said. “There’s an air primal boy, Wentin, his skins very dark so it's easy to miss the blue hue.”

“Well—” Kole began, but Amara bolted upright, and jumped out of her seat.

“A signal!” she shouted, making her way to the door, only sparing a glance back at her friends.

They all pushed out their chairs with a loud screech as they stood. Zale fished a handful of coins out of her coin purse and threw it on the table.

Kole quickly did the math in his head as he saw the coins spinning.

“That’s way too much!” Kole protested, but Zale grabbed him by the arm as he tried to collect the gold coin she’d tossed out.

“Don’t be cheap!” she said, yanking him after Amara.

“Bah hah!” Rakin laughed, downing his weird mushroom drink before running out. Passing Kole up he looked at his friend and shrugged. “Rich girls.”

Outside, Amara’s common sense caught up to her eagerness, and she stood anxiously waiting for her friends. But once they were all out she started running through the streets, chasing the path as pointed out by her device. Their running caused quite the commotion, especially as people caught sight of Zale with her voidling completion, and she reactivated her disguise to make their passage slightly less noticeable.

The tracker was generally pointing back out to the plains, far enough away that it hardly shifted when they travelled perpendicular to the bearing. After a frustrating amount of backtracking out of alleys, Zale took the lead, retracing the path they took with Runt as their guide. Once they reached the tent section, they broke off once more toward the correct heading.

Amara was the weakest link when it came to endurance, and their mad dash slowed to a light jog by the time they reached the plains.

They jogged on, not in the direction of the burnt section as they expected, but into a section of tall dry grass, higher than even Doug’s antlers. Doug took the lead, the grass parting for him, only to be trampled down by the four following him.

“Motes!” Amara cursed—or at least Kole thought it was a curse. “I lost the signal.”

“I got it,” Rakin said, pushing his way to the front, “Follow me!”

“Why?” Kole asked, trusting his friend, but still wanting to know why Rakin was so confident.

“I can keep a bearing,” Rakin said.

Kole shut up and followed Rakin in what seemed to him to be a pretty straight line. Only after he turned back did he see that the path they trampled through the grass was a perfectly straight line. Better even than the progress from when they were following the tracker as he saw that in the distance their trail began to waver.

They continued blindly at a walk, slowing down now that they knew the portal to be gone. After nearly half an hour of walking, they came to a large, trampled clearing in the grass twenty feet across.

Doug immediately bent low on entering the clearing, investigating the ground. The crushed grass parted at his gesture, revealing the dirt below.

“I think these were those soldier ants,” he said, looking up from the footprint.

Despite their ant bodies, the soldier ants had humanlike feet, and had worn sandals. These tracks—according to Doug—matched those.

“What does this mean?” Doug asked.

“This plain must be similar to wherever another ant army outpost is,” Kole said. “It sort of looks like what we saw when we first passed over.”

The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

“Do you think they opened it on purpose?” Zale asked.

“Probably not? The birds flew out before, and I can’t see Anitha have worked alongside the ants to open this if she was responsible for the missing primal. My guess is that this is another natural congruency. Whatever is happening with these portals, I think they are naturally occurring to some degree. Maybe the empire forces are using the phenomenon to stage an attack, but they don’t seem to be controlling them—at least not yet.”

Doug checked the clearing, but found nothing else, only more of the same footprints.

“It looked like they formed a perimeter and then fell back through the portal here,” he said, gesturing to a line in the grass. “They didn’t venture out, just defended.”

“So, this is something they’ve seen before and have a procedure for,” Zale mused. “We should report this.”

Everyone agreed, but a tiny part of Kole felt remorse at the thought of turning this information over, but then the horror of fighting through a spider infested mountain came back to mind and that faded.

Yeah, we should definitely report this. He thought.

“Can you unflatten the grass?” Zale asked Doug, gesturing to their trail.

Doug looked and then grimaced, shaking his head. “Not after you guys did that.”

Zale blushed, and asked “If we were more gentle could you hide a path?”

Doug considered it and then nodded.

“Great, let's go out further into the grass, and I’ll open a door home. You can hide it and we can keep it out here for a while and check up on the portal.”

Getting no objections, Doug led them through the grass, walking slowly, concentrating hard to keep the grass away from the group as they walked through. He took careful steps, instructing them all to step only where he did, and Kole couldn’t help but keep turning back in amazement as the grass stood back up behind them.

After only fifty feet, Doug stopped.

“I can’t do any more. Is this enough?”

They all looked around, not able to see any sign of their path.

“One second,” Zale said, vanishing into black motes.

She reappeared a few seconds later, up in the air, her feet ten feet off the ground, and immediately fell to the ground, falling to her side in a roll as she made contact.

“Ow!” she shouted, despite the seemingly graceful save.

“I could see the clearing but not our path,” she said. “There are some other tiny clearings here and there, so this one shouldn’t stand out if no one sees the door.”

Zale pulled the handle out of her jacket and opened a door back to the Dahn. The door opened smaller than usually, just tall enough for Kole to step through with his head bowed while Doug would need to finagle his antlers through with concerted effort. One by one they squeezed out into an unfamiliar room, a large circle with doors lining the walls.

“What's this?” Kole asked, not recognizing the room.

“The Lemon Hall,” Zale said proudly.

“The what?” Kole asked.

Rakin groaned, and rubbed his face in dread at what was to come, while Zale smiled.

“It’s a liminal space,” she explained.

“A lemon what?” Doug asked.

“Exactly,” Zale said. “Once mom and her team had a lot of permanent door set up, they made a room dedicated to it. Someone—probably Uncle Tal—called it a liminal space and someone else—probably one of my parents—misheard it as Lemon Hall Space, and it stuck.”

“I like it,” Amara said, looking around.

“The pun or the name?” Kole asked.

“Both.” Amara said, firmly.

“Can you open any of these?” Kole asked.

Zale shook her head.

“No,” she said. “You can restrict access to people with less privileges than you when you open doors, and I’ve never been able to go through these. I only opened the door here now because this room has extra defenses.

“Who has more privileges than you?” Kole asked.

“Mom, for one, she has the highest. Uncle Tal is probably next, along with Dagmar. After that it’s the college heads. I’m somewhere around the level of a college head—depending on how mom feels about me on the given day. That’s why I could steal the doors Underbrook set up.”

“Steal you say?” Kole said, jumping on the admission of guilt.

“Borrow!” Zale said, blushing as she hastily corrected herself. “Its not stealing if I’m allowed to take it.”

“Sure it isn’t,” Rakin said, joining in.

“Why didn’t you do this before when we had the door in the dormitory?” Kole asked, changing the topic for Zale’s benefit.

“I... umm,,” Zale began, looking away in a different type of embarrassment. “Sort of forgot about it. I’ve never needed to use it before.”

“It’s fine,” Rakin said, in an uncharacteristic show of encouragement “It worked out.”

They made their way out of the room, the exit taking them straight to their common living space. Once they were all through, Zale closed the door, opening it again to the foyer of the Dahn where the defense was being organized. The Dahn had been partly rearranged, and now more doors lined the walls, some leading to halls with rooms for more private discussions, while others opened to disparate locations across Kaltis.

“This is still mind-bending, and I’m a Space primal,” Doug said, rubbing a headache.

“Aye,” Rakin agreed, “But yer a broken one.”

I guess that was all the encouragement he had in him for the day, Kole reflected.

Doug took the comment in stride, smiling, and they all went through.

A small illusion filled one corner of the room, with a group of adults huddled around it. When the five got closer, they saw that it was another Hardball match. In it, the Ice Picks were completely dominating another team Kole only recognized the faces of, but no names.

“Why are the matches so one-sided—ignoring terrain advantages,” Kole found himself asking.

“Seeded brackets based on the standing from last semester,” Tigereye said from behind, his booming voice causing Kole’s heart to skip a beat.

They all spun around to see the imposing form of their teacher, who’d snuck up on them despite his bulk.

“What bad news did you bring this time?” he asked their group.

“We don’t always bring bad news,” Zale defended. “Just... sometimes.”

“True,” Tigereye conceded. “Which is it today?”

“Medium news?” Kole tried, earning a small smile from the serious man.

They explained what they did, correlating Runt’s intelligence on strange incursions with missing primals, and going to the first one that came up that they had door access too.

Tigereye waited patiently, withholding judgment until they finished their explanation, with Doug’s findings on the footprints.

“That matches what we have seen elsewhere,” Tigereye said.

Kole relaxed internally at the lack of reproach in Tigereye’s voice.

“There have been occurrences like this all over,” He spoke in his short halting sentences, pausing briefly before deciding to share more. “We have connections with the major city states. Most are coordinating. These incursions are picking up in pace. Few have led to violence. Those that have seem to be mistakes. The enemy is not ready to attack.”

“Has anyone gone through?” Kole asked, then added hastily. “Besides us?”

Tigereye shook his head.

“Not yet. We are trying.” He said, then turned to Amara.

“Does Professor Donglefore know about your continued work with your tracking?”

Amara, who had been holding the tracking device, nervously examining it, quickly stowed it as if she could hide the evidence they’d just confessed to having.

“No,” she said quietly.

“Tell him,” Tigereye commanded. “He should make more.”

Amara’s shame quickly flipped to elation at the prospect her idea would be an innovation to her mentor and looked around the room eagerly.

“He is not here,” Tigereye added. “You can go find him now if you wish.”

She took off, not even saying goodbye.

In the end, they didn’t get off without a lecture. Tigereye cautioned them to be careful in chasing these leads.

“I will not demand you stop,” Tigereye said. “Shalia would not ask that of you. But I ask you be careful. Do not act rash because you think you are solely responsible for this.”

He gestured around at all the staff at work—those at least that weren’t watching the match.

“You are not.”