[A picture of a mountaintop with a cutout showing the city of Hollow Peak within. Above the city floats a black orb symbolizing the Primordial of Space that resides there.]
P is for Primordials, the Fonts manifest in the realm. Some exist in harmony while others overwhelm. If people or beasts can live alongside them for years or decades, then primals may crop up in their children somedays.
-Sally Rider’s ABCs of Magic
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“What can it do?” Kole asked after a long silence.
“Oh, well, it’s the same as yours, but more efficient,” Amara said.
“Which reminds me! I have a new one for you. I got the Will cost of the blast down to 2 Will. It’s a tiny bit less powerful, but more efficient overall.”
She put the rod into the holster and went over to a stack of what Kole had thought to be dowels, but were actually finished blasting rods. She dug through the pile, muttering until Gus jumped down, dug through the pile, and pulled one out.
“Here,” Amara said, thrusting the rod at Kole. “I have the new intent somewhere. It shouldn’t take too much to modify the old one to work for this one.”
Kole looked from his full hands to the rod, and back.
“Oh! Sorry!” Amara apologized, quickly taking all the items from Kole and putting them back into the pouches.
After his hands were cleared and Amara had found the gem with the rune intent he needed, Kole spotted something familiar.
“What’s that?” Kole asked, pointing to a device that looked like a scaled up tracking rune.
“That’s the tracker I made to try to find you,” she said casually.
“You made a tracker to find us?”
She nodded.
“It didn’t work—or well, it worked as well as the one I made to find Anitha, which makes sense if she was captured by those spiders. I took it back out last night and have been working on it more. Now that I know she was taken to some some pocket realm through the Dahn’s doors, I can refine the design so we can go looking for her.”
She made eye contact for the first time since he entered the room, and the lost all the confidence she’d built up during her detailed explanations of her passions.
“If you’re still willing to help look that is,” she added.
Kole thought over what they’d been through and what he’d said he’d help with.
He’d committed to helping her before he know the extent of it all and since then they’d all agreed to leave it to t he school’s staff. But, he found that he didn’t really care about those developments.
The school’s tried to help, but haven’t actually made any progress.
He’d had faith in Zale’s mother and Tal to find a solution, but now they were missing. Maybe even missing in search of Kole and his friends. It seemed that he and his friends were the only people making any progress towards finding the missing students and they’d stopped actively trying.
It’s almost as if the Dahn is trying to push us onto this task. The thought, originally meant as a jest took Kole aback once he considered it.
Could that be?
He realized then that he’d never answered Amara.
“Of course, I’ll still help, and I think everyone else will be willing to as well, once we talk to them about it at least.”
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It didn’t take much to convince Amara to go get dinner with Kole. On the way, he learned that Professor Donglefore had arranged for food deliveries to Amara’s workshop when he learned she’d been neglecting meals.
“He said I was ‘one of those people,’” she explained. “It sounded like a bad thing, but he was smiling, so I don’t know.”
“What about classes?” Kole asked. “Are you going to be in trouble for missing so many?”
“I’m… not sure. Professor Donglefore would have said something if I was in trouble. Wouldn’t he?”
Kole saw her absolute faith in her mentor warring with the sudden thought she might be in danger of losing his mentorship. How she’d not thought about this over the past month he couldn’t believe.
“You should probably ask him about that the next time you see him,” Kole suggested.
Kole found Rakin waiting impatiently outside the martial hall. The dwarf looked irritated as usual, but Kole thought that just maybe it was less than normal as he reflected on Zale’s words.
If this his how he treats his friends, I wonder how he treats his enemies. He wondered, but then scenes from the battle against the ice people came to mind and he thought that maybe he already knew the answer.
“Finally,” Rakin said when Kole and Amara got near.
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
“I don’t actually think I’m late,” Kole said, looking at the setting sun to gauge the time.
Amara pulled a small device out of her pocket, checked it, and said the time confidently,
“6:05”
“Alright, so I’m not that late,” Kole amended.
“Nice doohicky,” Rakin said, “Can you make one for him?”
“Of course!” Amara said with excitement, “I just need a gem fragment. There’s a new method of creating clocks that use the internal structure of the gem used to store Will as the means of keeping track of time!”
Kole cut her off before she got too excited, “I don’t think I could afford that. How did you?”
“I said I needed it to time experiments so he provided me an additional gem,” she said, a little deflated at the lost opportunity.
Kole reached into his money pouch with the same forlorn regret he had whenever he had to spend any amount of coin but then had a revelation.
I missed four weeks.
He did some quick mental math. With the return of his gold from the ink, the magic spellbook replacing the need to buy the expensive ink altogether, the free room in the library, and the missing month of, well, existence, he could now afford his expected expenses for the remainder of his first year.
With less regret than he’d felt in a long time, he placed his 10 bits on the counter and walked in to enjoy a meal, vowing not to overeat to get his money’s worth—though he was still going to sneak as much food out as he could, just because he was no longer destitute didn’t mean he needed to be spendthrift.
“What’s she doin here?” Rakin asked in a hushed tone, pulling Kole from his thoughts after they’d gotten their meals.
He looked up to see Zale, sitting alone at a table, in her natural voidy state with her hair done up in an overelaborate fasion and dressed in a fancy dress Kole would have guessed was classified as a gown, but he admitted he didn’t know what made a gown different from any other type of dress.
They went up to her table, and Rakin spoke first.
“What’s wrong? What are ye doin here?”
She looked up, surprised to see them, the whites of her eye’s having veins of black in them the same way a non-void person’s would be red.
“Oh nothing,” she said sullenly. “Harold had to cancel last minute. Something important came up and he had to reschedule.”
“What came up?” Kole asked.
“He forgot he was going to help Gray with something,” she explained with a sigh. “He said it wasn’t his business to share but that he’d completely forgotten when he’d made plans and that we should reschedule.”
“Well that sounds like a load of mole shite,” Rakin said and Kole found himself agreeing.
“I don’t know why you don’t like those guys,” Amara said between mouthfuls of food. “They seemed nice enough. They helped me look for you guys when I used my tracker.”
“They did?” Rakin and Kole asked in unison.
Amara nodded.
“Yeah, and we fought these weird snake hyena things in the Dahn. It was crazy.”
Amara told them about her adventure with far less enthusiasm than she’d explained the effects of moisture content on the material properties of wood, telling the story between bites as if it were a chore.
Harold had recruited Amara to help search for them once it was clear they’d been missing—Amara wasn’t sure how long that’d been after the actual incident. She’d begun to create a tracker for Kole, using the blasting rod she’d created for him as the target of her tracker.
When they’d gone to look, Harold’s whole team had joined. The tracker jumped around a lot as usual but ultimately led to the dungeon room.
It was only when she reached parts where her rune knowledge was relevant that she put any semblance of excitement in her voice.
“I realized I could block out that signal to the tracker by scribing a rune on the floor outside the room to block the connection. It would only last a short while, but it led us deeper into the Dahn.”
They’d snuck past some barricades and guarded halls until they’d reached a deserted training hall at the end of another abandoned dormitory.
“Then the hyena monsters attacked. I had a blasting rod and killed one, but Gray’s team killed most of them. By the time we’d killed them all, the trace blocker had failed. We tried again through the weeks, but they kept leading us to old sections of the Dahn and we didn’t find anything before the rune ward failed. Eventually, we got caught reapplying the runes and were forced to stop our search.”
“Did you tell anyone about the hyena snakes things?” Zale asked.
“She said snake hyena,” Rakin corrected, earn an eye roll from Zale.
Amara nodded.
“After we got caught, we told Tigereye about them but they couldn’t find the hall we’d taken.”
“Hmmm,” Zale said, thinking. “I heard about other weird animals showing up while we were gone but not about the snake hyenas.”
Zale emphasized “snake” and glared at Rakin challengingly.
“The scalequines came back, and now the Glade has a big herd. Then there were some weird rabbit-looking things.”
“Do we think this is related to our recent experience?” Kole asked, more himself than the others, because he continued without giving them a chance to answer. “It kind of fits. There were the goblin rats when we faced the goblins in the dungeon, then the ice people before the blizzard. There were weird fish in a classroom before we went on the ship and these scalequines could have lived on a prairie like we traveled through. Every time the dungeon shifted locations, the creatures that showed up sort of fit the environment we saw. Then, when we were gone for four weeks and the dungeon was never shifted, the creatures that arose all still fit the prairie theme.
“The place we went to—with the weird floating stuff in the sky. That could be where all the creatures are coming from. The environment matched the prairie of the dungeon, and somehow we crossed over while inside. But why? Was the Dahn leading us there? Or is it some coincidence?”
Kole’s explanation was met with silence, as his friends absorbed the idea.
“We should probably tell someone… right?” he asked, looking around.
Zale bit her lip as she wrestled with something.
“No,” she said after a while.
“No?!” Rakin asked, staring at Zale in shock. “Why not? I mean, I’m okay with it, but I’m surprised ye are.”
“Mom’s gone. So is Uncle Tallen. The staff remaining are trying, but they haven’t gotten close to finding the missing primals. Whether or not it’s our own doing or the Dahn’s nudging, we found Hawk Talon. If we tell them about this discovery, they might turn the dungeon off entirely, then we won’t have a way to find Amara’s sister.”
They debated the pros and cons of bringing in the school’s faculty but ultimately decided to wait. The tracker always led to the dungeon, and Amara had been avoiding that section and searching for another path. They could always try to find a way past the team guarding the door if their attempts failed—so long as the dungeon didn’t shift away.
“We can ask Harold and his team to help us search!” Zale said after they decided to keep their theory a secret—for the time being at least.
“No,” Rakin and Kole said in unison.
“Why not?” Zale asked, growing a little heated.
“I don’t trust em,” Rakin said, and Kole nodded in agreement. “I don’t want to fight with people I don’t trust.”
Zale didn’t press the issue. Rakin’s opinions of her old friends were a well-debated topic, and his point was valid. Instead, she looked sullen, looking down at her outfit and remembering why she was there in the dining hall at all.
“So,” Kole asked into the silence. “What were you planning on doing tonight? Maybe we could all go together?”
Zale looked up, excitement in her eyes replacing the meloncoly.
“We were going to a play!”