I was on the top of a tower at one end of a massive bridge. Below the bridge, a river flowed, brilliantly blue. I followed its course with my gaze, seeing it branch and bend from my vantage point. Several times, the river became a waterfall, and I was sad that I couldn’t see the beauty of the features from on high.

As I gazed, I noticed that the river seemed to be ebbing and flowing; one minute its color was more vivid, its banks overrun, the next, it was wan and slow. It seemed to be shifting back and forth too rapidly, changing every dozen heartbeats or so.

Oh. Not a river. The River. Magic’s lifeblood, pulsing through all the demesnes of gods and men. Despite myself, I turned to look upstream, hoping for a glimpse of a source that couldn’t exist. Above me, the River was much the same as below. The waterfall was majestic though, and scarcely two miles away.

If I were looking directly at the River, then where was I standing? I finally paused to take in my surroundings. The bridge under my feet was formed of some material like glass, but rougher. It seemed to be woven of countless threads, like a spider’s nest or a silkweaver’s loom. But when I stamped my foot down on it, it seemed as hard as marble. The bridge itself was built across the River on either end of a large mountain gap. A road continued down the mountain on my side, and on the other side it seemed to cling to the side of the mountain, never ascending but following the face around until it wound out of sight.

The land below the mountain was tiered. Each tier seemed to be much the same as the last, a repeating pattern until the tier frayed into cliffs and foothills at the far edge, only for a waterfall that led to the same tier. Up close to the cliffs it was lush and green near the river, though it faded into drier climes further from the river. If I squinted, I thought I could just make out a building of some sort, near the far edge of my tier. I wondered if perhaps it was my bridge, cast in the same mold just as the tier below me and the one below it seemed to be.

I snapped back to the stone room, blinking. The green light was gone, the vision just a passing memory. Azul was staring up into my face, and I realized I could feel a shiver of magic as he tried to work out what had just happened. Wist and Dav had abandoned their work to investigate as well.

“I...I think that stone worked some sort of spell on me,” I got out. “How long since I picked it up?”

Azul’s eyebrows furrowed. “A few moments. Maybe half a minute, maybe two? I didn’t set a timepiece beforehand.”

“That sounds about right to me,” Dav whistled. “I only had time to cross the room before you came back awake.” Wist nodded along. Azul waited briefly to see if anyone was going to translate for him. When nobody did, he forged ahead.

“I was watching the magic that time. The stone definitely worked some on you. Seemed like a vision-sending---”

“Yes,” I cut in. “It was as if I were somewhere else…but shouldn’t a vision-sending usually include an image of the sender? There was no person there that I could see.”

I took a couple minutes to explain what I had seen to my companions.

“Odd. It definitely should have had a projection of the spell’s worker,” Azul concluded when I was finished. “I’ve seen dozens of spells just like it but for small details. I could probably work this exact variant myself. But see, that’s what’s strange about the stone.” He stopped, squinting at the stone in my hand. “The spell it cast, it wasn’t as if it were enchanted into the stone. If it were, I’d have been able to detect it while inactive. But instead it was like it was cast by a mortal. There was no magic at all until the stone drew it in, right before casting.”

“Wait. Are you saying this stone is a person? A wizard?” Wist interjected. “Azul, that’s ridiculous. Nobody could retain their mental faculties while they were a stone.”

“And yet. That’s the only way I can describe it. It felt like my kind of magic. Exactly like it. As if there were another wizard in the room and I was studying his spell. Except there wasn’t. There was just the five of us, and that rock.”

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“Okay,” I mused. “Okay. But, the real question is does that information help us right now? We need to find our way to fresh air sooner rather than later.”

“Perhaps the other rocks…” Azul started. Dav interrupted, and I translated for Azul’s benefit. “Not a good idea. This time was just a vision-sending, but what if the next is also a secret wizard and it decides to turn this room into an oven?”

“We might run out of other options, Dav.”

“A tunnel we should plan before we dig.” Dav answered. I have trouble with his idioms sometimes, but I think it roughly meant ‘we’ll deal with that when we have to’. And he was right. We still had several unexplored options. Wist had covered two walls before my episode interrupted her. I moved to the first and began closely examining the places she had marked in chalk. Dav tapped my elbow and passed up a small jar, glowing brightly. Flameless light. That would certainly help.

Azul finished his sweep of the room. Of course, if the stones in this place were capable of casting spells without being enchanted, the secret doors might be too. But he was a scholar by nature, and he wasn’t about to make assumptions based on one oddity. After he was satisfied that no magics were hiding that he was capable of detecting, he asked me if he could see the stone that had vision-sent me.

I hadn’t realized I was still holding it. After a brief discussion, the four of us agreed that Azul holding it was not likely to be any worse than me holding it. He retreated to the center of the room and settled on the floor again, muttering something about trying to contact the wizard on the other end of the stone.

I had just finished examining Wist’s marks on the first wall, when I heard a sound not unlike rushing water in a trench. I turned around. Dav’s fur and feathers were being tossed by a powerful breeze, which seemed to be emanating from his portable laboratory. After a moment, he chirped in triumph.

Wist had drawn her striker as she turned at the sound, and Azul had apparently seen what Dav was doing and was unconcernedly muttering. I think he was actually speaking to the stone itself. Wist relaxed slowly, stowing her striker as she realized what had happened. Then, hope crossed her face as she turned towards Suti, still resting on the folded bedroll on the table. It took a few seconds before the breeze was strong enough to jostle the little cloudsnapper’s gossamer wings, but as it did, her gill flaps started to work harder, and her eyelids cracked open.

“Wisteria?...” Suti whispered, then stronger. “Hughbert? Davin? Azul?”

“We’re all here,” Wist answered, hope swapped for relief. “All alive, mostly unhurt. We were worried about you, Suti.”

“Hrrrn.” Suti managed. Unlike Dav, she felt perfectly comfortable speaking in the trade tongue. I suspected that cloudsnappers didn’t “speak” in quite the same way as ground-bound peoples. It seemed to be a quirk of their native magic.

“Suti,” I offered. “We’re underground. Try to stay calm. We haven’t found a way out just yet, but we’re working on it. Dav managed to…what did you end up actually doing, Dav?”

“Derivation of a tornado-in-a-jar.” Dav replied, humming proudly under his words. “I just…scaled down the force quite a bit. It’s introduced clean, moving air to the room. A bit of moisture too. Not a rainstorm, but if it were cold enough it’d be misting.”

“Perfect. How much of it do you have?”

“What I mixed up should last about two hours. I could mix the same formula…” He checked his notes, written on the floor in charcoal. “I have enough here for three more doses. I can maybe stretch it a bit, but if I use too little, I risk the effect becoming unstable.”

Okay, I thought to myself. We have two hours of good air and Suti being healthy. We have are some suspicious sounding spots on the walls. We have a rock that may also be a wizard, a wizard who cannot sense any magic in this place. And we have several stow-holes with unknown symbols marked on them, along with a set of tools that have no clear relationship to one another.

What was the purpose of this room originally? It feels like…

“Crap,” I said aloud. The others all turned to look in my direction. “I just realized,” I explained, “What this room reminds me of. I don’t know why I didn’t notice it sooner. It feels like when a Fragment marks its territory. Pointless, endless tests and trials. Rooms with no purpose. Puzzles that are at once nonsensical and clever. That’s why there aren’t any doors. That’s why this table makes no sense, and these tools seem put here just to keep us guessing. That’s why there aren’t any chairs, and all the writing is hidden inside boxes grown out of the walls.

“I think we’re in a Dungeon.”