--- AENN, THE 34TH DIVISION OF KEEPERS ---
It was a day, certainly.
Aenn would never admit it to the other Keepers, but he found the average day to be… painful. It was almost like swimming through a pool of Arithren water. Sure, it was peaceful, but you knew that at any moment you might fall out and end up sprawled on the moist ground with the air knocked out of you.
Because even though average days were beautiful and serene, there was always the slightest chance that that would be turned on its head. This didn’t seem to bother anyone else. They all just went about their duty to the world silently.
Aenn measured the frequency again, muttering that these devices were always so imperfect. They left such a wide range for fault. How could he know if the portal had connected if the number he got was two thirds of a celestial unit wrong?! Sometimes his superiors joked that they should send him off with Tajan. As if no one else respected numerical perfection.
They were the types of people who thought the measurements were pointless. They were brutes, just here to fight any incursions. It was inelegant and absolutely insulting to his professional pride, but they were doing their jobs. Even if Aenn would prefer if they did their jobs a little more thoughtfully.
He’d lost count of the number of incursions that would have been caught early had he been on duty. The brutes managed to stop them eventually, but it was significantly more dangerous if they let an incursion continue past the two minute mark.
It was vital that this world in particular not have any of the true monsters escape into it.
Aenn peered between his glowing device and the enormous portal in front of him, glaring at it for a long moment as the dial slowly turned. He wasn’t entirely sure how the thing worked, but some mumbo jumbo with the movement of magical energies was involved. If he was being honest, he’d glazed past that part.
The dial finally moved the slightest bit, and in Aenn’s experience, that meant the portal was open now.
He jumped, pocketing the device and shouting to the other Keepers who were standing lazily at attention. The brutes stood up straighter, brandishing their spears and adjusted their stances—not that there had been anything wrong with their stances to correct in the first place, Keepers were a strict and disciplined group.
Aenn pulled out his own spear, remembering the thousands of past incursions he’d dealt with. There wasn’t anything they couldn’t handle. According to every guidebook and history of these types of things, the massive portal was predictable, constant. And most of the time nothing even found its way through. Gates were finicky like that. It was in their nature that you could never quite tell for certain.
But today, the thin surface that bridged this world and into the realm of connection rippled like water, the portal itself changing almost imperceptibly. Aenn narrowed his eyes at it, watching, waiting.
The tear in reality was massive, big enough that even ancient dragons could fit through it if they so desired. It probably wasn’t what one might imagine if told to think of a portal, or even a fully-fledged dimensional gate. It wasn’t anything like those. With a dimensional gate, it had a clear path forward and yet there was no way to see where the other side might take you.
This portal on the other hand was not only permanent and regularly shifted where it took whoever walked through, but you could see the other side. In most ways it looked more like a natural tunnel than anything, but there was a certain… impossible architecture past the rippling air.
The other side hardly changed much, it always resembled the crystalline tunnels of the Between realm. It technically did change what it looked like depending on what world it led to at any given moment, but Aenn only knew one Keeper with the ability to actually tell the difference in any meaningful way.
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The Keepers watched the portal, eyes narrowed and gazes ready. If they got the more sophisticated equipment out they might be able to tell which world it had connected to, and that would tell them a lot. But the last time they’d done that, one of the important pieces had been eaten by some kind of enormous slime monster. That hadn’t been a good day for any of the Keepers.
The portal rippled.
An enormous monster appeared. It was bird-like, with a wicked beak and oddly placed eyes. Its legs seemed to have too many joints or perhaps too few, and the sheen of its feathers almost made it glow in the sunlight.
Shards of crystal… The incursion was connected to Monori then.
Aenn shouted a formation to the other Keepers and they fell into it easily, hardly even thinking as they quickly rushed the disoriented beast. He was at their head, eyes calculating as he watched the monstrous bird. He didn’t know what the people of Monori called these things, but they had plenty of other monsters to keep it company. Aenn sometimes thought that the people themselves that inhabited that world must have been wiped out from sheer numbers.
But it was worlds like Monori that made guarding against incursions important. The Keepers couldn’t guard every portal in the network granted by the starstorms, and there was no way a division could be sent to places like Monori or Sireen, no matter how much the elders and Zolinal herself would rather keep tabs on those spots.
And so they simply did their best to keep the worlds from leaking too much into one another.
Aenn lept to the side, the other five Keepers scattering around the bird monster. It was large enough to step over them or even fly away if it wished. In Aenn’s experience, this kind of monster would always stay and fight if there was prey to be found.
Unfortunately, the Keepers didn’t look very appetizing to bird monsters, or most other kinds of monsters for that matter. There were only a select few who ate rocks and most of those didn’t really have hunting instincts.
Aenn stabbed his spear into the flank of the creature, but there wasn’t enough resistance for it to have penetrated the feathers. He flexed his soul as he pulled it out, hoping for some wildmagic—as he always did. However, as was just as common, nothing happened. The monster simply gave him a curious look, hardly even seeming to have noticed the stabbing.
He was already falling back though, trying to gauge the creature’s hostility. Many of the smarter ones tended to try and get back to the portal, unfortunately once they knew about it, it was the Keeper’s duty to eliminate them. The same usually applied to humans or bound races. But if something could talk, it got to have a chat with the resident elder first.
None of this variety of monster so far had been able to communicate—Aenn suspected they were all too dumb for that—but the Keepers still shouted toward it in various languages as they stabbed at it to see. Just because they couldn’t feel a Connection stirring to indicate a native tongue didn’t necessarily mean it couldn’t speak.
The monster roared after the third stab, this one finally seemed to have penetrated its thick feathers.
The Keepers switched tactics then from annoying it to distracting it, Rifiel, the one who’d managed to stab it, went completely on the defensive, dodging around with an impressive speed that was at odds with his heavy Arkorite body.
While the bird was distracted, Aenn launched himself upward, striking down through the thing’s neck. It wasn’t as painless a death as he would have preferred, but it would bleed out in minutes, giving them time to contact the resident elder about the incursion. The last one with something to fight had been over two months ago.
Aenn would be concerned about the system itself, but this portal was probably finally stagnating. That was for the best since it seemed to really like connecting to Monori. He couldn’t wait to be assigned to one of the smaller ones once this one dissipated.
He let out a long sigh, gesturing toward Rifiel to find the elder. It was better for someone who could use soul magic to be there when a monster died, the ones from Monori had a nasty tendency to send their corrupted soul into a new creature. While the Keepers and other bound races were protected from such things, there were plenty of animals on this island.
Snuff the wilds, for giving curses like this one… he glared at the beast as it continued to die. Every monster died differently in his experience, some fought all the way, while others were more like this one, pitifully fading away into the place beyond. Leaving the everything that was and returning to the anything that might someday be.
It was sad in a way, but mostly Aenn was bored with it.
He took out his device, watching and relaxing as the number slowly lowered. It tended to lose energy faster when something used the portal, and it would need some time to build up another opening. By his estimations they probably had one or two more incursions before this portal collapsed and half a year after that before it reformed on the mountain.
It was just another day.