“Luin!” I shouted as I sat up. My hand went to my throat. The sweet taste of air lasted a moment before I noticed the lack of a furry blue body on the stone table I sat upon. I sat there starting where she had been the last time in silence until I heard the counter click once behind me.

Those bastards took her from me. They followed us out of town and waited until bedding down before attacking us. What the fuck did they plan to do to her? Then it dawned on me. What the hell have they done to her in the past year. I had died again. Another year had passed in the blink of an eye. I will get her back, I told myself. Then I felt a flutter of emotions, not mine. It was like I could feel a surge of happiness in the far distance. I pulled my shirt away from my neck and looked down at Luin’s Stigmata. At the center of the outline of Luin’s head was now the rune for four.

I stared towards the pull, my mind telling me it was to the southeast in the direction of Ray’tha Rise. I could feel Luin, and I had a feeling she could feel me. She was happy I had returned. Then the emotions turned to anger and rage, and I knew I had to get back to her as fast as I could. Could I rescue her? Did I have the strength needed to free her?

I jumped off the table and was out the door sprinting to the nearest barracks. I grabbed another pillowcase and piled in the food. I returned to the large bedroom and went through the closest again, grabbing an extra blanket.

As I opened the door to the courtyard, sheer wind and rain greeted me in large quantities. I poked my head out and looked up to see a streak of emerald green lightning dart across the dark sky. A mana storm was currently raging and covered the island.

I sat down in the hallway, my back against the wall for what seemed like an eternity. I tried to meditate, but the anger I felt in the distance kept pulling me away from my center. I checked outside to find the storm was still raging.

I left the pillowcase and bedding near the door and began to roam the hallways. I found myself inside one of the barracks with the mirrors and tossed myself onto a bed. Turning around, I starred towards the mirror and portal, lost in my thoughts. A while later, something in the mirror moved, catching my attention, and I jumped out of bed, looking around the room.

I looked under the beds and in the cabinets, nothing. I went over to the mirror and stared at it. Nothing seemed out of place. Maybe the stress of losing Luin was affecting me. I’ve never been close to someone before, and I’ve only known Luin for a couple of days. I didn’t understand my attachment towards her at all. Thinking about her calling me papa warmed my heart. Maybe the bond magic did something to me upon its creation.

Finding nothing out of place, I hoped through the portal and began checking the doors around the room, finding nothing new. On the last door, I noticed two of the same rune next to one another in the doorframe just before closing it. I constructed a dull light sphere, and it appeared in my hand a moment later. Huh? I could use magic on the island. Maybe I could make a gateway off the island now. I turned back to the rune to examine it.

The two runes were the same as those from the metallic ring from the mine. I cursed as I realized I no longer had the backpack with the notebook, both my gifts from Kiszo, gone. I made my way back to the fancy bedroom and found parchment and what seemed to be simple charcoal pencils.

Going back to the room of doors, I examined the entire doorway. The door had the same three distinct runes in groups of two running along the left side of the doorframe. The same runes I remembered back at the mine.

On the right side where the door’s hinges connected to the stone were three, let’s call them groups of chicken scratch runes or symbols. At the top of the door’s center, I also noticed two runes that looked vaguely like an open door's outline, and they mirrored one another. There was also an eighth set of runes at the doorway’s bottom.

I outlined the door on the parchment and copied the runes to the locations. I found them as best I could. Closing the door, I moved to the next one and did the same thing. I repeated this for each door and went back into a barracks.

Laying the parchments on the bed, I studied them. Every door had the same three runes on the left side. Almost every door had two of the same runes on the right, but never three. Thinking back to the runes above the doors, I went back inside and copied them above each door’s diagram.

The two runes above the doors resemble two of the chicken scratch runes on each door’s diagram. I was pretty sure whoever had created these doors used a grid system, and somehow, these doors used it. I just wish I knew what the runes meant. I stacked the parchment and rolled them up, and left.

Checking my magic map, I made my way back into the room of doors and entered the left-most door, memorizing the runes before steeping thought. I summoned the map, noted where I was, and willed the two symbols above the door onto my location.

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I did this with the other fifty-one doors. My map was now filled in with the dual runes around the outside edges of the map. With a bit of parchment and time, the runes seemed to go in order from the top left to the right and top left to the bottom. They weren’t the same runes from the counter on the spawn table or the rainbow tunnels countdown. I would have to ask about them another time.

One mystery sort of solved. I made my way back to the courtyard door to find it still pouring outside. I stuffed my notes into the pillowcase and began to construct a doorway in my mind. The first half clicked again, but nothing happened every time I tried to think of a location. On a hunch, I thought about the docks down at the beach and received the mental click I sought.

So was it a range or mana issue then? Maybe I didn’t have enough mana for the distance. Another item to add to the list to test or ask about later.

With nothing to do, I looked at my map once more and decided to check the rooms I hadn’t been to yet. Most ended up being bare or replicas of the other rooms. I found more barracks without the mirrors and holding cells not marked on the map. I wondered what they had used all the cells for. Had this been a prison island at one point? The system had mentioned it being a facility of some type.

A few hours into my hall, wondering, I found a door not marked on the map. This door was different from the others as it looked like a slab of stone inlaid into the wall with no visible markings. Everything I tried wouldn’t budge the door. I went to a closed room and broke down another chair to use the wood.

I jammed the piece under the door and heaved. The door moved a bit before the wood gave way and cracked. Pissed off, I tossed the wood down the hallway in anger. I turned to leave, summoning my map and putting a question mark on my location, when I heard a grinding sound from behind.

I spun around as the door began to slide up, and a small-meter-tall stone humanoid with odd-shaped hands walked through the door and down the hallway. I watched as the little stone guy bent down and picked up the broken chair piece and then turned around and walked back into the now open door before it closed.

Was that a cleaning machine? I went back and grabbed more pieces of the chair and began tossing them down random hallways as I made my way back. I had to dodge a line of three of the small stone figures on my way back. I peeked into the room to find lines of the stone figures standing in silence. I assumed a handful of empty spots belonged to the ones to clean the hallways. So that’s why my chairs kept vanishing in the hallways.

I tried to walk through the door, but an invisible wall prevented me from passing. A minute or so later, I heard a grinding chirp of a sound behind me and found one of the little guys holding a piece of the chair looking up at me with an emotionless face. I moved to the side, and it looked forward, walking into the room.

I watched as the piece of the chair turned to dust as it passed the invisible barrier I couldn’t get across. The dust fell through a small slit on the floor. I kept watching as the stone figure made its way back to the line with an empty spot and turned in place, and went still.

It was an automated cleaning crew. I wondered if the barrier dissolved all nonorganic items besides the stone robot guys. Are they made out of magic? Do they have cores? More questions to ask in the future. I watched the rest of them return one at a time with the trash I had thrown about the halls. When the last of them returned, the door closed. I opened my map up and changed the question mark to a trashcan symbol.

I continued to walk the empty halls looking for more unmarked doors. I walked the many lines of hallways that circled this edgeless place many hours later. I avoided the halls with trap symbols except for the hall I had fallen to my death. The golden door at the edge of the pit seemed to be fake and was placed to lure those hoping for riches to their death. With the entire maze and rooms now orange on my map, I headed back to the courtyard door.

The storm still raged above, but the anger I felt in the distance had disappeared. No emotions could be felt now. Maybe she had fallen asleep. I removed a bag of jerky from the pillowcase and used it to keep the door slightly ajar so I could hear the storm. I pulled the bedding down the hall as not to let the rain come in to soak it and sat down to meditate.

I awoke to silence. Getting up and stretching, I looked through the door to feel sunlight caressing my face. Excited, I grabbed my sack of food and bedding and ran down to the docks as fast as I could. I knew I had a few sea-worthy vessels left on the docks and hoped the storm hadn’t damaged them yet.

I was ecstatic to see every boat still tied down on the beach and the docks. I made my way to the end of the dock and jumped into one of the smaller single sail vessels I knew had everything intact from my previous examinations. I did a quick inspection and found it still in great shape. I untied from the dock and pushed off. Once I paddled out far enough, I raised the sail and pointed directly towards Ray’tha Rise.

With everything tied in place, I sat at the front of the boat and allowed the salty spray of seawater to splash into my face. It felt amazing. After a few hours, I heard the crack of thunder and looked around. I looked behind me to see a Flat wall of darkness, the occasional flicker of colorful light within the wall of clouds. I followed the wall to my right, and the wall kept going, curving further to my right until I couldn’t see the wall anylonger.

I turned around and did the same to my left. I was in the eye of a massive hurricane. I hadn’t even thought of checking at the top of the hill to check my surroundings. I had blindly run to the docks and pushed off. I couldn’t die by a Mana Storm again. I began to panic and did the first thing I could think of. I created a construct of wind that constantly blew in one direction to push the boat faster. Everything I tried failed. Nothing would mentally click in my frantic experimentations. I could only create a simple burst of wind.

I turned to look at the storm and could see it beginning to catch up with me. I began to form a new construct when the idea popped into my head. It took many tries, but it finally clicked, and I released it. Ice began to form around me in every direction. Within seconds a massive sphere of ice with myself at the center formed. The ice was two meters away in every direction. The meter thick ice crushed the top of the mast and back of the boat. I hadn’t thought this, though, in my haste.

I could still see through the crystal clear ice as the storm drew closer, the waves picking up, and the sphere of ice began to bob in place. The boat’s weight kept the sphere upright, but the waves began to turn the sphere in circles, and I began to get sick.

As the wall of the hurricane-sized Mana Storm passed over, the world went dark before my night vision kicked in. I threw up many times as the sphere began to get tossed around like a beach ball. I crawled over to the mast and used the bedding to tie myself in place. I closed my eyes and expected to wake up on the stone slab one more.