Chapter 04

DEPTHS

PART 1

Releasing her grip on the mana she’d infused into the ground, Mara pulled her palm from the sand and stood up, now just an arm’s reach away from the bottom of the forge. Within half an hour, she’d gently elevated an entire hill beneath their feet, its smooth descent leveling out in the distance before rising to meet the coastline.

It was an impressive display of magic, doubly so as Jackle’s mentor had cast it without verbal or written components. Tearing his attention back to the task at hand, Jackle looked to the recessed section above their heads.

Mara, as usual, was already well ahead of him, scrutinizing the potential entrance above their heads. Aided by the ambient luminescence of Jackle’s bubble spell, both could see the slim groves on the surface outlining a door, square in shape and divided in two with a large circle straddling the middle.

“Interesting. There's not even a hint of mana in this thing, and its material composition is rather complex… I'd never think to bond carbon atoms like that...”

Mara's mutterings reached Jackle's ears to mixed comprehension, he’d like to think he'd misheard her, but at a deep level he knew she spoke with knowledge older than most countries, it was par for the course not to fully understand someone with that kind of vocabulary.

“Looks like there aren't any immediate traps… Though it's hard to tell with mechanicals.”

Whispering as she worked, Jackle watched as his mentor extended her sand protrusion into makeshift stairs, elevating her the remaining distance to the door and giving her tactile access to the entrance above their heads.

Running her hands across the surface, Mara circled her way inwards until she paused near the center, turning to her pupil with a gleam in her eyes.

“This right here is a prime use of that new spell you're learning, I hope you're paying attention.”

Punctuating her statement, Jackle watched as his mentor pulled back her hand and flicked a single finger upwards, expelling a beam of rainbow colored light from the tip of her finger, firing straight into a small notch in the door, too small for keys. On impact, it erupted into an explosion of colors and patterns and the beam itself began emitting an oscillating range of high pitched whines.

Within seconds of the blinding onslaught, a guttural click echoed from deep in the door and Mara’s beam of light vanished as quickly as it’d appeared just as the stone began to grind and groan, the two halves grating apart as the receded into the walls.

Inside, Jackle saw their progress blocked by another door on the far side of a square room, identical in construction to the first. The room itself was about as deep as the doors were wide and lacked any sort of light source within.

Expecting his mentor to extend her sandstone stairs upwards, Jackle was caught off guard as Mara placed one hand on the threshold and simply swung herself up, landing upright on the wall above.

“What the…”

Unable to quell the vocalization of his disbelief, Jackle found himself once again mystified by his mentor, who had an awfully frequent habit of defying his expectations in the most absurd of ways.

Following her lead, Jackle stepped up to place his hand upon the threshold as she'd done, and without warning, started falling, not swinging, towards his mentor.

With a contrasting lack of grace, Jackle tumbled into the room with Mara, the wall she had been standing on now clearly a floor, with the water behind them rather than beneath.

“Oh, that's convenient.”

Shaking his head as he righted himself, Jackle stood up to find his mentor facing the entrance they'd just come through, the water now right up to the threshold, and their blue luminescence nowhere to found.

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“Oh! The bub-ble… Wait, what?”

Panicking as it dawned upon him that his concentration had lapsed in the fall, Jackle felt his heart leap out of his chest, then snap right back in as he processed what he was seeing.

“Shhh, calm. You're fine, I expected you to falter at some point. We're fine for now though. The orientation of the forge is upright, so we’ve got an air pocket, the ambient pressure is keeping the water from rising.”

Patting her student on the shoulder, Mara pulled Jackle's gaze from mind-bending view of seeing the sea floor behind them, rather than below them.

“A form of levitation magic? No… I don’t sense mana here either…”

Flipping to an empty page in his grimoire, Jackle began jotting down notes with haste as he probed around the room, weighing and balancing himself as he went.

“Ohh, this is bad. Mechanicals shouldn't be able to imitate levitation magic like this. Not only is it perfectly uniform in application, it's unwaveringly constant to the point of deception.”

Next to him, Mara listened to his mutterings as she performed her own investigation on the interior door, evidently similar in construction to the exterior entrance, with two halves bisected vertically and a circle in the center, roughly a meter in diameter.

Palming the surface of the stone, Mara quickly found the small notch near the center of the circle she’d been looking for and cut in on Jackle’s research.

“It’s the Grav-Plating on the hull… Which, now that I mention it, is far too much too much explain… Let’s just say our next lesson will be on flying magic. For now, let's focus on the beast beyond.”

Extending a finger, Mara’s lit up the area once more, the chaotic beam of colors unlatching the second door with a near-identical ‘clunk’ followed by the familiar sounds of grating stone. However, this time, the sound came from behind them as the exterior door had begun closing them in.

Seeing their exit close up on them, Jackle turned to Mara to say something, but was headed off by his mentor’s wisdom.

“Don't panic. If I'm right, the interior door will only open when the exterior is sealed. Also, recast Bubble, there's no guarantee the air inside here isn't toxic.”

Nodding, Jackle heeded his mentor's words with haste, flipping open the pages on her Bubble spell as he did his best to calmly repeat the steps she'd taught him to cast with external mana.

It took a few tense moments, a paradox of trying to remain calm under a ticking clock, but with a steady exhale, Jackle re-illuminated the pair with the faint blue glow of a ‘Bubble’, just as the exterior door rumbled closed.

For a moment, it felt like they might have been trapped, but as his mentor rightly predicted, the groaning of stone began emanating from the next door, gradually revealing the larger interior of the forge.

Neither needed to communicate that the time for silence and caution had come upon them, both retreating to opposite sides behind the retracting doors, attempting to minimize their visibility while they scouted the room beyond.

Inside, the smooth stone floor they stood on continued unabated, but with railings instead of walls, overlooking an expansive interior, as if the entire forge were one large warehouse turned upright. The room was as wide as it was tall with the catwalk in front of them suspended in the center, extending far into the distance, likely all the way to the top of the forge jutting out just above the waves.

However, it wasn't the sights they saw, but rather the sounds they heard that gave them reason to pause. Beyond, the room was rife with the drum of mechanical activity, whirs, clanks, and beeps abounding.

Sharing a look of concern entwined with intrigue, the pair cautiously eased themselves out onto the walkway to get a better look at what they were hearing.

The path ahead of them extended deep into the forge, empty throughout, but under lit by a glow of intermixed colors. Looking below, the source of the lights and noise was readily apparent, and they were innumerable.

To their right, the walls were lined with glass cubes of varying sizes glowing a faint white light, piled nearly as high as they stood and stacked so deep at certain places the mess overflowed beneath them to the other side of the room, where hundreds, if not thousands, of bipedal machines scurried around with cubes like ants with sugar.

Beneath them, an army of metal-skeletons were taking the glass cubes, one by one, and bringing them back to workbenches, where they then dissolved each container to reveal a specimen of some kind, ranging from rocks, to plants, and even animals, or dead ones at least.

Glancing back to each other, Jackle and Mara shared another look before they both crept back to the foyer room, and Jackle was the first to break their silence.

“Holy hells, that's a lot of mechanicals. What on Somni could they possibly be up to?”

Glancing back into the forge, Mara appeared to weigh her thoughts before voicing them.

“I think it's trying to understand us, or this place. That’s why it hasn't attacked us yet. I'm pretty sure all those cubes down there are ‘samples’ taken from the coastline before it burned.”

Carefully leaning out to get a better look at the cubes, Jackle saw she wasn’t wrong and quickly snapped back into the room as a unnerving thought crossed his mind.

“If you're right, does that mean we could end up in one of those?”

“I doubt it. The only animals they had down there were dead ones, and we're not dead yet, so come on.”

Almost casually dismissing his fear, Mara started off down the gantry without another word, her step lighter than a feather, leaving Jackle to follow in her silent wake.