There is one difficulty with directions which consist of ‘go west to the mage’s spire.’ Mainly in that, there is an awful lot of ‘west.’
I spent more than a day and night flying my viewpoint westward. Flying my view high, I kept the northern mountains to my right side and flew as straight on as I could. This worked until the mountain range started to drift in a more northerly direction. By that point, I was entertaining myself by swooping down among the rolling hills that were spotted with forested areas. The sporadic copses of trees were odd because they were obviously man-made, or at least man curated. This wasn’t that interesting until I rolled over a hill and stopped in mid-air because of the pitch black trees.
I shortly moved on because, while the pitch black trees were an odd sight and the logging crews were fascinating, without the ability to poke someone and ask them what they were doing, it quickly grew tiresome. There is only so much you can learn from silently watching burly men chop up trees in a clearly dangerous way.
My flight west came out of the rolling hills and out onto a plain of long grasses. I wasn’t sure if these plains were part of the same kingdom, but the sudden absence of roads suggested to me that it wasn’t. Flying over the land was a tedious affair. I had been expecting to see cows or buffalo or maybe the equivalent for this world, but for the most part, I didn’t see anything of the sort. I did notice a disturbance in the grasses which when I looped around to check turned out to be something like a skinny pig without tusks. The animals were slipping through the grasses and running southward, so I decided to continue my trip without following along. The relatively short trip had already shown me that this world was just as fascinating as my old one, but in this one, I could travel anywhere I liked without paying for a flight and pop back home without worrying about my luggage being lost.
Strange trees and odd animals hadn’t been enough to draw my attention for more than a few minutes. The collection of creatures of obvious sapience, all riding animals which looked like large goats, those drew me away from my travel. Beyond the goat-like mounts, the other oddity of these men is that they were similar to kobolds only taller and had long shaggy manes of hair. It looked as if someone had roughly cross bred a kobold with a lion. These creatures, whatever they were, definitely were going to be visited one day by a gateway.
I had the urge to think of them as Native Americans, the leather armor, the bows, all urged me to think of them in those terms. But the giant curved sabers made of a white metal suggested that these men were not hunter-gatherers. Nomadic cultures not being well known for carrying around anvils and forges. I suppose that it could be possible that they had purchased the swords from somewhere, but when I looked into their leather satchels I found steel utensils and knives, their arrows had metal points, and they even had some coins in their packs. The amount of metal suggested that it wasn’t a rare commodity but a rather common one. Even some of the necklaces they wore had metal adornments. Somewhere on these plains was a town of these lizard-lions and I wanted to visit and absorb their culture.
I chuckled when I realized that I honestly wanted to absorb their culture in a literal sense.
Making a note that I would have to build some kind of bucking bronco riding challenge, I turned back west and continued to fly. By this point, I was starting to worry that my directions would be like the time I tried to visit a cousin in the country. Their instructions consisted of things like: ‘keep going till you get to where the old McMannon barn used to be before it burned down,’ accurate, but entirely useless.
The plains were seemingly endless. Flat, constant grasslands, only broken up by the occasional river or lake, until the grasses gave way to sands. The sudden line of sand was stark. The line between grasslands and desert was curving, and snake-like, nothing so perfect as a straight line, but the division between the two was absolute. To the west, sand, to the east grass. No grasses grew over the border in the dunes. The shift was most likely artificial in nature, but what caused it or maintained it, I had no clue. Like most of the things in this world, I had to just throw my hands up and proclaim ‘magic!’ but it was no less unsatisfying than in my old universe despite the fact it might actually be a valid answer here.
A few hours after zooming through the sands, a more desolate place I couldn’t imagine, I noticed a black dot in the distance. Assuming this was the spire, I shifted my flight further north and continued my travel. As I approached the sheer scale of the spire, and the outlying city, soon became apparent. The spire grew from the base of the town, the point seemed to reach into the sky. The spire itself appeared to be constructed of some type of basalt or granite stone, a greyish stone of some kind anyway, and interspersed with little flecks of color climbing the spiraling tower. All of this situated in a city of glass and sandstone perched on a high plateau with a winding road slowly arching up to the side of the stone formation.
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The sandstone wasn’t a surprise, a rock formed by compressed sand had to be easy to come by in a desert. But the glass was so prevalent that the city sparkled in the sunlight. I guessed that it was mage formed using the sand. The logistics of trying to produce that much glass, in a desert, using conventional fuel, boggled my mind. The view from the top of the plateau was breathtaking, and I spent time just slowly panning my view around and watching the setting sun over the dunes.
With the city of the spire found, I flew around seeing if I could find a large open area to place my doorway. No large courtyards drew my eye, this city was far more closely packed within its walls than the cities I had previously visited. Worse, the only open area beside the area around the mage spire was at the entrance gateway where animals were held as they were unloaded. Consider me snobbish, but I didn’t want to be associated with the smell of hard-working animals and their leavings.
Eventually, I decided that instead of blocking some narrow street within the city, and there were a lot of small little streets, I would put my gateway directly on the grounds around the gigantic spire. The swirling tower of stone pointed into the sky was a clear demonstration of magical might, but the grounds around the spire were equally impressive as they more resembled that of a tropical garden. I had seen the pictures of the massive buildings built on my old world, usually as a not-so-subtle demonstration of might, but this mage spire put them to shame. It was at least a couple miles tall and half a mile wide. Being surrounded by tropical bushes, trees, and winding pathways of stone and water, the entire place was a phallic roar of power.
From around the quarter-height range of the tower, I flew in a large arcing circle trying to decide where to put my gateway. If the spire had had a single entranceway, it would be easy, but the base looked like it had many entrances with walkways which spiraled out to connect to the wall that then connected to the rest of the city. No single area seemed to be significantly better connected than any other, though there were slightly more people coming and going from the southernmost paths. Deciding this was where I would place my gateway I divebombed downward to get a ground level view.
As I approached the ground, a bright purple flash obscured my vision for a moment, and suddenly my [Far Seeing] spell failed and my viewpoint disappeared! I reeled mentally for a moment. Since I had gained the [Far Seeing] ability, I had used it non-stop. Even when I was distracted within my dungeon I hadn’t canceled the spell, I simply stopped paying attention to the view. I had become entirely used to seeing everything within my dungeon at once as well as the roaming outside viewpoint. My sudden loss of vision felt like someone had poked out my eye! There was no pain from the sudden vision loss, but the disorientation was odd, more so because of my absolutely stationary nature.
Trying to recreate my [Far Seeing] viewpoint again produced another surprise. I was unable to recreate my view where my skill failed! Deciding instead to recreate my view from a more distant location, outside the city, my view popped into existence without difficulty. Slowly I pushed my viewpoint towards the spire, worrying that my skill would be dispelled again, but strangely nothing odd happened. When I reached the ground, I began to scout out the perfect place to put my gateway. Zipping along the earth to find the ideal spot caused the return of the purple flash and the disappearance of my [Far Seeing] ability again.
Recasting my viewpoint outside the spire’s exclusion area, I grumbled as I approached the mage guild grounds again. If I had a face, I would be resting it in my palm at that moment. A mage guild would definitely have some kind of protective spells. A useful protective spell would be one which would cancel any fast moving magical spell, say a fireball or maybe a scrying spell like mine?
That I was capable of moving my [Far Seeing] viewpoint onto the grounds in the first place was surprising on its own. I hadn’t considered it before, but it could have been possible they could have blocked out all scrying entirely as the ‘Guild’ had, or the king’s castle. Though, given the sheer scale of the building that might not have been possible. The spire was itself a small vertical city all on its own. That is a significant area to block out, something that couldn’t be cheap or easy to do. The anti-fast spell ward might be a compromise for cost, or maybe for practicalities sake. Either way, it was a good sign that this was the perfect place to start looking to learn more magic.