Christena took in her surroundings. Returning to this basement was nostalgic in all of the worst ways. All of the cleaning supplies had been cleared out of the room to make way for the time-slow ritual.
The dreary and cold stone bricks surrounded her, floor, ceiling, and walls. The room felt depressingly bland, and Fluffy seemed to agree. She sat perched on Christena’s shoulders— her warmth was a comforting presence against the cold aura that her employer seemed to emit as a matter of course.
Mr. Lomain had drawn freezing cold blue lines across the stone floor, each glowing trace an active working of his ice magic. Dorple, his bonded, sat at Mr. Lomain’s feet as he finished tracing the last bits of the diagram.
“How long will we have?” Christena asked.
“Real time? The magic will last for barely a day. As for the magic... well, I know I initially said I could keep us in time dilation for a week, but I think I smoothed out a few inefficiencies compared to last time. We’ll have closer to ten days— subjective time.” He barely stopped to reply, still bent over drawing lines of magic as he explained.
Christena sighed, but the action didn’t help release any of the tension sitting upon her shoulders. Addie and Nettal had been kidnapped for over a week. Anyone with any degree of knowledge would know that after the first 24 hours of a kidnapping... well, the odds of survival dropped precipitously. Luckily, she had been training Addie on self-defense lately, and she was a battle prodigy. Christena had to hope it would be enough. At least this time dilation ritual would give them more time to find them while also reducing the amount of time passing in outside of the ritual. They needed all the time they could get.
She also knew how much the situation grated on Mr. Lomain. His hair was frazzled while also somehow being limp and oily. He’d been wearing the same clothes for the last week, and he spent each of those days frantically trying to get help to Addie.
“Are you...” Christena hesitated to ask the question, but it needed to be said. She wanted to make sure he would be in the right mental state to help properly. “Are you okay?”
He snorted. “No, I am not ‘okay,’ I am working to get back my daughter. When I sent her off with you to visit my sister, I did not expect her to find a dragon, get involved with a rampaging cascade, or think that she’d be anything but safe spending time with her cousin.
“Instead, when you return, it’s without my daughter in hand. Worse, you’ve brought me news that she’s been kidnapped by an unknown entity who has masterful magical control over fog. And, if Addie wasn’t in physical danger in some way, how come she hasn’t already returned to us? If the dragon is as benevolent as you make out, wouldn’t she have already entered Realmspace and asked for his help to get home by now? No, something is truly, terribly wrong, and I can’t be there fast enough to help her.”
“She didn’t bring Sen’s necklace with her, we know she left it at Ms. Lomain’s house.”
“Sure, but then, what about Nettal’s ring?”
He sighed, and before Christena could even reply to that accusing question, he asked, “Are you any closer to finding a manual entry port into Realmspace?”
Christena decided to let the prior topic drop; he was clearly not in the right head space for that conversation at the moment. “Fluffy has no affinity for spatial magic in the slightest, as you well know—”
Christena was cut off by a voice from the stairwell, “I think I have a solution to that.”
Coming down the stairs was Ms. Lomain— Nettal’s mother and Addie’s aunt, not Addie’s mother. She wore battle armor— hardened leather with a metal chest plate. The woman was a walking tank with absurd amounts of strength. Her purple viollow twittered in behind her, the bird’s small size making it hard to guess that it contained strength-enhancing soul magics.
Mr. Lomain was quick to reply with relief, “Thank Aggan. What did you find?”
In one hand, Ms. Lomain held a glowing orb with white wisps circling around inside of it. In the other hand, she held Addie’s magical necklace that Sen had given her. “Our little cascade friend should be able to help. His soul has traces of Addie’s magic all over it.”
“Father just let you take that?” Christena asked incredulously. Letting such a dangerous soul out of his possession was unlike him.
“We do have some small degree of trust, Owlcharge and I,” Ms. Lomain smirked. “Living near to one another all those years does tend to add up, after all.”
“I always did wonder how you got pregnant with Nettal,” Mr. Lomain said leadingly.
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
His sister just smiled in response, not giving anything away— which in of itself spoke volumes. Christena would not be touching that ball of worms.
“I’m still unsure exactly how that will help us,” Christena said.
“Well,” Mr. Lomain began, still tracing runes on the floor, “We’ll have a week to figure it out.
“Can you tell me more about the dragon? I’m still skeptical about his intentions, but I’d at least like to know all of our options.” Mr. Lomain brought up, changing the subject.
“Sen was more than reasonable, I owe him my daughter’s life. I’m sure he’ll be more than amenable to assisting us again.”
“Only if we figure out how to contact him.”
In response, Ms. Lomain sent her brother a harsh glare. “Yes, well. I’m sure the three of us can figure it out. Two Area Lords and a cascade hunter— the odds could be worse.”
“You’re weaker outside of your domain,” Christena wasn’t trying to dig at her, but rather she was just trying to be pragmatic, “and your magic isn’t too suited for spatial magic; you admitted it yourself.”
“True,” Ms. Lomain conceded with a raised brow, “But you neglect to mention that all Area Lords require incredible mastery over the soul; I’m even more developed than brother dearest in that regard.”
“Stella is right,” Mr. Lomain interjected, “We’ll need her to make sure that cascaded soul is stable while we dissect my daughter’s residual magic.”
Honestly, this whole thing was a bit outside of Christena’s wheelhouse. She was good at two things: teaching how to fight, and fighting herself. However, she had gotten fairly good at homemaking working for Mr. Lomain— not that such a skill would help them any now.
“Will you need my help dissecting the soul, then?” Christena asked Mr. Lomain.
“No, we’ll need you for what comes after.”
“What are you expecting to come after?”
Mr. Lomain paused at his sister’s question, looking up from the traces of magic he was drawing on the floor to give her a stare like she was being an idiot. “A whole lot of fighting whatever kidnapped our children. They will know wrath like they’ve never known before.”
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Half of their time in the chamber had come and gone, the three of them barely sleeping to continue working. Christena didn’t participate much in the soul dissection or in analyzing the necklace, but it turned out her illusion magic was the best suited for trying to reproduce the spatial effects imprinted on the cascaded soul.
Mr. Lomain’s freezing and slowing magics wouldn’t help them get into Realmspace, and Ms. Lomain’s strength enhancement certainly wouldn’t do the job either.
The most difficult part for Christena was actually in trying to convince herself that her magic could do what she wanted it to. She had to force an extreme example of sideways magics— somehow trying to reproduce spatial effects using illusions.
She’d successfully managed to fake a teleport, but the effect reversed itself as soon as she lost concentration. This meant she’d pop from one place to another, only to return almost immediately as her magic failed. And, even when it worked, her physical body didn’t actually ‘move’. It just felt like and seemed like she had moved, her illusion fooling her own senses. Trying to fool herself into believing she’d teleported in order to make her magic actually work was nigh impossible.
She’d had to change tactics. As the Lomain siblings continued to provide her with scraps leftover of Addie’s spatial magic— tiny pieces of natural bonded magic here and there, she worked on adapting them to a suitable format for her illusions. The soul had traces of Addie’s magic after being used on someone, while the necklace held the key for how to actually get into Realmspace. Christena used the concepts from both to work on her own magic.
True teleportation would never work, not in the timeframe they had left in the ritual chamber. So, she worked on making a sort of scrying mirror— teleporting her illusion was fairly doable.
Once she got the hang of teleporting an illusory construct from one end of the room to another, she got to work trying to make her magic pass realms. At the same time, she tried to connect two scrying mirrors to one another. If they wanted to talk with Sen, they’d need a way to both talk to and hear whatever he was saying.
She got the latter idea working fairly quickly, compared to trying to enter Realmspace. Two illusory mirrors, one passing information to the other, stood across the room from each other. In front of one, Christena peered into it, seeing Fluffy on the other side. Her bonded was preening and grooming her fur. Feelings of pride and contentment flowed across the bond to Christena. Fluffy always liked to inflate her ego after they’d successfully created a new application of their magic.
Actually getting the mirror to teleport into Realmspace was an entirely separate problem, unfortunately.
“How much more of Addie’s magic is left over for study on the cascade?” Christena asked the siblings. The necklace had long ago been thoroughly analyzed—the magic within brilliantly simple.
They both had their eyes closed, concentrated on dissecting the soul, while both of their hands held either side of it across from one another.
Without opening his eyes, Mr. Lomain responded, “We’ll keep analyzing, but I think we’d be lucky to get more than a few fractions of an example of Addie’s magic.”
A sudden tightness bound its way through Christena’s chest. At this point, their plan mostly hinged on Christena’s ability to get them past the finish line.
“After Stella and I finish analyzing the last few parts, we’ll start helping you develop your magic. Otherwise, we could start trying some ideas for our own magic.”
Christena shook her head at that, not that they could see her at the moment. “Both of your magic is too unsuitable for this.”
“If we can’t figure something out soon with your illusions, we may have no other choice.” Ms. Lomain stated. “I have some ideas for myself— perhaps I can punch my way into Realmspace?” The way she almost asked that last sentence made Christena wonder if she was serious or not.
“You can’t solve all your problems by punching them,” Mr. Lomain said, as if he was quite used to such remarks from his sister.
“Hey, I mean, you’re the one who suggested we try something ourselves.” Ms. Lomain shrugged.
After that, the siblings got back to work dissecting the cascaded soul. In the end, they were able to give Christena a few new ideas and insights, but they were a drop in the bucket at this point. Christena believed she mostly understood how Addie’s teleports to Realmspace worked at this point; now she really just needed to figure out how to adapt that magic to her illusions.