When the storm finally arrived, it was as bad as I feared.
The ever-expanding splash zone of the shattered ring had grown steadily since the wyvern’s explosion. It was not long before they reached our world’s orbit. At first, small meteors appeared in the sky, largely burning up upon entry. Shortly after that, the full magic storm of the ringfall began in earnest.
“Papa!” Siral cried, running into my office with wide eyes. “The sky is burning!”
I looked up to find Boshan following Siral. “It’s raining fire!” he said, worriedly.
Standing, I followed my sons as they pulled me to a palace balcony where I found Sera holding Rodessa, looking up at the sky.
“What is it, Pilus?” she asked as I came to stand next to her.
I looked up at the meteor shower creating streaks of light racing across the sky. Meteors were also beginning to fall out of the sky, screaming as they rained down from the sky. I could hear explosions when they landed.
“It’s the ring material burning up as it enters the air,” I explained.
“Why is the air burning it?” Siral asked.
“Well… you know how if you rub your hands together really fast, they get hot?” I rubbed my hands together as I spoke, and Siral copied me, with Boshan copying him in turn. “And how when the wind blows really hard, you can feel it pushing you? Well, when something falls fast enough, which can basically only happen from really, really high up, it can rub against the air so fast that it heats up until it burns.”
That was only part of it, and heat from air compression was probably the better answer, but I was not sure how to explain that to the kids without a lot more science education.
“What did you mean, ‘enters the air’?” Sera asked. “Isn’t it already in the air, up there?”
“Not quite. If you go up high enough, the air stops. There’s an… air… sphere, I suppose you could say, which surrounds the world. The same force that makes you come back to the ground when you jump holds the air against the world so it doesn’t float away, but beyond that there’s nothing.”
My wife and children stared at me, except for Rodessa who remained preoccupied by the light show in the sky.
“I’m confused. Why doesn’t all the air fall to the ground then? How is there nothing past it? That’s where the source of magic is. What’s holding it up?” Sera asked.
“Why is the air a sphere?” Siral chimed in.
“It’s… hard to explain without explaining a lot of other things,” I said to Sera. “We can talk about it later. As for your question, Siral, the air is a sphere because the world is a sphere, and the air sphere surrounds it.”
“The world is a sphere?” Siral exclaimed, while Boshan scrunched up his face in confusion.
“Yeah. If you traveled all the way across the sea, and kept going across whatever you found there, you’d eventually come back around to the Kingdom from the other side,” I said, pointing out over the water then back behind us to the east.
“Wow,” Siral said, forehead scrunching up in thought.
A piercing shriek tore our attention back to the sky, and a crystal fragment slammed into the ground just outside of the capital’s walls, hard enough that I could feel it in my feet.
“That was close,” I murmured. “I should go check in with Nodel, see what’s happening on the ground.”
“If you go out there, be careful,” Sera said, giving me a kiss.
I hugged the kids and left them to observe the meteor shower as I walked back through the palace to find Nodel, who was occupied with Atlessoa and the other advisors organizing information about what was happening across the Kingdom.
“Have we heard of any impacts within any cities?” I asked Atlessoa after pulling her away from Nodel, who was about as stressed as I had ever seen her.
“Roko was hit, but the damage was minimal. Mirut wasn’t hit directly, but an impact in the sea nearby caused some disturbance. Some boats were damaged and some water was forced into the city and caused some flooding damage.”
“Right. Well. That’s not too bad.”
“For now.”
“For now,” I agreed. “Seems something impacted just outside the walls. I’m going to go check it out.”
Atlessoa glanced back at Nodel and the other advisors. “Not much more I can do here unless something changes. I’ll come with you.”
We headed out of the palace, although it was the Shadowblade and Bil who hit the streets and navigated out the closest gate, where we found Horg talking with some of the city guards, monitoring the situation at the wall. He caught sight of us approaching, and parted from the guard to come speak with us.
Stolen story; please report.
“Wasn’t expecting to see you here,” I said.
“One of my adventurers ran back with an update on the impact here, and I decided to come check on it to make sure he was speaking true,” Horg explained. “I was worried about a dungeon forming so close to the capital, but…”
“But?”
“Well, come take a look for yourself.”
He led us out the gates towards the impact crater, which had ruined one of the fields of grain that was nearing harvest. I could see where the field had caught fire due to the superheated meteor and where the adventurers had managed to contain the fire, sparing the nearby fields from also being lost.
Walking up to the lip of the crater, I looked down at the meteorite.
“Huh.”
“It’s blue.”
“Yeah, I can see that,” I said, frowning. Perhaps a sufficiently large chunk of blue crystal failed to burn up entirely on entry. I had not expected any blue crystal to make it to the ground, but perhaps that meant some of the other impacts across the Kingdom would also be blue crystal instead of red. What does that mean for the local ecosystem?
The impact itself had caused a lot of the blue crystal to shatter, and small shards littered the inside of the crater, but there was a fairly sizable chunk which remained too, hundreds of times larger than the small beast crystals harvested from evolved beasts or the deepwater pearls we fished from the ocean. The possibilities… I shook my head.
“Well, once it’s cooled, I’d like to take that back to the palace to look at,” I said to Horg, then turned my gaze to Atlessoa. “Also, find out who operates this farm, and see that they’re reimbursed for the losses. We might see more crop loss from this across the Kingdom, so let’s make sure the food situation stays stable. We’ll put out some crown bounties for meat with the Guild, too, to try and manage the difference.”
“Grain stores from last winter are still good,” Atlessoa said. I had implemented some food security measures over the past years once the food situation had stabilized, saving grain for just such an emergency, especially now that we had beasts like durcats to manage polerat and other rodent infestations for stored grain. “We should be able to make up for any losses from the stores, so long as next year’s harvest stays consistent with the average.”
“Good,” I said with a nod, then paused as a thought occurred to me. “If blue crystal is surviving entry inland… hmm.”
“What’s the problem?” Horg asked.
“Well. The beasts would still need to get strong enough to transform, but if there’s crystal out in the wilds, we might see an influx of transformed beasts.” I looked up at the Guild Master with a sigh. “Might need to warn the adventurers about stronger, possibly magical beasts out in the wilds.”
I made a note to tell Rena about that, as well. Wild evolved beasts would definitely change things for the Tamers Guild as well, when it came to bounties. It may also help some tamers jump ranks quicker if they could tame pre-evolved beasts.
“Lovely.” Horg rubbed the bridge of his nose. “At least there’s going to be plenty of work for adventurers in the coming years.”
* * *
Across the Kingdom, shards of superheated magical crystal slammed into the ground, ravaging the wilds and leaving behind pockmarked destruction. That alone would have been bad enough, but where the landed crystals were of the red variety, dungeons began forming.
Most of the landed crystals were red, given their robustness, but with so much ejecta from the ring, several large pieces of blue crystal also managed to survive entry into the world’s atmosphere. Large chunks of blue crystal also slammed into the land, and other pieces fractured upon entry, scattering shards far and wide.
Some of the impacts killed beasts, which in turn led to other beasts scavenging at the corpses. When there were a couple of ranks between the beasts, it led to wild beasts rapidly growing to their maximum potential.
With shards of magic crystal plentiful and readily available from the storm, it was not long before evolved beasts were changing the makeup of the wild.
In some cases, tiny shards of red crystal, too small to form dungeons of their own, were consumed by these beasts instead. It led to a new form of corrupted beast that was married to no dungeon, free to roam, rampage, and cause devastation.
Reports of roaming transformed beasts, either evolved or corrupted, began flowing into the city guards, as well as an increasing number of reports of mysterious deadzones where people lost their way.
Fortunately, the Adventurers Guild was prepared. I refined, built, and distributed new versions of the “dungeon compass” which guided parties to dungeons and also measured them by rank. Horg established new delving policies based on the dungeon break in Haklan, so that new adventurers would never make the same mistake. I also finally shared with the Guild and the Church how purification magic affected corrupted beasts, and slowly but surely priests started joining parties who were dealing with dungeons. Parties who were not comfortable delving into dungeons still had ample quests to hunt down the plethora of newly transformed beasts that were disrupting ecosystems, attacking settlements, or making their way onto the farms around the walled cities.
All around the Kingdom, mages, priests, and other magic users were noticing that their magic stores were recovering faster than ever. The magical storm had vaporized so much blue crystal in the atmosphere than ambient magic levels had risen. While that would likely wane over time, it was not clear if this would be a one-time event or something we would need to adapt to long term.
In the short term, it was a massive bump in power to any current magic user. Healers were able to push themselves much further, and mages could hit a lot harder. Even with MP potions, mages tended to be heavy hitters that quickly exhausted, leaving much of the endurance work to warriors. This boost largely increased their endurance, or at least their recovery time between big spells. The landscape of adventuring started to change, and adventurer parties were eager to add more mages to their ranks.
Once the official bounty on dungeon cores was set in place, mages became much more interested in joining adventurer parties as well.
Healers could perform significantly more healing, but their numbers were still limited, and it would be years yet before the newest priests raised with magic meters would start leaving the Church to work as freelancers. Only the earliest adopters of the reformed Church apprenticeship program were able to adventure, though more would graduate every year. In the future, these priests could help adventurer parties, but for the moment, the rise in danger for adventurers in the field needed to be handled.
With the incoming rise of available dungeon cores, I shared the secret about purifying red crystal to create true healing potions with the Church. When priests had an excess of magic and no patients to heal, they could make potions that would get sold to the Adventurers Guild, giving our adventurers in the field a way to avoid death in cases where they were injured badly enough that they would succumb to their wounds before returning to the city.
It was a time of massive disruption and change for the Kingdom, and had things gone slightly differently, it might have been disastrous. I had no idea what it might have done in other parts of the world, but the Kingdom found a way forward.