195 — Book 4, Chapter 39 — The Grand Assault, Pt 2

It didn't take them long to get to the Golden Sands at the speeds the fortress was flying at. They soared far above the range of most detection spells, speeding through the oceans between the continents and then the bulk of Illwyld.

Now that Cale knew what it really was, it was easy to see the shape of Vital beneath the continent. Part of him ached at the sight. He wondered what it had been like for his old friend, flung to the edge of the Great Realms and left here to die.

From the shape alone... He had curled into himself, allowing the oceans to wash over him. The spines along his back had become the Platinum Ridges, and his silver-tipped claws had become the Silver Shores. The Golden Sands had formed around the hole in his heart, where that Monolith-killing spear had become lodged in his body.

If only Cale had managed to find him sooner. Perhaps there was nothing he would have been able to do, but he hated the idea that Vital had been alone in his final moments. Even now, he would be speaking only to Vital's ghost—to the remnant of him that survived only because he represented the source of all Life and could not so easily die.

But Vital deserved at least that much.

The group of mages soared through the sand, but through it all, Cale was unusually quiet. His apprentices seemed to understand, fortunately, and gave him all the space he needed; all the while, he thought about what he would say to the final piece of his long-lost friend and to the mage that wanted to use it.

Failure here was not an option. He had failed the Source of Vitality already, too many times to count, and he would not do it again.

Helspeth was one of the few wyldfire mages in the Red Hunters' employ, and perhaps the strongest mage that wasn't a Red Sentinel. She had joined them for one reason and one reason only: it had seemed like something interesting to do.

She didn't especially care that the campaign against "wild magic" was utterly ridiculous. At least someone was trying to do something interesting in this godsforsaken realm. Helspeth had lamented far too many times the fact that she had been born in this backwater realm instead of on the frontiers of magic. She could have been pushing the edges of what was possible, and instead she was here, stuck in a realm whose population relied on the Gift as the arbiter of magic.

Really, just the fact that Utelia's population even entertained the idea of wild magic condemned it. As far as she was concerned, the Grand Magus could do whatever he wanted; at least he was trying to do something she hadn't seen before.

As for the Red Commander... well, Helspeth didn't miss him. There had been something wrong with that man. He was more interesting than most of Utelia's mages, certainly—mostly for his strange knowledge and the equally strange resources he brought to the table—but Helspeth had known it was only a matter of time before he blundered into someone more powerful than he was.

Now, it was true that the Gift was a wonder of magic. But so what? Helspeth thought it made magical research rather too easy. Every mage thought they were a scholar, these days, and yet none of them were actually taking advantage of the Gift's potential. It was to the point where even the most cutting edge of Utelia's magical discoveries were basically just a footnote in the research she'd plucked from its dungeons.

Research from other realms, in other words. Oh, how she dreamed of living in one of those realms instead. At least there, she could put her mind to proper use...

She had tried to escape the realm. She had searched and searched for all sorts of ways that she might pierce the Veil and plunge herself through the Abyss in the hopes of finding a better home. Alas, it was not to be. Every spell she cast that should have worked went wildly wrong instead.

Helspeth didn't understand why. Her calculations were perfect, yet the trajectory of her spells all veered off in some peculiar direction, and every time she tried a divination spell to see the outcome of her efforts all she saw was nothing. She wasn't foolish enough to try an Abyssal travel spell that wasn't absolutely guaranteed to work, of course. That was one of the obvious ways to end up with a fate worse than death.

And so she was trapped in this unpleasant, backwater realm. Maybe joining the Red Hunters had been a way for her to work off some of her excess rage, but Helspeth wasn't especially interested in self-reflection. She did what she wanted to do, and what she wanted to do was make sure things were interesting.

The Grand Magus was interesting. He had discovered this—what he claimed was the tomb of one of the Monoliths. Just the thought of it made her skin prickle with excitement. She did not, of course, trust that the Grand Magus would be able to do anything interesting with its remains, but all that mattered was that he had found it. She could easily slip in after he finished his little project, gather up the remnants, and maybe with a catalyst from outside the realms she would... be able to...

There was a flying fortress headed in their direction.

Helspeth, blinked, rubbed her eyes, then blinked a few more times, wondering if one of the other Hunters had placed a hallucinatory spell on her. It wouldn't have been the first time. There was no sign of any active magical effect on her core, though, and neither her [Self-Dispel] nor her [Truesight] changed anything about the golden fortress rapidly charging through the sky toward them.

Her [Threat Divination] and [Auric Sense] spells hadn't detected anything. Nor had her [Pillars of Disruption], which was a conjuration-divination spellbridge she had developed specifically so she could observe any significant changes in mana across an entire continent and disrupt any spells that were targeting them. If her [Phantom Barrier] was working, then there was no way that fortress knew where they were, but it seemed to be targeting them directly—

Helspeth cursed under her breath. "Espre," she barked, turning to the other mage on watch. "Is your [Dimensional Ward] still active?"

"What?" Espre frowned at her. "Of course it is. Nothing will be able to get to us. You don't have to be so paranoid, you know."

"I am not paranoid," Helspeth snapped. "Do you not see the giant fortress headed toward us? It is past the limits of your ward!"

"What are you talking about?" Espre turned to look at the sky, as if that would do anything. They both knew he was only doing it to mock her; his species did not rely on sight, and if this massive fortress was somehow invisible to her divination spells and wards then it would certainly be invisible to Espre's mana sense. "I don't see anything."

"You never see anything," Helspeth said impatiently. "[Light Scan] for it."

"Fine, fine," Espre said, shaking his head and sighing dramatically. "Honestly, Hel, if you wanted to surprise me you could have just—"

Stolen novel; please report.

He froze mid-sentence, which was good, because Helspeth would have strangled him if he hadn't shut up right then. "There's a fortress flying toward us," he said shakily.

"That is what I told you." She needed to stop working with idiots. The Red Hunters were interesting, but they were especially full of idiots. Helspeth had no idea how so many archmages could be indoctrinated by the Red Commander's rhetoric, but here they were. "Are you sure your [Dimensional Ward] is working?"

"Of course it's working!" Espre snapped back, panicked now; he began rapidly casting, pulling ingredients out of half a dozen pouches and scattering them in the air. Many of his spells required physical reagents or gestures for reasons that were utterly beyond Helspeth. The Gift should have eliminated the need for most of those. "They're just going through it somehow! Are you sure it isn't an illusion?"

"I cannot sense it, so no, I am not," Helspeth said with a scowl. "But I would rather not take the risk, would you? The Grand Magus is hardly known to forgive mistakes like these."

"I'm—I'm trying to stop it," Espre said. Half his reagents spilled out of his pouches as he hastily fumbled through them. The sky in front of the fortress flashed a brief, dazzling blue, but the fortress itself didn't seem to slow. "It's not working."

"What does that mean?" Helspeth glared at him. "It is a dimensional spell. They cannot simply move through it."

"Well, clearly they can!" Espre shot back, beads of sweat gathering on his forehead. He fumbled for the next pouch and cast something stronger, enough that Helspeth's teeth ached with the force of his magic. She could feel the way space in front of them warped and twisted.

But the golden fortress moved through it like it was nothing.

"How is it doing that?" Helspeth hissed under her breath. It wasn't even dispelling the ward! There had to be a way it was moving through their spells without detection, but Helspeth couldn't figure it out for the life of her.

Maybe it was an illusion after all. What else could explain its ability to just ignore their magic? [Dimensional Ward] was one of the primary reasons they had recruited Espre; it was a difficult spell to cast, but its ability to physically change the nature of space itself made it invaluable in constructing any kind of magical sanctuary, exactly as they had done around the Temple of Life.

"I don't—I can't stop it," Espre gasped out, and it was only then that Helspeth noticed he was visibly shaking, straining with the effort of trying to maintain his spell. "I'm trying—but I can't—"

"It has to be an illusion," Helspeth decided. "We should look for something else. They may be trying to sneak into the temple from beneath the ground while this... display of theirs distracts us."

"It's not," Espre bit out, and Helspeth shot him an irritated glance. Of course it was. She was an expert on the frontiers of magic. No spell existed that could allow an entire fortress to simply pass through a [Dimensional Ward] like this. Not on Utelia, anyway, and certainly nothing that could do it without setting off her wards.

"You can sit there trying to stop an illusion if you want," Helspeth said. "I will scan the underground. My wards should have detected them, but perhaps they were able to bypass one while I was distracted."

"You don't understand," Espre muttered; he was upending entire pouches of his reagents, now, as if desperate to find every last pinch of material he needed. "I couldn't feel them changing my [Dimensional Ward], but I've got a [Greater Dimensional Ward] active now, and I can feel—it's like they're unraveling parts of the ward and creating a bubble of traversable space. Every time I try to twist it they just untwist it—"

...What?

Espre let out a pained gasp and fell to a knee, coughing; Helspeth kicked the idiot before he burned his entire soul on the ward, and the impact jarred him enough that his ward fell apart. Above them, the blue tint in the sky shattered and fell through the air like so many pieces of glass.

"If the spell cannot stop them, then do not waste your fire attempting to sustain it!" Helspeth snapped. "You are a wyldfire mage now, you fool. You must keep your core in equilibrium lest you burn it away."

"I—" Espre took a shuddering breath, hacked out a cough, and stare wide-eyed at the blood in his hand. "R-right."

Idiots. Frontier of magic or not, Helspeth would never understand the Grand Magus's desire to make people wyldfire mages before they were ready. There was a reason that status was so difficult to attain, and it took centuries of practice to acclimate to using that power safely.

But what Espre was claiming... Helspeth turned her attention to the fortress, her expression grim. What he was describing should have been impossible. To unravel the labyrinthine depths of a [Dimensional Ward] would require perfect knowledge of all its twists and turns and a power that could undo it besides, and that sort of magic could—

—only be performed by a labyrinth mage.

Helspeth remembered two yammering Hunters mentioning a brat that was a wild mage. A labyrinth mage, specifically. Was this his work? But that was ludicrous; their son was only at plainroot, and he certainly didn't have enough mastery of his magic to unravel a ward on the spot like this. If this was him somehow, though, then the fortress must have been commanded by the professors at Brightscale.

That was fine. Helspeth could deal with Brightscale's professors. They were powerful, and that Headmaster of theirs was especially scary, but dragons did not deign to leave their territory, so the odds that they would have to deal with the Dragon of a Thousand Cores were low. Sternkessel was another wildcard, but he was out for the count, per their reports.

There was that other wildcard. Cale Cadwell Cobbs, or something along those lines? The magic over the site of the Red Commander's defeat had been so intense it was nearly impossible to scry and figure out what had happened, so Helspeth wasn't sure how easy he would be to deal with. He was powerful, if he had managed to defeat the Red Commander, and they had an entire missing mountain as evidence of how much power he wielded.

But Cale had never had to deal with any of their Sentinels.

"Espre," she said. "I will hold them off. Call on the Red Phoenix."

"What?" Espre shot her a terrified look. "But she's..."

"Just do it," Helspeth said, already tired of the man. "We do not have time to hesitate, and you certainly will not be of any help."

She grinned, eyes alight with fire. "But I will say, I am quite looking forward to a challenge, for o—"

A blaze of spatial magic erupted in front of Helspeth before she could finish her sentence, and some human wearing a hooded cloak stepped out in front of her. She reached instinctively for her magic, but something about his presence made her freeze; it felt like he was choking the very mana out of the air, overwhelming it with his own.

He leveled his gaze at her, and all thought of magic fled her mind. She had never seen eyes quite so cold.

"Sorry," he said. "I quite agree with you, actually. We don't have time, and I'd rather not waste it dealing with you. You wanted to live in another realm, did you? I'll grant that wish."

He walked forward, and as he moved past her, his hand caught her shoulder and he shoved.

Helspeth caught a glimpse of an enormity of magic. Of a blazing star that streamed with power enough to light the Great Realms. She saw the world shatter around her, then felt the shock of being submerged as she was plunged into the Abyss. Then the Abyss shattered, too, as the human's hand pushed her through some enormous untold distance—

When the weight of his hand vanished, Helspeth staggered, falling back into the sand. Except this was wrong, somehow. The sand beneath her was different, and above her, two suns hovered in the sky, their heat bearing down on her.

What... what had...

She tried to summon her magic, but it slipped through her fingers, sluggish and impossible to control. What was this? Where had that human sent her? To another realm? But that wasn't... She had tried and failed so many times—surely the human hadn't just pushed her into another realm through sheer force of magic.

And if he had, what kind of realm was she in? Not one of the empty realms, surely, void of divinity and starved of magic. No, there had to be life here, she just had to find it, adjust for the differences in mana between the realms or something.

Helspeth found out very quickly that she was right about at least one thing: there was, in fact, life here, wherever "here" was. She found this out in the form of an enormous worm that burst out of the sand and bore down toward her. She tried to use her magic to send it away, but once again the spell sputtered and failed, and so she made the only choice left to her.

She began to run.