Sagiro’s Story Hour, Part 259
Road to Nowhere
“Morningstar... Ell can’t really be dying. Can she?”
Dranko doesn’t understand it, but he holds the hand of his betrothed, who is still shaking after telling the others what she learned through her commune.
“All of the Gods as we know them may be dying,” says Aravis.
Yoba nods. “We’re taught that Yondalla is as strong as her worshippers. How many worshippers do your Gods have left in this world?”
“Ell says we have to succeed,” says Morningstar, her voice barely above a whisper.
“Then we’ll succeed,” says Dranko.
“It changes nothing,” says Aravis. “Failure has never been an option.”
“Then let’s go,” says Ernie. “I’m ready to cast.”
Once more, he and Morningstar cast plane shift. This time Ernie’s group winds up in the ocean, standing on the surface as it undulates beneath them. Morningstar’s group arrives on the mountainous coastline of northern Harkran, not more than two hundred yards from a large group of goblins clustered around a mine entrance. But the goblins don’t see them, and a few seconds later both groups have teleported to the Greenhouse roof. Their nostrils are quickly filled with the smoky reek of Pyke Vale.
Morningstar tries to smile. “Ah, home sweet... evil alternate reality.”
Ernie wants to head straight away to the Mirrors of Semek, just to get things over with, but the others convince him that they should replenish their spells before the final dash. Morningstar casts a sending to Eddings, so as not to surprise him too badly.
Eddings, we’re on the roof. We’re coming in.
Eddings replies: It will be nice to see you again, Morningstar. I trust that everything...oh, just come in and tell me in person!
The Company swings open the door, still boarded up to all outward appearances, but with the planks cut to allow it to open. Eddings rises from a chair in the living room, where he has been sitting across a chess board from Carp. The cats come running up to rub against Ernie, who reaches down to pet them.
“Yoba,” he says happily. “This is my home.”
“It’s lovely! Who are those people?”
Before Ernie can answer, Dranko says to Eddings, “You knew we were up on the roof, and you didn’t even get up from your game? Boy, you can’t get good service around here!” And with that, he seizes the butler in a ferocious bear hug.
“Has everything been okay here?” asks Morningstar.
“Boring, but good,” says Eddings. “I’ve had time to work on my carving skills.” He gestures at the chess set. All of the pieces have been hand-carved from the leftover bones of various meals from the magical Icebox.
Carp stands up. He looks healthy and fit.
“I hope you haven’t been too bored,” says Dranko.
Carp gestures to the chessboard. “I have learned this fascinating game. We have played it hundreds of times.”
“Who’s better?” Dranko asks.
“We win with equal frequency.”
“He’s being charitable,” says Eddings. “I lose two games out of every three. But enough about us. What have you been up to all this time?”
“Let’s talk over dinner,” suggests Kibi.
Ernie runs into the kitchen. “Oh, how I’ve missed you!” he exclaims. “No Icebox tonight. I’m making dinner myself!” Soon he and Yoba are happily preparing a homecoming feast.
“We need more trophy cases!” announces Dranko. He has started to pull out an assortment of objects from their bags of holding. The floor is soon covered with junk. There are Nightmare Beast tusks, giantish coins the size of dinner plates, statuettes of Kibi, gears and springs from the Screel, slaad teeth, a bottle with the sapphire dust left over from Flicker’s imprisonment, a Black Circle lantern from the storeroom, 15 adamantine hoops, obsidian bricks, the fake key from the giantish village in Surgoil, eyestalks from a tundra eye, a vial of quicksilver taken from the Abyss, the crystal head of a Black Circle devotee taken from the rotunda, some Blood Fox hair...
“Wow,” says Kibi. “You really DO collect a lot of crap!”
* *
Kibi does most of the storytelling, and does everything possible to embellish his own role and (when possible) make fun of Dranko. He delights particularly in telling about their time spent with the Vree, who had assumed he was a luminary and the rest of the Company his servants. Carp listens intently to all the stories. He seems much happier now, and for good reason, than when the party had last seen him – regular meals, good company, and not being burned alive in a huge furnace will do that to a man. He has heard from Eddings every story of the Company’s exploits, and so considers his hosts as near demigods. Aravis wonders privately what will happen to Carp if they restore the world. Will the universe tolerate him? He whispers his concern to Dranko while Kibi regales, and Dranko answers that if he proves “incompatible,” they can always plane shift him to a different Prime.
When the meal is over, Morningstar stands swiftly and goes to her room. Dranko watches her go but doesn’t follow.
“I should, uh, replenish my stock of cigars. Flicker, you in?”
Alone, Morningstar prays fervently in the darkness for her dying Goddess.
* *
The Company wakes comfortably in their own beds, though what wakes them is a new morning of distant shrieking from the streets of Pyke Vale. Without unnecessary delay they start to prepare for the journey to (and they hope through) the Mirrors of Semek.
“Will we have to wait for a Flashing Day?” asks Morningstar nervously.
“I think the Eyes will create a Flashing Day just for us,” says Dranko.
“And we’ll need Ernie’s belt, and Kibi’s... self,” adds Morningstar. “As the Opener.”
“And the Maze, as a power source,” says Aravis. He taps his head.
They start wind walking from the roof of the Greenhouse, and for good measure are disguised as sparrows courtesy of a veil from Kibi. They have left Sagiro behind with Eddings and Carp, though Yoba and Snokas are still with them. The journey is short as such trips go – it’s only two hours at top speed between Pyke Vale and the Mirrors. In their own world the flight would take them over many halfling villages, including Ernie’s home of Dingman’s Ferry. Here the lands below are desolate, with no sign that there had ever been peaceful folk tilling the fields.
The Mirrors of Semek first appear as black dots on the horizon. Dranko drops to ground level and flies forward to scout, a misty sparrow zipping along at sixty miles per hour. Soon he is close enough to see the clusters of tents just outside the ring of plinths, and a number of humans milling around – between fifty and a hundred, he thinks. There are patrols which don’t seem rigorous. One tent is conspicuously large.
“Dranko,” says Morningstar over the telepathic bond. “You’re too far away. Remember that the universe still hates us.”
“Stupid universe,” Dranko grumbles. He returns to the others, and they all fly in toward the Mirrors en masse.
The party has various divinations working: greater arcane sight, see invisibility, even a true seeing. While most of the Company hover two hundred feet above the Mirrors, a few drop down low enough for their spells to play over the scene. To Aravis’s arcane sight, a huge amount of Earth Magic is radiating out from the towering obelisks, obscuring all else.
Ernie remembers his long-ago dream of black giants, and idly touches the golden belt around his waist. Cranchus’ Gift
Everyone’s attention is drawn suddenly to a figure emerging from one of the smaller tents. It’s a tall warrior, with thinning hair, a goatee, and powerful muscles. There’s a black sword strapped to his back, and (most notably) familiar red armor strapped to his body. The warrior stretches, looks around, waves to a passing soldier, and moves toward a groups of men hovering around a cook-pot. The closer party members can hear the sounds of sparring, smell the odor of oatmeal. Dranko does a quick scout around the camp, and while a cluster of covered wagons seems like it might be interesting, they only hold uniforms, spare weapons and armor, and general supplies. There’s no sign of anyone being on alert for the Company or anyone else.
“It’s a trap,” says Morningstar, thinking of their recent debacle in Delfir.
The party regroups high above the camp to talk strategy. They have some ideas, but always there is the problem of not knowing how long it will take the Eyes of Moirel to do... whatever it they have to do, once they’ve landed inside the Mirrors. But they talk through the problems, inventory their assets, and eventually settle on a plan that meets with everyone’s approval.
“Wow,” says Morningstar. “We’re actually going nowhere. How long have we been waiting for this?”
“I’m excited!” says Flicker.
“I’m worried,” says Ernie. “I’m supposed to do something, but I don’t know what it is. I’ve never gone nowhere before. What if I do it wrong?”
“Ernie,” says Dranko, grinning. “In this regard, it’ll be a lot like sex. You know, like the bull knows what to do with the cow, without anyone telling it how. Sooo, in that same way...”
In a small voice, Ernie answers: “I’m not going to have to get naked... am I?”
“No, no,” Dranko assures him. “Ernie, this is a homespun parable here.”
Aravis smiles at Ernie. “You’re going to rise to the occasion. I know it.”
“Are we still talking about the bull?” asks Dranko.
Aravis blinks, entirely guileless. “No.”
“Not a good choice of words,” Grey Wolf chuckles.
The Company casts their spells. Everyone is made to be flying (without the wind walk, which doesn’t allow for fast aerial maneuvers). Aravis scrutinizes the red-armored warrior with his greater arcane sight, and sees that he’s under a number of spell effects: nondetection, spell resistance, fire resistance, spell turning, and true seeing. Aravis gulps as he realizes the warrior would see them hovering, if he happened to look up.
Kibi starts the ball rolling, reading from a scroll, and the red-armored warrior (whose name is Teskin) is sealed in a forcecage. Teskin is jawing it up with a grunt, but he catches sight (and perhaps hears) Kibi reading his scroll. He looks up and gives a shout – which is heard by no one save the soldier at hand, since the forcecage blocks all sound. As the Company swoops downward, Teskin barks an order at the soldier, who takes two quick strides before smacking into the invisible wall of his force-prison. The hapless soldier lies on his back, blinking. Are those birds? How odd..
Teskin looks down at the soldier, draws his sword, and swings it to no avail against the wall of the forcecage. Some fifteen feet away a second soldier, seeing Teskin’s odd behavior, asks “General? Are you all right?”
Once the final member of the Company has landed in the center of the Mirrors, Ernie casts obscuring mist, and Morningstar casts a circular blade barrier just inside the outer edge of the mist.
“Kibi!” says Morningstar in a low but impatient voice. “Tell the Eyes to get started already!”
“Hey, Eyes?” says Kibi. “We’re ready. Any time now!”
WE LACK POWER
Kibi shares this fact with the others
There is a sound of tremendous commotion outside the mist, and a confused babble of questions.
“What is that?”
“Should we investigate?”
“Could be dangerous!”
“Maybe we should fire arrows into it.”
“No, I think the Mirrors are supposed to do that.”
“Wasn’t Flashing Day months ago?”
“I don’t know; I wasn’t part of that rotation.”
“Why is the General flailing around like that?”
Yoba draws her weapon and moves to protect Ernie. Snokas likewise stands between Kibi and Aravis, picks drawn.
Aravis drops into the Crosser’s Maze. In an instant he is there, high above the three dimensional map of the multiverse. With practiced precision he zooms down to his own location on Abernia. The Mirrors glow brightly, seven luminous rectangles that in the Maze are not black, but hued like the colors of the spectrum. One is red, one orange, and so on through to violet. In the center of the Mirrors, Aravis sees four glowing lights: green, purple, blue and red.
“I think I saw a bunch of birds land in there, right before the fog.”
“What? Birds?”
“The must have been attracted to the mist.”
“No, the birds were there first.”
“Boy, Teskin looks really pissed about something. It looks like he’s shouting; has he lost his voice?”
Morningstar casts magic circle vs. evil, and Ernie pops a scroll of antilife shell into his quickscroll tube
“We’re under attack!” shouts a soldier with a more level head than the rest. “The General is trapped in some kind of... force cage!”
“Then somebody go break the stick!”
Er... what? That gets everyone’s attention. The worst interpretation is that they own a refuge token that will summon the Emperor himself!
An arrow comes flying into the fog; it bounces off Grey Wolf’s armor. It is followed by a dozen more, which either miss their targets or are deflected by the whirling blades of the blade barrier.
“Hey, something in the fog is mutilating our arrows. Don’t go in there!”
Grey Wolf activates his vest of greater invisibility and flies up high enough to clear the top of the mist. He sees that soldiers are running around, grabbing weapons out of tents, forming up ranks. Some bark orders. Teskin sees Grey Wolf and points, but no one else can see the invisible and illusion-bound enemy. Grey Wolf conveys all of this to others over the telepathic bond.
Morningstar grimaces. Nothing can get in our way. I can’t allow it.
She flies upward until she is next to Grey Wolf. The way must be clear. Ell is dying.
She casts firestorm. Coal-black flames rip through the ranks of the enemy soldiers, leaving charred bodies and incinerated tents behind. Thirty smoking heaps of armor are testament to Morningstar’s wrath. Dranko follows this with an ice storm that pulverizes most of those who somehow survived the flames. The few remaining soldiers take cover behind the Mirrors themselves, though Grey Wolf catches a few of these stragglers in a fireball.
* *
Aravis first tries to draw energy from the Mirrors themselves, but in a split-second he realizes he risks a catastrophic feedback loop that would annihilate his mind. Never mind. Instead, he draws upon the life-force of his fellows. Each member of the Company feels the chilling tug of the Maze, and without hesitation they give willingly of their own souls. Aravis channels the energy into the Purple, Green and Blue Eyes (while conspicuously avoiding the Red).
Scree flares up. Blue, green and purple beams shoot from his body at three of the Mirrors, and then start bouncing between them. The obscuring mist is illuminated from both without and within as rays of light slice through it. The light glows brighter as more life force is channeled from the Company to the Eyes.
Grey Wolf sees that a third person has appeared inside the forcecage. Probably a spellcaster, there to rescue the red-armored warrior. Directly below him he sees the mist glowing as if a rainbow had exploded inside it.
Kibi feels a deep shudder run through his body, and then a surge of saturating power. Earth Magic. He feels immensely solid, stable. And here, at the center the Mirrors, with the Eyes blazing, he realizes that something is wrong with the fabric of space. He realizes that he could reach out, part the air with his hands, but that his arms are shaking. In fact, everyone in the Company feels a growing vibration in their bones.
Everyone, that is, except Ernie. The belt around his waist grows warm, and the halfling feels stable, anchored. Kibi puts his hand on Ernie’s shoulder and for him too the buzzing vibration stops. Back in control of his limbs Kibi extends his other hand and pulls aside something essential about the space here in the center. He’s not exactly sure of what he’s doing, but he feels something part beneath his fingers like wet paper.
Those others on the ground reach out to touch Ernie, and they too become stable. The flyers come down and do the same. Morningstar touches Aravis's shoulder to bring him into the chain, Aravis, who’s still in the Maze, directing energy into the Eyes. The light inside the Mirrors has melded into a uniform white radiance, almost blinding in its intensity.
Ernie looks down curiously at the ground. Small rocks there are jumping up and down on the ground as if there’s an earthquake, but he himself is solid as stone. One of the rocks cracks and flakes into fragments. Dust is shaken loose from the ground and rising into the air in puffs.
The obscuring mist vanishes, dispelled. Teskin steps into view, just outside the ring of blades. Something or someone has freed him from the forcecage, and now he glares worriedly at the Company. Ernie tries to cast antilife shell from his scroll but he’s trying too hard to concentrate on being stable. The spell fizzles out, as Teskin takes the plunge through the blades and toward them.
Kibi is still making clearing motions with his left hand, as if he’s brushing away invisible cobwebs. The more he clears, the brighter grows the light reflected from the Mirrors. Now it has become as bright as the light that shone outside the Greenhouse when the history of Abernia was rewritten.
He realizes what he’s doing. Kibi is clearing away residual arcane energies. The Earth is the source of all magic, he knows, and as an Earth Mage he taps directly into that. Most arcane casters are not capable of direct contact; they rely on the residual, wispy magical emanations that rise from the earth and permeate the air. But here, that insubstantial half-magic is only getting in the way. He clears it away, leaving nothing but the pure power of the Earth to affect the Mirrors of Semek. The light shines white and blinding around them; they can no longer see even as far as the blades, let alone the Mirrors themselves.
Teskin steps into the light with them, black sword drawn. With one swift motion he swings his blade directly through Kibi, Aravis and Snokas. It passes harmlessly through their bodies. Dranko remembers that the Sharshun who once stood inside the Mirrors was similarly immune to their own attacks, and he smiles at the comeuppance. Teskin realizes his impotence and rages around in the light, slashing his sword futilely through the Company.
Then he realizes his armor is cracking. Being here in the Mirrors, without Ernie to stabilize him, is a bad, bad idea. He starts to back away, just as Kibi clears away the last of the hindering half-magic. The light somehow grows brighter, and Teskin falls to his knees, screaming in pain. The rocks and pebbles around him are being vibrated into dust. Blood is pouring out from between the plates in Teskin’s mail, and he falls face first into the dirt, pieces of his armor literally breaking off of his body...
...and then the body fades away, and the world around them fades, and the bright light grows dim, and goes out, leaving the Company in a strange twilight. There is nothing but the Company, and the Mirrors, and the Eyes of Moirel. They are floating in the midst of the mirrors, but at the same time they feel firmly anchored in place. Earth Magic suffuses them, and the landscape itself is blurred, but the Mirrors of Semek stand out sharply. Scree is floating in the center of the group, though he doesn’t seem to mind.
The world around them grows more and more blurred, as if the twilight is in strobe so rapid they cannot discern its flickering. Every few seconds one of the Eyes flashes its color. Kibi senses that the Red Eye is trying to stop what’s happening; one particular flash of red almost causes him to become unanchored.
The Green Eye floats slowly over to hover before Ernie. The young halfling flinches but finds he cannot move, is not sure his body is real. A voice sounds in his head.
YOU ARE DOING REMARKABLY WELL
“Thank... thank you,” thinks Ernie. “I’m doing my best.”
WHAT IS YOUR NAME?
“Ernest Wilburforce Roundhill.”
IT’S NICE TO MEET YOU, ERNEST WILBURFORCE ROUNDHILL
“Who are you? Do you have a name?”
WE DO NOT TAKE NAMES TO OURSELVES. THAT IS A POWERFUL ARTIFACT YOU WEAR.
“Cranchus gave it to me.”
A WISE DWARF HE IS. HE KNOWS OUR WAYS.
The Green Eye is bathed for a moment in a red glow.
I MUST CONCENTRATE ON THE TASK AT HAND. IT WAS NICE TO MEET YOU. PERHAPS WE WILL MEET AGAIN SOMEDAY.
A shape appears and disappears in their midst, so quickly that no one gets a good look. It was the size and shape of a person, and it was there in the center of the Mirrors, as if it were one of them. But before the Company can even begin to speculate, the shape appears again, and this time does not vanish.
It’s a Sharshun, and one they recognize. Floating among them now is Inivane, the Sharshun that the Company rescued from beneath God’s Thorn! He wears a glowing gartine circlet around his head, and out from that circlet shine three short, thin beams of white light, like spokes on a bicycle tire. At the ends of those beams are three Eyes of Moirel – Yellow, Orange and Indigo.
“Hey!” says Ernie. “We rescued him!”
Inivane stares at the Company confusedly; his expression indicates that they’re the last thing he expected to see.
“You should put time back the way it was!” shouts Ernie.
“What... what are you doing here?” asks Inivane.
“We’re here to make things right,” Ernie answers.
“That is also why I am here.”
“Yeah, but our right is better than your right!” says Ernie. “Our right doesn’t have people enslaved. It doesn’t have an Emperor. The... the Gods are dying!”
Inivane doesn’t answer, and a moment later he blinks out of existence.
OUR TIMING MAY BE OFF. THE RED...
A sudden flare of red light fills the twilight, there is a cracking sound, and the four Eyes drop to the ground. The flickering twilight resolves into early evening. They are standing in the middle of the Mirrors of Semek, and the world around them looks much like it did before, albeit without soldiers and tents and spell effects.
“Er... was that it?” asks Ernie to no one in particular.
Dranko reaches down and picks up one of the Eyes of Moirel. It is just a diamond now. Without color, he can’t tell which one it is. He peers closely at the white gem, and goes pale as he sees that it’s veined with deep cracks.
The Eye of Moirel is broken. All of them are.
... to be continued...
