by AC Cobble
“Maybe I’ll try that,” responded Rhys, his smile growing.
Towaal ignored the banter and continued to examine the room. Ben followed with his eyes, seeing a well-appointed room buried deep in the mountain.
In the sitting room, a simple writing desk and chair sat against one wall. Towaal sifted through the few items on the desk. A small notebook made its way into her hand, but the rest of the items were basic and she left them. A quill for writing, blank pages of parchment, and what appeared to be a poor attempt to carve a wooden pipe.
On the other wall were two comfortable-looking chairs with a stack of books between them. A crystal decanter of some amber liquid rested on a short table.
A thick rug covered the floor. Ben paused when he saw hanging against one wall a simple, solid purple flag.
“The Purple?” he asked, looking at it.
Towaal frowned and bent close to examine it. “Nothing special about it and no markings,” she said. “But who knows? I am not aware of any other significance to the color.”
The notebook and books would take further examination by Towaal and the decanter by Rhys. Other than that, the room was bare.
They moved back to the bedroom and Ben’s breath caught. A shimmering suite of armor stood in one corner, and beside it was a weapons rack. The rack held a massive mace and an elegant longsword. The armor was heavy plate. It looked like it had just been polished. The gleam of the metal reflected the room. Ben saw the companions moving in it as they approached.
A helmet with a purple plume hung above the armor. Rhys leaned close to see it. He slid a visor down to cover the face and Ben frowned. There were no eye slits in the visor. It completely covered where a person’s face would be.
“Mage-wrought,” whispered Rhys. “There must be some mechanism to see through the metal.”
“Mage-wrought armor?” asked Towaal curiously. She moved to look closer. Lightly, she touched the helmet and the plate. Faint sigils followed in the wake of her touch. None of them meant anything to Ben.
“That’s got to be worth a king’s ransom,” breathed Corinne.
“More like the entire kingdom,” responded Rhys frankly. “I have seen a lot, but I have never seen an entire suit of mage-wrought armor. Mage-wrought armor would be almost impossible to break or penetrate. A man could be near invincible in this.”
Ben moved over to the weapons rack and looked at the mace and the sword. The mace was a huge, oversized weapon. He couldn’t imagine the strength it would take to wield it. Sharp spikes sprouted out of the end of it and the shaft was as thick as his forearm. It had to weigh half as much as he did.
The longsword though was a normal-sized weapon. It had a brilliant silver blade and a finely forged cross guard shaped like the spreading branches of a tree. The hilt was wire-wrapped and on the pommel where a lord might keep a gem, was a round, smoothly polished sphere of a strange wood.
Towaal joined Ben and suggested, “Take it.”
“What?” he asked, shocked.
“The longsword. Take it,” she replied.
“I-I’m not sure…” he stuttered.
“It is also mage-wrought. It will take further research to determine its properties, but at the least, it is a finer blade than what you have now. Take it,” she said again.
“What about Rhys? He’s a better swordsman than I am. He should use it,” argued Ben.
Rhys tapped the hilt of his own longsword and said, “I already have a mage-wrought blade. That one is yours.”
The companions watched quietly as Ben reached out and wrapped his hand around the hilt. He lifted the sword off the rack. He wasn’t sure what to expect, but nothing extraordinary happened. It was a little lighter than his own blade but near the same size. The wire hilt felt cool to the touch.
Rhys pulled a simple leather scabbard from behind the armor stand and handed it to Ben. It was inscribed with a glyph, different from the blademaster one. Ben had never seen its like before.
He stepped back and whirled the sword through the air in a gentle figure eight. Maybe it was just his imagination, but it seemed a light breeze stirred the still air of the room.
Lady Towaal nodded appreciatively and remarked, “I must study that further when we’ve reached safety. I believe we have found something very special.”
“What about the rest of it?” asked Corinne, pacing in front of the armor and the weapons rack.
“I don’t think this will fit any of us,” said Rhys, gesturing to the armor. “Whoever wore that is at least a hand taller than I am, and even bigger than the rest of you. That would be more of a hindrance than anything else.”
“That is too bad,” murmured Towaal. “If I am interpreting the sigils correctly, I believe that armor would imbue a prodigious amount of strength into the wearer. Someone in that armor would be capable of doing amazing things.”
“That makes sense,” grumbled Rhys, looking wistfully at the armor then at the mace. He moved over to the heavy weapon and lifted it, barely. He let it thump back down onto the rack. “I don’t think any of us wants to lug that thing back to Northport, even if it is mage-wrought.”
“So, nothing for the rest of us?” complained Corinne.
“It doesn’t look like it,” said Rhys.
Amelie, after realizing none of the weaponry was appropriate for her, had moved over to a wardrobe and opened it up. It held clothes that seemed to match the wearer of the armor. She rifled through but came up with nothing of interest.
They walked back out into the sitting room and Towaal collected the assortment of books by the chair. Rhys unstopped the decanter and sniffed at it. A sly smile crawled across his face and he tucked the crystal container under one arm.
“Come on,” chided Towaal, pursing her lips in frustration at the rogue. “I want to look at the far-seeing table. Gather our packs up top and bring them down before you do any further research on that mysterious liquid.”
Rhys affected a hurt look, which drew no sympathy from anyone.
“Fine.” He sighed.
Back in the main room, the ladies cleared the dust off the onyx table. Ben and Rhys climbed up to collect the packs. Up top, Ben could see another storm was forming above the mountains. Dark, angry clouds spilled over the peaks and down into the Rift valley.
“How far do you think it is to the Rift?” asked Ben.
Rhys squinted, gauging the distance. “Four or five days, depending on the weather and how often you have to walk around those hills.”
“Do you think we would have made it?” asked Ben.
Rhys’ expression grew grim. “Do you think Towaal will be able to open up a volcano under the Rift from five days walk away?”
“I…” Ben didn’t know.
“Hopefully she can,” Rhys responded. “I’m just saying don’t cross it out that we might still have to walk a little farther north.”
Ben swallowed. “Let’s get back inside. I’m done with snow for a little while.”
The men cleared out the hearth and raided the preserved bedchamber for furniture. Borrowing Corinne’s hand axes, they hacked the writing desk and chair into kindling. The dry wood would burn quickly. Rhys suggested they cut up the bed too. The thick logs of the bedposts would last for a while.
“Why don’t you use those fancy mage-wrought longswords to cut up the wood?” asked Corinne when they handed back her axes. “I’m not an expert, never seen one actually, but I’ve heard they never need to be sharpened.”
“Every tool has a purpose and every purpose has a tool,” answered Rhys solemnly.
“My axes are for cutting through a demon’s skull,” remarked Corinne.
Just then, a cool light filled the room from behind them. The far-seeing table flared into life.
The group clustered around while Lady Towaal danced her fingers over the glass smooth surface, explaining to Amelie what she was doing.
“The device is setup like a bird’s eye looking down,” she said. “This one appears to be
roughly the same height as the top if the butte we’re housed in. It’s likely we could adjust that, but I need to understand better how the makers created this.”
Amelie leaned over the table and looked down. It showed rock and forest, just like the terrain around them.
Ben watched, open mouthed. He’d never seen anything like this.
Towaal slowly moved a hand over the table and the image moved with it, showing more rocks and trees.
“See. When I exert my will, I can alter the location we are seeing. These here,” she said, tapping a glowing set of glyphs near the bottom, “are the focus for my will. They signify direction and…likely some other things I am not sure of.”
“How do,” Corinne asked hesitatingly, “how do you make it work? Could I do it?”
Towaal smiled at the huntress. “With training, yes. Small far-seeing devices are relatively common. They are used by all manner of adventurers and seafarers. This larger the surface and the greater the distance, the more difficult it is to manipulate. Without sufficient training and practice in how to extend your will, I do not believe you would be able to control this device.”
Adjusting the display on the table with growing confidence, Lady Towaal kept speaking. “That being said, this table serves as a focal point, which makes this much easier and clearer than what I originally intended. I believe it will also extend the range of what I can see. My method would have required more effort and time to get it right. It’s obvious that whoever created this table did it with the purpose of a scouting device for the area.”
“But why?” asked Ben.
“If this outpost, or whatever it is, was for the Purple…” started Amelie.
“Then maybe they were using it to monitor the Rift,” finished Rhys.
They all looked back at the far-seeing table silently. Everyone shared the same thought. It made sense that the chamber was a monitoring station for the Rift. The obvious question was, what happened?
The soft, consistent yellow glow of the wall lights and the flicker of light from the table as Towaal searched the area began to get tiresome after a while. Ben couldn’t help but think what happened to the original occupants of the room. With the armor and equipment they found in the bed chamber, paired with the magical talents of the people who built the devices, they were prepared to defend themselves. Did they just fade away, or were they attacked?
While the ladies worked on locating a point of reference for the far-seeing table, Ben picked up Rhys’ torch from earlier and wandered back down the stairs to the lower level.
He walked to the preserved room and looked through it again aimlessly. The clothing held his interest briefly. It was an unfamiliar style. He wasn’t sure if that was because it was ancient or because it was just a different culture.
In the room, the only decoration was the purple banner hanging on one wall. The only sign of the occupant’s interests had been the stack of books and the decanter of liquor. He didn’t count the amateurish attempt at carving a pipe. To him, that looked like someone trying desperately to relieve boredom.
He walked back out into the hall and ducked his head into the other rooms.
They were similar to the preserved one with the notable exception that they were not at all preserved. The contents of the rooms had crumbled into dust. In the fourth room, he heard someone come in behind him. He turned to see Corinne in the doorway.
“Find anything?” she asked.
“No,” he replied. “Dust and…just dust.”
“Strange, isn’t it,” she said.
“It is strange,” he agreed.
“No, I mean, specifically it is strange there is nothing left in any of these rooms. Why was that one room preserved, and how come nothing is left in these?”
“Maybe no one had time to cast a spell on these?” he guessed. “They could have left in a hurry or didn’t have that kind of skill. Over time, anything in here would disintegrate.”
“Not the devices the mages created,” she challenged. “The lights and table not only stayed intact, they still work! That is craftsmanship. The preserved room had mage-wrought stuff inside. Even without the spell or whatever it was they did, that stuff could have survived. If these people left in a hurry, how come none of these rooms have anything remaining?”
Ben looked around the room they were standing in. Ankle-deep piles of dust covered large portions or the floor where neither weather nor wind had blown through.
“We never really looked in these rooms,” he admitted.
Corinne strode in the door and kicked through one of the dust piles, covering her mouth as the ages-old debris floated into the air.
Ben waded after her. Soon, the entire room was filled with a cloud of dust. They walked back out, coughing and grinning at each other.
“Let’s do another,” she suggested.
They stormed through two more rooms, kicking the dust around, coughing and laughing. Ben’s clothes were coated in pale grey dust, but after three weeks in the Wilds, he thought it might be an improvement. In the third room, Ben heard a clink when Corinne’s boot swept through a particularly deep pile.
“Hold on,” he said. “What was that?”
“What was what?” she said, breathing heavily with her hand over her mouth.
Ben shuffled slowly through the area he thought he heard the sound and was rewarded when his foot touched on a small lump.
He kneeled down and brushed the dust aside with his hand to reveal two wooden ovals. They were the size of his palm, hollow in the middle, and inscribed with runes.
Corinne kneeled beside him and asked, “What is that?”
“They look like wood,” he said, “but they sounded like metal, and, well, they’re still here.”
Corinne reached a hand forward.
Ben cautioned, “Should you—”
He didn’t finish before her fingers closed around the objects.
On closer examination, they learned nothing. They were smooth like polished wood and heavy like metal. They had a similar look to the disc Amelie carried and the one they found in the woods used for a ward. Maybe all magical devices looked like that, thought Ben.
“Let’s show Towaal,” he suggested.
“Sure,” answered Corinne. “But these are mine.”
“Whatever,” agreed Ben. Not that he could complain. The mage-wrought longsword was strapped to his side.
They cleaned out the other dust-filled rooms, finding nothing, and then went back upstairs where the rest of the party was huddled around the far-seeing table.
Towaal took a look at the small objects but couldn’t identify their purpose. She rapped one against the table, listening to the metallic clink. She handed it back to Corinne with a shrug.
“Let’s put it with everything else we need to research when we find time,” advised the mage. “They’re clearly mage-wrought, of course. There seems to be some sort of linking between them, but I don’t have time to look into that now.”
Corinne nodded, obviously disappointed.
“Let me look,” offered Amelie.
Corinne handed over the two wooden ovals and Amelie knelt down, placing them on the floor, and peering close to examine them.
Ben wasn’t sure what she could tell that Towaal couldn’t.
Amelie traced her fingers over the objects and moved them closer then further apart on the floor. She frowned at them, presumably trying to exert some will on the intractable wood. Finally, she clinked one on the floor, just like Towaal did.
Muttering quietly under her breath, she sat back on her haunches.
Corinne stepped close, peering down at the artifacts.
“Here,” said Amelie.
She handed Corinne one of the ovals.
“Go over to the far side of the room and rap it against the floor, just like I did.”
Corinne took it and did as she was instructed. Walking back to Amelie, she asked, “Anything?”
“I believe so,” replied Amelie. “These
are indeed linked and I think they are transferring sound. I’m not sure how…”
“Amelie!” exclaimed Towaal. She waved the initiate over. “Come look, I’ve found the valley.”
Amelie stood and tried to hand back the wooden oval, but Corinne stopped her.
“You keep that one and I’ll keep this one,” said the huntress. “If they are linked, maybe by keeping them separate, we can figure out how to use them.”
Amelie nodded then moved to Towaal’s side.
13
The Rift
The next morning, they continued to examine the rift valley through the far-seeing device.
Clustering around the table, the companions all watched as Towaal manipulated the display to scan across the valley. Unlike the rugged terrain leading up to it, the floor of the valley was smooth and steady. It was crowded with thick trees, and at the height they were observing from, they had little visibility into what might be moving in the area.
Sweeping back and forth, a clear picture began to emerge. The valley formed a shallow bowl with a river running through the middle. There were no features Ben could see until they got to what would have been the center of the valley.
In that area, on a hill that was clear of vegetation, stood an ancient stone structure.
From above, it looked to be the same level as a four-story building and was formed in a perfect circle. It stood balanced on its side, like an open gateway. Around it, they could see a few dark shapes moving.
“Demons,” observed Rhys.
Towaal nodded. “I’m not sure we would have survived going in there.”
Suddenly, there was a flicker of light near the rift and a new shape emerged near the stones. Other black shapes rapidly converged on it but their view was too far away to see exactly what was happening. Moments later, the shapes scattered.
“What was that?” asked Corinne.
“I’m not sure,” murmured Towaal. “Recruiting a newly arrived demon into the swarm?”
“Well,” said Rhys, “one thing is clear. We just witnessed a demon arrive through that thing. We might be the only people alive who have seen that. The suspicion about the Rift existing and being a source of demons is confirmed. The question is, what can we do about it?”