Greysons of Grimoire

by Tpaul Homdrom

  “And a long time ago, the Council of Mages even tried to use it to protect the entire city,” Caleb said. His own voice sounded far away to him, like it wasn’t even coming from within him. “That failed pretty poorly, and they abandoned it within days.”

  “Locational Time Magic is a form of Time Magic you likely won’t ever be able to use,” Midnight said. He paced a circle around Caleb, looking for all the world like he didn’t feel any pressure or discomfort at all — he probably didn’t, from what he’d said about himself and Ingrid. “But that’s not why you’re here. The point is, the pressure of time’s alteration is diffused. It won’t affect you as greatly or as quickly, but it will feel different. For the first few days — possibly even several weeks — your own senses and perception will struggle to keep up with how time has been distorted.”

  “Why do I still feel the pressure, though?” Caleb asked. “You said my problem was that I hold my breath when using Time Magic, but I didn’t this time.” Caleb inhaled and exhaled several times to experiment, proving his point. “So what’s the problem?”

  “You’re Human,” Midnight said with a chuckle. “And there’s nothing you can do about that. The Human body isn’t meant to exist outside of time’s regular flow. Think of it like water. Humans are similar to the top-dwellers, the surface level fish — or maybe even things like frogs, which don’t even spend all the time in water, but just live around it.”

  “So I’m a frog?” Caleb asked, laughing despite himself.

  “Metaphors,” Midnight said, rolling his eyes. “I’m sure you’ve heard of them. Humans are meant for — and accustomed to — the surface of the water, riding the current passively. No pressure there. When you distort time, or when time is distorted around you by others, things get flipped. Suddenly, the shallow swimming frog that you are is submerged, deeper and deeper. The longer time is altered, the deeper that little frog goes. And the deeper underwater you are —”

  “The more pressure there is,” Caleb said, nodding in understanding. “All the weight of the water pushes down on you — there are depths where even submarines get crushed, let alone humans — or frogs.”

  “Right,” Midnight said. “You’re no anglerfish, or other type of deep-dweller. You don’t belong in distorted or altered time. The longer you stay there, the worse it gets. That said, you’re a Time Mage. So you’re not like an ordinary Human. You have certain privileges, because you’ve been accepted by the River of Time, to a point.”

  “The River of Time?” Caleb asked.

  “Lots to explain on that front, we’ll get there,” Midnight said with a dismissive wave. “The point is, no matter who you are, you’ll always have limits. The good news is this: if you change the way you do things, and survive this training, you’ll be able to wield Time Magic with virtually no negative side-effects, as long as you use it wisely and sparingly. Before, the way you were using it, you were incurring negative effects every single time you entered Time-state.”

  “Time-state?” Caleb asked.

  “Plenty of terminology to learn,” Midnight said. “It’s shorthand for the state of altering time through Time Magic. The first key for using your Time Magic is efficiency. Short bursts are best, and don’t prolong Time-state any more than you have to. The second key is to space out your usage of Time Magic. The longer you alter time in one use, the longer you should wait before using it again.”

  “So, in the end, I’m going to need to learn to fight smarter, no matter what.”

  Midnight nodded. “Now you’re getting it. Speaking of fighting, we’ll also be working with your combat abilities. You’ve got some neat skills with those discs and chains you use. Proper training could make you an effective fighter — and you wouldn’t have to rely on Time Magic as much. You need to change the way you perceive Time Magic. It isn’t a crutch, or even the core of your skillset. It’s a tool. A secret weapon of sorts. The more effectively and efficiently you use it, the better. And,” Midnight grinned, “if you do well enough, I’ll even be able to teach you entirely new ways to use Time Magic. That is, if you’re interested.”

  “Of course I’m interested,” Caleb said, laughing. He shook his head, trying to shake off the fuzziness and sluggishness of his mind. His vision sometimes went out of focus, too. It was something he was used to happening occasionally when wearing contacts — they didn’t always stay exactly in the right spot on his eyeball — but when wearing glasses, this was a whole new sensation. “So… how do we start?”

  “First, work on your breathing,” Midnight said. “The first few days are actually easy. You need to get accustomed to all of this. Move around, breathe, and get to a point where you can function relatively normally. If you can’t get that far, then we can’t even begin the actual training.”

  Caleb took in a deep breath, then let it out slowly. It was difficult — he felt like he couldn’t quite fill up his lungs, and his exhale was stuttered as he struggled to maintain consistent air flow. Midnight began to walk back towards his house, and Caleb started to follow him.

  “Stay out here, Greyson,” Midnight said, waving a hand dismissively. “I’m gonna have Ingrid put together some food. If you can accomplish the tasks I set before you when I come back out, you can eat. If not, then you have to wait until tomorrow.”

  Caleb stared, slack-jawed. “Tomorrow?” he asked.

  “That’s right,” Midnight said. He pulled back his sleeve to show off a black-banded wrist watch to Caleb. “It adjusts its speed to how I’ve altered time. So far, your training’s been going for…” he took a look at his watch, “five minutes. I’ll be back in ten, and give you a few challenges. Complete those, and you can eat. Fail, and you’ll have to wait twenty-four hours — and complete a new set of challenges — to get a new chance at a meal.”

  Noticing Caleb staring speechless at him, Midnight smirked. “What?” he asked. “Already regretting your decision?”

  Well, now I know what Madame Chronos was warning me for. Caleb turned away from Mister Midnight so he could focus on getting his breathing and movement back to normalcy. But… no. I don’t regret it. Not yet, at least.

  It hurts. It’s uncomfortable. But that’s nothing.

  This will make me stronger. This will get me back to the others.

  This will make me useful to them. This will make me able to help Isabelle get home.

  Caleb realized he was grinning.

  Bring it on, Mister Midnight. I’ll take whatever you can throw at me. I’m a Hunter, after all. I can handle adversity.

  And I’m a Greyson. We’re as strong as they come.

  Chapter 33: Starlight

  — G —

  When Delilah stepped through the boundary separating Lilac Hill from the House of Truth, she was pummeled by a sense of complete wonderment.

  Stars filled the sky above and around her. Delilah had camped in the mountains around Grimoire and stared up at the sky at night, with stars unobscured by city lights. It had been beautiful and wondrous.

  This was beyond any of that, and even beyond Delilah’s imagination. There must have been hundreds, maybe thousands, more stars than could be seen on a clear night on Earth. The night shone with twinkling brilliance that brought a smile to Delilah’s face.

  “There’s so many,” Chelsea said, echoing Delilah’s thoughts.

  “Watch your step,” Gwen cautioned. “I know the sky is beautiful, but we seem to have arrived on one of the more dangerous bridges.”

  That got Delilah to look down and around at her physical surroundings. She stood on a metal bridge that seemed perfectly stable and well-structured. The only problem was… there were no railings. One wrong step, and Delilah would fall right off of the bridge. Peering out over the edge, it was clearly a long drop down. Looking down and all around, Delilah’s jaw dropped.

  The entire place was a city made up of towers floating in space — the starry sky wasn’t just up above, but also down below, as if there was no ground anywhere. These towers ca
me in many different sizes, shapes, and colors, and at varying heights — some towers had their bottom floors at the same height as another’s roof. Very few of the spires were tall enough to start at what Delilah assumed was the bottom and extend all the way up to the tallest point of the city. They were all connected by long bridges of varying sizes and styles. Many of those bridges had very clear guardrails to prevent pedestrians from falling over the edge.

  “It seems I was wrong,” Gwen said, taking a look at her pocket watch before snapping it closed and looking around at the city. “I thought we’d reach the House of Truth, but instead we’ve arrived at the city known as Starlight Spires.”

  “Take a guess how it got its name,” Chelsea said with a smirk.

  “Watch yourself,” Lorelei said to Isabelle, taking the girl’s hand. Isabelle looked up at her, smiling at Lorelei’s reassuring presence.

  “Let’s get somewhere safer,” Chelsea said. “There’s a balcony on the other side.”

  Together, the five girls walked along the bridge to the opposite side, finding refuge at a stone balcony with low walls as protective edges. Isabelle let out a weary sigh, making it clear she’d been very tense on the walk over.

  “Where do we go?” Delilah asked, bracing herself against a low wall as she leaned out and continued to survey the starlit city. “It’s… huge. There must be millions of people living here.” She could see many walking around, on bridges, through windows on different towers, or on rooftop gardens and other balconies like the ones the girls stood on.

  “The number of permanent residents is surprisingly small from what I remember,” Gwen said. Her golden eyes seemed silver in the starry light. “About fifty thousand make their homes here. But the number of visitors and tourists continued to grow, so the city grew to accommodate them.”

  “There must be a lot of things to do here,” Chelsea said, grinning. “I wish we could take our time.”

  “We could spend years here and not see or do everything,” Gwen said, laughing. “Last I visited, I stayed for several months and still felt like there was so much more to do.” She gave another look at her watch, then pocketed it. “Well, we’re not where I hoped we’d be, but we still might be able to find our answers here. And if not, there should be a door leading directly to the House of Truth.”

  “It’s kind of high-tech,” Delilah said, noticing neon signs flashing here and there. Through a window of the nearest spire, she saw someone typing away on an old, bulky desktop computer. “At least compared to what we’ve seen so far.”

  “Technology is an interesting thing in the Dominion,” Gwen said. “Since magic is so prevalent, there are many Locations and people who just don’t bother much with technology, only developing as far as necessary. Many mages from Earth — those that know about the Enchanted Dominion, anyway — make Starlight Spires their main vacation destination, so there’s been quite a bit of transfer of technology.” She shrugged, laughing. “I guess the short story is that technology’s really more of a Human endeavor.”

  “Where’s our destination?” Delilah asked.

  “We’ll want to head to Millennium Vista,” Gwen said, pointing.

  “It’s hard to miss,” Delilah said, staring. In the midst of the many spires of competing heights and widths, a true behemoth of a tower took up the center of the city. Its bottom floor was the lowest of all the towers, and its roof was so high up that the tower must have thousands of floors — maybe even tens of thousands. While many of the spires adopted darker hues and reflective surfaces to make them appear like a part of the starry sky all around, Millennium Vista was pearly white, and shone with many lights of its own.

  “No more weird gaps between trees or obscure steps into nowhere,” Chelsea said. “We’re heading to the main attraction.”

  “It’s pretty far,” Isabelle said. Lorelei had set her on her shoulders, so the girl could see, and she looked rather glum as she stared at the white, shining tower. “Can we make it?”

  Gwen turned away from the view, to a door that led in from the balcony. “We’ll be fine,” she said with a smile. “Millennium Vista has doors that serve as stable portals to many Locations, including the House of Truth. Most of them are entrances, just one-way, but they don’t change with time.”

  “So we have all the time we need,” Lorelei said. Isabelle’s glum expression turned to a smile.

  So the girls began their journey. The tower which housed the balcony they came in from was quite small and rather run-down. Cobbled together from wood, stone, and metals of many different types, they descended a spiraling staircase that creaked with every step. Most of the doors they passed were boarded up, and the one window along their descent was cracked, letting the wind whistle through its slim openings.

  “Seems like we arrived in the slums,” Chelsea said, frowning at their surroundings.

  “Slums imply that people live here,” Gwen said. “This is one of the few abandoned spires. As construction constantly continues, some areas of the city simply lose their relevance. Don’t worry. It isn’t far to more welcoming environs.”

  Six floors down, the girls stepped out through a doorway with no door, crossing another bridge with no guardrails. Isabelle sat steady on Lorelei’s shoulders, while Delilah had to stare at her feet as she walked. There was simply too much to look at, and she was too easily distracted, to trust herself to walk safely along any other way. Chelsea’s owl flew up, hovering around her, after being shooed off of her shoulders, being told “You’re too distracting, get off!”

  This bridge led to an outdoor stairway around a blocky stone spire, and the girls continued to descend. Keeping one hand on the railing, Delilah stared out at the city around her.

  She’d seen pictures of larger cities, and had even visited Chicago once. She thought she knew vertical cityscapes, but this was something entirely different. There were no vehicles whatsoever — all traffic was by foot. The largest bridge Delilah could see was a well-lit pathway that led directly to Millennium Vista, seemingly wide enough for dozens of people to walk side by side. Otherwise, most of these crossings were like a one lane city street or narrower, and they rarely covered a lot of horizontal ground.

  No, the focus was on the towers — and “Spires” was an apt descriptor for them. Delilah had read somewhere that the tallest building in the world had one hundred and sixty-three floors. While Millennium Vista already completely dwarfed Delilah’s perception of how tall a single building could be — and even dwarfed the mountains around Grimoire — with its thousands of floors, most of the spires, by Delilah’s reckoning, had several hundreds of floors, and quite a few easily had a thousand.

  The architects of these spires were tremendously creative. There were many completely open floors, without walls or windows at all. Balconies were a constant fixture, providing reprieves from the frantic inner-spire life while also breaking up the skyline and keeping the constant towers from blending together in Delilah’s vision. There were rooftop gardens and pools and outdoor cinemas and stages, and yet the roofs weren’t the only locations of wide-open entertainment.

  Crossing the next bridge, the girls passed through an entire indoor zoo that in no way felt like it was indoors. The ceiling was painted and lit to look like the starry sky outside, and with very few walls or windows around the perimeter, it felt like a small outdoor zoo. And the animals were fascinating. Delilah spotted some she recognized — zebras, hippos, boa constrictors, and mountain lions — but most were completely new to her. There was a bird with rainbow plumage that shimmered and shone, changing colors as it moved. When they passed its enclosure, Delilah marveled at just how large the bird was. It towered over her, and as she stepped up to the glass, the bird lowered its head, fixing its pitch-black eyes on her.

  An enclosure with several small, excitable birds, each with dozens of wings, became even more excited when Chelsea passed by. Her owl Summon perched on her shoulders, and the small birds were very excited by the sight of him. They flitted
here and there, squawking and chirping and singing. Chelsea’s Summon, for his part, simply cocked his head to the side, watching them with something akin to bemusement.

  There was a petting zoo area, where children laughed as they held, petted, and played with a variety of small, adorable, fluffy animals. One of the animals glowed blue and chased its tail, reminding Delilah of Shana and Altair.

  Leaving the small zoo behind, Delilah finally felt like they were actually in the city. This next bridge had guardrails and lamp posts, and several potted plants were fixed to the rails. Most were dark-colored flowers that seemed to fit right in to the starry light all around. Even the lighting elements used, from neon signs to lamp posts, were designed to preserve and accentuate the natural lighting of Starlight Spires. Nothing was very bright, and there was no single, overpowering light source in the sky like the sun, so while Delilah could see perfectly well, it all felt rather mysterious and dreamlike. No one cast much of a shadow, and it was very strange to be able to see so much color yet not have to strain her eyes in a place where it was perpetually nighttime.