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Book 5, Chapter 40
🕑 Added 2024-12-04 13:58:06 +0000 UTCReaching stage seven involved a mage anchoring themselves in the Astral Realm, with future stages building on that connection. It was a difficult milestone to achieve, but well within my capabilities. The hardest part had been finding—or building, in my case—a mana resonance point that would hold the mana flows in the physical realm in sync with those of the Astral Realm while I worked.
Anchoring a spell partially in the Astral Realm was another matter entirely. It actually had the opposite problem a mage did. Instead of trying to force the mana flows to contort to my physical body, I had to find a way to make sure the spell didn’t slip fully into the Astral Realm and unravel. That was easy as long as I was actively holding onto it, but quite a bit more difficult to manage if I wanted to be able to release the magic to actually do something.
Difficult wasn’t the same as impossible, and I had plenty of experience using this method to infiltrate warded areas. It hadn’t been a viable option with Ammun’s tower after he woke up for a few reasons—namely his wards were more thorough, there were a ton of mana wraiths eating the mana I’d have to deal with, and heavy mana in general made the whole process more difficult—but this new structure was significantly more vulnerable.
I put together a couple enchantments based on my own educated guesses about Ammun’s design philosophy, a few catch-all attempts just to see if they’d work, and three different designs specifically targeted toward surviving the teleportation across a massive distance. Theoretically, that shouldn’t stop any of them, but I could only confirm their efficacy with standard teleportation spells.
Building them near the resonance point was easy, and holding them to shape while teleporting directly to the gestalt’s lair barely taxed my strength more than a normal teleport. The colony assembled immediately at my arrival, and the gestalt’s voice spoke into my mind. ‘You are ready to begin your experiment?’
“I am,” I said. “The major hurdle is the distance, of course. But you’ve already got the scrying connection going, and my enchantments are pure mana constructs. They’re designed to anchor themselves in the Astral Realm, so, in theory, they should be able to travel along the scrying path to Yulitar, where they’ll be swept up in the mana vortex and pulled inside Ammun’s new tower. I need your cooperation to launch the enchantments.”
‘Very well. Walk us through what exactly we need to do.’
Working together, the gestalt and I sent one after another of my scrying infiltrators skyward. As I’d expected, there were some problems with adapting the spells to use a different form of teleportation. Fully two-third of the enchantments collapsed on the spot, and of the three that I managed to adapt, two of them became fully subsumed in the mana stream. They probably still existed in the Astral Realm, but that didn’t do me much good.
Finally, after a bit of tinkering to account for all the new problems we’d come up against, I held what I hoped would be the final attempt loosely in my mind. If this one failed, I’d need a round-trip back to my demesne to take advantage of my resonance point again, but I didn’t think it’d come to that.
“Here we go,” I said. At the gestalt’s mental confirmation, I sent the enchantment racing along the scrying lines, tethered to the spell the gestalt was maintaining to help my magic find its way. It slipped into the Astral Realm, but a moment later, it was back in the physical world.
“No losses in the rune structure,” I said. “Perfect. The enchantment is on Yulitar.”
‘The tower is pulling it in,’ the gestalt sent.
We watched in silence as the spell I’d put into Ammun’s orbit circled around his tower. If I was too far off the mark on what kind of filter wards Ammun was using, we were about to find out. Best case, my magic would break apart into unstructured mana. Worst case, the lich would recognize the invasion attempt and probably make some alterations to his wards in an effort to strengthen them.
On the other hand, if the spell did manage to slip through, it would let us scry the inside of the tower and maybe, for the first time in the last six months, give us a realistic timeline for when we could expect Ammun to return to Manoch. That would be an immense help in deciding what to prioritize.
“Almost there,” I muttered. “Come on…”
The spell slipped into the tower without so much as a blip. It swept through the intake until it reached the interior, where I manually pulled it out of the mana stream before it could be captured in what appeared to be an enormous crystal pillar. Fully a hundred feet tall and twenty feet wide, it rose through the interior of the tower and deep down below the moon’s surface. As it pulled in more and more mana, the crystal crushed it down, converting it into heavy mana.
‘That is a significant amount of mana. Perhaps we did not understand the true scope of this teleportation spell,’ the gestalt observed.
I shook my head. “It’s for something else. I think this might be the focal point for the soul tether that will connect Ammun’s physical shell to his phylactery.”
The crystal spire was less interesting than the walls of the tower itself. There were millions of visible runes carved into its surface, and I could see panels of moonstone stacked up waiting to be installed on top of the runes already completed. It was probably possible to count how many layers Ammun had constructed, but it wouldn’t be easy with my limited ability to snoop.
Still, it was a good sign. I’d gotten the teleport ritual down to a single room, not even a tenth of the size of the interior of the tower, with no extra layers of walls for more runes. Whatever Ammun was doing was a hundred times more complex. It would take far more time and mana to utilize this setup. What I needed to figure out was exactly how much more time he needed.
Ammun himself floated in the air near the top of the tower. He was wearing the same dark robes I’d seen him in last time, now considerably dustier. With one finger, he carved runes into a blank stone panel on the wall in front of him. The speed at which he worked was impressive, especially considering the cloud of dust he’d created by manually breaking down the stone instead of reshaping it to form the runes.
I did a quick count of the uncarved panels still waiting to be installed, then compared it to how fast Ammun was working. A lich was undead; it needed no rest. It didn’t get fatigued. At no point would its hands tremble and threaten to ruin its work. Undead were practically biological machines. Because of that, I figured it was a safe guess to assume that his current speed was as fast as he could go, which meant he needed about six weeks to finish carving runes into his supply of panels.
That was only true if he was carving one side, however, and there was no real reason to do that. Double-sided panels would cut the number he needed in half in addition to providing smoother, more efficient mana flows. That was how I’d do it, and since Ammun seemed to have modeled himself completely after me, I suspected that was his process as well. If that was the case, six weeks became twelve.
His current stack of raw material was enough to complete another layer on all four floors of the tower with enough left over to do a third or so of an additional round. Did he have a stock of extras, or was he going to have to take a break to make more panels? Considering how easy they were to manufacture, I could easily see the logic going either way. Why worry about making too many when each one only took a minute to craft? Why worry about making sure he had enough when if he ran out, he could just step out of his tower and get more immediately?
The only way I was going to get a clear picture was to get a look at the runes themselves and try to piece together exactly what Ammun was building. If nothing else, I wanted to know if the teleportation portion of the tower was completed. I was assuming he wouldn’t come back without the soul tether issue also sorted, but after that, I could also see him adding some sort of weapons system like his old rival cabal had used when they’d taken over Amodir a thousand years ago.
If he was making that, I’d have no choice but to return to Yulitar and attack Ammun. I couldn’t afford to let him build a planet-cracking mana beam cannon floating over all our heads, but I didn’t know how I was going to win that fight. Hopefully, it wasn’t a priority to Ammun right now. He’d be much easier to handle on Manoch, especially once his demesne finished crumbling under its own weight.
I’d just started prying into the rune structure, barely even skimming over it to get a rough idea of what things were supposed to do, when Ammun suddenly froze in place. “Shit,” I swore. “Looks like he noticed something.”
Slowly, the lich turned and looked down at the partially phased out scrying beacon we were spying on him through. “Interesting,” he said. “Who might you belong to? Oh, like I don’t already know. Master Keiran, how nice of you to check up on me.”
‘Shall we terminate the connection?’ the gestalt asked.
“No, take in as much of the rune structure as you can get and project it as illusions down here,” I said. With any luck, having a few million minds would allow the gestalt to perfectly recall what the runes looked like. Being able to fully study the magic at my leisure would go a long way toward giving me an accurate timeline for Ammun’s return.
“It was an impressive trick, leaving me stranded up here by using my ritual fodder to get back home yourself,” Ammun said. “Though I do wonder how you managed to coerce the other half of my diviner squad into assisting you. The numbers just don’t add up, you see. One way or another, there should have been some bodies up here.”
“Keep talking,” I muttered. “Give us just another minute to look around.”
“Ah, well, I suppose I’ll find out soon enough, when I come to question you in person. It won’t be long now. My work nears completion, but let’s leave it a surprise as to when exactly I’ll come to call on you.”
Ammun reached out with one hand, his skeletal fingers clutched into something that remotely resembled a fist, and a pulse of mana rolled out of him. My scrying spell was snuffed out, snapping the connection and sending mana lashing back at us.
I grounded out the reprisal without issue, then turned my attention to the gestalt. “Tell me you managed to copy his work.”
‘We did, though not all of it.’
“Damn. That’s going to complicate things. How much did you get a good look at?”
‘Everything on the innermost layer and the layer behind that, and a partial look at the third layer,’ the gestalt explained. ‘We believe there were two more layers based on the thickness of the panels and overall surface area of the interior of the tower when compared to the exterior.’
I blinked in surprise. “Really? You got all that from just that minute or so of examination?”
‘Yes.’
“Well… That’s a lot. Can you share it with me so I can start reverse-engineering his progress?”
A now-familiar barrage of images entered my brain, too many for me to sort out all at once. I could already feel the beginnings of a headache coming on, but I’d just have to suffer through. This was too important to take it slowly.
“Thanks,” I said. “Alright, making some assumptions about the outer layers housing the ward schema, let’s see if we can find the beginning of the thread with what we’ve got to look at.”
And so the gestalt and I worked together to unravel Ammun’s magic, one panel at a time. I didn’t sleep for the next three days, but when we were finished, I had an answer. Unfortunately, it wasn’t one I was happy with.
“Ten weeks,” I said. How much could I get done in just ten weeks?
