The world exploded.
Or at least, close enough, so far as Hawthorne was concerned. She plunged into choppy waters, no longer standing on the deck she’d just been on, and hurriedly cast a spell to put a bubble of air around her head.
Swearing under her breath, she looked around frantically. Where was Keolah? Clumsily, she moved her arms and legs to try to propel herself through the water, but for all that she’d spending so much time aboard a ship, she’d never been particularly good at swimming. Around her, the gnomish Water and Wind Mages swam around to rescue their crew mates who didn’t have one of those Talents, but she could see no sign of Keolah. Hadn’t she been standing near Silver in the aft of the ship?
She wasn’t a Water Mage and couldn’t swim like a fish, but that didn’t mean she was helpless. Drawing mana from Zarnith, she sent a stream of Wind Magic behind her to propel her through the water. There was Silver! Blown further away from the ship than most of the others. Narcella was already rushing to help him. With another jet of air, Hawthorne shot through the water again, looking for Keolah.
Next to an outcropping of rocks, she spotted something wavy and green that she might have mistaken for sea grass if it weren’t next to fluttering brown cloth. It was Keolah’s hair. She was unconscious, and her clothes tangled up in the rocks. Hawthorne swam close and put an air bubble around Keolah’s head. Fuck, she wasn’t breathing.
“Keolah!” Hawthorne cried out, grabbing onto the woman and shaking her.
Water leaked out of Keolah’s mouth as her head tilted to the side. Could Hawthorne get her breathing again? Not wasting any time thinking about it, Hawthorne held Keolah’s head and shoved air into her mouth with Wind Magic. It felt stupid, but she thought it was worth a try. Maybe it would work. Maybe she wasn’t really dead yet. She couldn’t be dead. She couldn’t be dead. Not after not everything. Not after everything they’d been through.
Keolah coughed and sputtered, and spat up water. She was alive! Still not lucid, but at least she was starting to breathe on her own again. Hawthorne wrapped an arm around her and propelled the two of them toward the surface. She didn’t care where or when in space and time they’d wound up, so long as they were alive.
Keolah slowly came to. She didn’t recognize the place she was in, but it wasn’t one of the cabins aboard the Careful. Where was she? And more importantly, when was she? Upon sitting up, a wave of dizziness rushed through her head, and a strong hand rested itself on her shoulder and helped her lay down again without falling out of the bed.
“Easy there,” Hawthorne said. “You bumped your head and swallowed some water before I could get to you.”
“Hawthorne?” Keolah croaked.
“Hi,” Hawthorne said with a coy grin.
“What happened?” Keolah asked. “Is everyone okay?”
“Everyone’s fine,” Hawthorne said. “Well, more or less. Two gnomes lost their hearing when the engines exploded, but the Water and Wind Mages were able to keep anyone from drowning and Kithere healed any cuts and burns.”
“Wait a minute,” Keolah said. “The engines exploded? What happened to the ship?”
“The ship currently exists in tiny splinters scattered across time,” Hawthorne said. “Most of the metal components are now at the bottom of the Bay of Scalyr.”
“The ship was destroyed?” Keolah said. “By Valissa, Sarom’s not going to be happy.”
“Are you kidding?” Hawthorne said with a laugh. “He’s thrilled. And he already has plans for a new ship named Carefulyoudontgetstruckbylightningwhiletravelingthroughtime.”
Keolah groaned. “Gnomes are weird.”
“I know, right?” Hawthorne said.
“What about the books?” Keolah asked.
“Had to fish them out from the sea bed, but they’re fine,” Hawthorne said. “Pretty sure they’re enchanted against being blown up, and the water definitely didn’t hurt them any.”
“Okay, now here’s the real question,” Keolah said. “Did we succeed?”
“So far as we can tell, yes,” Hawthorne said. “If this isn’t the timeline we started in, it’s one similar enough that Sedder couldn’t find any significant differences between this and the city he’s lived in for years.”
“What about insignificant differences?” Keolah asked suspiciously. “If we go to Torn Elkandu right now, will we find the buildings we grew there and the books we left in the library?”
“We won’t know until we get there, will we?” Hawthorne asked.
“That’s not very reassuring,” Keolah said. “And what if it’s not? We don’t even have a ship now!”
“We’ll manage,” Hawthorne said brightly.
“How can you be so cheerful about this all?” Keolah asked. “We could have all died! Or been trapped in another time, in another timeline, in someplace horrible with no way to escape.”
Hawthorne cocked her head. “Maybe. But I have faith in us to find a way.”
“You’re a fine one to talk about faith, for someone who isn’t overly fond of the gods,” Keolah said.
“Pfah, faith has nothing to do with gods,” Hawthorne said. “Faith is other people.”
“Well, I guess I’m flattered by your confidence in me, then,” Keolah said. “But hasn’t everything we’ve been through been nerve-wracking?”
“Sure, a bit, sometimes,” Hawthorne said. “But it’s been a wonderful adventure, and one I’ve gotten to spend at your side. I wouldn’t trade it for the world.”
Keolah smiled weakly. “Hawthorne.”
“Yeah?”
“Do me a favor?” Keolah prompted.
“Sure, what do you need?”
“Lean down here,” Keolah said.
A little confused, Hawthorne leaned over the bed. “This is going to be something embarrassing, isn’t it. Well, okay, there’s nobody in here but your sister, so embarrass away.”
“I’m asleep,” Kithere mumbled into her pillow.
Keolah chuckled. “No, it’s just that I can’t sit up without falling over and I want to kiss you.” She reached up to put an arm around Hawthorne and pulled her to her lips.
“Completely asleep,” Kithere muttered, turning away from them.
The swirling purple sky of the pocket-world opened around them, and beneath it, the buildings of Torn Elkandu awaited. Frost’s Mountain loomed at one edge of town, overshadowing the School of Thought. It was only upon seeing that that Keolah finally relaxed and breathed a sigh of relief.
“We’re really back,” Keolah said.
“Well, to be fair,” Hawthorne mused, “we’re either in the timeline we started from, or in an extremely similar one previously occupied by versions of ourselves who did more or less the same things.”
Keolah stared at her incredulously. “Whatever it is, I’m going to consider it good enough, and not overthink it.”
“That’s probably wise,” Silver muttered.
“I do not understand what this place is,” Sardill murmured, gazing at the sky. “It feels strange. Unreal. A place between places. A place that is not a place.”
“Well, if you don’t know what it is, I certainly don’t,” Keolah said.
“So it was these Tin’dari who built this place?” Hawthorne asked as they walked toward the arcane complex.. “The ones who spoke Tinean?”
“No, it was the Vel’dari who built this place,” Keolah said.
“Then wouldn’t the language be… Velean, or something?” Hawthorne asked.
Keolah blinked. “I don’t know what the name of their language might be, but yeah. The tree elves said that their language was probably similar enough to that of the void elves to be mutually comprehensible, though.”
Hawthorne paused at the edge of the great circle. “So, is it?”
Keolah stared down at the runes running at her feet. Close, but not close enough. It was just different enough that it might even make this task impossible. One line, one letter out of place, and the meaning was completely different. Where Tinean in some ways seemed organic with curves and circles, ‘Velean’ or whatever one might call it was more likely to sport corners and triangles. She groaned softly, her shoulders slumping.
“I don’t believe this,” Keolah said with a dejected sigh. “everything we did, and it’s all for nothing. We can’t use this.”
“Well, we still have the time travel ritual,” Hawthorne said. “We could always start over, set that up again, and go back to when these Vel’dari lived and just ask them.”
“No,” Keolah said, shaking her head and dismissing that possibility outright. “Not only would that be extremely dangerous, but I don’t trust the Vel’dari one bit. Not after what the Tin’dari told me about them. And they have no reason to want to help us, either.”
“When has something being dangerous ever stopped us before?” Hawthorne asked.
Keolah slowly set off down one of the roads leading toward the Nexus, the spokes of the wheel, eyes fixed upon the runes on the ground as they went, tracing the patterns and the way they interlocked. Regardless of her initial panic, they were clearly the same sort of runes. They were based on three sides rather than four like the elvish and common writing systems, and probably linked together in the same way.
The Nexus loomed before her, and she had no greater understanding of its inner workings than she had when she started. Her eyes scanned the runes on the eight obelisks, hopelessly looking over unfamiliar symbols. She’d just barely started getting a handle on Tinean, and now there was this. She ran a finger down the engraved stone, over the strange runes so like and yet so unlike the ones she’d just been studying, and paused. Her finger rested upon a glyph that looked like three triangles, one within another in another. Just like a target with angles instead of curves.
“This is a keystone rune,” Keolah breathed, the correlation dawning on her.
“Hmm,” Delven mused, leaning close. “And you said it was circles in Tinean? Yeah, this reminds me of human writing, in a way. No, I don’t mean directly. I mean like, you know how the common tongue has uppercase and lowercase letters, and the lowercase ones are often more rounded versions of the uppercase ones, like the M and N for instance?”
Keolah nodded thoughtfully. “Maybe this is doable after all…”
They brought out their notes and got to work. Tinean and Velean runes did have some significant, but regular, differences. Once they realized the pattern to them, it was a lot easier than Keolah had feared it would be to begin to decipher them. The outer part of the complex, the spokes and the wheel, seemed like support and stabilization mechanisms for the Nexus. Oddly enough, if Keolah was reading them right, they’d already begun to absorb the mana and spells that her group had put into Torn Elkandu to provide power. Building that random mountain hadn’t just been a waste of time or simply practice for Yennik and Kithere, because the rune complex was assimilating the mana that had been put into it. Something more would be required, though. The runes seemed to indicate something about fountains that were supposed to be at each hub where the spokes met the wheel. She’d wondered what had been up with those empty circular depressions. They’d actually been supposed to be water basins.
“Calto,” Keolah called him over. “I’ve got a task for you. You see this circle of runes here?”
“Yeah?” Calto said.
“We need to put a fountain here, as well as in the counterpart spaces in the other intersections,” Keolah said. “Get some of the gnomes to help with them. If I’m reading this right, the water needs to be infused with different types of mana.”
“On it,” Calto said.
Keolah headed back to the Nexus, where Delven and Amanda were examining the obelisks.
“Hmm,” Delven said. “This one seems to be mainly dedicated to Speech Magic. Unless I’m missing my guess, it probably is meant to blanket the whole area in a translator spell.”
Amanda nodded in agreement. “It’s unkeyed and dormant at the moment, though. Once we bring it back online, I’ll show you how to key it to get a universal translator enchantment effect.”
“That would be very convenient,” Keolah said. “Have you learned anything else?”
“Each of the obelisks is covered in very different enchantments,” Amanda said. “I haven’t analyzed them too closely yet, but I’m going to guess that some of them are dedicated to locating a target, opening a connection, and activating a teleport.”
“Let’s see what we can find out, then,” Keolah said.
Hawthorne wandered up as Keolah was closely examining an obelisk that seemed to be the primary foundation enchantment that everything else was built on, providing a solid stabilization to all the energies flowing through the place.
“So, hey,” Hawthorne said. “Zarnith and me just finished up dumping some mana into those fountains. Making any progress here?”
Keolah nodded. “Yeah, I think this obelisk here is the one that powers up the whole thing.”
“So what does it do?” Hawthorned asked.
“Nothing in and of itself, so far as I can tell,” Keolah said. “Just sets up the power for the rest of it. I just want to make sure that it’s—”
“You said the symbol of three triangles in each other is the activation rune, right?” Hawthorne said, pointing at the one on this particular obelisk.
“Yes, but—”
Hawthorne channeled a burst of mana into the keystone rune before Keolah could say another word or stop her. Lines of mana rushed across the pillar. All around them, runes flared to life, glowing brightly with cyan light. Several of the people around the pocket-world looked over to them in alarm.
“Hawthorne!” Keolah cried out. “You don’t know what that could do!”
“Sure I do,” Hawthorne said. “You just told me yourself. It’s an ‘on’ switch.”
The activation had not been very stable, and as soon as Hawthorne let go of her magical connection with the keystone rune, the runes around the Nexus began to flicker. The ones on the wheel went out first, then the spokes, and finally the Nexus itself went dark again.
“Well, that was disappointing,” Hawthorne said.
“I don’t think it even got fully activated to begin with,” Amanda said. “It destabilized and collapsed almost immediately. I don’t know if there were any ill effects from it, though.”
“There were not,” Sardill said, approaching them.
“How can you tell?” Hawthorne asked. “No, wait, don’t tell me. Catalysm.”
Sardill gave a longsuffering sigh. “Yes, Hawthorne. ‘Catalysm’, as you so eloquently call it. I would have preferred to refer to my particular magical discipline as ‘Mysticism’ or ‘Enchantment’, but if you insist upon coining such a term, then far be it from me to attempt to dissuade you.”
“Pfft, it’s not really very mystical,” Hawthorne said. “I mean, technically it is, but then technically all magic is mystical. And all types of magic can be used to make enchantments.”
“As you say,” Sardill said. “Regardless, I do not believe that you managed to fully activate the Nexus with such a brief, thin stream of mana. You may have initiated a startup sequence, but did not follow through on it. Though it is probably just as well until we learn more about it. Fortunately, nothing exploded this time.”
“The Nexus is built out of some material I’ve never seen before,” Amanda said. “It’s not truly rock or metal. It seems to be capable of handling vast quantities of mana without a problem.”
They continued to spend many more days working out the runes on the Nexus, although Hawthorne continued to insist upon dumping different quantities of mana into the keystone rune on the activation pillar for different lengths of time just to see what happened. Keolah eventually gave up on trying to discourage her, seeing as it didn’t seem to be hurting anything, although it was a little distracting. When she used Zarnith to initiate the activation process, the runes around Torn Elkandu glowed magenta, but when she did it herself, they glowed cyan. However, she found that when she used her own mana to activate it and Zarnith’s to maintain it, the runes remained glowing with her own magical signature rather than his.
“Hawthorne,” Amanda said. “So long as you’re playing around with that, take a look at the obelisk next to it. It seems to be the next in the sequence to energize and stabilize the Nexus.”
“Isn’t it already energized?” Hawthorne asked, going over to her and taking a look at the obelisk at the end of the road that led to the gardens.
“Not truly, no,” Sardill said. “It appears to be sufficiently active to begin receiving mana, but has not yet drawn any mana from the wells we set up.”
“The first pillar seems to be something like ‘life’,” Amanda said. “That one you’ve been playing with. This one seems to be ‘energy’.”
“Hmm,” Hawthorne said. She channeled mana into the keystone rune of the second obelisk. In the distance, the eight fountains let out geysers of different colors into the air, and mana began flowing along the spokes toward the Nexus. “Neat. Have we identified any of the others yet?” Hawthorne asked. “And by ‘we’ I mean ‘you’.”
Amanda nodded. “Each of them seems to have a common rune that I believe would translate as ‘perfect”.”
“I’d say it’s more like ‘right’ or ‘correct’,” Delven said.
“No, it’s probably ‘complete’ or ‘whole’,” Keolah argued.
“It probably doesn’t matter too closely as long as we’ve got the right idea,” Hawthorne said.
“Either way, the one you’ve been working with is labeled ‘perfect life’,” Amanda said. “The next one seems to be something like ‘perfect effort’.” She went over to the next one, between the roads to the gardens and the school. “And this one is ‘perfect awareness’.”
“Maybe more like ‘mindfulness’,” Keolah put in.
“I think it’s probably involved in selecting a destination,” Amanda said, going over to the one between the school and the mountain. “Next, we have ‘perfect concentration’.”
“I would have said ‘meditation’,” Keolah said.
“Yes, well, you’re a druid sort of Earth Mage,” Amanda said.
Keolah snorted softly. “If that was supposed to be an insult, it kind of failed at it.”
Amanda ignored her. “Anyway, this one probably involves focusing and calibrating the Nexus.” The went to the one between the mountain and the lake. “Here, we have ‘perfect view’, or perhaps vision. It almost certainly involves scrying the destination.”
“I think it does more than that, and I would have called it ‘understanding’,” Keolah argued.
“Fine, I’ll give you that you’re the inborn Seeker here and all,” Amanda conceded. “Next, we have ‘perfect intention’.”
“Should I suggest that I would have said ‘aspiration’ here?” Keolah asked. “Or will you just make another comment on my ‘druidy’ descriptions?”
“Then, we have ‘perfect speech’,” Amanda went on. “We’ve already determined that to be a translator spell.”
“I don’t think it’s just a translator,” Keolah said. “But let’s go with that.”
“Finally,” Amanda said, turning to the obelisk between the Junkyard and the Fire Caves. “‘perfect action’. I believe this is the obelisk that is used to activate the Nexus in order to teleport those within it once a destination has been set and confirmed.”
“While I’m sure the obelisks do function to control the Nexus,” Keolah said, “I’m not sure their purpose is entirely that mundane. There’s a lot we don’t understand about them still, nor about the spokes of the wheel. We have miles of lines of runes that we haven’t even begun to scratch the surface on.”
“I’ll grant you that,” Amanda said. “There are probably many, many functions that we have yet to even guess at the existence of. I’m certain that there are some sort of safeguards built into it somewhere, as well. Still, I think we’ve learned enough that we may be able to successfully activate the Nexus now.”
“This is risky and premature,” Kithere said. “There’s no need for us all to almost die again when we’re already here and can spend as much time as we have to learning about this place. And even if we can activate the Nexus, what’s to say that we’ll be able to get back again?”
“I don’t think it needs to be one or the other,” Keolah said. “There are runes we should be able to use to tell us information about the other Nexi in the network. We can use those before we commit to actually teleporting anyone anywhere.”
“Okay, now that definitely sounds like a sensible course of action,” Kithere said.
“What, did you think we were just going to activate the Nexus without knowing what most of even does and teleport blindly without knowing where we’re going?”
“Not you, no,” Kithere said. “But Hawthorne—”
While their attention had been turned toward analyzing the runes, Hawthorne had been playing with the Nexus. With a burst of mana into the keystone rune of the activation pillar, a cloud of swirling mist filled the center of the Nexus, and when it cleared, Hawthorne was gone.
“Well, shit,” Keolah muttered.