When the air went from mild and comfortable to frigid and biting, Hawthorne instantly realized her mistake. With a shiver, she threw a ward up around herself to at least keep the wind at bay, but that did nothing to help with the cold. The wind out of her eyes at least, she looked around at where she’d wound up. Another Nexus surrounded her, with the runes exposed only because they’d apparently melted whatever ice and snow had been covering them when they activated. Once it started snowing, they’d probably end up getting covered up again. It probably would have been nigh-impossible to locate the Nexus from this side.
A bright, blinding blue sky stretched overhead, with some traces of clouds in the distance. Around her stood walls that she at first took for cliffs and rock formations, but they were too neat and regular for that. A castle of some sort had been buried underneath several inches of ice. The Nexus stood within its courtyard, leaving the runed walkways that went off in each direction to pass under archways into the rest of the castle, although not all the walls are intact and only two of the exits still actually had archways over them.
Well, this had been an interesting experiment, but she didn’t like this place and figured she might as well head back. She located the activation rune on the obelisk she thought corresponded to the one to activate the Nexus, and channeled mana into it. Nothing happened. Oh, right, she needed to power it up first. She went over to the one next to it and charged up the activation rune in that one. The runes on that obelisk began to glow faintly and remained glowing, but the rest of the complex stayed dark. Either it was broken, or that wasn’t the right obelisk either. Damn it.
Examining them more carefully now, Hawthorne went over to find the right obelisk, locating one she thought matched the right markings, although it was hard to be certain since she couldn’t read them. Hoping this was the right one finally, she channeled mana into the activation rune. Same thing as before, only that obelisk lit up, and not the rest of it, and remained glowing faintly. Grumbling to herself under her breath, she tried another one. The runes of the arcane complex around her flared to life and began to glow cyan. That was more like it. Once she got that powered up, she put mana into activating the obelisk directly to its right, to energy and stabilize it. She thought she was getting the hang of using this thing. Except… no further energy came into the Nexus and it didn’t seem to stabilize. Oh, right, that was what those mana fountains were for, wasn’t it. Okay, she could handle that.
Pulling her cloak tightly around herself, Hawthorne headed out through one of the standing archways, giving it a suspicious look as if warning it not to fall on her head. Outside the Nexus area, very little of the arcane construct could even be seen beneath piles of collapsed stone blocks. Whatever happened to this castle had not been kind to it. Would even an enemy siege bother to knock down even the interior walls that weren’t blocking anything? Or maybe they were trying to destroy the Nexus and, failing at that, just decided to collapse the whole castle on top of it. It was difficult to tell beneath the snow, but the stone the runes themselves had been carved into seemed to be of a different type than that which the castle had been built from. It was probably the same sort of material that made up Torn Elkandu, the sort that was supposed to be good at channeling mana and difficult to damage.
She hoped at least something was intact, or she was going to freeze to death out here. Why hadn’t she been wearing one of those enchanted items that protect against cold? Right, because they’d been in Kalor, which was tropical, and that was utterly unnecessary there. It’s not like she’d thought things through before hitting that activation rune. She wished Keolah were here. She could use some magical heat right now. Also Fire Magic.
In Torn Elkandu, it was around ten minutes walk from the Nexus to the edge of the circle, but that was a clear walk across smooth, open ground. Here, it took her over half an hour to reach and locate the intersection point of the spoke and the wheel, and when she finally did, it was half-buried beneath part of a stone wall. The basin itself, however, was clear. Channeling mana with Zarnith, she dumped energy into the fountain. A pink geyser shot into the air above her. That… was bound to attract the attention of anything nearby. Fortunately, the mana fountain let off quite a bit of heat as well, so she decided to remain nearby for a while to warm up again.
A few minutes later, a sound rumbled behind her like breathing from a very large throat, and a great shadow crossed the wall in front of her. Hawthorne spun about, and came face to face with a reptilian maw that could swallow her in two bites if it were so inclined. Pristine white scales like new-fallen snow covered its body, and it looked down at her with blue eyes the color of the clear winter sky.
“What manner of being is it that has come to my castle?” asked the dragon, breath heavy with frost. “A purple elf? How strange. The product of magical change, a throwback to another time, or a breed from a far distant realm?”
“Um,” Hawthorne said. “The latter.”
“Very interesting,” the dragon replied. “How is it that you came to be here, then? And why do you speak the tongue of this realm?”
“I have a translator amulet,” Hawthorne said, then paused. “Except it’s not set to snow elvish. Um. I think I accidentally turned on the translator function of this arcane complex?”
“Ah,” the dragon said, a puff of icy breath from its nostrils threatening to freeze Hawthorne’s skin. “Either way, it’s magical. Well enough.”
“Sorry, I don’t mean to be rude, but unless you want me to freeze to death before I can answer your questions, would you point your mouth in another direction?”
The dragon chuckled, and its form began to shrink. In moments, where a massive winged reptile had been, a small elven woman stood. She bore the same snow-white skin and blue eyes as the dragon had, with the addition of a stream of long, silver hair.
“You’re no snow elf, then,” the dragon-elf said. “Snow elves would not be bothered by the cold. What are you?”
“A song elf,” Hawthorne replied. “I’m called Hawthorne. How should I address you?”
The dragon-elf snorted softly. “The people of Aymiaysia refer to me as ‘the dragon of Icewall Castle’. Not very creative of them, but there you go. You may call me Winter, if you like.”
“Aymiaysia?” Hawthorne repeated. “Is that the name of this realm?”
“No,” Winter said. “That’s the name of the city down there, below the cliff.” She pointed off into the distance. “The name of this realm is Sasherey.”
“I see,” Hawthorne said.
“I assume your means of getting here has something to do with that warm purple jet behind you?” Winter said.
“Yeah,” Hawthorne said. “Did you know this rune complex was here?”
“I did not,” Winter said. “I may have noticed some markings beneath the ice, but I did not think much of them. I know nothing about who lived here before I moved in. It has been abandoned and in ruins as long as anyone can remember. Are you saying you’ve found a way to activate it, and that it’s a teleportation device of some sort, that brought you here from another realm?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” Hawthorne said. “I don’t really know how to use it right, though. If you can help me get back to where I came from, I’ll tell you all about it.”
Winter giggled, a disconcerting sound to hear from a dragon, even one who was currently in elven form. “Alright, I’ll play along. I’ll admit that I’m curious, now. The snow elves around here are dreadfully boring, and the less said about those penguins, the better.”
With Winter’s help, Hawthorne made her way around the circle of runes and activated each basin in turn. Winter transformed back into a dragon to use her superior strength and size to help move the fallen stone blocks out of the way of the mana fountains. Finally, once all eight of them were ready, they returned to the Nexus.
“So this is the teleportation device?” Winter asked.
“The part of it that actually teleports, yeah,” Hawthorne said. “Alright, let’s see if I can get this working, then.”
First, the ‘life’ obelisk to turn the construct on. Then, ‘energy’ to power it up. Which one did they say would let her choose a destination? She tried another obelisk. What’s the worst that could happen when blindly channeling mana into things she didn’t know what they did?
A cloud of glowing fog appeared in the middle of the Nexus, and through it, the image of a forest could be seen. That certainly wasn’t Torn Elkandu. She cut off her flow of mana, waited a few moments, then activated it again. Still a forest, even if she tried really hard to think about Torn Elkandu. Maybe that was why she’d gotten sent to Sasherey. It had been stuck on the last used destination.
“Fascinating,” Winter said. “I have never seen a place quite so green before. Is that where you’re from?”
“No,” Hawthorne said. “I don’t recognize that place. Hmm.”
As she started trying to figure out how to switch the destination, runes on a different obelisk lit up on their own. Frowning, she wondered just what this was doing, or trying to tell her. One rune sat there softly blinking as if trying to get her attention. Shrugging, she sent a short burst of mana into the rune.
A swirl of mist filled the Nexus, and a small group of people appeared. Keolah, looking worried. Delven, looking amused. Sedder, looking annoyed. Silver, looking confused. Amanda, looking curious. Sardill, looking like an illusion was hiding his face as usual. Once the mists cleared, Keolah ran up to Hawthorne and grabbed her around the shoulders.
“Hawthorne, I have no idea whether to extol your brilliance or smack your stupidity right now,” Keolah said.
“Both?” Hawthorne said.
“We couldn’t teleport after you,” Amanda said. “It seemed to be warded out somehow.”
“Oops, I think I must have accidentally turned on some sort of safeguards while messing around with it,” Hawthorne said.
Sardill sighed in exasperation. “Hawthorne, I would be more annoyed at you if you did not wind up solving more problems than you cause, entirely by accident.”
“That’s part of her charm,” Delven said with a smirk.
“Am I the only one concerned about the dragon?” Sedder asked.
“She’s friendly,” Hawthorne said offhandedly, and gave a quick round of introductions.
“What manner of beings are these?” Winter wondered, turning back into a snow elf to take a closer look at them. “Hmm, are you a snow elf?” she asked Silver.
“Windrider,” Silver said. “Sky elf, you might say. Long-lost sibling of the snow elves.”
“Are we going to invite the ice dragon back to Torn Elkandu, too?” Sedder wondered.
Winter giggled. “No, I much prefer it here. It sounds much too warm in your realms. But it’s fascinating to see what sort of people come through my castle.”
“Well, if you’re hoping for guests,” Hawthorne said, “you might want to see about fixing up some rooms that have roofs and aren’t freezing.”
“I will take this into consideration,” Winter said. “Though I suppose it couldn’t hurt to take a peek…”
“Not to complain, but Keolah?” Hawthorne said. “Can I get a heat spell over here? I’m freezing my titties off.”
Keolah chuckled. “Right, of course. Forgot all about that.” She made a casual wave of her hand, and Hawthorne was comfortable again.
“Let me guess, you reflexively put up a heat field around yourself and forgot about everyone else?” Hawthorne said with a grin.
“Maybe…” Keolah said. “Er. Well, it’s a good thing that this place doesn’t have the same magic amplification effect as Torn Elkandu, or otherwise I might have set you all on fire accidentally, because I totally didn’t think to check first.” Keolah looked to the sky. “So we really did it. This is really another world.”
“Sasherey, Winter calls it,” Hawthorne said.
“Let’s head move out of this castle so we can get a better look at the world around us,” Keolah suggested.
“What, on foot?” Winter said. “I can do you one better.” She shifted into a dragon. “Climb on! All of you.”
“You’re just trying to show off,” Hawthorne said with a chuckle.
“Well, yeah,” Winter said as if that were the most obvious thing in the world. Universe. Multiverse?
The seven of them climbed onto the back of the dragon, with some help from part of a collapsed wall to get themselves up on top of her. Once they were all as firmly in place as they were going to get, and protected by Hawthorne’s wards against falling off, Winter sprung into the air with strong legs and took off.
The ruined castle, and the remains of the city in the center of which it once stood, lay at the top of a vast cliff that Winter called the Icewall. Beneath them, as Winter flew off the cliff, a large city sprawled out onto the frozen plains, its buildings and archways almost seeming to be made of ice themselves. Maybe they were. From this distance it was difficult to tell who inhabited the city, but judging by their coloration and Winter’s comments, Hawthorne guessed them to be snow elves.
“Look at the horizon,” Silver breathed.
Hawthorne looked up and gazed off into the distance. She didn’t understand what she was seeing at first. The tundra stretched on for what seemed like miles upon miles, until it reached far distant mountains that she could barely make out. Although it was hard to tell exactly how far away they were, she knew from all the sailing she’d done that the world dropped away after a certain point, where land and other ships fell below the horizon. That was what the curve of the world looked like. Or was supposed to look like. But this world didn’t curve. It looked wrong, and now that it had been drawn to her attention, she could not stop staring at it.
“What am I seeing?” Hawthorne said.
“The world is… flat?” Keolah said.
“That would take some getting used to,” Hawthorne commented. “Although at least it beats the world falling away into the Void a mile away from the center.”
After circling around the area and giving them a good view, Winter flew back to the Nexus at Icewall Castle and landed.
“That was funny,” Winter said, resuming elven form. “As soon as I got away from the ruins, you all started babbling in another language that I couldn’t understand. Hawthorne mentioned something about translator runes?”
“I guess she must have activated them accidentally,” Amanda said. “Seeing as everything she does is accidental.”
“Not everything,” Hawthorne protested.
“And they must have already been keyed in with the local language,” Amanda continued. “Considering that, and the fact that whoever lived here clearly built this city long after Torn Elkandu fell, I’d estimate that it was still active until relatively recently, archaeologically speaking.”
“Relatively recently, to you, might still mean several thousand years,” Keolah commented.
“True,” Amanda said.
“Winter, is it true that the world is flat?” Keolah asked.
Winter cocked her head in puzzlement. “What do you mean? Of course it’s flat. What else would it be?”
“Not just the immediate area,” Keolah said. “The world as a whole. Lezaria is a globe. It curves.”
“So people fall off the sides?” Winter asked.
“No, gravity goes down toward the middle of the sphere,” Keolah explained.
“Huh,” Winter said. “Now that’s just weird. I’m going to have to see this for myself. So, Lezaria is the place you’re from?”
“Yes,” Keolah said. “And Torn Elkandu is the location of the Nexus that brought us here.”
“Does that make you Elkandu?” Winter wondered.
Keolah grinned. “I guess you can call us wizards, yeah.”
After some trial and error, they figured out how the change the destination settings of the Nexus, and discovered that only two locations were accessible from here: Torn Elkandu, and that wilderness plane that kept showing up.
“Only two?” Hawthorne said. “That’s disappointing.”
“I think it’s only showing the ones closest in the network,” Amanda said. “Or the ones intact enough to receive an incoming teleport, but considering how resilient these Nexi seem to be, I doubt that.”
“Let’s get back to Torn Elkandu and see if anything else is accessible from there,” Keolah said.
Seven planes could be reached from the Nexus of Torn Elkandu. In addition to the frozen lands of Sasherey and the wilderness plane, they saw images of a dark, ashen wasteland with three moons in the sky, a series of caverns with seas of molten lava, a sky dotted with islands floating in the air above endless mists, a patchwork plane divided by crisscrossing giant forcefields, and a vast city stretching on into the distance.
“Whoa,” Hawthorne breathed. “Look at these places!”
Keolah nodded in agreement. “I mean, I feel like I still haven’t seen everything there is to see on Lezaria, but this is incredible. And we didn’t find any trace of the Vel’dari on Sasherey, and I don’t see anything that looks like it might be their style on any of these other planes, either. It’s good that we don’t have to just blindly activate the Nexus and see where it takes us.” She gave a meaningful, sidelong look to Hawthorne.
“I wasn’t expecting it to actually work!” Hawthorne protested.
“Uh-huh,” Keolah said with a smirk.
The others, for the most part, had started to settle into Torn Elkandu, content to make a home for themselves here. Some of them thought it was the best opportunity that had come into their lives, while others simply had made new friends and had nothing they particularly wished to return to in the world outside. The Witchwood would make journeys back to Lezaria not nearly as trivial as exploration of the Seven Planes, but Keolah was still considering ways to get around that. Still, she was not blind to its usefulness as a defense mechanism. It had been a fortunate fluke that had found this place to begin with, and highly unlikely anyone else was going to repeat it anytime soon.
“You feeling out of place here among us mages, Vakis?” Hawthorne asked.
“We can get you home if you want,” Keolah offered.
Vakis shook his head. “Oddly, no. This place feels strange, but it feels right to me. I feel like I belong here. I feel like I’ve finally come home.”
“You are an inborn mage, Vakis,” Keolah said. “I can tell you that much. But I don’t know what your Talent is, which is strange in and of itself.”
“Plenty of time to find out,” Vakis said. “I would like to be an… Elkandu? That was the word you used?”
“Yeah,” Keolah said.
“So,” Amanda said. “We’re calling ourselves Elkandu, then?”
Keolah nodded. “Yes. And once we have gotten everything set up and had more of a chance to study the Nexus, we can start arranging explorations of these other planes. Start off with short hops to take a look around, ensure that the Nexus is accessible and see what’s in its immediate vicinity, and what the plane is called so we don’t have to just call places things like ‘the wilderness plane’—”
“Wilderplane?” Hawthorne suggested.
“—or let Hawthorne give them stupid names,” Keolah went on.
“Yes, she already gave my Talent a stupid name,” Sardill said. “Let us attempt to limit that where possible.”
“I just keep calling it Catalysm to annoy you,” Hawthorne said.
Sardill sighed.
“A worthy cause,” Amanda agreed.
Keolah took a step back and looked over the Nexus, its runes glowing cyan and lighting up what was quickly becoming a city in the pocket-world. Torn Elkandu, home of the wizards. It was beyond anything she’d ever dreamed. And now, the multiverse was in their grasp. It was time to see what was out there.