These channels weren’t empty, either. Light flowed through the narrow troughs fed by lines crawling down from the ceiling. Or did the channels send the light up along the walls?
Calya gazed upward, unable to pinpoint where the glowing lines disappeared in the inky darkness over her head. The winding path down from Matthias’s office had done nothing for her sense of direction, but she guessed that she was below the attempted man-made wellspring.
The center of the crater was dominated by a large glass sphere. At least, that was how it appeared to Calya’s distinctly unmagical mind. It was twice her height and several strides across.
Big enough to hold more than the two people suspended inside.
Two silhouettes were visible against the glow of the ball. Calya slowly moved closer for a better look. A path had been carved around the inside of the crater, saving her from having to slide to the bottom. As she approached, an odd, unsettling hum, similar to what had been around the garden plots, assailed her. She stopped a few paces back from the glass, starting in surprise when she recognized the people within.
The Coalition mages, Treen and Aylton, floated within the sphere. Their hair and clothes drifted in a weightless way, as if suspended in water, but without being soaked through. Tendrils of magic, burning so intensely that they appeared more white than gold, streamed from their hands. The light swirled together, forming a braided cord that collected at the center of the ball and flowed into a quartz stone like the one in the wellspring above.
Hesitantly, Calya tapped on the glass. A jolt ran up her arm, and she yanked her hand back before it could spread farther. Neither of the people in the sphere gave any sign of noticing her, their eyes closed, their bodies upright yet limp. Faint wisps of yellowish smoke, or perhaps mist, wafted within the glass, broken up by intermittent sparks of white.
The image was almost mystical, almost haunting in a way that Calya would’ve called magey, artsy, weird. Almost, but not quite. Really, it was more cursed than enchanting; the white sparks didn’t glimmer or crackle. They popped, splattering the glass as if they were made of liquid rather than light before slowly evaporating…
Except not fully evaporating, either. A residue was left behind, drying down to barely more than dust as it joined the mist.
Both of the mages enclosed within the ball appeared alive yet lifeless. Signs of ill health were visible, their cheeks sunken, their hair lank and thinning as if some had fallen out. Calya had met them only days ago, and already they were so diminished.
She searched for a way into the sphere, but the structure was eerily seamless. Thick, jagged lines glazed the surface along one curve of the sphere where it reached the ground, but nothing like a door appeared. It defied her knowledge of construction, which admittedly was basic and more applicable to wood than glass.
At a loss, she retreated to Brint’s office. There she found the journals and a few of the seals Matthias had saved stuffed into a small leather pack alongside another ledger. A tiny hearth was set into the side wall, a plain brazier nestled at the center, embers glowing orange-red.
The wind’s message of fire still prevalent in her mind, Calya approached the hearth with trepidation. It burned gently, the coals seemingly well contained. Runes glowed at the base of the flue as the air magic imbued in the stone directed the smoke up and away instead of letting any spill into the main room. However, a pile of books thrown on top of the brazier was forcing the enchantment to work overtime. Most had already turned to ash, falling apart when Calya tried to salvage the remnants with a poker left on the floor.
Only the top-most book—another journal, palm-sized, the same as her pocket notebook but with fewer pages—was somewhat legible. The thin leather cover, though blackened and cracked, had kept the contents from being a complete loss. Yet, as she gingerly flipped the cover open onto Brint’s desk, her heart sank. The little journal’s pages had been old and delicate even before their time in the fire. Portions of every page bore damage. Some had lost only the corners, but many had been reduced to half their original size, if not less. Writing in a language Calya didn’t recognize accompanied sketches, and she wasn’t entirely sure what they were sketches of, either. In all honesty, sketches might’ve been a leap of an assumption. One page seemed to depict a contraption similar to the glass sphere. The writing was sparse, a few lines here and there, more like notes or captions than thorough documentation.
Calya smothered a last ember with the edge of her cloak, her nose wrinkling against the smell of burnt leather that wafted up now that the journal was removed from the flue enchantment. She had flipped through a few more pages, unsure if it was worth trying to save the unreadable book, when the pounding footsteps of someone racing toward the office echoed down the hallway.
She stuffed the little notebook into her cloak pocket, grimacing as she heard a stitch tear. The footsteps were nearly upon her. Fight or flight? But if the latter, then to where? There could be a dozen more tunnels for her to get lost in if she ran out into the crater room. Or none. Perhaps this was the end of the line, and the only way out lay through the same hallway she’d already passed through. The same hallway bringing whomever barreled toward her, panic and desperation fueling their steps.
Calya snatched the poker from the ground. She could hear her old training master’s aggrieved sigh in her head, and a wry smile curled her lips at the thought.
Brint stormed into the room. Because of course it would be him, the cockroach of her life. He looked like shit. Ragged barely began to describe him, and a new gash across his temple—from her ice pendant, perhaps?—painted the side of his face and hair with crusted blood.
“Calya,” he panted, staring at her as if he couldn’t decide whether to be glad or pissed.
“Brint.” She raised the poker in a way she hoped was menacing. Weapons handling hadn’t been a focus area for her. “You’ve been a busy boy.”
“It’s not what you think,” he said. “I can?—”
“I think you’re growing the fucking Eyllic poison in Graelynd for the Coalition. I think you’re committing treason,” she hissed. “I just can’t imagine why.”
“Patriotism. This is for Graelynd, Calya.”
“For Graelynd? I didn’t get that impression, what with you poisoning mages and keeping people in magic shackles and”—she jerked her head in the direction of the pit—“your nightmare bubble. How many people have you fed to that?—”
“No one has died. We haven’t had any casualties.” An ugly pause followed as his mouth worked but no sound emerged, the yet held back on the tip of his tongue. “Not one,” he finished weakly.
“What happened? Things have been going bad here for months, Brint. Gods, or has it reached years? If this is for Graelynd, why didn’t you fix?—”
“What do you think I’ve been trying to do?” Brint snapped. He took a step closer, raising his hands in a placating manner when she waved the poker. “The containment measures Eylle promised weren’t enough. People got sick. I tried to get restoration efforts here.”
“What efforts? You mean, when you were trying to scam Sylveren grovetenders into consulting on your ‘harmless’ project”—she sneered the word—“or do you mean how you’ve graduated to just kidnapping people and forcing them to salvage your fuckups?”
“It’s not my fault!” he cried. “If that paranoid bitch had just told me more of her plan, I would’ve known the next step. I would’ve known how she meant to fix this.”
“You’re incompetent.” Calya gave a bitter laugh. “What were you going to do, throw me in the hold while you escaped? Or just leave us in that cell and hope maybe someone found us before we died?”
