“Wait… You’ve at least been tested, right?” Azarin gave Rade a suspicious look. “You told us you were a rank two.”
“Forgive me. I misspoke.” Rade easily laughed that off. “I met that one, obviously.”
Come to think of it, Rade had produced about as much evidence of his magical prowess as he had his claimed noble lineage. He only knew a few spells and hadn’t yet mastered any of the ones we’d shared with him.
“You must at least have your papers showing you’re a two from when you got tested, right?”
“Tragically, I lost my papers in a boating mishap.”
Of course he had.“Well, I did have a nice conversation with a tester in Fogo not too long ago. Tester Pivorotto seemed like a decent fellow. I don’t know if he’s returned to the Core yet, but I can check.”
“Splendid. Secretary Trax, please note that Carnavon has promised to find a tester for us.”
With congealed pig blood dripping down his face, Trax looked at me and sent, “I will be the best secretary ever.”
“Don’t worry, my friends. We’re likely to find so much treasure on this abandoned isle, that hiring this tester of yours will be easy. We’ll sell our loot in the market—after our crime lord gets his cut, of course—and then we’ll fill our coffers with element. We won’t need to search out teachers, because they’ll come to us. This is an exciting day for our merry band.” Rade might be delusional, but I couldn’t fault the man his enthusiasm. “I believe that concludes our new business. Anyone else? No? Then let us adjourn.”
“Seconded,” I said, because I had a whole lot of work to do.
Rade banged his fist on the table again, then lifted his mug high. “To adventuring!”
Caught up in the excitement, Azarin returned the toast. “To adventuring!”
Krachma didn’t appear to understand what we were doing and frowned as Azarin banged her mug into his hard enough to spill a bit. Trax went back to slurping rotten pork bits. I resentfully, sullenly, lifted my mug and muttered, “Hooray, adventure.”
Seven
This was the year 4581 AN, which stood for After Nexus. Our years had begun counting the day the Great Machine was activated, connecting the seven realms to the central Core. For over four and a half millennia, the mountain-sized Great Machine steadily turned. Each dawn, the Nexus gradually opened one of the gates around its base, connecting the Core City to another realm, until the gate slowly closed at sundown, and the Core was cut off for the night. The next morning, the process began again.
There were seven gates upon the Great Machine, one for each day of the week, and four corresponding gates inside each realm, scattered across various distant kingdoms. That meant the Nexus connected to twenty-eight different locations a month, thirteen months a year. I’d seen a grand total of two of those realms, Fogo for nineteen years, and Acheron for a few hours.
Around the Great Machine had been built a grand market where all the realms could trade their vital supplies. A thousand kingdoms’ worth of merchants, coming and going, selling the products of their kingdoms, then taking home goods which came from whole other worlds.
Each realm produced one distinct magical element. By themselves, each of the seven were potent. Combined together, they could create miracles.
The Core City around the Great Machine had grown ever larger over those centuries. They’d filled the available land, terraced the mountains, and even built out over the sea. They erected great towers and castles so vast, they were like entire towns housed in a single building. As spell craft advanced, powerful wizards began building artificial islands suspended in the sky. There were dozens of these feats of magical engineering levitating above us today, housing tens of thousands, or maybe even hundreds of thousands. I wasn’t sure how crowded they were. I’d never been to any of those because the City Watch wouldn’t let someone of my impoverished nature past the checkpoints on those golden bridges.
Regardless, everyone knew the Core was the biggest, most populated, and most impressive city there’d ever been. Without the flow of trade through the market, many kingdoms—like my home of Fogo—would perish, because they simply couldn’t survive on what they produced on their own. Trade was the only thing keeping those kingdoms alive. The city’s majesty was reflective of its importance.
Sadly, after losing access to one of those seven realms—Time—and its corresponding element—Permeance—five hundred years ago, all that growth had slowed, and a creeping decay had set in. That was why the floating Upper Aventine was incrementally losing altitude—and accordingly been renamed the Slump—and was now threatening to flatten the Lower Aventine beneath—which was why that once prosperous district was now called the Under Slump. This was likely also what caused the mile-tall, gravity-defying, Tower of Primopolus to suddenly fall over one day, crushing whole neighborhoodsbeneath… Where I now lived in a section of that sideways ruin and had to pay the rent.
That pressing debt was why, that afternoon, I’d travelled to the Core City’s southern bay. The long walk through several districts, past all that stately and historic architecture, was what brought to mind this history lesson. Nothing drove home just how large and old this city was quite like walking through part of it.
Once I reached the rocky cliffs overlooking the water, I got my first view of Korthican’s Warning. I’d been told the island was a small tan lump of sand, only a few acres in total, with some crumbling structures and handful of trees atop it, about half a mile out… and that description was accurate.
The Core had been around for over four thousand five hundred and some odd years—I had no idea how long it took them to actually build the massive Great Machine before they turned it on—but those twenty-eight mighty wizards built this place upon a civilization that had already been old when they’d gotten here. According to Carcalla, this island was once home to a lighthouse even back then. And like most of those structures, it was ruins now.
I’d been in part of that ancient undercity once, though only briefly. I’d been trying my best to not get murdered by Linus Adderlane and a bunch of Tempus cultists the entire time, so I’d not been able to do much sightseeing. But, whoever built those structures had been advanced, capable of making things just as nice as the upper-class districts I’d strolled through. The dungeons beneath Korthican’s Warning had been dug by that same mysterious civilization.
They were also cursed as fuck, which was why most sensible people left the place alone.
I’d come here to gather information about an island, but paused at the overlook to marvel for a while, because I had never actually seen an ocean before.
That was alotof water.
Coming from the Elemental Plane of Fire, the vista before me was downright inconceivable. When a body of water formed in Fogo, it would boil away in no time. I’d nearly drowned in one of the city’s canals, the water proving swift and overwhelming, and from here, five of those canals were visible, dumping into this bay. They were but a trickle compared to the big blue mass that seemed to go on forever.
The big crashy white parts must be waves. I’d never imagined water could be soloud.When the waves hit the rocks below, it threw salty mist into the air. Everything felt damp, and then I suddenly felt a whole lot colder, as the ocean breeze cut right through me.
