“Magelord James and party, to see the Matriarch. They are expected.”

Khetzi says the words into a gem mounted to the side of an ordinary-looking door in an ordinary-looking corridor, and we stand in varying degrees of patience as the gem turns from a deep blue to something more like a watery cyan.

I get the feeling there’s a power play involved in making us wait outside, and in particular in making me wait outside, but that’s fine. The door is nothing, just a regular door, but the gem itself is fascinating. Not because it’s particularly amazing, mind you; it’s fascinating because I can actually understand it, which is kind of a novelty here in the Tournament’s grounds.

It’s a five-glyph circuit. There’s an ambient flow, that’s three of the glyphs, and any sound at the gem imparts a wobble into that flow through a fourth one. The fifth is a transmitter, or maybe a transceiver, and I’m pretty sure that wherever that transmission lands has the same circuit, only with a magic-to-sound instead of a sound-to-magic. There’s not enough logic there to let both people talk simultaneously even if this side had a speaker along with the microphone, but there’s no inherent reason you couldn’t use something based on this circuit that had enough state to handle the differential in the circuit patterns.

It’s nice. I might be wearing something closer to my audience finery than I’d like, with bright-turquoise tights under pants that gather at mid-calf and a shirt that’s a fair bit tighter in the chest and shoulders than my usual, but this reminds me that I’m still me. I’m still the jumpnav who made his way up the Temple by breaking it, and I’m still the Runewright who suborned an Architect and killed another.

That was probably overkill, but it’s too late to be having second thoughts.

The door opens, sliding smoothly into the wall, while I’m still working out how a proper two-way communication setup should work. I’ve figured out a thirteen-glyph solution, but I’m pretty sure I can get it smaller, since it’s just arithmetic operations on a waveform; it’s just that I was always pretty bad at electrical engineering, and this is more like that than it is anything else. Sure, I could write code to figure it out for me, rather than figuring it out myself, and I would do that if this were something genuinely important, but this was just to distract myself until the door opened.

Which, right. I give Amber and Zidanya’s smirks the sidelong glower they totally don’t deserve and we step through in our vague approximation of a social formation: Amber in front, Zidanya and Sara behind me, and Vonne at my side.

About five steps through a painfully bland, narrow-ish hallway, well, narrow-ish relative to the colossal scale to which everything’s built, so we’re talking maybe two meters wide, and everything changes. The hallway opens up into a vision of lush greenery with a river running through it and a small, largely open house on a little hill; I glance upwards, blinking in surprise, and see nothing but wispy clouds in a clear, sunny sky. There’s a vast sense of depth, a sky that calmly asserts that it goes on for kilometers and kilometers, no ceiling here, no sir.

It’s fucking terrifying.

I’m pretty sure it’s not supposed to be terrifying, which is a tiny bit of consolation, but I take two rapid steps forwards and bury my face in the shirt on Amber’s back, hands on her shoulders, heaving heavy breaths. There’s one strangled gasp from Zidanya, but otherwise, the rest of my party is apparently fine; I’m the only one affected.

“It’s just an illusion. Come on, come on! We can’t keep Mama Vix waiting!”

“Shut your mouth and give my lord time to adjust.” I can feel Amber’s muscles shifting as she turns, probably to glare at Vonne. I feel bad about that, but not bad enough to stop her.

“If on account of her own endeavors the Magelord tarries, Shulemi will have to wait for him. An she protest, I’ll give her not a moment’s care; she knows better.”

“But—”

“Enough.” I pry myself away from Amber and take a couple of steps towards the river, towards the house. My eyes flicker upwards and then recoil, so I lift my head towards the sky, forcing myself to drink in the vastness of those depths. “Sorry. I’ve gotten too comfortable, and I’m getting rebuked.”

There’s a silence in response to that, like nobody quite knows what to say. I give Amber a push, and we drift forwards a few steps to a bridge over the river. I quit my staring contest with the sky, satisfied that at least I’m capable of walking forwards while looking up; I count it a win despite the wobbliness in my legs, and anyway, there’s rather a lot of pretty glorious greenery to look at. Interesting architecture, too; it’s all wood in dark reds and reddish browns, smooth curves and jutting-out bits scattered asymmetrically but pleasingly around. And there’s life absolutely everywhere; trees and bushes and grasses, mosses on the stones, a green tint to the river’s water that doesn’t stop me from seeing bottom-feeders and various fish darting around, birds and frogs and lizards and more.

And four people.

They’re lounging insouciantly in front of the bridge, leaning against the pillars on either side. A couple of them are fox-like, with a distinct similarity to Vonne’s own appearance; I glance over at her, and I have no idea what the shake of a head she gives me is supposed to mean, but she’s got her claws tucked away and isn’t telling me anything in particular, so I ignore it. The other two, paired with one foxkin each, are huge by comparison to their partners. They’re over two and a half meters tall, and where one of them is banded with heavy fat over enormous musculature, the other one mostly eschews the fat in favor of even more eye-popping strength.

Ape, I think to myself about that second one, the one on my right; she’s got the skeletal structure of one, even more ape than Vonne or the other two girls are fox, and I’m pretty sure she’s only upright so casually because she’s leaning on the pillar in whose shade she’s looming. It might be the same for the other brawler, if he were standing up, but he’s sitting back on what I’m pretty sure I shouldn’t be calling his haunches, and he’s still well taller than I am.

“Well, well.”

“If ‘t ain’t the Magelord.”

It’s the girls who talk, the fox girl on the left and the ape girl on the right, and my eyes light up with joy. “Stars and old stories, are you four hooligans?”

This does not appear to be the reaction that anyone was expecting, other than maybe Zidanya, who sort of cackles quietly in laughter before shoving her hands into her mouth to stifle herself. The ape girl recovers first. “We was hopin’ for a bit’a conversation, maybe ask a favah, yeah?”

“And you’re trying to talk in an accent to sound tougher, but it’s a made up one, otherwise Omniglot would let me translate it without working quite so hard. That’s amazing! You’re even loitering at the pillars to the bridge!” I’m a little too close to squealing for my own comfort, given that I’m supposed to be middle-aged rather than a teenager, but it’s that or dissolve into giggling. Possibly I could manage both. “Vonne, can I get some names for the set dressing? They’re doing such a good job. It’s absolutely adorable. Two foxes, an ape, and?”

There’s a rapid exchange of pointed looks and faces twisting into expressions, and Vonne shakes her head. “Nuh uh! Not telling their names. They don’t have names when they’re guarding. Not real names. Riva,” she says, pointing at the ape girl. “Reeve. And one of them’s Sheva and the other’s Khoshva, but I dunno which.”

“Gods, Gavva—”

“—hey, don’t call me that!”

“You’re such a kid sometimes.”

“Children, children.” I smile at the fox girl who’d been talking, and put a hand on Vonne’s shoulder. I step forward, hand keeping her where she is, and my smile turns a little wider. “This was cute, but we have somewhere to be. Let’s wrap it up.”

“Magelord.” The brawler on my left inclines his head respectfully. “Some folks would argue that point, ‘cause it ain’t fully proper to rush. But not the hippopotamus.” He pauses a moment, and I wait for him to continue, feeling like there’s a joke that I’m missing. “The one request, first. Mama Vix, she says out a’ politeness please don’t use that Visor you got. Ain’t kind to put the strain on her weave, you get me?” Quieter, he adds, “I know you got nothing to fear from her displeasure, but us, Mama Vix is all we got, yeah?”

I nod at him. “I’ll keep the peace as long as it’s kept.”

“All a sed can ask.” His teeth are a green-tinted off-white when he smiles, two rows of squareish molars. “All a sed can ask.”

They straighten up as we pass onto the bridge, wooden planks set so tightly that I can barely see the lines between them, forming an exaggerated arch. The fox girls’ eyes don’t stop darting around the area, head occasionally turning to track the source of a sound, and there’s a hint of tension under the aggressively relaxed posture of the two bruisers; I made light of them to make a point, but I have no trouble imagining these four as effective guards, for all their deliberate aesthetic otherwise.

It’s an interesting and very deliberate piece of craft, and it has me both more and less interested in meeting Mama Vix as a result.