“...else to do.”

Serenity realized he’d been sitting there not listening for a while; he had no idea what his mother was telling Blaze. He didn’t think it had been all that long, but it was clearly long enough that the attention was no longer on him. He could have asked Aide, but he decided to just listen for a moment and see if it became obvious.

“You haven’t tried to leave?” Blaze sounded surprised.

Bethany shrugged. “There isn’t any obvious way out. We expected people or at least another pyramid, but there doesn’t seem to be anything under that dirt pile. We explored the entire place, but we haven’t been willing to try to break through the locked doors with glowing skulls; that seems like a bad idea. We’ve tried all the other doors.”

“That can’t be right.” Blaze sounded bothered. “You said you didn’t find any people; there has to be a way out. This was clearly inhabited. The air’s still good, too; there has to be a connection outside.”

Blaze was probably worried about being trapped.

“That could be managed magically. Probably is, with as large and sealed as this place is,” Serenity interrupted. “It’s not a problem, though. We’re still on Earth; we just have to figure out where we are and Ita will be able to get us out. For that matter, Ita can probably figure out where we are eventually.”

Blaze nodded but he still looked concerned. “Yeah, we can get out, but what happened to the people who were here before us? This place has been abandoned for a very long time. It’s far too clean.”

“Too clean?” Serenity looked around the room. The only areas that counted as clean were the ones that had clearly been either brought or cleaned by his parents. They hadn’t cleaned the entire room; about half of it still showed at least some dirt, though even there the floor had been swept. It wasn’t perfect, but it was far better than the other surfaces or the hallways. “Wait. Where’s the broom?”

“There’s a closet over there,” Lex pointed behind Serenity. “Everything else is dried up or too badly damaged to use, but there are a couple of brooms. They’re not in great shape but they’re better than nothing.”

Serenity twisted around and found a door roughly where his father pointed.

“That’s not what I mean,” Blaze said. He sounded exasperated. “Look at this place. When do you think it was abandoned?”

Serenity looked around. Now that he thought about it that way, Blaze was starting to make sense. “It depends on what I look at and whether or not I assume it’s been sealed. It can’t be completely sealed; it’s obvious stuff’s been coming in the same way we did. In that case …”

Serenity paused and thought about what he’d seen. Everything was collapsed, but it looked like failures of the connecting pieces rather than of the actual material. He’d seen that before. “We’re near water, even if I’m not particularly noticing the humidity. Maybe there’s a rainy season? Everything metal that isn’t enchanted against decay is falling apart with rust. Wood seems to be mostly okay, which is strange, but I haven’t seen any fungal growth at all. Maybe the small organisms that break down wood aren’t here despite the water?”

“Maybe it’s from water,” Blaze disagreed, “But even then, how long could it have been? I’ve never seen anywhere so broken down with so little dust.”

Serenity had. Well, the Final Reaper had. More than once, in fact; several of the species that had attempted to kill him had hidden in sealed bunkers to prevent his spells from entering. They hadn’t worked. Oh, they’d slowed the spells down a little, but they didn’t stop them. Everything died. Everything.

The last ritual he ever cast in war hadn’t even noticed their precautions. The Final Reaper had broken into some of the bunkers decades or even centuries later. He still remembered what he’d found; sometimes everything looked pristine, while other times anything that could corrode was little more than a pile of dust. Sometimes the bodies were gone; more often, they were dried-out husks. There was always more dust in the ones where the bodies were gone.

Serenity looked at the layer of dust that coated everything that hadn’t been cleaned. “You’re right. This place has to have been sealed. But if it was sealed, then how were-” He stopped short. The answer was obvious. “There wasn’t enough magic for things to get in. Probably not enough magic to run whatever makes the air in here fresh, either. So everything died; there might even have been a precaution that did that. But over the last year or so, there’s been more magic so things are opening up again and the Wells work, so we were able to get in.”

“Then how did Grandfather use the Wells?” Lex didn’t sound like he accepted Serenity’s solution. “That can’t have been that long ago. There wasn’t any magic on Earth when he came through the Well.”

That was clearly not true, but it certainly wasn’t as overt as magic was now. There was a better answer, however. “He didn’t end up here. Maybe he would have if there was more magic, but he ended up on that island. That’s how you found it, after all.”

Lex shook his head. “No, he’d have started here. That’s why it’s so strange that we can’t find an exit.”

Oh.

Serenity had assumed his father had asked the same questions he had. Clearly not. “He’s not from Earth. He’s from a moon named Suratiz. I wonder if he’d have ended up here if it were open?”

Serenity hadn’t considered that before, but it seemed plausible. An item that was supposed to protect against a dangerous travel method would probably have a destination. If that destination was blocked, it should be designed to select another destination, but how would it know what to pick? It could pick anywhere, but close to its design goal would make sense.

That implied that development on the multiple-to-multiple connection he’d found in the Broken Mirror was farther along than the report he’d read, but that wasn’t unbelievable. He’d found a project proposal; he had no idea how long after that the project continued. The one thing that was definitely clear was that this wasn’t just a one-to-one connection. If it had been, they’d have landed on Suratiz, not Earth.

They also wouldn’t have landed on a spot that didn’t seem to have a way to return to the Wells. Unless … perhaps there was something in the ceiling? They did fall when they arrived, even if it wasn’t far. Serenity decided he’d make sure to check that before they left.

“That explains why we didn’t find any children’s areas,” Bethany commented. “This wasn’t a place for families, even though it’s clear people did live here for long stretches of time.” She chuckled. “A good thing, too, even if their food is terrible. It’s still food.”

“Their food is terrible?” Serenity frowned at his mother. “What?”

Bethany pointed at one of the devices fixed to the wall; the floor was cleaner in front of it, but Serenity hadn’t paid attention beyond noticing that it was relatively intact and it had a slight concentration of mana about it. The device had a blunt spike in the middle. On each side of the spike there was a rod that extended up from the back of the device to partially cover the open space on either side with a disc. The upper disc on the right was small, perhaps an inch in diameter, but the one on the left was more like six inches. “Lex figured it out; it glows when someone gets close to it. You have to push mana into the thing on the right; water comes out on the right and food on the left. It’s a little hard to tell what the food is exactly, but it’s pretty obvious that it is food. It’s not the only one, but it’s the only one that still works. This was a cafeteria; if you look around a bit, it’s obvious.”

Serenity supposed that explained the food question.

“It gave us the only real clue we’ve got to what the facility did.” Bethany sounded excited. Serenity couldn’t remember when the last time he’d heard his mother be this excited; maybe this whole “explorer” thing was good for her. “There’s another of those spikes in there, but it’s a lot bigger. Lex and I have been trading off filling it; when we got here, it was below the level marked ‘critical mana shortage’. It’s rising even when we don’t put mana in, but adding mana helps a lot. I think that means that it’s powering stuff but at a really low level that needs additional mana. We’ve been hoping it would let us open the locked doors when it’s above critical, but it should also let us figure out what some of the things that aren’t working are for.”

Serenity blinked. That sounded an awful lot like magitech or at least an extremely complex enchantment. That was strange; complex enchantments tended to decay first, not last. Had someone actually come up with a way to preserve them?

That was exciting even for someone who couldn’t craft things. Enchantments degraded faster when they were used, but they’d degrade even if they weren’t used. The more complex the enchantment was, the faster it would go. That was one of the reasons that really complex enchantments simply couldn’t be made at lower Tiers; they had to be overpowered compared to the level of effect they could achieve to survive long enough to be useful. They generally cost more than they were worth.

Now that he thought about it, the self-repair on the road wards back on Zon seemed similar. That had required Essence-based runes as well as mana; was that why no one had ever figured out how to do it for enchantments?

If Essence-based crafting did things as important as keeping the enchantment functional … how was it lost?

This place was old. Serenity couldn’t tell how old, but his best guess was before the Godswar that broke Earth’s core a second time. There simply hadn’t been enough magic to make large things since then, as far as he could tell; that would explain why it was refilling now, too. That wasn’t as old as the road-wards, but it was still old.

For that matter, when was the ability to make self-sustaining enchantments even lost? Vengeance had never heard of them outside of rumors of ancient artifacts he’d never quite believed; most weren’t useful for him anyway.

He was speculating ahead of the evidence. There was no reason to do that.

Serenity pushed himself up from the chair. He still felt a little off, but concentrating on something interesting like learning another way to use Essence was just what he needed to help himself feel better. “I’d like to see that.”

Bethany grinned and sprang out of her chair. She was definitely more energetic than she had been at her old job. “Come on, then!”

Bethany led Serenity out of the room and back to where he’d found his parents. This time, he was able to focus on the room rather than his parents. There was indeed an enormous spire in the middle of the room, near where he’d first seen his parents.

Lex and Blaze entered the room behind Serenity. Serenity thought he heard Blaze chuckle at something Lex said. For a moment, Serenity thought about heading back to ask what the joke was, but he decided it probably wasn’t anything he really needed to know. The spire was more interesting right now.

Lillene

Serenity is completely uninterested in and incapable of crafting anything.

Just ask him.

….but don’t watch what he does. That might give you the impression that he’s actually interested.