Lillene

Enjoy!

The other three ley line inputs didn’t have a convenient alternative. Two of them did have other lines that ran through a nexus not far from where the ritual’s area started, but the other lines weren’t much smaller. Both nexuses held dungeons, however, which was enough to give Serenity some hope he might be able to work with it.

The last ley line was even worse. It didn’t have any connections for over a hundred miles from where it entered the formation. It was also the strongest of the four; between those two facts, Serenity suspected that it was they ley line the ritual was originally designed around. It clearly hadn’t needed to be redirected before it was split up into smaller bits to form the spell’s details. Serenity had no idea how he was going to keep its power from entering the ritual, but he had to. It didn’t carry enough power to liquefy hundreds of miles of rock, but even something as “small” as a flash-burn across the entire surface area of the ritual would be devastating and it could definitely power that.

When Serenity looked up from his contemplation of the ley line map, Russ was gone. Serenity wanted to run his thoughts by his father-in-law before he moved forward with them, but first he needed to figure out exactly what he was going to do. 

There was someone who might help him with at least two of the ley lines nearby; he was sitting inside her, in a sense. Serenity looked up and spoke to the air around him. “Aki? If you tried, could you move power from one of your ley lines into another?”

“I do that all the time, it’s part of balancing the ley line flows,” was Aki’s immediate response. “If you mean to do something unbalanced then yes, I can, but how much it costs depends on what I’m doing. Given what you were just talking about, I assume you’re going to want a dungeon to completely block a ley line?”

“Two dungeons, and … maybe not completely block but seriously restrict?” Serenity looked back at the diagram. The two lines that passed through dungeons were different; both fed into the power circuit, of course, but they also fed other parts of the spell. One focused at least as much on containment as it did on power, while the other was mostly power with a little bit of … was that locational control? Serenity thought that was probably what that section did. “If either of them is blocked, it’ll be pretty obvious at the central node, and I don’t want to alert the enemy.”

Aki chuckled. “Then have the dungeons fully cut it off when they feel the draw increase suddenly. They’re close to it, aren’t they? Dungeons balance flows; normally, we smooth them out and make certain that additional magic input is accepted evenly, but we can also tell when more magic is being pulled out.”

Serenity frowned at that. He’d never really thought too much about where the raw mana that filled ley lines came from; the normal theory was that it was slowly, passively generated by every living being. That shouldn’t result in sudden changes either way, should it? “A big enough spell that uses raw mana could lower the amount in an area, I guess, even if it didn’t draw on ley lines like this one does. You said that excess power infusions are more common? Why? What causes them?”

“How should I know? I can’t see anything outside the dungeon,” Aki reminded Serenity. “Still, if I had to guess, it’s the same thing that makes more uncleaned raw mana in the dungeon, magic use. Mana surges do tend to carry the taint of Affinity. Some do not, but most do.”

Serenity felt like he should have thought of that. 

“That solves two of the problems; I’ll have to talk to the dungeons. That’s doable.” Serenity frowned; he still wasn’t sure what to do to switch a pair of ley lines or how to deal with the last one. He wasn’t sure if there was a dungeon at the next node on that line; there were several that could be in line with it, but Legion hadn’t mapped that far. He muttered to himself, “I also don’t know what butting down hundreds of miles of ley line would do. For that matter, what will the lack of ley lines from the spell do if I disable them? That’s got to be better than melting the area, but I’d really rather plan ahead.”

“Ask Gaia,” Aki suggested. She’d clearly overheard him and didn’t have patience with him anymore. “She sees a lot more than I can, and is far older than I am as well. She’s taught me some tricks and I thought I knew them all.”

That was a good suggestion; Serenity hadn’t talked to Gaia about this yet, after all. In fact, he hadn’t talked to Gaia since he left A’Atla. They’d exchanged a few words after she could see the island again, but then she was busy and it wasn’t like Serenity didn’t have other things to do, too. It was a good time to try and see if he could get some useful advice.

Serenity picked a couch in the front room; there was no reason to leave Aki’s dungeon and every reason to stay inside. His own home was the most comfortable place for a long discussion and it was inside a nexus; he’d have no trouble reaching Gaia now that he knew what to do.

Admittedly, at least half of the reason he could get to her so easily was that she was happy to talk to him. No, on second thought, it was well over half the reason.

Indeed, when Serenity closed his eyes and reached out to find Gaia, he was quickly greeted with a sense of motion as he was pulled along the ley lines to the same nexus that held Gaia’s core, the place he’d talked with her and her Guardian, D’Nehr, before.

Unlike the last time, Gaia did not seem hurried. “Welcome, Serenity. It is good to see you back so soon.”

She definitely had a different perception of time than most people did; it’d been months. Of course, she was a planet; it made sense that seemed soon. Serenity was fairly certain he’d felt the same way about time as the Final Reaper, as well; there was something about living a very long time that distorted the time scale.

“One of these days I should visit just to visit … but today isn’t that day. I need your help,” Serenity admitted.

Gaia’s chuckle was warm, welcoming. “You are welcome here for whatever reason you wish to visit. You have done a great deal for me, more than I can repay.”

Serenity didn’t really think he’d done anything that amazing. Yes, some of it was difficult, but it was all well within his capability. He’d helped Gaia, but Earth was his home. In a way, everything he’d done was selfish. There was no point in arguing, however; Gaia clearly felt differently. 

“The problem this time is ley lines. It looks like they’ve been split and moved to form the pattern of a spellform, to use as a ritual spell…” Serenity walked Gaia and D’Nehr through the problem. He knew better than to just ask for help with moving the ley lines; they knew more about ley lines than he did and might have some better ideas.

As it turned out, they knew significantly less than he did about both spellforms and ritual spells. It took quite a bit longer to explain that than it had with Russ; Russ not only had some background from previous explanations but didn’t really feel like he needed the details. D’Nehr wanted details. 

By the end of the discussion, Gaia was projecting an image of that part of Earth’s surface ley line network for both of them. In a way, it annoyed Serenity; he’d had Legion spend months exploring the network when he could have just asked Gaia for help. At the same time, when he overlaid the maps, Serenity noticed something important: a lot of the detail was missing from Gaia’s map. Some features were shifted dozens of miles from their location, as well. It was like the difference between what you could feel and actually looking at your skin when someone poked you. You might know roughly where it was, but vision was more precise. Gaia only had “feel.” 

In fact, Serenity got the impression that ley lines were a major part of what Gaia could feel. If there wasn’t a ley line close enough, the area was a blank spot on her mental map. Serenity suspected that she didn’t even know there was a blank spot sometimes.

When Serenity wrapped up his story, D’Nehr and Gaia were both silent while they thought. D’Nehr was the first to break the silence. “You said you know your opponent is a demon lord because you smelled him during the events on A’Atla?”

Serenity nodded. “It was obvious in the remnant mana. He also sent a demon at me, but that’s less telling.”

“What else do you know of him?” The magma elemental’s gaze met Serenity’s. Serenity knew the Guardian could be whimsical at times, but none of that showed now.

“Ah,” Serenity cast his mind back over the interactions he’d had with his opponent. “He pretended to be Helios, or maybe Apollo, when he set a curse on my girlfr- er, my wife’s family.” Russ definitely had a point. Serenity was married in everyone’s eyes except his government’s, and he wasn’t entirely certain that “his government” was the right way to look at it anymore. “That was centuries ago, at a minimum. It was difficult to break; even now, it’s only really partly broken.”

“A powerful, insidious thing. Not something I have much skill with, unfortunately. What else?” D’Nehr’s voice was slow and calm, but sped up a little at the end.

What happened next? Well, really, the next thing Serenity could think of was what happened on A’Atla. “He uses a strange shadowy hot mana that Blaze calls Night Fire. Blaze recognized it. I keep hoping he’s wrong or that there have been multiple people who use it.” Serenity really didn’t want to think that one of his closest friends owed his existence, at least in part, to the being that damaged Rissa so badly. She didn’t usually show it, but Serenity had seen the pain when she let her mask drop, as rare as that was.

“I know of what you speak.” Serenity couldn’t really read D’Nehr’s facial expressions, but he’d have sworn there was a from there for a moment. D’Nehr’s mixed-up grammar probably meant something, as well. “There have been a few. They all followed one that I thought, hoped, was long dead. What else do you know?

The more Serenity thought about it, the more he realized that they’d build up a house of cards, assumption piled on guess, to reach the conclusion for who the enemy once was. Sure, it might well be correct, but there was no proof. Unfortunately, proof one way or the other was effectively impossible to find. He’d just have to lay out the evidence for D’Nehr and see what he said. 

“There was a message at the building of A’Atla’s lord. He told me to … this will be easier if I just repeat what he said.” Serenity pulled the message from Aide and spoke it along with the recording. “So, outlander, since you found me first, I have a task for you. Find my sister and tell her that she was wrong; Father survived. The last war never ended and now he has killed me. If you cannot find the Lady of Strategy, seek the Messenger Lord; he will know how to find her. Tell them the Lord of Earth and Sea has fallen at the hands of his father and place my trident in their hands; they will know how to lay me to rest once my killer is dead. Beware the Lords of Light and Lightning for I do not know where their loyalties lie. Other than the two I have named, the only one I know you can trust is the Guard at the Deep Gate; should he have turned against us, it would be far worse than merely my father’s survival.” 

Serenity paused for a moment, but D’Nehr didn’t say anything. “I cleansed it, but the building was full of Night Fire. We know there’s a connection because we were attacked earlier than that by someone who was infested with the stuff. The summoner’s Tier was increased with Night Fire and that happened before A’Atla rose, so I know it wasn’t from the building.”

“That’s enough.” D’Nehr’s voice cut across Serenity’s attempt to explain what happened. “Do you know if he recovered his weapons?”

Lillene

It’s almost like the lost secrets of the past lived through a lot of the past together …