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🕑 Added 2023-11-25 04:16:37 +0000 UTC“Master?”
Tzi groaned, which was a mistake. It was her first conscious action, and it made her skull vibrate unpleasantly. Her skull felt generally as if it had already taken all the abuse it could handle. What had happened? She'd been up half the night working on a ritual...
“Master, I really think you should get up, please.”
“I'm skipping breakfast,” Tzi muttered thickly, trying to turn over and burrow back into her blankets.
Except that there were no blankets, and she was lying on cold, slightly damp stone.
Momentary confusion was followed by memory. Her Grimoire, Knauer's diabolical ritual, something about a portal, and then indescribable pain and...
Gasping, Tzi sat bolt upright, opening her eyes, and immediately had to spend a few moments fighting off dizziness. That spared her at first from getting a clear look at her surroundings. Then she was spared further by the appearance of a gilded, stylized face set in a rectangle of brown leather.
“There you are!” her Grimoire exclaimed. “Thank goodness, master, I was beginning to worry.”
“Ngh.” Closing her eyes against the world, Tzi reached out to grab the Grimoire by its spine with one hand. Not that the floating book could physically support her in any way, but just touching it was comforting. The good news was that her stomach quit pitching after a few moments, and she finally opened her eyes again. “What happened, and where are we?”
“I don't know,” the Grimoire admitted. “Nothing about this place is familiar.”
Tzi set it in her lap and frowned, panning her head slowly to study her surroundings. She was sitting on a round granite slab which seemed weathered, but not to the point of decay; it had suffered tiny chips here and there and some rounding of its corners due to wind and rain, but wasn't in ruin. It was laid out in five concentric circles with deep grooves between them, the innermost (which she had to shift herself to see) being a melon-sized orb of blue-green crystal half-embedded in the ground. Each of the stone rings was divided into uneven segments, and marked with lines and sigils she did not recognize, creating an effect of overlapping circles. They somewhat resembled ritual circles such as she knew, but not the specific ones with which she was familiar. Five obelisks of the same pinkish granite stood evenly spaced around the outer rim, also engraved with deep geometric patterns, but those lines glowed with a faint greenish light. As Tzi watched, it shifted faintly, as if they were lit from within by flickering green fires. She did not feel magic at work, but it obviously was, and she was just an apprentice after all—a junior one at that. Whoever had built all this was clearly well beyond her.
The level stone platform was positioned toward the upper edge of a long, sloping valley, rimmed by hills which rose up into uneven cliffs and spires of dark volcanic stone—jagged and quite unlike the granite on which she was sitting. The valley was actually rather lush, in an alien way. It was carpeted with dense grass that stood waist-high, its long blades a peculiar pale beige. Wildflowers stood here and there, mostly on long bluish stalks whose ends dangled bell-like clusters of black petals, some of which emitted a soft glow from light sources deep within themselves. There were also smaller flowers, their leaves and stems also blue, the blossoms resembling hibiscuses, except in shades of white and gold. Around the edges of the valley, and occasionally in small stands throughout, stood peculiar trees—not excessively tall, and with pale bark like willows but with vertical striations of reddish-brown, the trunks tapering slightly inward in the middle before swelling again near the top. They were long, clean shafts of wood holding their crowns of spiky crimson leaves well out of reach of the ground. In their shade grew clumps of bushes with triangular blue leaves that might have looked jagged had their rounded shapes not created an overall fuzzy effect.
Tzi was no botanist, but she had traveled a lot in her childhood and studied biology during her apprenticeship. She did not recognize a single one of these plants.
“Okay,” she said aloud, blinking at the scene. “Could be worse, I guess. It looks vaguely...tropical? Just how far did that old coot send us?”
“Master,” the Grimoire said hesitantly, “perhaps you should look up.”
Its tone made her pause in apprehension. There was nothing for it but to follow its advice, though; a wise practitioner always listened to their Grimoire. She tilted her head back to look at the sky, and in the next moment gasped and fell back onto the platform, fingers scrabbling for a grip on the stone.
Scattered wisps of cloud drifted across the sky, which was black and filled with glittering stars beyond them. Much closer, though, was a single round orb hovering almost directly overhead, four or five times the size of the moon Tzi knew and entirely wrong. This nearby world also had white patterns of cloud drifting across its surface, revealing glimpses of blue seas and brown landmasses between them. Even that was small potatoes, though. A truly colossal sphere of deep cerulean absolutely dominated half the sky, stretching from one horizon to the other and beyond. It took some staring for Tzi to make sense of the other shapes blotting out the stars, but after a few moments of panicked silence she realized it was a vast system of rings encircling the great blue world. She was on a planet which, like the one floating high overhead, orbited a massive, ringed gas giant.
“It's too bright,” she heard herself say in a faint voice, still clutching the stone as if she might fall right off it and into the sky. “It's dark out, there are stars, but...”
“The other celestial objects nearby reflect sunlight,” her Grimoire explained quietly. “Given their size and proximity, I doubt it ever gets truly dark here. Look, master, there's the sun over there.”
The book had floated a bit higher and turned, and Tzi looked in the direction its face was now pointing. A white star hovered above the rim of the spires around this little valley, vastly outshining any of the others in the sky. It was a star, though, a bare fraction of the size of the sun she knew; she could look right at it without discomfort.
“I guess...” Tzi trailed off and had to swallow down the lump in her throat. “I guess we're farther away from the sun here than...back home.”
“Master,” the Grimoire replied almost apologetically, “while my grasp of astrophysics is extremely basic, I am familiar with the works on astronomy with which you made me, which include a thorough inventory of the solar system. This includes no blue gas giants with expansive ring systems. That is a sun, but it is not our sun.”
It took her a moment to realize that the whimpering sound was coming from her.
Tzi rolled over on her side and curled up. “No, no, no...”
How could he do this to her?! So maybe she wasn't as quick on the uptake as Rhynnian, but she did not deserve this. Where even was she? Was this another plane of existence, or had Knauer “merely” hurled her across the physical universe? What had he said? He'd said something... Tzi groped backward through her own memories, searching for anything to provide her a handhold, a glimmer of hope.
“Dysland,” she muttered.
“Master?”
“Wasn't that what he said? It was something about...”
“Yes, master, that was the word he used. He said the portal was something he was using to contact Dysland.”
Slowly, Tzi extricated herself from her fetal position, struggling to breathe evenly. “Yes. Okay... I remember, now. It was the phrasing—the old man didn't want to curse or transfigure me or something because it would mess up the ritual he was doing, so he used something already there. A portal to Dysland. Which means...”
“That must be where we are,” her Grimoire finished.
Tzi straightened up, tucking her legs under herself and instinctively drawing her wand. Luckily, it was still there, and undamaged by the transition; she absently ran her fingers over the wooden shaft, the crystal at the tip and the silver wire and supple leather strips binding it together. Everything was shipshape.
“Then whatever Dysland is, wherever this is...it's not random. Knauer was doing something here. And that means...” Tzi felt her own face falling into a furious glare, directed at a perfectly inoffensive stand of red-leafed trees in the near distance. “That means there's a connection, something he needs. We can get home.”
The Grimoire didn't respond, sliding silently back into its pouch at her hip.
Abruptly, Tzi groaned and covered her eyes with a hand. “...and then try to match wands with a master wizard, because that worked so well last time.”
“According to the spellbooks you used in my creation, master, large and daunting undertakings are best approached by breaking them into a series of smaller workings. It is important to prioritize. In other words, what's needed...”
“Is a place to start,” she finished, recognizing that particularly tedious chapter on magical theory. Hearing it now, it occurred to Tzi that this advice could apply to a lot more than just magic. With a sigh, she clambered to her feet, wincing. “Nf. How hard did I land on that thing?”
“We did materialize several centimeters above the ground, master. I was pleased to note that you landed on your bowed back and thus avoided head trauma, but I would imagine some bruising has occurred, particularly of the spine.”
“Well, as starts go, that's as good a one as any,” she said, raising her wand. That wasn't actually necessary since she was casting magic internally, not propelling a spell outward, but it was habit.
The spell was familiar, a series of associations stored in her mind, corresponding to the magic she wanted to use. There was its sigil, which she had designed when first invoking it; Tzi didn't even have to close her eyes to call it to mind, envisioning it hovering before her to activate the magic. Memories of sensations accompanied it: the warmth of sitting near a fireplace in the winter, a coolness like the breeze in early spring, a complex scent layered of recently-cut grass, rubbing alcohol, and dried herbs, a persistent soft music like wind chimes and harp strings.
Spells that could be learned were complex and difficult, requiring a mastery of magic that was above her. Wizards had to start at the bottom, designing their own, and that entailed first a ritual to call up and shape the power, and then the mental exercise that would enable it to be called upon at a whim: the association of complex sensory inputs that would bring her mind back to that ritual state.
The power welled up, tingled as it flowed through her; the crystal tipping her wand flickered alight. Tzi frowned, though, even as she felt some relief from her bruising from her simple healing spell going to work. It was so much weaker than it should be...
“Ugh,” she muttered, closing her eyes, and tried again. “Focus, concentration, calm....aaaand I think I see the problem.” Opening her eyes, she lowered her wand and looked up at the giant looming planet dominating this alien horizon. “How am I supposed to be calm?!”
“You know how, master,” her Grimoire said patiently from its perch at her hip. “The mind is a feral beast, wanting to run this way and that...”
“A wizard's first task is to tame it,” she finished with a sigh. Well, this was already a step up from having those old passages quoted at her by Knauer or the senior apprentices. Even Wesker and Rhynnian had managed to sound annoyingly smug about it, but the Grimoire was just relaying knowledge as it decided she needed some.
Tzi rolled her shoulders as she stepped carefully off the platform into the strange grass. Still a little stiff, but the healing spell had helped before it fizzled due to her mental discomfiture. She wandered off, brushing through the vanilla-colored blades, which were surprisingly soft to the touch. Carefully keeping her eyes on the ground, she scanned her surroundings and avoided looking at the disturbing sky as best she could, and quickly selected a destination. It took her only another minute to wade through the grass to stand at the base of one of the slender, red-crowned trees. It seemed to rise straight from the soil, its root system apparently buried deep, but around its base the grass grew much shorter. There was one of those blue-leafed bushes on its other side, but the tree provided Tzi a convenient place to sink down and sit at its foot.
She breathed in and out slowly, allowing her eyes to go out of focus. There was a faint distant creaking she hadn't noticed before, not quite like cicadas but probably something similar. While she listened, she became aware of intermittent tiny chirps and whistles; Tzi wasn't absolutely sure she'd have recognized the voices of individual songbirds back home, but she had a feeling these were a brand new experience anyway. Aside from that, the only sound was of the light wind brushing through leaves.
“Keep an eye out, would you?” she asked. “No telling what lives here, but I probably don't want it sneaking up on me.”
“Will do, master,” the Grimoire promised, rising out of its belt pouch and beginning a slow orbit of the tree trunk just above her head.
“Not just dangerous stuff,” she added. “Watch for creepy-crawlies going for my hair, or anything like that.”
“Consider it done, master.”
She drew in another deep breath, let it out, and closed her eyes. Tzi focused inward as Knauer had taught her years ago. Meditation was hard; the last thing the mind wanted was to shut off its constant noise and exist in stillness. But it was the only reliable source of the calm and focus that magic required, and after long practice she had become quite good at it, she felt.
Even so, attaining that calm took her quite a bit longer than usual, this time. Under the circumstances, Tzi was inclined to cut herself some slack.
***
“Cinnamon stick trees?”
“That is what it says, master,” the Grimoire replied, hovering open in front of her and facing away so she could read its newly-inscribed page on the subject. This included a colored sketch of the thin, red-leafed trees as well as a thorough description of their ecology, life cycle, and uses. Apparently their wood was excellent for furniture construction, being a natural pest repellent, but the trees did not produce any edible fruits or seeds.
Interesting as that was, Tzi was still stuck on the name. “They don't actually make cinnamon, though... Wait, doesn't cinnamon come from trees? These don't look like anything I've ever seen.”
“This world appears to have a completely different biosphere from our own, master,” the Grimoire replied, closing its pages and pivoting in midair to face her again. “I doubt actual cinnamon is obtainable here. The name most likely comes from the resemblance.”
Tzi studied the tree again. Actually...though the color of the bark was all wrong, the trunk did sort of resemble a cinnamon stick. It even had a vertical ridge along one side as if it were a tightly-rolled scroll. The leaves were nice and cinnamony in color, too.
“The Divination spell inscribes everything known about whatever it's used on in the caster's Grimoire,” she said slowly, thinking out loud.
“Yes, master, which is why you could never do it before; it requires a Grimoire to work. In addition to knowledge it also grants you the very useful ability to reproduce the divined object via Conjuration!”
“I don't know Conjuration,” she said absently. “It inscribes everything known. Known to whom? How? Where does it get this information?”
“Magic is the exertion of thoughts directly upon reality,” the Grimoire replied. “So extracting information from thoughts is actually quite elementary.”
“That's creepy.”
“Actually, master, it is all but impossible to gather useful data from an individual's mind directly; the mind's nature and organization render its contents incomprehensible to other minds unless filtered through some mutually agreed means of communication. The data gathered by Divination is aggregated. For it to work, there must be a quorum of individuals who already know this information. In the absence of such, Divination will still allow you to record and reproduce the object's properties via Conjuration.”
“Which I still don't know,” she said brusquely. “But more important, think what this means! If this thing is called a cinnamon stick tree, that means it was named by people who know what cinnamon is! And that means Knauer isn't the only one with a means of getting here from our world!”
“A logical conclusion, master. Had you ever heard of Dysland before?”
She shook her head, pacing around the tree and dragging her fingers over its papery bark. “I'd never even heard of using magic to travel to other worlds. I mean, actually, I have,but only in fairy tales and such when I was a kid. Nothing authoritative. Then again, I'm just an apprentice...there's an awful lot I don't know.”
Tzi glanced again at the sky, then had to pause and focus on her breathing to avoid another rush of panic that would undo the last hour of meditation.
“I think,” she said, shaking herself off, “it would be a good use of our time to gather as much information as we can, since I've got a handy spell for it.”
“A good idea, master. Might I suggest that you look into learning the spell for Conjuration as well? Like Divination, it is contained in the spellbooks used to create me, but it does require a somewhat more elaborate ritual.”
The Divination ritual, in fact, had been exceedingly simple, not much more than meditating on a sigil; it hadn't even required a spell circle. Well, following her Grimoire's advice was always a good idea, and Divination had already paid off.
“What's the benefit of learning to do Conjuration?” she asked, even while aiming her wand at the blue bush and casting Divination again. As she focused, the crystal tip began to glow.
“Conjuration allows the caster to create physical objects with material permanence,” the Grimoire explained. “You can only reproduce shapes, structures and materials already recorded in your Grimoire via Divination. Given a sufficient library of such sources, it will enable you to produce food, clothing, weapons, even construct shelter.”
“Okay, I definitely see the benefit of that in an outdoor survival type situation like this,” Tzi said.
“I should caution you, master, that Conjured food is less nutritious than the natural variety and can cause health problems if eaten exclusively. You also cannot Conjure magical objects of any kind. Congratulations, master, you have successfully Divined the floofberry bush!”
It opened and held itself up to show her the new page, complete with a drawing and description of the shrub with the triangular blue leaves.
Tzi wrinkled her nose. “Floofberry? Is that a joke?”
“If so, not mine, master. I only convey accurate information with the utmost possible clarity. They do produce edible berries, it seems, but they appear not to be in season. More's the pity.”
“Well,” she said with a sigh, “I guess we might as well learn all we can while we're here. There doesn't look to be anything going on in this little valley; best to move on before it rains or something. But there's stuff to Divine, and it sounds like I should get in the habit of using Divination on everything I see.”
“A wise course, master. The ritual to learn Conjuration may present a challenge, as it requires several components which, while readily available on our world, might be difficult to acquire here.”
“Great,” she muttered, pointing her wand at the grass.
Over the next several minutes, Tzi expanded her knowledge of this new world, one object at a time. The trees, grass, bushes and wildflowers she cataloged, noting the medicinal and magical properties of several, though aside from the so-called floofberries, nothing else that grew in this valley seemed to be edible. She also found vines and some kind of hanging moss on some of the trees rising up along the outskirts of the valley, but overall, there just didn't seem to be very much growing here. It was a quiet and, in fact, peaceful spot, once she got used to the alien plant life. Even the sky was beautiful, in its terrifying way.
Not that Tzi intended to settle down here or anything.
She never did find any of the bugs that were making that cicada song. They seemed pretty shy; whenever she drew closer to a source of the noise, it would stop, only to begin again a distance away, still hidden in the vanilla grass (vanilla grass, more proof that whoever had been here to name all this stuff shared her own points of reference). Eventually she caught a glimpse of what was making the cheep-cheep-whistle sound: they were, indeed, small birds, and very pretty ones. Their feathers were the same shade of red as the cinnamon trees' leaves, which made perfect camouflage; Tzi only spotted one when it moved. The songbirds had very large eyes, a rakish crest of feathers on their heads and long, drooping plumes for tails.
Her Grimoire informed her that Divination would also work on animals, though she was denied the opportunity to test this. The spell took a few seconds to cast, and these birds were no more interested in sitting still while a large alien brandished a glowing stick at them than those back home would have been.
“If you can get the opportunity,” the Grimoire said after her last attempt to sneak up on one failed, “they can provide materials as well as knowledge. With the creatures recorded in me, you will be able to Conjure parts of them, though you cannot create animal life itself.”
Tzi wrinkled her nose. “Gross.”
“Animal products can be extremely useful, master! I doubt these specimens would yield anything worthwhile except perhaps feathers, but still.”
“Hm. I guess if I Divine something I could make leather...”
“Well, you could Conjure its skin, but leather actually requires some treatment to be useful. Raw hides are not good for much, master.”
“What about meat, or eggs?”
“That shares the same problems as Conjured food, master. It will ward off hunger but you are much better off with natural food. If it comes to that, it makes more sense to Conjure fully cooked food and save yourself some time.”
“Hm. All of which is pretty useless unless I can learn the Conjuration spell.” She peered around the valley yet again. “What components will I need for that?”
“Standard-grade spell chalk for the circle. Blue and yellow candles, three of each, preferably beeswax. A tool to inscribe the candles with symbols. A crystal focus, rose quartz being ideal but clear quartz adequate. A small quantity of powder composed of wood ash, ground granite, and powdered bone, species irrelevant.”
Tzi drew in a deep breath and expelled it in an explosive sigh, puffing out her cheeks. “Gonna be interesting to find some of that in a place like this.”
“I'm afraid so, master.”
“Which means I won't be Conjuring anything soon, so we need to be looking into food and shelter, and I don't see any here. All right, let's just make sure we've got everything we can get outta this place before moving on.”
Casting Divination at the platform did nothing; the Grimoire reminded her that the spell was not useful on magical objects or creatures.
“Magical investigation is its own field, master,” the book explained. “It will require significant study and practice before you can extrapolate data directly from enchanted objects.”
“One thing at a time,” she grunted, turning away and making for one of the stone outcroppings which ringed the valley. “Is it just me, or do these rocks go all the way around?”
“There appears to be a gap at the narrow end, master, but yes. I think this is some kind of crater.”
Tzi tried Divination on various pieces of rock, singling out everything that looked different or interesting. She was no geologist, and accidentally repeated herself several times, Divining apparently different types of stone which it turned out were the same. Still, after ranging up and down the outer walls of the valley for a quarter hour or so, she had added entries to her Grimoire for basalt, granite, diorite and obsidian.
“All igneous stones,” the Grimoire noted. “This is definitely a volcanic crater or caldera, master.”
“All the more reason to get outta here,” Tzi said, tucking her wand back through her belt and turning to head for the one gap she had spotted.
“It appears to be quite inert, master! I detect no danger of eruption; look how eroded all this stone is. Nothing of geological significance has occurred here in millennia.”
Tzi didn't bother to reply. Her survey of the crater's rim hadn't been exhaustive by any means; she had gotten tired of the same old rocks before covering more than a quarter of it, but at a glance the Grimoire's assessment was right. The whole valley was crater-shaped, and its edges grew progressively harder to climb the higher they went, becoming increasingly heavy with cinnamon stick trees and floofberry bushes (she still shook her head in disbelief even at thinking of that name). For the most part, soil gave way to rock once the slope became too steep even for plants to cling to, and in several places actually curved back upward again till there was a slight overhang. Here and there rose igneous spires and boulders, adding a jagged appearance to the valley's natural wall. There was only one place where a crack in the outer border permitted entry or exit, at least at a glance. Tzi headed right for this, her Grimoire floating along at her shoulder.
The crater's walls were impressively thick, to judge by the length of the opening. It wasn't wide at its base, being scarcely large enough to walk through, but immediately beyond the breach the opening widened. It seemed this section of the outer wall had collapsed long ago, tumbling outward to form a convenient slope of fallen stones. A conveniently stable one, and in fact, it had long since been covered with soil, and then with more vanilla grass and floofberry bushes whose roots doubtless helped hold the lot in place. Now, it made a neat path onto what proved the slope of a gentle hill.
Before her, the landscape stretched out in all directions, with mountains rising off to her left (she had no point of reference to determine what was north or south) and a glittering plane along the horizon to the right which seemed to be a large body of water. Rolling hills covered with vanilla grass were dotted with more stands of bushes and cinnamon stick trees, giving way eventually to an actual forest, its canopy a mingled red and blue. The cinnamon stick trees outnumbered whatever the others were, but their blue-leafed counterparts stood much taller, with mighty branches pushing their cobalt foliage high above the red canopy.
It all looked perfectly alien, and quite appropriate for the bizarre, planet-filled sky. But even more significant, there were now signs of habitation.
Plumes of smoke rose in three widely separate locations within the rolling, forested hills. Some dozen or so meters down the slope atop which she stood, a flattened area of grass showed hard-packed dirt, gradually tightening as it continued until it was an obvious trail, vanishing into the distant woods.
More near at hand, two wooden stakes had been rammed into the ground on either side of the slope into the valley. Each had affixed to its top an animal skull of a provenance she didn't recognize, painted with faded green marks.
“Well,” Tzi said after standing and staring for a moment, “I guess the locals don't want anybody going into that crater. Wonder why? It seems pretty peaceful.”
“Perhaps something to do with the platform,” her Grimoire suggested. “It clearly serves as an arrival point for magical travelers. There were no other signs of recent activity, though.”
“I guess the only way we're gonna get any answers is to find somebody who knows 'em,” she said grimly, setting off down the slope.
“Proceed with great caution, master.”
“Yeah. No kidding.”
Comments
George R
Thanks for the chapter
