Millennial Mage

Tala moved over to sit on her throne, having brought herself, Rane, Lyn, and Terry onto the dais which was at the center of the sanctum.

Rane sat on the throne beside hers, Terry curled up on his lap, watching raptly. The terror bird probably would have been on Tala’s lap, but he likely knew such would be distracting, and what Tala was about to attempt would be potentially difficult enough.

That wasn’t to say that the task would be technically difficult. Instead, it would require the utmost focus to ensure that nothing was going catastrophically wrong.

Rane willed for a chair to appear for Lyn to sit in, and the seat was there, ready for her use.

At the same time, Alat brought forth a large upright slab—as extreme in its thinness as it was in its height and width—and used that to display one of the perspectives on the flier awaiting on the superficial for their use. This perspective in particular was one that was a bit above and behind, looking down and forward.

“-The bloodstar clouds are in place.-” Alat’s voice sounded in the sanctum itself as well as within Tala’s head.

Lyn looked up and around, smiling. “Hello, Alat.”

“-Hello, Lyn. This should be exciting.-”

“Yes, certainly something worthy of record.” And putting action to her words, Lyn pulled out an Archive slate and began taking notes. Though, to be fair, Tala could perceive that much of what Lyn was doing seemed to be related to her work. That stood to reason, as nothing was actually happening yet.

Tala gave him a humorous smile in return. “How magnanimous of you, my husband.”

He gave a seated bow. “I do my best as an enlightened Paragon.”

Tala chuckled. “Well, shall we?”

With two nods, a trill of excitement, and an affirmation from Alat, Tala willed for a small portal to appear, leading from her sanctum into the tiny space within the flier’s interior. It was originally intended to hold siege orbs or other items at her need, and she was incredibly glad that it was there, as she didn’t have to worry about breaking the construct by jamming the portal into a space otherwise needed for something else.

“Let’s start slow and take in the results.” She was speaking mostly for herself but verbalizing the thoughts for Rane, Lyn, and Terry.

Tala wasn’t limited to the singular perspective given by the massive display that Alat maintained before them all. She still had that one coming straight into her mind, but it was along with fifteen others around the construct as she watched in every direction from two nebulous locations, one stone- and the other starward of the flier.

She was also still processing her own bloodstar clouds anchored around her physical location for a wholly other ‘complete’ perspective with which to compare and contrast that which she was seeing around the flier. Though, as she was in Kit, most of what she easily saw was within the expanded spaces. Still, it was further data, and she was wont to give up any potential information while performing this test.

The flier, for its part, was floating three feet off the ground, ambient magics more than sufficient to maintain it in that position. That was quite the change from the first times that Tala, Rane, Alat, and Enar had used the constructs.

Away from Alefast, ambient magic around the cycling cities wasn’t enough even for that, but she’d noticed that difference the last times that she flew the construct. It just hadn’t been worth remarking on.

Now? Now, everything needed to be noted. Anything could be important.

With a bit of will—and an extra thread of power—the device started forward, quickly coming up to match the speed of a slow walk.

She held it at that pace despite the very magics that made up the construct seeming to yearn to go faster. “Alright. Let’s begin a preliminary investigation. Magical resonance is as low as expected.”

“-I am not detecting any excessive damage to Reality.-”

Rane grunted. “Something would have gone truly and terribly wrong indeed if even this was causing detectable damage.”

Lyn shrugged, a note of pride in her voice, “It is still good to check.”

“Oh, absolutely.” Rane nodded sagely.

Tala grinned. “All checks as expected. How is our Archive link?”

“-Solid, with all information being recorded as it happens. It’s handling the greater throughput splendidly. I don’t think we’ve ever kept perfect record of so much information at once.-

Tala grunted. That was probably true. Alat liked to go through it, paring things down and collating them first. This time, she wasn’t taking the time. Thus, there would be a lot of overlap in the perspective and other unneeded information of that kind, but that was alright. This could be important to have precisely logged. “Noted. Thank you, Alat. Let’s go a bit faster.”

She increased the flier’s pace up to the speed of a slow jog, senses focused to the utmost, her entire dual consciousness locked into a study of—

Something pulsed into being, coming up from the stoneward reaches of existence—though, its sudden appearance there before the beginning of its assent seemed to indicate that it came from elsewhere.

Likely because she was so focused on her perceptions, Tala felt almost forced to watch as a thick Reality thread snapped into being between the creature and…

The connection with the Archive?

-We’re linked to—and controlling—the flier mainly through the Archive, and I’m actively dumping every detail that we’re perceiving there. As you’re aware, I usually refine, prune, and order information before doing so. Moreover, all the non-critical missives and updates to the Archive from all of Ironhold just began to be sent starward. We’d held them in reserve for twelve hours after departing Sunnydale as a courtesy at their request. All that combined?…This is the heaviest connection we’ve had with the Archive in a long time, maybe ever.-

Well, that might be it, then. The sunnydalians had insisted that Archive connections could be dangerous in this region. Maybe they were about to find out why.

The creature itself was… odd, even odder than its manner of arrival.

It looked mostly like a man, but it was too stretched out, too lanky… It had too many arms.

Those arms faded into and out of existence as they moved, making it impossible to tell how many there truly were. This wasn’t even a shifting along the stone- starward axis, as Tala was watching that too, and it was easily moving in those dimensions as well.

Its visage was at once a blank white mask in a shape similar to a heater-shield, and the face of a great owl. It was also quite similar to an octopus perched atop the slender, humanoid shoulders, and at the same time as if the beast was entirely headless.

Tala immediately questioned her early thought that it was humanoid, as it now appeared more like a great lion, or a bat, or a snake.

She felt her mind begin to reject any perception of the creature—if it even was one—as every moment it was slightly or entirely different. Somehow, regardless, every moment it was also still itself, its reality node more solid than any that Tala could recall having ever seen.

It was utterly Real in a way that even the reality beasts she’d fought hadn’t been. Yet, there was a power to it that pulled at her magesight, dazzling it and making it impossible for her to tell what advancement to which it might be equivalent.

Cut all Archive connections.

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

-Already done as soon as we noticed the reality thread. Our soulbound connection is as quiet as I can make it, but it is still there.- There was an infinitesimal hesitation before Alat asked, -Should I sever the soulbond?-

It was a testament to just how overwrought Tala felt by her perception of the still surfacing thing that she genuinely considered saying yes.

Before she could gather her wits enough to decide either yes or no, the creature was passing by their stoneward position.

He, she, it, they—whatever the thing may be—seemed to glance toward them, and somehow Tala knew that it had locked gazes with her, not her bloodstar perspective, but her mundane eyes, even though those same eyes couldn’t perceive the creature at all.

A ripple of fear passed through her at the certain knowledge, and she broke out in a cold sweat despite herself.

Then, the creature seemed to dismiss her even as it breached the superficial.

Around its point of contact, the landscape changed.

The rolling prairies were immediately gone, replaced instead with a blasted-out crater of molten rock.

There had been no impact; there had been no explosion; it simply was not as it had been.

A twisting, writhing, undulating limb reached out, not even touching the flier yet, and Tala felt an implacable challenge to her will, to her power, to her authority.

She was only magicbound to the flier, but it was surrounded by her bloodstars, hemmed in, bolstered, and reinforced by each of their overlapping spheres of aura and authority.

Even so, the flier was wrested from her as a greased pig might escape a scrambling butcher, or as water would vanish into parched sand.

With barely a blink to even realize what was happening, Tala watched the flier cease to be, her portal which had resided within severed with a violent backlash that caused her to spasm upon her throne.

Barely three seconds had passed since she had first sensed the thing’s approach, and those with her were only beginning to gasp at the alteration to the view around the now nonexistent flier, which was still being given by Alat’s manifested perspective.

Blessedly, the clouds of bloodstars remained, even after the flier was gone.

A cognitive understanding more than a voice resounded within the sanctum, indeed, resonating through all of existence for quite a ways in every direction, though Tala couldn’t tell exactly how far.

MINE.

It was at once identical and utterly alien to the expressions of the dasgannach she’d encountered before.

A dasgannach of a different kind?

-One of… connection? Archive connection? Is that even a thing?-

I… I have no idea. How would that even work? I’m not sensing any connection to the Archive from it. Wouldn’t such have to be maintained for it to be a dasgannach of such?

-I have no idea.-

Regardless of the specifics, Tala had felt a question—or maybe more accurately the offer of a challenge—in the assertion.

Would she contest its claim?

Following an instinct that she knew came from the dagannach that she’d subsumed, she… resonated the iron in her being, throughout all of Ironhold and her sanctum, causing it to ring out in a manner entirely unlike a sound.

The sense she got was that she’d had responded something akin to, ‘This is MINE.’

Though only the iron had resonated, the sense she’d projected encompassed all of Kit’s domain.

At nearly the same time, she ‘heard’ a similar resonance from a void-hung part of Kit. Similar though it may have been, this one that sounded more crystalline… Like glass breaking?

But her focus was too honed at the moment to think further on it. The being—she decided it must be a being for it was communicating in a sense—regarded her for a long moment, during which she felt light tugs from all over within Kit as everything with a potential Archive connection as well as every book, every mind, even the core of every part of every plant, animal, and person was briefly tested. It was as if someone had blown across an ancient item, checking to see if any dust would come free.

Tala’s will—the strange resonance that she’d invoked—said no, and everything held firm, even as it felt the brushing of power. She held firm, and the test didn’t come again.

After a moment in which the being almost—somehow—looked surprised, there was a sense of surly acceptance as the being moved stoneward once more, retreating even as existence itself seemed to begin to warp around it. It felt like magic, reality, and void were all colluding to reject the being in a manner that Tala found utterly incomprehensible even while she thought she understood the purpose.

As it descended, Tala looked closer, and saw that, just as with the city stones, the stoneward region was distorted, compressed oddly so that a point far in that direction was equidistant from much of the region around them.

If she had to bet, the feeling that she got was that that compression and forced equadistance didn’t extend into the forest—likely due to Anatalis and Vidarra—but did wrap far south and east as well as north and west, reaching at least another hundred miles in the direction that they were heading while seemingly extending quite a distance back the way they’d come.

This whole region was seemingly under this being’s watch.

There was no wonder that Sunnydale and this entire area eschewed the use of Archive related magic and advancements wherever possible despite them obviously having been exposed to such over the years.

Tala swallowed, only then realizing how close they’d come to destruction.

If she weren’t bound to a dasgannach, if she hadn’t asserted her claim over all within Kit…

-Assuming we’re understanding correctly, which is a big assumption.-

Fair…

The view through her bloodstars, including that which Alat was still showing, no longer showed either the blasted crater of the being’s arrival nor the rolling prairies of before.

Now, the rolling hills had returned but all traces of life were gone.

There were no ashed remnants, no corpses of small animals, nor husks of insects.

Everything that had been alive was just gone, leaving bare soil and rock behind.

Lyn and Rane were staring, wide-eyed, at the display before them.

Terry was looking back and forth between the display and Tala, crooning softly.

Tala let out a long, slow breath, then shook her head. “Well, that was unfortunate.” She bit her lip, then clucked her tongue. “I’m glad we have five more of the fliers.”

Terry turned to her, raising an avian eyebrow.

Lyn simply gave her a dumbstruck look, even as Rane barked an incredulous laugh.

“What?” Tala gazed back at them before gesturing at the display. “That wasn’t directly because of my tests. It was incidental. We’ll do the test then step into the forests to put all the information in the Archive. We’ll also do all of Ironhold Archive work then. In that way, we don’t have a back-log bumping up our information traffic again.”

Lyn cleared her throat. “Tala… I really don’t know what happened. I saw… something before the flier was just gone and absolute devastation was wrought on ground around where it had been.”

Rane nodded. “I also felt… what was that? A tug on me? It was as if it were purely authoritative in nature.”

Lyn turned to him. “Really? I didn’t feel anything at all.”

He shrugged. “It was like someone trying to grab me, and failing, as I ran past. I felt the brief contact, but whatever it was didn’t seem able to gain any purchase. If I wasn’t practiced in looking for authority, I probably wouldn’t have even noticed.”

Lyn grimaced even as she grunted. “Evidence suggests that you’re right.”

Tala gave a playfully feral grin. “That's because you're MINE, and I’m not going to let some creature get handsy with my husband.”

“Yes, love.” He chuckled, then hesitated, his expression shifting to a frown. “Tala, dear, you might want to talk with Walden, Lupe, and Lisa. They will all have felt something similar, and they might not be very happy at the moment.”

“Oh!” Tala put her palm to her forehead. “That was Lupe, who I sensed.”

Lyn arched an eyebrow. “I still don’t know what’s going on… Can you start back at the beginning?”

Tala considered a moment then shrugged. “Alright.”

She did just that, describing what she had seen, sensed, and done.

When she got to the end, both Lyn and Rane were slightly pale.

Lyn swallowed reflexively then cleared her throat. “I think… I think I agree with your guess. I obviously don’t know, but it sounds like it was something like an information dasgannach. How could something like that even exist? Wouldn’t it be made up of only information?”n/ô/vel/b//in dot c//om

Tala opened her mouth to respond, when she got a feeling from Kit. “Oh, Lupe wants to talk. Maybe she’d know?”

A moment later, Lupe appeared beside them, sitting cross legged on the ground in the shape of a young woman. “Thank you for speaking with me, Mistress Tala.”

“Of course. I assume this is about the recent… incident?”

Lupe’s face cracked into a smile. “Yes. I sensed one of my brethren. I am glad that you all survived.”

Tala nodded even as Lyn paled once more, and Terry let out an irritated trill. “Can you illuminate what it was, and what happened?”

Lupe shrugged, causing a whitening of much of her form, even while Kit blocked the sound of so much breaking glass. “From what I could sense it was a knowledge dasgannach. From what little I know those are very rare, very unstable. Existence doesn’t really like those of us without a physical component.” She tapped her lips with a clinking sound that Kit let through the obscuration. “I’d honestly thought all would have discorporated long ago, but that one is at least as advanced as I, though it is hiding out where existence has less of a… tangible hold.”

“The Doman-Imithe?” Tala guessed.

“That is as good a name for it as any, I suppose. Yes, I believe that is the case. Hiding in the void wouldn’t have allowed it to endure.”

“What even is it?”

“A dasgannach.” Lupe looked genuinely confused.

“I mean…” Tala grimaced. “I suppose I don’t actually know what a dasgannach is. Not really.”

“Oh… that’s… that’s odd. But you’re bound to one.”

Tala sighed. This was going to take a while to untangle…