Moonlight Relic, Ch 7: Hall of Sorcery (Patreon)

Sam charged through the currents of bright dust as he raced back toward the center of the room. This time, his stylus was in one hand and an Expert aura from a Hoarfrost Serpent was swirling in the other. He had to empower the runes and the first thing that came to mind was to create an enchantment that would funnel energy into them.

It was only a few strokes and runes to create the pattern and speed was of the essence. If it worked, he could drop auras and cores into it and their energy would be diverted into the runes. He wasn’t sure if the connection would be accepted by the enchantment, but from the way it was drawing energy into itself already, he had to guess that it wouldn’t refuse. As he got closer to the Blood Elemental, the Guardian Star spoke up again, its attention fixed on the Outsider.

The elemental is bonded to the artifact, either as a controlling spirit or as a servant. The majority of its strength is being absorbed by the containment field, which is blocking its primary abilities. The approximate strength it can exert against you is Level 157. That will last until the runes fail.

Sam let the information wash over him as he crashed to the ground outside the circle, staggering as another hammer blow of force slammed him toward the stones. He rolled toward the closest rune and fixed it in his mind’s eye as he drew a thread of energy from the aura in his hand. He didn’t have time to sketch the enchantment in chalk first, so he was going to have to freehand it. The floor might crumble if he took too long. Fortunately, the area around the circle was the most stable in the entire hall.

He connected the thread of aura to his stylus and poured essence into it as he began to draw. First, a connecting line that spiraled off from the edge of the rune and then an energy-drawing spiral with a directional band. Lines began to swiftly form beneath his hand, each of them outlined in crystal blue essence. He abandoned all attempts at supporting runes, stabilizing patterns, and safeguards. Hopefully, the runic circle was built well enough that it could withstand a sudden force pouring into it.

If the way it was pulling substance from the hall was any indication, it would be fine. The stones throughout the hall were continuing to crumble and he was at the center of the spiral created by the disintegrating material. The flow of shattered stones past him felt more like mana than it did earth, and he came to a sudden realization as he felt it.

Nothing in this hall was real except the bowl, the altar, and the runic circle. Everything else was a mana construct, from the stones on the floor to the pillars stretching into the distance. In order to fuel the enchantment, mana was being pulled back out of the structure, which was causing it to dissolve. With a few more lines, the pattern was half complete and on the spur of the moment, he added a directional energy rune that he had learned from the ruins in the relic, using it as a bridge between his pattern and the circle.

The elemental was still splayed out across the surface of the barrier, its body morphing into spikes, hammers, and scythes in a mind-bending aberration of nature. At the center of the mass it had become, there was a slowly growing crimson-black splotch that was connected to the bowl. As that area grew larger, Sam could feel the pull on his veins grow stronger. It wasn’t clear what it was doing, but it didn’t bode well. As he worked, the Guardian Star continued to analyze the enchantment and sort through the relic’s memory. A few moments later, it spoke up again.

This hall is a spatial formation called the Hall of Sorcery. It was a specialty of the Three Peak Sorcerers. The Blood Elemental needed to be separated from sources of new blood for a long period of time, so they trapped it here. The Path of Blood requires constant genesis. The most effective way to deal with it is isolation from all forms of life. From traces left near the circle, the Icebloods sacrificed a number of beasts or people to wake it up.

At that moment, the current of icy mana that was flowing across the room and restraining some of the blood aura faded away. Across the room, the three sylphs staggered, half falling over as they grabbed onto each other. The floor beneath them rose up like a wave as the cracks in it expanded. Stones flew outward, dissolving into nothing as they joined the whirlwind.

Siwasir grabbed onto Raelir and Danir as the floor beneath them shattered. He leapt off, dragging them after him. They crashed onto the stones two dozen feet away and rolled away. Siwasir shot a glance toward Sam as he spun to catch his balance, but then he was focused on the other two sylphs. He pulled the stack of healing scrolls from Raelia’s hand and activated half a dozen at once, shoving two into everyone’s hands, including his own.

“Sam! Gather near us!” he shouted as he pulled a shining white-blue crystal out of his shirt and held it in his free hand. “I’ll try to open the path back!”

The crystal is imbued with the dimensional signature of the sylvan village, the Guardian Star analyzed. It was likely intended for communication, but there is a trace of something more powerful. Using it as a coordinate for spatial transfer is not ideal, even if the barrier around this spatial node weakens.

The words washed over Sam and tugged at an idea, but he pushed it to the corner of his mind as he focused on drawing the runes. Three strokes later, he was done, even as the floor bucked. The entire circle and the floor around it lifted on the wave and slammed back down, throwing him into the air. He only managed to keep himself in place by wrapping bands of air around himself and pressing them toward the ground. Despite the movement, the stones stayed intact.

Inside the circle, a rippling band of blood was twisting around. It formed a series of shining, liquid runes that dripped at the edges. These weren’t the foreign inscriptions on the artifact, but a version of the containment enchantment.  A glance told him what the elemental was trying to do. It was creating a mirror pattern of the containment circle, trying to use it to connect to the circle. It was one method of breaking enchantments, but very difficult to execute, since it required a level of skill on par or greater than that of the enchanter. Intelligent enemies were the most dangerous.

The elemental had been here for untold years, and in all that time, it had definitely learned the shape of the spells that confined it. If it succeeded, the circle would fall under its control. Probably the only reason it hadn’t tried before was the chance of backlash, but with the hall dissolving, it had nothing to lose.

When the floor stabilized again, Sam pulled a pouch out of his pocket and bit at its strings to get it open. He ended up tearing it in half and got a mouthful of sparkling, crystalline dust. He spit it out into the circle at the same time as he slammed the pouch down, scattering the contents across the runes.

The dust was Crystallized Earth Mana, part of some crafting remnants he’d saved. It had a stabilizing effect on enchantments and right now he needed all the help he could get. He wasn’t carrying any of the Earth mana spheres on him, or he would have tossed them in too. He threw the bag aside as he slammed his hand onto the circle and activated it.

The runes came to life in a series of swirling crystalline arcs, first on one edge and then the other. They were a mix of blue from his essence, silver-white from the Earth mana, and a dustier white from the aura. As they activated, they burned themselves into the stones, but unlike with most aura enchantments, this time the color faded out to a translucent spiral that rotated slowly in place as it began to pull in ambient mana. As soon as he saw that, he pulled a handful of monster cores out of his pouch and slammed them into the center.

Cores were normally as hard as gemstone, but the instant they entered the spiral, the enchantment pulled them toward the center and they began to crumble. There was no need to hold them in place. With his hand inside the pattern too, the spiral pulled at his essence like a yawning void, but he ignored it. Instead, he pulled out another handful of cores and threw them in.

Soon, there were nearly two dozen monster cores swirling inside the spiral, filling the center of it until he couldn’t add any more. They rotated with a swiftly increasing force as they picked up speed, slowly crumbling away into opalescent dust. A wave of aura and mana flowed through the enchantment and along the connection he’d made to the circle. Inside, the elemental was focusing all of its attention on the runes it was forming. There were several dozen of them now in liquid crimson that seemed to burn with tiny, licking flames. The elemental’s size seemed to be dropping at the same time.

When the energy hit the edge of the circle, the runes there flared up in a burst of silver light, like a fire that had just received new fuel. The dissolution of the hall was continuing as the mana from it flowed into them at the same time, but the effect of his enchantment was completely different. The runes slowly brightened as their color deepened and some of the empty feeling in them disappeared.

It didn’t take him long to realize what it was, and he threw another dozen monster cores into the enchantment as he kept himself plastered to the stone. The hall was full of mana that could support the field for a while, but the enchantment was old and suffering from a lack of aura. The cores he was feeding to it had some.

As soon as he saw that, he shoved his hand into the spiral and began to pour essence into it. He might not have the mana reserves to support an enchantment like this, but he did have aura. He reached into his dimensional storage and began pulling out auras. If this enchantment needed aura, he’d give it to it.

One after another, he shoved in the auras as fast as he could pull them out. He had about thirty Basic ones, and he tossed those in first. The few dozen Advanced auras he had followed. Finally, the last four Expert ones, the Auras of Blood Winter that he’d gathered from the Icebloods. He tossed them in with a flicker of irony. They had been the ones to cause this, so it was only appropriate that they contribute. Hopefully, it would be enough.

As the enchantment absorbed the vast amount of resources he’d thrown in, its spiral expanded to nearly ten feet high, still focused in a tight cone inside the runes. All around the room, the dissolving structure of the hall formed a much larger whirlwind as the far walls broke down, revealing the dark void beyond.

As he stared into the darkness, he felt as if he were falling into it, his soul slipping away into the distance. He jerked himself back as he tore his gaze away. Perhaps it was best not to wonder what was in the void. Even as he watched, the central support pillars that held up the roof crumbled away and the spatial tears grew wider. A moment later, half of the outer hall broke away into chunks. Some of them spun outward to disappear into the dark, even as the majority flowed toward the center.

The two spirals rotated opposite of each other, the big one spinning clockwise and the small one counterclockwise, like an eye within an eye. The auras spun in the center like a haze of ghostly lights that sent a flickering worldly pressure across the hall. Where the darkness outside felt like it would devour everything that touched it, these were the roar of a winter wind, the rise of a mountain from the earth, and the boiling heat of magma.

The auras funneled through the spiral as they fused into the runic circle, which began to gleam more intensely. There was a building sense of strength in it with the endurance of mountains and the crash of waterfalls. The Blood Winter was there too, its jagged crimson streaks marking out where hope met its end on the ice. Here, at least it was helping as a sense of desolation spread through the runes.

In its prime, this hall must have required an enormous amount of aura. Over the ages, even with whatever cores the builders had used to stabilize it, that energy had slowly crumbled away, weakening the runes and the structure of the enchantment. Then the Icebloods had arrived and tampered with it some more, nearly letting the elemental free.

He wasn’t a Third Evolution enchanter and he didn’t need to rebuild the hall. He just needed to stabilize it long enough for them to get out. The stronger the runes were, the better the chance that the elemental’s effort to escape would end in failure. Just as he thought that, however, the Guardian Star’s warning rang out.

Move! A fluctuation is occurring at the edge of the circle.

Sam followed the star’s prompt even before he could process what was happening. He spun the wind that was holding him down as he tore his hand free from the enchantment. The redirected force hurled him away toward the Ice Sylphs as he looked back and saw what was happening.

In the space between his enchantment and the circle, there was a dark score along the stones. It gleamed like obsidian as it absorbed the light around it, and then it grew longer. With a silent crack, the stones near it split away, falling into the void, and a sliver of darkness ran along the edge of the circle, tearing through one of the confinement runes.

It was a spatial tear.

The core stability of the hall was failing. The spatial tear ripped through the rune and extended a long, jagged edge into the circle with the Blood Elemental. All around it, the shield erupted in a coruscating halo of explosive silver light as the runes flared up. It was so intense that he couldn’t see what was happening beyond it, but the images came to him from Crystal Focus.

As soon as the tear broke through the shield, the elemental froze, its form rippling like a curtain. The runes it was making dissolved, flowing back into its body. It spun in place, drawing in its limbs it was using to attack the shield. Then, like a viper spotting a target, it coiled and struck at the opening. Its body lengthened into a long spear as it tore through the crack.

The circle exploded. Shards of rock flew in every direction, along with a world-shattering eruption from the runes that swallowed up the center of the hall. The whirlwind held for a moment and then it was torn to pieces, blasted backward by the force. A tidal wave of wind and mana slammed into Sam halfway through his leap and carried him along with it.

At the same time, an enormously powerful blood aura crashed down on the area, a dozen times as strong as it had been before. It was so dense that it felt as if he were swimming in a river of blood as it rolled through the underworld, tossing corpses from bank to bank. Even the mana in the air was crushed down. The Blood Elemental, the destruction of the enchantment, and the torrent of mana in the hall all fought for supremacy.

Beyond them, the silent howl of the void loomed in the jagged lines that continued to grow. A brush against any one of them would be enough to slice him into pieces. If he fell through, he had no idea what would happen. The last time he’d visited the void, a teleportation enchantment had protected him.

Images from dreams flickered through his mind as he saw the cracks expanding, changing into the darkness he’d seen before, and then the barren continent of stone where the Nexus had formed at the beginning of Aster Fall. He was floating, spinning in the air. A sliver of darkness loomed in front of him.

A swirl of ice wrapped around his waist like a rope and yanked him away, pulling him across the hall. Raelia and Danir held the other end with one hand and onto Siwasir with the other, who was focused on the crystal in his hands. All three were so pale they looked like alabaster statues, and their eyes were pinched with pain, but they were standing, if it could be called that.

Their feet were frozen to a chunk of stone larger than the others that had come loose from the floor. Now, it was tumbling at an oblique angle perpendicular to where the floor had been. A swirling barrier of green light radiated from Siwasir that was keeping the stones together. It felt like spring and the first flowers in bloom.

Sam had sensed that energy before. Siwasir was somehow expending his aura to protect them. The blood aura was weaker here, held back by that fragile green light. Sam crashed onto the stones beside the sylphs and Siwasir turned to look at him. His eyes were hollow and the bright blue had faded to a nearly translucent white.

At that moment, the reason the barrier was working was clear. Siwasir was burning away his own life and aura to fuel it. The sylph nodded and then raised the crystal into the air, before he reversed the end and stabbed it toward his heart. Time froze in Sam’s eyes as he saw it fall. He heard Siwasir’s murmured words echoing all around them, resonating like a chant to the heavens.

“Life calls to life. Summer passes and the son returns to the mother.”

Then an explosion of spring blasted outward from where the crystal pierced Siwasir’s chest. The green barrier flickered, folding in as space rippled around it. A field of early summer grasses appeared in front of them, fading in and out as waves of energy crashed against the barrier. It was a familiar sight, a field of flowers near the sylvan village. From the color of the sky, the sun had just set. Streaks of golden-orange and pink laced the clouds, and Silvas was visible in the distance, just above the horizon.

At the same time, however, the Blood Elemental coalesced at the center of the destroyed hall. Half of its body was stretched out as it was pulled away to the void, but the rest formed into a series of branching veins that shot straight for them.