Tala, Rane, and Terry stood together at the edge of the former site of Arconaven, side by side once again beneath the stars.

Rane and Terry had reached the center and stayed there for a bit while Tala and Alat recorded what was happening all around the two. They had then come back to Tala, allowing her to collect her iron along the way.

At the moment, Rane was considering her with an intense gaze even while she was looking toward the north. Finally, Tala broke the momentary silence, “What is it?”

“You advanced.”

She grinned. “That I did!”

“You advanced a lot.”Vissit novelbin(.)c.om for updates

Her smile widened. “Good of you to notice.”

He sighed, but his smile was still impossible to hide. “Every time I think I might be getting ahead of you, you surprise me.”

“Hey, you wouldn’t want to dominate me would you?”

He gave her a look, blinking a few times. Then, he said quickly, his tone sounding a bit scandalized, “No! No. Of course not… What do you even mean by that?”

“I mean, you wouldn’t want to leave me in the rust while you reach Paragon without me. Right?”

“No, never that.” His smile returned, full of warmth. “So, what now? What do you need?”

Tala frowned. “Well, I think I corrected my mis-thinking, but… I think I can learn something from ruins. Are you up for checking out another? The previous Marliweather is just north of here, right?”

“Sure.” He shrugged, agreeing easily. “I’m happy to go there with you. A bit to the west, but yeah, mostly north of here.”

Tala smiled. “Good, that’s the plan, then.”

Terry shifted on his feet, still perched on Rane’s shoulder.

That drew her attention. “Terry?”

He gave a mournful whistling chirp, looking to the north.

“What is it?”

He looked down, shuffling his feet again.

Tala considered for a moment, then it came to her. “You came from up north, didn’t you?”

Terry bobbed in affirmation.

“It wasn’t around old Marliweather, right?”

He shook himself, clearly indicating a no.

“Further north than that, right?”

He bobbed again.

Tala and Rane shared a look, then Rane stroked Terry’s head, the avian leaning into the touch.

Tala smiled. “Do you want to swing by where you came from?”

Terry stiffened slightly, but then, after a long moment, he bobbed his affirmation. He let out a long, mournful trill before hunkering down and closing his eyes, clearly indicating that he wanted to end the discussion there.

“Alright. To old Marliweather, then north, on toward…” She hesitated, clearly unsure of which city ruin lay there, what would be their destination.

Rane cleared his throat. “Manaven was north of there. There’s another in between, a bit to the east, but I’m not sure how much help that one will be, and it doesn’t seem like that’s where Terry is looking.”

“Thank you. To old Marliweather, then north, on to old Manaven!”

-I could have told you that information.-

Sure you could have, but you didn’t have to because Rane already knew it.

-Fine…-

* * *

Tala, Rane, and Terry took to the plains once again, running, leaping, and flickering through the night, heading north and a little west toward old Marliweather.

Terry did take a bit of time to divert and hunt on their way, but there weren’t too many arcanous creatures along the direct path.

They did see some rather fantastically large herds though, moving in the middle distance to either side of their corridor of travel.

Tala actually paused at the top of one of her arcs, reducing her effective gravity even further to simply glide along as she stared in wonder at one particularly large herd.

It was like watching a cluster of islands moving, large beasts in groups of fifty to two hundred, shifting around each other in one mega-herd in the gray light of early morning.

The sight was formidable, and something about it even gave Terry pause, the terror bird giving the mass of normally prey animals a wide berth.

Strength in numbers, indeed.

Even at the distance of tens of miles, Tala could hear the low rumble of their movements and feel the very zeme trembling as their collective trickles of power combined into something that even an Archon should be wary of.

She couldn’t quite place what magics they wielded, but they didn’t seem to be the thunder bulls of the western plains, at least not to her distant perspective.

Still, while it was a curiosity, she could look it up with relative ease if she was truly curious. So, it wasn’t worth diverting from their travels.

After her incredibly limited gravity brought her back to the ground, she adjusted it back to the level that she’d found would give her the easiest leaping pace and sped back up.

In her conflict with Mistress Cethira, Tala had found herself able to propel her own body with her aura—so long as she had an exterior locus for her aura to act from—but she wasn’t confident in using that ability in long-range travel, at least not at that moment.

That’s true… These creatures seem to be reinforcing the connections. Or they help rebuild them by their very nature, which amounts to the same thing.

-That’s what it seems like.-

They went back and reviewed what they’d seen in old Arconaven, and with their new insight, they were able to see the same thing occurring across the rents there.

There was a catch, however. The reality-threads that were stretched across the damage in old Arconaven degraded incredibly quickly in the maelstrom of Reality, Magic, and Void. Thus, even with dozens—if not hundreds—of times as many creatures, the aggregation of reality threads effectively repairing the damage was much slower.

Fascinating. They eat the magic even as they stitch the holes closed, attacking the problem from two sides.

-I wonder if these are natural or designed?-

You think that gated-humanity designed these things? Tala hesitated. You know, they might have?

-Ask Mistress Ingrit?-

Yes please. She continued her examination for a few minutes before the Archon responded. Alat read through the response and gave Tala the shortened version.

-No, gated-humanity didn’t create them, to Mistress Ingrit’s knowledge. There are records of them from a time before gates. They are considered to be a more passive version of Magical creatures, it seems. Something that Reality itself apparently creates in order to counter high concentrations of Magic.-

Tala nodded slowly. That did make more sense as the things seemed too… alien to have been conceived of by a human mind.

-What about a really odd one?-

I mean… maybe? But he would have to be very odd indeed.

Tala and Alat paused for a moment before moving on, feeling vaguely uncomfortable with the topic overall.

In the end, they were getting a relatively clear picture of what the damage looked like after a city had been fully abandoned, after the damage had been mostly healed, and what the process might look like going from one to the other.

Old Manaven would give them another, far longer view when they got there, given that that city waned more than a century and a half earlier—a century before old Marliweather, where they currently were.

And the increased pull between reality nodes that I enacted within my sparring ring—and which I’m building up within my sanctum lung—seems to be exactly what the repair entails, except it is executed differently.

-Yeah, as opposed to lashing two things together like we’re seeing here, you cause them to pull together without the extra ties.-

No. Tala disagreed. I am augmenting the ties that already exist, those ties of Reality which Magic might otherwise break down.

And there it was. The overly simplistic description of the degradation caused by human gates.

Magic eroded the interconnected nature of reality—the causal and physical connections of existence—allowing or even forcing division where none was previously, thus introducing void.

Or drawing forth the void that is always lingering within all things.

Tala frowned, about to point out an issue when Alat broached it first, -What about the increase in the stability of Kit as you advance? As you have more magic?-

Yeah…

-I believe that’s thinking of it backward. Kit isn’t more stable because you have more magic. It’s more stable because your soul is more stable. Because of that, your soulbonds are more tightly connected.-

Tala gave a slow, understanding nod. And it is precisely those connections which resist the degradation caused by magic.

-I think so, yeah.-

That made so much sense to Tala.

Tala sighed, causing Rane to open his eyes. Something in her sigh must have conveyed more than she thought, because his question was rather insightful, “What frustrating thing did you just realize?”

A smile pulled at her lips as she looked his way. “Reality hates us because we degrade it, right?”

“That’s right.”

“So, anyone who dabbles too deeply into Reality magic goes a bit crazy and anti-gated-human, right?”

“Right.”

“Well, with a proper application of Reality magic, I’m pretty sure that we could not only fix the damage, but prevent it from happening in the first place.”

Rane stared at her for a moment before giving a rueful chuckle. “If you ban all forms of violence, you have no one left capable of dealing with those who don’t follow those rules?”

She blinked a few times before giving a slow nod. “Not the analogy I would have used, but… yes? I think that tracks. We need Reality Mages to fix this issue, but—at the risk of over-personifying one of the three pillars of Existence—Reality is so angry with us that it makes it impossible for us to have any Reality Mages, because instead of fixing the issue—as only they can—they attack us.”

“Thus, we have to make them taboo, preventing the fix at the root,” Rane finished for her.

“Exactly.”

He frowned. “Can you explain what you’ve learned in more detail?”

She nodded and did so, laying out what she’d perceived and what she’d gleaned from it.

He asked probing questions, testing her assumptions, but in the end, he didn’t find any major flaw in her thinking. Leaning back, he pulled a waterskin from his dimensional storage and took a long pull. After wiping his mouth, he nodded. “Can you implement the fix? Can you put in preventative measures?”

Tala let out a long breath, puffing out her cheeks with the breath as she slowly shook her head. “Honestly? Yes, but no.”

He tilted his head to the side, waiting for her to continue.

“I can do the work, but this is like looking at a child with a shovel and asking her to relocate a mountain. In concept? Sure, it’s possible, but it’s not going to happen.”

He grinned at her, then. “So, what you’re saying is that you need to get stronger? You need to advance?”

Tala chuckled. “Wouldn’t that be nice?”

“Well, ‘to fix that which is broken’ isn’t the worst eternal goal I’ve heard.”

She stared at him for a long moment. “Well… rust. I think you’re right.”