Chapter 519 – Incorrect Analysis

Sophia’s mind raced. Now that she remembered that she already knew the cause of the confusion effect, did that help? Could it help her extend the range of the key’s protection? 

It did make it even more likely that she was right about overlapping auras being relevant, but it didn’t seem likely that helped. They could probably leave the key in the camp and then all be able to go the radius of their own aura away from it, but that wouldn’t actually help; it would only reduce the distance they could go. Sophia’s aura was larger than either Xin’ri’s or Dav’s. “Revanos? How far does your aura stretch? Can you hold the key and give us some more distance?”

“Probably, but I’d rather not,” Revanos admitted. “Or, rather, you’d probably be better off if I didn’t. I can and usually do restrain my presence, but when I do that it doesn’t reach as far. You have an unusually large presence; for mine to be notably wider, I would have to release my restraint enough to be rather uncomfortable for you.”

Sophia frowned at Revanos. When he said presence, he had to mean aura. He was focusing on the fact that you could feel the presence of those whose aura you entered. She could even guess why it would be uncomfortable; aura told you how strong others were by how they naturally took hold of the mana around them. It was possible to suppress that, but restricting your hold on the mana around you with your aura was a lot easier if you just didn’t control as much space. Revanos was somewhere around the fifteenth upgrade, or had at least been to the fifteenth branch of the World Tree; it made sense that he would naturally lock down the space around himself if he didn’t watch what he was doing. 

Sophia was pretty sure she’d be fine. She grew up around people who were easily that powerful, after all. That didn’t mean it would be comfortable. It probably wouldn’t be. If she could retract her aura to a shell around herself that she could control, it would be better, but she couldn’t completely avoid his aura and still get the benefit of the key’s protection.

Plus, Dav and Xin’ri would have it worse than Sophia did. Unlike her, they never learned how to deal with stronger people by pulling their auras close and controlling a far smaller area. She’d taught both of them a little but there were some things that were better learned from experience.

Sophia started to tell herself it would be good practice for them, but honestly she knew better. There were long-term runescripts scattered around the house at home in addition to the fact that they lived in a dungeon that moderated the aura weight of those stronger than the area they were in and she still knew whenever her father or one of her stronger aunts or uncles got upset or her mother had an unpleasant vision. The point of the runescript wasn’t to block the feeling; it was to prevent it from being harmful.

They didn’t have anything like that here, so at the best it would be unpleasant. At the worst, it might actually hurt someone. It wouldn’t be deliberate but that didn’t change anything.

Sophia sighed. “Fine. You’re probably right; it’s probably better if we don’t have to deal with your aura. I can’t think of another way to let us get farther apart, though.”

“It’s not that important,” Revanos said with a shake of his head. “If there were dozens of us, it would be an issue, but with only four people? We’ll be fine. We can head back out of the mountains if we truly need something. It’s only a couple of days’ travel each way.”

A couple of days’ travel each way meant at least five days away from the workshop, five days where she couldn’t make progress on how to get home. She knew that shouldn’t bother her, but it did. It also wasn’t something she could do anything about unless she managed to crack the mystery before they needed supplies.

That sounded impossible; it had been over two thousand years. At the same time, Sophia knew A’Atla’s vault was sealed for longer than that without anyone opening it because no one found it. Very few people even reached A’Atla before it rose from the sea. This wasn’t that different; the area was hidden by the confusion field. It was entirely possible that the only person to reach Mimir’s workshop before them was the Mage, and no one knew what happened to her.

If someone could break into the workshop, the Mage was the most likely candidate. She knew far more about that sort of runescript than-

“It’s your turn, Sophia,” Dav interrupted. “I hope you’ve got a better move than I do or Revanos is going to take this one.”

Sophia didn’t; in fact, she had to draw two tiles before she could play. Revanos won that match and the one after it before they all decided it was time for lunch.

Sophia had to admit it was a good morning. Maybe the break really was needed. That didn’t mean she was going to abandon her work for a full day!

That afternoon, she decided that sitting back where she had been and working on the same thing she’d been failing at for days probably wasn’t the best choice; she needed to see more of the workshop, even though it meant dragging everyone else around the building with her. Sure, she could get closer to the building and cover it with her aura, but she couldn’t get close enough to allow her friends to stay in one place well away from the building while staying safely away herself. They’d have to move with her.

It wasn’t hard to convince the others to move around the building with her; in fact, they were eager to do something. Sophia expected Revanos to help keep the others safe, but he was the first to walk up to the workshop.

Naturally, that meant he was also the person who noticed there was an actual physical gap between the workshop and the dirt that surrounded it. It was only a fraction of an inch but it was clearly visible. 

Sophia couldn’t tell it was there with her aura; the dirt was inert like the air, without any notable magical presence. When she tried, she noticed something different: the spellforms she’d thought were contained by the walls actually extended slightly beyond them by that very fraction of an inch. 

That led to a lot more examination of the wall to see if there was anything else interesting about it that they couldn’t see from a distance. There were a lot of small details Sophia had missed, including a tracework of the runescript she was looking at, but the most interesting part was that closer examination revealed a completely different explanation for the breaks in the walls than “explosion,” even an explosion confined and channeled by the runescript.

The breaks in the wall connected parts of the wall where the runescript met the spellform. Most of them were away from the entrance, which was confusing in its own way: why weren’t they there if they were everywhere else? 

If that was right, Sophia was completely wrong about what the “luck” part of the runescript did and how the “protection” portion played into the breaks in the wall. That was discouraging; she’d thought she was actually starting to understand what she was looking at, but she was wrong. She was still convinced that the different portions of the runescript were interacting with the broken walls; she just wasn’t sure why or how.

Taking it down safely was going to be a lot harder if she couldn’t tell what it was doing. All she could really do was read the mana flows; she couldn’t actually interpret the spellform. It was too alien to the forms she was used to, even though she could read the language of the runescript.

The sun was low above the mountains when Dav distracted Sophia from her attempt to rebuild her guess at what the runescript was doing. “I think I see something.”

Sophia would take any distraction she could get right now. “”Oh? What?”

Dav waved towards the wall. “Over here, next to the entrance. There’s a glow inside the building, a pale blue. I think I see the shadow of someone just inside the door. It’s hard to be sure; I’d have to move more of the dirt to see better.”

Dav moved out of the way. As he stepped down the steep slope cut into the dirt to reveal the door years earlier, his foot skidded. He thudded soundlessly against the wall.

No, against the gap in the air. Oddly, his hand stopped a little farther from the wall than the dirt did. Sophia wasn’t sure what it said about her that she noticed that in the moment before she realized that this might be a very bad thing. “Dav! Are you okay? How’s your hand?”

“My hand’s fine,” Dav answered as he slowly straightened. “I think I twisted an ankle, but that’s what my healing Embodiment's for.”

Dav started to turn, then froze. It wasn’t incredibly obvious why, but Sophia’s attention hadn’t left his hand and she could see his arm tense to try to pull it away from the wall and the hand not move for a long moment. When his hand did finally separate from the wall, it was so quickly that he smacked himself in the forehead with the back of his hand. “Uh, hum, apparently the wall is sticky?”

“Are you sure you’re okay?” Sophia finally made it next to him. She wasn’t about to risk him tripping again so she summoned her wings and shifted to pick him up. “Come on, let’s get away from the workshop.”

“I’m fine, really!” Dav protested. He stepped forward, away from the slope, then stopped with a wince as he started to life his other foot. “Okay, maybe not walking’s a good idea right now. Dammit.”

Sophia carried Dav back to their camp. It would have been funny under other circumstances; she was far smaller than he was and could only carry him because her wings didn’t actually have to obey physics. She set him down on a bench that Revanos pulled out of nowhere (or maybe made while Sophia wasn’t looking) a few days earlier, then deliberately frowned at her boyfriend. “Are you sure your hand’s okay? It wasn’t hurt by the wall, was it? Or whatever’s in front of the wall?”

Dav rubbed his right hand with his left. “Feels fine. It was a little tingly right after I pulled it away, but it was just like it was … well, stuck to something. I don’t feel anything sticky. Do you think that maybe the gap is from the stasis? If it sticks out a little beyond the building, what sort of edge effects would that cause?”

Sophia opened her mouth to deny the possibility but the words never came out. She couldn’t actually say he was wrong; she’d never heard of such a thing but she couldn’t decipher the runic inscription either. 

“It’s probably pretty inefficient if it does go beyond the wall,” was the best she could come up with. “There must be a really good power source. I guess that would explain why this place is lower mana than the rest of the world. You did say this are was lower mana, didn’t you, Revanos?”

“It is,” the Wanderer agreed. “And since Dav is convinced he’s fine, I want to know more about what he saw.”