37. Inverted City

Chapter 037 Inverted City
In the interest of giving as little of a warning as possible to the necromancer, Marcus and Helvran set off almost immediately. If Helvran’s suspicion was correct, she would quickly realize what was happening, and they didn’t want to give her time to prepare for their arrival. One of the best ways for a weaker adept to take down a stronger one was to prepare a trap for them, and Marcus wasn’t even sure she was weaker. Helvran simply said she was at least rank six.
Basically, traps were really bad news, and it was never smart to ignore them. Marcus had learned that early in the war against Veldoran, when he cockily walked into an ambush he knew was there because he felt his opponents were too weak to do anything.
He still had a faint scar on his neck where that blade had almost decapitated him.
They informed Vitruvius and Sabina that they needed to take care of something and that they would be away for a few days, and then immediately flew off in the direction of Kerig Island.
Helvran was a lot hardier than his students, so they could fly faster and without stopping as much. Their progress was rapid, and in less than a day they approached the island. However, as they were nearing the southern coast of the continent, a chaos storm hit and they were forced to take shelter in one of the caves they spotted along the way. This was not terribly unusual, as winter was the usual season for chaos storms, but it was unfortunate, as it meant they would have to delay their arrival until tomorrow. The storm didn’t look like it would abate any time soon.
They made a fire and settled inside the cave to wait out the storm. Marcus was calm, idly manipulating the smoke and the sparks coming off the fire to make animal shapes in the air, but his companion seemed uneasy. The priest was staring silently into the crackling fire in front of them, a deep frown etched on his face.
“You should stop worrying so much. Being anxious won’t make the chaos storm pass any faster,” Marcus told Helvran, trying his best to create a dragon out of smoke. “We’ve done what we could to move quickly, but the world has its own plans. If it makes you feel any better, the necromancer is very likely also taking shelter from the storm. She cannot operate in this weather any more than we can. It should all balance itself out in the end.”
Helvran closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
“I envy your ability to take things in stride,” the priest said, keeping his eyes closed. “I used to look down on you somewhat, when I first met you. I thought you were reckless and poorly organized, with more power than wisdom. However, I find myself wishing I had some of your confidence and courage. I wonder, is that simply how you are? Or a natural outgrowth of your great power?”
“Hard to say. What you said about me having more power than wisdom was a frequent lament of all my teachers as I was growing up. I’ve gotten better since then, but maybe part of that is due to my power catching up to my pride and recklessness,” Marcus said, unbothered by Helvran’s admission. “That said, you’re usually pretty good about taking things in stride yourself. Are you worried by the power disparity between you and the necromancer?”
Marcus had questioned the priest about his abilities and experience as they flew. He normally didn’t question Helvran, as he felt he already imposed on the priest enough, but considering what they were about to do, he had to know exactly what he was working with.
Helvran was a rank four priest, essentially equivalent to a foundation mage. He was considered very talented by Raven Temple standards, and had advanced through the ranks quickly in his career, but he wasn’t experienced in fighting. He had travelled a lot in his career, but few people wanted to fight a priest of the Raven Temple, and he didn’t make a habit of venturing into wild areas where monsters might try and prey on him.
Talented, but kind of sheltered, and two whole ranks lower than their opponent. He wouldn’t be of much help in a fight against the necromancer, at least not directly. However, Helvran was an expert in necromancy, and had access to divine power, which could cut through mortal magic and work miracles. Plus, it was well known that necromancers relied a lot on their minions, so Helvran would not necessarily have to tangle with a sixth rank adept directly. Both of them agreed that the priest had to come with him, even though it put Helvran in considerable danger.
“I am not. Death comes for us all, and if it’s my time, then so be it,” Helvran said, shaking his head. “I suppose I’m worried about what happens if I survive this.”
Marcus stared at him curiously.
“I am doing this entirely on my own initiative, against the advice of my superiors,” Helvran explained. “I will definitely be called to explain myself, even if we’re successful.”
“You’ve never defied your leaders?” Marcus asked, amused.
“Not everyone is like you,” Helvran said. “I was taken in by the temple at a very young age, and I have little in the way of personal ambitions. I’ve never had any cause to defy their orders and pursue things behind their back like this.”
What a virtuous man.
“Put that out of your mind,” Marcus advised. “Focus on the present danger. If you must worry, worry about how we’ll defeat this necromancer, not what you’ll have to do afterwards. This is dangerously close to thinking we’ve already won; a form of arrogance. A spirit-rank adept is never someone to take lightly, or while distracted.”
Helvran didn’t say anything in response.
“And besides, my experience is that if you win, people are unlikely to question you too much,” Marcus added. “Disobeying orders is only a problem if you lose.”
Helvran chuckled in response.
“There is a parable about that very thing in the Book of Heresy,” he told Marcus, “but I don’t feel like telling it to you right now.”
He didn’t feel like telling one of his parables? His mind must be truly thrown into turmoil.
The two of them then fell into comfortable silence. Leaving the fire alone, Marcus amused himself by pulling out his spellbook and browsing his spell collection for anything that could be particularly useful in the upcoming battle. It was something he used to do all the time before battles as a young man, but which occurred less and less frequently as he grew more powerful. The spells he found these days were usually not good enough to impress him, he had grown very proficient with his usual selection, and he could keep a large number of them memorized at once. Most of the time when he switched some of his spells, it was to make room for utility spells or some specialized magic for unusual circumstances.
After some time leafing through the book he found the page on the Exsanguinating Stake spell. Hmm… a spell designed as a counter against blood fiends. Blood fiends… like the Blood Moon Ancestor?
According to Helvran, there was nothing of note at Kerig Island, just like he had concluded when visiting it all those years ago. The Blood Moon Ancestor was sealed away elsewhere, his disciples dead. So there should be no real need to memorize the spell…
…but he decided to make room for it anyway.
“Do priests have to choose which spells to memorize like mages do?” he asked Helvran.
“No, we differ greatly in this regard. Our spells are simply different ways to tap into and express the divine powers of our patron. The potential for every spell in our repertoire is already there, or not there, and there is no need to attune oneself to specific spells to have them available. A priest just needs to know the necessary invocations and rituals,” Helvran explained.
“Convenient,” Marcus said.
“The downside is that if something is beyond the sphere of our patron, we simply cannot learn it,” Helvran continued. “I cannot learn most of the elemental spells you mages are so fond of, and many other things besides.”
“Can’t you memorize some mage spells on top of your connection to the Raven God?” Marcus asked. “Priests still do familiar things like build internal mana reserves and gather logos. It seems to me you have most of the prerequisites for learning a mage spell.”
Helvran gave it some thought.
“It is probably possible,” he concluded. “There is likely some sort of catch, since I’ve never seen any of my elders using mage spells, and I do know I can’t just take a random spellbook and start memorizing spells from it. I tried that once out of curiosity and it didn’t work. There is surely a way to make it happen, but it would likely run into the same sort of problem that all dual adept paths face – it all competes for the same limited amount of soul power that a person has.”
“So what do you do when you need some piece of magic that isn’t covered by the Raven God?” Marcus asked. “Hire other adepts?”
“We don’t necessarily have to look outside the Raven Temple to find other adepts,” Helvran said. “Much like mage academies, the three temples train and employ other types of adepts like warriors, hunters, alchemist, artificers… and mages. If our duties require mages, we can simply tap into our own mages for that. Though, of course, employing outside mercenaries and allies is also an option.”
Right. Once an adept organization gets big enough, it makes perfect sense to start training your own support staff, including adepts from paths other than your own.
In any case, the conversation seemed to be doing wonders for Helvran’s mood. He seemed a lot more relaxed after talking to him a bit.
“You know, I’ve been thinking… if Kerig Island really does contain some remnant of the Blood Moon Ancestor, how would that work? Purely theoretically speaking,” Marcus said. “The adepts that defeated him surely searched the place thoroughly… and frankly, I suspect I’m not the only powerful adept over the ages that got curious enough to break the prohibition and look around there. What would it take to hide something from all that? It has to be something really, really odd…”
Helvran gave him a curious look. “What are you thinking of?”
“Does the island have caves underneath it?” Marcus asked.
Helvran frowned, hesitating for a moment. “You think it’s the same as the caves underneath your tower?”
“Why not? That space beneath our tower is able to evade all but the most dedicated and sophisticated search. If you don’t already know it’s there, chances are you aren’t finding the entrance,” Marcus said. “If there is a space like that hidden beneath the island, it’s entirely possible the Blood Moon Ancestor left something there without anyone being the wiser.”
“But what are the odds of there being two such places here on Tasloa?” Helvran asked dubiously. “One already seems unlikely. For two to form…”
“Who says it’s just two?” Marcus challenged. “There could be many more scattered about. The entire planet could be riddled with spaces like that, and we’d never know.”
It was something he had been thinking for a while now. There were a number of suspicious cave systems all over the planet, and people usually didn’t think much of them. On top of that, he had heard rumors of things that could be similar spaces. For instance, it was known that Heartfire Academy had some kind of underground training ground for their most talented members, and they were incredibly secretive about it. And Tasloa was clearly special in some way, different from other planets. He wouldn’t be surprised if the dead giant’s cave was just one of many such spaces.
“You’re just guessing,” Helvran said.
“Well yes. I have no proof,” Marcus confirmed. “What else do you think the necromancer is looking for? You said she was digging holes across the island, no?”
Helvran said nothing. He didn’t have any better ideas.

The two of them landed next to the biggest set of ruins on the island. The remains of a massive palace, ringed by walls and towers, eroded and overgrown. The central dome was broken, the roof partially collapsed, and the walls had huge holes punched through them. One of the towers was missing its top entirely, as if sliced through by a huge blade. The stone was still unnaturally smooth where the cut was made, even after all this time.
Smaller ruined sites lay scattered around it, remains of other buildings that supported the citadel. This was clearly where the main stronghold of the Blood Moon Ancestor once stood, and according to Helvran, this was where the necromancer spent most of her efforts after arriving on the island.
If Marcus were to imagine the remains of an evil adept from ancient times, he would have thought of a ruined castle upon jagged black stone. Maybe shrouded in perpetual storm or fog or something. This place was nothing like that. The massive stone ruins, heavily overgrown with moss and grass, with swarms of seabirds nesting in its nooks and crannies, didn’t give off any ominous feelings. As for the land around the place, it was just a grassy plain littered with rock formations that were likely just loose stones knocked off from the main ruins by the centuries of erosion and bad weather. A strong wind blew over the plain, producing a calming murmur.
Back when Marcus had first visited this place, he had been too focused on looking for treasure to really enjoy the view, but now that he took his time to absorb the sights and sounds… it was not bad, honestly. Sordid history aside, the place was beautiful. Majestic. A painter could probably create a really good landscape painting out of this.
There was no sign of the necromancer or her golems. Even after they circled around the island two times, they failed to find her current base. They had landed next to one of her recent excavation sites – a deep hole where her minions had dug straight down in search of something – in hopes of finding some clues. Marcus wandered over to the hole, Helvran trailing behind him, eyes taking in the land around them, looking for any sign of ambush.
“She definitely knows we’re here,” Helvran said. He looked up in the sky, where some of the birds were following their movements suspiciously closely. “And so do the scouts assigned by the Raven Temple to spy on her.”
“Will they try to stop us?” Marcus asked, crouching next to the hole to cast a divination and try to track down those that made it.
“No,” Helvran shook his head. “They will just watch to see how things play out, then confront us later. Even if they wanted to come over, it would take them a long while to reach us. They aren’t like you, they can’t just fly over whenever they feel like.”

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That made them a rather poor check on the necromancer, in Marcus’s opinion. If she really did find something, she’d have plenty of time to escape the island before the Raven Temple’s response could reach her. No wonder Helvran was so uneasy about her activities. Then again, if they did transport actual people to the island, the necromancer could just hunt them down and kill them, so they probably didn’t have much of a choice.
The divination spell didn’t return any results. Their enemy had done a good job of erasing any magical traces of her passage. However, the golems she was using were big and heavy, and not terribly subtle. After looking around, Marcus was pretty sure he could track their movements simply by observing the tracks they left as they moved about. He wasn’t a master tracker, but he could do it when it was something this obvious.
He summoned Chompy and told him to map out the local underground, seeking out any underground cave networks, and then motioned for Helvran to follow him. He would try to track down the necromancer the non-magical way while Chompy did his own thing.
It was harder than he hoped. The golems left plenty of tracks, but they tended to split and cross in different directions, creating a confusing mess of traces. He didn’t think the necromancer was deliberately trying to mask her movements, she just led her golems to many different places, leaving tracks all over the place.
Helvran had ways to detect necromantic energies with his magic, and he helped him orient himself better. Eventually they discovered something. It wasn’t the necromancer herself, but rather a disembodied human skull. It sat on a broken wall in one of the ruins, seemingly just a grisly relic of the past, but neither of them were fooled. It was too intact to be ancient, and they could feel subtle magic infusing it.
“A trap?” Marcus mused out loud. “Or a spy device?”
“Neither,” a female voice said, originating from the skull. Faint points of green light lit up in the skull’s hollow sockets. “I left this in order to try and reason with you. Now we can talk without worrying about one of us immediately attacking the other.”
“If you wanted to talk to us, why make us track down this skull? Why not just send some other relay to us directly? What if we missed it?” Marcus said, scanning the environment for any signs of a trap or a curse field being activated. It would be a pretty classical trick if she stalled them with talking while a subtle piece of magic slowly closed around them.
He lightly stomped at the ground with his left foot, and a dispelling wave erupted from him, washing over the entire area as a faint distortion in the air. He didn’t find anything hostile, but he did it anyway, just in case.
“I didn’t know where you were going to land,” the skull said. “I placed a handful of these around and if you couldn’t find any, well, maybe you weren’t worth talking to after all. I’m sure you understand.”
“We want you to leave the island,” Helvran told her. “And preferably this whole world, too. Go back to where you came from.”
“I’m afraid I can’t do that, little priest. I gambled everything on this trip. This has to work,” she said. The flickering lights in the skull’s sockets focused on Marcus. “Now that I have a chance to look at you up close, I see I was right. You are definitely practicing a variant of the Ghost-Devouring Method. In retrospect, I really should have known one of your ilk would be here. A planet with an abyssal infection is like a signal fire to the Pale Tree and its minions. Listen, I know this is probably wasted on you, but I’m not actually aligned with the Abyssals. This is just an alliance of convenience. Once I get what I need from the Blood Moon Ancestor, I promise I will leave and not interfere with your hunt. What do you say?”
What an interesting conversation. The necromancer seemed to be assuming a lot about him, and he would dearly love to pick her brains for what she knew about this Pale Tree and its ‘Ghost-Devouring Method’, but she was an enemy and that would involve admitting he knew far less than she assumed.
More importantly, she just revealed to him that she was working with the Abyssals. He hadn’t actually known that, and it instantly made him loathe her. He could forgive her for being a necromancer. Apparently he was too, in some strange sense, and death magic was ultimately part of this world, being one of the six pillars of creation. But siding with the Abyssals? This was like Veldoran all over again. Unforgivable.
“And what about the Blood Moon Ancestor? Is he also going to leave the planet with you?” Marcus asked.
“Why would you care about that?” she asked, seemingly surprised.
“This is my home. Why would I not care?”
“What? You… you’re native? But how did you…?” she spluttered briefly, before catching herself. “No, it doesn’t matter. Look, the Blood Moon Ancestor is also just an opportunist like me. He isn’t going to stop you from going after the Abyssals. I know we represent opposing factions, but let’s be honest: all three of us are nobodies in the grand scheme of things. We can all agree to stay out of each other’s way. Nobody has to know.”
“The Raven Temple has been monitoring the island,” Helvran pointed out. “They will definitely know. They know we were here, and they will want an explanation if we just walk away without doing anything about you.”
The lights in the skull’s sockets flashed ominously. “Why did you have to bring this annoying guy? You have a terrible taste in allies. The Raven God is merely a jumped-up beast, and his ‘wisdom’ is nothing but fatalism and reveling in defeat. Well, fine. I always knew this was a bit of a long-shot. If this is how it is, then have fun finding m-”
Before she could finish, Helvran rushed forward with speed that surprised Marcus. His hand clamped down on top of the skull, looking black and clawed, like a cross between a human hand and a raven’s talons. Glowing blue threads buried themselves into the skull through the exposed eye sockets and other openings, and a brief magical fight broke out as blue and green light intertwined around the skull.
Then the skull exploded, blasting the area with tiny bone fragments and sending Helvran tumbling back. Marcus caught the priest and helped him regain his balance.
“Well?” Marcus asked. “Did you manage to pinpoint her location?”
“Perhaps,” said Helvran, rubbing his forehead. “I couldn’t sense where exactly she is, but I could feel she is underground. Deep underground. If what we talked about was correct…”
“I see. I got back from Chompy about the layout of the island’s underground. I think I know where we need to go,” Marcus said.
He set off towards the island’s interior and motioned for Helvran to follow him. Truthfully, if he didn’t already have an idea what was happening, he would have no idea where the necromancer could be, even with Chompy’s map. There were no well-developed, extensive cave systems beneath the islands. There were several caves, but they were relatively small and all quickly terminated in dead ends, and all were empty.
He didn’t want to fly. While it would have gotten them to their destination faster, it would also make it harder to spot an ambush. Best to advance carefully.
“My worst fears have been realized,” Helvran said as he walked. “She was attempting to stall us with that supposed negotiation. She must have known that using a relay like that would give me a chance to trace the connection back to her, but she was still willing to risk it to keep us busy for a little while longer. I can only imagine she has found what she’s been looking for, or is extremely close to doing so. What bad luck! She made no progress in the months before this, only to get results just as we landed. Did we cause this somehow? It’s hard to see this as accidental.”
“I also think this isn’t an accident, but I think this has more to do with the chaos storm than us specifically,” Marcus said. The place he had in mind was nowhere near the main ruin complex. In other words, the necromancer had been looking in the wrong place up until now. “I think she fled deeper into the island because she knew we were coming, and the ruins are an obvious first place to search. She then took shelter in the caves there, and found her answer.”
Marcus had noticed back home that chaos storms caused disruptions in the entrance to the dead giant’s space, making it more visible and likely to draw people in. He wasn’t sure if the strange spaces and chaos storms were inherently connected in some ways, or if the chaos storms simply had a disruptive influence on them, but it wouldn’t surprise him if the necromancer was only able to spot an entrance to one because there was a chaos storm raging outside.
They soon reached the hilly, elevated interior of the island, including a small canyon. Marcus remembered checking it out when he visited the island several years prior, because it was one of the more eye-catching geographic features in the area. Back then he regarded it as unremarkable, but now, armed with a higher rank and deeper understanding of magic, he could tell it was actually a spell scar – the whole thing had been carved by destructive magic so powerful that traces of logos were still embedded in the canyon walls.
Marcus had found other, even more impressive spell scars across Tasloa as he wandered the lands in exile. Some of them retained enough ancient logos that he was able to reinforce his foundation from insights he found in them. This canyon had barely perceptible traces, most of the magic having faded away with time, so it was no wonder he had never sensed anything during his previous visit.
He greedily absorbed the few intact logos fragments he found in the walls, until he sensed an ambush embedded in the canyon walls ahead.
Bone golems embedded in the rock, ready to spring out and assault them at just the right moment, no doubt. It was done expertly, such that one would never be able to tell that something was buried there just by looking at the canyon cliffs, but between Chompy and his own magic, Marcus was not easy to surprise with buried things.
He decided to counter-ambush them, and ordered Chompy to approach one of them from behind while pretending he didn’t notice anything. Alas, he had no way to signal to Helvran to play along, and the priest was also perceptive enough to notice the ambush… and much worse at keeping his cool.
“Watch ou-” he started to shout.
The walls of the canyon exploded outward in a shower of dust and gravel as two hulking humanoid forms rushed at them. They looked like a pair of goliaths encased in armor of bone, extending their massive clawed hands towards them as they ran.
Marcus had already fought one of these back in the Vespid forest, but these two were even bigger and faster, and presumably tougher.
However, there were no vespids to distract him this time. He raised a low wall of earth that rose up to their knees, causing them to stumble and slow down, breaking their charge, and then simply enveloped himself and Helvran with a flight spell and took off into the air.
One of them tried to jump at them, but that was laughable. It was absolutely trivial for Marcus to just dodge out of the way… though that caused the other one to point its arm towards them and fire a barrage of bone spears out of the hole in its palm.
Marcus didn’t try to block them with shields, remembering what happened the last time he tried to shield against the bone golem’s strike. He could sense similar magic on the bone spears, and had no doubt they would punch through any barrier he might erect. Thankfully, he was agile enough in the air to dodge both the jumping golem hurtling towards them and the bone spears the other one launched at them.
“Light up the runes like last time!” Marcus told Helvran.
“I can’t! They’re too fast!” Helvran protested. His survival was entirely reliant on Marcus flinging him around with his flight spell, or else the bone spears would have impaled him by now.
As the jumping bone golem sailed past them, Marcus cast an earth spell on the walls of the canyon and caused pillars of stone to slam into it from all sides, pinning it in mid-air between them. He then followed that up by throwing a crystal spear at the golem firing projectiles at them from the ground. He aimed it at the torso, where he guessed the animating core might be, but the golem reacted with incredible skill, putting its other hand in front of the incoming attack.
It was speared straight through, the crystal spear passing through the arm and body alike to pin the golem into the ground, but the movement of the arm diverted the projectile enough that the actual damage Marcus inflicted was minimized, and the construct was nowhere near disabled.
Meanwhile, Helvran tried to use the distraction to fire a ghostly white beam at the golem suspended in mid-air by the stone pillars. However, this golem was fully finished and much stronger than the one they fought in the past. As the glowing blue runes started to materialize on the golem’s body and its movements slowed, the golem suddenly erupted with power. Its surface grew a multitude of stone spikes and it tore through its restraints with ease. Helvran’s spell bounced off, stunning the priest for a moment, and as the golem fell back to the ground it launched a dozen or so slow-moving projectiles from tubes running down its back.
They were human skulls, Marcus realized, wreathed in pale green flames. They rushed towards them with an eerie keening sound, and while they were relatively slow-moving, there were a lot of them.
He didn’t wait for them to reach him, and instead intercepted them with dozens of his own projectiles – fast moving red stars that exploded into fireballs when they hit stuff.
The resulting explosion was far bigger than he had imagined. The flaming skulls were also explosive, it seemed, so when the two projectile barrages met, the resulting detonation was titanic. The entire canyon shook, and Marcus was forced to erect a shield in front of himself and Helvran just to withstand the aftershocks, only for the two golems to charge out of the explosion unaffected, seeking to exploit the situation.
They immediately stumbled into a trap Marcus had laid for them. Overlapping waves of seismic force washed over them, and for the first time since the battle started they shuddered and stopped. The bones they were made of cracked and fell off, and Marcus took advantage of this surprise to launch crystal spear after crystal spear at them. One, two, three… he launched them without pause, focusing his attacks on only one of them, impaling its torso again and again.
Before he could finish this, the other golem jumped back and rushed straight into the wall. Rather than collide with it or start to dig, though, it phased straight into it without any resistance, almost like an earth elemental.
It rapidly left the scene, and Marcus soon lost sight of it.
As for the other golem, the one with three crystal spears sticking out of its chest, it simply stood there, unmoving. Marcus threw two more crystal spears into it for good measure, and it collapsed into the dirt face-first. At least one spear hit something critical, it seemed.
Five crystal spears to kill one of these things was probably overkill, but he was unfamiliar with their weaknesses, and according to Helvran the core wasn’t always in the same place from golem to golem. He would rather be certain that he got one of them than try to disable both only to end up doing nothing.
Helvran cautiously approached the fallen bone golem and placed his hand on it, closing his eyes as he tried to glean some kind of information from it. Marcus scanned the area again, looking for any further traps but finding nothing.
The necromancer who controlled these golems had incredible control over them, Marcus mused. He had fought against golems before, ones made out of wood, clay, or metal. They were resilient, but pretty dumb. Their masters had to shout commands at them and could only broadly command them by giving them tasks to focus on. These ones… they cooperated with one another to put pressure on them, reacted from moment to moment to resist his attacks, and generally behaved like living beings rather than constructs. Clearly the necromancer could see through them, and control them as if they were extensions of her own body. He had never seen anything like it.
“The other one fled, and there is no indication that it intends to circle back and attack us again,” he commented.
“She doesn’t want to lose it,” Helvran guessed. “Another attempt at stalling us.”
“How many of these golems did you say she has?” Marcus asked Helvran.
“At least eight,” the priest said.
Marcus looked at the one golem he downed and frowned. That was not good.
Not good at all.

They reached the end of the canyon with no further attempts to stop them. There, they found a hole in the ground surrounded by trees.
The hole itself was unremarkable. An irregular opening into a wide underground cavern full of stalagmites and stalactites. There was a natural stairway of irregular rocks leading downwards. Moss and grasses grew in areas where the sunlight was able to reach into the cave. The place was partially flooded, and looked completely natural.
Marcus already had Chompy explore the cave, and he knew it did not have any extensive underground tunnel system attached to it. There was also no undead base in it.
Yet, Marcus was sure that this was it.
“I don’t sense anything unusual,” Helvran commented. “But then again, the necromancer did try to stop us from reaching this place. I almost want to call it a mistake on her part. Why was she so sure we would recognize this as significant?”
“Because we immediately made our way to this place,” Marcus told him. “I would have assumed the secret is out too.”
He stared at the trees that surrounded the hole. Much like the cave entrance itself, the trees looked completely normal. They weren’t magical at all. However, there were exactly six of them, and the way they were arranged around the entrance… this was a magical circle, he was sure of it.
He placed his hand on the trunk of one of them and closed his eyes. It took him a minute, but he was eventually able to feel it. The subtle flow of magical energies anchored to the tree. It wasn’t a spell to hide the entrance like he had first assumed – the place was already hidden by its very nature, just like the dead giant’s cave was. No, this was an enchantment to open the entrance, woven into the living trees in a manner he had not encountered before.
He found the spellwork incredibly fascinating. He spent ten more minutes studying it, memorizing it and mirroring it in his microcosm, before he reluctantly opened his eyes and took a step back. Hopefully the trees would still be there later. Right now, he didn’t want to spend more time on this than necessary.
He made three sharp movements, and extended his finger towards the hole, as if trying to touch something invisible in the air above it.
A swirling spatial distortion opened up in front of them.
“What-“ Helvran began to say.
Suddenly, both of them were hit by a vision. They were inside a massive underground cavern, much bigger than the ones they had seen when peering into the hole just minutes earlier. Inside the cavern there was an inverted city of black stone, hanging from the ceiling like a collection of giant stalactites. Inside, there was a heart, beating. The sound of the beating heart was painful and exhilarating at the same time, and Marcus felt like his own blood was trying to escape his body and flow towards it.
Though it was just a heart, Marcus felt that the heart had met his gaze when he beheld it in this vision. An ancient will stared into him, cold and hungry, and attempted to reach into his mind to instill a single, very simple command.
“Come.”
Marcus flared his spirit and broke the vision, both from him and Helvran. He found himself standing before the spatial distortion, the inverted city nowhere to be seen. Helvran was kneeling on the ground, eyes unfocused, breathing heavily.
Marcus waited a few seconds for the priest’s breathing to slow down and for his mind to clear and then extended a hand towards him. Helvran gratefully took it, allowing Marcus to pull him back to his feet.
“S-Sorry,” Helvran said, clearly still rattled. “I haven’t experienced something like that… well, ever.”
It was nothing compared to the divine vision, really.
“Well, you heard the invitation,” Marcus said. “We better not keep them waiting.”
He stepped though the gateway, Helvran trailing more hesitantly behind him.