CHAPTER 20 - RIFTS
Melanie whistled softly and leaned back in her chair.
Julian had never seen her so impressed. He and Raedrick sat in the couch across the coffee table from her. Raedrick had just finished telling the tale of his exploits the night before last. Her eyes had grown wider and wider the more he spoke.
“I’ve heard of this sort of thing.”
“Oh?” Raedrick replied.
Melanie nodded. “Timon told me about it. It’s called…”
“Timon?”
Melanie looked at Raedrick with the sort of expression Julian had seen teachers use with particularly dense students. “Remember the hypothetical mage I told you about?”
He nodded.
“If that had really happened, Timon would be the mage in question.”
“Ah.”
Melanie rolled her eyes and shook her head quickly. “As I was saying, Timon told me about it. It’s called a trans-planar rift. It allows passage from our world to one of the higher planes of reality.”
Higher planes of what? What the hell was she talking about?
Looking over at him, Julian could see that Raedrick was just as confused as he was. That helped. A bit.
Melanie must have seen the confusion on their faces because she looked at the ceiling and sighed, then stood up. A small writing desk stood over by the window. She retrieved a pen and inkwell along with a piece of paper from the desk and returned to the coffee table.
“Look. The material world we live in is not the sum total of existence.” She looked down her nose at the two of them, adding, “You should have learned this from your school teachers, or at least from your priests, at some point.”
Raedrick nodded.
Julian spread his hands and shrugged. “Yeah the priests always used to talk about how the gods live in the higher realms, or some such drivel. Didn’t mean much to me.”
To his surprise, Melanie smiled. “Or to me either, to be honest. When Timon explained this to me, I thought he was putting me on at first. But it turns out to be true.” With a little shrug, Melanie looked down at the paper and drew a line on it. “Let’s say this is our material world.”
“The world is not two dimensional,” Raedrick pointed out.
Melanie gave him a long-suffering look, making Raedrick shut his mouth and slouch back in the couch, looking chastened. Julian found himself grinning. She could be a handful, but he found himself admiring her more and more.
“If we assume our three dimensional world can be represented by this line,” Melanie said in an annoyed tone, which Raedrick responded to with a nod, “we can also represent the other planes of existence with lines.” She drew several more lines on the paper, some above the world line and some below. “All have their own rules. Some are very similar to ours and can be visited. Some are different enough that to enter them means instant death. A few are so dangerous that even opening a portal to them could destroy wide swaths of the material world.”
“How do we know that?”
Melanie looked at Julian and shrugged. “Trial and error. From what I hear, members of the Magestirium have experimented with accessing the different planes for years. Centuries, maybe. And they aren’t the only ones.” Her eyebrows rose high on her forehead. “Do you remember the tale of Ciril Eremot?”
Julian nodded. Who hadn’t heard that story? How the ancient kingdom had come to a sudden end, destroyed by the gods in a fit of rage. How the kingdom’s entire existence had been wiped away, leaving only a deep crater that was filled by the inrushing water from the world’s oceans.
Wait…
“Are you saying the Ciril Eremot was destroyed because someone there accessed one of these…places?”
Melanie nodded. Julian felt a chill go down his spine.
“A trans-planar rift is a junction between our material world,” Melanie placed the pen on the material line and drew a second line connecting it with one of the other lines on the paper, “and one of the other planes. If the plane in question is habitable, people can go visit. It’s tricky, but it can be done. Even more tricky, it is possible to establish a permanent connection to part of a nearby plane and then create a bubble, if you will, of the material world within it. I’ll wager that is what you and Selam encountered, Raedrick. It would explain why time was different there, as well as the strange perception you experienced.”
“How…” Raedrick stopped and swallowed. He looked as confused, as disturbed, as Julian felt. “How is that sort of thing accomplished?”
Melanie shrugged. “I’ve never seen or heard the incantations for it. If Timon knew them, he did not share. He did say that only the most powerful mages, wielding the rarest of compounds, could create a trans-planar rift.”
“Bugger me,” Julian said. “That means Farzal…”
“Isenholf,” Raedrick corrected.
“Whatever. That means he has a big-time mage on his side. And we’re supposed to fight that how?”
Melanie looked askance at him.
“No offense, Melanie. I’m sure you’re totally capable. But you just said you don’t -”
“I know what I said. You did not listen.”
“Sure I did. Only the most powerful mages can do this sort of thing.”
“True, but you did not stop to consider the implications of that fact. When I say only the most powerful can do it, I mean less than a dozen men in the entire world.”
“So?”
“So, everyone knows who those men are. And where they are. These are not the sorts of people who tend to associate with criminals. Or to go somewhere without people knowing about it.”
Raedrick interjected, “Alright. So if it wasn’t one of those famous mages, who could have made this place?”
“Could be it’s been there for a long time and we just didn’t know about it,” Julian offered. “There are a lot of old ruins everywhere.”
Melanie considered his words for a moment, then shook her head. “It’s possible it was there before, but these aren’t the sorts of things you can just walk into by mistake. Sometimes they are tied to an object of some kind, a focus for the magical energy. He would have to have obtained the precisely correct object linked to that particular rift, and then known the correct procedure to activate it, in order to access the rift.”
Raedrick frowned. “That leaves us with the fact that he has help from a mage.”
Melanie nodded.
“Hang on a second. You just said -”
“I said he wouldn’t have help from one of those particular mages, Julian. If the rift was activated through an object, a large number of lesser mages could make it work.”
“Could you?”
She did not answer immediately. Looking down at her sketches of the planes, she picked up her teacup and sipped it, a thoughtful and troubled expression on her face. Finally, she looked up at them.
“I’m not sure. If I found the exact procedures associated with the object…maybe.”
Julian and Raedrick exchanged troubled looks. This just got better and better.
“That means that Isenholf’s mage is probably more skilled than you are,” Raedrick said. It was not a question.
Melanie nodded. “Looks like you’re definitely going to need my help again.”
“Told you so,” Julian said with a broad grin. That earned him an annoyed look that turned, after a moment, into a small smile and a nod from her.
Raedrick looked between the two of them, a thoughtful expression on his face. “Well we have one advantage. Isenholf probably doesn’t know we found his lair.”
“How’s that?” Melanie asked. “You killed four of his men.”
Raedrick nodded. “True. But Selam and I drug the bodies a few hundred yards into the mist, away from the trail to the fort, and cleaned up or covered as much of the blood as we could. So it’s possible they just think those fellows deserted.”
“You hope.”
He nodded again. “Yes, I hope.”
“Another advantage,” Julian said. “With your adventure, that puts him down nine men. If he started out with forty -”
“Thirty-five,” Melanie corrected.
“He probably did not send all his men to the raid on your caravan,” Raedrick explained. “He probably had at least forty men at that point.”
Melanie frowned, but nodded. Then her eyes opened wide. “He’s taken twenty percent casualties in less than a week! That’s got to have some of his men thinking about whether they want to keep doing this.”
“Exactly. If we can whittle away at him a bit more, maybe we can force his hand, get him to do something foolish.”
A sudden thought occurred to Julian. “Melanie, what would happen if the object controlling the rift were destroyed?”
She pursed her lips in thought for a moment. “Most likely the rift would close forever. Although, I suppose there’s a chance of something more dramatic happening.”
“So best case, whoever was in the rift at that point would be trapped, Is there any way they could come back?”
Melanie shook her head. “No. There are an infinite number of planes of existence. Even if a highly skilled mage consented to recreate the rift, to target the exact place on the exact plane where they were located without a guide of some kind would be all but impossible.”
“Well that’s it!” Julian bounded to his feet, unable to contain his excitement. “We don’t need to worry about fighting all of them. We just need to find that object and…” He made a gesture like he was breaking a stick in two.
Raedrick’s eyes widened. “You might be on to something there.”
“No.”
Melanie’s emphatic statement took the wind out of Julian’s sails. He looked back at her in confusion. “Why not?”
“Any object chosen to be imbued with this sort of power would have to be extremely durable, for the reason you just stated. I doubt you could just simply break it. But even if you could…where is it?”
“I don’t know. That’s why we need to find it.”
Raedrick sighed ruefully. “No, Julian, she’s right. They’ve probably got it hidden in their fort. Or Isenholf keeps it on him. Or the mage does. Either way, we’d still end up having to fight our way through his men to get it.”
Julian nodded reluctantly. He hated that they were right, but he couldn’t deny it. It would come down to a pitched battle after all.
Wait a minute.
“Melanie, why can’t you just, you know,” he waved his hand around in a way that he hoped looked mystical, “bring the chasm down and block the rift that way?”
Raedrick rolled his eyes. “Really, Julian? She’s not a god.”
“Didn’t say she was, Rae. But mages can do some impressive things.”
Melanie replied, “Julian, while that is theoretically possible, it’s not practical.”
“How come?”
“Well for one thing, like I told you before, the incantations for a spell that would actually move the earth would take a couple hours and the components would likely cost more than this town.” Julian blinked, his initial enthusiasm blunted by her response. It got worse as Melanie continued. “But more important than any of that…I don’t know any spell that could do that.”
“Rubbish. We saw the mages in the Army do things like that.”
Melanie nodded. “I didn’t say the spell doesn’t exist. I said I don’t know it.”
Julian sighed. “Well maybe we could roll a bunch of rocks down manually. You know, get a bunch of men from the town to -”
“Julian.” Raedrick was eyeing him in his patented ’stop being stupid’ manner.
And he was right. There was no way they could get enough stones moved in to block up the chasm without the brigands noticing it somehow. Then they would just have a fight on their hands, and they were not ready to face all of Isenholf’s brigands yet.
So be it.
Julian sighed again. “Alright. Let’s figure out how to whittle him down some more, then.”
Glimmer Vale is the first book of the Glimmer Vale Chronicles, an ongoing heroic fantasy series set in a world of valor and magic. It will be published here, one chapter per week, on Tuesday.
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