Kanin Fyre: Chapter 39 - The Sanctum

For a moment, the barrier seems to resist me. When I’d been standing at the edge of the portal to Earth, I’d been able to hear birds, see trees; it had all looked so close I could have reached out and touched it. But this is the first time I’ve actually tried to go through the other end of the Planar Linkage spell, and it’s different from what I expected.

The air feels elastic. Pressure mounts against me as I move through the portal, growing more intense the harder I push. Briefly, I’m plagued by doubt. Did I do something wrong? Did Shirasil send us somewhere we weren’t supposed to go? Is it the connection I made with Noli? Will my friends be hurt because of me?

Then the pressure vanishes, like a popped bubble, and we stumble out into the realm of the gods.

[You have been subjected to a Time Dilation spell.]

[You have entered The Sanctum.]

[Ollie: WOAH. IT’S SO WHITE! IT HURTS MY EYES.]

He’s right; everything is painfully white. The floors, walls, and ceiling are all one consistent white material. It almost looks like a videogame with unrendered graphics: too perfect and blank. There are weird block-like structures sticking out of the ceiling and floor, but it a way I can’t quite understand what I’m seeing—at least, not until I take a step forward.

The shift in perspective causes everything to snap into clarity. We’re not in a room—well, not exactly. We’re on some sort of platform, and the blocky structures, above and below, before and behind, all appear to be suspended in midair.

[Fyre: Oh. That is unfortunate.]

Great, now what.

[Kanin: What is?]

Fyre steps to the edge of our platform, peering over.

[Fyre: I misinterpreted our map.]

I pull up the map of the Sanctum to see what she means.

As before, it appears to be designed like a wheel, with spokes representing hallways that lead between buildings. It takes me a second to understand what she means.

Oh. Crap.

The blocks all around us are the buildings on the map. But the gaps between buildings, which I mistook for hallways, are in fact, just gaps. Open air. The map appeared to be two dimensional, but the room is actually shaped like a giant sphere. I send some glass to scout our surroundings, looking over every side of our platform.

Well, that’s annoying. Fyre, Ollie, and I can fly, but the same doesn’t go for Noli. I wonder if I could carry her?

Something cracks behind us, and we all jump. Ollie emits a low grumble, flapping his wings and stirring up a gust of air. He jumps—and falls back to the floor, producing another crack. Fyre kneels by his side, gesturing for him to stop.

[Ollie: HEY! HOW COME MY WINGS AREN’T WORKING?]

Fyre winces.

[Fyre: The lift to weight ratio is too low. Shoot. I should have thought of this from the start. We shrunk his wings, but maintained his mass.]

[Kanin: He’s too heavy?]

[Ollie: OH NO! BUT HOW WILL I BE ANT MAN?]

I’m relaying this to Noli as Fyre and I speak.

[Fyre: In a sense, yes. More accurately, his lift surface isn’t sufficient anymore given the force his magic can produce.]

Thanks for the science lesson.

[Ollie: I DON’T KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS]

[Kanin: What if he was lighter? I have an anti-gravity spell.]

[Ollie: OH MY GOSH]

Fyre’s eyes light up in excitement.

[Fyre: You do? Fascinating! Oh, I’d love to study it a bit at a later date. Is it like the ones they use on airships?]

She is way too excited about this.

[Kanin: I don’t know. Probably.]

I shared the spell with Dizzi, actually, and she helped me do a bit of fine-turning, but we didn’t spend more than an afternoon on it, what with the Planar Linkage spell to be focusing on.

“Would you like the spell, too?” I ask Noli. “I’m not sure how else you’ll be able to get around.”

“I have some rope,” Noli signs. “And I can use magic to boost my jumps a little.”

She pauses, an eager expression on her face, but she clasps her hands together to stop herself from saying anything else.

“...But you still want to try the antigravity spell, don’t you?” I ask.

Noli’s lips part in a dazzling smile. “Oh yes, I really would!”

This is a delay I had not planned on. Especially worrying considering every minute we spend in here is an hour back on Lusio. But if this gets us through here faster—not to mention, without getting caught—it will be worth it.

I use Echo to call up the spell schematic in my field of view. Removing a nub of charcoal from my Inventory, I quickly sketch out the spell on our platform. One at a time, I have Noli and Ollie stand over the circle as I cast the spell. Luckily, Shirasil gave me significantly more mana than I needed for the Planar Linkage spell, so the antigravity enchantments will hardly make a dent. At least, for the short time that I plan to be sustaining them.

“Okay,” I tell them when I’m done. “That should do it.”

“I don’t feel any—” Noli gasps, clapping her hands to her mouth as her feet lift off the ground and she begins to rotate. I grab her and pull her back down.

“You’ll need to be careful what you’re pushing off of,” I tell her, relaying the same message to Fyre and Ollie. The boy flaps his wings, and lets out a tiny, excited chirp as he floats off the ground.

[Ollie: WOAH! HAHA, THIS IS FUN!]

Unlike Noli, he’s able to get control of himself with some angling of his wings and tail. I also feel a small breeze accompany his flaps; he probably has wind magic to help.

Noli doesn’t, however. I remove some glass from my Inventory and string a quick belt together. Noli lifts her hands as I secure it around her waist.

“What’s this for?” she asks.

“To weigh you down a little,” I sign. And also so I can grab her if I need to. “Will this work?”

Noli gives a test bounce, and she floats up and down in slow motion, like an astronaut on the Moon. “I think so. Oh, this is going to be fun!”

We’ve just broken into the realm of the gods and could be imprisoned forever at any second. Not exactly my definition of fun. But leave it to Noli to find the silver lining to any situation. “Just let me know anytime if you want me to stop the spell.”

I turn back to Fyre.

[Kanin: I’m going to retrieve Anika’s refiner, first. After that, I’ll try to figure out where the Travelers are.]

[Fyre: Ollie and I can find the Travelers. It will be—

[Ollie: HOW DO WE DO THAT?]

[Fyre: —faster with both of us looking. You can meet up with us when you’re done. Ollie, let’s switch over to our Mind Link so we won’t distract Kanin.]

[Ollie: OH, OKAY. GOOD LUCK, KANIN!]

[Kanin: Thanks. You, too.]

I relay the plan to Noli as Fyre and Ollie take off in different directions. I’d worry about the kid, but his white scales blend in with our surroundings so well that I lose sight of him in seconds. Fyre’s flames are a bit more conspicuous, but she uses them carefully and sparingly, and she’s also soon out of sight.

Bringing up the map of the Sanctum, I find the location Shirasil marked. It’s about a quarter of the way around the room from where we are. Unfortunately, Shirasil’s map doesn’t give any indication of if that mark is above or below us. How are we going to…

The second I wonder, the map in Echo’s interface shifts, becoming a globe. Well that would have been nice to see in advance. With a mental sigh, I gesture for Noli to follow.

At the edge of the platform, I look down, and my soul flips. That sure is a long way to fall.

Ink sends me a memory of an eyeroll—okay, rude—and reaches to take over. I let it step in.

Heights don’t bother us like this. We can fly, after all. Still, we jump down to the next block anyway, landing lightly, and listening carefully. We send more pieces of glass to other nearby structures, keeping an eye on our surroundings.

It’s eerily quiet. Not a complete silence—there’s an ever-pervasive hum the fills the room, like we’re inside of a power plant, but there are no voices: no footsteps. Nothing but sterile blocks of white.

It makes us uneasy.

Noli follows as we make our way to the spot marked on the map, pausing every jump to ensure no one else is here and that our footfalls are as quiet as possible. Noli can’t hear the sounds she makes, but she’s being remarkably quiet anyway, eyes darting across every block we pass, each move controlled and precise. Her boots don’t even scuff the floor.

It only takes a couple minutes to find the block Shirasil marked. It looks like any other, this one roughly cube shaped, about eight feet across. Now that we’re this close, we can feel the familiar prickling in our soul. The remnant is nearby.

But where?

We float our glass around the cube, and when that turns up nothing, we crawl down the side and check each face ourself, as if we’d somehow see something new that our glass missed. From the direction of the remnant’s pull, it must be inside the structure.

We relay this to Noli.

She frowns, crouching down to examine the surface. “Do you think something about these runes could help?” she asks, running a hand over the markings inscribed in its surface.

Probably. But would Shirasil assume we’d know how to read and operate them? Maybe not. So what would he think we were capable of? What tools does he know we have at our disposal?

We splay a hand over the surface of the cube and separate our mind enough to reach the System.

Echo, we think. Open this.

There’s a pause. Then, [Access granted.]

Sections of the cube tessellate away like faces of a puzzle box. Inside, there is nothing except a single black marble, suspended in the middle. Check.

[Refiner,] Echo says. [Occupied.]

Anika. That’s it. We start to reach inside, but Noli stops us.

“Is it safe to touch?” she asks.

That’s a good question. We’re not getting the overwhelming sense of Danger that other refiners have given us. Maybe that’s because this one is already in use. Even so, we decide to approach it carefully, holding our void back as we send some of our glass toward it instead. Theoretically, it should only pose a danger to Ink, and by extension, our void (and by extension to that, our soul). But glass should be safe. Should be.

Hesitantly, we tap a piece of glass to it, then pull back. Nothing happens. We touch a piece of glass to it again, this time leaving it in contact. Again, we don’t feel anything. Gingerly, we pluck it out of the air and float the black marble toward us.

The faint pull in our soul grows stronger as it reaches is. It’s not a Danger sense, though. It’s similar to the magnetic sensation we feel toward Blair and Shirasil.

At first, we’d assumed the feeling we had around Blair was because of the piece of the predator she had, which allowed her to see some of my memories. But the sensation had been the same with Shirasil, and he never claimed to carry a piece of the predator.

His explanation was that the remnants were connected to the power that created gods. That had also made sense at the time. But now…

Anika’s refiner feels exactly like Blair and Shirasil. Not just similar, but the same. Meanwhile, Fyre and Sandro’s remnants had all felt so much stronger—the same as Anika’s, before it was captured.

And we can’t help but recall what Yedzaquib did with Anika’s refiner once he obtained it.

Do all gods have refiners in them? Are they all carrying remnants, too?

No way to answer these questions now. But we’re going to have a lot of questions for Blair and Shirasil when we get out of here.

Right now, however, every second counts.

We peel our void away from our chest, keeping it carefully away from the refiner, then tap the marble to our core.

[Refiner added to Inventory,] Echo reports.

Whew. We weren’t sure if that was going to work. But now we don’t have to be careful about touching it—and we have our hands free for the next step.

We close the cube back up as we reach out to Fyre.

[K̶a̵n̷i̶n̸: i have it. travelers next]

[Fyre: We’ve found some of them. They’re all inside the white cubes, but we aren’t sure how to get them out. We’re toward the top of the Sanctum if you want to see.]

Opening cubes is something we can help with.

[K̶a̵n̷i̶n̸: coming]

We turn to Noli. “It’s done.”

“You have her?” she asks, frowning in concern.

We nod. “Now for the others.”

The wrinkles ease out of her expression, and she sighs with a faint smile, expressing everything we currently feel. “Good. Lead the way.”

The two of us begin to leap our way up through the field of floating blocks. While we pause to listen to our surroundings, Noli jumps ahead to the next block, shooting a victorious grin back toward us. Our void ripples with amusement. A competition, is it? She doesn’t stand a chance.

We leap after her, grabbing the next structure with a Chromatic Limb and pulling ourself up; combined with our levitation, it slingshots us toward the cube rather quickly. Noli silently laughs, grabbing one of our limbs before we’re out of her range so we unintentionally tow her along. She lands on the platform, eyes sparkling with mirth. How is she able to have so much fun in such a tense situation?

We’re aiming for the next platform when Noli’s head snaps to the side, her smile wiped away in an instant. “Stop,” she signs sharply, then goes still.

We freeze. What is it? What did she notice?

At the same moment, however, we feel it. A tug in our soul.

There’s a god nearby.

[K̶a̵n̷i̶n̸: don’t move. we have company]

[Ollie: FYRE! YOU’RE IN DANGER.]

[Fyre: What? Who?]

Some of the glass we’d left scattered throughout the room finally catches sight of what Noli picked up on moments before.

An opening has appeared in the wall of the spherical chamber, about halfway around the room from where Noli and I are frozen. In that cavity is a harpy, hovering in the air despite their shimmering gold wings remaining motionless.

[Name: Rinviu]

[Title: God]

[Class: Divine Messenger]

[Level: 100]

[Mana: 10,000]

[HP: 10,000/10,000]

[Role: The Winged Herald]

They silently drift forward, reaching a hand toward one of the cubes, and they pass out of our line of sight. Meanwhile, the vision of one of our glass shards is obscured as a hand closes around it.

We take the opportunity to quickly usher Noli beneath the cube we’re standing on, hiding from the harpy’s sight. We hover beneath the structure, keeping a hold on Noli’s glass belt so she doesn’t drift back out into the open.

Through our glass, we have a close-up view of the god’s sharp, yellow eyes as they examine the shard. They pinch their fingers together, and we wince at the sting of pain as the glass is crushed into dust.

“Whoever is here, step forward,” they call, passing in and out of other pieces of glass we have stationed around the room. We flatten these against the surfaces of cubes in an attempt to keep them better hidden.

Rinviu pauses, glancing around the chamber. They appear more perplexed than angry; probably no one has ever broken into the realm of the gods before. Maybe they think we’re just some lesser god or champion who isn’t where they’re supposed to be.

But as the silence persists, their curious look turns into a frown. “This area is restricted,” they say. Their voice carries easily through the room. “You will not be in trouble if you reveal yourself now. It is pointless to hide from my wind.”

Oh, shoot. If they’ve got some kind of Elemental Radar like Shirasil’s wind, then they don’t even need to see us directly. But where to go? How can we hide from air?

We haven’t even finished relaying this to Noli before she gestures to the structure above us, hurriedly tapping her hand against the surface.

Right. Right! Good idea. We press a limb to the surface and separate our minds, asking Echo to open the cube. As before, the surface peels away, and Noli and I quickly float inside, sealing the face after us.

[K̶a̵n̷i̶n̸: hide in the cubes—you can open them with echo]

[Fyre: On it.]

[Ollie: KANIN WHY IS YOUR TEXT ALL MESSED UP?]

We don’t reply, and Fyre must have said something to him, because he doesn’t ask again.

Outside, we’re still watching Rinviu through our glass. They appear more irritated now, and raise a hand before them. The cubes rock faintly, and a low howl echoes through the chamber as wind whistles over the surfaces. It’s too faint for our glass shards to feel; we hope the shards are flat enough to escape the god’s notice, too.

But then, Rinviu stops. They touch a hand to their chest, glancing about as if in search of something. They slowly rotate, and when they stop, they’re facing our direction.

“There you are,” they say, floating our way.

The faint pull in our void starts to grow stronger, and our soul plummets.

Ink. They can sense Ink.