strokinit Book 6 - Chapter 20
Book 6 - Chapter 20
Brin was pounced on immediately. Anabet, a [Student of Magic], said, “Hail, Lord Mistaken. We were all so terribly worried for thee.”
“Not all,” muttered Guoncal.
“Aye, all of us!” argued Gyromia the [Gravity Mage]. “What ails thee, and how may we lend thee aid?”
“Ailing? How could anything ail me when surrounded by such excellent company?” Brin asked. “But I suppose... I suppose I could say that this morning was somewhat fraught, with the way that some of our classmates... well, you know.”
Gyormia nodded, eyes suddenly watering.
Brin felt a little bad, but there was nothing to do but press on. “I would never question the wisdom of the Master of Magic, of course I wouldn’t. But were they really infiltrators? And if they were, why not capture and question them? I... I still hear that ghastly shriek. Perhaps I should sit.”
“Yes, come, and let us take our repose!”
Brin let himself be guided to the park bench that Vitor had broken and then sat down. He was immediately trapped with Gyronia on one side and Annabet on the other. Sancha smoothed her skirts and then sat on the ground in front of him, and three other girls followed suit, while another draped herself across the back of the bench behind him.
“It was cruel. Truly, most cruel!” said Gyromia. “And I would say that to his face, an I dared.”
Bia projected at him again. “Even after what Vitor did this morning, why is it that out of the two of you, I think you’re the one who’s the enemy of all women?”
He didn’t think that was quite fair. Several of the gentlemen surrounded him as well, though they were probably just following the ladies.
Also, he didn’t know how Bia was doing that. High level ventriloquism? It was such a dumb idea, but he honestly thought that might be it. He answered in Silent Voice. “Is that jealousy I detect?”
She gave a shocked laugh, which turned a few heads because she seemed to be laughing at nothing.
Brin shook his head mournfully. “Even after that, my morning didn’t improve.”
“No, no! Thou needs not tell us of your vision. Whatever thou sawest is betwixt thee and the gods,” said Gyronia.
“I have no need for secrets. The gods you say, but I was tempted by devils. Truly tempted and tormented. First, there appeared to me a specter in the guise of a warrior. He drank blood instead of water, though he was no undead and I was given to understand that he symbolized the blood I shed in battle. He pointed and I beheld a muddy field where lay the bodies of the slain, their bodies recently uncovered by a winter rain...”
Brin made up a Class Selection vision wholesale, inventing three evil Classes that he had certainly never been offered. He sprinkled in a bunch of details of his tragic backstory, including a time where he dueled his estranged step-father to the death. And then, because this was a fairly common plot in the chivalric romances everyone seemed to love, he made up a story about how the woman they’d been fighting over revealed herself to be a secret turncoat for Arcaena. When he accidentally mentioned being taken prisoner for seven months, he realized that his fake stories were a little less fake than he’d been going for and desisted.
The three Evil Classes he chose represented the Three Fools in the story of the Temptation of Roadguard and he cast himself in the role of a rather heroic godling, but he doubted any of this crowd would pick up on it. The scripture he was pulling this from was fairly apocryphal.
The seven girls near him were watching Brin with consoling and attentive eyes. Whether they really were fawning over him or just having fun playing the part, he couldn’t tell, because he was going extremely over the top right now and they were matching his energy one hundred percent.
“...and that's when I knew that this would be my final choice. A Class for peace. For making rather than destroying. Scarred, but not broken. Pressing onward in hope...” Ok, this was starting to get pretty cheesy. He started panicking, not sure how he could wrap this up, and help arrive in the nick of time.
A level 35 [Water Mage] approached and said, “Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen. I’m to inform you that the Master will not be returning, so your tour has been cut short for the day. You are free to explore on your own until the luncheon at noon. Don’t worry about going somewhere you aren’t allowed; the doors won’t open to you if you don’t have permission."
The man had hardly finished speaking when half the assembled students were starting to practice their new magic. Apparently, it was assumed that since the Master wasn't coming back, his prohibition on using magic was no longer in effect. Balls of flame, gouts of water, and sparks of electricity zapped in every direction. Brin and his story were forgotten in the sudden mad rush to use their [Mage] Skills for the first time.
Brin spoke “
Summon Flame through Glass leveled up! 0 -> 1
"Quite a sight to behold, to be sure!" Gyromia said, still at his side.
"Oh, come on. Don't tell me you don't have something new to try," said Brin.
"I suppose I can fain pretend otherwise," said Gyromia. She cast something, and Brin was immediately pulled into her, shoulder to shoulder.
Vitor, who'd been loitering nearby, suddenly tripped, and on the way down, he was pulled into the gravity effect. He floated straight through the air, face heading towards Gyromia's lap. She suddenly reversed the effect, pushing with a mighty surge of force.
Brin got caught with a partial blow that knocked him off the bench, but Vitor got the full effect, and somehow ended up getting blasted into the fountain.
Gyromia must've activated her Gravity magic on herself at that point, because she practically teleported to Brin so fast that she nearly caught him before he hit the ground. She fell over herself apologizing, but Brin laughed as he got to his feet. "No, no you can't apologize to me. I told you to do it, after all. That was incredible. Gravity magic is--"
He saw a familiar face, one of the [Mages] who'd been in the Atrium and stopped to watch when all the new students started acting stupid at the same time. He recognized her. That was Iola Neves, the [Rider] from Oud's Bog. He'd wondered if she would be here. [Rider] wasn't exactly a magical Class, but it fit into Life magic better than [Scout].
"Hold that thought," said Brin, and started walking towards her. Gyromia seemed more than happy to switch to the next drama.
"Oh no! Lord Vitor's broken the fountain!"
"Quick! Who has water magic? Keep it from spilling out. Stone! Who can fix stone?"
Brin only glanced at the unfurling disaster for a second, but when he looked back he could no longer see Iola's face in the crowd. He walked to where she'd been, but she was nowhere in sight. He shrugged, figuring that she just hadn't seen him coming this way.
On the way back to the rest of the group, [Know What's Real] informed him that the students weren't quite where they appeared to be. Now that he was looking for it, he could tell. There was illusion magic being cast in the area. They were being subtle about it, whoever it was. By casting from very far away, they could disguise the use of illusions even to another [Illusionists]. But that wasn't enough to trick Brin.
He decided to play along for now. He threw a couple of Invisible Eyes into the air, just to make sure he knew where he was going, and sure enough, from any perspective but his, the whole area looked different.
Brin walked towards his schoolmates, at least from his perspective, and paid attention to the subtle way that the [Illusionists] shifted things. It happened so gradually that Brin would've just adjusted without even realizing he was doing it if his Skills hadn't warned him that something was going on.
They didn't get closer as quickly as they should've at the speed he was walking. Again, he might not have even noticed if not for [Know What's Real]; he probably would've just quickened his pace unconsciously. They were leading him through a door in the side of the room.
Should he really go in there? This could be one of two things: This could be the Tower's [Illusionists] trying to introduce themselves, and maybe enact some sort of hazing ritual. Or this could be someone trying to isolate Brin in order to assassinate him. If it was the first thing, he sort of wanted to go through with it. But what if it was the second thing?
He slowed his pace for a second, hesitating. If someone really wanted to kill Brin, would they use illusions? It seemed counterintuitive to use the one kind of magic that Brin's worst enemies all knew he possessed. Unless that's what they wanted him to think...
He shook his head. He couldn't live his life this way. He squared his shoulders and walked forward.
He bet that the illusion would break down as soon as he went through the door. Brin could imagine changing someone's viewpoint of where they were in a room with some magnification tricks, but actually making them think they were in an entirely different place would take a huge and complex array of illusions. You'd have to build a box around them, paint on the walls, and adjust the illusion to their movements perfectly. It wasn't something Brin would be able to do on the fly; he'd need weeks to work out the perfect spell for it, and even then it didn't seem like a one-person job.
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The illusion suddenly shifted. All the people seemed to fade away, the lights filtering through the foggy glass in the ceiling became much brighter, and he felt a sinking sensation as all the walls and the ceiling seemed to suddenly move away from him at high speed, stretching away into eternity until he was all alone in a white void.
"Wow. Nice one. Normally this is where someone would throw down an Eveladis, but I bet if I did that I'd be completely alone in a random room somewhere with no idea who was trying to abduct me. How did you induce that strange sinking feeling, I wonder? Sound vibrations in the inner ear to induce nausea? Or... hm..."
Brin closed his eyes and tried to narrow down the exact feeling. Nausea and dizziness wasn't quite right, he was feeling it in his legs and chest as well. Oh, he was actually sinking. This was an elevator, going down.
As soon as he figured it out, the ground began to tremble all around him, and he felt the pressure against his feet increase, telling him the elevator was slowing to a stop.
Walls began to grow out of the ground, a maze. It was enormous; the phrase 'Maze of Sezorat' rose unbidden into his mind. It was too big, actually. If it were a bit smaller he'd believe they were planning on placing that maze on top of a real maze here in the Tower's basement, but there was no way something of this scale existed under Steamshield. As the walls of the maze grew higher, the bright light of the atrium grew dimmer until it was nearly pitch black. The only light left was a strange glow that seemed to come from below and only showed him about eight feet in any direction.
The illusion placed him in a small square room with one entrance, which made sense if he was in an elevator car. The walls here appeared stone just like the walls he could see outside of it. He put one hand to the wall, and it felt like stone.
He moved out, letting his fingers trail the cool wall of the stone, and there didn't seem to be a seam where the elevator car ended and the maze began. Maybe the walls didn't move with it at all. It could just be a platform that raised and lowered magically while the walls stayed in place. That didn't seem very safe.
He walked along in the maze, not really caring where he was going and making sure his hand stayed in contact with the wall. Even if he didn't believe the full scale of what he'd seen, the maze was impressively large. He couldn’t see far in front of him, but that was fine because [Know What's Real] still didn't believe anything he was seeing. The walls and the floor were solid. Other than that, he saw only bare empty stone.
As he went along, he felt himself lose contact with the Invisible Eyes that he left behind him. The ones he’d left in the atrium up above were still there, but every illusion he created down in this maze was pulled away from him the moment he got more than ten feet away from it.
After ten minutes of wandering he realized that he was going in circles, not because he recognized anything of the areas he passed through, but because he started counting his steps in each direction. His plan of keeping one hand on the right-hand wall and just walking until he found an exit wasn’t going to work. The walls were shifting.
There was no sound or vibration at all to give him the clue of when it was happening, but of course there wouldn’t be, not when his adversaries were [Illusionists]. These guys were pretty tricky, weren’t they? Why had no one told Brin how annoying [Illusionists] could be? Even [Know What’s Real] wasn’t helping much.
One thing was for sure, random wandering wasn’t working. He needed to try something else. First, he cast a bright light, as bright as he could make it without giving away his lasers. For a brief moment he seemed to push the darkness back to reveal another twenty feet of maze, but then something pushed back and collapsed his spell.
There was a brief clash in the Wyrd, just enough to know that the [Illusionist] he was contending against was far beyond him.
He cast Self-Invisibility and a Mirror Image at the same time, and again someone dispelled them both. It was the light this time. The dim glow surrounding him was also giving the other [Illusionist] immediate contact with any magic Brin cast from himself. The other party’s authority was absolute and brooked no room for argument. Whoever was at the end of this was an absolute master of illusions.
Brin started splitting off minds. He could split his brain into 5 without any risk of strain, and then he could have each of them create three conscious threads before their perception of time sped up too much to be useful. That gave him 15 workable minds. He had each of them summon a Mirror Image, in random places in his field of vision. At the same time, he cast a Mirror Image on himself, the “anonymous guy” one from his Lightmind.
The Mirror Images closest to him immediately collapsed, including the one on top of himself. But the rest survived the first second. He ordered them all to run, and took off himself.
Three seconds later, and Brin still had five Mirror Images, careening off down into the darkness. He summoned twelve more to replace the ones he’d lost, and this time the one he cast on himself stayed for a whole second-and-a-half. Maybe even longer since his perception of time was messed up.
He kept on like that, gaining time while covered by a Mirror Image with every repeat, until finally, he fooled the light that was tracking him and burst through into the darkness. He didn’t dare use any illusions that might give him away, so he dismissed all his minds and ran through the dark.
Once or twice, he saw brief flashes of the light somewhere behind or ahead of him, a spotlight moving through the maze looking for its quarry again. More than once or twice, he ran face-first into a wall. He started trailing one wall with a hand again, but that didn’t always help and he didn’t dare slow down lest they catch up with him again.
He started to hear murmurs now, voices in the dark, like someone talking just behind a closed door. Should he follow them, or keep away? For now, he opted to stay away. He hoped that if he could get far enough from any places the other [Illusionist] was actively watching, they’d stop being able to trap him by shifting the walls of the maze.
He plunged further into the darkness. He considered more than once dropping beads of glass to help him navigate or track where he’d been, but he didn’t think he should. This was some kind of illusion game, and he wanted to win as an [Illusionist].
He ran onwards, until he saw a flash of something. [Know What’s Real] was telling him that he’d trailed his eyes across something that was more fake than the regular darkness. Moving his eyes back over the spot, he got the impression it was human shaped. Invisibility.
Main: Glass Chain.exe
Task Manager: Prepare for time dilation in 5. 4. 3...
This was a Battle Program he’d worked out an odd for for summing a chain all at once. It basically worked by assigning each link in the chain to a new Directed Thread who would do their part and then dismiss. By forming a fifty-link chain with fifty independent minds, he could theoretically summon it near-instantly. In reality, it was a bit trickier than it sounded. The threads needed coordination to make all the links in the right spot, so he had to set up some minds to manage that and coordinate with each other. He ended up needing forty Directed Threads for twenty-five links in the chain, and it took five seconds to prepare and three seconds to cast. In a fight, that was eternity.
Here, though, it was fine. He waited the five seconds, and then completely lost the three seconds of summoning time. From his perspective, it felt like a long glass chain appeared in his hand out of nowhere.
He used [Shape Glass] to quickly wrap it around the other form and pull it tight. “Got you!”
The person shrieked as the chains bound him and struggled to get away, but Brin formed it to lock around his arms and legs. He dragged the figure towards him, half with magic and half with his arms. “Get over here!”
“Stop! This isn’t part of the test!” said his captive. It was a man in [Illusionist] robes like Gustaff used to wear. Brin got a glimpse of a youngish freckled face before the man summoned a white mask to cover himself. [Wyrdic Inspect] didn’t give him any System information, but he felt illusion magic in the Wyrd.
“So this is a test,” said Brin. He’d never really toyed with his [Terrifying] Achievement yet, but maybe now was the time. He used [Say What’s True] to imbue an extra amount of menace into his voice. “For a moment there, I thought I was being assassinated.”
“No, no, no, no! That’s not it at all! This is just a fun little challenge we do for newcomers.”
“What’s your name?” asked Brin.
“We don’t do names. My code name is Wings. And you... you’re Brin. We’ve met, sort of. I was part of the Great Conduit.”
Brin stopped inflaming his [Terrifying] through his voice. “You were? That was a neat piece of work. I’ve been thinking about it all this time. I remember seeing a stone lying on the road, and every single Mirror Image stepped over it. There wasn’t a single one that clipped through it. I mean, how would you even go about doing something like that? There were thousands of soldiers in that fake army, and the attention to detail was flawless!”
“It’s true, that was hands down the best illusion I’ve ever been part of. There are pieces of it that even I wasn’t allowed to see, but I know the answer for the thing where they all dodged the rock! The trick is that each of the Mirror Images have a set of instructions that are handled by our Lightminds; that’s how they can walk and stop and stuff. But then if something comes up, rather than give directions to each Mirror Image individually, you say something like ‘Complete this command and when you’re done, send these instructions to the next Mirror Image behind you.’ Then you can just fire off one order and trust that all the nodes will do their part. Then the common itself is ‘Step over that rock’. The word for this is–”
“Recursion,” said Brin.
“That’s right,” said Wings.
“That’s awesome! So much better than what I was picturing. I haven’t even thought about recursion since... a long time ago. I’m a failure as a,” Brin almost said ‘Programmer’. “...[Illusionist].”
“Don’t say that!” said Wings. “Learning that stuff is what the Circle is for. You are here to join the Circle, right?”
Brin made his eyes a bit more reflective so that he could flare [Terrifying] again. “Am I? No one told me anything. They just lured me down here and stuck me in a maze.”
“But like, someone definitely would’ve warned you that this was coming, right? I mean, [Illusionists] don’t just pop up out of nowhere.”
Brin thought about it. Yeah, Hogg would definitely decide not to warn him about this just to be funny. Or actually, maybe not? The fact that he used to be an [Illusionist] might be completely unknown to this Circle.
Wings wilted a bit under Brin’s continued glare. “T-the good news is that you’re almost there! Just keep doing what you were doing.”
Brin nodded. “Good.”
“So would you mind letting me out?” Wings shifted in the chains, still tight from Brin’s magic.
“No.”
“No, you don’t mind, or no, you’re not letting me out?”
Brin started walking, and pulled Wings along behind him. Since he’d already pulled out the glass anyway, he let a trail of glass dust rub off the links of the chain behind him, just in case they were going to mess with his sense of direction again.
He listened to the murmurs, and they felt close, like the people talking were just around the corner and they’d pop out any second and find him there. He kept moving, into the deeper darkness and towards the quiet patches, but they were all over the place now, coming from every direction but one. They were funneling him now.
He went to the spot where they obviously wanted him, and then the lights went on.
He grimaced but refused to shield his eyes. He’d long since moved past the point where bright lights could blind him; he’d already summoned Invisible Eyes on top of his own.
He was in a workshop; that was the first impression, though on a closer inspection he wasn’t sure he recognized any of the devices on the worktables nearby. They were all shapes and sizes, and made of copper and glass.
On either side of him, two rows of men and women with concealed faces and [Illusionist] robes, proudly wearing the blue fields with star and moon patterns. There were perhaps thirty in all.
One man stood directly in front of him, with the same robes as the rest. His face was not concealed, and he was an older man with a sharply pointed gray goatee. “Would you perhaps mind releasing my [Illusionist]?”
Brin dropped his glass leash, and let the magic around Wings loosen.
The man stepped forward. “My name is Valentin Solorgiao, advisor to [King] Lancarote, and Master of Illusions.” He grasped hands with Brin to prove that he was real. “But in this Circle, only I carry my own name. How shall we call you?”
“Lancer,” Brin said.
“Lancer. Welcome to the Circle of Illusions.”