A place to rest one's head

Aeolia glided through the air silently and landed upon a roof across from the disused building that housed her deceased guild’s HQ. A wave of sadness and guilt washed over her as she stood over the empty Barrier, causing her to hesitate in her mission.

“Standing outside isn’t going to make anything happen or change things,” she muttered after a few moments, shaking her head clear of indecisive thoughts. Taking a deep breath, she dived into the alley and vanished into the Barrier, gliding into the headquarters through the busted open door. Her flight took her to a part of the building John hadn’t ventured towards, around the halls that circled the ransacked main meeting room until she reached a door at the far side of the floor. Like all the others, it had been **** open, though what lay beyond it likely wasn’t taken or destroyed.

Down a flight of stairs was a basement area that matched the area above in size, though seemed larger given the lack of walls or contents. The only thing that existed in the room was a cube made of black stone and carved in sigils. Aeolia landed in its shadow, the bleak stone nearly double her true size. She regarded the marked cube, the anchor that helped to maintain the Barrier’s integrity, with heavy eyes.

“Zeph worked really hard on this,” she said, voice thick with sadness as she traced the markings that bound and regulated the magic with her free hand, mind flashing back to her brother spending days carefully etching and charging the glyphs. She closed her eyes, forcing back those memories, and focused her mind on what she had to do.

Aeolia flew over to the far corner and grew to her maximum height. She reached through the wall, an illusion masking an alcove, and withdrew another carved cube. It was smaller than the first, still large enough to need both hands to fully withdraw. The carvings were far less intricate than the one in the center of the room, though they still thrummed with power.

She placed the backup anchor on the ground and shrank back to her natural size, the cube only slightly taller than her. Aeolia placed her hand upon it and let her magic flow into the stone, an arduous task as her power clashed with the stone’s enchantments. Manipulating something that had magic in it was always harder than non-magical items, with the odd exception of living beings. Zeph had postulated that her magic had an easier time with living targets because their magic was in an inert state, there but inactive compared to most magically imbued items, which let her power affect them.

She pushed back her brother’s theorising and redoubled her focus. The tension grew as she fought to spread her magic into the anchor. Determination, however, overpowered the resistance and the cube began to shrink, quickly reducing in size until it was only around a third of Aeolia’s height. She removed her hand and took a breath; the process took far more out of her than she had expected.

“Don’t even want to imagine how much the main anchor would resist my magic,” she said softly, glancing back at the item in question before she willed herself to maximum height and collected the shrunk cube. Aeolia left the basement, walking up the stairs, each echoing clack of her talons a stab to her heart. Before, the drive to find anything that could lead her to those responsible for her guild’s destruction had let her tap down the sadness, bury it under righteous fury.

But now, all alone in the desecrated Barrier with only her thoughts, even her desire for retribution couldn’t distract from the harsh feelings that bubbled up inside her. Sadness welled up as she walked the empty hall, memories of better times tainted by the wrecked doors and broken furniture, echoes of upbeat jazz broken by the sluggish tap of her steps.

Her slow march brought her under the entrance to the AvenFae quarters and she placed the spare anchor on the floor and her glaive against the wall, shrank back to her natural size and flew into the hidden alcove, her flight direct to her room. Like her brother’s, it was cut off from the main hall via a curtain, though hers was a simple piece of cloth instead of one that shifted color.

Brushing past it, Aeolia entered her orderly and somewhat spartan chamber, a sharp contrast to Zeph’s chaotic one. She strutted to one of her two drawers and withdrew a spare bed sheet. After a moment of thought, she pulled some spare clothing from the second drawer and brought those items to her bed.

She eyed the tidy bedspread, fingers easing out an errant wrinkle that popped up as she laid her supplies upon the comforter.

“I can’t stay here,” she admitted to the room. “It just doesn't feel right. And, leaving John alone for long doesn’t sound like a good idea. We’ve been lucky so far to not get attacked again, but whoever summoned those hounds might be waiting to recover their strength. The ones at the school were definitely weaker than…”

She abruptly ended her soliloquy as memories of her guild’s final moments threatened to overwhelm her. With a shuddering breath, she focused on packing her collected items, using the mundane task of turning her sheet into a makeshift pack to distract from past events.

Sufficiently distracted, Aeolia finished her packing, tying off the sheet, and with one final, sad look over the room, departed. She quickly flew back to the main corridor, growing back to her maximum height as she landed next to where she left the reduced anchor and glaive. Kneeling down, she opened her pack and placed the cube within. Then she tied it to her glaive, just below the blade and returned to her true size.

While she, and all her clothing and equipment shrank, the cube did not, suddenly taking up the bulk of her pack. Aeolia tensed as she adjusted to the sudden weight shift. With a mighty flap of her wings, Aeolia launched into the air, easily flying with the weighted addition to her weapon.

Aeolia glided out the destroyed doorway, pointedly ignored the shattered remains of Clay as she passed and exited the Barrier, emerging into the late afternoon sun. She flew high, the warmth of the setting sun easing away the cold and lonely feeling that had encroached upon her. After a moment to bask, she oriented herself towards John’s house and began the journey back.

John eyed the ceiling above his bed as he stood near its headboard.

“I’m pretty sure that the attic is above there,” he mused, raising a hand towards the plaster above him. He tried to cast Instant Barrier, intent on entering the Barrier he made. When nothing happened, he stepped onto his bed, careful to avoid causing the loot pile to cascade to the floor, and extended his hand again, fingers pressed flush against the rough material.

John invoked his skill again and felt himself wrenched upward. The movement ended as suddenly as it started and John crashed upon the floor of his recreated attic.

“Ugh,” John groaned, “that wasn’t pleasant.”

He pushed himself to his feet, noting that despite turning off the light in the real attic, the replicated bulb still glowed with its slightly too bright incandessence. Likewise, the open hatch and extended ladder were present where the ones outside had been closed behind him.

“What’ll happen if I try to go down this?” John pondered as he stared down the ladder, finding an endless pit of darkness instead of the floor below. “Or maybe I should test that with something.”

Backing away from the void, John withdrew his wallet from his Inventory and pulled an old loyalty reward card from a coffee shop he went to once.

“Only went here once,” he remarked, bending down and holding the unused card out over the dark expanse. “Never really liked coffee anyway, so no loss.”

John dropped the card, the slightly rigid paper falling into the open hole. It passed beyond the event horizon and drifted several centimeters into the dark before it began to hover in the emptiness, bobbing around like it was floating atop unseen water. Confident that he wasn’t going to hurt himself, John reached down to collect the card and get a firsthand experience of what the edge of the Barrier felt like.

As his hand descended, an odd pressure grew around his hand, pushing upwards. It grew stronger as he pushed deeper, undulating against his hand like a jet of thick water. It reached what John assumed was its zenith as he took hold of the card, then he tried to press further down.

The resistance grew tenfold not even a centimeter lower, and John got the impression that trying to proceed would be like trying to **** a rubber band past its limit, and he wasn’t keen on finding out what would happen if it snapped.

Minor experiment done, John walked back to where he had his less than pleasant entrance and knelt down on one knee, pressing his hand against the floor.

“I got in here relatively fine,” he muttered. “I should be able to get out the same way, right?”

Deciding to test his luck, John cast Instant Barrier with the intent on returning to his bedroom. Reality shifted once again and John reappeared in his room, floating above his bed. Gravity was quick to assert its dominance and John crashed onto his bed.

-5 HP

Thankfully, his positioning had left him perpendicular with his bed and above the empty portion of it, minimising the damage. John pushed himself back to his feet, groaning again.

“Might be faster, but I think I’ll just take the old way up,” he bemoaned before his attention was drawn to his left hand. Or more accurately the pillow under it that was still warm from Aeolia’s nap.

“I should offer Aeolia a place to stay,” John said with a frown. “It doesn’t feel right to make her go back to her HQ.”

The image of Aeolia holding back her grief in the ruined remains of her guild’s main room came unbidden to John’s mind and he shook his head to banish the sorrowful vision, though it only galvanised his desire to offer her a place to rest.

“But where?” John mused. “Can’t have her sleep on the couch, obviously, and me sleeping there will lead to just as many problems. The Barrier won’t work since the light stayed on. I guess I could undo it and make a new one with the light off, but then it won’t work for storage and asking someone to sleep in a storeroom is pretty rude. And in here…”

John glanced around his room. While the notion of having a girl sleep in his room was one he had often fantasized about, the reality of it was far more somber given the situation at hand.

“Can’t put another bed in here, even if we had one,” John said, making his way to his chair and plopping down in it. He spun around, the action his go-to thinking activity. His coat, still draped over the back of the chair, got caught in the wheels and **** the rotation to stop suddenly, the break of momentum causing John to smack his leg into his desk.

-1 HP

“Fuck,” John cursed, leaning over to rub the sore spot. “How much more damage am I going to take today? Wait a minute.”

John moved from his bent position to open the bottom drawer of his computer desk. Inside were an assortment of spare cables, mouse pads and other related peripherals.

“I can clear all this stuff out,” John said excitedly. “Put down one or two of those small pillows Mom got for decoration, grab a sheet. She’ll need a blanket or something… Ah! Mom tried to make fleece blankets a few years back. She probably has some of the scraps still around.”