Chapter 156

I stayed until Voretta recovered. It took a while.

While the other orcs tended to her, I cleaned up what we’d left behind - scraped bile from the floor, gathered what shouldn’t have been there at all - bone, sinew - things that didn’t belong in a stomach, much less outside one.

By the time she finally stirred, the tent had settled back into something resembling normal.

“Sorry, kid,” she rasped, voice rough from the strain. “That’s all you get.” She shifted slightly, wincing. “Rest is yours to figure out.”

I let out a slow breath. I didn’t even know where to begin.

The bone spears - what were they? War? ****? Some kind of foundation? They’d felt… structural. Important. But I couldn’t pin down why.

And the web - that mass of sinew stretched between them - woven tight and pulling inward. A trap? Fate? Connections? It felt intentional.

The tapestry was worse - a flower, just beginning to bloom, its petals curled inward - and leaking sap like blood. That meant something, but what? The Gallowborn? Something else entirely?

And the man at the loom…

He was the only part of it that felt certain. He was at the center of it. Was he the one leading the Covenant?

“Are they always that… chaotic?” I asked.

Voretta gave a tired huff. “Usually clearer than that.” She shifted again, settling back. “That one was strange. Even for me.”

She studied me for a moment, her gaze sharper now. “I was looking through your future,” she said. “Through you. You’ve seen things I haven’t. Things I might not understand. That muddies it.”

I frowned.

“They’re always symbolic,” she went on. “That’s the trade. Mirri gets clarity. I get control.” A faint, crooked smile tugged at her mouth. “You don’t like it, complain to her.”

I shook my head. “No. I appreciate what you did.” I hesitated. “One more question, then I’ll leave you to rest.”

She gestured for me to continue.

“The bone and sinew,” I said. “In our stomachs. Was that interference? Did the weaver try to stop the vision?”

She considered that, then gave a small shrug. “Maybe. When someone interferes, it usually comes back along the dream thread - a spell or something else - something directed.” Her brow furrowed slightly. “That didn’t feel clean like that.”

“So what was it?”

“If I had to guess?” she said slowly. “The weaver was strong enough to reach back… but didn’t know how.” She tapped her fingers lightly against her staff. “Instinct, maybe. Or something tied to what it is.”

That didn’t make me feel any better. “Thank you,” I said quietly. “I know that wasn’t easy.”

“It never is,” she muttered.

I stood. “Rest. Be well, shaman.”

She gave a faint nod, already sinking back into exhaustion.

I stepped out of the tent. The air outside felt sharper. Cleaner. Without the incense my head started to clear.

If that vision was my future - filtered through her understanding - then it was potentially more ambiguous. I exhaled slowly.

The spears could be anything. Skyscrapers. Missiles. Or something else entirely.

The web of sinew… maybe the internet? Was the weaver manipulating the media?

I didn’t know. I needed context.

And whether I liked it or not, I was starting to think my best way to track down the Covenant was to head back to Earth.

* * *

“Not by yourself, you’re not,” Mirri said, flat and final. “Not after last time.”

“I’m feeling better,” I told her. “And… I’ll take Lilae with me. She really wants to see a library.”

“I would like to visit an Earth library as well,” Elise added quietly.

“See?” I said, spreading my hands. “Lilae and Elise. They’ll keep me out of trouble.”

Mirri turned her head slowly and looked at Elise. “No offense,” she said, “but you three need supervision. Especially since we don’t know how your aura will affect people on Earth.”

Elise inclined her head. “That is a valid concern. It may be prudent for me not to go.”

I exhaled, dragging a hand down my face. “I get the concern. I do. But that’s not fair. We need to figure out how to get you into a library. You’d love it.”

“That doesn’t change anything,” Mirri said. “You still need a babysitter.”

I opened my mouth, then closed it again. Past experience wasn’t on my side.

“…So who’s coming with us?” I asked, glancing between Mirri, Serah, and Ashlara.

The three of them exchanged a look - quick, silent, and decisive. An entire conversation passed between them without a word.

Mirri sighed. “I will.”

I smiled despite myself.

“But,” she added, fixing me with a sharp look, “we’re going prepared. More healing herbs. Better disguises. And plenty of glow rocks.”

“What’s a glow rock?” I asked. In nearly five years, I’d never heard the term.

Elise tilted her head slightly. “Spellstones would be a worthwhile investment,” she said. “They may help offset the lack of ambient mana.”

“I agree,” Serah added. “I had several worldbones in my hoard before it was lost. Even unused, they hold value. Practical and otherwise.”

“Okay, okay,” I cut in, holding up a hand. “First, can we settle on a single name for… whatever the hell these things are? Second, what is a glow rock?”

Elise straightened slightly, slipping into her lecturing voice. “Glow rocks, as Mirri calls them, are crystalline formations that develop in areas of high mana concentration,” she said. “They are one of the more compelling pieces of evidence supporting Grimshaw’s theories. They tend to form in places where mortals are scarce - most commonly underground - but there have been surface blooms found in Ilyr’Vaeneth and the western desert.”

She paused, choosing her words carefully. “They do not form like ordinary stone. They form lattices - structured pathways - through the surrounding material. Within those structures, mana accumulates and circulates. Properly utilized, they can serve as supplemental reservoirs for large-scale spellwork. Some practitioners have even learned to refine them into draughts that temporarily replenish one’s reserves.”

“…Got it,” I said after a moment. “Why didn’t you just say mana crystals?”

Serah looked at me. “How do you know about them? Your world has no mana.”

I chuckled, running a hand through my hair. “Video games.”

“What’s that?” Mirri asked.

I hesitated. “…It’s like… an illusion?” I winced. That wasn’t right. “There are rules - systems - that define how the world works. And you control a person inside that world. You explore, complete tasks, fight things…”

Mirri stared blankly at me.

I tried again. “Okay, maybe it’s more like telling a story together? Except you’re… reacting to it in real time. And there’s a lot of hand coordination involved.”

That didn’t help.

I frowned, searching for something that would land. “I’m explaining this badly,” I admitted. “I’ll just show you when we get there.”

Mirri studied me for a moment, then nodded once. “Okay.”

* * *

Elise and I went to Spellmarch to see if we could pick up some spellstone - or glow rocks, or whatever we’d decided to call them.

The shop she led me to felt more like a jeweler than anything arcane. Clean. Bright. Carefully arranged. A single-story building lined with glass cases, each one displaying trays of stones under steady, white light. Two attendants moved quietly through the space, answering questions, retrieving selections, and closing sales with practiced ease.

At first glance, it all looked simple.

It wasn’t.

The stones were… strange. As Elise had explained, they weren’t crystals in the way I expected - no clean quartz points or perfect formations. These were veins. Lattices. Crystalline structures threaded through other stone like something grown. The crystal itself carried a faint internal glow, pulsing softly, unevenly - like breath.

The color shifted from piece to piece. Greens from Ilyr’Vaeneth. Warm reds and burnt oranges from the desert. Deep violets from Dumrath Kol-Varn. Cool blues from Morentis.

Even the surrounding stone varied wildly. Granite. Limestone. Marble. Slate. Some polished smooth, others left rough and natural. A few had been stripped entirely of their host rock, leaving only the delicate lattice behind - fragile, intricate, like bleached coral frozen mid-growth.

Each one felt… alive in a way I couldn’t quite explain.

And each one was expensive as hell. Prices ranged from a few gold to several thousand, depending on origin, size, purity, and structure. Small stones - barely larger than marbles - sat beside pieces the size of fists.

“Hey,” I said quietly, leaning closer to Elise as we moved along the cases. “The Covenant was shipping something to Earth. Do you think it might be these?”

She met my eyes, then smiled - just a hint of color touching her cheeks.

“It’s possible,” she said. Then tilted her head slightly, thinking it through. “In fact… quite probable. Assuming they function in a world without ambient mana.” Her expression sharpened. “If I were attempting something… illicit, in such a place, this would be among the first things I would bring.”

A well-dressed man approached us then - dark hair slicked back, beard trimmed with surgical precision. He offered a polite greeting as Elise requested a closer look at a selection.

He brought out a tray.

Most of the stones were about the size of a golf ball. Some smaller. Some larger. Elise lifted one carefully, turning it in her hands, studying the internal lattice with that quiet intensity she always had.

There was a small sticker on the base.

She ignored it. I didn’t.

I reached out, gently taking her hand and rotating the stone so the label faced up. “What does this mean?” I asked, pointing to the notation. MC13.25T

“It indicates its thaum capacity,” she said. “MC stands for matrix capacity. The T stands for thousand.”

I released her hand, my thoughts already moving ahead of me. “Matrix capacity…” I murmured. “How big would a stone be - one that holds… say, twenty-five million thaums?”

“As I said, that depends on the purity, the lattice structure, the-”

“Generally,” I cut in. “On average. How big?”

She tilted her head, considering.

“Slightly larger than your head,” she said. “Generally.”

I turned to the merchant. “And something like that - what would it cost?”

He started to answer, but I cut him off before he started. “Generally,” I said. “Just capacity. Ignore everything else.”

He didn’t like that. I could see it in his face. “…At least ten thousand gold,” he said stiffly. “Though-”

“That’s a lot,” I muttered. “That’s a whole lot of resources for something like this. A whole project built around it…” My thoughts spiraled, numbers stacking on top of each other. “But then again, moving that many guns wouldn’t be cheap either. They were what, ten grand a piece? More? Four flatbeds… maybe twenty per-”

The merchant’s expression soured.

Elise’s hand slipped into mine, gentle but firm.

“Seth,” she said softly. “Let’s focus.”

I looked at her and for a moment, everything else fell away - just her pale gray eyes, steady and calm, grounding me before I disappeared down the wrong path.

Then my brain caught up. I cleared my throat. “Right. Sorry.” I gave her a small smile. “What do you recommend?”

* * *

We left having dropped over two thousand gold on glow rocks, which put a noticeable dent in my finances.

We were doing well - between the trade of raw materials and books I conjured in the demesne, crops we grew, and the occasional enchanted item I crafted - but a purchase like that wasn’t something you shrugged off. It would take time to recover.

Since I’d read the ledgers from the pyramid, copies of them had appeared in my library. I’d pulled them out, the shelves had quietly replaced them, and now I had extras - one for Jenkins, one for Donnelly. I added notes in the margins - what I thought the entries marked “MC” represented and rough calculations of what several million thaums could actually do.

The numbers weren’t comforting.

I dug through the rest of the library and turned up a few useful odds and ends - an old driver’s license, my birth certificate, SSN card, and a couple of utility bills. I doctored the bills to look current and packed everything away.

Our clothes from the last trip hadn’t survived. Serah had shredded hers mid-transformation. Ashlara had ditched her oversized hoodie when things turned violent. Hats and sunglasses - lost in the chaos. Mirri and I had fared a little better, but even our clothes had been chewed up by the Interstitium.

It didn’t matter. In the demesne, I could conjure whatever we needed. I should’ve thought of that before, but I’d been too focused on Lilae. Prep had slipped.

Not this time.

It was late fall. Cool, but not freezing. Philadelphia would swing wildly - cold one day, sweltering the next - so I layered everyone up.

Mirri got a band shirt, jeans, sneakers, sunglasses, a ball cap, flannel, denim jacket, and a cloth mask. Similar to what she’d worn last time, but leaning into a rocker edge.

Lilae got a band shirt, oversized hoodie, jeans, sneakers, cap, sunglasses, and a mask. For both of them, the goal was simple - cover the skin and avoid attention.

Elise I dressed in black. Short skirt, thigh-high boots, net stockings, a band shirt, and a long, light coat. With her pale skin, it gave her a striking, almost gothic look. I asked Mirri to darken her eyes and lips with makeup.

For myself, I kept it simple. Polo, slacks, sneakers. Something clean, respectable - forgettable.

I packed spare clothes for everyone, grabbed the cash I had left, a few gold coins, my documents, food, bandages, and anything I could think of that might matter once we crossed over.

“I don’t know where we’re going to come out,” I told them as we stepped into Noraethil. “No idea if these things line up geographically. For all I know, we could end up in Kansas.”

Blank stares from everyone.

Except Lilae.

Her face lit up. “I want to see a farm like Dorothy’s!”

I laughed. “Only you would get excited to trade goats and chickens for pigs and chickens.”

We moved through the abandoned village.

It was quiet in a way that pressed in on you. No birds. No rustling. No life. Whatever had been here was gone - or eaten.

“This place is creepy,” Mirri muttered.

“It conveys a sense of impending danger,” Elise agreed.

She stopped abruptly.

We all tensed, scanning the empty houses, the tree line, every shadow.

Elise tilted her head slightly. “Is this what people feel around me?” she asked.

“No,” I said immediately.

“Yes,” Mirri said at the same time.

We glanced at each other.

I sighed. “Maybe.” I hated that answer.

Elise was brilliant. Kind. Beautiful. Strong in ways most people couldn’t begin to understand. The last thing I wanted was for her to feel… different.

But she already knew. People gave her space. Avoided her. Sometimes ran away. It wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t anything she did.

It was what she was.

Adhaneth had explained it once. When Vaerethis, the goddess of magic, was slain by Myrddin during the first Silent War, the fabric of reality tore. Void magic seeped through those wounds - something akin to anti-magic. And in those fractures, children were born who could wield it.

Elise was one of them.

Void magic didn’t mix with any other type of magic. And something about it - something fundamental - set off alarms in people. A quiet, instinctive fear.

I’d felt it when I first met her. That sense that something big and dangerous was just behind me, just out of sight. But I hadn’t been able to identify it or its source.

Mirri had recognized it instantly.

“Hey,” I said, drifting closer and taking Elise’s hand. “Don’t worry about it.”

She looked at me.

“You’re not creepy,” I said softly. “And that feeling? It fades. People don’t get used to it - it just… goes away.”

I held her gaze. “And honestly? I don’t think I felt it the same way Mirri did. Maybe that’s because I didn’t have flowlines back then. Maybe your aura won’t even register on Earth.”

I placed my hands gently on her shoulders.

“You are an amazing woman,” I said. “Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Not even yourself.”

I leaned in and kissed her - brief, but steady. Everything I felt, I tried to pour into that moment.

She flushed, then nodded slightly. “We should continue,” she said, her voice soft but steady.