Temperance composes a letter to send home explaining the concept of a printing press and then goes to sleep. She wakes up early and starts doing magic research on her own. Comparing what she knows and what the book tells her. She has a late lunch and then remembers to actually send her letter.
That done she sits in the library and proceeds with her research. She ate enough at lunch that she decides to skip dinner and wait for Kaede while reading.
Okay so wards to keep them dry and she sets up her magic tent which is bigger on the inside and they can make hot food and drink warm tea and oh gods yes.
Food and sleep are very good, yes, even though they could technically convert their vast stores of mana into wakefulness and stuff.
The next morning (?) the storm has abated, somewhat, reduced to just rain.
"Well, it seems pretty clearly designed to... prevent people from passing. I'm not sure whether from our continent to the North or the other way around, and I'm not sure whether it's to protect or isolate." She looks around at the stormy barren lands. "My money's on protect."
"Yeah, I think there is a saying that 80% of a secret is the fact that the secret exists."
"Well, we do know it exists. We should... probably explore some more. Go farther North."
"Yeah, what is the size estimation of the thing? Has anyone ever managed to navigate around it?"
"Not really—we know the equator crosses Bezanab so the storm doesn't section off the entirety of the North hemisphere, but most of it, and other than old stories about a continent here where the ancient civilisations used to live and thrive we don't know much."
"Any chance that this is something like a failed magic experiment or a final-fuck-you in case a country lost a war or something?"
"Both possibilities, but—someone with this much mana and this much knowledge shouldn't be able to lose a war. Not unless the other side was even scarier, and in that case, how is the world even still whole?"
"I have no idea. Maybe it was a weather-regulation system that had that capability as a secret??"
"It's even more terrifying if someone could throw that kind of power around for weather regulation!"
Felix mimics her gaze. "I can believe that... We're pretty sure there was a multiple-worlds ending event in the worlds connected to Elsewhere... Elan, the Earths and Efross were annexed after that. And our magic isn't as destructive as yours."
"The stories say the War happened when the most terrible metamancer of all came from the North and conquered it all, and that when we drove him away and defeated him that storm was there, but they never speculated that he might have been the runt of the pack."
"General complaint about having power and knowledge that strong," she points at the storm, "and getting up to shit like the War."
"Well, there is an entire continent that we can explore. Where can we start?"
"...North? That spell I cast said North was everywhere except in the direction of the storm so, like, I guess that doesn't constrain us much. We could just pick a direction and go there, it doesn't look like any direction's different than any other one."
View Flat HTML
View Metadata
Search Post
