The first results for "invasion" and "ambush" are similarly varied but before he can get to "Mako" Kaede shows up.

"We got it!"

Felix is hugging her in the blink of an eye. "You did? Of course you did."

"Come on, let's go!"

She pulls him with.

He follows along.

And Temperance will happily explain how they didn't directly find the artifact that does the magic effect, but they found three artifacts that activate the artifact that does the spatial effect and after a lot of thaumatobabble they figured out how to deactivate the whole thing despite being only two of them.

"Ready?"

"Very much!"

Felix holds Kaede's hand and waits.

She and Temperance coordinate, pull—

—the effect is extremely disorienting and dizzying, like space is folding in on itself but also out and in impossible to understand ways and they can feel the start of a headache—

—and then it's gone, and they can see.

Or they could, if it weren't for the purple noxious clouds and the lightning going up and the widespread destruction.

Well, shit.

Protection, protection, Temperance pulls up several protections around them.

Yeah good idea.

There are ruins. More ruins than they've ever seen, ruins that suggest an empire, a staggeringly large civilisation. There's a cluster that obviously used to be a city, but it's reduced to several smoking (still, after all these years) craters and destroyed buildings and scattered bizarre spatial effects that twist and curve light, making it extremely hard to build a mental map of the place. There are signs of magical effects gone awry as far as the eye can see. There are giant golems, crumbled to pieces or twitching on the ground. There are in fact a couple of them still grappling with each other, noticeably active due to the minute movements they make but unable to break each other's hold and with no instructions on what to do in case of apocalypse. The land is barren, the sky is twisted—if a war between several extremely powerful metamancers ever happened, this would be its result.

It's terrifying.

"Do you guys think you can clean this up?"

"Probably. Eventually. If we're—exceedingly careful."

Nod. "What now then?"

"...now I'm hungry and sleepy and don't want to deal with that."

Hugs.

"Let's set up our tent—Temperance, can you ward the place?"

"Of course."

So they go inside the tower for more protection from the elements and she sets their tent up in there, bigger on the inside and all.

And they can snuggle up and Felix can tell the things he found in the journal.

"...it sounds like it might be worthwhile to at least skim it, read one entry per month or something."

"Good idea. Still it's going to be more than three hundred entries, but there is no way around that."

"And three hundred entries aren't even that long a book, and we can work in parallel."

Nod nod.

"A morbidly curious part of me wonders if the author ever imagined that someone from another world would find it."