Chapter 8-227: A Trip through Hyperborea

I murmured the Salute to Aethra, my Magical Day staying constant even as what constituted Dusk Renewal swung about wildly. Maybe it would shift when I actually reached the continent, but either the continent was rotating or the ‘sun’ was spinning around it, none of which were apparent from outside the space. I could only surmise the Sun wasn’t really here, and the space was simply manufacturing it, or importing the light for the space.

Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! And ding!, just to be contrary...

The magic spiraling through my entire body, lighting up every cell with control and awareness I didn’t have a moment ago, basically gave away the whole secret, but sure, let the alchemical distillations forming in my blood be a big surprise.

I left off painting off the stars here into my Visual File, and reading the magical signatures of the creatures embedded into and affected by them. Maybe they were a way home to the original dimension, maybe not...

Warshaper/2. Such a vital Class, I suppose. +4 to Strength and Constitution, due to being able to maximize use of every cell when exerting yourself, and control your physiology. If I were a warrior, I’d be ecstatic.

Purchased Feat was taken from Alchemist, which was probably the major qualifier to all of this with my Alchemical alterations of my organs. Blood Healing, 5 Health/round, rounds per day equal to Alchemist plus Warshaper Levels, i.e., six.

As opposed to getting something useful, like Healing Reserve, which was twice as fast and unlimited.

Purchased Mastery was... Ki Feats/3: Blood and Spirit: For each Ki point invested, +1 to Fast Healing and Cure effects. I could currently invest... three.

Which I proceeded to do, because I had the excess ki to do so, and my Blood Healing improved to 8 points a round, for 9 rounds a day.

Still worse than Healing Reserve, but it automatically activated if I was unconscious, so there was that.

And there was naturally the expected triumphant sound of Elf/3.

+2 to Intellect. +1 to Wizard/4 (12).

Another space opened up in my brain outside my skull, aired itself out, and gave me the thumbs up to start handling a heavy processing load. And another 12 Pool points, too.

Well, another +1 to Casting Level and some more Pool room couldn’t be a bad thing. I just sighed, and eyed the expanse open in my head.

-Sama, I’m putting up my Map. If you and Briggs could add in before it goes public?-

-Sure!- Sama /replied cordially, and our Visual Files did a mutual data-dance on the /tellepathic level, Lived-lines met cordially, sat down, and rendered into real-space details.

Well, she had certainly been more places here than I had, which happily disguised the fact that all the details weren’t time-based, so nobody would know it was me.

I caught the humorous edges around locations where a lot of Imprusar churches and temples had been mysteriously burned down, and members of their clergy gone abruptly missing. Sama didn’t like Imprusar.

Briggs looked to have wandered up and down the East Coast, Greenland, and Iceland, getting involved in things certain deceased creatures didn’t want him to. His career wasn’t exactly public or private, and I could probably look it up online... but it would be more fun to have him talk about it.

Still, The Map was up, painting itself in swathes of incredible accuracy everywhere we had been.

++Allegiance Announcement: Ladies and Gentlemen, The Map is now going up. Allegiance Magic is at work. If you could look at The Map, and remember where your life has taken you.++

Startled eyes turned on The Map rising up in the locus of the Allegiance and Sama’s Markspace, and almost instantly, it began to fill in.

The most detailed area was centered around Detroit, but there were tens of thousands of people in my Allegiance now, and people came from all over. The Map almost exploded with instant threads along roads and rails, the home towns of people, where they had gone to school, every place they had lived and moved and vacationed, growing and filling in with rapid detail.

There were more than enough Vassals to fill in tons of everywhere, especially the Clergy, who had traveled to fill in my stolen childhood home in France, covering up my lack of knowledge there fairly nicely.

Libraim thought it had mapped the civilized world? It didn’t come close to the immediate thoroughness and detail of this.

With some effort, different memories could be timed, and you could see a place held in joint memory at different points in time, and literally sit there and watch a place evolve. Some people were doing that now, gawking as suddenly their own memories of their past became a playback of all the changes that had gone on around them that they had never really paid attention to.

Stores and shops opening and closing, homes changing colors, trees growing, yards morphing, neighborhoods expanding, or falling into nothing.

Then Sama’s older Marks began to hit, some of them older dwarves and other races, joining in at first reluctantly, and then sighing as the maps of their lives extended out behind them, rich and thick with emotions, many of them extending across the seas to the Old World.

To the darkness in the past that had taken so many.

There were quite a few people who had seen the Russian Shroud that had started it all. It was almost a rite of passage for the Powered in Europe, setting eyes on that brooding, inky black cloud in the distance, the power seething and waiting there, nobody daring to get closer than twenty miles without being able to flee very quickly, indeed.

There were multiple Shroudzones in Europe, just like in America, and on The Map, they were soon all there, alive and waiting in memory, the roads to them and from them played out across the world, the distances of lives lived connecting and interconnecting, setting them down with an absoluteness nobody had really thought that they had, locking them into relevance and existence.

Who-left-what wasn’t apparent, but that was fine. It was all pulled out of memory, there to be looked at, perhaps to wonder who had seen this and when, and what it was like, now.

And, of course, there were gaps. Huge gaps.

I could almost see things crystallizing among the members of the Allegiance: the desire to fill in those holes, to update other places, to make things more current. Almost immediately there were people planning trips and time off and actual expeditions here, there, and everywhere, just to fill in the holes on The Map.

And now they could follow my long Lived-Line across the waters, always in close sight of land, always relevant, always anchored to reality, down the coast of South America, across those churning seas to Antarctica, and up onto the ice and across the frozen lands, crisscrossing the mountains with their insane music to this long bridge in the void.

A map, extending out into a place bigger on the inside than the outside.

The Traveler was also an explorer, going somewhere nobody else had been before.

It was appropriate, in the end!

-------------

It was over three hours before our destination actually began to form in detail far before us.

With Eagle Eyes, it was visible as dark bumps on the white churning of the sea and falling waters. As we closed in, it became columns and pillars on a rough island, sitting there at the void that formed the end of the flat disk that was their world, the seas falling down all about it in waterfalls that eventually gathered towards the underside of the world, and whatever magical operations were going on down there.

As we grew closer, those islands became crude bastions, the columns rough carvings of something that wasn’t really stone, molded and formed into shapes and designs that humans wouldn’t ever carve (well, at least the sane ones wouldn’t), and this road drove right up to a great misshapen arch extending between them.

Well, at least there weren’t any doors closed, although it looked like someone had built a wall across the way.

Which was smart. My Detect Time was indicating a smooth temporal merging, but that just meant it might have been almost eighty years since the road connecting this place was formed. Nothing had come to them... except the Haze, which could not possibly have been welcome with the effects it brought.

They had probably been dreading an army or something marching across it, but the vacuum had naturally defeated them, and they couldn’t Teleport blindly to the end, either. It wasn’t made of stone, so they couldn’t Stonejump or something similar, either.

We weren’t exactly advertising our coming, and Sleipner certainly wasn’t using any running lights or anything.

Magical and mundane lighting was here and there along the columns and the crude wall beneath that arch, so whoever or whatever was guarding it had made themselves at home with observation posts, and there were probably internal rooms and chambers in the pillars and things.

Sleipner coasted to a stop about a klik out from the walls. -How do you want to handle this?- Master Fred /asked calmly.

I considered the play of some very subtle, high-end energies about the place. Normally such things would be invisible, but if I was Humming, my Caster Level for everything was now post-Thirty. Even basic spells started getting seriously strong with that much Power behind them. Higher Valences wasn’t everything.

-I’m not saying we couldn’t just blow through it and make a spectacle of things, but I don’t think that will help them or us in any manner. The island only looks to be about five miles wide. Get off the bridge and go around it.-

Master Fred put his hands on the handlebars, the Ward Ride glimmered again, and Sleipner turned and took us off the Road.

The instant we left the road, gravity failed, which naturally made it difficult to stick to a surface. I just spent a Valence on Flight, Casting it on Sleipner while I held on easily, and he used it to stay on the Ward as we tooled sideways at speed.

We were a thousand meters out in the void, little more than a blur. Someone may have spotted something, but the air was heavy with particulate mist, and who could be sure? We were rapidly out of human visual range, swinging around the edge of that black stone with its amorphous shapes and ageless power hanging about it. We pulled in over a waterfall to end all waterfalls, literally stretching out in a barely curving line towards the horizon of stars to our right.

It was a beautiful sight, if you couldn’t sense the things behind those stars out there. Because the water wasn’t hitting any stone, it was also oddly quiet, no roaring to speak of... there was nothing to echo off of, as it were.

We slid onto the tops of the streaking waves heading off the surface; gravity and air came back, the latter definitely on the cool side, but not icy.

The peak ahead in the distance was now obscured by the Haze, and very quickly, so were the stars behind us. The gap of darkness to the void grew rapidly smaller as we made for the horizon, and even if the world was flat and it didn’t go away, soon it was just a shrinking line of blackness on the ocean.

Detect Location logged direction and distance faithfully as we rode across the sea. Master Fred reported there were old things in the waters that should have died off long ago, or gone elsewhere, and he wasn’t going to risk contacting the Waters directly.

-This IS the Elsewhere they went to,- I /told him, and he just went ‘ahhhhh...’