Tara leaned against a wooden railing that groaned under even her minuscule weight, staring out over the city below. Night had begun to fall, which meant Promise City was almost completely dark. What light trickled in from the hole in the shell was residual twilight, barely enough to even distinguish the shell from the dark sky.
However, this night was unusually bright.
The city below was ablaze. Fires burned in many districts, and Tara knew that the disaster would be much worse were the entire inner city not built of stone. That said, even a single rogue spark could ignite the entire Ricket, killing thousands and displacing even more.
The brightest light was not from flame, though. The Needle was aglow with blue light, casting eerie shadows that flickered as they interacted with the fires burning below. Tara had spent several years in Promise City, yet she had never seen the Needle glow, not even a little.
“Tara, dear! We’re going to lock up for the night early, so make sure you come inside quickly!” a kind woman called from the door of the inn behind her.
“I’ll be back soon!” Tara shouted over her shoulder.
She smiled slightly, thinking about how comforting it had been to see Nelly again. She had offered Tara shelter many a night when she and her father had no coin to stay elsewhere and no place to call home.
Tara was reluctant to admit it, but Nephthys was right. She would have probably avoided seeing Nelly again had she arrived in Promise City on her own. She would have come up with many excuses to avoid the inn, and they would all have seemed equally legitimate to her at the time.
“There is no fight, no threat, here, save what you yourself bring.”
Tara glanced back over the railing toward the glowing Needle and the fires below. Nephthys was out there, somewhere, doing who-knows-what. She knew it was senseless to worry about her, but Tara could not help it. She also could not help the small pang of angst in her heart at being left behind.
She knew she would only get in the way. Myra’s training had made it abundantly clear that she could not even look the threats people like them faced in the eyes, but she felt useless sitting here.
With a sigh, she turned around to return to the inn and hunker down for the night, but a voice off in the distance cut through her thoughts like a knife through flesh.
“—found him dead in an alley. It’s ‘bout the right size for me, dontcha think?” a man asked.
Tara turned slowly toward the voice, her thoughts halted completely, all sense and reason gone. A man towered over a linen sack, its contents shining in what little light there was. The man was donning the chestplate and wrist guards as he removed them from the sack, chatting with another, weaselly-looking man beside him.
“Figure lookin’ like a guard during a riot’ll get us into lots’a great places. Maybe get us somethin’ to sell, maybe somethin’ real valuable,” he explained, his eyes practically glowing with avarice.
“Could also get you killed. Riots started from people fightin’ the guards, from what I understand. Ain’t you just say you found the gear on a dead one? How the fuck you think he died? You go down there lookin’ like that, I ain’t watchin’ your back, that’s for sure,” the second man spat.
“Aye, but you’re still comin’, aint’cha? You ain’t turnin’ down the potential for easy loot just cause you might have to run from some angry carpenters,” the towering man observed, turning a greasy smile on his cohort, who returned a smile absent a few teeth.
The two took off at a jog, the tall man with guard gear donned, and the wiry man jogging a couple of feet behind, seeming poised to abandon the other in an instant.
Before she could even process what she was doing, Tara was running after them. It could just be a coincidence. There were any number of voices she might get mixed up. But she was positive it was no mistake. The towering man had the scar around his eye to prove it.
Tara had given it to him.
As she ran, her blood began to boil. She could almost feel him pulling her by the hair away from her father. She could almost feel his fist in her gut, cutting off her panicked screams. She did not have to imagine the greasy smile. It was unchanged, even after all these years.
With no plan, nor even a real idea of what she was doing, Tara vanished into the shadows of twilight.
————————————
Jace’s group walked to the edge of the enormous balcony, which seemed to occupy the entire roof of this building. The antenna extended up and through the black-glass ceiling behind them, originating from the roof they stood on.
“We will descend here. No sense traipsing through the whole building, particularly without power,” Jace said, stepping on a platform that glowed blue as he mounted it.
The other three followed him on, and it began to slide down the side of the building, no ropes or pulleys in sight.
“How is this possible?” one of the men asked, crouching low, as if he might have to do combat with the platform.
“This city has been vacant for centuries. We built to last, but even the most robust of our structures would run out of power after so many years.
“Fortunately, the most critical of our infrastructure can generally be powered manually, hence why this platform activated when I stepped on it,” Jace explained, his pride obvious.
Perhaps it was the atmosphere, the strangeness of the situation, but none of the three seemed to catch the implication that Jace regarded the Praxic constructs as ‘his’ people’s creations.
The platform glided down soundlessly, as if floating along the side of the building, until it reached around the halfway point. Jace turned and looked out across the city, gesturing grandly.
“Behold: the Aqueduct,” he declared.
Out intertwined among the multi-story buildings, all harsh angles and straight lines, was a track of twisting, swirling metal. Rings fastened to metal rods and secured to the tops of buildings supported the track, which corkscrewed through the city, all gleaming silver metal, inlaid with gold.
Though it was apparently deactivated, it was still a sight to see, nothing comparable existing in all of Radaar.
“How could water possibly move through such a twisting track? It goes upside down in places,” wondered a woman in the group.
“It supplies power, not water,” Jace remarked without turning around.
“So this ‘Aqueduct’ will supply power to the Conductor?” a man asked.
“Hopefully. We must visit the Well first. It should have power remaining. It was built for storage, after all. Assuming there is sufficient power remaining in the Well, we will reroute it to the Conductor.
“If there is no power remaining in the Well, however…well, we will move onto plan B,” Jace explained ominously, glancing at the three behind him.
The platform reached the ground without a sound, and the group was just as silent.
——————————
Nephthys descended the metal stairs, deep in thought. As soon as the Needle lit up, she knew where she needed to go. She should actually be grateful that Jace practically placed a beacon on top of himself, else she would have had a tough time searching.
Still, she was annoyed with herself. That the Needle could be an ancient artifact from the Praxic Empire had never even entered her mind. True, it was some strange machinery built for some advanced magical purpose, but the idea of a huge antenna broadcasting a magical field made perfect sense to her modern mind, so accustomed to seeing its electrical equivalent.
It should have stood out to her immediately, for she had not seen its like anywhere else in Rengan. Granted, the logical part of her also recognized that it was just a big metal tower, so she should not beat herself up for not recognizing its significance immediately. That was her modern perspective, though. She should be more aware of the world around her.
She ran her hand along the wall as she floated down the stairs, admiring the enchanting work. It was a shame she was not more acquainted with enchanting, as she might make better sense of it. The near-microscopic script covering floor to ceiling seemed excessive if its only function was to broadcast the magic field. Perhaps the function of the field itself was written here as well?
The thought soured her mood, bringing her reverie to an end. She had discovered several bodies surrounding the entrance to this tower. There were a couple of guards, and several of whom she assumed were the tower operators, and although she did not take a great deal of time to examine them, their wounds seemed to indicate that they offered no resistance.
Whether that meant Jace and his men executed people who had surrendered, or if they merely died before they could resist, she did not know. It did not bode well, either way.
The atmosphere in this antenna was bizarre, growing more pronounced as she descended. It felt like it should be oppressive, with a torrent of mana swirling through all the enchantment channels, surrounding her on all sides. And there was something surrounding her, but it was…muted.
It was mana, no mistake, but it was not the same atmospheric mana she was used to, nor did it feel like the personalized mana she felt when others cast spells. This was…different somehow. She thought it was like seeing a river where the water runs slowly, as if it were viscous. The disconnect between what she expected and what she witnessed was uncomfortable.
Her thoughts cut off, fading like an afternoon breeze as she exited the staircase. Before her was a city, one that felt jarringly out of place in this medieval fantasy world. She had seen cities like it in magazines and travel blogs in her own world, though most were not quite so angular.
Above her stretched a ceiling of what looked like obsidian, though that could not be right. It was a colossal dome of the reflective stuff. She did not know the relative strength of obsidian as a building material, but there was no way it would support such an enormous cavern for so many centuries.
Squinting, she studied the city for several long seconds before the realization hit her: the entire place was suffused with mana. The obsidian roof was held up by some sort of mana shield, but it did not stand out to her because everything, from the ceiling to the buildings to the ground beneath her feet, exuded a faint mana signature—the same one.
It was not several different sources of mana. It was one, single mana frequency, uniform across all the surfaces it touched.
She gazed out at the scene, completely baffled.
Why had she seen none of this in Prelude?
——————————
Jace entered the building, the floating platform’s glow vanishing as he stepped off. The doors slid to each side silently, allowing him entry without even a handle to pull. The three followed behind him, each unnerved by the doors, which closed behind them just as silently as they had opened.
“The Well will be on one of the lower floors,” Jace said, leading the way through the dark building, which lit up with that same soft white light as he walked, always illuminating just enough of the path to see by.
“This ‘Well’ is in the same building as the antenna?” the woman asked, breaking the silence.
“Of course. This is the city’s broadcast array. It only makes sense for the power storage to be close. Why pipe the power across the city to the antenna just to distribute it back across the city?” Jace replied rhetorically, not turning to look at them.
“But…how is any of this still here? What material is the roof of this cavern that it could hold up over so many years?” one of the men asked.
“I don’t know, probably some fusion of stone and dirt. This city would have had a mana shield to deploy and protect it from the Skyfade. In fact, that shield is still active now, at least partially, evidenced by the fact that this cavern has not collapsed,” Jace chuckled.
The others all opened their mouths, questions on the tips of their tongues, but as the next light lit, their words froze in their throats.
Two skeletons were illuminated by the soft white glow. They sat across from each other on either side of the hall, as if sitting and talking. They were slouched on the floor, their backs leaning against either wall.
“Yes, I imagine this city’s final days were quite gruesome,” Jace said, nodding to himself as he passed by the skeletons.
“What do you mean? I thought they had a shield?” one of the men asked.
“They did, but as you can see, they were trapped by it. The shield may have protected them from the impact, but it could not provide them with food or water once their city was buried alive,” he explained.
“...but, surely they could have simply left the way we came in,” one of the men muttered.
“You are assuming the antenna was not also buried completely and exposed later, but even if you are correct, what do you expect they would find if they left?
“You see what covers the shield right now: stone and dirt blasted with such heat that they fused. Do you think any food or water would be waiting for them even if they managed to dig themselves out?” Jace prompted, never slowing his pace.
The group exchanged looks once again, but there was nothing to do but continue following Jace.
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