Anser was startled, but immediately noticed that the old wizard floating in midair had an insubstantial body. He wasn't actually there in the flesh.
"Haha..." Veronica couldn't help laughing. "He said the same thing when he first met me."
"Next, he'll definitely tell you that you have extraordinary talent, that your future is boundless, and that you're destined to become a legend."
The old wizard ignored her. His gaze remained fixed on Anser, his expression serious. "Yesterday, I performed a divination. The future was nothing but chaos."
"At that moment, I knew that someone who existed beyond the bounds of fate was about to appear."
Veronica's expression froze. Why had he changed his spiel?
She had learned the secret of this place even before the queen, because she was the finest spellcaster the royal family had produced in generations and therefore qualified to know certain secrets.
As far as she knew, Sakkors had used this same fortune-teller routine on more than ten direct members of the royal bloodline.
Anser paid no attention to his nonsense and quickly took in his surroundings.
This was a hemispherical chamber with a radius of fifty meters. Arcane array patterns covered the walls, while an enormous crystal sphere roughly thirty meters in diameter floated at the center, radiating brilliant light.
The interior of the sphere was filled with intricate patterns resembling both spiderwebs and lightning. Streams of light darted through them as iridescent colors flickered, forming one strange three-dimensional structure after another.
The old wizard quietly stepped aside so Anser could get a clear look at the details within.
"Are you the arcanist Sakkors?" Anser withdrew his gaze without looking for long. He couldn't understand any of it anyway.
"No. I am not an arcanist. I am the spirit of a mythallar." The old wizard's gaze was profound, his voice steady but aged.
"If I take you with me, what can you do for me? And what can I do for you?" Anser stared at him, beginning his own probing.
The die spun rapidly, working hard to detect information about the mythallar.
With this informational advantage, he could easily determine whether Sakkors was lying.
Sakkors did not answer directly. Instead, he looked at Veronica. "Girl, did you learn anything from that?"
Veronica lowered her head without speaking. She knew Sakkors was mocking the royal family's greed. They had always treated him as nothing more than a tool and a bargaining chip, knowing only how to make demands.
{I do not depend on the Weave. Do not mistake me for an ordinary mythallar.} Sakkors went straight to the heart of the matter, though he spoke through a private telepathic link.
{My creator, Ioulaum, foresaw Netheril's end long ago and began researching a new magical architecture that would free us from dependence on the Weave...}
{My intelligence did not arise naturally. I was once a great arcanist. After Netheril's fall, he willingly merged with me through a unique form of soul magic...}
Ioulaum had abandoned Netheril before its fall. No one knew whether he was still alive or what he was doing.
After Netheril's destruction, many had searched for him, but all that ever surfaced were scattered fragments of dubious authenticity. The secrets of the mythallars were buried with them beneath the dust of history.
After Sakkors, the spirit of the mythallar, came into being, he had nothing but a few conjectures to work from and could only explore on his own.
He had once fallen into the hands of the phaerimm, Netheril's nemeses, leaving him unable to access the Weave for a long time. It wasn't until several centuries later that someone seized him from them. After changing hands several times, he was eventually brought to the Rock of Bral.
Yet it was also during that period that he discovered ways to replace the Weave using faith, psionics, elemental power, and raw magic. His solution was to emulate the Shadow Weave of Shar, the Dark Goddess, and create an independent magical network of his own.
But every attempt afterward ended in failure.
That was because Shar had taken a shortcut. Her Shadow Weave relied on faith and her divine portfolio.
Sakkors had neither faith nor divine power, nor did he possess the Goddess of Magic's ability to weave and control the Weave. Fortunately, he still had another model to draw from: the ruler of the mind flayers—the Elder Brain!
And so, during the two or three centuries he spent sealed away, a miniature Weave constructed from magic and psionics was born.
It could bypass the Weave to absorb raw magic, while also drawing in psionic and elemental power. It could even operate stably within dead-magic zones and wild-magic zones.
Through the Micro-Weave, Sakkors could also maintain telepathic contact with everyone connected to it, allowing them to communicate in real time.
But the Micro-Weave had a drawback: it was incompatible with the Weave. Spell-slot casters couldn't use the Micro-Weave to cast spells and had to cast using Magic Power instead. The upside was that this kept them from being discovered by the Goddess of Magic.
After all, plenty of people cast spells without going through the Weave. Sakkors wasn't "stealing bandwidth" from it; he'd simply set up a separate "LAN." Surely the Goddess of Magic couldn't be that overbearing.
The Magic Power within the Micro-Weave was different from raw, violent magic. Its nature was extremely stable, making spellcasting only slightly more difficult than casting with spell slots.
So by any measure, it was a success.
{Considering the Micro-Weave's relatively limited range, I can also place a Rary's Mark on its users. It's an ability I developed by imitating the 5th-level spell Rary's Telepathic Bond, allowing users to remain telepathically connected regardless of the distance between them...}
The more Sakkors spoke, the more excited he became, as though this were the first time he had ever told anyone about all of it.
Anser felt increasingly unnerved as he listened. Sakkors was utterly outrageous. He had actually modified a mythallar to this extent entirely on his own.
Wasn't this basically a magical version of an Elder Brain?!
Fortunately, it was only a telepathic connection, not the kind of irresistible mental and thought control wielded by an Elder Brain.
'This isn't a great arcanist... This is a mad scientist.'
At that moment, the die gave a slight tremor, and information about the target appeared:
[Sakkors Mythallar, Wondrous Item, Artifact...]
If Anser remembered correctly, an ordinary mythallar was only a Legendary item.
He carefully examined the information. In addition to its core ability, [Micro-Weave], Sakkors possessed several other fairly practical abilities.
The first was [Flight]. It wasn't particularly fast, reaching only fifty or sixty kilometers per hour.
The second was [Recharge], the mythallar's traditional specialty. It could restore all expended charges or uses of magic items within a certain range.
The third was [Control Weather], with a casting radius of 160 kilometers. Its effect was similar to the 8th-level spell Control Weather, but its area was considerably larger.
In addition, the mythallar was filled with highly concentrated magical energy and was extremely dangerous. Anyone other than an attuned creature who touched it had to make a "Very Hard" Constitution Saving Throw. On a failure, they would take 20d10+100 (120–300) radiant damage.
Any object it touched, meanwhile, would be instantly disintegrated unless it was a powerful magic item of Legendary rarity, an Artifact, or something comparable.
Anser quietly breathed a sigh of relief. Sakkors hadn't lied or held anything back. Their initial exchange had gone fairly smoothly.
{Who else have you told about all this?} he asked telepathically.
{Only you,} Sakkors replied with absolute certainty.
{Why?}
{The Cozar royal family isn't worthy. If the Micro-Weave is to grow, someone like Veronica could never accomplish it. Talent is merely the foundation. What matters most is daring.}
{I knew the moment I saw you that you have no reverence for the gods. You act cautiously, but underneath that caution, you're confident you have something to fall back on.} Sakkors pointed at his temple, grinning broadly.
"I'm taking this mythallar!" Anser immediately took out the [Eye and Hand of Vecna] and carefully placed them in front of Veronica.
"Wait. I... changed my mind." Veronica stared intently at Anser.
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