Chapter: 481 – An Understanding

Tala and Terry were the first ones to the end of the tunnel—as usual—with Rane close behind.

The other members of the unit were coming just after Rane.

Master Limmestare was understandably giddy at the idea of a glass-based lifeform—Tala could practically feel the man’s soul vibrating with glee.

Master Girt seemed more focused on his friend, Master Limmestare, seemingly ready to snatch the man back if he tried to advance before it was time to do so.

Mistress Vanga’s focus was quite obviously on Tala—as the vanguard—and the healer’s magics were primed to come to her aid, should Tala be in need.

Master Clevnis had a hand resting on the sword at his waist and was outwardly calm.

Mistress Cerna was just finishing up a series of floating inscriptions to augment those she’d draped over each of their shoulders. Both sets of magic were designed to dampen and filter sound, given the warnings depicted in the entry hall.

Terry—as was fitting—was faster than Tala, though she did flicker forward to stand beside him a moment after he stopped at the mouth of the tunnel, using his presence as the source of her aura to move to.

It was interesting to her that he could go wherever he wished, the absence of their aura notwithstanding, but she could only do so with that base of authority.

Another thing to work on, just like moving my iron beyond my aura.

He glanced her way when she arrived, letting out a contented chirp.

“Thank you. I am trying to use it more often.”

He chirped again, turning to regard the landscape before them.

Tala did likewise, even though her threefold sight had already taken it in.

Well, to be fair, his threefold perception would have done the same.

The cell was entirely composed of desert, the sand an odd blue-green color. Tala could see that it was at least a hundred feet deep, and the cell extended that far up as well.

The whole thing looked to be roughly a mile across, with very little variation in the rolling hills.

As Rane stepped up beside her, he let out a long breath. “It looks like the ocean, held still.”

Tala frowned… he was right in a sense. It was a bit sparklier than she remembered the ocean being, but possibly on a truly bright, spring day? Yeah, she could see that. “That resonates. It’s beautiful.”

“Indeed.”

Master Limmestare maneuvered himself forward to kneel at the end of the tunnel and put his hand forward. He clearly marveled at the sand that he touched. “No sharp edges. It’s all rounded, all glass. Don’t step out, I don’t know that it would hold you, and you might just plummet straight to the bottom. It wouldn’t be like a fall through the air, but I doubt it would be that much better. More importantly, it would be a pain to get you back out.” His power flexed, but seemed to be rebuffed by the glass. “I can’t do anything with this at all.”

Tala nodded. “What about with an increased surface area?”

The glass Mage grinned up at her. “Well, given you can stand on air with those magics, yes, I think you’ll be fine with an increase.”

She rolled her eyes, then nodded in return before amplifying the power going to the surface area expansion scripts on her feet and stepping out.

It felt like how walking on syrup might. That wasn’t quite right, though, as it wasn’t sticky. Maybe a viscoelastic fluid?

Yeah, that was closer.

Not that she’d ever actually done that.

-The swamp in the void-hold?-

Maybe…

There was clearly some coherence to the glass-ball sand, otherwise there couldn’t be dunes, waves, or whatever the rolling hills should be called.

Even so, she had to increase her surface area even further before she felt herself steady, the glass no longer trying to roll around the edges.

She had only taken four steps before the tableau changed.

The whole of the cell began to move, as if it were really the ocean, and it had simply restarted its movement.

The sound would have been deafening without Mistress Cerna’s magic. Their enhanced and reinforced ears would simply have been overwhelmed by the sound to the point of essential deafness rather than actually being damaged, but the effect would have been the same.

Tala’s helmet helped a bit, but it just wasn’t designed for sound isolation.

Bless that woman.

Tala found that with just a small increase to her scripts beyond the stability she’d already found, she was effectively a buoy, bobbing on the surface.

Thankfully, the motion didn’t last long.

A moment later, a bird rose up from the depths and the whole of the cell stilled, the surface becoming a perfectly flat, seemingly solid plane of glass.

The bird was… small. It wasn’t the size of a hummingbird—not quite—but it might have been likened to a large sparrow.

Each beat of its wings was accompanied by the cascading sound of cracking glass. Those cracks were even visible as waves of jagged white lines within the glass depiction of a bird, though they sealed almost as quickly as they were created.

The effect was very much like the crashing of waves upon a sea-shore.

The movements of the wings were clearly mostly for show, as they were not moving enough to have been keeping the bird aloft.

Terry trilled up at the clear bird, eliciting a grinding, chirp of sorts in return.

He flinched slightly at the sound, but hid it reasonably well, responding with another trill, tilting his head toward Tala and the unit as a whole.

The bird regarded them for a long moment before shattering, glass pulling up from the ground to join the fragments from the bird, together reforming into the shape of a woman, standing on the still surface.

A dress of woven glass fibers unspooled to drape around her. Her actual form was of solid glass, though, which seemed like a strange choice from Tala’s perspective.

The glass-woman opened her mouth, and the sound of breaking, cracking, grating glass intensified even as the waves of white cracks radiated around each movement. Through Mistress Cerna’s spells, Tala was able to pick out the likeness of words.

-I’ll clean that up, one moment…. There.-

With Alat’s help, Tala was suddenly able to hear the woman properly. The alternate interface even processed the glass-woman’s words back to the start of what she’d been saying, “Greetings, Archons of Humanity. Long have I slumbered in this place of my authority. If you do not know, I am Lupe. By your lack of obvious pain at my voice, you have come prepared. I am grateful for that. I do not like harming your kind.”

Her eyes swept them, clear interest in her eyes, but then her gaze jerked back to focus on Tala.

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“You… you contain echoes of one of my kin, yet you are not as I am. How can this be?” Lupe’s throat whitened with each syllable, healing quickly enough to visibly whiten again as she continued to speak. It made an oddly beautiful display that Tala could not focus on at the moment.

Tala nodded, having anticipated the potential for something like this. “So, you are related to the dasgannach?”

“I am—or was—such a creature, a curse at my very core. That which eventually became me strove and struggled, gathering unto myself my material until, one day, I was simply more than I had been. I believe there were sapients nearby when this happened, but whether they had a hand in the change, I never learned. What are you to my kin?” While it was hard to determine expressions precisely on the see-through face, Tala had rather a lot of practice doing something similar given her threefold sight. If she read Lupe correctly, she was intensely interested in the answer.

-Yup, you have to be a master sleuth to have deduced that.-