Chapter 2 – Mictlān

There was nobody around. Callum had a certain amount of trust in his perceptions, considering that he’d been able to spot basically everything within his sphere. Even fae and dragonblooded magic, while incomprehensible, was extremely obvious. So when a faint, indecipherable whispering started echoing all around them with no discernable source, he was fairly well spooked.

He shot to his feet, followed by Lucy, and wrapped his threads around them both as he prepared to teleport away. The only thing that stopped him from doing so immediately was that when he enclosed Lucy in his teleportation frame, he was absolutely certain the fae magic had begun to fade. It was working, if they could stay.

“The hell is that?” Lucy asked.

“I don’t know. Gayle?”

“What is what?” Gayle replied, confused. Apparently the noise didn’t make it through the phone-portal, adding to the weirdness of the noise. He kept his metaphorical finger on the button to teleport away into his cache, but was unwilling to so do while Lucy was still under the sway of fae magic.

“I hear⁠—” Lucy began, then stopped. There was another voice that spoke in the same unknown language as the whispers. They quieted, and someone stepped into Callum’s perception on the other side of the portal. Oddly, he wasn’t a mage, or at least didn’t have a mage bubble, but he was clearly supernatural by the vis density in his body.

“A moment of your time, young man?” The stranger called out, voice carrying weirdly through the portal space. It should have been a distant shout, but it sounded much closer.

“Only if you stay there!” Callum replied, feeling for his part like he did have to yell to push through the enveloping quiet. His instincts screamed at him to just leave, but he could practically see the dissolution of the fae spell. For the moment he had to rely on his reflexes being fast enough. They were, after all, several hundred yards from the portal entrance through a weirdly distorted space.

“Could this one tempt you into leaving the realm of Mictlān?”

“Not yet,” Callum said bluntly.

“I dunno, big man. I’m starting to feel a little weird.”

“Should I get Gayle?” Callum was glad he was used to splitting his attention, since he had three people to pay attention to at once.

“Maybe? I’m not sure…” Lucy wobbled, and Callum stepped closer to steady her.

“One points out that Mictlān is not for the living. In a single day and night, any mortal would become a whispering shadow.” The stranger said, and Callum couldn’t tell whether the man was listening to his conversation with Gayle and Lucy or not.

“I don’t intend to be here that long,” Callum called back, easing Lucy back to her seat. The warning prompted a memory to click, and he finally recognized the name of Mictlān. The underworld for the Aztecs and others of that tradition. Considering the weirdness of the portal world, it seemed appropriate.

“See that you are not. The shadows will get restive, should you linger.” The man sat down cross-legged outside the portal, treating water like solid ground, which made Callum relax fractionally. He still would have been gone already if it weren’t necessary for Lucy’s well-being. The situation was not at all under his control and he hated it.

“One is curious, however. You seem to have trained in the style of the priests of my people – with your power bound into blood and bone, rather than separating yourself and casting your power into a shell to block out the world.”

That got Callum’s attention. He had always figured that his own peculiarities as a mage, while rare or at the very least against prevailing orthodoxy, couldn’t be unique. He had never been able to set up a particularly strong bubble and found the process of doing so to be a strain. That was ignoring the way it left trails everywhere, which offended his sensibilities.

Unfortunately that implied that the person actually was a mage, and maybe even one with a passive sense like Callum’s. Or rather, he had to have some kind of passive sense, if he noticed that Callum wasn’t using a bubble and even called him a young man, and that was not good. He well knew he could cast where he could sense, so the other man was within striking range.

It was a tense standoff, at least from his perspective. The other man seemed perfectly at ease, sitting crosslegged on the ground and either meditating or just relaxing. Which just didn’t seem fair when Callum was coiled like a wound spring.

“I would be happy to discuss this later,” he said after a few moments, keeping a hand on Lucy’s arm. He had to purposely relax his grip, and she’d probably still have bruises, but Lucy hadn’t even winced. Callum couldn’t deal with everything at once, no matter how good he was at multitasking. The man had certainly piqued his interest and Callum would have liked to talk under other circumstances, but it wasn’t vital enough to be worth the distraction. Even if it was vital, he’d still choose Lucy.

In the end, people were more important than knowledge. There was no point in becoming more capable if he didn’t keep his integrity. He still felt a little guilty delaying the Connor’s rescue just to crib the portal plans, even with how well that had turned out.

“I’m not sure I should be here, big man,” Lucy said hazily. “I think⁠— no, I don’t know…” She seemed to be wrestling with herself, which more or less confirmed what Callum had thought. Some kind of fae influence on her mind, which was quickly being shredded by the foreign space and foreign mana. If it had been a mage enchantment, it probably would have broken right away, but fae stuff seemed more flexible.

“Don’t worry, Lucy,” he told her. “I think you’re almost clear.”

“Clear? I⁠—” Lucy suddenly groaned and leaned over to the side, making retching noises and spattering mostly bile across the obsidian. Callum grimaced, brushing her hair back out of the way as he steadied her. It seemed whatever it was they’d done to her was really nasty, or at least the process of removing it was. Admittedly, he was sure that his approach to dealing with the issue wasn’t the usual one.

“Gayle, I think you’re going to need to heal Lucy again in a minute or two.”

“Okay?” Gayle seemed mostly confused, sitting on a chair in the middle of nowhere wrapped in blankets. It was in a way rather surreal. Portals made a mockery of the concept of distance, especially since he could chain them together.

The wispy, liquid construct of fae magic was rapidly dissolving, apparently having crossed some sort of threshold. Every moment it frayed further until suddenly it snapped, and the magic lost its hold on whatever was anchoring it to Lucy. Then it was just gone, vanished like a puff of smoke.

“God, it’s gone.” Lucy said weakly. “Thanks, big man. I think I gotta lay down for a while…” She started sliding off the chair, and Callum caught her before she went down.

Shadows started to slide in from the surrounding obsidian spires. It didn’t make any sense, because there wasn’t any light. There was nothing to cast the shadows, and they didn’t register to his magical perceptions, but he could see the human-shaped silhouettes slipping toward them. All his hair stood on end.

“Time to go,” he said, and teleported several things at once. His spare portal anchor went outside the entrance to Mictlān, at the bottom of the stream that filled the temple. Once the current crisis had passed, he did want to speak to the strange mage. Lucy went to the cave where he’d first put her and Gayle, and he withdrew to his cache. Instantly he felt better, less oppressed, and without an active portal into Mictlān he didn’t have to deal with the incredibly creepy shadows.

He really should have known there would be things his spatial perceptions didn’t catch. If for some reason he was blind to glamours, it was obvious that there were a lot of different spectrums when it came to magic, and no single approach was universal. Also, it was obvious he should keep the hell out of Portal World Six.

“Gayle, could you help Lucy, please?” He hated leaving it to the other mage, but he couldn’t deny the value of magical healing. Once again he opened a way between the north Texas cave and the surface, and Gayle ducked through, pulling in her bubble so she wouldn’t break the portal with it. She knelt down where Lucy lay and started her work.

“It’s not working? Why can’t I help her?” Everything Gayle said sounded like an uncertain question, and Callum tamped down his temper.

“She’s probably just exhausted. Who knows when she last slept, and what that thing was doing to her.”

“What thing?”

“Some kind of fae magic enchantment entangled with her vis,” Callum said.

“It was fae magic? I guess that makes sense, but normally I can fix things!”

“I don’t imagine magic can fix everything,” Callum said, trying to suppress his own worry. “Is she fine physically?”

“Yes?”

“Then just keep an eye on her for me for now, please.” Callum pressed his lips together. He certainly had no interest in holding hostages but it’d be nice to have a pocket healer around a little bit longer. “I’ll drop you off when I can,” he said. “Might be another hour or so.”

“I will,” Gayle said. “But…” She trailed off hesitantly.

“Yes?”

“Can I at least get something to read?” Gayle asked plaintively. “I appreciate that you’re just going to send me home but it’s so awfully dull here.”

Callum stifled a laugh and combed through his cave-cache. It was something he actually had thought of and had picked up a crate of science fiction paperbacks at a used book store for something like twenty bucks. He hadn’t even looked at what they were, and it wasn’t like he could read with his spatial perception, so he just transported the whole crate over.

Then he dropped into one of his remaining chairs with a groan. He’d left the ones in Mictlān there, because the shadows could have them for all he cared. The thought made him reach out for the other half of the portal anchor he’d left, though. The strange man, presumably the one in charge of the portal world, likely wouldn’t be patient forever.

The portal snapped open almost immediately, given the heightened mana near a portal world, and Callum was glad to see that the anchor was where he left it. He was less glad to see that the stranger had turned to face its direction. Considering the difficulty others had in locating it, he would have hoped the knowledge of the anchor would have kept for longer, but then he hadn’t really been particularly stealthy.

Callum popped open a phone-portal, though reluctantly. He really disliked dealing with another mage that seemed similar to him, and under the circumstances he added a bit of safety by a sort of ad-hoc ward around the portal terminus. Both of them, actually. Rather than the elaborate frameworks that most mages used, he mostly had a thin frame filled with dense vis, just so he’d notice if something tried to push through it.

In fact, that frame might be enough to block the other mage’s sight, the way mage bubbles did. He was pretty sure anything strong enough to get through it would also collapse the portal, so for a spur-of-the-moment defense it worked pretty well. He’d have to work on it once he had time.

“You asked for a moment of my time,” Callum said. “I’ve got some now. First though, I can say I haven’t actually received any training at all.”

“Ah, a shame. One had thought perhaps you were some lost and distant inheritor.”

“Not so far as I know,” Callum said. “Unless you had some dalliance about thirty years ago.” It seemed highly unlikely. The man had a completely different body type, so even if Callum mostly took after his mother, his father was almost certainly of European stock as well.

“Certainly not!” The man said with a laugh. “One is named Huitzilin,” he said, the name very obviously not an English one. “You may use Wizzy, as one doubts you have encountered the proper tongue before.”

“I haven’t,” Callum admitted.

“And you, I suspect, are Callum Wells.”

“I am,” he said cautiously, double-checking the warding around the portal pairs.

“There is no need to worry,” Huitzilin said. “This one is not properly part of their nation. The people one protected died out long before they ever came to this continent, so now one is merely the guardian of Mictlān.”

“Well,” Callum said judiciously. “I am sorry for intruding, but I needed a portal world and there aren’t many I can enter easily.”

“Most would not consider it easy to enter Mictlān. It is hidden and protected, and the world itself is unwelcoming to outsiders. Though, you do not shout your power and shoulder aside the world with it like mages do. That is why the shadows did not notice you for so long.”

“What were those, anyway?”

“Those who walked into Mictlān and did not return,” Huitzilin said simply. “It is a land for the dead and only for the dead.”

“Will there be any lasting effects?” Callum asked, suddenly concerned. “We were only in there for a few minutes.”

“There are lasting effects for everything,” Huitzilin replied. “But I do not believe a few minutes of exposure will result in any harm. If the shadows had touched you, perhaps there would have been issues.”

“Good to know.” Returning to Mictlān was definitely out. “What about the obsidian?”

“You took some of the fragments from the old site?” Huitzilin didn’t seem perturbed. “You are welcome to them if you think they can be of use. Dead obsidian does nothing for anyone.”

“So long as no shadows came along with them.”

“Certainly not. They are of Mictlān, and cannot leave.”

“That is the best news I’ve heard today,” Callum said, but he still relocated all the obsidian into the sunlight above the cave-cache for the moment. He was pretty sure Huitzilin wasn’t lying. There wasn’t any point, in part, but he also didn’t seem to actually care that Callum was an outlaw. Maybe he just got that impression because he could actually sense the man and read his body language rather than just see a bubble.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

“What was it you wanted to discuss with me, then?” He asked finally. If Huitzilin had some sort of agenda he was being very patient by answering Callum’s questions.

“One only wished to get the measure of the man who may herald the end of the cycle.”

“Um.” Callum said. “What? I’m not some sort of chosen one, I assure you.”

“Indeed?” Huitzilin asked with amusement. “One would point out that you have chosen yourself. Such is the nature of things. Civilizations rise and fall. Cities burn and new ones are built. One cycle ends, another begins. The higher the tinder is heaped, the smaller the spark that starts the fire. There is always someone who chooses to be that spark.”

“That makes some kind of sense, I suppose,” Callum said cautiously. “And GAR does seem massively unstable, especially considering the modern world.”

“They are far overdue for the deadwood to burn,” Huitzilin said.

“So you’re some kind of GAR revolutionary?”

“No, I’m too old. The cycle is the business of younger people,” Huitzilin said, rather fondly. “But it is the world I live in, so I have an interest.”

“Well, to be honest⁠—” Callum started, then stopped. “Actually, I just had another thought. One second.” He opened yet another portal to Gayle’s cave, feeling the strain from holding so many constructs at once and for so long. Even if he could do sixteen-some teleports, maintaining things definitely wore at him.

“Gayle, do you know a mage named Huitzilin? Says to call him Wizzy?”

“Oh, Archmage Wizzy.” Looked up from her book. “He’s weird.”