Penitent Book 3 Ch 6: No Road Trip

They kept moving west and the hills and plains they’d been traveling on rapidly became wild forest. As they made their way deeper into it, and the sunny day gradually became shaded by the thick canopy above them, Michael began to feel a pull from the southwest. He began to turn in that direction.

“You know what I could go for?”

“What?” asked Michael as he ducked under a branch.

“A long fucking drive.”

“Really? All this walking hasn’t been a joy for you?”

“Eh, I don’t actually mind the walking, but I miss a good drive. A long stretch on the outback, driving like a hoon. Sunburn on your arms where it hits you through the windows, sweat down your back and nowhere to be. Getting to where you’re going to crack open a cold one and drain the whole thing in a minute, then ten more before crashing on a friend’s couch with the TV still crackling on in the background. Just knowing that you’re going to be up to no good the next day.” He shook his head and sighed. “Not to mention just the feel of being in car. The engine hummin or roarin…the rumble of it.”

“I had a drive across the I-10 like that once. Just out of college, heading to stay at a friend’s apartment. There was a concert we were going to, I can’t even remember who. Maiden maybe? Someone Jay was more a fan of than I was. When I hit Texas it was an entire day of just empty desert and misery, but there was something relaxing about it too.”

“What did you drive?”

“An Escort.”

Ollie laughed. “Christ, my Dad took me to school in an old Escort. Probably a newer one than you had.”

“It would have to have been. I liked that car though. I think it died a few years after that.”

“I bet I could’ve brought it back to life.”

“Well, all you’d need to do it now is a time machine, a dimensional teleporter and a way to keep your magic from making everything explode.”

He shrugged. “Small problems.”

Michael chuckled and they made their way deeper into the woods. The pull grew stronger the closer they got, but it took two days before they actually arrived. They began to encounter small patches of gray-white fog as they got closer to the lake. Eventually they reached a large clearing. There were no structures left, but the remnants of them were clear. Massive chunks of marble could still be made out under overgrown trees and vines, cuts of smooth stone not quite covered in dirt were clear as well, and even pieces of statues with still visible details had managed to survive. A massive palm, thumb, and forefinger in particular was leaned against a tree that had seemed to grow out from beneath it.

Michael looked to Ollie to see that he was breathing heavily.

“Are you alright?’

“You don’t feel that?”

Michael frowned and closed his eyes. He could still feel the pull from his Seer title, though that had settled a bit now that he’d arrived, but aside from that… He opened his eyes. His mana channels were reacting to something. He could feel a kind of resonating coldness within them.

“It feels like someone just cast a spell here.”

Ollie shook his head. “No. Someone cast a spell here a long time ago… it was just powerful enough that we can still feel its echo here.”

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Michael swallowed. “Can you tell what it was?”

“No. It’s too ephemeral. I can just tell that it was powerful. More powerful than any other spell I’ve ever been close to.”

Michael nodded and began looking around more closely, keeping his senses open and listening for any more guidance from the gods. He heard nothing but the usual chatter as he made his way around, but he did get a better idea of his surroundings. The ruins seemed to have been a manor of some point, not quite a palace, but definitely beyond a house. It would’ve taken up most of the clearing itself and there were a number of outbuildings as well that surrounded it. He could find no traces of a road to it, but that may have simply been the first thing to go when it was abandoned. A lot of the damage seemed to be unnatural, but he couldn’t tell exactly what had caused it. There weren’t any clawmarks, or scorchmarks, or anything he could discern, but he knew for a fact that a piece of foundation that matched a far corner of the manor by the treeline definitely shouldn’t have been on the beach.

Ollie was looking around as well, poking things with his staff and summoning orbs of light when he wanted to examine things more closely. He was also holding out a hand as if he was trying to sense something through his palms. If Michael focused he could feel his friend channeling a large amount of mana with whatever it was he was doing.

Before he could ask him, a large amount of mist seemed to roll in in an instant. He lost sight of him and activated Eyes of Love so that he could follow a cord of it to him. He began doing so when a hazy figure approached him from the left. Michael dodged to the right and drew his mace, but as it approached the hazy figure grew no clearer. It was simply a black outline of a man or woman, walking purposefully in Michael’s direction and then past him. As he passed, Michael saw a dozen more of the figures. All of them were walking or moving purposefully in one direction or another. Some seemed to be working with invisible tools, others were gesticulating at one another with no noise, and he even saw one seemingly sitting out on a dock that wasn’t there casting a line to fish.