74 – Threshold

Vivi honestly hadn’t expected to find Isabella Caldimore alive.

She hadn’t thought the possibility nonexistent, either, else she wouldn’t have dived headfirst into the primordial soup to begin with. But she’d expected complications at least. For Isabella to be hurt—physically, mentally, or in some inexplicable magical way. The girl had slammed into and through the dimensional boundary, breaking open a pathway for other travelers. And come out fine?

Though maybe ‘slammed into’ was verbiage that didn’t apply. That was how Vivi imagined the situation, but these were magical and metaphysical concepts so far above even her understanding that she wouldn’t pretend to be an authority. There was no particular reason to believe Isabella would have been hurt by such a thing; Isabella had specifically not been a sacrifice, merely a component. Vivi had just assumed the worst.

That Isabella was unharmed relieved Vivi greatly, but they were far from out of hot water. There might not be complications when it came to the girl herself, but that didn’t mean that there weren’t ones for the situation at large. Getting back home wasn’t going to be easy. She wasn’t even sure how to go about it, yet.

“Our first step is finding out where we are, what this place is, and how it works,” Vivi told the still-stunned blonde girl, choosing to address the practical concerns to help snap her out of it. “Though I’m not sure it can be considered a place at all. Not in any traditional sense.”

Isabella focused on the words, as Vivi had hoped. “Not a place at all? What do you mean?”

After a second’s hesitation, Vivi chose to deflect. “Let’s go take a better look.” She held a hand toward the girl. “Can I teleport us?”

“Y-yes?”

Before Vivi did so, she layered the usual suite of defensive spells onto Isabella. They had been heavily adapted against the void by this point, though Vivi had far from fully cracked that enigmatic puzzle, so she intended to keep a close eye on Isabella to personally guarantee her safety. She couldn’t blindly trust her shields anymore, which unsettled her.

Once Isabella was protected as best she could be, Vivi started pulling together a [Blink] spell. She wondered what she was in for. She had only gotten a quick glance at the otherworldly terrain, because immediately upon groaning into consciousness—in her bedroom at her estate, of all places—she had jolted into awareness, then cast [Detect Presence] and hurried for the one living being that had pinged to her senses. With great relief, she had found Isabella.

But that meant she knew little of what was going on. She really shouldn’t have tried to keep her eyes open when jumping through the dimensional rift. Perhaps if she’d blocked her senses, especially her magical ones, she wouldn’t have gone insensate for—she wasn’t sure how long, but enough time for the gateway to finish scabbing over. Meaning grabbing Isabella and fleeing back through was no longer an option.

She wasn’t sure she would have wanted to try that, anyway. Vivi had survived the passage, but she was a fair bit tougher, magically speaking, than…anyone. Could Isabella handle that same trip? She would at least like to contemplate the idea for a bit, and perhaps design safeguards to wrap Isabella in before going again.

So all things considered, this wasn’t a total catastrophe. She hadn’t expected to snatch Isabella and rush back through the boundary. The fact the option was denied to her was almost relieving; she wouldn’t have to make that complicated decision now.

She [Blinked] high in the sky with Isabella in tow, and the city of Meridian presented itself to her. It was as she remembered from her quick glance earlier. Physically, the structure of the city was unchanged, though everything had been leeched of nine-tenths of its color. The streets were empty. All the objects remained: stalls, tents, banners, buildings, abandoned horse carriages, and so on. But not a soul stirred, sapient or otherwise. Not so much as an insect.

Interestingly, even monsters were scarce. She saw some, with how keen her eyes were, but most were voidlings or voidbeasts floating lazily in the distance, with a few black-violet carapaces stalking the streets below. Considering the sheer amount that had poured through the breach, she’d expected a realm packed to the brim.

Then again, she had spent fifteen minutes unleashing her full power on those hordes, erasing them by the thousands, maybe the tens of thousands. She had heavily thinned their numbers, explaining their scarcity. Plus, the gateway had acted as a beacon. With the wound sealed, the local residents were no longer swarming toward Meridian from miles off, and specifically where the Wardens’ guildhall had once stood.

Speaking of—her gaze drifted in that direction. The guildhall was gone. The scab was almost gruesomely accurate to the metaphor, dimensional flesh stitching over. Perhaps it was because she’d drawn that comparison that the pulsating, shattered patch of ground so strongly reminded her of a healing wound. What she was seeing wasn’t physical, after all. Simply a visual interpretation of deeply magical phenomena.

“Where are we?” Isabella murmured, tone somewhere between horrified and awed.

“A liminal space, if I had to guess,” Vivi said absentmindedly. “I don’t think this is another world, properly. I don’t think it exists physically. I’m not sure we exist physically.”

Even before she finished the sentence, she winced. If she was right—and she felt fairly certain she was—then she shouldn’t have shared the theory with Isabella, a thirteen-year-old girl. Being some sort of disembodied magical existence was a disturbing enough concept that even Vivi didn’t particularly like thinking about it.

“We…don’t?” Isabella asked.

She shrugged. “Anything I say is a best guess. I wouldn’t put too much stock in it. Just, this is clearly not a proper world. It’s a…reflection of ours. The monsters—the System named them voidlings and voidbeasts. So we’re in a void. A place between places. A threshold?”

She finalized the thought, and confidence settled into her. Earth had been a world, an alternate dimension. So was the world of Seven Cataclysms. But this? No. Vivi and Isabella had gotten themselves stuck in the great black emptiness between. A nowhere-place. The gray impression of Meridian was the world they’d traveled from leaking into the void, like heat rising out of a deep-sea thermal vent. Or maybe steam imprinted on a cold mirror. Or—who knew, really.

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“A threshold?” Isabella repeated quietly. A few moments of silence passed before she blurted out, “Is this even real? Am I—am I dead?”

“You aren’t dead.” Funny enough, Vivi knew exactly how she was feeling. That sense of surreality. Her arrival to the world of Seven Cataclysms had evoked similar emotions. “And I’ll find us a way back home. You don’t need to worry.”

“It doesn’t make any sense,” Isabella muttered.

“What doesn’t?”

“You. Being here. You’re…Vivisari. The Sorceress.”