Epilogue

The Voyager emerged from the fog like a bird of prey before sputtering to a sad halt in a spray of foam and nasty swear words. Sails hung limp from the two main masts while, on the deck, the circuits tasked with keeping the gardens alive fell dark. Sailors and soldiers rushed to the railings to look around now that visibility had been restored.

Viv walked forward, watching a freshly cast void blade fail only a few handspans away from her. It wasn’t so much that her willpower was defeated as the fact space around them seemed to obey different rules of physics. Or magic, maybe. It even felt strange. Her instincts told her the spell was working fine yet she could clearly see it wasn’t?

“Well that’s going to be problematic,” she commented.

She turned to gray-haired Sidjin but his gaze was firmly fixed to the front. Not far from them, tall cliffs covered in thin patches of green lichen rose from the sea like painted black walls, their surface pitted by age and the elements. Beyond that were distant hills, also green, and beyond that…

“Land, land!” the watcher on shift uselessly said after recovering from his surprise. Beyond the valley was a crystalline structure not unlike a tower, if someone had taken a normal model in a software then deleted pieces at random. The tower stood, an impossible edifice somehow suspended over the land like an affront to physics architecture. Some of the pieces were not even attached to anything.

As they watched, the structure shifted and some of the pieces disappeared in a sparkling blast of colors, others reappearing at random. A pulse made every caster shiver.

“Looks like your readings were correct,” Viv admitted.

Sidjin smiled, though it was bittersweet.

“One last adventure?” he suggested.

The rest went unsaid as Viv returned that smile. Last adventure before she ascended, leaving the nation to those who would not be so bound in their nature. One last adventure before Sidjin died of old age.

One last chance to find out if there was, after all, a way to become an arcane elemental.

“By my estimation,” a stern voice said from behind, “this unusual structure stands at the exact center of the emissions we detected.

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The mage woman behind them made notes on her thick book, then readjusted a thick pair of glasses. An exaggerated blink made her whole face twitch.

“With a thirty paces margin of error, I would say.”

“Thanks Eliz. Now we just need to find a place to dock.”

They looked around while the skipper screamed yries insults at everyone glutting the railings. At first, Viv thought it was just because they were slacking but a comment about ‘port’ changed her mind. She moved to the left, where the cliff continued. There were indeed distant ships heading towards them, two to be precise. She reflexively tried a long view spell before it fizzled between her fingers. The skipper lent her his binoculars without prompt.

Oars propelled the ships, low raiding crafts that reminded her of viking longships. Humanoid creatures with thick tentacles where the hair ought to be worked it, muscles stretching under a grayish skin. One of them stood at the prow, waving a handful of harpoons.

“Is it me or are those things huge?” Viv asked.

“The natives are getting agitated,” the yries captain spat.