Sophia was up at dawn, eager to get moving. The rest of her team wasn’t far behind, but Arryn made them all wait while he ate breakfast at the Registry. They were supposed to et the rest of Arryn’s team there, and they didn’t start trickling in until an hour after Sophia finished.
Despite the slow start, they were still at the entrance to the Maze at least two hours earlier than any of the expeditions they’d been on. The only ti they entered the Maze earlier was when it was only their own team.
They had to pass through two zones to reach the link that held the nascent Tower. According to Cliff, that was the quickest route; any other route would require even more zones. The first was a simple cave exploration zone where they faced monstrous bats, a series of strange cooperative beetle monsters, and then the rodents that had tad them. The Earthen Marmot Beetle Cavalry were annoying, but they were still only second upgrade. On top of that, even though Sophia had never fought them before, she knew everything about them, as if her Plud Knowledge was active. Sophia had to assu that was because of her link to Cliff through Scion of the Towers.
The second zone was one none of them had seen before. It was a trap-filled maze, but the walls were enchanted cloth and the traps were entirely magical. According to Cliff, the normal way to get through it was to wander through the maze until you either set off a trap or got tired of it and cut your way through the fabric. Either way, you’d be hurt and the trap or damage to the maze would call the weavers: third upgrade silkworms and silk moths. They were physically fragile but ca in large numbers and all of them could use thread magic, which was extrely versatile.
Sophia led the way. She didn’t know the way through the maze and she didn’t know the trap locations ahead of ti, but with the knowledge that they’d only fight enemies if she made a mistake, she could move fairly quickly. The traps were all extrely obvious to her manasight, glowing lumps of thread that were nearly invisible to everyone else but that stood out clearly to Sophia. Disabling them was almost as easy as seeing them, so they only had to pause a few monts for each trap.
When they reached the end of the maze, they found a giant silk moth waiting on top of a small folded pile of silk fabric. Sophia approached the moth cautiously, but all it did was fly to one of the cloth walls and perch there. The cloth was clearly their reward; while they could have harvested more by tearing down the cloth walls and collecting them, that cloth had previously been enchanted while this cloth was pristine. Sophia wasn’t an enchanter of any sort, but she still knew that mattered.
Sophia expected to face the Imperial Hall when they exited the zone, but that wasn’t what she saw at all. It was a fairly ordinary link, if rather bare, with a cobbled path that led through the sand and no vegetation at all. There were two exceptions to the idea that it was an ordinary link: first, the only link-gate was the one they used to enter, and second, there was a stone building in the middle of the link.
The stone building was plain, about twenty feet wide on the side Sophia could see, with a fifteen feet high wall for the first story. A second story was visible above the first, but while it was the sa height, it was set back several feet on all sides. There were no windows, but a single huge door faced towards the link. The cobblestone path continued around the building on both sides, with a ten-foot-wide gap between its surface and the wall.
“Any idea what that is?” Dav spoke out loud as he turned towards Sophia. “It’s more than I expected, but also less at the sa ti?”
“It’s supposed to be the Tower,” Sophia answered slowly. “The Gateway’s on the Tower. I thought that ant the Imperial Hall, since that’s where Ansuz is and where the foundation of the Tower is, but I guess not. That was in a zone, so … maybe this is the outside part and that’s inside sohow?”
“Then that should be the Gateway.” Dav didn’t wait for confirmation before he headed up to the door. He reached out and grabbed one of the door handles, then stopped. “It just told that the Tower is only open to people at the first upgrade or below.”
Sophia took a deep, sharp breath. Had she gotten it wrong? Did she need to wait before she left? There wasn’t really any huge hurry, but it sucked to know she’d done it out of order for no reason.
“I bet it’s around to the side,” Ci’an offered before Sophia spiraled any further. “You said there could only be three Gateways until the Tower was bigger, right? Co on, Let’s find out which side it’s on!”
Ci’an was right; that was what Cliff told Sophia about the Gateways. It wasn’t sothing she’d thought much about, since it seed like such an arbitrary number. If anything, she’d assud that it was because of power or sothing, like the fact that there were only a handful of locations the Gateways could reach. Connecting it to the number of walls on the Temple that weren’t occupied by the entrance was not sothing she even considered.
Sophia followed Ci’an around the building slowly, so she was the last person to see the Gateway itself. The side of the building she passed had an archway, but it was filled with stone. The rear of the building held a huge tal doorfra with a dull glass orb set into the decoration above the middle of the pair of doors. This ti, when Dav touched the doors, a light appeared in the glass orb and the doors swung away from him.
The view in the distance was only the sky; the ground wasn’t visible through the clouds. A series of roughly conical islands that looked like they’d been pulled out of the ground, trees and all, floated in the air.
Next to the door, there was what looked like a small entryway, complete with an arch of a completely different design than the one set in the side of the Kestii Tower. A small green-white glowing platform extended from their Gateway to the other one, the one that Sophia guessed was probably the Archons’ Gateway, almost like a short foyer or sothing.
Sophia looked at the end of the glowing platform, then grinned. “Well, I think we know why they ca here instead of anyone going there.”
Dav laughed. “Good thing we can all fly, then. Arryn, Arak, adow, Rockfist - do you have a way to fly?”
“Not exactly,” Arak Shade temporized, “But if you do, I can tag along. It’s close enough.”
“I can walk through the air, but not well enough to reach one of those islands. What I can do is shift space once you land. As long as I can see you, I can get to you.” Arryn paused, then glanced at adow and Rockfist appraisingly. “If I need to carry two others, I can do that once, maybe twice. On my own, I can manage a lot more jumps.”
adow shook her head. “Rockfist and I can’t fly. I might be able to hang on to soone and be carried, but that’s it. Rockfist definitely can.”
“I do earth, not air,” Rockfist concurred.
“I can summon an Echo to carry soone,” Sophia offered. “She might be able to handle two of you for short flights; we really haven’t needed to do that often since I reached the third upgrade but she should be strong enough.”
“Sounds like we have a plan, then.” Dav nodded and stepped through the door. He seed to flicker as he passed through the portal and staggered a step, then stopped at the edge of the platform and looked around. “Uh, we’re not on a building. This is a gigantic tree.”
Sophia moved forward. She had to see this; if it was a tree, it was bigger than any she’d ever seen, and she’d been to the great tree city known as Serenity, which had trees far larger than the old sequoias.
The mont she stepped across the line, the world vanished and she had to catch herself because the floor wasn’t exactly where she expected it to be. It was off by no more than an inch, but that was enough.
It also wasn’t floor. She was standing in a huge patch of flowers at the top of the bank of a stream.
Magic filled the space, dazzling her magesight, but despite that she could see an apparently human man sitting beside the stream smiling at her. He looked older than Sophia but younger than Arryn, with a little gray in his dark hair and more in his well-trimd beard. He wore practical but relatively new clothing, with a pair of leather bracers that didn’t look like they’d ever had a hawk land on them and a fancy-looking cloak with a design of dots and lines that shifted every few seconds.
No, those weren’t dots and lines. They were constellations, weren’t they?
The man nodded at Sophia, then stood and extended a hand. “Sophia? I think it’s long past ti for us to et. I’m Revanos ste’Ilian; you know as the Wanderer.”
Sophia shook the Wanderer’s hand as he clearly intended, then brought up the question that bothered her since she wasn’t hearing her friends’ voices in her head asking where she was. “Did I just disappear from in front of them? They’ll be worried.”
Revanos shook his head. “No more than Dav did when I spoke to him. You’ll only be gone for a mont, so long as we don’t spend too long here; most people can’t stand a Patron’s Realm for too long in any case. It’s one of the few freebies the Guide gives to Hallowed; whenever you step through a Gateway, your Patron can temporarily redirect it to lead to their Realm. When we’re done, you’ll step through on the other side almost as though you weren’t pulled away.”
Sophia frowned for a mont, then shrugged. That level of ti dilation was extre, but even greater dilation was possible for the Voice back ho. There was no reason to assu the Guide couldn’t manage it. “That’s what you ant when you said we’d talk when I went through the Gateway. You ant it literally, not that you’d be waiting on the other side.”
Revanos nodded. “I thought we’d be able to talk more normally, but the Broken Lands are even more damaged than I thought. I am very happy to have a Gateway open again, even if the one you picked will make it hard to send visitors your way; very few humans live on Arcatiz. Why did you choose Arcatiz?”
“An Archon built the interspace conduits between the crystal minds, which go through a heavily distorted corner of the Origin. That ans so of them used to know how to get there and might know how to cross universes so that Dav can get ho.”
“You want to leave?” The Wanderer looked thoughtful. “Well, I can’t say that I’d mind a new place to see.”
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