Before the Flood, their access to metals was restricted to the few surface deposits of ore they could find—and the metal to be found in their fellow sea drake’s bodies. Their growth was slow. Once the world flooded, vast cities of metals became available to them, and the population of the sea drakes boomed as they no longer had to fight each other for metals.

  -Lidian’s Manual to Magical Fauna, 283rd ed

  —

  Developing never before seen magics was a tricky sort of work that couldn’t be done in a single day. In fact, it took Kole five whole days before he managed to do it. Luckily for Kole, they were trapped in a strange realm with nothing to do but sit and wait.

  The success came while Zale was busy going over a summary of her findings. In watching the camp, she’d taken exhaustive notes on their patrol schedules and had a good idea of the camp's strength. 8,000 soldier ants made up the encampment, with only four of the stone people serving as the leadership. Patrols constantly moved in and out all day, each led by one of the stone people. With this knowledge, Zale established that there would be a point for forty-five minutes every day where the camp only had one stone man.

  All that information told them one thing, they were in trouble. There was no way they could sneak through that camp. Zale was pretty sure she could make her bracelet disguise her as one of the stone people, but it would be a stone person that had her features, and she suspected the camp would be a little wary of a random teenage stone girl showing up in their camp.

  When Kole suddenly disappeared from where he was laying on the ground as Zale was relaying her findings with an air of hopelessness, no one noticed.

  He had to fight down a cheer of success as he climbed to his feet. Everyone minus Amara—who was surveilling the camp—was sitting in a circle talking. Kole walked right into the middle of the group and clapped his hands.

  Everyone reacted to the sound, but after looking around for a moment and seeing nothing, went back to their conversations.

  “Hello?” Kole said, waving his hand in front of Zale’s face despite knowing she couldn’t see it.

  “Kole?” Zale asked, once more looking around, but this time with her eyes glazed slightly as she took in the world with her Willsight.

  The first time Kole had turned invisible in front of Rakin and Zale, they’d seen him through their extra senses. Zale smiled and waved to Kole, and he let out a big sigh.

  “That’s not fair, you literally see magic,” Kole said.

  “Who’re ye talkin to?” Rakin asked from behind.

  Kole spun around to face the dwarf.

  “Where’s Kole?” Rakin asked, squinting as if that would make his invisible friend appear.

  “Right here,” Kole said, stamping his foot on the ground.

  Rakin’s eyes snapped to Kole’s direction when he spoke, and he scowled deeper.

  “Did ye just teleport?” Rakin asked.

  “No,” Kole said. “I’ve been standing here the whole time.”

  “I didna sense ye on me tremor sense until ye spoke to me.” Rakin said, stroking his short trimmed beard.

  Moved to the side, making efforts to stay silent, and Rakin began looking around again.

  “Where’d ye go?” the dwarf asked.

  “It seems like if I’m trying to hide from you, I disappear from your tremor sense,” Kole said, and Rakin turned to face him. “But if I talk, you can sense me.”

  They continued testing the ability further, Zale eventually fetching Amara, who had Gus try to sniff Kole out. In the end, so long as they didn’t physically touch him—which would cause the spell to end anyway—they couldn’t find him if he didn’t wish to be found.

  They each tried the mental defense exercises they’d learned in class—even Amara had learned some in a class she took on mental vaults for the non-wizard. With the defenses active, the invisibility’s attention hiding aspect failed, and non-sight senses like smell could then pick up on him.

  “That’s extremely effective,” Zale said admiringly.

  Kole had felt elated at his success, but Zale’s praise brought that up to another level.

  “Aye,” Rakin said in agreement. “So are ye going in now, or later?”

  “Flood,” Kole cursed, having largely forgotten the purpose of his recent experiments.

  Kole walked slowly towards the camp, his heartbeat thrumming loudly in his ears as his adrenaline coursed through him.

  At least I know they won’t be able to hear it, Kole consoled himself.

  Despite being fairly certain he’d not be detected with his new enhanced invisibility, Kole had taken some precautions to further reduce the chance. Having been laying out in the dirt for three days under the light of a pseudo-sun, Kole had gotten a little stinky. He’d gone off to the river and cleaned himself and his clothes before setting off on this mission. It was unlikely they’d sense him where Rakin and Gus couldn’t, but it wasn’t worth testing fate.

  Crossing the river was his first challenge. The river by the camp was impassible, with workers digging away near its bank day in and day out—though with e never setting sun, there was no discernible difference from day in or out.

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  What does ‘day out’ even mean? Kole thought as he was wading through a shallow section where the river had grown wide and shallow enough to cross.

  While the camp was at the joining of two rivers, a bridge allowed the ant people access to the bank opposite the hill Kole and his friends had staked out. The bridge was formed of sculpted stone pulled up from the earth as one continuous piece free of seam or crack. The seamless construction reminded Kole of the stoneweaver works he had seen in the city. It was guarded by two soldier ants, each standing perfectly erect, their blank eyes staring out into the distance.

  Kole held his breath as he passed them, expecting them to sound an alarm at any moment. But the pair continued their silent vigil, not sensing him at all. By the time he made it across, he thought his heart was going to burst, it was beating so fast, and he had to stop himself and to calm down. If he allowed himself to get too flustered, the spell could fail, and that would give him a real reason to panic.

  After settling his nerves, Kole moved on towards the camp, keeping just to the side of the road.

  The camp was surrounded by an earthen rampart, with a deep ditch dug on the outside. As Kole got close, he could tell that some more Earth magic had been used to aid in its construction, because the slope of the walls was far too steep and smooth to have been constructed by the means he saw the ants working outside.

  He’d originally planned to scale the wall as it looked climbable from afar, but up close he realized that wouldn’t be happening. Instead, he stood by the gate—a massive iron thing set into the earthworks on either side—and waited. It didn’t take long for a cart drawn by scalequins and driven by one of the smaller ant people to come out of the gate, and Kole ducked in behind it before the gate even began to close.

  Aside from the residents all being seven foot tall ant people, the camp beyond the gate was exactly what Kole would have expected to see after reading up on the Midlian Empire. While they’d been pretty sure of the origins of these strange ant people, Kole was certain now.

  Either the empire turned into ant people, or they conquered some ant people and made them their soldiers, he thought.

  Kole navigated through the camp, heading towards the large tent they’d seen the stone people walk into. He had a general idea of the layout from looking at it from atop the hill, and he’d been certain it conformed to the standard Midlian Legion camp.

  On his way to his target, Kole passed through the central area of the camp, with the stone plinth, and had to stop, performing a double take. The thirty-foot tall stone pillar was a perfect replica of the Dahn. And once he’d realized that, he recognized the other shapes.

  “It’s the campus,” he said aloud to himself before he could stop it.

  He looked right to left, but no one was nearby.

  Is it a battle map? he wondered.

  Unable to pass this by, Kole moved over to investigate. On the edge of the clearing, one tent was open wide towards the miniature campus. Kole headed over, giving all the ant people working on the replicas a wide berth. Within, he saw tables of maps and diagrams. On closer inspection, they were all detailed maps of the city. The largest and most prominent document Kole saw without touching anything was a heavy marked up map. The map originally had shown two rivers near a mountain, but someone had gone over it with red ink, redrawing the lines of the waterways.

  Kole compared the map to the ones around him, and quickly realized what it was.

  They are sculpting the river to match the path of the ones around Edgewater! But why?

  Kole was eager to unravel the mystery but had spent long enough lingering. Looking everything over once more so he could recall it all with the aid of his spellbook, Kole left the tent and headed toward his target.

  The large tent served as the command tent. Kole didn’t know what he was looking for exactly, but he figured something able to block access to the Font of Space from miles away wouldn’t be easily missed. Going by that logic, the command tent was a bust. Kole was easily able to sneak in behind one of the countless couriers that came and went at all times.

  Table lined the inside of the tent and glass globes illuminated the place, emitting an orange light, similar to a torch. Kole tried to sense the magic from one as he got close but when he felt the heat of it realized it wasn’t Light magic but Fire.

  The stone man inside the tent was dressed in armor that Kole was certain denoted some lofty military rank, though he had no clue which. The man appeared human, if you ignored the fact his skin looked to be made of a tan rock and his hair a darker shade of the same. Despite that, he moved just as any other man would, but a quick glance at the reinforced furniture in the room suggested that to be a result of incredible strength.

  Kole made sure to stay as far from the man as possible. While Rakin couldn’t sense Kole with his tremor sense, Rakin hadn’t literally been made out of stone, and Kole suspected this man might have more acute senses.

  Once it became clear the rather spartan tent lacked his quarry, Kole tried to get a glimpse of one of the dispatches that came and went a seemingly endless tide.

  Unfortunately, the dispatches were not written—if that indeed was what they were. Each courier that entered gave the tent’s sole occupant a stone chit and took one in return. The stone man would hold each in his hand thoughtfully before grabbing a fresh one from his pocket, holding it for a moment and giving it to the courier.

  The only clue as to what this army was up to were the maps spread out over the tables, but even that wasn’t helpful in the specifics. They depicted every major city in Basin, the one of Edgewater prominent amongst them all on the table before the commander. Obviously, they were planning some sort of invasion, Kole knew that already. What he didn’t know was how or when they planned to do it.

  Up close the man seemed aged. If he were human, Kole would have guessed him to be in his sixties, but who knew how long these creatures of earth could live.

  Once he was certain that the room was empty of his goal, Kole snuck out behind the next courier.

  Where to next?

  Kole surveyed the tents around him. Their plan had obviously been flawed, and in hindsight the presence of the people in charge didn’t mean much, but it had been all they had to go on. But now in the thick of things, Kole had to adjust.

  He spent a while walking up the rows of identical tents, marveling at what he saw. Soldier ants everywhere, going about their day-to-day lives. Some worked at forges, repairing arms while others talked in bars in a strange clicking language Kole couldn’t understand—though he always felt just on the edge of comprehension.

  In this wandering, Kole came across a tent completely ringed with guards. The tent wasn’t particularly large, half the size of the command tent he’d been in before, but that still left it twice the size of the rest of the tents. This tent boasted six armed soldier ant guards.

  Kole had grown confident in his invisibility and nearly walked right in through the flap before catching himself.

  Best I don’t let them see the flap open on its own.

  Kole didn’t have to wait too long for a soldier ant to come up to the tent with a sack in two of its four arms. The guards gave him a once over and waived him in, and Kole barely reacted fast enough to run in behind him. He had to push the flap open slightly to make it in, but no one noticed the slight alteration to the closing.

  Within glass orbs of fire dimly lit the room just like the command tent. By that light Kole could make out what seemed to be a pale human with black hair half buried in some brown potato sacks

  The soldier ant took his sack into the tent, and tossed it in toward the man in the middle and shouted a word Kole was almost certainly “eat” but with a few clicks thrown in.

  Is this some far drifted Rilith? he thought, certain he’d understood the word.

  The man in the center looked at the soldier with disdain, but then his eyes turned and focused on Kole.

  Gods! Of course, he could see me!

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