Ivalié stepped forward through the light of time, his massively overgrown beard hanging down over his newly robed chest.

  He pushed a pair of broken, uncomfortable spectacles up his nose, squinted in an attempt to make some use of them. When he still couldn't see, he discarded them off to the side.

  Then he stepped forward onto the basalt platform which overlooked the city—a city covered in the amber glow of combat, the black smog of siege, the blue riptides of lightning searing through the battlements as mages made fierce battle miles, miles beneath him. A marble city, a glowing, magnificent place, a place where every building was carefully architected like they were each cathedrals…

  “It's…”

  “Morbid,” filled in the voice from behind him.

  He spun in alarm, his hand impulsively went for the ley—no magic came to him.

  The room was dark; Ivalié could just barely see the edge of the throne against the far wall. But when the figure stood amidst the darkness, blue bulbs lit up all over his gauntlets, let him be seen through the dim cobalt light.

  “I've come intending no harm—am I in Caloria?”

  The man shook his head. He looked weathered, worn down… His frame was large in a way which belied his exasperated facial features, the gray of his skin, the white of his beard and topknot.

  “I'm looking for Caloria. Please tell me there's a way—do you bear passage to adjacent realms, here?”

  “We did. Once.”

  Ivalié narrowed his eyes. “The ley is dead. Those are magi beneath us?”

  Then, the man began to approach. His golden crown slid off his head and rattled when it hit the tile floor.

  Ivalié backpedaled slightly, seeing then how big those metal gauntlets really were upon the man's hands.

  “You—you speak Huntish!?” Ivalié stammered, put up his hand to shield himself. “This realm can't be far off! Please, I've come so far—I need to know that there's a way back!”

  The man stopped once the light touched his worn face. His forlorn expression showed that he desired no conflict. But then, Ivalié knew how desires could betray intent.

  He began with a deep breath. “My name is Ivalié. I've come from a realm named Caloria—I was brought out of my home by an acquaintance of mine, one Jirtu… er, I don't know his surname. But he brought me beyond the borders of my realm, and I've wound up here in an attempt to reach my home plane again. Can you tell me where I am?”

  The man snorted. “This is Eztharil. I am Seig. This was once my realm.”

  “Okay. Okay, good. Eztharil… I'm not familiar. Can you enlighten me as to how magic functions in this plane?”

  “It doesn't.”

  The mage raised a brow. “It doesn't?”

  “Not so far that any of us know. We just have… these.” He lifted his gauntlets to inspect them. The stones flared up.

  “Mage bulbs?”

  “We call them Godstones.”

  “Godstones… Then, they function as magic does?”

  Sieg smacked his lips as though unsure. As though contemplating his next move.

  “If I could just take a look—”

  “You’re out of line.”

  Ivalié winced. “I don’t mean to offend. Please, I’m just trying to find my way home… Are you… You were the king of this realm?” He slowly lowered himself to the ground. “I prostrate myself before you, my liege. Let this show that I bear no ill intent by stepping foot here. But you saw as well as I did, I appeared here suddenly, without warning… such phenomenon is only explainable by magic, isn’t it?”

  “And I very well believe it was the gauntlet which brought you here.”

  Sieg began to stomp forward, slowly. Ivalié looked down to the floor, watched the sweat bead down from his forehead and stick softly upon the floor.

  The king stopped just shy of his head. It would have only taken one swift gesture, and that would be it… that would be…

  BWOM.

  The ground shook when one of Sieg’s gauntlets fell from his wrist. The magi looked up at it in shock.

  “You may take a look. I have very little to lose at this point regardless of if you’d use it to kill me, anyway.”

  “Thank you,” he gasped, grasped out frantically for it.

  The king stepped away, loomed over the precipice where Ivalié had once stood. He folded his hands behind his back, watched over the horror which had befallen his city.

  Ivalié took the glove in careful speculation, looked closely at every inch of it. It was made of a sleek black metal, silver grooves followed the traces where tendons would be within the flesh if it were a hand. The inside of the palm was white; it looked as though the black had been burned out of the metal, the magic within had stolen the very color from the device.

  Ivalié didn’t dare put it on. He didn’t know how it would affect him, nor whether the king would see that as some form of retaliation. Instead, he shifted his focus to those blue bulbs glowing within each of the knuckles.

  “And these are… Godstones.” He brushed his fingers against one. He twisted it just gently enough to see if it would move.

  But instead, he moved—it felt as though the world itself shifted around him and everything was suddenly a dream within a dream. He saw the king sitting upon his throne almost in a black and white vignette, saw the king’s fierce battle just beyond the hall, watched him slam shut the door to the throneroom and bar it with a chunk of wood that had fallen from the rafters during his engagement.

  Then Ivalié was back. His head throbbed in pain.

  “Your… my liege,” the words were uncomfortable in his mouth, “This is…” His head moved up to the door where the battle had taken place in his mind, just a dozen or so feet away from the throne.

  And he saw the handles slowly twist.

  “An attack!”

  Ivalié spun and hurled the gauntlet at Sieg before realizing—his heart sank before he saw that the man was more than ready, had easily caught it in his other gauntlet. He slipped it onto his bare hand with ease, and all the bulbs flared to life. “You a fighter?”

  “Not by any stretch.” The mage backpedaled toward the cliff, held his hands aloft as though wielding his old staff.

  “Well they’re here for me, anyway. There’s a library down below…” Sieg plucked one of the gemstone out of his gauntlet, flicked it in Ivalié’s direction.

  The mage barely caught it, bounced it between his hands. Once he’d caught a firm grip, that sensation rattled through him again, sent him down spiraling staircases, sent him down to the very pit of the castle, to the heart of the ruined capital.

  “Someone worked for me once, in that place. I believe he may have left behind the answers which you seek.”

  “But what about—”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  Stolen story; please report.

  The wooden beam holding the door shut suddenly lit up down the center, sliced by a silent knife. The pieces fell to either side with two loud slams before the door thrust open.

  “Go!” Sieg barked, charging.

  Ivalié’s eyes bulged; in came soldiers in armor like chainmail, formulated entirely of those bulbs. They glowed all over, filled the once dark chamber with near blinding light, phosphorescent jellyfish in a black sea.

  And Ivalié, in an instant, had no escape from the room.

  “Fuck!” he whined as Sieg rushed at them, threw a fist which at once decapitated one of those glowing soldiers. His head flew off and blasted a hole through the wall behind him, crumbled dust and detritus down across the whole chamber.

  Ivalié had no room left to backpedal, finally feeling the step onto the precipice at his heel. There was only one way out, and he turned his head in horrible realization to look at it.

  Sieg threw another blow from his left, missed as his target ducked beneath it. They thrust their glowing dagger up from below, stuck it through the fat of his forearm. The impact reverberated through the flesh, and just like that, his arm was severed.

  The king stumbled back with a cry of agony. He held aloft his remaining gauntlet, but it was quickly becoming a futile struggle.

  Then another blade severed that arm. The man fell low—off came his head.

  Ivalié swallowed his anxieties. He commanded, “Dammit, ley, don't abandon me now!”

  And with that, he threw himself from the balcony.

  The wind whipped at his face in a way he'd never felt before, it felt impossible to breathe, his stomach sank impulsively as his body reacted involuntary to the suggestion of a horrible death by impacting the stone courtyard far, far below him.

  But he held in his hand that glowing blue ball, he held it tightly, he demanded of it a fate better than death.

  “Somewhere safe… somewhere safe!”

  He shut his eyes. He prayed. Even to Azafel and Evra, he prayed.

  When he next opened his eyes, he was hitting the ground—nowhere near as hard as he ought to have. He fell to the cobbles, sprawled out, sucked in a breath of fresh air, exasperated.

  “The ley… the ley works as it once did! It just takes…” He looked to the bulb in his hand. “It just takes these.”

  Then came shadows lunging over the stone fences encircling the courtyard, prompted by his excitement.

  He quickly tried to sit up, but found a steel spear at his throat. He saw at once that the base of the spear was implanted with one such gem.

  “State your name,” commanded the fierce-eyed woman beyond the weapon.

  “I am Ivalié,”

  She looked to her arriving comrades with some modicum of confusion.

  “And I hail from Caloria!”

  BZZZZPT!

  Lightning tore through the air between them. He lifted the sphere aloft and just like that:

  KA-BOOM!

  A blast of lightning ripped down from the sky and cleared everybody from his vicinity at once. The crystal glowed with power it had never known.

  He grinned wildly as he stood. It's not that magic doesn't exist… it's that they don't understand how it works!

  It didn't take much longer for him to find the library, nor for him to clear out the remaining soldiers who barred his path there. He felt alive with the Godstone, in a way magic in Caloria had never made him feel. The amount of energy within the bulb was unthinkable, not to mention the very idea that low-ley environments would no longer be a problem with such a device in the hands of every valuable magi all across his home plane.

  The thoughts were intoxicating. The future held such value; he'd bring a new revolution to Caloria. He'd make them see the Age of Magic, grander than even the Age of Etherians.

  But first, he'd have to get back.

  The library was a cluster of bookshelves with seemingly no order, some kind of labyrinth with a center beneath a grand chandelier, visible even from the very edge of the massive domed room.

  Ivalié saw the Godstones in the walls as he entered, lifted his own into the air and watched as they all lit up, filled the room with brilliant light.

  Then he looked to the chandelier. In the blink of an eye, he was beneath it. He grinned again, still in wonderment at the effects of the strange crystals.

  He felt it rattle in his hand, then. The sensation brought pause to his enjoyment, and immediately he was looking around in alarm.

  There came the tapping of rushed footsteps from behind him.

  Ivalié spun out of the path like a dancer, laid his eyes upon his assailant at once:

  A boy? Dark-haired, but still so alike in age and appearance to one Cedric Castelbre. Perhaps this was his mirror self, the Cedric of a parallel dimension?

  In his hand was a great glowing sword of that same blue magic Ivalié had become so familiar with. And with the swing came a blast of raw magic so devastatingly wide, Ivalié was immediately shocked that it hadn't struck him.

  “The crown is upstairs, usurper. Leave me beyond your conflict.”

  Ivalié scrunched his brow. “You have me mistaken for another. I'm not here for your crown—I was told there's something in here, a way for me to return to my home plane?”

  The man grit his teeth, swung the weapon again through the air.

  The riptide coursed from the blade. Ivalié had only an instant to react, and he stuck the blue bulb out in the path of the shockwave.

  BROOOOOOSH…

  The attack warped around him like a fierce gust of wind, left him unscathed.

  The man raised a singular brow. “A magi from another realm, then? Where are you from?”

  Ivalié didn't release the bulb. He still held it there before himself, a test of his courage. “I hail from Caloria.”

  That seemed to bring some alarm to the man's face. He lowered his sword slightly, lowered his guard almost altogether. “From Caloria?”

  “So you know then that it'll be better for your health to let me use your device and escape your plane. Right?”

  The boy hesitated. “Right.”

  Ivalié lowered his bulb. He only looked at the sword in the man's hand and that was prompt enough for him to lower it.

  As the magi approached, and the man backpedaled, he asked, “What about your name?”

  Another tense pause. “Cedric.”

  The mage’s eyes sprung open. “Then it is true—you're the Cedric of this realm?”

  “I didn't realize there was another.”

  “Well… You bear a resemblance, to say the least.” Ivalié took a longer look at him and agreed with himself: “Yes… It's so strange, but… The features aren't identical, but the aura is the same. Like brothers.”

  The man didn't reply.

  Then Ivalié looked down to the map on the table before him.

  It wasn't a map of a realm. It was a map of a device that could be crafted from the Godstones, a map underneath it which communicated every such realm which could be reached from such things. The mage was left in astonishment at the ingenuity. “And I thought the library of Shogal-B?z was impressive… This is incredible. You made this yourself?”

  “I did.”

  “Is it possible to track someone through these means? I see that you used traces to identify realms, traces locked within Godstones… If I had something touched by magic, would that let us trace the source of that magic?”

  “...It would.”

  Ivalié looked to him. “I can't expect to impress upon you the politics of my own realm, nor the stakes of the coming battle… But if there's a way to track a trace… I need a hand.”

  The man didn't speak again. He looked away, lost in thought.

  “Please. There are great things at stake. There's a man—Kasian—”

  The boy's eyes flared madly at the mention of that name. He swung his weapon through the air with force entirely driven by rage.

  Ivalié still had the bulb in his hand—he brought it up just in time to deflect the attack, and then—

  BAM!

  A flare of raw magic shot back at the man, bounced against his blade and made it flicker with fierce, uncontrollable magic.

  “I'm simply asking a favor!” hissed Ivalié. “Unless, you're…?”

  He swung the blade again. The lights flared and flashed, shot more magic before the swing than through the arc and ravaged the ceiling, dropped chunks of stone all around.

  The stones crumbled between them—dust separated their line of sight from each other.

  The last thing Ivalié saw was the glare of his eyes before the smoke occluded them completely.

  “...Kasian?”

  He clutched the marble firmly in his hand, let its cool surface engulf him.

  Come now. You know the ley just as well as he does—surely it's all the same...!

  There flashed images through his mind of the realms, of platinum Evra, of chilling, primordial Azafel...

  And then came that horrible purgatory of interplanar transport.