Keiran

Eyrie Peak was the largest mountain in the range by a mile. In fact, it was one of the largest I’d ever seen, its height dwarfed only by Ammun’s tower thousands of miles northwest of here. The peak of the mountain had been ripped off, leaving a relatively shallow—compared to the rest of the mountain—depression in the top. That chunk of stone was a few thousand feet overhead, floating up beyond the clouds and full of the interred bodies of dead brakvaw.

I’d never gotten an accurate count of the living brakvaw, especially not after they’d had a bit of a civil war a few years back once their leader had finally managed to come down from their floating graveyard to oversee the mountain personally. His elder council hadn’t liked that one bit since it meant they were no longer free to flout his commands and run things as they saw fit.

Things had gotten messy, and I’d have been content to stay out of it except for the fact that some of the splinter factions had started targeting human settlements. That had dragged me into the middle of the problems and resulted in me assassinating four of their elders and opening a portal to another continent to expand their hunting grounds so as to keep them all from starving when they returned to Eyrie Peak.

Of course, that portal had to be shut down once Ammun woke up, and I’d been obliged to make a whole new network of sixteen portals to unleash the scourge of giant carnivorous corvids on wildlife all over the world. I’d been well-compensated for that work, so I couldn’t complain.

For all of that, though, our alliance was tenuous. Most of the brakvaw didn’t like me, and some of them for good reason, but Grandfather wasn’t in that camp, and he kept the rest of his people from attacking me on sight. It was with only a nominal amount of caution that I appeared on the teleportation platform I’d left at Eyrie Peak. I wasn’t expecting to be attacked, but I was ready to respond if I was.

To my surprise, the platform was unguarded. That didn’t usually happen, not that the brakvaw stood over it like a human soldier might, but there was always one or two of them in the area to notice someone showing up. Today… nothing.

Tendrils of scrying magic extended in every direction to give me a better picture of what was going on, only to reveal more of the same. The mountain seemed to be abandoned, something that hadn’t happened even when two-thirds of their population had moved to other hunting grounds. And I’d just spoken with Grandfather a few hours ago, which would have been the perfect opportunity for him to warn me if something big was going on.

Did this have something to do with Ammun’s mage hunters? Individually, I doubted any of them were a match for an adult brakvaw. But they certainly had the numbers to swarm the entire colony if they wanted. It was just hard to imagine what the point would be. Portal networks weren’t unique, and they were well inside Ammun’s expertise to create himself. They weren’t even that expensive to maintain.

I took to the skies while I hunted for signs of brakvaw. At first, I was only mildly curious, but when three minutes of scrying confirmed for me that there were none anywhere on Eyrie Peak, I started to get concerned.

Everyone else might be gone, but Grandfather physically couldn’t leave. He was permanently tethered to the bowl at the top of the mountain so that he could channel the spell that kept their floating graveyard aloft. Even in his sleep, he cycled mana through the massive construct. The only way he was moving was if Querit was able to figure out lossless enchanting, or he died.

Given that I didn’t see the wreckage of a floating island strewn across the top of the mountain, it seemed safe to assume that Grandfather would still be there. When I flew closer, however, I didn’t see the enormous grayfeather perched in his customary nest. Knowing how little he could actually move from there was the hint I needed.

I was trapped in some sort of enchantment, probably triggered the instant I had arrived at the Eyrie Peak teleportation platform, which meant that the mysterious third master mage who’d fled was far, far more dangerous than I’d given him credit for.

Now that I knew what to look for, I could sense the ethereal threads of the enchantment surrounding me. The formation wasn’t one I was familiar with, but all enchantments shared the same weaknesses. If they ran out of mana, they starved and broke. All I had to do was start pulling, and things would unravel on their own.

“Lord Ammun did warn me that you’d be more formidable than anyone else I’d ever faced,” a voice said from nowhere. “But it appears I underestimated you. I thought I’d have more time to work. No matter. Just becoming aware of the dream net doesn’t mean you can escape its clutches.”

The enchantment shifted around me, its threads slipping through my grasp as it did. Laughter echoed through empty air, and Eyrie Peak faded away. Instead of the familiar mountain, I stood in a fog-filled forest, greener than anything I’d seen since being reborn. I wondered briefly if the illusion was based on some real place the masked mage had actually seen, or if it was wholly imagined.

The one thing I was sure of was that my attacker hadn’t managed anything deeper than a surface-level enchantment on my mind. Even that was surprising; my shield ward should have at least alerted me to a hostile action. Whoever this mage was, he was archmage-level good at enchanting. Was this Ammun’s plan then? If he couldn’t field an actual archmage against me, he’d form teams with individual skill sets that picked up each other’s slack?

It wasn’t the worst idea I’d ever heard, but it lacked the kind of synergy having all that knowledge and skill in one person gave. That was how I kept picking them off, by finding the gaps in their techniques and exploiting them. This guy was very, very good at what he did, but I knew all about enchanting, too. More than that, I knew the weakness to this kind of attack.

He couldn’t be very far away if he was actively manipulating it, possibly so close that he was touching me. He was hijacking my senses and motor functions, essentially keeping me paralyzed, blinded, and deafened. I couldn’t move my mouth to chant the runes of a spell, but I didn’t need to. I just needed to understand that the spells I thought I’d been casting hadn’t been real, and burrow past that to tap into my true mana core.

I hoped there were no brakvaw nearby.

Even trapped in this enchantment, I’d maintained the shield around my core that made it invisible to others. And the master-tier spell known as inferno took no time at all to cast. Usually, the pre-spell setup was for creating the wards needed to prevent the spell from cooking me alongside everything else, since I would by necessity of design be at the exact center of it.

I’d just have to trust my shield ward to keep me safe. No doubt the enchanter was attacking it right now, trying to overcome it by draining its mana so he could kill me. If he did a good enough job, I was in trouble. If not, I’d walk away unharmed.

I couldn’t see the light or feel the heat, but fire washed out of me in every direction, swirling around and around. Anything and everything nearby was scoured down to the bare stone. At first, nothing changed, but then the enchantment started to waver. I latched onto it instantly and ripped the mana out of it.

The illusion surrounding me faded away, revealing the teleportation platform at Eyrie Peak. There were no brakvaw near me, thankfully, but there was one very blackened corpse about three feet away. It was facedown, turned away from me as if it had been running away when the flames caught it. Smoke rolled off its twisted and distorted limbs.

I wouldn’t be asking him too many questions, not unless I wanted to delve back into necromancy and pull his soul back from beyond the veil. But no, I’d sworn off that power. Never again would I bring back the dead. It only caused more problems.

No less than six brakvaw were winging toward me from different directions, probably attracted by the burst of light and heat my spell had caused. If I had to guess, my attacker had probably woven some sort of magic to trick the normal watchers into leaving the platform unguarded so that he could ambush me the instant I came through, when I was most vulnerable.

I took a moment to recharge my shield ward, now almost completely drained, while the brakvaw closed in. Luckily, I recognized a few of them. When they landed, I just said, “I’ll need to speak to Grandfather right away. This shouldn’t have happened.”

I used telekinesis to shake down the corpse, hoping to find something that would clue me in to how the mage had escaped custody and set up a trap. I had some theories, but I wanted evidence before I spoke to Grandfather. My spell had been a bit too thorough, however. It was hard to feel too bad about it when I’d been facing an unknown, invisible attacker. Better to kill him than to let him escape, or worse, break through my defenses.

Theories would have to do. Grandfather and I had a strong working relationship. He’d listen to me.

My examination of the corpse complete, I flew up into the air and let two of the brakvaw accompany me up the side of the mountain. This time, there were plenty of giant birds perched on their nests, and even more of them flying through the sky. I gazed down at the wall of portals I’d built for them and wondered which ones I’d be breaking. Hopefully the brakvaw had a better idea than me.

Grandfather’s projection appeared in the sky next to me as we flew past the portals. “Keiran,” he said, “I’m afraid the intruder managed to escape and fled.”

“He didn’t go far, just down to the teleportation platform, where he used powerful illusions and enchantments to hide,” I said. “I was forced to kill him to save myself, which leaves me in a bit of a quandary.”

“What’s that?”

“Originally, I thought the force that found my home came overland, flying or teleporting the whole way. Then the one that got away was waiting to ambush me here instead of fleeing. Why here, of all places? How could they know that I’d come here?”

Grandfather followed my eyes down to the portals. “You said it was impossible for anyone who wasn’t keyed in to use the portals.”

“It is,” I said. “What’s not impossible is someone else keying more people in, and this group showed a surprising amount of skill.”

“But we would have seen a few humans coming through.”

I shook my head. “Maybe, but the one that nearly got me was sitting on your teleportation platform for what I assume was several hours, completely undetected. He even managed to drive away the brakvaw who should have been watching it. It’s entirely possible that they had a teleportation specialist who managed to key them into the portal to go along with the enchantment specialist who allowed them to pass through undetected.”

“These portals aren’t safe then,” Grandfather said.

“No.”

“But we need access to the hunting grounds.”

“I know. Talk to your people. Find out which portals lead to places with human activity. Maybe I can shut down a single portal for now. In the meantime, I’m going to add some heavy detection wards, independent of the portals themselves, which will hopefully prevent anyone who does manage to come through from hiding. At the very least, you’ll know about future intruders.”

Our plans laid, Grandfather and I separated. I cast a few temporal divinations to try to discover which portal had been infiltrated, but got nothing in return. Still, I didn’t think I was wrong. Just in case I was, though, I needed to secure my parents’ home as well.

One problem at a time.