RE: Monarch

After parting with Kilvius and returning to the castle, I spent the rest of my evening in the royal library with Alten, risking the librarian’s ire with an open flame. There were mana lamps in the library. However, the dwarven technology was still a luxury in this iteration of Whitefall, and they automatically turned off late in the evening and early in the morning. When I tried to convince the librarian to cycle them back on for me—first with charm, and when that didn’t work, direct bribes—I was given an earful on exactly how expensive the lamps were, and how difficult they were to charge.

The lamp cores were charged in bulk, the large inscribed-metal mana powering modules within them removed from their ornate housing and stacked into a pile on an evening when ambient mana was densest. Ambient mana correlated with darkness, so historically, times of high mana concentration coincided with various celestial events. According to various records, something as simple as a lamp core could be charged in seconds during an eclipse. But as eclipses were rare, and only tentatively predictable, the next best time to charge the cores was the start of the lunar cycle, when the moon itself disappeared. Which effectively meant expending too much of the cores’ energy would ensure they expired well before their charge time.

When I commented that this felt oddly primitive and finicky, considering the technology, the librarian gave me a strange look.

“By dwarven standards, this is relatively pedestrian,” she said. “You’re lucky these are new constructions.”

“Oh?” I was tired, and mostly being polite.

The librarian nodded solemnly. “There are still quirks, but modern dwarven engineers have traded much for the sort of clockwork efficiency we have today. People laud the old constructions and mourn the simplicity of the new, but they always seem to conveniently forget how difficult the more legendary devices were to maintain.”

Thinking back to the complicated process of repairing the dimension gate, she was probably onto something. With that in mind, I let it go. But I got a sense she wasn’t too happy with the lantern on the table that served as a substitute.

Alten sat back, worn down and bleary-eyed, tome splayed out on the table before him on the same page it had been for a while. “I just read the same line five times in a row, and my mind didn’t bother informing me till the last.”

“Fabled Beasts of Stone and Shadow not doing it for you?” I joked.

He didn’t answer at first, and returned to squinting at the text, then seemed to finally register that I’d said something. “The writer’s unnecessarily obtuse. Uses a lot of gilded words to overcomplicate simple concepts.”

“Peril of the trade.”

“If it was fiction, maybe.” Alten scowled. “This is a reference. Stop tryin’ to show me how smart you are and let me reference what needs to be referenced.”

“Hear, hear.”

I blinked several times, trying to banish the sleep from my eyes. My volume, Beasts of the Enchanted Woodlands, wasn’t much better. I’d selected it in hopes I’d find something to support my current theory. Whitefall’s monster infestation had to come from somewhere, and considering the expanse of magical forest just beyond our walls, it wasn’t a huge logical leap to conclude that the monsters in question probably came from the Everwood. What I’d found was a massive swath of unorganized text that constantly flirted with verse and flowery imagery, to the point I was suspecting the academic who wrote it had aspirations for poetry.

Once I was past the presentation, I could understand why Kilvius and whoever else was looking into this were having so much trouble narrowing it down. There wasn’t really anything that fit. I’d researched along similar lines before in the infernal archives, looking for the source of my doppelgänger during the enclave siege.

Changelings were a real possibility, but their process of overtaking a host was messy, and for that matter, they were fiercely territorial with an excellent sense of smell. If multiple changelings were active in Whitefall, they’d be too busy hunting each other to enact abductions on this significant a scale.

Jinn were rare and too cruelly focused on individual victims to fit. They’d take over your life and blow it up in front of you for laughs, but they weren’t subtle, and lacked the mechanical efficiency we were dealing with.

There were a few other possibilities that sounded too mythical to be real, and I was beginning to sense the familiar disappointment of a dead end.

I snapped the book shut and placed it at the top of the stack. “Wish we had access to the infernal archives. Their texts are better, but I’m pretty sure the king wouldn’t appreciate me running back there so soon.”

Alten gave me a dry look.

“What?”

“While I’m not exactly particular to this continent, and don’t doubt the infernals have better records—they’d have to, with all the magic and whatnot—I’m getting the impression you’re one of those people.”

“Which people?”

Alten leaned back and put a boot up on the table. Someone cleared their throat irritably, and he quickly removed it. “Boastful travelers. Otherphiles. The kind that can’t stop talking about how much better wherever they visited is compared to where they came from.”

“Am not.” I crossed my arms and tried not to smile. Alten was irritable from the lack of results, but it felt more familiar than mean-spirited. He’d been less guarded with me since our impromptu meeting with Kilvius, and the last thing I wanted to do was stop the development flat.

“Want me to prove it?”

“Go ahead.”

Alten leaned forward, as if he was about to spill a grand secret. “Panthanian. Wine.”

I blinked. “Well, that’s just demonstrably better.”

“See?” He pointed a finger at me and returned to the text, wetting his thumb and turning the page at the corner. I pushed on for nearly another hour before I faced the unfortunate reality that this wasn’t the sort of problem we could solve in a single night. The dawn beyond the ornate windows was already beginning to glow with the beginnings of first light.

A warm sensation radiated through the amulet at my neck, signaling that Vogrin was awake. That was a good sign and an indicator that some of the simpler modifications to my inscriptions were working. Inscriptions couldn’t increase the size of my mana stores—if they could, I expected the practice would be far more common—but they could better filter impurities in the mana itself, which in turn would last longer and sustain a demonic summon better.

I focused in, pushing mana from my chest into the amulet, more vividly feeling the process as it navigated the containment channels and fed enough into it for Vogrin to manifest.

The demon popped into existence with a shimmer, and Alten nearly fell out of his chair.

Vogrin chuckled, then turned to me. “Not quite as good as when we were in the sanctum, but still a notable improvement. You implemented the inscriptions we spoke of?”

When I told him I had, he seemed pleased.

“Good. I’ll be feeling the effects of the transition for some time, but this will help smooth the adjustment. How I yearn for the ancient times, when ambient mana was plentiful everywhere.” There was a touch of genuine longing in his voice.

“Careful.” I said, “Alten will call you an otherphile.”

Vogrin raised an eyebrow and shifted toward the guard. Alten didn’t look up from his book, but his audible huff made up for the lack of reaction.

I recounted the events of the last day to Vogrin, paying special care to Annette’s mystery voices and the unidentified monster spiriting away infernals and elves in Topside.

“The voices could be anything,” Vogrin mused, his expression grim. “Illness of the mind. Or a malady of the spirit manifesting itself in an uncommonly direct way. Simple isolation alone is a well-documented source of hallucinations. That being said, aural projections are a common form of early demonic ingress. I’ll need to observe her before I’m able to say more. This however, is far more interesting.”

Vogrin skimmed through my notes, looking more befuddled with every page. “You were right to exclude the changelings. There aren’t many magical beings capable of working together so cohesively, even fewer capable of subsisting in a city center under the nose of a cabal of mages, incompetent as they are. None that I can think of that can operate so meticulously and impulsively enough to kill for pleasure.”

That last point wasn’t mentioned in my notes, and I picked up on it immediately, as did Alten, who glanced at me in alarm.

“You don’t think they’re just feeding?” I asked.

Vogrin shook his head. “Unless I’m missing something. This is over what period of time?”

“Half a year that we know about,” Alten said.

“Then almost certainly not,” Vogrin replied. “Unless they’re constantly under threat, which if they were, I doubt it could have stayed quiet, they’re killing because they enjoy it.”

“Still not understanding how you’re reaching that conclusion.” Alten frowned.

Vogrin sighed, ignoring him and leveling a long-suffering look at me. “Despite the sanctum being chock-full of dangerous magical creatures who feed on mana, the infernals feel comfortable sending their children into it. Why?”

I considered my experiences. “Because most of the creatures aren’t overly aggressive. They’re territorial, and their behavior becomes more volatile on lower strata, which means comparatively speaking, it’s mostly safe.” The “mostly” was doing a lot of work there. The sanctum was confusing, and while it was mostly safe if you stuck to the entry level, it wasn’t always clear how deep you were.

“Why aren’t they aggressive?” Vogrin pressed.

“Because there’s plenty to eat?” I guessed, not sure where exactly he was going with this.

“Yes, and no. What you have to remember is nearly every piece of flora and fauna within the sanctum is magical. It’s in the air they breathe, the soil they tread on. Every time they hunt, every time they consume, they receive a huge influx of fuel from their prey, be it animal or otherwise. Coincidentally, this is also why many of the same creatures outside are far more aggressive than their sanctum counterparts.”

“And that explains why they’re suddenly getting their jollies off by hunting demi-humans how?” Alten asked, flipping the cover of his book shut and focusing on Vogrin.

“Because you have to consider their prey,” Vogrin said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. “Their victims are mortal adults with a reasonable amount of mana. Ignoring their territorial tendencies for the sake of hypothesis, if two dozen changelings were holed up in a derelict building and somehow miraculously evaded detection, they would need, perhaps, a quarter of these victims at most, over a much longer period.”

Alten’s expression grew dark. “So, we’re either dealing with a much larger infestation than we thought—”

“—Unlikely, considering how long they’ve remained undetected,” Vogrin cut in.

“Or we have intelligent creatures hunting high mana targets for sport,” I finished grimly.

“Which, in all honesty, still doesn’t sit right with me.” Vogrin hesitated, seeming torn. “There is a final possibility. One so improbable and dire I find myself reluctant to voice it, as it may redirect you from more fruitful avenues.”

“Go ahead.”

Vogrin shivered. “The chance is infinitely small. But the pattern cannot be ignored—mass disappearances for purposes of mana harvesting, using times of unrest and upheaval as cover—we may be looking at the rebirth of an abyssal god.”