Chapter XIX (19)

  After an hour of ripping, banging, and indulging every violent intrusive thought to cross her mind on the treasure trove of inanimate objects, Mitsuko flopped back on the pile of gold coins. Despite all the damage, almost everything looked pristine. The magic items, as it turned out, could not be repaired by her spell. The enchantments required too much of a toll for the first level of her Mend spell to manage. Some of the mundane things were also now displaced from their original positions. A stone bust with gem eyes lay on the floor, for example, was too heavy to replace on its pedestal after it fell. And yet, there wasn’t a single chip in the stone floor from the statue’s impact.

  “Why don’t the objects revert back to their original placement?” Mitsuko asked Sterling.

  The sage rolled his eyes, as if the answer was obvious. “I cannot say. It encroaches too closely to a question that would require a level up.”

  “Seriously? This is just part of the spell you said you’d coach me on.”

  He said nothing. She frowned. Perhaps it was part of the spell’s future potential? He only told her about the capabilities of the current level. Which wasn’t much.

  “Fine,” she said, standing up. “Well if you’re not going to help me anymore, then I’m going to go find my friend. You said she’s been wandering around the city’s empty streets.”

  “Correct. She’s still there from what I can see.”

  “How can you see her?”

  He raised an eyebrow at her and smirked. Useless asshat.

  She grabbed handfuls of gold and stuffed them into her pockets. And snatched up an enchanted helmet for good measure.

  “I’m going,” she announced. “Anything you want to say first?”

  “Speak to me again when you’ve leveled. There’s much you need to know and I will guide you to the next sage. And practice Mend. You cannot fathom the power of my spell. I never settle for anything other than the best and that includes my spell specialization.”

  “What will you do in the meantime?”

  Their entire conversation, Sterling had stood with perfect posture and hands behind his back. He might be barely more than a ghost or spirit, but just looking at his rigidness made her back ache.

  “I will be where I am needed.” Then he took a step backward and passed through a cabinet filled with golden tableware, vanishing.

  “You could at least tell me where Holly is in the city.”

  She glared at the cabinet but got no response.

  It took several hours of stumbling around the forgotten city before she finally found her gnome friend. Even covered in soot and standing barely at a height with Mitsuko’s stomach, Holly’s purple hair still stood out in the bleak empty streets.

  She didn’t notice as Mitsuko approached. Holly’s full attention was on a large book she held in both hands. The gnome simply stood there, in the middle of the street, engrossed in reading.

  “Hey,” Mitsuko called out once she got within speaking range.

  The book nearly flew out of Holly’s hand as she jumped at the noise. It snapped shut as she barely caught it before it fell to the stoney street.

  “Mitsuko! Don’t sneak up on me like that! I nearly died from fright!”

  “I’m glad to see you’re alive too,” Mitsuko said dryly. “What did you find there?”

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  “Ah, this?” Holly glanced at the now closed book. “An atlas. I found it in one of the homes. Mitsuko, have you looked at this place?”

  “Yes. I’ve seen the people.”

  “It reminds me of a city I once visited as a kid. Back on Ilson-don before I evacuated with my parents..”

  “I didn’t know the gnomes built cities.” The descriptions of the gnomish culture she knew painted their homeland as a peace-loving continent with forested villages and nomads. Before the Ooze Calamity, of course.

  “We didn’t. Well, not for a millennium. This city was a relic of the past. It was buried in ash and uncovered only a few years before we visited. Only a tiny fraction of the city had actually been excavated. You could see the people as they were right at the moment of their deaths.”

  “The ash preserved their bodies? Was it enchanted?”

  “No. It was from a volcano. Mundane destruction.”

  Mitsuko could understand why she might be thinking of the city. While the city was magically swept clean of any ash, the island was buried in the constant spew from the ash cloud overhead. But she didn’t understand the preservation of people.

  “The bodies rotted away centuries ago,” Holly explained. “Nothing of them remained. But the ash had originally hardened around their corpses, creating pockets in the earth. Shaped exactly like them. And earth elementalist used the pocket as a mold to show the exact forms of the people as they died. Details down to their facial expressions. I remember staring at one of the statues. The boy’s face had forever been frozen in the image of a scream as he suffocated under the heat and weight of the volcano’s destruction.”

  “That doesn’t sound like something I would show a child.”

  Holly grinned. “I had nightmares for years. But it also is one of the reasons why I’m out here with you.” She paused and looked around the city streets. There was a somber glint in her eye. A yearning Mitsuko resonated with. “Being here. Well, it makes me feel like I’ve come full circle.”

  They both considered that in silence.

  “The people here are still flesh,” Mitsuko. “Not stone.”

  “Yes. Brilliant observation, Mitsuko. What do you think happened?”

  “Something with temporal magic,” Mitsuko guessed. She had the bonus context of knowing a powerful sage of temporal magic existed here. “It looks like some sort of mass stasis spell.”

  Holly cocked her head and looked at Mitsuko. Something ticked behind those violet eyes as she considered. “You should try using that strange spell you learned from your divination vision.”

  Mitsuko blinked at the suggestion. “What?”

  “Don’t you think it’s weird? You experience a vision that grants you a unique temporal spell I’ve never even heard of before. Then we just happen to stumble on a city frozen in time. It’s a bizarre coincidence. I’ve never heard anything about a place like this. There’s no way it should be so unknown if it's this easy to walk into it. And there’s nothing alive in here besides you and me. And I doubt that this place opened for me. Which makes me think that maybe it only unlocked for you. You should try using Mend on one of the people in here.”

  “I’m not a mage or a hero,” Mitsuko said.

  The gnome rolled her eyes. “A new lie and an old lie. Come on, humor me.”

  Mitsuko grunted but complied and followed her friend over to the nearest house. Unlike the ones she’d peeked inside before, there were no people inside the front room. At least, not at first glance. As they stepped inside, Mitsuko nearly tripped over a child, hunched on the floor.

  Her heart stopped. The girl, maybe four years old, was low to the ground, playing with a puppy. The dog’s tongue dangled from the side of its maw, saliva still gleaming. The two of them looked at one another with a pure love that only children and animals possessed.

  Only then did the horror of the city’s plight finally dawn on Mitsuko. Trapped like this for an eternity. According to Sterling, that was the fate of everyone on the archipelago if Mitsuko failed to free them. Not just her life was on the line. Wan, Holly, even the children she’d seen playing in the streets. Every soul in the archipelago would be utterly doomed unless Mitsuko figured out a way out of this mess.

  Holly fell to her knees beside the child and puppy, likewise saddened by the sight. The gnome girl didn’t know that she’d join them in this purgatory if Mitsuko failed. Mitsuko dimly wondered if these people still felt pain. Maybe she should run them through with a sword. Would that be a mercy? Could she muster the strength to kill a child, even if it was a mercy? It was all Mitsuko knew how to do though. Stab things with a sword.

  Holly reached out and cradled the child’s smiling face. Then she pet the puppy’s back with her other hand. “They’re still warm.”

  Mitsuko crouched beside her. The child’s eyes were blue pools of innocence. Nothing present there but affection. What had they done to deserve this? It wasn’t fair.

  “Save them.”

  And Mitsuko tried. She cast her spell. And hit a block. Nothing happened. She cast it again. And again. A hundred times. More. All while denying a simple truth. She wasn’t strong enough.

  Not yet.

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