Chapter 7

Aston answered the insistent knocking at the door. He had just managed to calm Aco enough for Claw to fade. That fight had been fast and furious. Her rapid jumping so many times had left Aco nearly unconscious on her feet when she had finished cutting the lizards to shreds. He opened the door and saw it was a messenger. “What,” he snapped.

The girl looked scared, “My apologies, sir. Master Gareth wants you and Miss Aco in the side lounge as soon as possible.”

Aston tried to lighten his expression. “Tell him Miss Aco is indisposed for a few hours; I will join him momentarily.”

“Very good, sir,” she said and returned to the lift.

Aston laid out his field armor and brushed the grey and brown leather free of debris from his last outing. He donned it and left quietly. He didn’t want to wake Aco. On the ground floor, one of the runners was waiting for him. Aston was escorted to the small lounge and seated with the two older men.

Gravin Granger, contemplating the situation he currently found himself in. His home world, Ashenfey, had entered this hasty alliance without enough intelligence to ensure a safe mission. All he had been told was an ancient relic had been discovered on a previously unknown world. He was to retrieve it and bring it to the federation council. Gravin snorted at this thought. ‘This Federation of Worlds was a joke. Fair and equal trade the damned lizards and dark ones had claimed.’ He looked up as a young man approached the table and joined them. The portal system was the cause of his world’s current problems. Ashenfey had been a purely industrial tech world all through its known history. Magic was a thing of myth. The first man to discover and tap into the power had risen to become a nightmare. He kept the source and methods secret and became the tyrant of the age. Thankfully, he never discovered how to give himself eternal life. Gravin had to wonder at the effort to erase the history of that being. His name had been erased from history.

The council of the time recovered the books and tomes the madman had written over his life. From there, the power of magic was brought forth to a world not ready for the consequences of this power. It was quickly discovered that very few people could tap into this new power source. A few worked out how to use it to power simple devices. Fortunately, they could not mass produce anything with the magic in it. This would change over time if they were given the chance. They weren’t.

A frustrated student at a technical school was tired and angry. He had been trying to make a simple fire spell work. He could get a spark at times but little else. His actual training was in electronics repair. He had an old radio from a friend he was working on. The old tubes were working, but he couldn’t align the tuners. At some point, somebody had detuned all the amplifiers. In frustration at another attempt at the simplest of spells, he slapped his hand down on the table, not noticing he was now holding the antenna inputs to the radio. He cast again, then found himself dug out of the rubble that had once been the lab. A broken arm, leg, and two cracked ribs. Add in a mild concussion and a large assortment of cuts and bruises was all the damage he suffered in the explosion.

The interrogation from the proctors that followed his release was very unfriendly. The school was not happy at losing most of the electronics research labs. The staff worked out what the student was doing. A simple old-style radio repair. Next, when they got him to admit he had been trying to cast the match spell, they began to wonder. Could the radio have amplified the power, causing the explosion?

Ashenfey was a world of limited power, so it did not appear on searches for new worlds. It was a low-level, level-one world of energy. The blast of power from the radio was a level ten blast out across reality. Every magic searcher on ten thousand worlds spotted the flash and afterglow. It was like a supernova had gone off amongst the stars. The worlds with high levels of power looked on in terror. All known worlds were limited to level nine; only a few could reach that power level.

What Ledger didn’t know at the time when he destroyed the weave suppression devices was that they pulsed at level Eleven. The gods in multiple realms stood up and took notice of that. Fortunately, it had been very brief. Gardallen had been spared an invasion from a bunch of scared higher beings. Had Ledger known what resulted from his actions, he may have left the devices in place.

Gravin was born ten years after the first portal was built. It was hoped that other races might have reached the same level of magic use. The day the portal was to go live for its first search for other life, it came to life from an outside source. The silver wall formed in the portal ring, and seconds later, a small ball came bouncing out of it to stop in the middle of the chamber. All personnel had fled as soon as the gate started coming to life, so nobody was visible to the sphere. A minute later, fifty beings exited the gate. Their skin was a deep purple, so dark it was almost black. All had hair that was white as snow. Half wore metal armor, the rest leather or cloth. The weapons startled the men watching the monitors that showed the portal ring. (Ashenfey tech level matches Terra as it stood in the late 20^th century.) The weapons were swords, bows, crossbows, and staves.

Several had staves that carried large balls of flashing crystals on one end. The portal closed, and they looked around. One, who was the apparent leader, looked around and spoke. The language was incomprehensible to the Ashenfey. The scientist knew to keep their silence to see what would happen. The first event of note was the sudden cessation of power on the staves. This caused an immediate reaction. The leader began issuing orders. They all backed away from the ring and waited. Two of the beings waved their fading staves, and the portal re-opened. The leader barked one command, and all the beings ran into the portal to vanish from where they came from.

Reviewing the video footage showed that Ashenfey had less power than they expected. The energy records showed where they had gone. The one disturbing thing in the event was a large metal ball being dropped in front of the gate. One of the techs decided it would not be a good idea to leave the unknown thing in the room. He opened the door he was by and ran to the sphere. He had to struggle to lift it, but he managed. He tossed it into the silver field just before it broke up and vanished.

On the other end of the transit, the party relaxed as power was restored to them. None expected the bomb they had left behind to roll out just as the portal closed. The closing portal was the single for the device to activate. The home world of the dark-elven had to wonder what went wrong. A crater, twenty miles wide and deep, where a major city had once stood.

Several attempts by the Ashenfey to link to other portals only showed dead worlds. When a world with a civilization was found, the first explorers were told to return home and not come back. This happened several times, and then they came across the Dragon Kin. A race of human-like dragons. Trade was quickly opened, and things started looking good. Trade and relations with a dozen other worlds began. Things got strange when the Dark Ones constructed a new gate and returned to the world. When asked why they had left a device behind, they said, “What device. We don’t know of any device. Pictures are not proof we visited you,” and so on.

Decades passed, and then the pulse from Gardallen was seen. Mages from the magic-driven worlds had fits. The power of this pulse exceeded the natural limits of what should have been possible. Then, an ancient relic was discovered. A sword of legend. A living weapon with a soul embedded in it. The Dark Ones went nuts and began offering rewards for forces to go and capture the sword and bring it to them. This is where Gravin and his mercenaries come in.