Chapter 20

“There are glyphs above it, like the ones in the keep,” Talia said as they began looking at the wall, to figure out the best way to take it down. “I can feel the energy from it. I think they’re active.”

“It has to be to help reinforce the wall and keep it up,” Jasper said. “If they were scared enough to brick this up, then they’d want to make sure the wall stayed up.”

“Can we remove them?” Osric asked.

“Yes. That’s the downside of glyphs and why they’re not used much. If you alter the symbol, it loses its magic. While powerful, it’s one of the weaker enchantments artificers can make, mostly because any change in the glyph renders it worthless. Remember the cuts down the one we saw in the keep? That is why they were depowered. They’re really only good when you can place them so the people they need to affect can’t get to the glyph itself.”

“Like here,” Grace said.

“Like here.”

“So, go ahead and do whatever you have to do to depower it, then,” Osric said.

“Should I point out again how this door is not only bricked up but has magical protection over it on this side of the wall, meaning it’s targeted at keeping something in there in, not keep us out?”

Talia ignored her and, with a hand up from Osric, scraped some notches out of the glyph with her dagger.

“That should do it,” she said as Osric set her down.

Osric hadn’t felt anything, but if she said it was gone, then he’d believe her. The magic must have been doing the heavy lifting, because together, he and Rowan managed to knock the wall down fairly easily.

The air on the other side was stale and musty, opening into a long hallway with rooms on either side all the way down. They carefully entered this section of the second floor, peering into the rooms which were small and completely unadorned.

“Meditation rooms. This close to the observation deck, this would have been for the priests here to meditate on their findings, or maybe work on their research. The writings weren’t clear,” Jasper said.

“Do you know what’s beyond this area?” Talia asked.

“No. There weren’t a lot of good descriptions. There was something about meditation rooms close to the platform where rituals to the gods would be held, or so I assumed. Most of what I know is about the first floor, and that is still very limited.”

There was a doorway at the end of the hall that opened into a T-intersection, where they could either continue straight, along what Osric thought was the front of the temple, or turn right, continuing deeper into the temple. Or they could have turned right if the second floor was complete. The hallway turned into a sheer drop-off about a hundred or so feet down, which roughly corresponded to the drop-off in the antechamber. It appeared like the entire second floor, aside from the section close to the front supports, had collapsed in on itself, which didn’t bode well for them finding an alternate way down.

Rowan held up a hand, signaling for silence. “Did you hear that?”

They all strained to hear. At first, all Osric could hear was an occasional creaking. Then he heard it. A faint clicking sound, almost like an echoing skittering. It only lasted for a second, but as they started forward again, they could hear it. It was hard to pin down where it was coming from exactly, just that it was getting louder.

Suddenly, a flicker of movement caught Osric’s eye. A small creature had darted out of one of the meditation rooms and into the next, too quickly for him to clearly make out what it was.

“Did you see that?” Grace said from the back of their group.

Talia gasped. “Is that ... it can’t be.”

“I think it was,” Jasper said.

“What was?” Osric asked.

“A skivver. I’ve read about them, but I thought they were all extinct.”

“What’s a skivver?”

“They used to be everywhere, at least in Aeloria, back in the early days of the kingdom. Most writings from that time mention them as a pest, and they were common enough that they get referenced a lot, but they were hunted to extinction because they would steal things from people’s homes. They were nocturnal and lived in burrows, caves, and under buildings. People hated them. Unfortunately for the skivver, they breed slower than mice or other creatures, so once the hunt started, it didn’t take long for the population to dwindle. It’s been nearly a thousand years since the last sighting.”

A head popped out of the meditation room. It was bigger than Osric first thought, maybe the size of a cat. He might have accidentally mistaken it for one if it wasn’t for the elongated snout and very large ears and eyes. It didn’t seem afraid. More ... curious. Just staring at them, its little nose twitching.

Osric took a cautious step forward.

“Careful,” Rowan warned. “We don’t know if it’s dangerous.”

“Yes, it seems deadly,” Grace said sarcastically.

Osric bent down, extending his hand. “Hey there, little one. It’s alright, we won’t hurt you.”

The skivver cocked its head, long ears wiggling back and forth. For a moment, it almost seemed tempted to approach. But as Osric took another step, it quickly scurried away, disappearing into a narrow crevice in the wall.

“Guess it’s pretty skittish around humans,” Jasper mused. “Can’t say I blame it, given the history.”

“As fascinating as this is, we need to stay focused,” Rowan said. “I doubt that glyph was installed to protect them from that.”

“Probably not,” Osric said, straightening.

They continued on down the hallway, past the next junction, moving beyond the meditation rooms. Beyond the junction, the hallway opened up into an immense room, easily three hundred feet long and almost as wide. Lining each side of the chamber were six stone pedestals with stone steps to walk up, each bearing a large, upright stone ring.

“By the gods...” Talia said.

“We’ve seen these before,” Osric told the others. “In the keep where we found the first part of the document, there was a room like this. Smaller, although not a lot smaller, but with the same pedestals and rings.”

“I believe these are teleportation stones,” Jasper said, moving forward to examine one of the rings more closely. “There are references to chambers like this that were in the major Calaphium outposts. The magic taken to create these was incredible, although the arts needed for it are long lost. Even the Conclave hasn’t managed to reproduce it.”

“You could travel from place to place using these?” Grace asked, showing a rare moment of honest awe.

“Yes. I never really understood how they worked, although after hearing Osric’s stories, I think they might have created some kind of controlled rupture in the Veil, connecting two physical points. It would have been similar to the magic used to send your ring through time.”

“They created ruptures on purpose?” Osric asked.

“That’s a guess, but it makes sense. We know they did it at least once, with your ring, right? We’ve seen that these ruptures aren’t just between realities, but in our own world as well. You saw me through one, and we’re in the same reality, and you saw this temple.”

“But they’re dead, right? The ones we saw before didn’t work either. Talia said the magic had all faded from them.”

“They appear to be,” Jasper said, running a hand along one of the rings.

“We found another room,” Osric said. “It wasn’t like this, long with a bunch of these stones. It was smaller, with workbenches and a single stone on a much smaller pedestal, but that ring was half melted. The ring, my ring, not the stone one, still had magic in it and, when I got close to the melted stone ring, a rupture appeared right before us. We could see through it, and I’m pretty sure now that we were looking through time. We saw the same room, but cleaner, not ruined, and there were men inside it. The men were wearing black robes and working on something around the ring. Other men stormed in, shouting about them being ‘under arrest in the name of the council,’ and then a fight started and the rupture closed suddenly.”

“If I had to guess, the council probably meant the Council of Elders, the ruling body of the Calaphium. It’s strange though. It sounds like the people in that room were working on learning the secrets of teleportation, but I hadn’t heard of anyone learning that magic outside of the Calaphium themselves.”