Fortress Al-Mir

“So, you’re saying I don’t need to dig downwards?”

Arkk stood in the middle of the largest room in the fortress. It took a full week for Vezta to convert the model temple room into a workable schematic. The room itself had been ready in two days. Compared to digging a straight line, where more than one lesser servant would just get in the way of any others, digging out a large room made space for many others.

But he was a little confused about the specifications Vezta had given him.

“The pool is supposed to be deeper than the floor of the room, which will be roughly where the floor is right now,” Arkk said, looking down at the tiled ground.

“The schematic was designed with this floor level in mind. Interestingly enough, should you decide to dismantle the room following the ritual, the floor will return to this level.”

“How?”

Vezta shrugged. “Fortress magic.”

Arkk gave the servant a flat look. “Considering I’m in charge of this place, I feel I should understand how it works a little better.”

“Even my former master didn’t understand all its nuances. I doubt any but the [PANTHEON] know how it functions.”

Zullie looked between Arkk and Vezta with a small shake of her head. “I’m still hung up on the fact that you can convert gold into entire rooms filled with all kinds of different matter. Gold is alchemically pure and magically inert. Introducing impurities the way you are should be impossible.”

The witch had a point, he supposed. The room construction itself wasn’t something he understood either, he had just come to accept it as part of the fortress. The whole place was as much a mystery to him as it had been the day he found it. It was just that it was his mystery.

Reaching into the treasury, Arkk pulled over several piles of gold. Almost a third of what he had collected thus far. A few months ago and he would have died from shock at seeing this much gold. Knowing it was all his still caused an odd sense of disassociation. “I really hope this works,” Arkk said. It didn’t quite feel real. Throwing it away on a flawed ritual would still hurt.

Taking a breath, Arkk focused on the schematic in his mind. Vezta, like the other schematics, had communicated what was needed in the [CONSTRUCTED LANGUAGE], which shoved the concept of how to go about building this place straight into his mind. It wasn’t so much that he knew what needed to happen as it was that she had developed an instinct for it within him. However it worked, he could hear it working even with his eyes closed. Like an archivist using an enormous wooden block stamp to mark papers, the room around him shifted and changed.

Opening his eyes, Arkk looked around. The tiny model from a week ago had blown up to a truly staggeringly sized room. He, Vezta, and Zullie all stood in the direct center of the room, atop a platform with a detailed ritual circle carved into its surface. Intricate metal archways lined the edge of the pool, both around the central altar and on the far sides beyond the narrow bridges. Each bridge, stretching out in cardinal directions from the central altar, was engraved with a long pattern of maze lines quite similar to those in the [HEART] chamber and a few other areas around the fortress.

The maze designs on the bridge had Arkk frowning as he knelt to inspect the lines. “This wasn’t in the schematics. Is it going to cause a problem?”

Zullie joined him, bending to run a hand over the faint indentations in the stone walkway. “I’ll have to double-check whether or not magic is being channeled through these areas. If so, the design will likely cause resistance as the magic tries to work its way through the maze. That could cause a cascading—”

“It shouldn’t be a problem,” Vezta said, standing tall just behind the two of them.

“And how can you say that? You don’t even know how this ritual works,” Zullie said, looking over her shoulder. “Need I remind you that you left its design to me?”

“This is true. However, while you may know magic, I know Fortress Al-Mir. It wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize the intent of a room.”

Arkk raised an eyebrow at that, turning to Vezta. “Is the fortress alive?”

“The beat of its [HEART] is the beat of your heart.”

“I mean, how does Fortress Al-Mir know what the intent of the room is?”

“You know. It knows.”

“Alright. But I don’t know. I might be learning a bit about proper ritual construction from Zullie but this reverse evocation ritual is about a hundred levels beyond me right now.”

Vezta just shook her head. “[Fortress Al-Mir]/[HEART]/[Arkk]|[created by]/[placed by]|[PANTHEON]/[beings above all]. Attempting to comprehend the inner workings is likely an exercise in futility that— Zullie, I would recommend against touching the water.”

Arkk looked back to find the witch near the edge of the altar platform, hand stretched out over the glassy surface of the utterly still liquid. Her hand snapped back as Vezta spoke, looking at the servant with alarm.

“Why? It should be regular water.”

“The majority of this room is based on the temple. Arkk, you may recall passing a room with a pool of water during your initial exploration of this fortress.”

“I didn’t investigate too closely, but yeah. I remember. The lesser servants had eaten it by the time I thought about exploring this place later on, unfortunately.”

Vezta dipped her head in a nod. “My former master used the temple to gain boons from the [PANTHEON]. To do this, he would offer something to the temple waters. It serves as a gateway between this plane and theirs.” She paused, canted her head, then added, “Things that cross over rarely returned and, when they did, never in the form they departed in.”

“But the planes are disconnected,” Zullie said. “Reopening the portal to one of those planes is the whole point of the ritual here.”

“Still a bad habit to get into.”

Curiosity getting the better of him, Arkk approached the edge as well. He trusted Vezta enough to not touch the surface of the water, but he was still interested.

The surface was glassy, looking more like a polished silver mirror than water. Except, while it reflected the world around him—the rest of the room—he didn’t see his own reflection as he leaned over the edge. Zullie, still near the side, should have been visible as well. She wasn’t. Just the violet glowstones set into the ceiling—which was a great deal higher than it had been before constructing the room.

“Your former master would put something in and get something else in exchange?”

“This is correct.”

Pulling a gold coin from the treasury, Arkk held it in his hand for a slight moment before tossing it out into the water.

It slipped through the surface without causing any disturbance. Not even the slightest ripple spread out. The coin just disappeared. He couldn’t see it beneath the surface either. The way it simply slid out of the world made him shudder.

He wasn’t the only one. Zullie had almost the exact same reaction. As a chill ran up her spine, she slowly scooted back from the edge.

“This is no wishing well, Keeper,” Vezta said, though she sounded more amused than annoyed.

Arkk just shrugged. “You said to toss something in so I tossed something in.”

“Many rituals my former master performed were private affairs, even to me. I do know that he occasionally entered the temple room with captured prisoners and returned with loyal minions. Other times, he would enter with grand meals or livestock.”

“What if we tie a string to the coin?”

“I would suggest you do not offend the [PANTHEON] by attempting to retrieve your offerings. However, with access to the [PANTHEON] restricted, it is likely nothing will happen should you attempt your experiment.”

Zulllie’s eyes brightened for just a moment before she started scowling. “Great. Another magical mystery to add to my ever-expanding list. I’ve been here for a month and a half and it seems like my list doubles in size every other day.” She shot a glower at Arkk. “I don’t suppose you’ve had any luck recruiting more researchers? Or just laboratory assistants? An extra hand could go a long way.”

Arkk shook his head.

He hadn’t found anyone, not that he had an opportunity to try. Those inquisitors were still around Smilesville Burg. He hadn’t dared to return. In fact, he hadn’t left the fortress at all. The only thing he had done remotely related to venturing out had been ordering the lesser servants to dig a tunnel out in the opposite direction from Langleey Village, headed toward a burg roughly the size of Smilesville on the other side of the Cursed Forest. He didn’t know that Stone Hearth Burg would have anything that Smilesville didn’t, but at least it didn’t have inquisitors swarming around.

“I did scry on the gorgon mines,” Arkk said. “There is a human in there living with the gorgon.”

“Without being killed? A prisoner?”

“I don’t think so. I wouldn’t call their existence copacetic but the human does seem to be directing the gorgon around. The archivist mentioned something about mind magic. I assume that is how he has survived among them; he’s using them as his guards now. No idea how to approach that situation, unfortunately. I already know Rekk’ar and most of the orcs would riot and abandon us if I tried to tell them to go there.”

“Best to avoid that,” Zullie said. “We’re already short on people for this ritual.”

“I know. I’m thinking about solutions. It’s just those inquisitors aren’t making things easy. I know they’re here for me. Still, if I could get a message to Savren and offer him asylum in exchange for helping out in this ritual… The food alone has to be better than rats and mushrooms and…”

Arkk trailed off, squinting as he looked over the wide pool of water. While the pool was shaped like a diamond, the room was square. Each corner of the pool was at the mid-point of the walls.

Along those walls, he spotted several large pedestals that also hadn’t been in the schematics. Turning around, he found four pedestals against each of the four walls.

A few of them were occupied.

“What are those?”

Both Vezta and Zullie looked over, following his gaze toward one of the occupied pedestals. Following him, they crossed the bridge and came to a stop in front of a tall statue of a woman wearing a long, ripple-covered dress. She had her arms spread wide as she stood in front of an engraved decoration that looked like a tall closed door. The door had two half-circles, one on either side, that looked almost like large glass windows looking out onto a field of stars. The stars were just tiny glowstones, however. The door didn’t open either.

Probably.

The magic of the fortress could be strange at times.

Large thin tendrils reminiscent of Vezta’s extra limbs reached out around her from the false door, winding around her arms and wind-blown wavy hair. A large orb at the center of her dress looked like an eye, though not like Vezta’s many eyes. It was more like a mechanical depiction than burning suns set into a void.

Vezta gave a deep, respectful bow toward the statue. “Xel’atriss, Lock and Key. The member of the [PANTHEON] holding dominion over barriers, locks, boundaries, and separation. The Lock and Key’s presence is likely a good sign, indicating that we are on the right track.”

“It is just a statue though,” Arkk said, hesitated, then added, “Right?”

“This place is more connected to the [PANTHEON] than any other physical location in this world. If anyone can breach the barrier separating them from us, it would be the Lock and Key.”

That didn’t answer Arkk’s question in the slightest. Still, Arkk didn’t see any sign of intelligence or movement in the violet gemstones that sat in place of the statue’s eyes. Turning to the pedestal two away from this woman, Arkk asked, “What about that one?”

It wasn’t human. Humanoid, yes, but not human. With a head like the skull of a goat, four sets of horns stretched out in a long and tangled mass that wrapped around the depiction of the creature like a briar thorn bush. It held both hands in front of it, one hand above the other. An hourglass floated between, rotating end over end to keep the sand within from ever emptying fully into one side.

“The Jailer of the Void. Time. Eternity. Emptiness,” Vezta said, offering another bow to the statue. “I’m not sure why this one would appear.”

Arkk waited but Vezta didn’t have anything more to offer. Instead, the servant narrowed her eyes as she looked at another wall. Another pair of statues occupied two of the four pedestals.

The first was a woman cast entirely in gold armor with a large heart-like object placed within the breastplate. The headdress she wore over her full, curly, and golden-brown hair was large and extravagant, making her look like some kind of royalty. The serious expression on her face reminded Arkk of some of the times Abbess Keena gave the occasional harsh Suun lecture.

On the other end of the rows of pedestals, a tall man stood clad in golden light that hurt Arkk’s eyes to look at. Much of his chest was bare with only those thin lights of gold stretched between his muscles. He had a chiseled, angular jawline and short hair. Like his chest, most of his face was hidden behind a form-fitting mask of golden light.

“The Heart of Gold and the Holy Light,” Vezta said with ill-concealed hatred. “Traitors.”

From her tone of voice, Arkk didn’t think it was wise to ask further questions about these two. The servant turned on her heel, fists clenched as she strode across the bridge to the opposite wall.

Only one of the pedestals was occupied here. The last of the sixteen with a statue in place. This one was of another muscular man with longer hair striking a heroic pose. A spear in one hand and a staff topped with a fleur-de-lis in the other, the ends of both were planted near his feet. A long billowing cape was frozen in the air behind him, though Arkk wasn’t sure how it was attached to him. The man didn’t have a shirt on and, below a washboard of muscles, he only had a wrapping of cloth around his hips. Two feathery wings sprouted from his back, giving him the visage of a particularly humanoid harpy.

“The Almighty Glory,” Vezta spat. “The three instigators of the Calamity. Trapping the rest of the [PANTHEON] while they run free? Betraying their sisters and brothers to elevate themselves? Disgusting.”

“Should we… destroy these statues or something? If that tentacle woman is a good sign, surely these are the opposite.”

“I would leave them all alone,” Vezta said, her voice in a forced cool tone. “For now. In addition, I would suggest you avoid further experimentation with the waters of this chamber. Although I imagine it is unlikely that those present are watching us in any capacity, tempting that would be unwise. Avoid the room until we’re ready to use it.”

Arkk nodded, glancing toward the sole doorway. A translucent visage of a metal door appeared with his gaze. The work order would already be in the smithy.

“Right. Zullie. No experiments.”

“Am I the only one creeped out by these?” the witch asked, staring at the towering face of the Almighty Glory. “They weren’t in my plans.”

“This is the first room I’ve made that had unexpected changes,” Arkk said with a frown. He cast his gaze around the empty pedestals, wondering if they would populate after the ritual.

He eventually looked back to the Almighty Glory. Though he expected it to be looking down at him with his back turned, it wasn’t. The statue remained still and stagnant.

“As long as they aren’t manifestations of these beings…” He shook his head. “Let’s get out of here. Zullie, I don’t suppose you’re aware of any other outlaw spellcasters,” he asked as they started walking away.

Only Vezta remained, shadowy tendrils around her roiling as she glared at the tall statue.

Eventually, she turned away, putting her back to the statue as she left the room.

None of the five statues moved.