NOVEL WEB Chapter 3: Competent Guards
With the fall of the Tower of Illunia, the art of reading spellforms disseminated throughout the land. It hadn't been contained as well as the Tower believed and with the threat of death gone, those with knowledge were eager to share it—for a modest price.
-Tallen Elmheart, On Mages
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The next morning found Kole sleeping in the sewer. It wasn’t a bad sewer as sewers went. Like many of the isolated cities that survived in odd niches in the aftermath of the Flood, Illandrios had adapted to the sudden isolation and lack of resources by getting creative. They developed countless ways to reuse everything from timbers to paper, found magical solutions to mundane problems, enslaved a kraken and forced it to pull ships to the depths, collected poop for composting, and many more.
Because of this, the sewers built before the Flood to manage rain and waste, now sat empty and unused in this sub-aquatic city. After a few forsaken incursions in the wake of the city's deliverance, the city sealed them off to better defend themselves. As a social outcast, Kole had found plenty of opportunities to explore alone, and with a constant need to hide, he eventually discovered a few entrances that remained open.
Kole had prepared for this exact eventuality—sort of. He expected to have to flee from his uncle one day to go to the surface, and he even expected the need to travel light. He hadn't, however, foreseen that he’d be forced to flee wounded. So, he sat in the not-so-bad sewers, ripping up his clothes to form bandages as he contemplated his next move.
In the darkness of the tunnels, he fell asleep, only to be woken by the clattering echoes of armored men stumbling through a tiny passage.
Kole turned invisible out of reflex and looked around. The tunnel was strewn with supplies, and there was no way he could hide all the evidence of his presence. He had to run.
But why are they here? How did they find me?
There was no time for questions. Kole gathered his bag, shoved what food he could fit in it, and ran.
“What was that?” a voice asked from behind, but Kole wasn’t concerned.
In the sewers, the armored soldiers couldn’t keep pace with his smaller, less encumbered frame. After a few minutes, he was out in the dim light of the Globe of Day, just in time to see it shift from night to early day.
His plan for escaping was simple: he'd run through the caves to the tower that led to the floating city above, book passage with a ship clan to the Basin, and make his way to the Academy of Illunia where he would find the solution to his magical problems.
He quickly lost the guards, distantly hearing the echoes of their voices when they discovered his hiding spot.
Kole’s mood began to lift after escaping the sewers as he walked through the meadows that lay between the city and the caves, but when the gate came into sight, his rising hopes were dashed. A heavy guard stood outside the gates to the caverns, only opening the doors when people arrived. They inspected the beds of each cart, physically waving their hands above it even if nothing could be seen. They even sprinkled white powder on the ground and watched it closely for signs of movement. In short, they were guarding against an invisible escapee.
“Flood,” Kole cursed to himself. “I probably shouldn’t have broken those glasses. They must have cost a fortune.”
Also, he reflected, he probably shouldn't have left behind his notebook with his escape plan.
That's probably how they knew to check the sewers.
Kole sat in the field of wheat, hiding low in the grass, contemplating his options and eating a small breakfast of dried meat when the great migration began. The first of the deep whales made its appearance near the caves, where it met the barrier of the dome. Its massive claws passed through the barrier first, and the rest of its ten-foot chitinous form followed. The creatures were essentially massive lobsters but with more legs and proportionally longer bodies. More followed after the first, until eventually the meadow between Kole and the cave was a sea of black.
The frustratingly competent guards closed the door at the migration and waited for the first wave to pass. The great migration happened every four hundred seventeen days and spanned a week. The deep whales roamed the ocean floor in a very specific circuit, a circuit that led directly through Illandrios. Records from the early days of the Flood were lost, due to the whole scarce resources thing rendering things as trivial as history superfluous —and the small issue of a tyrannical brainwashing overlord from another reality--but eventually the migration became a holiday for the city. The beasts roamed in dozens of herds, and each herd took hours to pass, leaving gaps of hours in between each group.
Once a herd had passed, the townspeople descended on the roads with buckets, wheelbarrows, pots, and anything else they had at hand to collect the excrement left behind. This particular “tradition” was relatively new. The lack of resources of a bubble city had left Illandrios bereft of skilled alchemists after only a generation, and eventually, the art was lost. When contact was regained with the surface world, they were pleasantly surprised to discover that the filth left behind by their giant crustacean visitors was far more valuable as an alchemical reagent than as a fertilizer.
An industry rose up to collect and process the waste, and some even began to capture and pen the creatures in the waters just beyond the bubble.
Watching his neighbors scramble over the dark gold gave Kole a terrible idea.
Typically, the only way to the surface was through the caves, but during the migration, there was one other way. The quantity of deep whale excrement was so great during this time, that it was sealed into giant steel cylinders and pushed through the barriers where they shot up to the surface. Up above, ships collected the barrels, dumped the contents in their holds, and sent the now empty containers back down.
“This is a terrible idea,” he muttered to himself, just as he ignored his own judgment.