Broken Lands

"This detail here," Sweetfire pointed at the small silver spade shape in the open space to the left between the two large circles, "Only works on intact Windows; it seems to change the view, maybe shift it around. The one to the right of it does the opposite. However much mana you put in one, if you put the same amount in the other, it will return to the original view. The two above it tilt the image up and down."

Maybe the view that looked like the sky really was the sky after all, if the view could be moved from here.

"Don't put mana into any of the four; that sometimes breaks the Window." Sweetfire grimaced for a moment. "Found that out the hard way. Happily, it was easily fixed on that one. The next four change the colors and make the view fuzzier or clearer. It's not always the same ones, so I can't tell you which is which. Those four have never broken a Window for me, but they don't really do much, either."

Sophia shook her head at Sweetfire. Wasn't he supposed to be telling them how to fix a Window, not how it worked? He reminded her of her father when he started talking about runic inscriptions.

"The next pair either breaks the Window or changes what it's looking at; I managed to get that to work a few times on one of the Windows, but it's broken the others I tried it on. I don't understand how it changes the Window, either; it's almost like it's looking at completely different places, but most of the time I can't tell where they are. Quite a few are simply dark. The pair at the very bottom doesn't seem to do anything at all, but like the ones in the very center I've never had them break a Window. I spent a lot of time trying to get them to work, but whatever they did once upon a time, they don't now." Sweetfire looked up at Sophia and grinned. "If we had time, I'd ask you to look at it and see if it's locked."

Sophia shook her head, but couldn't resist smiling back at Sweetfire. This was interesting, even if making things wasn't really what she did. She was certain Xin'ri was even more interested than she was, even if she hadn't said anything.

Sophia glanced at Xin'ri. The reason she hadn't said anything was suddenly obvious; she was sketching the illusion into a notepad in detail. Sophia hoped she was paying enough attention to catch Sweetfire's explanation, but it wasn't like she couldn't ask him later if she missed something. She'd have a drawing to refer back to, after all.

"The spots between the large circles don't do anything, and adding mana anywhere inside the larger circles does the same thing; I think that's what those circles do, even if I haven't been able to figure out the rest. Don't ever put mana into the top one; it always breaks the Window. The second one is also not good; the window turns black and if it breaks, there are a lot more monsters. That happens sometimes before they break on their own." Sweetfire paused and glanced around the room, then looked down at the trail that led away from the Window Taika stood behind. "That probably happened to this one; there were a lot of lizards."

Dav crossed between Sophia and Taika's illusion, then stopped in front of the Window. Now that he'd pulled her attention to it, she could see that there was a lizard's forelimb sticking out of the front. As she watched, the snout slowly oozed into the room. Sophia would have sworn it wasn't there the last time she looked at the Window's surface, but it was clearly there now.

Dav didn't immediately strike, probably because of how slowly it was coming out of the Window. Instead, he glanced at Sweetfire. "Do I kill it now or should I wait until it's all the way through?"

Sweetfire shook his head. "No reason to wait, as long as you watch the window. The next one will be a little sooner, but we should have it patched by then."

Dav nodded and sliced a line in the top of the lizard's head, then down the only leg that was visible without allowing his blade to touch the Window's surface. He seemed especially careful about that. The caution seemed reasonable; if anything was going to react unexpectedly with the surface of a portal that led to the space between things, an eldritch blade was a good candidate.

The partial wall lizard collapsed as the black ooze inside it drained out. There was more than Sophia expected, almost like some came from the other side of the Window as it fell, but after a moment the flow stopped. More than she expected or not, there wasn't really that much there.

"The third large circle doesn't do anything at all," Sweetfire continued as if a monster hadn't tried to come through the thing he was talking about. "I've tried everything I can think of and it just doesn't do anything. It can't be useless, but I don't know what it does. It's probably only active at certain times; that's how the last one is. It doesn't do anything when the Window is intact, but when it's broken it either fixes it or makes the Window go dark for good. Nothing ever comes out of the permanently dark Windows, unlike the ones that are temporarily darkened by the second circle. The darkness looks different, too; it's flat instead of rippled with spots."

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"Like the Window two to the left of that one?" Sophia pointed at the one she meant. It had severe dark streaks below it like the one they needed to deal with, but it was completely dark, without the root-like lines and green background glow of the one that produced the lizards. It reminded her a lot of the difference between a backlit computer screen showing darkness and one that was turned off.

Sweetwater nodded. "That one broke a couple of years ago."

A low hum quickly grew in volume until it would have drowned Sweetwater out even if he had continued talking. Sophia turned towards it and saw that it came from the broken Window. It rose in pitch, then suddenly vanished, taking the image it showed with it. For a moment, it looked like the dead Window, then it began to hum again quietly. The screen filled from the top down with a mostly dark image that looked like stone blocks, except that they were shaded in green and purple and covered in a speckling of stars. The hum stopped once the bottom of the image was visible in the Window.

Sophia shook her head. "Is it always that loud?"

"You can hear it?" Sweetwater sounded surprised.

"Can't everyone?" Dav answered with a question of his own. "I don't think anyone could have missed that."

It turned out that only Sweetwater, Dav, and Sophia could hear it at all, and Dav and Sophia heard it far more clearly than Sweetwater did. Sophia's first thought was that it had something to do with the trip through the Origin, but that was clearly wrong; Taika didn't hear it at all, and he was the one who triggered the "repair" rune.

It was just going to have to remain a mystery.

Sweetwater led them through the rest of the area that held the Windows. As expected, none of them were broken; a handful were completely covered in solidified black goo that was slowly flaking away. There were no more lizards, which disappointed Sweetwater. He'd wanted to use their goo on the truly broken Window, but it didn't stay liquid for long once it was exposed to air. He considered it pointless to try if the Window-monster wasn't in the same room as the broken Window.

Once they were certain there were no more monsters, Sophia carefully checked each mirror for any sign that it showed an image of somewhere other than the Broken Lands. She couldn't tell if they were actually portals, but they didn't look like it; stepping through them would be awkward. It was more likely that they were either observation of communication devices, maybe both. They clearly worked through the interspace, which was definitely some weird portion of the Origin near the Broken Lands.

That thought combined with the sight of one of the dulled Windows made Sophia stop in her tracks. "Communication device that works through the Origin but has a broken Connection."

"What?" Dav turned towards Sophia. He seemed to be the only person who heard her mutter.

"I couldn't send a message back home before, there's been no way. We didn't have the supplies to build something that would work in the Origin; the materials needed to channel magic there…" Sophia shook her head and focused back on the opportunity in front of her. "But with this, we don't need them. This is already built to communicate through the Origin! Okay, maybe it's not really set up to send a message that far, but it's made for connections! That means one of Ita's spells might work, with Dad's modifications to the rune matrix for stability and … dammit, I swear I saw something like that in that notebook. Where was it?"

She dropped her backpack on the floor and started digging. The first two notebooks she turned up were old ones from when she was a child, but the third one was the one her father prepared for her and Ita hid in her backpack without telling her. It was full of different runic inscriptions; communication of one sort or another was the most common theme, but none of them would work across universes.

Not normally, at least.

Sophia was pretty sure that she was going to have to combine a few of them, but the one she really needed was close to the back, so she flipped to the end and started moving forward. She only got a couple pages in before she stopped and stared at the last page that was present in the notebook.

It hadn't been there the last time she looked. Why hadn't she looked more recently?

She knew why. She'd thought nothing could get through. How could something have been added to the notebook? Yes, there was a spell to copy things from a notebook her father had, but there was no way it could reach that far.

Sophia,

I have no idea if this will ever reach you or not, but I might as well try.

Your brother Xavier came up with the idea when he visited home. It's apparently related to the way the Voice talks to planets, but I think that was an analogy and not a direct translation. His notes are attached in case you need them. The short version is that he was able to get a 'direction' for where you were thrown when the dungeon ripped apart, as much as the Origin has directions. It's more intent than anything, but he says you followed a very old striation line in the Origin that is maintained by the memories of people who crossed that way in the past.

That was enough for us to try to send something along the same route, and it may be enough for you to return a message if you can find a way to gather enough mana; we used a rather large ley line ritual (also in the notes). The connection is far too weak to trust yourself to, so please don't try unless you absolutely must; I don't want to lose you.

I've added a few more test inscriptions and what I think might be a reversal of what we did, along with the construction diagrams. I can't send any material, since this will end up in your notebook as a copy if all goes well, but I've also added the linking enchantment needed to connect additional runic paper to your notebook. I'm not sure how I missed that in the first place.