Call of the Abyss [Book 2 Complete]

Julia's mouth hung agape, her steps faltering. The huge wall of Adamantine, with its golden chains of Orichalcum, rendered her near-catatonic. Why was she not wearing her armor? If the city had this much exotic metal to throw around, surely everyone would be walking around with rare and expensive trinkets.

The group had approached the city as evening fell, the sun casting long shadows behind them and painting the huge crater with a golden glow. The crater itself was enormous, occupying more and more of the horizon the closer they drew. Now, standing before the city's gate, Julia couldn't see the end of the crater from left to right, nor could she even tell it was a crater—its circular shape not obvious due to its scale.

Perhaps even more impressive than the crater was the Adamantine wall, which dominated the landscape, as though daring any challengers. The wall must have been several climbs tall, with towers sticking out from the top. It was from these towers that golden chains of Orichalcum hung limply.

Julia couldn't see the whole city from her position on the ground, so she could only see two of the towers, but she could count six chains from where they met in the middle. They hung from a huge, elaborate stone that seemed shaped like a crystal—deliberately?

The chains, while slack most of the time, hummed and tightened periodically before a cascade of white, crackling energy traveled down their lengths, striking the towers, and sending a huge pulse of something into the surroundings.

It's not that Julia had no idea what the pulses were—it was more that she had no idea how they were. Their function was obvious, as she could feel their effects even when they were still half an hour from the city gates. The pulses emitted some kind of…scrambling energy. She couldn't describe it well, but it flooded the surroundings with a sort of chaotic intent that sent the ambient mana into a frenzy.

The effect didn't seem to penetrate into her body, so it wouldn't be bothersome to most. However, even if Julia's body was unaffected, her senses extended into the surroundings, and it was almost violently uncomfortable for her. The border between her domain and the rest of the world became fuzzy, like the scrambling effect was constantly fraying the edges.

It would be difficult to translate into a human's experience, but she supposed it might be like someone was constantly rubbing one's body all over with an abrasive cloth. It didn't hurt in the way humans felt pain, but the discomfort was so extreme that Julia had been focused on little else until the sight of the Adamantine wall and city beyond became impossible to ignore.

Her companions, having noticed her obvious discomfort, had inquired several times what the issue was, but not only did Julia not have a clue how to explain her situation, she didn't have the spare mental energy to even respond. All her thoughts, except those needed to keep putting one foot in front of the other, were bent on countering the dissonance.

It made sense now why she'd felt a 'wall' when looking through space in this direction. It wasn't literally a barricade preventing her sight, which wasn't based on mana; it was a scrambling of all the information within the layers. If she thought of the 'folded pages' analogy again, she could still see the pages themselves, but they appeared blank due to all the information being scrambled and illegible.

Julia's tolerance reached a critical point—scaling with her proximity to the city—and she simply couldn't stand it any longer. She sat down right on the side of the road, covering her ears with her hands and closing her eyes. She wanted to shut out as many other senses as she could, not just to think without distractions, but also due to her senses being completely overloaded.

She sat for a moment, her thoughts going blank as the wave of overload crested. After only a few seconds, her faculties returned. For some reason, the scrambling became easier to tolerate—not a whole lot, but it wasn't overwhelming her, at least.

She sat, still with her eyes closed and ears covered, examining the feeling with a more level head. The most uncomfortable feeling was that the mana was fluctuating. Julia hadn't ever thought of it before, but it seemed that people—including she—were more comfortable with a steady, predictable mana pattern.

However, the more she examined it, the more she realized it wasn't random. It was complex, but there were distinct loops—a pattern. Braden had once said something like, "True randomness is extraordinarily difficult in a world governed by rules and laws." Julia wasn't completely sure what the implications of that statement were, but she could glimpse some of their effects.

There must be some kind of device—a powerful device—that emitted those pulses. Without knowing the specifics, she'd just have to take Braden's word for how difficult randomness was, which meant that the already-powerful device would probably have to be unfathomably powerful to create a completely random signal. As it was, it was just imitating randomness to make the pattern difficult to discern.

This level of defense was already pretty paranoid, she thought. Prior to closing her eyes, she'd observed that the elves hardly even noticed the field that surrounded them. Perhaps, had they attempted to cast any magic, they would have noticed when their spells fizzled out, but it didn't seem to cause them any discomfort simply by existing.

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Perhaps people like Julia were more common than she assumed? That might explain this level of paranoia—building close to random patterns into the dissonance to make it harder to counter—but it could also just indicate extreme caution from whatever powers ruled this city.

Regardless, when she considered the pattern of the mana 'noise', Julia began to remember teachings about light. Braden had taught her only a little about light waves and frequency and the like, as he claimed to not be knowledgeable about it either. She was skeptical, as how could one teach something they weren't knowledgeable about?

One specific thing she recalled was how waves interacted with each other. There were waves that would pass by, unaffected, but there were also waves that would interfere or enhance each other. Of particular note in this case were waves that were exact opposites—they would collide with each other and cancel out. 'Destructive interference,' if she recalled correctly.

That concept, while useful, was difficult to translate to her current situation. It didn't feel like 'waves' were washing over her, though the connection was there conceptually. Fortunately, concepts were extremely important in magic. She simply needed to visualize it in a way that made intuitive sense.

She was going to have to combine techniques in ways she hadn't before, but the grating, abrasive discord scraped and scratched at her domain, constantly threatening to wear her current peace of mind away, so she just had to get started.

All As One, although it was subsumed, had made individual parts of her body all smaller parts of a larger whole, even when separated. She utilized this fact and separated a part of herself—her mana—within her chest. It was isolated from her body, but all was part of a whole, so she could still feel and control it.

Parallel Processing had long ago been absorbed into her Spirit Body, spirits apparently being more…diverse in their thinking by nature, but she utilized it now to sort of segment a small portion of her mind, planting it within the isolated section of mana within her. Still, all was part of a greater whole, so it wasn't isolating and segmenting so much as dedicating part of her body and mind to certain tasks, but the visualization was helpful.

She then set that part of herself to analyzing the fluctuating will in the noise around her. Analyze it, replicate it, and then counter it. This was easier said than done, as again, the will fluctuations weren't exactly waves. What she had to do was counter what the effect of the will was. For example, if the device willed mana up, she had to will it down the exact same amount. If it willed fire into existence, she had to will it out.

As the small section of her began analyzing, focusing fully on the task, she realized that it was actually much simpler than it seemed at first. The effects of the will weren't so numerous—they were largely just pushing little bits of air around. It was just enough to make a light breeze, barely even noticeable if one wasn't looking for it.

This made sense, as she thought about it. The city had to function, so the device couldn't be doing anything that would interrupt anyone's day-to-day life, like shaking the ground or making random fire. It was essentially just vibrating the air a bit—and vibrations were waves.

As the first counter-wave pulsed out from her core, Julia felt immediate relief. It felt like plunging into cool water on a hot day, or the warmth of a fire in the dead of winter. She didn't realize how much she took just feeling normal for granted until her equilibrium had been thrown off.

She sighed in relief and opened her eyes.

"You are…alright now? Lumenfall said you would be, but we were becoming worried," Sahira said from her position crouched in front of Julia.

As she spoke, Julia became aware of a ferret-sized lump atop her head. Lumenfall must've come down to reassure the group after she suddenly collapsed to the ground in distress.

"Yeah, thanks. Got a little…weird for a second. Out of curiosity, do none of you feel anything abnormal?" Julia asked, accepting Sahira's offered hand and standing.

The Thornalûn looked at each other in confusion, each eventually shaking their heads. Ithshar turned around from where she'd been watching the road.

"Indeed, there is a…presence in the air. It seems to deter magic, though the Mother's magic is not completely blocked—only hindered," she said, casting herself in a golden glow.

The glow seemed to flicker and fray at the edges, as though the farther out it went, the more it unraveled.

"I think…well, I don't want to overpromise. There might be an enchantment I can rig up to mitigate the effect around you all, but I'll have to test and find the right materials.

"I also don't think—even if I can get enchantments working—that we should broadcast that the field isn't affecting us. I would guess it's a safety precaution to prevent instances of combat magic being used in the city," Julia reasoned.

Nods were exchanged all around, and they started on the final stretch to the gate.

The road to the gate was paved with square-cut stones of dark gray. Julia was unsure where the stone had been quarried, as the crater was a massive feature in an otherwise-flat plain. Perhaps they quarried the stone from the crater itself? Regardless, the road started long before the crater proper.

The road was sloped gradually and meticulously to prevent a sharp incline that would be difficult to walk. As a result, the road was elevated above the surroundings for most of its journey toward the city gate, where it finally ended level with the crater edge.

The gradual incline along with the well-maintained road made for easy and pleasant walking, so Julia had been enjoying the journey thus far. The elevated road provided a wonderful view of the surroundings, helped by the fact that the rest of the area was a flat plain—she could see for journeys in any direction from the road.

Her enjoyment of the trip now thoroughly dampened by the dissonance ordeal, she examined the enormous, golden gates as they approached. They were probably a solid climb tall, made of what seemed solid Adamantine and framed in Orichalcum. They bore a strange insignia on them: a circle with lines shooting out from all directions (the sun?), and a many-tentacled creature reaching its arms toward the circle.

She wasn't sure why, but Julia thought it ominous—as though it embodied a greed that sought to lay claim to the sun itself.