Ideworld Chronicles: The Art Mage

Day in the story: 17th December (Wednesday)

Victor lived in what looked like a normal apartment block, and to make things easier for me, the main entrance was wide open. An old man was dragging a huge vine-like plant out of the building and into the cold. Why, I had no idea, but I watched him haul it to a snow-covered patch of ground in front, set the pot down, then drop to his knees and start digging with his bare hands.

That was my cue: not my business, not my problem. I slipped past him and deeper inside.

The corridor looked nothing like the outside promised, it was as if I'd stepped into the belly of some old galleon. Wood everywhere, creaking like it remembered the age of pirates, with electric lights shoved in as an afterthought. Something always had to break the immersion.

I passed a family trying to get into their apartment. If I didn't know better, I'd have thought they were just regular humans. They even argued like one: the woman scolding the man for slacking, the kids shrieking as the older boy picked on his younger brother. The younger wasn't exactly innocent as he kicked back at his brother's shin, sparking another round of shouting from their mother.

Moments like that made me oddly grateful. I never had parents to argue with. Just Peter. And we never wasted our breath fighting each other. We knew that when the world ended again, we'd only have each other left to rely on.

He was apprehended yesterday morning, and I hoped Joan would sort it out soon, but his absence still left me uneasy. I missed him and the ordinary stuff we used to do before Reality made me an odd-one. I hoped that would come back, even if only for a little while.

I found the apartment at the end of a long hallway, a stretch that ran farther between doors than anything I'd passed so far. It made me wonder whether the hallway had warped itself because people resented this man, or if it had been built that way from the start.

The door was, of course, closed. I pulled out a trusty can of black spray paint and worked until the cartoonish hole was big enough for me to slip through. As I finished, a flare of shadowlight slid across the wet paint and into the gap.

I stepped inside—

—and for a second I could've sworn I'd slipped into another dimension entirely.

The place was what I'd call a reverse-engineered Domain. It was massive, far too big to fit inside this building, most of it stretching into one wide, open hall. In the middle stood a glassy containment tube, at least six feet across, rising floor to ceiling. Inside it? Shadowlight, swirling and glowing, trapped in some kind of gaseous suspension. Thin strands, like optical fibers spread from it like spiderwebs, trailing along the ceiling to feed into strange devices scattered around the room.

Some looked ripped out of a sci-fi novel, others straight from a fantasy book. The closest to me resembled a furnace, only it was built of polished wood and coral, and inside, resting on a tiny platter was some oblong object that looked half cucumber, half screwdriver.

It felt like stepping into a fever dream. Trying to make sense of it all was pointless.

I reached for my Spellbook and pulled my Lóng through again. This time his arrival was smoother, gentler as he must've been idling when I tugged him out of his place.

"Help me out, Liora," I said, mostly to hear my own thoughts spoken aloud. "This was the workshop of someone building magical devices. He left, and I'm supposed to find him. How the hell am I supposed to do that?"

Of course he flared red—dim, the shade of dirty blood and dull rubies.

Not that it mattered much, but the thought snagged me. Colors were so damn plentiful, and I'd been lazy, bundling them all under one banner. Easier that way, hues only shift minutely, an artist's tool, changing with light, medium, abundance. But with Liora, maybe the exact hue meant more. Maybe I needed to actually pay attention.

[Pay attention to the details.] Anansi's voice slid into my head.

The problem was, I didn't know the details of this place—the machines, the processes, the weird artifacts. I was clueless. But I knew how to read people, how to read behavior. If I looked close enough, maybe I could stitch something together from the changes, the aftermath.

And since there were no obvious reflective surfaces, my hoped-for window to the past was out. The only glassy thing was that tube in the center that looked like a handmade soul core, but it was completely see-through.

So my knowledge of behavior really was everything I had to work with in that moment.

If Victor had been scared, the natural thing would be to hide or run, but he was an artificer and people like him usually cared enough about their work not to leave it unprotected. He would have taken something with him, or he'd be close enough to keep coming back to check on the stuff.

But if he was coming back, why didn't he contact Joan after that initial message? That was the question I had to start with. They used shadowy versions of phones here, so if a phone was somewhere in this room and Victor wasn't, that would be a clue about what happened to him.

I moved to the first desk, the one with the furnace-like invention, and looked around and under it. Apart from the optical fibers running in from the ceiling along the wall, nothing connected it to the rest of the room. The machine itself seemed seamless, as if it had grown instead of been built. No crevices, no panels to open, just that oblong cucumber-like, screwdriver-like thing sitting on a small platter. It definitely wasn't a phone, and I sure as hell wasn't going to touch a magical device of unknown origin. This station was a bust. But the fibers?

I looked at them. At first I dismissed them, there were so many in the room, sprawling like vines or a spider's web, trying to tie everything together. They were probably a power source, since shadowlight itself does that work. It's a carrier for authority, and my experiment with the fire cards had shown it could steadily supply whatever the identity switch needed.

But those fibers weren't carrying anything. They looked switched off. So the machine likely wasn't working either.

I refocused on the center tank and traced all the fibers coming out of it. Most were empty like that, but a few strands still carried shadowlight to their stations. Two stations, actually, each fed by a handful of strands.

If Victor had left in a hurry, those working stations would be the most likely places he'd been last, since they were the only things still alive in here.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

As I walked toward the first of the lit-up stations, I mulled over the possibilities.

If Victor had left on his own, why would he cut off all contact? Joan swore they were allies, but that was only their word and I'd only just met them. For all I knew, they'd bribed or tricked me into doing their dirty work. Maybe Victor had never been missing at all. Maybe he'd been hunted by the Shattered, slipped out of their grip, and now they wanted me to succeed where they'd failed. That theory fit the room better than anything else: a lab not trashed, still humming faintly with use, but absent of its master.

I couldn't help smiling. This kind of investigation, it reminded me of designing a heist, or layering paint until an image revealed itself. Finding the truth in the patterns and connections, in what was absent as much as what was present. Something told me I could grow to love this work, dangerous as it was. Maybe also because of that.

The first contraption still drawing power looked like a nautilus shell perched on four delicate legs. A cable linked it to—not an ancient stone tablet like the setting half-suggested—but a modern electronic tablet, sleek, black, glowing faintly as if it was still alive.

The shell itself pulsed with shadowlight. It seeped through its walls, making the surface glow with subtle highlights. Parts of it looked dense, solid as bone, while others thinned almost to translucence, like paper lit from behind. The spiral mouth of the shell, though, was sealed tight with a flexible, almost organic membrane, holding the light inside like it didn't want to let a single flicker escape.

It looked less like a machine and more like something half-grown and half-built.

Which, now that I thought about it, was kind of incredible. Normal light couldn't be caught or caged, it always passed through or bounced off surfaces. Maybe I was wrong about the science, but shadowlight didn't behave that way. It stayed. It clung to things, filled them, even made a home inside them. Or maybe it wasn't the light itself but whatever force made it, shining out through its vessel. Those strands running like nerves across the ceiling, were they really carrying light, or something else that happened to glow?

Fascinating. Tempting. But not my field. I wasn't a scientist, and the more I poked at that thought, the more it promised to swallow me whole. So I let it drift back into the shadows of my mind, tucked away for later or never.

The station itself was set up on a plain wooden desk, three wide drawers stacked on the right side. The electronic tablet perched on top glowed faintly, tethered to the strange nautilus contraption. Touching it seemed like the quickest possible way to discover how catastrophically one girl could explode, so I left it alone. The drawers, though, that was different.

There could be notes inside. Tools. Even Victor's shadow-phone, if I was lucky. But opening them bare-handed? Yeah, no. Not when the room was humming with power like this.

So I improvised.

I pulled out one of my eye-cards and flicked it upward. It spun once before embedding itself into the ceiling at just the right angle, letting me peer down from above. Then I unwrapped my scarf from around my shoulders and tied it snugly around the drawer handle. Once it was secure, I backed away, holding the loose end.

"Become steel," I whispered, willing authority through it.

Color shimmered and ran like liquid metal along the length of the scarf until it stiffened, hard and gleaming, as rigid as a forged bar. Perfect.

I exhaled, set my stance, and gave it a sharp pull.

The drawer slid open with a groan.

It didn't blow up. No gas, no sparks, no sudden swarm of hungry shadow-bats, just the faint scrape of wood on wood. Even Liora seemed intrigued by my cautious little maneuver. He glided closer, and hovered by the open drawer, tilting his head like a curious cat.

I let the scarf soften, authority draining away as it slumped back into fabric, and approached.

Inside: nothing lethal. Just paper, pens, and a handful of pins. Liora leaned in, peering over the edge, but after a moment he lost interest and drifted away to study something shinier. That was his way—curiosity without recklessness. He rarely touched, only looked, which made him infinitely easier to trust. I wondered if he behaved like that because of me, if our bond fed him my habits.

I untied the scarf and looped it around the next drawer handle, leaving it slack on the floor for later. Then I bent over the first drawer's contents, riffling carefully through the stack of papers.

Blueprints. Schematics. Notes scrawled in English, thank Reality for small mercies. All of it centered on the strange shell-machine on the desk. According to Victor's writing, the contraption was meant to bridge signals between worlds. Catch Earth's mobile transmissions and reroute them into Ideworld. A makeshift interdimensional cell tower.

But by his own admission, it wasn't working. Not yet.

No mention of enemies. No sudden confessions or warnings tucked into the margins. Just technical scribbles, trial after trial, dead ends.

Which left the tablet.

If this shell was meant to carry phone signals, then the tablet connected to it could have been Victor's makeshift phone. His link to Joan. Maybe even the very device he'd used to reach out.

And maybe the reason he'd left it behind. If it only worked while tethered to this thing, it wasn't exactly portable.

I glanced at the glowing screen, my gut tightening. Touch it, or don't?

I decided to risk it. A machine designed to bridge phone signals wasn't exactly the kind of thing you'd rig with traps, and so far nothing in this place had screamed booby trap.

I steadied myself, drew in a breath, and tapped the screen.

It flickered to life with the familiar glow of an Earth-standard OS. Just a tablet. My thumb hovered for a moment before I tapped the little green phone icon.

The call log was sparse with barely a handful of entries. And most of them from the same name: Eddy. The last answered call was on the 14th. Exactly the day Joan said Victor went dark. Eddy could very well be Edward.

So much for my Shattered as adversaries theory. Unless this Eddy was in on it, Joan had told me the truth. Victor had really gone silent after that. The "why" was still dangling in the air, taunting me.

I flipped through the rest of the history. Same pattern: Eddy, Eddy, Eddy. And mixed in, a string of calls Victor had tried to place to number prefixed with a strange dial code. They didn't connect. But with his notes in mind, I could guess what they were—attempts to call Earth.

I slipped out my work-phone and saved this number. When I made it back to Earth, I could try it myself. See who he was trying to reach.

That was all this station had to give me. I closed the call app, let the screen dim back into darkness, and pushed the drawer shut.

The scarf was still dangling from the next handle. I gave it a tug and hardened it again, repeating my earlier trick. No sense wasting the method when it worked.

This time, Liora didn't even glance my way. He was utterly transfixed by the glassy tank at the center of the room, the shadowlight swirling inside like a bottled storm. I couldn't blame him as it was mesmerizing.

The second drawer slid open with a small scrape. Inside: phones and tablets, but all gutted down to their bones. Stripped circuit boards, cracked casings, innards picked clean.

The third drawer opened on nothing at all.

I had another contraption to check, and this one promised to be even more interesting but probably just as unconnected to the disappearance as the last. It sat on a desk without drawers. The surface was cluttered with screws of every size and scattered screwdrivers, and at the center stood a harness holding a glove-like device. Each finger contained a small transparent tank of shadowlight, ending in tiny crystal fragments, as if chipped off a soul core. My guess: the device was designed to channel shadowlight through the fragments to produce some effect. Definitely an interesting design.

The glove's tanks were already full, yet more shadowlight kept flowing in. On closer inspection, it was evaporating into the air, unable to find a place in the glove. A small discovery, but telling: Victor had begun powering this tool, whether a device or a weapon, I couldn't be sure, but something had made him abandon it along with the tablet he used for his last call. Two valuable items left behind, but no signs of struggle. If he was taken, it hadn't been violent.

I moved toward the doors. Nothing rigged, but a large lock sat there. And it was unlocked. I pushed it open, and nothing stopped me. I could have done this from the start, ignoring the hole entirely. I closed the door and turned the lock. Whoever took Victor didn't do so by his own choice. He was forced to leave, but not violently, and had no time to even secure his own things.