Ideworld Chronicles: The Art Mage

Day in the story: 17th December (Wednesday)

I checked the other devices in the room, and the adjacent spaces too—a kitchen, a toilet, and a bedroom with a sizable bed. Every shadow that lived in this wicked place seemed to possess one, probably because Ideworld copied the homework without thinking it through. Every corner, however, was just as silent about what had happened.

Everything felt like a dead end in the investigation. Yet I wasn't ready to leave, especially not while Liora hovered so intently over that massive tube in the middle.

I glanced at it again. "What do you think this thing even is?" I asked my little spider companion.

[A faux crystal core?] Anansi offered.

I just wished it were a mirror instead of plain glass, then I might actually see what had happened here. And that wish pulled me into a more reflective frame of mind. "Anansi, do we know how to turn glass into a mirror?"

[Do we know? That's a strange question to ask.]

"Well, you're me, and I'm you, little shit," I muttered. "I'm just being polite. So… do we, or don't we?"

[You don't remember?]

"That's the thing. I'm sure I knew this once, but I kind of forgot. Not sure."

[What do you think?]

"Layer behind the glass. Silver?"

[That would be my guess as well.]

Kind of shitty, you having access to only the things I already know. I should let you out more.

Still, thanks to this little chat, I had a plan. I could paint the insides of the tube with silver paint, turning it into a mirror and hope it remembered what happened before it became reflective. It kind of should, right? Even a glass surface picks up faint images, even if they aren't sharp.

"I could just paint another hole on the surface and go in, but I am kind of scared of the shadowlight swirling in there. It would also have to be removed so it wouldn't cover something important, but that wasn't a huge deal," I said aloud to make my thoughts clearer.

Liora did something strange in response. He swam through the air close to the tank and shifted into pure shadowlight, like he did when he slipped into me to check if my soul wasn't too cluttered for him to join. Then he passed into the tube, unbothered by the solid glass, and turned back into his draconic form while inside.

"Don't!" I shouted when I saw what he was doing. He seemed completely untroubled by the light and went back and forth as if to prove it was safe.

"Did you know it would be safe when you went in there?" I asked. He flared red shadowlight. "Then you shouldn't have done it!" I snapped. "It was dangerous. You could have been hurt."

But he wasn't and I now had an option to teleport to him while he was inside, but the fact that the shadowlight was safe for him didn't mean it was safe for me.

Painting a hole on the surface seemed like the safe move at first. I could go in and quickly out. But that was me thinking like the old me, the one who leaned on identity instead of connection.

"Stay there, Lio," I said, and he answered in soft jade.

Become Noxy, I thought, laying my gun gently on the floor in front of the tank. If things went sideways, she'd be my anchor to pull myself back. Still, I couldn't shake the hope I wouldn't end up as a frog or something worse.

I was just about to jump inside toward my Lóng when a thought tugged at me. Liora might be fine in there because he was partly shadowlight himself, but that didn't mean I would be. I needed a test, something made of regular flesh.

Then I remembered the meat Lio had left unfinished somewhere in the room. I combed through the stations until I finally found it, dumped near the side of a desk. Not exactly appetizing, just one mangled rodent leg and part of a chest. But it would do. I tapped the remains with my finger, then blinked them inside the tank, right beneath Liora.

The instant it vanished, I rushed back to the glass and stared, waiting for… anything. But nothing happened. No sizzling, no disintegration, no strange reaction. Just a half-eaten carcass lying there as the shadowlight swirled lazily around it.

Lio flicked his head at it, interested only because I was watching.

That was enough for me.

I filled my lungs, focused on the bond tethered between me and the dragon, and pulled myself toward him.

It felt like the world decided to reward me for daring to step inside.

Light erupted all around me—bodyless, invisible fireflies trailing wakes of brilliance, bursts of lightning that melted into mist. Colors layered on colors: turquoise, pink, yellow, beige. They writhed and coiled like serpents without form, endlessly circling some unseen center that kept it all bound.

I lifted my hand, palm open, and the shadowlight bent toward it, swirling, curling around me as if my very mass tugged on it. If I hadn't been so utterly spellbound, I might have been offended by the thought—that I was just heavy enough to bend the magic. But there it was. Pure, raw magic. The light that carried authority, that shaped reality however a mage willed it.

And here I was, standing inside that primordial soup, peering back at the inventor's workshop from behind the glass.

I wasn't here for wonder, though. Nor for comfort. The sight burned to stay in me, but I shoved it down, made myself work.

I pulled out the silver spray and started covering the glass.

**********

It was something else. The mirror I'd made reflected the whole room back at itself from every angle, and yet faint threads of shadowlight still glimmered beneath the surface. Good thing I'd left Noxy on the floor as Lio couldn't move through the painted glass even in his shadowlight form. Maybe it was the reflective layer or something else, but he got stuck and I had to yank both of us out with a teleport.

With that mess sorted, I finally had a mirror that might tell me what happened here. I just had to use my borrowed ocular tricks right and hope the surface remembered.

"What do you think, guys? Ready?" I asked. Lio flared a lovely green. The color of summer grass wet with dew.

[Focus on the particular event with Victor, or we'll spend an eternity in here.] Anansi said.

"That's exactly what I'm going to do," I answered, wondering if Lio thought I was talking to myself as I skipped some replies.

[He can hear me too.] Anansi replied, and Lio bobbed up and down like he was standing on an invisible platform, flaring green again.

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"Oh nice. I didn't think of that. You are part of my soul, so you're bound to him as well."

[No. He is bound to me.]

"Oh Anansi, technicalities. We're all in this together."

[By your choices, Alexa, not mine or his.] I laughed at that.

"So, nice chat, guys, but the girl's got work to do." I started placing my upgraded eye-cards around the room until I had coverage of the whole space. When they were set I reached out with my aura and made them my eyes of the Shattered and I asked one to also be my ears, just to catch anything he might have said. I wasn't sure it would work with audio, but it was worth a try.

My vision exploded out like I'd dropped into a dozen new places at once, each one looking back at me. It was amazing and weird, but it no longer hit me with side effects. My mind had grown used to seeing more. Maybe it was always my thing—looking past the surface to find the truth. Or maybe it was shadowlight, authority, and habit combined. Either way, the mirror was waiting.

I focused on Victor as I knew him: a shadow with so much will to become something else that he reached past the veil between worlds and claimed the man who dreamed him. They became one, and even though I didn't fully understand the process or its implications yet, it felt important.

I pictured his determination—meticulous, prepared, driven to understand and use shadowlight. He was a recluse; his height and odd looks scared most people off, leaving him only the fringe folk for company.

With that image lodged in my mind and soul, a connection formed and the shattered eyes started to work. Shadowlight seeped through the cracks in the painted cards as I became overwhelmed with dozens of saved reflections of the man in this room, each eye catching a different moment. I discarded most with a thought, with focus and my soul's authority, and turned my attention to the thing that mattered: December 14th, the day of his last call to Eddy. That was where I wanted to go; that was what I needed to see.

The mirror answered, and the fragmented images of that hulking man began to coalesce into one.

First thing first. This guy's entire visage was much stranger than I'd expected from the picture Joan had shown me. Ordinary-looking, hunched, long coat, a bit of a plump face, sharp fox-like eyes and curly black hair, right? Wrong. Well, partially wrong. In the memory held in the reflections I saw his true self, without the cloak to hide him.

He was tall. Towering—at least eight feet—and he wore, in the comfort of his apartment-workshop, nothing but once-white boxer shorts with comical red dots. The body he used for locomotion wouldn't be called human if found on Earth. Alien, at best. His legs bent oddly, more like a grasshopper's, giving him an enormous stride. He squatted in front of desks instead of sitting, which explained the lack of chairs.

His torso was changed too, being bigger and wider, with two sets of shoulders, and yes, two pairs of long arms. Each ended in hands with three fingers and two opposable thumbs, because why not be more efficient, right?

His hunched back had a second curved spine next to the original one, and between them tiny crystals sprouted from the skin. Focus on that column and they felt embedded more than grown, probably soul-core fragments.

And the bulging eyes? Stranger still. They were more like snail eyes than human ones, mounted on little antennae so he could stick them out and see things up close without moving his face.

Overall he looked like a cross between a beetle, a snail and a human, sprouted with augments meant to boost dexterity, strength and focus. If this is how the original Victor Bohr dreamed himself to be, he was both madman and visionary. It was nothing short of amazing and horrifying to witness.

So far the day started pretty uneventful for him, and no—unfortunately I didn't have the sound, so I removed that part of authority from the card and kept watching through my augmented sight while I lay on the floor staring at the empty ceiling with my biological eyes.

He moved around and experimented mostly with a tablet, connecting mechanical parts and crystal fragments, then feeding it all shadowlight and dialing the Earth number. At one point, frustrated when another dial didn't connect, he grabbed the crystals and threw them on the ground, dramatically spreading both sets of arms and shouting up at the ceiling, looking like an augmented gorilla ready to smash something. He quickly regained composure, though, dropped to a squat and began collecting the tiny crystals into his hands while murmuring to them and checking them with his telescoping eyes.

He looked genuinely distressed that he might have destroyed them in a fit of rage.

His work continued for a while—at least an hour by my count—until he suddenly jerked toward the door from over his workstation. He stood, moved to the door and talked through it with someone off-mirror for a minute or two. He tensed visibly during the conversation, then went back to his bench and dialed Eddy.

He put the call on speaker and paced, gesticulating with all four arms, both angry and upset. Whatever the person at the door had said had clearly spooked him. Partway through the call he composed himself, went into another room and returned quickly with his cloak on and that glove device that still sits connected to the machine. He put the glove down, moved to the central tube and pressed one hand to its glass. Shadowlight began to flow through the optical fibers in the ceiling toward the contraption.

[Good part incoming?] Anansi teased.

"I believe so, girl. Although this silent movie thing is a little bit infuriating. You think it's how the Shattered see? Seems pretty inefficient, knowing a person only by what they look like doing. Hearing's important too, right?"

[It is, but sometimes seeing is enough. And it's not like you are seeing sounds yourself.]

"Yeah, it is true," I muttered as Victor in the memory turned back toward the door. He stood just to the side of it, speaking through the wood for a while. Then his head dipped, heavy and slow, like disappointment weighing him down. One of his long hands dragged across his entire face, as though he wanted to rub the feeling away, erase it like chalk from a board.

Then, with a sudden steadiness, he straightened, reached for the lock, and turned it open, while simultaneously stepping back a cautious half-pace.

The moment the lock clicked open, four figures poured inside, armored head to toe in gear that screamed SWAT, rifles leveled, formation tight. They fanned out around Victor like predators circling prey. He didn't move, didn't even twitch, just stood there in his coat while two more stepped through the doorway.

The first I recognized instantly: Robbie Rhythm Reyes, Malik's brother. Even he wore the tactical plating, though he carried no weapon, just the weight of his presence and that cold, unblinking stare pinned on Victor. The second man I'd seen before too, though only briefly—back when I visited Bobbie's house. Then he'd been dressed down in dirty jeans and a flannel shirt. Now he looked every bit the soldier, armored like the rest, his mustache thick, beard stubby, scalp buzzed to an inch.

He was the one doing the talking. His posture, his gestures—this was the negotiator, the mechanic mind behind the brute force. Victor tried to explain something, pointing at the nautilus device on his desk, but the mustached man barely spared it a glance. He simply motioned for Victor to move.

I could see the hesitation in him. His long limbs tensed, his torso angled subtly toward the glove's station, the one still humming with power. He thought about resisting. For a moment, the possibility hung heavy in the air.

But Rhythm caught it. His smirk curled as he raised one finger, wagging it lazily like scolding a child reaching for candy. No, no.

Victor's second set of shoulders slumped, his monstrous frame folding inward. Defeat. He obeyed, trailing after the mechanic and two of the riflemen. The remaining pair flanked them, with Robbie at the rear.

Before leaving, Reyes lingered in the doorway. He turned, eyes sweeping the room, and let that smug smile stretch across his face, like the place, the work, even the man himself, all of it belonged to him now. Then he pulled the door shut behind him.

I lingered a while longer, trying to see if anything else was caught in the reflection, but soon after they left, the vision in the mirror dissolved and the memory of Victor no longer continued.

Everything I saw and concluded from my time in there painted a clear picture. Victor had been coerced by Edge of Tomorrow to do something for them, most likely tied to their gate—that was my guess, based on what I'd seen in Bobbie's house and here. They must have found out about him and taken something important to force him to cooperate, since they left in relative peace but the tension was still palpable. This wasn't a friendly visit. He'd prepared to face them, but the informant wasn't quick enough and he had no weapon ready. That glove looked like the thing he intended to use for defense. I was tempted to take it, but I was also afraid of what it would do to me or my Domain. Leaving it here felt wrong as well.

"What to do?" I asked aloud.

[Isn't it artistic in its design?] Anansi suggested.

I moved closer to look at it. The intricate connections of crystals, the little tanks and the gauntlet itself did look like something an artist would create.

I closed my eyes and focused. With my Authority I decided to declare its artistry. I stepped to the other side of the room and Lio followed. When the distance felt safe I reached through the link I'd established and let my Authority flow forward with one command: become a glove.

As soon as it took hold, hopefully stripping the thing of any lingering magical tricks, I sent it, with a flick of thought to the edges of my Domain. Somewhere out in that barren wasteland that surrounds my stumpy tower with the cracked roof.

I waited a bit after that, watching Liora and him watching me, but my soul seemed intact and nothing exploded in my Domain, so hopefully I'd done the right thing.

This whole investigation gave me more answers about Victor than I expected. I knew who took him and the direction they went, thanks to the gang encounter earlier. I also pretty much understood why. What was left was to get there and get him out, but for that I'd probably need some cavalry.