Metaworld Chronicles

"Magister Song—"

"Good morning, Magister."

"A moment of your time, Magister…."

"May God's grace be with you, Magister Song."

Strangely, in the microcosm of the ship and its crew of youthful Mages, the oldest of whom was in their thirties and the youngest just twenty, Gwen finally felt less like a cuckoo egg.

Charlene was their official leader, respected for her charisma and her associations. Comparatively, the respect she commanded was different, for hers were based on the promise that her Shoggoth possessed more destructive potential than all the Mages on the ship, rivalled only by Hanmoul's mechanised infantry.

On the sea map, the voyage to Ross Island, the seat of Mount Erebus, would take ten days, nine if the seas are fair, and twelve should the weather encourage detours. Charlene had taken great care of the voyage's potential misadventures, however, and had brought along one of the aspiring "genius" Diviners from the Queen's College, skilled in clairvoyance and steering the Royal Raven away from mishaps.

When Gwen asked about the paradox that Mayuree had prescribed, the Diviner intimated that she divined minor aspects of the journey, such as the conditions of the ship's parts as canary objects, as well as the health of certain members of the crew who loved or hated certain weather conditions—then pieced together something akin to a data field to plot the ship's course.

For a "foretelling" Diviner, the young woman had explained, talent in foresight wasn't necessarily a good thing—for the details of progress were far more important than the end itself. This "Big Data" approach was a genius form of circumvention Gwen had not at all expected—and thus, could only nod and marvel at the methodologies of Cambridge University's elites.

On the first night out of port, she, Charlene and the young nobles, together with the Dwarven leadership, convened at the castle to discuss matters moving forward. Together with her new favourite, the Diviner Magus Marley Dixon, they mapped out the threats ahead.

The first and foremost threat to any shipping into the Black Zones was the giant sea monsters that made their home in the cold waters of the South Sea. Krakens, despite their reputation for being homely lair monsters, often ventured from their Pocket Dimension sea homes to attack ships, arguably out of beak-clenching reflex. Ningen, the whale-monsters with wing-like arms and operable digits, also made their home in the Antarctic, though these were known to be docile, with the rare "Priest" capable of reason and communication. The worst-case scenario was an encounter with a young Leviathan, one exiled from the Elemental Plane of Water by competition or curiosity. These simple-minded island-fishes are usually enslaved by the upper-class Elementals of the Seven Kingdoms, becoming living pleasure barges or siege beasts for their underwater wars.

"The region is sectioned to the Sixth Swell," Charlene explained, appending that a "Swell" was the corrupted translation of what the Mermen termed the tears into the Elemental Plane. Each of the Seven Kingdoms, dotted in unknown depths in the North and South Pacific, was home to such a "Swell". Some Magisters argued that the Swells were moving, living entities tied to their Ancient Mythics. Others compared them to the World Trees of the Elves. The current conjecture, however, was that none of that mattered as no human being had seen one, much less studied a "Swell".

What was known was that the reigning monarchs of these Swells were old beings of the Elemental Planes who had chosen to stake their claim in the "New World". A monarch now well-known to Gwen was Miommiriorthyr, the ever-slumbering Dragon Turtle of yore, tagged by Charlene as the lord of the Fourth Swell, controlling the regions from Fiji to the Coral Sea east of the eastern Australian coastline.

The South Ocean was the domain of Odidi Vel, the Supreme Seat of the Sixth Swell, a title that sounded as intimidating as it was alliterative.

"And?" Gwen asked, sipping her Maotai in contemplation.

"There is no and." Charlene's grey eyes remained puffed and watery from the wafting alcohol permeating the ship. "We only know of him or her from the traders who traffic Mermen through the Grey Market. There's nothing this far south for us to be interested in, and the Sixth Swell rarely gets involved in the war with the Commonwealth, unlike the First, Second and Fourth Seats."

"Hmm…" Gwen sat back. She was a classic landlubber, and her maritime knowledge consisted only of lessons taught by conscripted instructors in Auckland, not personal experience.

"Don't yer worry, lassie." Hanmoul was optimistic as always, trusting only in firepower. "We'll blast 'em right back into the Elemental Plane of Water, come squall, Kraken or maelstrom."

Gwen nodded. Of that, she was confident. With the Dwarven mercenaries on her side, their ship temporarily possessed a repulsion Core that could rival a Tower for several days. Additionally, her Diviner had already predicted that no catastrophic danger would threaten the integrity of the Core's functions. And should a creature brave the destruction of its Core to assail the ship, the barrage of the Mages and the Golems on deck would transmute it into grilled calamari.

The concern that remained, therefore, was their limited information on their destination—the southernmost volcano and one of the largest on Terra, Mount Erebus.

When Charlene had promised to bring every shred of data the Mageocracy possessed on the volcanic island-peninsular, Gwen had anticipated topographical maps with illusion-empowered overlays, information on the beasts and monsters, as well as routes and lanes for both sea and land.

What Charlene instead showed the crew were reproductions of hand-drawn maps from 1909.

"The last harrumph of Ex-Meister Shackleton," the Ravenport heir spoke with reverence, her grey eyes twinkling with remembrance. "According to his biography, Sir Shackleton survived there, in that sunless Black Zone, for six months while waiting for rescue, battling Frost Howlers, hunting the Ivory Seals for meals, wearing their skin and eating their gut-linings to keep his surviving crew fed."

"Final harrumph?" Gwen remarked. "The biography didn't sell well?"

"The expedition ruined him." Charlene sighed wistfully, fingers caressing the running writing that Gwen could read through her Translation Stone. "If I were born a century earlier, I would have funded him personally, but the Royal Geographical Society wasn't so keen after he lost the most expensive sail ship ever equipped to an Ice Elemental maelstrom. After which, over the next six months, he lost five Mage Flights in a time when a single Flight could hold down a regional colony."

Gwen felt a twitch from her right eye, hoping their expedition would fare better.

"It didn't help that several of those Mages who died were the second-sons of their households, who went with Shackleton out of love and respect for his spirit of adventure and discovery. In that disaster, almost a dozen bloodlines were diminished, and an Earldom was entirely extinguished once the heir was forced to participate in the Great War in place of the spare."

"And all this—"Gwen swept a hand over the maps. "Is what remains of his legacy?"

"Yes." Charlene gazed over the replicated parchments printed on enchanted linen indestructible by water or fire. Gingerly, her fingers brushed by what looked to Gwen to be a family crest. "This is all that remains of House Shackleton. Nonetheless, By Endurance, we Conquer."

"Endurance," Gwen said drily, taking from her parallel history. "The name of Shackleton's ship."

"Yes. I wanted to call the Royal Raven that." Charlene laughed. "But father said it was an ill omen."

"As opposed to ravens?" Gwen scoffed. Did this world have Coffin Ships?

"What's wrong with ravens?" Charlene raised a brow.

Gwen said nothing. Instead, the group refocused their attention on the maps.

"Holy hells." Her eyes fell on the topography. "I knew Erebus was big—but is that for real?"

"Fret-not, lassie. Tis a wee-little hill." Hanmoul, who had seen his share of mountains, was only mildly impressed. "Four thousand human metric units? We'll scale it no problem."

"With luck, I don't think that would be necessary." Gwen quickly performed her best PowerPoint(™) sorcery to transform the map into a three-dimensional projection plotting the points on the hand-map through her mind. As a Lightning Mage, her spatial awareness was already leagues above the average sorceress. Dimension Door, with its higher demand for cognitive analytics, was a very stern teacher.

A few minutes later, a crude map of Mt Erebus, or more accurately, the island peninsular formed by the lava from its dome, made itself evident.

Their navigator, a Viscount-in-waiting named Able Burton, helpfully adjusted her misreadings.

"We will cut through the ice sheets. Here and here." Charlene pointed to an alcove just below the mountain's saddle, where the slope was steepest. "Our journey inward isn't so bad, according to the Meister's notes. September is the period of peril. If we cannot leave by mid-August, we'll be locked in until the spring melt—around January."

"We might just do that." Gwen slowly turned the map. "I don't know what we'll find, but if we are to beat back the Fire Elementals, I don't think it'll be a single battle. Add in logistics. It'll take time."

"You're confident about that, I see." Charlene motioned for their navigator. "Bertie, if you could?"

Bertie could indeed. With great gusto, the man added to Gwen's geographic details, such as a four-kilometre lava lake called the "Hole of Terror."

Unfazed by the name, Gwen continued to plot the dangers.

"And here, we have the Saddle of Ice Horror—and this would be the Valley of A Thousand Cuts—"

"Hold up." Gwen waved her hand through the illusion, halting Bertie. "Who came up with this stuff?"

"Sir Shackleton's cartographer, ma'am," the young man replied. "These are quite literal, I fear. The saddle, we can assume, would still be home to Frost Horrors—degenerate Frost Giants more beast than man, cannibals who hunt and kill anything that moves, while themselves are hunted by the Lava Wyrms from the Hole... and so on."

"I see." Gwen allowed her imagination to do the leg work. Certainly, Auckland Tower's library hadn't prepared her for such a literal and dynamic Black Zone. "Carry on."

Bertie continued, slicing their destination into six major sectors. Taking up bits of the journal, he explained that Shackleton's landing, a relatively newer portion of the peninsular, was an uncontested beachhead with a sheltered cove of breakable ice to the northwest. This location would be their sector one, where they aim to land. Sectors five and six were the mountain itself, one for the ever-smoking peak and the other for the lava lake to the peak's northeast.

Sector three, east of their landing and west of the peak, would be their presumed goal—for that was where Shackleton had recorded his encounter with the fabled Rime Wardens of Illhîweth.

Bertie cleared his throat, then read the exert attached to the paper map.

"We met strange and alien Elves, with faces of delicate beauty, each an ice sculpture from a master's hands. These sported an upper body both lithe and regal, akin to their cousins from Tryfan. Their lower bodies, conversely, distinctly deviate from the norm. The Frost Wardens were the strangest of all, sporting arachnid limbs from a sleek hip, gliding over snow and air with a grace that would put the Royal Ballet's prima donna to shame. The priestesses, conversely, were humanoids, though their complexion would appear near-transparent as if the clearest glacial ice."

Shackleton's stricken crew had lost several Mages to the Frost Wardens before the Frost Flower of Illhîweth, a Demi-Goddess Shackleton named Illhîwenthiel, spared them. Later, on the plains overshadowed by the eternal plume from Erebus, the Meister witnessed the Frost Wyrm Illaelitharian's grand battle against the encroachment of a Lava Drake.

After the titanic, mythic-class conflict, the hapless adventurer had begged for aid from the Elves. Perhaps his presence had caught the interest of the Lady or her Wyrm, or maybe the effort of helping the lost Humans was lesser than the effort of slaughtering them—Shackleton was able to safely return to base, after which his subsequent treks no longer violated the sacred region he dubbed the Pillar Grove of Illhîweth. As for the grove, the explorer wrote thus:

"Different to the brutalism of Erebus, the Grove of Illhîweth stands as a forest of fumaroles, as the Society would label them—but each a pocket dimension upon itself. The smallest of these ice trees stood taller than our tallest buildings—some kilometre high, while in the distance, my men and I spied such a structure as human eyes could not conceive. A TRUNK of Ice that seemed to hold up the heavens itself and lend support to the very reality of Elemental Space in its surrounds! So enormous was this construct—so immeasurable that we chose to give it the name of 'The Pillar'."

After Bertie finished the reading, the meeting room took on an atmosphere of contemplation.

"So... yes. We are following the steps of Meister Shackleton himself," Charlene broke the silence. "We're making history, Gwen, Master Hanmoul. In more ways than one. We'll be the first Dwarves and Humans to set foot on Erebus and Ross for almost a century."

"Officially." Gwen decided to douse Charlene's fire a little. "But I reckon some enterprising fellows would have come here or drifted here by chance or purpose. If I know my Humans as well as you, I wouldn't doubt that."

"It doesn't count." Charlene's smile grew crooked. "Unless you bring back a map and a trade route. Most, I'd imagined, died here."

"Well." Gwen returned her attention to the map and its notes. "I sure as hell hope we live to tell the tale…"

On the third day, the crew spotted their first bit of self-fulfilling prophecy.

A Kraken, its burning-orange elongated shape just visible under the noble-green waters near freezing temperature, could be seen pulling alongside the ship, staying just far from starboard that the gung-ho Dwarven artillery could not purchase a formidable impact.

For hours, the Kraken and the Royal Raven sized one another while Gwen, Lulan, Richard and their best Mage Flight circled the ship from forecastle to poop, anticipating the Kraken to make a move.

By evening, with the Dwarves blasting lumen flairs that lit up a kilometre of the sea, the Kraken and its Shoal thought better of antagonising the Royal Raven, electing to return to the depth. Their path, their Diviner, had later explained, had been a Goldilock's zone inspiring indecisiveness, straying somewhere between two Kraken's lairs.

On the fifth day, the ship side-swiped a storm and detoured by sailing perpendicular to the weather phenomenon.

As the torrential pour blasted the ocean, turning the bean-green waters white, they saw a flock of Thunder Birds frolic in the kilometre-thick clouds. At once, sensing its desires, Gwen released her Ariel, who sailed into the heavens to join the joyous flight with gleeful cries of "EE-EE!"

A few minutes later, Ariel returned with a dead bird the size of a horse, its limp neck still bleeding liquid electricity from her Kirin's bite-holes.

Immediately, Charlene ordered the Resonance Chamber to be set to a seventy-five per cent threshold—though there was no need. Sensing Ariel's Draconic lineage, the birds dispersed, ending the thunderstorm and the detour.

Were the birds the cause of the storm?

Or did the storm summon the birds?

That was a phenomenon the Cambridge scholars debated but lacked the evidence to ascertain. Away from the familiar climes of the northern hemisphere, the South Ocean was a place with unpredictable everything, at least by the standards of Human Magecraft.

On day six, an albatross joined the ship.

Immediately, Richard and Lulan began to salivate, boasting that the lone bird was great practice and a source of income.

Knowing her Romantic Poetry, Gwen grew instantly wary. For one, this was no Albatross that a simple bolt could strike down. With her spatial perception, Gwen guessed the creature to be somewhere between twenty to twenty-two meters from wingtip to wingtip, making it a contender for Golos. On that account, Gogo's absence made great foresight, for she recollected how easily the Wyvern attracted the Da-peng in Amazonia. Had Gwen brought her ally, Golos would have attacked and eaten the Albatross without a word.

And if such a noble bird died, Gwen was sure that some otherworldly God would make the Royal Raven pay a tax in suffering.

"A Chasm Chaser Albatross," one of Charlene's lackeys, a zoologist Conjurer by trade, named the bird after filming the thing for several hours. "Extra-planar beasts that hail from the Elemental Plane of Air. It's likely looking for a way home. They're related to the Big Birds of yore, the ones your Magistership met during the IIUC."

By the late afternoon, the Albatross had attempted to come closer to the ship several times. In response, one of the Magus nobles asked if they could open a "path" to the Elemental Plane of Air with a Maelstrom.

Charlene gave an affirmative order, and an impressive, dozen-meter wide hole was made manifest into some unknowable portion of the Elemental Plane of Air.

With a shriek, the Chasm Chaser transformed into a shrieking arrow, shot through the vortex, and then was gone, leaving only giant feathers as souvenirs for the Mages.

"These make excellent ingredients for implements of Flight." The zoologist Dimension Doored from the sea just as Gwen wondered if the man had signalled a death flag and was about to be eaten by a giant fish. Charlene berated her junior officer, though the happy scholar was happy to compose a ten-thousand-word reflection.

"Do you think it knew?" Gwen asked her crew.

"It seemed to know what it was doing." Richard stared coldly at the door where the happy Conjurer had gone, eyeing the enormous feathers cradled in the man's arm. "It knew too well."

"I'll be down below." Lulan walked away with a bored expression. Charlene's nobles, who could not at all penetrate Petra's crystalline coldness, had elected to pursue the exotic Sword Mage with praise and gifts. As an answer, she offered them one path to getting horizontal—harrowing Mage Duels.

When she had asked for the same, all politely declined.

Gwen watched her companions go, then returned her attention to her Omni Orb. Intelligently, Ruxin's priceless gift sparkled in the sun's dying light. Her miraculous device was as much of a navigator as their collection of Diviners. The furtherer they travelled, the scarcer the sun became. By the eighth day, the Diviners had anticipated that there would be no more light and that the crew would have to utilise their low-light vision implements and enchantments to avoid the ship becoming a beacon of disturbance. In August, the Diviners had said, the Royal Raven may not see the Plane of Radiance at all.

This far south, the air had also grown frosty. Were it not for the strange conversions the Dwarves made to the ship, there would be hoar frost covering the barge's decks.

At the same time, the giant icebergs passing by were making her Cameron-inspired PTSD flare. However, Gwen had been assured that there would be no "Titanic", certainly not with Mages like Richard aboard who could drain a dozen freight holds of water without breaking a sweat.

Together with their Dwarven companions, who could repair the ship so long as it remained in a single piece, their only worry would be that which was unknown.

Day Eight.

The unknown.

First came the clouds, so dense as to have substance.

Then came the darkness, an absence of light so total that even low-light vision, perfect for starlight, had reached its limits. The arrival of the Antarctic winds had likewise defeated the mechanism put in place by the Dwarves to radiate the residual heat from the Fabricator Engine, forming slippery ice deposited by clattering squalls of sleet. After that, the drift ice, the long-promised menace of the South Ocean, made its presence known in the form of screeching scraps and crunching groans against the barge's side.

Progress, which had seemed fair for the last seven days, slowed instantly to a halt. The Walls of Force that reinforced the hull flickered, offering hysterical bursts of light as the heavy-duty Ether engines thrummed, adding to the effect of Shatter spells used for deep excavation. In addition to the weight of the ice, the Royal Raven's Militant Faction Captain had to keep the ship in perpetual motion, for the ice became living things of constant dynamism. Though the Raven could arguably free itself, a moored Breaker Barge more than likely found itself ensnared by ice up the sides of its hull, which, if significant enough, would make them sitting ducks for predators from the Elemental Plane of Ice.

Once the weather fouled, the Mage Flights scouts were wholly withdrawn, as the darkness made anything other than clairvoyance futile. Even the Diviners unhappily reported that Elemental Ice and Air were so thick in these parts that any monster of these Elements would be undetectable as long as the weather continued, making the ship arguably blind.

Ergo, they were up against the unknowable, undetectable, and unseeable.

Of course, Gwen still had the Omni Orb to correlate with the Diviners, meaning they couldn't be lost for long. Ergo, focusing only on avoiding dense ice, the Royal Raven barged its way south, negotiating for Humanity's re-entry into the South Pole.

Day nine.

Gwen saw nothing but snow, glimmering in the perpetual twilight from bow to stern. White as linen and limitless as the horizon, the snow spread in every direction, with only the trail of broken ice left by the Royal Raven as evidence that they were in motion. Then, to the steam-exhaling crew's amazement, their Magister opened the double-sealed doorway—then stepped into the fresh morning ice, her hair billowing in the cross breeze.

And while the others wore magical garments of warmth like armour against the chill, she wore only her crow-suit.

After a moment of circulating her Almudj-blessed mana, Gwen affirmed a hypothesis.

As suspected, she was impervious to cold, at least in terms of climate. She acknowledged the bone chill, but the adverse sensation was temporary. Instead, she felt akin to Bondi in autumn, where the first few minutes spent in the sea made one's teeth chatter, but quickly, after dozen waves, the wetsuit voided the cold, and activity only made one cosy.

"You're insane." Charlene arrived beside her, wearing an attractively silhouetted armour built for the extreme cold, shivering despite the HDMs invested. "Your armour has only a Tier II Weather Seal."

As the young woman spoke, her breaths turned to mist, making her criticism comical.

"I'll be fine." Gwen smiled back, seeing that she was joined by Richard, Petra and Lulan, who had all come to observe the spectacle. "But let's inform the teams. We'll start our acclimatisation training now, and let's see if we can find some locals to test our mettle."

Day Twelve.

Hours before arrival, the crew gathered to survey their future landing.

The leadership of the Royal Raven stood on the forecastle, forming a reverse V, each with grim expressions as they surveyed the path ahead.

Their ship had yet to arrive at the destined cove, though it was now close enough for the Mages to marvel at the glowing furnace of a mountain dispelling the fingerless dark.

No longer did they rely on their low-light vision, for only in the brilliance of a thousand Day Light orbs fired from Dwarven Spellswords could the scope of the catastrophe be ascertained.

"What the hell is this?" Richard half-leaned against the rails with Lea hanging overhead, arms wrapped against his body to keep her Master warm. "That doesn't look like soil."

"It's Soot." Gwen touched a clawed finger to Ariel's fur after her Familiar retrieved a paw full of mushy snow. From the looks of things, there was more ash than powder, with the slush-pack instantly melting in her hands, staining the boat's grey dock and her dark gauntlet with the stink of old sulphur.

"Weather's not particularly frigid." Charlene opened the collar of her protective suit. "I can even feel my fingers."

The Ravenport's observation was answered only by the moaning of the unseen wind, carrying a scent that was both rotten and foetid, dredging up memories of Shenyang.

"It's winter," Gwen murmured, her blood cooling more than the others, knowing that the implications of what she saw held a far larger impact than volcanic pollution. "It's dark as well. Yet, it isn't freezing here, and everything is covered in soot. The weather—the Elemental Balance is completely off the charts."

"SHAA—!" Caliban, playing the role of an impromptu measuring stick, slithered up the ship's side.

A few of the Mages, joined by Hanmoul, ran to her mewling fiend and ran what looked to be a measuring implement across its lower body.

"Himmseg above, lassie. It ain't looking good." The Dwarf returned with the bad news. "The Elemental Ash reading is over twenty times what yer Meister recorded on his visit."

Her Cambridge staff confirmed the Dwarf's finding.

Gwen gulped. But even as she tried to digest the direness of Hanmoul's words and read the writing on the wall, her Divination Senses gave no quarter.

DING! Several Message spells bloomed at once.

"SHAA—SHAA—!" Caliban contorted itself, pointing its faceless head toward the distance.

A few pinpoints of light, bright orange and with the likeness of fireflies, appeared and disappeared like air traffic signals on top of desolate skyscrapers.

Gwen focused both mana and essence on her eyes, forcing her vision into a strained state of hyper-clarity.

She saw… long necks, a hound's jaws, wings… no tail, culminating in a flock… of fiery things, half the size of Golos, but more than making up for the loss with quantity.

"Charlene, tell the crew to prepare for battle," she gave her recommendation at once. Whatever these flying lizards were, they were not approaching the ship to trade or demand tea. "Wyverns, likely Chimeras of sorts. They look like bats, but with a protracted torso."

"Ashworld Wyrmbats, your Magistership." The zoologist interrupted her flow of consciousness, holding a magical looking-glass in one hand. "We should be careful. The ash they spread is highly corrosive, and burn wounds cannot be cured with non-magical means."

"ALL HANDS—BATTLE STATIONS!" Hanmoul was suit-clad and clattering down the ship's metal deck before Charlene had finished giving her human crew the orders to crack up the shielding and the Resonators. With a roar, a dozen War Golems on the foredeck began to steam and thrum, their backs opening to reveal the receptacle for their Golem-suited pilots. Elsewhere, the sides of the ship, heavily modified by the Dwarven crew, began to blossom like an iron flower, revealing gunning platforms, each housing the Iron Guard's artillery units.

Gwen shouted into her Message device, telling her Shadow Mages to protect the ship and crew in the instance of an unlikely boarding, advising that they leave the ranged fighting to the war machines.

"Master Hanmoul!" Charlene's voice came over the shared intercom channel for the commanding officers. "Do we hold our position?"

"Nay—lassie!" Hanmoul's gruff voice was aflame with battle passion, mixed with the distinct clang of cranking shafts slotting mana crystals into micro-furnace chambers. With a hiss, the Spellswords on the backs of his artillery squad grew erect. "FULL STEAM AHEAD, lassie! Let ter Iron Guards show yer how us Dwarves defend a Citadel!"