The slow, steady rasping of metal against stone continued. Caleb stared at the far side of the Keep, the darkness from which that sound was coming.
“I’m on it,” Chelsea said, raising one of her lighters. She clicked it once, sending a flickering orb of emerald flame floating slowly into the darkness.
They all stood watching, waiting.
The rasping of metal on stone continued. It wasn’t constant. It would start up, pause, start again, pause. Sometimes it went on for a few long, slow seconds. Sometimes it was quick, short, and the pause was shorter, too. Sometimes the pauses were very long. But there was a pattern there, Caleb was sure of it. Especially as the rasping came closer for a while, and then started to get farther away. It had moved from left to right, getting closest when it was directly across from Caleb, starting to move farther away as it continued right.
Chelsea’s orb of fire floated above the place where the rasping came from, and blossomed brighter, illuminating the floor below.
Moving on its own, not held or wielded by any person…
Was a sword.
It was a large, two-handed sword with a wide, impossibly huge blade. It was easily taller than Caleb, straight but only edged along one side. Near the hilt, extra metal was folded in layers, like some kind of reinforcement.
Embedded in those folded layers was a watch.
While the blade and handle were worn and weathered, cracked and chipped, marred by rust and decay, the watch embedded in the sword’s reinforced area gleamed with a bright, polished sheen.
The sword was moving, blade pointed down, scratching out lines on the floor. When it had completed a section, it then floated to a new spot, and scratched there.
Caleb approached the sword’s handiwork.
“You sure it’s safe?” Chelsea asked, following him.
“I’m not sure how else to find out except get closer,” Caleb said, shrugging. He didn’t mean to act nonchalant, but…
There’s not much else to do here. We need more information.
And for some reason… I’m not worried at all.
He wasn’t carefree or thinking too big of himself or his abilities. He wasn’t throwing caution to the wind.
He just didn’t feel any need to be worried. Something about the blade’s appearance and movements struck a chord with him. He was fascinated, interested, curious.
“This is probably exactly what this place is for,” Caleb said, pausing a moment to look up at the faintly illuminated ceiling of Nostal Keep.
“This place is for a sword to float around and carve up the floor?” Chelsea asked, raising an eyebrow.
“What’s it carving?” Addie asked, stepping closer and watching.
It looks like…
Caleb smiled as he realized what the sword was hard at work creating and recreating in the floor.
“A clock,” he said.
Interestingly, considering they were in the Enchanted Dominion and most tracked time by Universal Time, this sword was carving out a standard Earth-style analog clock face. The numerals I-XII were carved out at their proper places in a perfect circle, with small notches between them delineating minutes. And interspersed with all of that…
“It’s like it’s tracking a series of events,” Will said softly, kneeling at the space between VI and V — they stood at the VI side of the clock, its bottom, so it was a forward path to both V and VII. “But I don’t understand these symbols. If it’s a language, I don’t recognize it.”
“I don’t believe it’s a language,” Gwen said. “It’s certainly not anything I’ve seen used in the Enchanted Dominion. They seem more like visual representations, or some kind of code.”
Between VI and V there were three events with special carvings. The closest to the bottom of the clock was a house wreathed in flames. The next one, moving towards the V, was a shield emblazoned with an hourglass, and the final of the three was water being poured out of a pitcher.
“Why’s he carving this stuff?” Addie asked.
“He?” Chelsea asked.
Addie nodded. “The sword,” she said, pointing at the sword, which was now moving from the III to the II. “He looks like a boy.”
“Let’s see if we can ask him,” Caleb said with a smile, taking Addie’s hand and walking towards the sword. The clock that it had carved into the floor was complete — I-XII and all the notches between — but the sword still moved around, rasping against the floor as it carved. The pair of them got within two feet of the sword, and it still kept scratching and floating along, paying them no mind. “Excuse me,” Caleb said, somewhat hesitant — how often did someone talk to a sword? “Can you explain what’s going on here?”
The sword didn’t make any motion of response, nor did it speak. “Guess it’s not a talking sword,” Addie said glumly, slumping her shoulders. “That would’ve been the best.”
Caleb laughed, following the sword on its path. He focused his attention on the watch embedded near the sword’s hilt. Why was it so clean? It was like it was kept in perfect condition, while the sword around it decayed, but…
“Hold on,” Caleb said, reaching out. “The watch… it’s not ticking.”
“Is it broken?” Addie asked.
As Caleb’s hand came within a few inches of the sword, the sword went rigid, no longer carving along its path, and wreathed itself in a bright white aura. Caleb’s hand was pushed back — gently, but firmly. Then the aura faded, and the sword continued its work.
“Guess he doesn’t want to be touched,” Caleb said, placing his hands on his hips, watching as the sword continued on. “But the glass over the clock’s face is slightly cracked. Maybe it was hit by something and it stopped? Or maybe it just hasn’t been wound in too long.”
“Wound?” Addie asked, looking up at Caleb. “You have to wind it?”
“Yeah,” Caleb said, pulling out his pocket watch Talisman and showing it to Addie. “See this knob at the top? You can turn it, like so —” he demonstrated, winding his watch with a satisfying winding sound to accompany it, “and that resets the gears to keep them running. If you don’t wind it, eventually it’ll stop ticking.”
“Oh no!” Addie suddenly said, pulling out Tock’s pocket watch, which she kept around her neck. “I’ve never wound it!” She clicked the watch open and stared, cocking her head to the side. “But… it’s still ticking.”
“It’s probably magical,” Caleb said with a laugh. “My Talisman is, too — technically, I don’t ever have to wind it, I just do it sometimes because I like to. Hers probably keeps ticking along by magic.”
“But I should take better care of it,” Addie muttered. She breathed on the watch’s face and then polished it off with her sleeve, then closed the watch and wound it. Her face lit up with every turn, until it stopped turning. Satisfied, she tucked it back under her shirt. “All set!”
“Nice going,” Caleb said, grinning as he high-fived Addie. “Now… let’s try and figure out what’s going on with the sword’s watch.” The sword was now passing the XII spot, continuing on its journey.
“Why’s it going counter-clockwise?” Lorelei asked.
“Huh,” Caleb said, staring.
“You didn’t even notice that?” Chelsea asked, letting out a sigh. “You’re the clockwork nerd.”
“I was kinda distracted by the floating sword stuff,” Caleb said, laughing sheepishly. “Counter-clockwise, huh? What’s that all about…?” He got as close as he could to the sword but didn’t reach out to touch it as he followed its path around the clock it was carving. Even though the numbers were already carved, when the sword passed over one, it re-carved it once more. All of the notches, too, it carved again into the same spot, deepening the lines the tiniest bit. But the symbols representing events or some kind of code were erased. When the sword reached them, the symbols vanished on their own, the floor was restored to smooth stone, and then the sword drew new symbols in their place.
“Do you think it’s going back in time?” Addie asked. “The symbols keep changing. Those are events in its life. It’s going backwards, though.”
“Like writing a biography but starting at the end,” Will murmured thoughtfully.
Caleb stood still then, watching but not following the sword. He pulled out his Talisman again and gazed at it. With a small exertion of thought and effort, he attempted to enter Time-state.
He heard the bell chime, the bell that sounded his time in Time-state was over, and his situation remained the same.
How am I supposed to solve this without Time Magic? There has to be something I’m not seeing here, something I can’t see. Do I just wait it out until I can enter Time-state again? But I have no idea how long that’ll take.
My first thought would be to try and wind the watch that’s in the sword, but it doesn’t want me to touch it. That wasn’t just a physical force that pushed me back — I could feel something, an emotion, a desire not to be touched. So that’s a no-go. But then how do I fix it?
If there’s something I can only see with magic… hmm…
Oh!
“Hey, Will,” Caleb said. “You use Energy Magic, but can you track it, too? Can you detect what types of energy are being used and how?”
“I… can,” Will said hesitantly. “It’s complicated. It would be easier with Divination Magic tuned towards that, but I can do it. We’ll all be seeing everything, though, not just what one object is using or doing. If you’re not used to it — well, even if you are — it’s overwhelming.”
“That’s fine,” Caleb said. He flashed a grin. “You’ll help us make sense of it. Oh, um…” He smiled sheepishly. “Do you only see it yourself, or can you show us all?”
“Everyone can see for as long as I keep the trace up,” Will said. He stood, pulling out his pen Talisman. One word he wrote in the air: TRACE. The purple, gleaming letters pulsed with light and then shot into the ground when Will tapped them.
All of a sudden, Nostal Keep was filled with light.
There were lines and ripples going out from and connecting to everything. Every single movement that Caleb made, a ripple went out from him, or a line tracked from one part of his body to another. He and all of his teammates were like that, with all sorts of lines traced over them, tracking every conceivable type of energy — heat, blood flow, brain waves, electric impulses, and so many more. For a long time, Caleb was simply staggered by the sheer volume of information.
“Hey, it’s different for him!” Addie said, pointing at the sword. She’d gotten her wits back quickly. It still took Caleb some time to follow where she pointed to locate the sword in this mass of glowing lines and ripples and other effects, all in different colors and shades.
But when he finally managed to focus on the sword, he realized what Addie meant.
The sword itself, the watch, its movements, and every single carving on the clock it had formed in the floor, were all the same color, the same consistency, barely moving — blue. The blue of the River of Time, specifically, a deep, beautiful blue that matched the streak in Caleb’s bangs and the glow in his eyes.
Along with that, the sword and its carvings were completely untouched by the lines and ripples going out from everyone and everything else. Heat, light, sound, none of it actually touched the sword or its work.
“It’s blocked off from us?” Lorelei asked. “Perhaps… it’s not supposed to be moving counter-clockwise.”
“The watch looked broken,” Caleb said with a nod. “It could be chronologically out of sync, but in a subtle sort of way. We can see and hear it and all it’s doing, but otherwise, it’s not actually here.”
“Is Time Magic really that weird?” Chelsea asked.
Caleb laughed. “You have no idea. I’m no master like Mister Midnight, but from all I’ve learned and gathered, I think that’s basically the gist of it. And if we can find some way to repair the watch, that might get the sword back in sync chronologically, set it going forward again instead of backwards.”
“But how do we do that?” Chelsea asked, eyeing Caleb meaningfully. “You’re still a temporary non-Time-Mage, right?”
Caleb sighed. “Yep.”
“The watch looks different,” Gwen said. “It’s subtle, so Human eyes might not perceive the difference in color, but there’s certainly a difference.”
Caleb turned his attention to the watch on the sword again. It was difficult to focus on anything else in the Keep, but since the sword and its carvings were completely disconnected from all of the other energy traces, he found it easy to focus on them. Adjusting his glasses, Caleb stared intently, and…
“I can see it,” he said.
“So Human eyes aren’t as lacking in subtlety as you thought,” Chelsea said teasingly, smirking at Gwen.
“No, the way she said that made me remember that my glasses let me see the world the way Enchanted do,” Caleb said. “So you probably still wouldn’t be able to notice the difference.”
“You don’t have to say it like that,” Chelsea said, pouting slightly.
“Yeah, don’t be mean to her!” Addie said, squeezing Caleb’s hand, sending a ripple of red light bursting a short distance out from the contact.
“I didn’t think it was mean,” Caleb muttered, frowning. He looked over at Chelsea, who was staring at him with a smirk. That got him smiling, too.
“It’s so nice of you to assist with my dramatic side, kiddo,” Chelsea said. “But I was just kidding around. So?” She shifted her attention back to Caleb. “What do you see?”
“The watch is a lighter shade of blue from the sword and its carvings,” Caleb said, approaching the sword so he could follow it and look more closely. Gwen did as well, since they were the only two who could see these differences.
“There are faint veins of silver through the watch, too,” Gwen said. “They seem to be concentrated on the crack on its face.”
“Will, what do the colors mean?” Lorelei asked. “Do you know?”
“I don’t know all of them,” Will admitted. “Or rather, they don’t always mean one thing all the time. But silver… silver is usually used to denote abnormalities or some kind of damage, something that needs fixing. Related to that, it’s sometimes showing a blockage of energy flow. They’re probably related in this case.”
“Broken, and blocking energy flow,” Caleb murmured. “So… how do we fix it?”
“Look at how the lights move,” Gwen said, indicating their subtle patterns with movements of her finger. “See how everything moves up towards the sword’s pommel? But the lights on the watch…”
“They’re stuck in place,” Caleb said. Indeed, the traces of energy on the watch were spiraling all on their own, contained in one space, not joining the rest. “So the watch is stopped somehow. But how do we start it? The sword won’t let me touch it.”
“You probably can’t if it’s out of time-sync or whatever,” Chelsea said.
“So how to fix it…?” Caleb murmured, crossing his arms and studying the problem.
Will came to stand with him and Gwen. “I can’t see the differences,” he said. “But if you can point them out to me, I might be able to correct the flow of energy. I’ll have to figure out what kind of energy it is, but if it’s energy, I can do something about it.”
“I never really thought of Time Magic as energy,” Caleb said. “But… that’s the color I’m seeing. The watch is a slightly lighter shade, but it’s still the same kind of blue, if that makes sense.”
“A lighter shade normally denotes a weaker output,” Will said.
“The silver line is here, along the crack in the watch’s face,” Gwen said, pointing. “And the spiraling flow of the watch’s energy is moving counter-clockwise, at this speed.”
“Counter-clockwise… just like the sword’s pattern,” Lorelei said. “That’s probably where it all originates.”
“Okay, I think I understand,” Will said, after sharing a few questions with Gwen and Caleb and studying things himself for a bit. “Give me some time to work on this. I’ve never worked with this kind of energy before.”
Caleb stepped back and watched Will get to work. Will had a thoughtful look in his eyes, and took things slow. He’d always been that way, working on problems at his own pace and considering all of the angles and possibilities. He was similar to Chelsea and Lorelei in that he’d started training with his specific type of magic — Energy Magic — from a very young age, but unlike them, he’d done the majority of his training quietly, alone, working through problems and experimenting at a thoughtful, careful pace. He was often very quick to act in combat situations, but that was all thanks to him devising very specific words and Energy Magic application and then drilling those thousands, tens of thousands of times until they were perfect muscle memory.
Fellow Hunters usually only saw that side of Will’s magic. Seeing Will apply himself to a new problem and slowly contemplate, carefully experiment, all with incredible patience and focus — Will was perhaps the only person Caleb had never seen get actively frustrated or lose his patience when it came to puzzles and problems with an intellectual or creative bent — was nostalgic for Caleb, and put a smile on his face.
But alongside that, he was happy at everyone with him.
They all saw different things, recognized different parts of this situation than I did. Each of them helped me to understand the issue more fully, and arrive at what will hopefully be the solution.
But more than anything…
I trust them. I feel safe with them. It’s because of them that I didn’t panic and could consider the situation calmly. I don’t have my Time Magic right now, but I don’t have to worry.
Operating with a team was what Hunters were all about. For a long time, they’d focused on operating in pairs, though that had recently been expanded to teams being required to have three or more members ever since the battle with Blaise’s Shadows and the Radiance. Hunters never operated alone.
I have the best team there is.
“It’s tricky,” Will said after a while. “But I think… yes. Here we go.”
He spoke in a soft voice with little emotion, but Caleb could hear the slight shift in his tone that signaled a triumphant enthusiasm. Will wrote in the air “TIME,” then slashed through the word with his pen. Rather than break the letters up, they multiplied into a pair of the same word, and then started spiraling in a clockwise rotation. Will directed the glowing words into the watch’s face, and…
The silver line suddenly vanished. The crack repaired itself.
And suddenly, everything blazed with light. Caleb shielded his eyes; he couldn’t take how bright it all was. Addie clutched tight to him, and with his free arm he held her protectively.
For several long, agonizing moments, the brightness blazed.
And then, it faded.
Caleb opened his eyes.
“Hold on, what?”
Those words came out of his mouth faster than he could think them. He was so stunned that it took him a moment to register that he’d spoken them.
He wasn’t in Nostal Keep anymore.
His team was with him — he quickly checked that, and breathed a sigh of relief.
When he turned his attention back to his surroundings, he still couldn’t make sense of it. He knew where he was, but… how had he gotten here?
And then he saw it. In this field of red flowers, with so many swords embedded in the ground point-first, there it was. The impossibly huge sword with the watch embedded near its hilt.
It was here, too, embedded at the far side of this flower-filled valley, near a large white boulder. A crack in the top of the boulder contained three of the red flowers that filled this place.
“Hold on, are we…?” Chelsea started.
Caleb nodded. “Morispé Vale,” he said. “The last of the places I saw during my Trial.”
“Did the sword take us here?” Addie asked. “Was that its thanks for fixing it?”
A deep, commanding voice — a familiar voice that made Caleb’s heart soar — called out a warning. “Hit the deck, kid!”
Caleb did as instructed, pulling Addie to the ground with him, and his teammates followed suit. A harsh whistle of something sharp blasted through air above them, and was followed an instant later by a booming rumble in the distance behind them. Caleb leapt to his feet, looking around. His eyes found the one who’d warned them, and despite the danger, he grinned broadly.
“Mister Midnight!”
Mister Midnight gave him the briefest of nods in reply, racing towards him with Mineria and Ingrid. “Whether the sword was thanking you or not doesn’t matter,” he said, standing beside Caleb and glaring towards the distant white boulder. “Not right now. Not as long as she’s here.”
Caleb looked, and saw the source of the danger. Seated atop the boulder was a young girl, not even Delilah’s age in appearance, but with an air of age and wisdom about her thanks to the Radiant King’s experiments granting her eternal youth. Raven curls fell about her shoulders, contrasting starkly against the white of her Royal Guard’s uniform. Across her lap she cradled a tall staff topped with an onyx gemstone.
Nyx. Former Royal Guard to the Radiant King.
Murderer of Mister Midnight’s parents, and many more before them.
A monster in a child’s body. She smiled as she saw all of them gathered together.
“Do you know,” she asked in a silky yet sinister voice, “what this valley’s name means?”
“We don’t much care,” Midnight said, stepping forward into a fighting stance.
Nyx laughed. “It’s no accident that I waited here for you,” she said. “Morispé Vale… it’s a fitting name for the coming battle. It means ‘The Valley of Dying Hopes.’”