Broken Lands

Chapter 422 – The Second Letter

Sophia started to flip the page to the next letter, then froze. What if it was bad news? Or for that matter, what if it was good news and made her homesick? Should she read the letter now or wait until there was really a chance to get home? Or maybe space it out so she’d have news from home later?

Nonsense. Waiting to read it wouldn’t change what was in it. It was already old, at least if the fact that there was another note behind it was anything to go by.

She turned the page and was confronted by her father’s handwriting.

Sophia,

I don’t know if you received any of the earlier letters or not, but it seems unlikely - well, other than the one Xavier sent a few weeks ago. That one should have made it, so at least you know we’re looking for you.

Sophia signed internally. She’d missed that she had a letter for weeks?

Xavier has been working with Althyr and they worked out a flaw in the spell I was using in conjunction with the runescript to get the letter close enough; I didn’t allow correctly for the composition of the Origin and how it affects cross-universal travel. I managed to get the gradient shift on the entrance to the Origin correct but the spell would never complete unless the notebook was within the Origin or at least within a region of crossover with fluctuating boundaries. By now, all of the letters should have been degraded by the energies of the Origin. Probably, at least; there’s always a chance that one got lucky, but the odds are low.

Sophia giggled as her mind flashed to the connection between Othala’s complex and Tiwaz’s. That had to be what happened, why she’d gotten the first letter. The conduit was badly damaged, even largely missing. It also explained why she hadn’t gotten any others, even though she’d been through other conduits since then; if there wasn’t an intact letter waiting when she entered, she wouldn’t get it. Most of the later conduit exploration was clustered after they learned how to harvest the black goo.

I’ll recap what was in the previous letters. Rissa insisted.

You were caught in a profiteering ploy by several offworld mercenary groups. They no longer exist and the Voice blocked the exploit they were using to kill dungeons. There was a flaw in the instancing that created a feedback loop through the other instance to the dungeon’s true core; all it took was a minor damping on the mirror resonance to fix it, but it couldn’t be fixed until the Voice knew the problem existed.

Their inclusion in a party with you was deliberate. They specifically wanted a local who wasn’t human and wasn’t in an established group to take the fall as “the one who killed the dungeon” in case they were caught. If they were following the same plan as the others we found, they planned to kill you and the Tier Zero you were escorting after the dungeon collapse. We were able to track them back through several previous worlds. 

I had a little chat with the Emperor after that. I’m confident he wasn’t involved; he was horrified that people were destroying Imperial infrastructure for personal benefit. He doesn’t really care that they were blaming nonhumans except that it meant they were getting away with it, but I’ll take what I can get. There was a purge of his dungeon bureau after that, which says he really was upset.

Locally, Rissa took a broom to the Adventurers’ Guild. I had no idea it was that bad. From what she says, it wasn’t that bad until the new CEO who came in a couple of years ago instituted some “cost-saving measures” that didn’t actually cut costs, just redirected where the money ended up. We’re adding some additional low-cost combat training … well, low cost to them, not to us. That’s the thing: I don’t care about the price. It’s going to be cheaper than the Etherium that comes off of Earth’s dungeons so why the hell should I be a skinflint? Supporting the Adventurers is what the Guild is FOR. 

It took long enough to convince people that it was a better deal to go through us than around us. I really don’t want to return to the days where we had to try to guard dungeons; that’s a waste. It’s much better to make it part of the background, where delving is just another job that some people do full time and others pick up occasionally either as additional income or on a lark - and most of those hire a guide.

None of that matters to you. I should go back to stuff that does. Legion Carl will do fine as CEO; I’ve wanted him there since the beginning.

Xavier got his Shaman certification a couple years ago. He’s been studying the Origin with Althyr since then. Rissa keeps trying to get him to take an interest in other things (like finding a girlfriend), but I think it’s a positive thing overall. His spellcasting has improved, and if he doesn’t want a girlfriend, who are we to tell him he has to get one?

I know, I know, Rissa just wants grandkids. I keep telling her that we’ve got decades or centuries, but she doesn’t quite believe me. You’d think she would; just look at how active our parents are. Mother’s been muttering about having another child but Dad keeps reminding her of how much effort I was. I’ve offered to pay for a nanny, but they probably won’t take me up on that; it’s not like they can’t afford one on their own. I think Mother’s going to win, even though Senkovar’s hints that he’d like more descendents annoy Dad.

Jenna started dating someone from the Empire, then went on a long trip with him. I wasn’t impressed. They had a falling out when they got back and she sent him packing. I had to play the protective father for her when he decided to try to claim a breach of promise. I think he thought he had an advantage since he’s an Imperial noble and we’re non-Imperials; if the Imperial court decided in his favor, they could have required Jenna to marry Benalos if she wanted to move freely in the Empire. That pissed me off.

If there actually WAS a formal agreement with a marriage price paid by the Vo’ki Intheras, we could have returned the marriage price to call off the wedding. The thing is, there wasn’t - so we couldn’t produce the paperwork that said what it was even if we wanted to pay for the problem to go away. They couldn’t produce it to prove it existed, but they don’t have to. 

Well, they didn’t think they had to. That’s where it got fun.

The Vo’ki Intheras damn near disinherited Benalos when the Emperor showed up for the first hearing to talk to Jenna. They dropped the claim, clearly hoping it would just go away, but they certainly weren’t expecting Jenna to show up with everything in place for a counterclaim of attempted bridal entrapment, witnessed by the Emperor. That was your mother’s idea. It’s supposed to protect Imperial nobles and merchant scions (basically the same thing in the Empire) from treasure hunters who make the claim Benalos did. It reversed our positions - with the Emperor’s witness, we were the party who was presumed to be in the right.

Rissa didn’t let me attend, but she did let me watch the recordings she took. It was hilarious, and it was even funnier when all she asked for in return was court and transportation costs, peanuts to the Vo’ki Intheras. She could have taken them for a lot more and they know it, which (according to Rissa) means they now owe us a pretty significant favor. I’m betting they’re also pretty pissed off but I have to admit I don’t care. They deserve it.

I still hate politics. I know I always say that but it’s still true.

After the hearing, Jenna threw herself into a series of delves to blow off steam then applied for the Tier Eight Dungeon program at the Imperial Academy. It’s on Corbetta, and she says that’s why she picked it: the program on Corbetta has a series of classes aimed at young nobles that she thinks will help her avoid problems like Benalos in the future. It’s a bit of a stretch for her - she’s only Tier Seven - but she should be fine. 

 She’s worried about what the others will think about her “only” being Tier Seven at her age. She didn’t quite believe me when I told her that she’s well within the normal range for Imperial nobles. I think she should be more worried about what her peers think of her when they find out she knows the Emperor, but she might get lucky. Corbetta’s a long way from Intheras.

As for Leo … well, he turned everything on its head. For a while, we thought he was going to change his root Affinity to Death, but it turns out that’s not quite right. His Affinity eventually stabilized as a Death-related variant of change, not quite rebirth or transmutation but in that area. So far, the only thing he’s done with it is change light into height (and a little heat). Well, also speed, and he can reverse it, but I liked the rhyme. We’re calling it energy conversion for now but that’s definitely not the only thing his Affinity will be able to do once he masters it. Althyr wants to call it directed change, but he says Leo needs a lot more training before he can really claim that.

Right now he just wants to zoom fast. I’m sure you can guess how much luck we’ve had keeping him inside Aki’s dungeon where it’s safe.

No, he’s been on the news. Twice. Fortunately, when he’s really zooming he’s using the light that hits him for motion, so he just looks like a dark missing spot in the sky. No one knows it’s Leo. Yet.

Amaia is amused by it, something about every ending being a new beginning. Althyr is overjoyed; apparently there are currently no other dragons with an Affinity to change itself, though it was apparently a common Affinity in the first few generations after dragons emerged from the Origin, one of the first Affinities to split off of the Chaos line. It’s not the dark story I was afraid of; instead, the children of Change-aligned dragons of whatever type almost always have a different root Affinity. They change.

It’s apparently also one of the very few draconic root Affinities that can change later in life. Go figure.

I think that’s everything. The following pages have a copy of my notes from the development of this version of the communication spell, but you can ignore them if you want to; I only included them in case you run into someone who needs more information to build you a way home. Xavier can’t cast the spell and you don’t have a return anchor like the notebook, so I don’t expect you to be able to either.

That almost hurt. It wasn’t wrong - Xavier had always been better at spellforms than Sophia was - but it still wasn’t pleasant to know that her father didn’t think she was capable of something.

Or maybe it just hurt because it meant he knew her. She still hadn’t spent more than a dozen hours looking at the first packet he sent, after all, and she’d certainly had enough downtime to do that if she wanted to. It didn’t have a way home and she couldn’t immediately make sense of it enough to send a response letter so she just sort of … didn’t. 

Xavier is planning to send you a letter in the next few days with a spell you can use to return a short message. I hope to hear from you soon.

Love you!

Serenity

P.S. I love you too. - Mom