Broken Lands Novel Chapter 134 – Farewell

The farewell party was not what Sophia expected.

She expected a small get-together with friends in one of the Registry’s eting rooms, probably with food. That much, she got right, but it was far more than that.

Lady Essia reserved all of the eting rooms, hired a band, and invited everyone at the Registry. It was large enough that the Registry’s tavern was actually closed to al orders because the kitchen was cooking for the party. The bar was open, but anyone who wanted food was sent to the party rooms. Sophia was pretty sure everyone in the Registry building stopped by, and she didn’t even know most of them!

A lot of people didn’t know what they were celebrating, either; Sophia overheard people wondering about it. The top guess seed to be that it was a celebration of the end of the corpsevine hunt. Sophia didn’t bother to correct them; she didn’t know them, so why should they care that she was leaving?

Almost everyone she’d t in Casterville stopped by to congratulate her. Even Lady Essia’s father, Mage-Chancellor Ansari, stopped by. He took the ti to thank them for their service to the city and quietly presented them with three identical bracelets. Each one had a eight-pointed star charm dangling from one side and a larger eight-pointed star inside a circle on a longer chain.

The bracelets could serve two purposes. First, they could be used as compasses; that was what the larger star did when it was held flat, then had mana channeled into it. The leg of the star that was closest to north would glow. It would work even in places where a compass wouldn’t, but the Mage-Chancellor didn’t seem to know how it worked.

Sophia asked.

She planned to check it against the compass she carried as they were traveling and see what it said. If nothing else, it might be interesting to see if the Broken Lands had different magnetic and magical norths; after all, it wasn’t like a place that wasn’t a spherical planet would have a true north.

Which reminded her. One of these days, she needed to find out what was at the edge of the maps. Did they use the portals because they were convenient shortcuts or because it wasn’t actually possible to cross so sort of divide? All she knew was that the roads stopped. No one seed to have gone to look, at least not anyone in Casterville.

The more important use, as far as the Mage-Chancellor was concerned, was that the bracelets could find each other. That required tucking the smaller charm into the larger one; once that was done, the charms would glow to find any other charms that were close enough. It wouldn’t show distance clearly, but in general the farther away a bracelet was, the less it would show.

The one warning he gave was that the bracelets were made to work together. If they added a fourth person, it wouldn’t be easy to add a fourth bracelet; that would require an enchanter to also modify the existing bracelets, and it was usually better to just buy a new set made as a group.

Sophia didn’t ntion Taika. The gift was sothing she hadn’t thought of that could be useful; she didn’t see any reason to object because it couldn’t track down soone the Mage-Chancellor probably thought of as a pet or summoned creature. They’d simply have to plan carefully how to use them. Amy would definitely get one, since she was the scout; other than that, they would have to decide who was staying together.

It quickly beca obvious the Mage-Chancellor hadn’t kept the bracelets a secret. In fact, it was clear that the party wasn’t a surprise to any of the main guests other than Sophia, Dav, Amy, and Tika; several other people presented small charms to add to the bracelets, and it seed very unlikely that they’d all gone out and gotten them in the past day.

Samuel’s was a group of three feather charms. One was red, one was green, and the last was blue and white. The colors were apparently simply for style; they were charms that would lighten the weight of the wearer’s possessions. They wouldn’t work on living things, but it could make a load easier to carry or to fight in.

Sophia tried it out imdiately and found out that it was noticeable but small; it would probably only matter for long distances or long fights. With her pack’s extra storage space, it wasn’t that necessary, but she was still grateful for the thought.

Rensyn gave them small snowflake charms with the explanation that everyone liked a chilled drink sotis. They weren’t strong enough to cool a large area, but he was careful to point out that they could create a very intense cold in a very small area if that was needed, far colder than was needed to chill a drink. He said it as if he was trying to get them to be careful, but Sophia wondered if he was hinting at other things a localized extre chill could be used for.

Lady Essia’s contribution wasn’t magical. Instead, she got them each a colorful but warm scarf to go with their winter clothing. Sophia’s was even extra long “so that she could wrap her head and her horns and not have to worry about damaging her hood.” They already had scarves, but Sophia was still grateful; Lady Essia’s were better. It was obvious she’d thought about what they would actually need and done her best to get it while they were out shopping.

The Quinns gave a joint gift: charms in the shape of symbols Sophia thought were almost certainly runes. They were each different, but would serve a similar purpose of helping to deal with the unquiet dead: one to help find them, one to affect them when they manifested in a form powerful enough to harm others, and one to disperse the energies if they were not strong enough to manifest.

Sophia tried to tell them not to give away things they might need, but Moti insisted. They didn’t need them, but Sophia and her friends might need them. Moti sounded a little troubled as he said that, so Sophia asked what he ant. He was reluctant to talk about it, as if it were sothing bad, and in the end all he did was mutter sothing about seeing Death’s shadow.

When she heard that, Sophia relaxed; she’d been worried that sothing was actually wrong. Death was everywhere and wasn’t sothing Sophia was particularly concerned about. Moti seed confused by her reaction, almost like she expected her to be mad at him for saying anything, and she had to reassure him that she wasn’t upset.

Since Sophia was the one with True Death spells, she ended up with the rune that would help see ghostly energy. Those spells would affect ghosts just as much as they’d affect golems; she didn’t need another charm for that. She simply had to know which was there. The charm looked sort of like an h, but Sophia strongly doubted it was the letter.

The last gift ca from Registry Master Jessamine. Like Lady Essia’s, hers was not magical. Unlike all of the others, it also wasn’t imdiately useful. Despite that, Sophia thought it might be the gift with the most long-term potential.

The Registry Master gave them a set of notebooks and said they were copies of her notes on the various Challenges she’d seen over the ti she spent traveling as the Shield of the Sun. The last two notebooks were filled with observations on the Maze.

Sophia had to ask what the Maze was. She’d heard it ntioned a number of tis, especially in reference to portals that might be able to get her ho, but she hadn’t really worried about it once she found out that it was in a dangerous area, dangerous enough that no one knew if the portals were even still there; no one had used them in centuries.

The explanation she got was maddening. The Maze was, once upon a ti, the heart of Kestii’s trading empire, connecting many different cities and even worlds to Old Kestii. It was also the access point to hundreds of different Challenges, the primary place Called went to gain power, and the source for nearly

all of the goods Professionals used.

That was before it broke in the Shattering; as Amy put it, that was “when the Broken Lord broke.” The Registry even knew which day it happened: Samhain, the holiday closest to what Sophia thought of as Halloween, one thousand, six hundred, and twenty-eight years ago. It was the first day of the current calendar. New Year’s Day was definitely not the sa day in the Broken Lands as it was back ho.

The Shattering was a catastrophe worse than any Sophia knew of on Earth since the creation of the Voice and the slow loss of Earth’s magic millenia before she was born. Only the arrival of the Voice and the consequent return of magic was widespread enough to compare, and it was far less destructive than the Shattering. It cut communities off from each other, which would have been bad enough even without the loss of everyone who was in the Maze. The ergence of large numbers of monsters where there had never been any didn’t help.

Sophia had so doubt that it was as peaceful as the stories said; it was clearly a myth of a golden age, and she knew enough about golden ages to know that there were always severe issues. She simply didn’t know enough about this one to know what they were. She suspected that no one else did either.

After the Shattering, the Hallowed all fell sick and were unable to defend the population. The first to recover were the Hallowed of the Broken Lord, who led the charge against the monsters and helped carve out a few pockets where people could safely live around Nexuses that protected against monsters. None of the new cities were in the locations of old cities; those places were monster-filled deathtraps too dangerous to even scour for supplies.

The Patrons other than the Broken Lord were supposed to have fought their way through the Maze after the Shattering in an attempt to fix things. Registry Master Jessamine said there were many stories of the effort told in old hero-tales, but so things were clear. Most of them traveled in a group, with only the Mage, also known as Lady M’Beja, and the Wanderer making their way alone. The Mage could open pathways no one else could see with her understanding of the Maze, while the Wanderer was a mysterious figure who helped others who were lost in the Maze and seed to be avoided by all of the monsters; they would run when he ca close.

Sophia had to ask what happened to the other Hallowed. The Registry Master shook her head and told Sophia that she didn’t know; they were never ntioned again in any story. Jessamine assud that ant they either didn’t survive the illness or were killed later without much impact on the new cities. What she could say was that the only Hallowed since the Shattering were Hallowed by the Broken Lord.

What she could say was that the Hallowed of the Broken Lord were the reason people talked about Called instead of specifying whether their Sphere was a Vocation or a Hallow. They were common enough that there were always so around, and they tended to be powerful warriors, but they didn’t like being called Hallowed.

Sophia had so dark suspicions about what wasn’t being ntioned. There was no reason for the Wanderer to tell them to hide the fact that they were Hallowed if everything was peaceful. Perhaps it was to protect them against accusations of lying, but Sophia doubted that. It seed far more likely that there was an active threat. She could only hope that it wasn’t connected to whatever happened during the Shattering.

Registry Master Jessamine was clearly convinced that the Maze was a large part of what made the world wonderful before the Shattering. Sophia supposed that made sense; why else would she spend years trying to make it through the Maze?

For Sophia, it definitely sounded like sowhere she’d want to go eventually. Even if she couldn’t use it to find her way ho, it would be a fun adventure. She probably wouldn’t spend years trying to get through it, however. That seed like a bit much.