Chapter 13
Eli's eyes opened in the darkness. Reflexively he sent a precise pulse of mana to silence the alarm he had set for himself earlier that night. He lay still for a moment, listening. The keep was quiet, its bones settled into the night, it’s people carrying out familiar routines. Beyond the walls the watch moved in their slow rotations, at least one of the shadow guard would be keeping silent sentry, but inside the family wing no one stirred. It was the dead of night, hours past the moon’s zenith and hours yet until dawn.
He sat up and sent a pulse of mana through his channels, flushing away the remnants of sleep and priming his body for action. His mind was filled with a satisfying alertness, the sensation keeping him steady and hyperaware of his surroundings. Every creak of the floor, every brush of wind against the windows, every faint murmur of the wards was laid bare in his perception. The silence was both reassuring and deeply foreign to him. Eli had conducted uncountable stealth missions, had begged, beaten and bartered his way out of a myriad of situations, and had survived the wrath and censure of beings so frighteningly powerful that he lacked the both the vocabulary and the experience to properly quantify their power. However, this was the first time in either of his lives that he was about to sneak out of his own home.
The thought pulled a dry smile to his lips as he dressed himself in the deep blue garments he had prepared the night of his punishment training. Three centuries lived, and never once had he played the rebellious son. Not as a boy, not as a grown man. His parents had always set reasonable boundaries, tended to listen to his requests, made sure to push him safely out of his comfort zone, and had never placed any expectations on him that he hadn’t been eager to meet and exceed. Only now, with death and regression behind him, did he find himself creeping through the halls of his home like a delinquent youth. He would have found it funny that it took growing up to finally act like a child if the circumstances were less serious.
Eli had spent much of his first childhood trying to live up to his parent’s legacy, and to represent his family in the best possible light. He had been, and still was, incredibly proud to be a Rodrigo. However, things were different now. He knew too much to tread the same path. As he silently made his way out of the family residence and into the keep proper, he acknowledged that his idea of ‘doing the family proud’ was no longer based on his parent’s standards and shaped by their expectations. He still loved his family, he still wished to uphold their legacy, but what that looked like had changed so drastically the two ideals barely even seemed like they came from the same person. He also had different goals now. Bigger goals. Goals that required him to step outside of the boundaries he had once accepted being confined to.
He did not want to deceive his parents, but he simply couldn’t do nothing. He had thought briefly about telling them. If there was anyone in the world who would support him through anything it would be his parents. They would make the most incredible allies… in the future. Right now, he was still too young. Sure, he had always been incredibly mature for his age, and the time travel had only amplified that. However, to the world he was still just a child. A child who would be saying a lot of unbelievable things and making a lot of dangerous accusations with neither the firm evidence nor the personal strength to back it up. Not yet. If he told them, and they didn’t believe him, the consequences could be catastrophic. It was not a risk he was willing to take. He needed time to grow; for his body to be mature enough to handle his magic, to set up systems to take advantage of his future knowledge, to find and provide proof.
Perhaps if he had returned a few years into the academy, or when he was a commander on the battlefield, he may have risked the truth. Of course, by then things would have been too late. So until he could tell them, he would much rather people believed he was simply sneaking out due to juvenile rebellion than believe his actions could be remotely treasonous. Something told him ‘but the Families did treason first’ would not be accepted as a legitimate defence.
Ideally though, he wouldn’t be caught at all.
The wards at the outer wall shimmered faintly, an imperceptible curtain of power woven to keep the people inside the keep safe, to keep intruders outside when they were trying to get in, and to ensure that anyone not authorized to leave remained contained. Eli didn’t have authorization, but he did have centuries of arcane knowledge.
The first step was climbing the wall. Truly child's play after the horror that was the gauntlet. The true difficulty there came from not being seen. Cloaking himself in shadow, and carefully spreading his mana sense to track the movements of the guards. Sensing the gap in the tight rotation he made his move, vaulting over the outer wall and up onto the ramparts proper.
He stayed low to the ground; precise body control and a careful application of air magic contained any sound emanating from him and kept him from disturbing the stone floor as he dashed past. It didn’t take him long to make it to the other side. That’s where he ran into the final major obstacle of leaving the keep unnoticed. The dome.
The dome was a giant interconnected weave of protections that created a dome over the keep. He needed to get through the warding if he wanted to get out. Something he would have to do fast, as the next patrol was already approaching. Even completely concealed in shadow, he knew he wasn’t safe. The work he was doing was delicate, and required precision, competence and concentration.
The problem with messing with active wards was that what had once been a consistent flow of power working within its programmed instructions suddenly gained inconsistencies. Inconsistencies like the invisibility scripting being disrupted and causing a portion of the barrier to briefly become visible. It was just a brief disruption of the scripted sequence, just a tiny irregularity in mana density causing a failure cascade that Eli halted and prevented from triggering any failsafe. Unfortunately for Eli in this one particular instance, House Rodrigo guards were trained ruthlessly to spot ‘brief disruptions’ and ‘tiny irregularities’. The guard had been too close to miss the brief ripple, and was making their way over with haste.
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Eli froze, space and shadow mana spilled over him creating a pocket in the stone that he tucked himself into, allowing him to stay flush with the parapet. The shadow mana hid him from sight, and he angled it so that it aligned exactly with the natural shadows and danced subtly under the light cast by the many torches on the walls.
Holding the concealment spell, the spatial magic, and stabilizing the partially disrupted ward all while keeping himself utterly unnoticeable wasn’t just taxing on his mind, it was straining his magic. There was a time when he could have held his position for days, his natural regeneration and deep reserves ensuring that even double the number of simultaneous processes wouldn’t even strain him. But this body was young, the mind still developing, his pool still expanding, and his stamina was quickly being sapped.
He hoped desperately that the guard simply walked on by. Nothing to see here, no problems to report, but despite his best efforts, the guard still approached. Most of the night guards had been given training by the shadow guard. Not enough to learn any secrets (or even of their existence), but enough to understand many of the tricks of the trade. More relevant to Eli’s current predicament, enough to want to call for a sweep of the area just in case.
Eli watched in mild despair as the guard paused barely a meter from his hiding place. Their eyes adhered to the spot where they had seen the irregularity, then they pulled out a small rectangular token covered tip to base in enchantments. A transmission talisman. These ones were linked to the ward and only worked inside the keep itself, but the guard didn’t need it to work anywhere else. Eli had seconds to act before a swarm of house guards would be scanning the area with every tool and test they could devise to rout out foul play.
Why! Why were they being so cautious. Eli knew why though. ‘Safety over pride.’ It was a principle taught to every guard, every retainer, every scullery maid and stable boy under the House Rodrigo mantle. If it felt off, it was always better to suffer the inconvenience of being wrong than the consequences of being right. Good in practice, terrible for Eli’s evening plans.
This was supposed to be the easy part. He slips out of the keep, past the town, and into the border wilds. He wasn’t supposed to start straining his magic until he was kilometers past easy detection, and able to truly test his current limits. Simple. Except he was obviously out of practice with clandestine operations, and that was absolutely unacceptable.
He would speak to Master Moss about getting some training. Shadow not being one of his affinities was no excuse for him to have slipped up so egregiously. Too much that he’d be doing in the future would be counting on his ability to keep things not just discreet, but invisible. Right now, however, he needed to adapt, and he needed to do it fast. He really only had three options for how to proceed:
His first option was to take out the guard before they had a chance to make a report. The issue with this course of action being that the incapacitated guard would be noticed. There was little he could really do to them from this range that wouldn’t end up with the entire keep knowing that something had either happened or was actively happening.
In scenario number one, the best he could hope for was that they’d tighten security so much that getting back inside would be a true nightmare, and the whole keep would be put on active alert for the following weeks if not months, heavily restricting his ability to act independently. More likely, however is that the family would be alerted, safety protocols would be enacted, and they would discover a conspicuously empty bed where a sleeping Eli was supposed to be. That would go over about as well as a wingless dove.
His second option was to bank on his concealment. He would stop holding the ward and double down on hiding, then slip entirely into a spatial pocket. Next, he would release the shadow cover and instead use his meagre illusion magic to conceal himself. The rest would truly come down to luck and timing. He would send a prayer to the spirits, friendly of otherwise, that his mana held long enough for him to be in the clear.
It was certainly possible, but protocol dictated that the disturbance be checked by the next guard in the rotation as well. Expecting them not to notice anything either would be pushing it. Especially if they were awakened. Even weak mages could cast detection spells, and his current physical limitations were quickly becoming magical limitations that he was more anxious than ever to overcome.
Option two also had the unfortunate side effect of him releasing the half picked apart warding. Needless to say, the potential issues resulting from that action alone had him nearly dismissing option two entirely.
His last option was to make a break for it. His work would be sloppy, and would introduce vulnerabilities in the ward that he’d have to fix before he slipped back in. However, this option actually had the benefit of creating an easier entry point when he needed to return. Sure, it meant he would need to ‘fix’ what he ‘broke’, but that was a small price to pay for a quick, clean escape, and his plans moving forward.
So, still tucked in his alcove, working almost entirely off of his senses, and gentle probing with fine tendrils of imperceptible mana, Eli parted the ward just enough to let him slip out. The movement caused the faint distortion once more and Eli heard the guard reacting. He didn’t stick around long enough to hear exactly which protocol they were invoking.
On the other side of the ward Eli made quick work of scaling down the wall, marking the place where he landed so that he would know exactly where to re-enter once he returned. The moon, the shadows, and space itself aided him as made his escape. Precisely cast space magic propelled him forward as he continually compressed the distance between him and his next step, propelling himself like a warp hawk.
Then he was outside the town walls. His boots sank into damp earth, the freshly sewn fields stretching out ahead of him in in the pale moonlight. Past the cultivated rows the land gave way to brush and uneven ground. He sped past the cultivated wilds and felt the density of mana spike precipitously as he went. The border wilds were not the place where the true monsters resided – no wyverns, or manticores, or beasts with true minds called this place their domain – but he was well past the much more civilized section of forest that abutted the farms and upheld industry. Here, predators prowled the night, cautious but deadly. Here, Eli was one of them. He walked unafraid. If anything challenged him, it wouldn’t take long for them to regret their poor choices.
He walked, and walked, following vague, youthful recollections of a specific place. It took him a while, but eventually he found what he was looking for. At the edge of the brush, just out of sight from one of the ubiquitous rivers that trickled like moving branches down the mountain, a clearing appeared.
Finaly, Eli thought as he pulled off his face covering and hood, drew in a deep breath, and folded his legs beneath him to meditate. He needed to cycle and recover, then he could truly begin. So there Eli sat, on the plush grass of the hidden meadow, his mana moving with the rhythm of his lungs, and the deliberateness of the nature surrounding him. His pool was quickly filled to the brim. When he rose again his body was fully in the present, his mind was sharp, and his purpose was clear.
It was time to test his limits.
