“For your final, you’re going to be spending a week in another plane.”

  I stared at the Erudite as he casually announced this, flexing his fingers in order to get a better look under his nails.

  “What does this have to do with statesmanship or subterfuge?” Yushin demanded, a severe annoyance laced through her tone.

  “Oh, more than you’d expect. There are no less than nine different points in Ocean Spires where a faerie plane overlaps with our world. And not all of them have the good grace to overlap right next to an outpost of the Queen of the land. I’ve had to venture through monster-filled wilderness more than once. But this is Applied Mage Combat, not Applied Mage Statesmanship. That’s an important skill to helping you avoid combat, but sometimes things aren’t so simple.”

  “Wha’ can we expect to see in the plane we’re being sent to?” Salem asked. “And why didn’t ya’ tell us earlier? I’ve got another final tomorrow, I cannae just miss it.”

  “And I have shifts at work,” I added.

  “Oh, the last part is simple,” Henry said, shrugging in a very dismissive way. “Not all planes have synchronized time. This particular plane is about eighty-seven and a half times our world’s time flow, at least for our version of today. The planar geometry does constantly shift, but that means you’ll be gone for about two hours here. In that time, you’ll live a week in that plane.”

  “Planar geometry?” I asked, leaning in, only for Henry to give the exact same dismissive shrug.

  “Toadweather will teach you more about it next year.”

  “You never answered the original question,” observed Jackson. “What’s this plane like?”

  “It’s an elemental plane, probably. It’s one of those planes that doesn’t quite neatly fit into an exact description, so it tends to get lumped in with the elemental planes. It’s relatively hostile to human life, and is extremely rich in ether and songcalling power. Lots of monsters, some of them weak, some of them strong.”

  At his description, my mind started to refocus. I couldn’t use songcalling magic – I didn’t even really understand it. I’d seen phrases like tonality, tonal architecture, swordsinging, and probably others I couldn’t remember, but that didn’t mean I understood any of them. But ether? A place that an Erudite considered to be rich in ether was going to be an absolute goldmine for components. Even if it wasn’t as concentrated as it was in Tall Mesa, where it could actually solidify into ether crystals, we might be able to get some materials for the mage tools ritual. And then there was the fifth circle spell that would do something similar, the one that could produce an athame, hat, an orb, or the one thing we’d missed from the original mage’s tools ritual. We’d need materials for that. Could this let us gather them?

  Yushsin, however, asked a much more relevant and useful question.

  “Can we breathe on this plane?”

  “Some places. Where I’m portaling you, you can.”

  “Will we have spellmarks on us, like usual?” Jackson asked.

  “No,” Henry said, shaking his head. “They don’t last that long. I’ll be watching you all, so I’ll try and pull you out if you’re about to die, but I’m not perfect. You should come to terms with that. If you duck out now, I can’t legally punish you, per the High King’s decree.”

  My mood, which had been almost brimming with excitement before, grew somber at the fact that this mission would have a real possibility of death. There was always some risk with this class – artifacts weren’t perfect, after all. But this would be much higher than usual.

  “How long do we have to prepare?” I asked. Henry scratched his chin, then squinted at the sun.

  “Five minutes, give or take?”

  “I think we should play a defensive game, while scouting out the local areas,” I said as I spun to face everyone. “Here’s my plan…”

  As soon as I finished a quick rundown of my plan, with everyone making minor additions or alterations to add their own respective skillsets in, we began casting defensive spells. I drew out my staff and cast greater arcane armor over myself, before wrapping us in a curse of misfortune that would lash out at anyone who attacked us. Before we’d even finished our preparations, Henry picked up his staff and spun it in a lazy circle. Where the head of the staff passed, blue light leeched into the air, and as soon as the shape was complete, the entire space turned blue. Henry gestured to it, I hopped onto my broom, everyone else cast flyte on themselves, and we lifted into the air to fly the portal.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  We emerged in a rather pretty plains region, with gently sloping pastoral hills of yellow grass. Despite its color, it smelled fresh and alive, rather than sunbaked and dying. From our position in the air, we could get a good look out, and I slowly rotated to take in my environment. To the north was a towering mountain, part of a somewhat more distant mountain range. No, not a mountain. Though it wasn’t especially thick, there was a plume of white slowly wafting from the top of the mountain. A volcano, then. I shifted to look west. The grasslands rolled out for some ways, with the odd tree cropping up here and there, until the entire area was filled with forests. Said forests continued to extend southwards, but the trees themselves began to change. It was wetter, swampier, and the faint smell of rot came from the south. I even thought I spotted a handful of towering mushrooms among the trees. Finally, I turned to the east. The strange yellow pasture extended out eastward as far as I could see. I doubted that it went on forever – if this plane was even a tenth the size of my home, then having a plane stretch out beyond where the eye could see was rather normal.

  The slightly more concerning thing were the shapes that moved about in each of the environments. Throughout the prairie, I could see large creatures, almost like wild dogs, running around. The dogs smelled of decay, poison, venom, and other nasty things, and I thought I could see pustules on some of them. They seemed to hunt some sort of mole-like creature the size of an elephant with thick gray crystal armor around portions of its body, and a bloodline of crystal and traces of metal. Packs would cluster around the holes the enormous moles used, and attack them as they emerged, but were usually brushed off by the powerful armor extending to further cover the mole.

  I swept my gaze around the other environments around us. Circling the volcano, I could see swirling rings of birds. They were too far away to smell, but I wouldn’t be shocked if they were dangerous. I couldn’t make out anything through the canopy of either the drier or marshier parts of the forest, but there were occasional instances of shifting in its leaves.

  Finally, my eyes settled directly below us. Several of the dog-like decay monsters were gathered there, staring up at us. These were close enough that I could see the pockets of puss and growths full of glowing green liquid all over their body, erupting from the sparse hair. Their saliva dripped the same green color, and where it touched the grass, it withered into a blackened patch. They watched us hungrily, greedy eyes shifting from person to person, their muscles twitching oddly. I considered trying to cast process body on them, but I didn’t even know what I’d try to harvest. No, it was best to let Jackson handle this, so I turned to him and nodded.

  Jackson spread his hands wide and began to chant, calling out a full prayer. Even as he did, a sphere of flames began to flicker in his hands. As the silver and gold light built between his palms, I started mentally working to construct my part of the plan, trusting that Salem was doing the same.

  “Begone!” Jackson commanded, thrusting his hand down, weaving together his divine boons, his affinity magic, and a new fifth circle fire spell he’d just learned. Power thundered down from the sky, a solid cylinder of fire that reduced everything within to cinders. As soon as the flames were gone, leaving a perfectly scorched ring, Salem swept down and slashed his wand through the air, muttering words of power as he did. He’d layered the conjure cottage spell to effectively cast it twice, and as he completed the incantation, an eight hundred square foot stone cottage shimmered into existence. With that, it was my turn, and I floated down while spinning my wand in a circle and speaking the words to complete my own spell. As I did, I focused on the stone of the earth around us. I hadn’t done a full analysis of it, but judging by the red of the mole-holes, it seemed to have a good bit of clay. I focused on gathering that clay, then I pulled in silica from everywhere I could, before mentally firing it into thick ceramic plating. There was a massive rumbling of the earth as I drew in the needed materials, and my reserves of ether began to drop precipitously. I might be needing to create some of the silica from nothing but component essences… that was troubling.

  If I had all the time in the world, I might have focused on slowly raising the wall over the course of minutes or even an hour, but more of the disease dogs were turning to pay attention to us, and some of them were far stronger than the pack we’d turned to ashes, even if those powerful ones were a bit further away. I grunted and used Maugrim’s surge to draw up more ether, and gasped. The Erudite hadn’t been lying about the ether being rich here. If the normal connection of my pool to Etherius was a sapling, then this was a mighty, ancient oak. The power cascaded in, more than I could fill my pool with, and I diverted the rush into the spell. Stone walls exploded up from the ground until they stood ten feet high and encircled the cottage in all directions.

  We floated down and landed, and with my pool still buzzing with power, I started the next phase of my work, while Yushin provided her own. She had learned a large-scale illusion, one that would last a day before needing to be refreshed, much like the cottage. It would help hide our entire encampment, making us nearly invisible from the air, and blend into the environment better from the sides. I flew around the ring of the wall, placing down protective runes, attuned to the ether signatures of the four of us. I’d initially planned on putting them on the outside, but that would risk them detonating if something just walked nearby. With them on the inside, they’d activate if something broke through our wall or flew down.

  When my ether pool was empty again – a difficult thing, with even Xander’s massage working to pull in power much faster than I’d experienced before – I headed into the cottage to join my friends. Salem had created a large common area with some simple furniture, a fireplace with a cooking pot hanging over it, two bedrooms, and a dug out latrine. I flopped onto the wooden, lightly cushioned couch next to Salem and looked at my companions.

  “We’ve been handed an amazing opportunity. Let’s see how we can best use it.”

  Patreon Here!

  Discord Here!