This Used To Be About Dungeons полностью

“You should understand that we’re all in this together,” said Alfric. “We don’t have to like each other, but it does help things. Try to find common ground. Try to build bridges. Talk to each other.” These were his father’s words coming out of his mouth. He hoped that his father was right.

“Well, okay,” said Mizuki. She stopped, and Alfric stopped behind her. “We’re here.”

Alfric looked ahead and saw that they were in a circular clearing, which had clearly been made that way by human hands. Saplings lined the edges, attempting to reclaim the space, and the grass was tall. A giant rock occupied the center, twice as tall as Alfric, as thick around as a wagon, and covered with lichen, but there were carved runes visible on it.

“What is this?” asked Alfric.

“Magic stone,” said Mizuki. She walked forward, brushing past the tall grass as she moved along the thin trail until she was standing next to it.

“What does it do?” asked Alfric.

“Oh, I have no idea,” said Mizuki. “It’s ancient stuff, at least two thousand years old, maybe even more. Same with the portal, right? A bunch of runes telling you stuff, and no one knows how to read them.”

“There are people in Dondrian who know,” said Alfric.

“Well, sure, I didn’t mean that it was lost,” said Mizuki. “But you go off the color or whether they light up, right?”

“We do,” said Alfric. He frowned as he looked over the stone. When the Editors had made the change that had given every hex a dungeon, it had been an enormous benefit for the world, even if it hadn’t happened exactly how they wanted it. The stone collars around most dungeons post-dated that change, obviously, since the dungeons were ancient, before recorded history, even among the feil and dwodo. Things like that were still quite old though, and Alfric treated them with a certain respect because of that. This seemed to be of the same class of thing, and Alfric felt a reverence toward it.

It was a respect that Mizuki clearly didn’t share, because she had begun to climb it.

“What are you doing?” asked Alfric.

“There’s a thing at the top,” said Mizuki, who was using the runes carved into the rock as handholds and footholds. From the way the lichen and moss on the stone had been disturbed, it didn’t seem like it was her first time. “I don’t know if they have these in the city or not.”

“We don’t,” said Alfric as he watched her hoist herself up onto the top of the stone. “What does it do? Should you be messing with it?”

Mizuki was catching her breath from the climb and now standing high above Alfric, looking down at him. “I’ve done this dozens of times before,” she said. “It makes me happy.” She knelt down and pressed something on the top of the stone. It immediately lit up, with the runes all glowing blue for a moment, then pulsing slightly at a slow pace.

“What does that mean?” asked Alfric.

“No idea,” said Mizuki cheerfully. “But from the color and the pulse, I think it’s an all-clear of some kind. Blue means there’s nothing to be worried about or maybe the job is done.”

“Who put this here?” asked Alfric. He guessed that it had been moved in the last hundred years. “Why?”

“Dunno!” Mizuki called down to him. “Watch this!”

She crouched down until her butt was nearly touching the rock, then launched herself into the air. It wasn’t a jump, or not just a jump, because she continued on up for what had to have been a hundred feet. That high up, a fall would have killed her, but she fell slowly, spreading her arms and then gliding in a gentle circle around the stone. Alfric watched her carefully, worried that she would suddenly plummet to her death, until she was low enough that a fall would only injure her, nothing a cleric couldn’t fix. She kept on gliding in circles for as long as she could, then stopped in place and dropped the last two feet to the ground.

“Impressed?” she asked, grinning at Alfric.

“I am.” It was spectacular. Alfric had always liked seeing displays of magic. “You used the magic of this thing, whatever it was doing?”

Mizuki nodded, still grinning. “Countermagic, but yeah. It’s just about the only thing that gives me enough power to fly, and then only once a day. I think my record is half a mile, and I could have gone further if I hadn’t gotten stuck up in a tree.”

“It’s impressive,” said Alfric. “I just wish I understood what you’d actually done.” He looked at the stone behind her, which was once again inert.

“There’s a balance to magic,” said Mizuki. “You do something magical, you shift the balance of the aether, and when it’s out of balance, that’s where someone like me can come in. Whatever the stone is doing, it’s very global, so it leaves an imbalance toward the personal. But it’s also very heavy on information, which means that it leaves an imbalance toward the physical. My best guess is that this is some kind of information-gathering doodad.”

“And you do this a lot?” asked Alfric. “You activate it?”

“Sure,” said Mizuki, shrugging. “It’s not a big deal.”