15-25. Mitharin

The rest of the day went toward recovery, both of the caravan itself and the people who’d been injured in the battle. At final count, the battle had claimed seventeen people and gravely injured more than three hundred others. Those closest to the breach had fared the worst, but a few stealthier vespirans had made it much further down the line. They’d been killed, but not before inflicting grievous damage on a few key targets.

Even one deity had died.

She was a non-combatant. A wagon driver, from what Elijah had been told, and she had been killed before she even knew an attack was underway. The tragedy of it made Elijah grit his teeth in frustration, but there was nothing he could do about it. Instead, he focused on stepping in to heal non-emergency wounds in the hope that it would get the caravan moving more quickly.

Still, it took the better part of five hours before the ekolasi took their first steps. The wagon train’s speed slowly ramped up until they left the site of battle behind. The repairs they’d affected were temporary, but according to the technicians responsible for those patches, they would hold until a team of real ethereal engineers could return to the location.

For his part, Elijah climbed atop Mona’s back, where he found Tisk. She’d been wounded in the fight, but not so badly that anyone had bothered healing the hole in her stomach.

“Spear,” she said. “I put a poultice on it.”

“Here,” Elijah said, casting Wild Resurgence and Bough of the World Tree. She let out a sigh as the vitality settled onto her like a warm blanket. “Better?”

“Better,” she agreed, though they both knew it would take some time before the wound completely healed. The vespirans’ weapons had been coated in some toxin that made the injuries they’d inflicted resistant to vitality-based healing. Most of the real Healers had ways around that, but Elijah’s spells did not.

“Does that happen often?” Elijah asked, leaning back with his palms resting against Mona’s pebbled scales.

Tisk shrugged. “It’s not uncommon,” she answered. “Usually, they don’t have transcendents with them, though.”

“You think Mano’s okay?”

“The Black Death? Of course.”

“He’s kind of a big deal, isn’t he?” Elijah asked. He obviously knew that Mano was a transcendent, which was an achievement in and of itself. He also knew that his adopted brother had made a name for himself fighting on the front lines in the war against the Ravener. And apparently, dragons like Alrhok had grown up hearing about Mano’s exploits. However, Elijah didn’t really know much else about the big dragon.

“He’s famous,” she said. “One of the most famous transcendents out there. I grew up hearing about his battles.”

Then, she went on to describe some of them. To Elijah, those stories smacked of myth, not unlike the ones dedicated to figures like Hercules or Ajax. It was easy to believe that the feats had been inflated in the retelling, though given what he knew of Mano, he couldn’t help but wonder if he’d really accomplished the things Tisk attributed to the black dragon.

So it went for the next few hours until Elijah saw a gate looming in the distance. The Coreway led right into it, prompting him to ask if they’d reached their destination.

“In a way,” Tisk answered. “That’s Mitharin, a Coreway intersection.”

She then once again explained that there were many such intersections scattered along the path. Most of them stood inside hospitable dimensions that differed very little from their native reality. Or they weren’t outright hostile, at least.

“One of the key requirements for an intersection town is for the atmosphere to be survivable for ascendents. That usually means that demigods won’t even feel uncomfortable,” she went on as the caravan closed the gap toward the gate.

“The other requirements?” Elijah asked, craning his neck to look up at the towering gate. It was at least two hundred yards tall and just as wide, with the frame displaying much of the same artistry he’d seen on the Coreway’s arches. The interior of the gate was dull grey, though Elijah could see shadows on the other side. To him, it was like looking through a thin cloth.

“No major threats,” Tisk answered. “Proper infrastructure. That sort of thing.”

Elijah didn’t have a chance to ask further questions before Mona led them through the gate. Passage came with a subtle popping sound that sent vibrations throughout Elijah’s body, but they passed after only a moment.

And then, he saw Mitharin.

The first thought that crossed Elijah’s mind was that it looked a bit like a railroad interchange. However, instead of train cars, it hosted massive wagons pulled by huge beasts like the ekolasi. Most were scaled, just like Mona, but there were plenty of furry creatures as well. Elijah even saw a couple that sported bright features and looked like overgrown ostriches.

Tisk used a spell to calm Mona, while the wagon driver guided the big ekolases down a slightly curving path. Meanwhile, Elijah saw another train waiting for its turn to go the other way.

Over the course of their journey, they’d only passed one other caravan going the opposite direction, though Tisk had assured Elijah that the Coreway was usually much busier. Seeing the intersection, he could certainly believe that.

The path curved in a wide circle that soon became a spiraling ramp. From his perch, Elijah got a good look at the rest of the infrastructure. Miles and miles of paths, curving and snaking in a pattern that looked tangled but assuredly worked off of precise timing and measurements.

Like a busy airport.

Elijah gaped at the sight, appreciating the complexity until, at last, they broke free of the subterranean intersection and into silver light.

He blinked in the harsh light, and when his vision cleared, he saw dozens of towering buildings lining a long road.

“Just a bit longer, and you’ll get the chance to explore,” Tisk said.

Looking around like a tourist, Elijah could only nod. He already knew that the other gate that they would use to reenter the Coreway was on the other side of town, and the entirety of Mitharin functioned a bit like an interstate interchange, with another branch of the Coreway running adjacent to the one they traveled.

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Or relatively speaking, at least. Elijah knew better than most that traveling through the void wasn’t so simple as all of that. Directions weren’t always relevant descriptors.

After about an hour, during which Elijah realized that what he’d taken for buildings were actually more like the walls of a trench that cut through the city, they reached their destination. It turned out to be something akin to a train yard, where the caravan would curl around itself as they awaited their turn to enter the nearby gate that would send them on their way.

It all worked like clockwork, and soon enough, Elijah had joined his acquaintances to head into the city proper. He’d invited Tisk along, but she chose to stay with the caravan, citing a need to see to Mona. Elijah could infer from the way her eyes darted to the crowds that there was another reason behind her reticence.

Clearly, she preferred the company of the animals.

In any case, the trip into Mitharin was eye-opening. The whole place looked like a gothic dream turned up to ten, with gleaming silver steeples adorning most buildings. The people themselves were just as odd, and they uniformly wore red outfits that kept their entire bodies covered. Adorning their heads were conical hats attached to gauzy veils that gave no hints as to the features on the other side.

Those veils even stopped Soul of the Wild, but the ability still bypassed the robes to tell him that the residents were more or less human, though with almost entirely androgynous bodies.

Of course, there were plenty of other races about. Dragons and drakes were in the minority, but Elijah saw scaled and feathered humanoids, dwarves, gnomes, and elves. And everything in between as well.

The sheer variety of the crowd was overwhelming.

Elijah stuck close to his companions as Alrhok led them to a tavern recommended to him by one of the wagon drivers. Inside was a subdued atmosphere that Elijah immediately found off-putting. The red-robed people were in abundance, though they drank with such austerity that Elijah couldn’t help but wonder what the point was. They never even removed their veils. Instead, their silver glasses passed right through the material.

Elijah tried not to stare, though he was only mildly successful in that endeavor.

Thankfully, they soon found a private room. When Okar shut the door behind them, it felt like everyone loosed a collective sigh.

“This place is so weird,” Alrhok said. “They told us about this in the academy, but…”

He seemed lost for words.

“They’re a pseudo-collective,” Imal provided, taking one of the silver chairs for herself. “Technically, they’re human, but at four years old, they undergo a rite of passage that connects them to the rest of their race.”

“Why?” asked Okar.

Imal started to answer, but before she got the words out, the door opened to reveal one of the red-robed natives. They stepped inside and asked, “May I provide sustenance? We have food, alcohol, and other refreshments.”

Their voice was high-pitched, but not feminine. Nor was it masculine, matching the androgyny Elijah sensed with Soul of the Wild. He wasn’t so crass as to take it any further than a cursory glance.

A moment later, they handed out silver placards that Elijah soon found were menus and left them alone to decide what they wanted to order.

“What’s with all the silver?” he asked.

Okar answered, “It’s not silver.”

Elijah looked closer at the placard. “Looks like silver to me,” he stated.

“It’s mithril,” he explained. “Or a mithril alloy. Too bad most of it is unstable outside of this dimension, or it would become one of the richest resources in the entire Empire. Didn’t you see the mountains?”

Alrhok asked, “What mountains?”

“Oh. I’ll have to show you. My parents actually do a lot of business with Mitharin,” Okar said. “Most of the mithril here is useless outside of this dimension, but there are still a few dense veins that we can mine. And we do. It gets a little tricky though. What with the mind spiders.”

“The what now?” Elijah asked.

“Mind spiders,” Okar repeated.

“He’s messing with you,” Imal said with a roll of her eyes. “There’s no such thing as mind spiders.”

“I love spiders,” Elijah said.

“What?” Alrhok exclaimed. “They’re gross.”

“Oh, c’mon. I have this little buddy that’s a spider. Well, he’s not so little anymore,” Elijah explained. “Last I saw him, he was…I don’t know…maybe forty feet wide? Most of that was legs, though. And he had thousands of little spider kids, too. When we first met, he was only about…” Elijah held his hands a foot apart. “Maybe that big? I don’t remember. But he was so cute.”

“Spiders are not cute,” Alrhok insisted.

Elijah shrugged. “The fuzzy ones definitely are,” he stated.

“Dragons and spiders don’t mix.”

“Dragons and drachnids don’t mix,” Elijah corrected. “That’s like saying you don’t like dogs because you had a bad experience with a werewolf.”

“What’s a werewolf?” asked Okar.

Elijah sighed. It really was difficult to remember that Earth’s mythology wasn’t always universal. Sometimes, the system did some of the heavy lifting when it came to translation, but not always. Apparently, werewolves were one of the exceptions.

So, he spent the next few minutes trying to explain the long history of werewolves, starting with the Greek myth of Lycaon, who tricked Zeus into consuming human flesh and was punished when the god turned him into a wolf. Then, he explained the medieval European werewolf panic and ended with their eternal feud with sparkly vampires. Of course, he wasn’t entirely certain about that last bit, but that was the gist of it according to his sister’s teenage obsession with terrible fiction.

“Your planet is bullshit,” Okar muttered.

“Can’t argue with that,” Elijah said, taking a sip from the hot beverage he’d been provided. Somewhere in the middle of all that, the androgynous server had returned to take their orders. And before he’d finished, they had brought the drinks. For his part, Elijah had chosen something that sounded a bit like coffee, but with an alcoholic bite to it.

Okar had picked a huge tankard of frothing ale, while Alrhok had taken a goblet of wine. Surprisingly, Imal had chosen what looked like a daiquiri, complete with a little cherry-like fruits impaled on silver toothpicks. Or probably mithril.

After popping one such fruit into her moth, he gestured to Okar with the probably-mithril toothpick. “Before we got sidetracked, we were talking about mind-spiders.”

The halfling set his mug down, revealing a foam mustache that nobody bothered to tell him about. “Right. Mind-spiders. This reality is infested with them. They’re only about two or three inches across, but they hatch as demigod-level beasts. By adulthood, they’re at the level of deities,” he said. “The connection between the natives’ minds is there as protection. Alone, one of them might be vulnerable, but when they’re all part of a collective, they’re basically immune.”

“Uh…we don’t have that protection,” Alrhok said. Obviously, after what had happened to his sister, he would be very wary of mental magic.

“The city is protected,” Imal said. “That was one of the stipulations for it to become an intersection.”

Alrhok let out a sigh of relief, but he didn’t completely relax.

Imal went on to explain that the natives’ collective wasn’t a true hive mind. They were connected, but not so fully that they couldn’t act as individuals.

“What happens if they leave this reality?” Elijah asked. “The people, not the spiders.”

Imal answered, “Most of them die.”

“Oh.”

“A few make it, though,” Okar interjected. “One of them works for my family’s company. Fun fact – they’re not true natives of this reality. They got stranded here by accident, but they were originally from our dimension. That’s why they have access to the system.”

“Not every dimension is like that, though. When the Coreway attaches to a new reality, the system usually comes with it,” Imal explained. “But sometimes, there’s pushback. Maybe it’s a competing system. There are some of those out there. But usually, it’s just an ultra-powerful creature sort of like the World Tree. They don’t usually accept the system.”

The rest of the next hour or so was occupied by speculation as to what gaining power in those worlds looked like. Elijah excelled at that, mostly because Earth had built a host of myths and stories about that sort of thing. By contrast, the others had never known any reality but one governed by the system, so they had some difficulty latching onto other concepts.

In any case, it was a good way to wind down after the first leg of their journey, and it gave them a chance to relax in the wake of the battle.

However, it eventually came to a close, as much because the potent liquor had slowly degraded their wits as because they knew the caravan would move on in the morning. Nobody wanted to be left behind.

With the mind spiders.

So it happened that they found themselves staggering through Mitharin and back to the caravan, where they collapsed under the wagons and promptly passed out.