Wish upon the Stars chapter 910

The lift lowered slowly. I didn’t know why, maybe it was because of the attraction force from the infinity crystals, but clearly, they were wary about us descending too quick. Terrence the bowler hat guy was clearly unenthused with this pace, as he sat unhappily on the box nearest to the center, muttering to either himself or the…Void weres? Whatever the hunched furry things were.

“Cocky little bitch,” he hissed as he kicked casually out at one of the monsters. “Thinks she’s so special because she gets to come and go. Thinks she’s too good for me. Once this job is over, we’ll see what’s left of her.” He sneered at one of the closest monsters. “You thought you were special too, didn’t you mutt? I wonder if she’ll turn out like you did?”

I doubted she was still around. If Sofia had any common sense she’d have booked it out of Yettin first thing. I wasn’t planning on chasing her, she’d helped us get this far, and honestly I had bigger problems. But I didn’t like how creepy and vindictive Terrence was, so I decided to take him out when we raided whatever was down there. Callie, detecting my emotions through the bond, nodded solemnly. Some people just deserved to die.

We listened to him seethe and whine for another half hour before the lift began to slow. “Bethy, do you mind scouting ahead?” I asked her quietly, staring intently at the mist coating the bottom of the chasm. Outside the lift, the floor of the gap was completely concealed in fog, which meant Bethy could move perfectly undetected down there, in a state of absolute stealth even more flawless than her usual sneakiness.

I was positive this was a better idea than me going in person, mostly because I could sense extreme danger from that mist. The lift seemed isolated from it, but the closer we got the more my Danger Sense screamed at me not to touch that stuff. Luckily, Bethy’s mist form was pretty impervious to most things, so she should be safe to go out there. Devlan seemed to know what it was and didn’t object to her going, so I took that as a good sign too.

She nodded happily. “Um, duh! Exploring a secret treasure cave sounds like so much fun! I bet there’s a temple down here. Treasure caves always have temples.”

I recoiled. “Don’t even SAY that! Temples are the worst. I’ve never had a good time in a temple. If there IS a temple down here, you come back and tell us and we’ll leave. Don’t get close to it, they’re always really weird and dangerous.” She pouted, but I repeated myself firmly. “Bethy. Seriously. This is important. It’s not safe, promise if you find something like that you’ll come back.” I held up a hand, extending my little finger. “Pinky promise.”

Gasping, Bethy flinched. “That’s…so excessive.” At my implacable, silence, she sighed and extended her hand, locking her pinky with mine. Then, as we finally came to a stop, she turned to mist and flowed out of the lift.

“Pinky promise?” Said Abel acidly. “Seriously?”

I snorted. “What do you know? Pinky promises are part of the honor of the modern age. Pinky promises, dibs, nose goes, and shotgun. These are the foundations of human trust. If you can’t abide by the conventions of the honorable modern gentleman, you might as well be a beast scrambling around in the mud.”

Callie sighed. “He and Benny take those kinds of things really seriously,” she explained, entirely unnecessarily. “I’m still not totally sure it’s not partly contract related recursion.”

I rolled my eyes, but generously declined to comment on her spurious accusations. “Anyway. They’re unloading the boxes, and that’ll take a while. I’m hoping Bethy can get us a decent picture of what’s going on out there. I can’t really perceive anything outside the lift for some reason. It’s like my Perception is getting lost in the mist. It just sinks in and dissolves. Even Murmur can’t bypass is.”

“That’s infinity mist,” Devlan informed me helpfully. “It’s…hard to explain. Think of it like every drop of water is a VERY small pocket dimension. Like…an inch, maybe. They congregate together into that mist around infinity crystals, as a byproduct of their existence. Most Perception abilities don’t work around them.”

I cursed internally. I was familiar with the mechanism, it reminded me of the space isolation trick our friend Anna had used back during our army training in the empire. I knew spatial phenomena could cause problems with stealth and Perception, but I hadn’t realized it would be an issue down here. “What about Bethy?” I asked worriedly. “She’s mist right now, is she going to be swallowed up by the pocket dimensions?”

“She won’t be affected,” he assured me. “That’s part of the reason I recruited you to help me move the crystals. She has a Domain, which is its own spatial anomaly, and a much higher level one. Her Domain is part of her, and will render her basically immune to the mist and any other side effects of the crystals.”

I sighed in relief. “Alright, good. Once she gets back, she can take us further in. They have to have some way to resist the mist in there. Speaking of which, how are they moving through it so easily?” I gestured to the monsters unloading the crates.

“Void is the opposite of space,” Callie said with a sigh. “Void energy has some strange interactions with spatial energy. I’m guessing that’s what they want the infinity crystals for, so it makes sense the Void creatures would be resistant to whatever spatial erosion that mist can cause. I assume that’s what it does?”

Paying closer attention, I could kind of feel it. The particles in the mist were…heavy, drawing in the space around them. That was the cause of the insane pressure in the chasm, this huge bank of infinity mist was dragging all the space above us down. It didn’t seem to be affecting the actual stone around us though. I was guessing constant exposure over a long period of time had hardened the stone against to an insane degree. 

In fact, I wondered if maybe this chasm hadn’t been so deep to start. Maybe the mist had compressed the bottom slowly downward until it was too solid to go any deeper.

Whatever the case, this lift was warded against the mist somehow, so we could only stay and wait for Bethy. “How did you expect us to rob the depot with this shit around?” I asked Devlan. “Just relying on Bethy?”

“Mostly,” he admitted. “But there’s also some warded passages that allow people to move around down here. It took us DECADES to get any sort of information on the security arrangements, and that’s basically all we know. We’ll need your vampire friend to pull off this raid, but the mist is thicker than I thought, so we might be in luck. It SHOULD isolate our attack on their base so the depot won’t notice it.”

That was probably the only silver lining here. I’d been worrying about whether we could pull this off. Still, I was feeling better about this raid. Bethy was basically the perfect counter to this mist, and without her this place would be basically unassailable. There was no way there people had maintained any vigilance at the bottom of this giant ass chasm surrounded by crushing death mist.

We waited for the monsters to finish unloading the lift, with Terrence sitting around shouting insults and throwing things at them. Honestly I was feeling bad for the creatures, they looked kind of confused, and despite being Void monsters they didn’t seem hostile. Knowing they might have been people before maybe made them more sympathetic, but still, the whole scene convinced me even more thoroughly that Terrence deserved to die.

When the crates were done, Terrence sneered at the monsters and chased them away from the entrance, then slipped on a ring. The ring was pitch black, and as he put it on, a black mist emerged from the band that flowed over his body. A very familiar black mist with a very unsettling feeling coming off it.

As he stepped into the infinity mist, the black mist from the ring clashed against it, creating a sound like water poured into a hot pan, but he remained otherwise unharmed as he strode into the depths of the fog.

Only minutes later, some mist slipped through the entrance of the lift, undisturbed by whatever force was keeping the infinity mist out of the lift. Within moments, it reformed into Bethy, who was hopping up and down yelping. “Ouch, ouch, ouch! Pins and needles, pins and needles EVERYWHERE! Gods WHY?”

“Bethy?” I asked worriedly. “Are you ok?”

She shook her whole body like a wet dog. “Ouch. I’m fine. It just stings. Like my whole body fell asleep when it was mist. Give me a second.” She breathed through the pain, hissing in discomfort for another minute, and then finally sighed in relief. “Alright. It’s gone. That SUCKED. This place is terrible. And there wasn’t even a temple, just a dumb house in the middle of a cave.”

“A house?” I asked with interest. “Is the area around it clear of mist?”

She nodded absently. “Yeah, there’s a big open space surrounding it. The house is small, but pretty nice. I saw that jerk in the hat go in there a minute or two ago. I guess thats where the boss guy is.”

“I’d assume so,” I said with a grimace. “Look, I don’t want to ask but…”

“You want me to carry you guys into the empty space?” She asked, her smile knowing. “I figured. I’m not too worried about it. The mist doesn’t feel good, but it didn’t damage me or anything, it just stings. Sit tight guys!” There was a flicker, and we were standing in a field of black grass outside a castle under a blood red sky.

We waited for only a few minutes before another flicker had us standing in a cave, positioned behind a large rock. Off to one side, I could see a wall of mist. On closer inspection, I realized the “wall” was more of a fabric, with thin tendrils of mist woven into a strange pattern.

“Formation,” I said with dawning understanding. “They aren’t stopping the mist, they’re using it to stop itself, directing it into a formation that creates the warding effect. That’s smart.” I glanced around, worried someone might have noticed us. As soon as we appeared I’d applied Murmur, but it was highly possible someone noticed our appearance before I triggered it. Luckily, Bethy had set us down behind a rock that blocked us from view, so we were pretty safe from notice.

“Alright,” I told my friends as we stepped out into the cave. “Time to poke around. Obviously stay close, but point out anything you notice. We’re going to put together a comprehensive map of this place for our team when they arrive.”

Everyone nodded, and we emerged from behind the rock, doing a circuit of the empty cavern, slowly closing in on the house. Sure enough, that had been a smart call. While they didn’t maintain vigilance that I could see, they DID have passive traps set up. Murmur allowed us to bypass them, but I had to slow down, processing the information needed to detect each trap as we went closer.

Finally, we arrived outside the house, and I posted up next to the window, looking in to find an older man with a lionlike mane of grey hair and a neatly trimmed goatee sitting at a table, already working on a wine bottle he appeared to be siphoning black mist out of.

I let Murmur seep into the area, slowly learning more and more about the place, but when it became clear he wasn’t going to do anything else, I stepped back and turned to my friends. “Ok, that should be everything. Lets get back up to the surface to meet with Devlan’s people. I want to get this raid finished as soon as possible.” After that…we had some crystals to steal.