The Edge of the Old World

We reached the edge of the cave mouth where our dungeon dive was set to begin just as the sun peeked over the horizon. Taking a moment, I looked east and marvelled at one of my favourite creations in this world: The Broken Shard Sea.

This feature was a nearly two-hundred-mile-diameter crater mostly filled with sand and a few desolate desert outposts. At the center of the treacherous and hostile landscape, a mesa towered proudly. This obelisk was once the grand mountain city of Westerriton, a beacon of mortal innovation and magical creation second only to the First City created by those who would call themselves Divine. Three thousand years ago, during the Great Cataclysm, in a fit of rage, the Gods razed the city so thoroughly that all that remained was a crater and a remnant.

It was a beautiful sight, probably more to me than anyone else in this world. This was because I understood the complexity of its history and knew what secrets remained hidden within that remnant. Ancient arcanotech, alien and more advanced than anything Esseria wielded at current, still lay dormant at the heart of that desert—technologies that would change this world.

Bah-dump! Bah-dump! Bah-dump!

My heart raced with the prospect of gaining access to it one day. But before I could do that, I would first need to complete this quest.

“Oh wow, is that it?” Rionriv gasped, though she wasn’t talking about the desert.

I turned to face the direction the girls were looking. They glanced south, towards the ridgeline of this crater and where the Fallen City of Talir’sahn stood. No longer a city, this graveyard was now only used by merchants passing through to the desert or soldiers transporting dangerous prisoners to The Kiln, a maximum-security prison hidden deep in the scorching sands.

Rumours were that the Fallen City was eternally cursed by the wandering souls of residents lost during the Two-Generation War. These were mostly false, but there was some truth to them. While ghosts wandered, lost without a purpose, most of the dangers came from the contaminants and mutated beasts still left over from the devastation.

Talir’sahn had been a peaceful nation, aiming to recreate the technology of Westerriton. They only fought to stop the conflict between Anak’hati and Sutin’eli, but when the city fell, the war soon ceased. Not because of actual peace or resolution, but due to fear. The war stopped because of the weapon used on this cursed city. A device so powerful, so destructive that Talir’sahn and its residents had all but been eradicated in a single flash of light.

The equivalent of an arcane nuclear bomb had wiped them out. Mostly.

“That’s it,” Sharzin acknowledged. “Looks like what they taught us in class.”

Though the triop also wasn’t looking at the skeletal remains of ancient buildings, either, but instead the massive, faintly luminous dome shielding a fifth of the city under a pearlescent curtain. An impenetrable bubble put up at the end of the war by one of Talir’sahn’s greatest Generals that, for a hundred and fifty years, has stood.

“What is it, Iz?” Aesandoral asked with genuine curiosity.

“What?”

“The shield? You know, like, everything—so, what is it?”

“A time dilation effect of a reality-breaking chronomantic spell. In fact, it’s the only one of its kind. The shield is a bubble of space-time that separates our reality from theirs.”

“And what does that mean?” Rionriv questioned with a huff. “Please, in the common tongue for us non-oracles.”

“For us, a hundred and fifty years have passed since the bubble appeared. For everyone inside of it, less than a second has passed. No one can enter because the different states between our reality and theirs would tear us apart.”

The three looked at me with eyes widened by bewilderment, which made sense. The number of chronomancers that Esseria had seen in its thirty-thousand-year history had been limited to a handful of individuals, which numbered even less than Triple-S adventurers. This was a direct result of chronomancy being more science than arcana, and, historically, when Esseria drifted too close to technological advancement, the Divinity-that-was knocked the mortals down a collective peg.

“They’re alive in there?”

“Eh, more like frozen in a moment, waiting for someone to press play on the tape.”

“Again, with the weird nonsense.” Rionriv shook her head before directing her attention to the cave mouth behind us. “Well, it's dawn.”

“Agreed,” I replied and gripped my quarterstaff tight. “Enjoy this view. It’ll be the last glimpse of daylight for a few days.”

Taking a final moment to appreciate the world, we looked each other over before moving towards the secret entrance to the facility. We turned to leave as I stole a final glance at the desert and fallen city, taking a last deep breath of fresh air.