The Third Gate: Chapter Fifty-Five (Patreon)

When I appeared, hovering in the air above the root, Dawn was blazing with her newly minted second gate. She couldn’t use any new spells – it was dedicated to a full-gate spell, though one whose alien, mind bending structure meant I couldn’t even begin to parse what it did – but the jump in mana density helped strengthen her mind, body, and beyond. After all, she was a being of purely mana.

That new strength, alongside overcharging some of the spells that she had been working on without my knowledge, was how she planned to help me.

Her dominion swept out around us, burning bright, despite the fact that she shouldn’t even have access to one yet.

A small voice in the back of my mind pointed out Dusk had been similar, able to push her legacy and nascent truth to touch on a dominion before spellbinder, so maybe Dawn was doing something similar? 

I dismissed the thought and focused on pulling my spirit back under control after the teleport. 

The ghost exploded upwards, and it reached for my mind again, screaming words, but I wrapped myself in Placid Mind from the Runelight Lens to fend off the raw mental attack, while Dawn met its spiritual power head on, allowing me to get the first real sense for it.

It was powerful, but decayed. Once upon a time, it might have been at the very pinnacle of fourth gate, all but ready to try and take the jump into the world of Arcanists.

Now? While it was fourth gate, its power was lesser. It reminded me of the revenant I’d fought. There were tattered scraps of something that had once been mighty, far better than me, but it could only express that power in fragments. 

“Thou shalt die, and this false kingdom shall fall,” the ghost intoned. “Supposedly Grande Mage Vivian. Tayvon. Pryderi. And thee, foul mockery. Ist thou pale lady too much a coward to face me a second time?!”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about!” I snapped, then started channeling power into the spirit-gourds. 

The ghost was ripped into the gourd, and I let out a sigh of relief. With it sealed, I could at least focus on the animation-fungi.

Then its power spiked and it exploded from the spirit trap, howling.

“Trickery! Thoust mind art fiendish. Forsooth, for thy power is false!”

It swept its hands out wide, and attempted another battering assault, but with Dawn’s burning power, and the Runelight Lens, it slipped aside. Its power faded, and it was sucked into the gourd again. 

I… was getting annoyed. This fight wasn’t fun, it was just frustrating. The ghost couldn’t threaten me, and the fungi was too far below to reach. Even if it was willing to sacrifice a second leg for a leap, I’d just pull myself back into Dusk’s realm. But as things stood, I wasn’t draining it or attacking, so it just waited for me to come back down, conserving its power like the ambush predator it was. 

I felt power boiling inside the ghost again, and I grabbed the gourd, overcharging my mana and reinforcing the array’s structure.

“Your battle ended,” I snapped at the spirit within. “We’re in the late 700s Mossford, almost the 800s. Your war ended. You died.”

I let go of my grip and allowed the spirit to escape. It shouted how I was a lair, but I ignored its words. Instead, I focused on intent and emotion, and let Dawn’s dominion reverberate with my words. For a second, it was as if we spoke as one being. 

“Your war has ended. Your castle is naught but dust and ruins. Now you hurt those who seek to live peaceful lives! If you wish for justice then know that you endanger the innocents.”

I let mana bleed from me, rippling with authority, and it hit the ectoplasm almost like a physical strike. 

“You’re dead. Accept it!” 

I slammed my hand into the ghost, which phased inside of it, given that it was a completely insubstantial spirit, rather than a physical thing. As I did, I cast Lesser Psychometry, Internal Pocketwatch, and Lesser Image Recall, all at once. 

The image of a pocket watch appeared, and the hands on its face started ticking backwards as the ghost was faced with the images of it waiting, seething with rage against an enemy who had long departed. 

I didn’t think that this would have worked on a human, but ghosts were specifically echoes of a mind and emotion in time – in essence, they were already psychometry made manifest. It had been a risk, but one well worth it. 

A century passed, then another, and then a few more years anyways, and finally three figures appeared – the ones who I assumed the ghost was so enraged about. 

One of them was a plain looking girl with long, straight, dark hair, pale skin, and angry looking eyes. She was pretty, but kind of gangly, and though she looked to be about twenty, her acne hadn’t completely cleared up. 

The second was a short, handsome man, muscular, with neat cornrows, a well groomed beard, dark skin, and intensely dark eyes that looked even more angry than the young woman’s. He looked to be a year or two older than she was, and had on bright silver gauntlets. 

The final one was a tall, lanky man, with black hair and glowing green eyes. His skin was chalky pale, to the point it looked either inhuman, or unhealthy. I was leaning towards inhuman, given the eyes. His face and features were too sharply angular to be the most conventionally attractive, but I liked it – they were like a more extreme version of Kene’s own angular sharpness. 

Each of them blazed with a power I recognized with the Winds of Resolve, as warriors who could serve as a great challenge to me one day, if I walked that way. The Winds of Fortune had another tale to tell, though – this was the scene of friends working to keep a nation together, and the beginnings of a tragedy. Dawn sent me the feeling of her Winds of Destiny’s amusement, like it was watching a retelling of one of its favorite plays. 

In the image, the three of them were battling against the ghost, who was alive. Its form was blurry and indistinct, as the ghost couldn’t seem to remember what it had looked like while it was alive, but it was weaving together beast and plant magic, fighting with a style that didn’t look too dissimilar to my own style. There was less teleportation, and more melee combat, but it bounced between fighters, slashing out with indistinct hands that transformed into claws, thrashing war roots, a horde of animation-fungi, long rents of blademoss, a cloud of aerosolized poison from a bottle, and more. 

The image flickered and shuddered, stretched beyond what it could normally do, and working to force the ghost to confront the very thing that had made it into what it was now. There was an image of the pale one spinning a scythe and cutting through hopping scarecrows directed by a pair of witch sisters, an image of the handsome one with silver gauntlets unleashing massive rippling shockwaves through the earth that broke apart portions of a castle, the dark haired woman commanding an army of skeletons to fight the fungi and war roots.

Things snapped back into clarity a moment later, when the woman was holding the indistinct figure of the ghost aloft with one hand. Power was flowing off of her, and she was chanting something. Ice and shadows dug into the shapeless form, and she tossed the body to the ground. 

This was the moment that the ghost had been born from, the terror and hands of death. I replayed the moment and stared into the ghost’s eyes. 

“You’re dead,” I said softly. “Your war failed. It’s over. Now you’re just hurting the people here.” 

The ghost looked at me, and for a moment, I felt its power fill the air. Its dominion thundered, and Dawn’s snapped under the pressure. The fact she’d been able to stand against the fourth gate ghost at all had been impressive, but this massive wave was entirely different. This was the complete and utter power of a mage who’d sought to rebel against Mossford, to fight against warriors that had achieved power infinitely further than what I had. 

I threw everything I had into Placid Mind, but when the spirit’s power hit me, it washed over harmlessly and kept going. 

It continued to pass down into the ground, and it reached into the animation-fungi below, where blue motes of light started to rush upwards. 

It spread through acres of the forest, spreading to the very limit of my mana senses, then beyond. Across the forest, more blue light began to drift up, gathering into the spirit’s location. 

They slowly flowed into the spirit, then… 

Silence. 

The ghost was gone, and the power that had once made up the footprint of a person was becoming one with the world again. It had been the echo of a horrid event, one so terrible that it had even created a time catch. The ghost had been stuck in the past, unable to accept what had happened, but it had seen the truth and accepted it. Unable to fulfill the reason it existed, it had released its hate and anger. 

Since the first time I’d stepped foot into the forest outside of Kene’s home, I’d known that there was something strange about it, something wild and dark, wilderness reclaiming where people had once lived. 

Now the darkness was lifting. 

The sensation of wilderness still stood. This was a wild place, with centuries of letting itself be overrun. But it wasn’t quite as much of a dark place as it once had been. 

Between the destruction of the time catch by feeding it to Dusk what felt like so long ago, before the idyll-flume, the destruction of one of the surviving war-roots, my current work to purge the animation-fungi, and the release of the ghost’s anger, I’d been working to cleanse this forest since I’d started coming here. I just hadn’t realized it. 

I looked down, and saw that with its passing, the ghost had wrought a change in the fungi that I’d been working to purge. It was almost like an incredibly massive draining spell had struck it, one not limited to merely harvesting excess, and instead trying to absorb everything. 

Where there had once been a huge cluster of fungi surrounding a war-root, there was now just a massive pile of compost. I gently floated to the ground, spreading my senses, checking to make sure that there wasn’t anything left. 

When I found a power leaking from the pile that reminded me of a ghost, my stomach clenched, and I shot over to it as fast as my flight potion would allow. 

It was a mushroom. Tall, thin, bright yellow, with green gills that released a spore. The spore felt like it would empower ghosts in the area, maybe shades as well, but I wasn’t sure. I let out a sigh of relief at the false alarm and sent a sample into the mushroom village within Dusk. 

A moment later, Kene stepped into the clearing, wild eyed. 

“What in the name of the sealed primes was that?!”