Isabella Caldimore wondered why she was still alive.
In every conceivable future, the completion of her father's oft-alluded-to grand ritual had been the end of her. She'd known for months that he intended to use her as some main component in the proceedings. Even if he hadn't always spoken cryptically of necessary sacrifices and ultimate duties, she wouldn't have struggled to deduce that. And seeing how decades-long secret rituals to create weapons of unimaginable power never ended well for anyone involved, Isabella had known that she was a dead girl walking.
But Father had completed his ritual, it had gone very wrong—or very right?—and Isabella had gotten to endure the horrifying sensation of slamming face-first into a dimensional boundary, blessedly losing consciousness before her mind collapsed under the stress of what she was experiencing.
Then, she'd woken up alive?
Obviously, she should be dead. She should be magically smeared into a million pieces, maybe her soul eradicated alongside her body. A soul should be everlasting—that was what the priests said—but if anything could break that rule, it would be a profane ritual of almost unprecedented scale. Death had been her starting assumption. She had been scared of what more might happen to her.
Yet here she was.
Peering through the window of her Institute dorm bedroom, for some bizarre reason. Looking down on an alternate version of Meridian, the magnificent capital city of a flourishing humanity. Everything, from buildings to streets to foliage, had taken on a dull gray quality, like the colors had been leached out and texture removed. Only a faint memory of its original vibrancy remained. The sky above was pitch black, and the sun too, though she could make out details easily—like it was bright outside, but also dark. The contradiction made her head ache.
Only she had retained her full color. She looked kind of garish by comparison, her bright blonde hair, academy uniform, and fair skin set against the leeched-out grayness of everything around her.
There were monsters.
A lot of them. From the high vantage point of her Institute dorm room, she could see the alien creatures streaming through the streets and slithering through the sky in massive numbers, sinuous and sleek and oh-so-otherworldly. All were headed for the Adventurer's District. For the Wardens' guildhall, she knew, even if she couldn't quite see it happening. Where else would they be going, if not for the origin point of Father's ritual?
She could guess the general shape of what had happened. Anyone could. Father had been trying to gather more of that voidglass of his, and the source of it was rather obvious now. Like most catastrophic instances of magic running wild, there was a sense of irony in how the ritual had manifested. It had given him what he wanted: a glut of the raw material, more than he could ever make use of.
Father had punched a hole through reality, and now denizens of another world were swarming into her own.
***
Inspection failed. Approximation provided.
***
***
Greater Voidling
Lv. 884
***
She really disliked looking at the monsters. The sensation was vaguely like turning a corner and finding a centipede crawling on the wall. The jarring, instant spike of horror. She hated insects. Their long and spindly legs, segmented bodies, the way they skittered around. They evoked instinctual fear.
Laying eyes on those sleek black and violet monsters was like that, but also not. Maybe more accurately, it was similar to looking down and seeing a bone sticking out of her leg. An image that instantly conveyed that something had gone wrong. Something horrendous. But on a much grander scale. Rather than recognizing that she had been injured horribly, the sight of those creatures told her that reality had been mutilated. These beings did not belong here, in the same world as her.
Though in reality, she supposed she was the one invading their space.
Isabella was pretty sure she would've been eaten already if not for how every monster for miles was rushing to that dimensional puncture. She swore a few of the flying ones had even turned to consider her before deciding there was more enticing food elsewhere. The moment the gateway closed—and she supposed it was optimistic to think it ever would—Isabella's brief and impossible survival would come to an end. Without something to distract them, she would be the tastiest morsel, the subject of their fascination. And the end result of that was obvious enough.
She wondered whether she should try to do something. Come up with a survival plan. If she was right, and those monsters were escaping through a hole in the dimensional fabric, could she, too, jump through and return home?
She would die long before she got close, much less all the way to the breach. And even then, if she did, who said she would survive the trip? She'd lived one way, but that had been with the aid of a ritual. And obscenely powerful, unchained magic was anything but consistent.
That was as much analysis as she could muster up. The truth was, the fight had gone out of her a while ago. All she felt now was resignation—if, at least, a less awful resignation than before. Because there was one monumental upside to all of this, and it was that she was free from that man. Beyond his reach, permanently.
It was over. However little time she had left to enjoy that fact.
She took a deep breath, released it, then walked over to her strangely desaturated bedsheets and crawled into them. She stared up at the ceiling. Nothing she did mattered, or could matter, a world away. So why worry? She was tired of caring. It never helped anything.
She hoped that Meridian wasn't being reduced to rubble even as she lay there and tried to not think about it. Some of those gigantic monsters had been level nineteen hundred, so the odds were pretty high. Only the Party of Heroes could have done much against threats of that scale, and they were long gone.
Father might have genuinely ended the world with what he'd done. It was a rather surreal thought.
The Party of Heroes…
She couldn't ignore the niggling in her head. A suspicion that poked at her despite her trying to push it away. Saffra's strange mentor. A demonic woman, a mage, who had somehow beaten the Red Tithe, even when he wielded Father's strongest artifacts. Just as Saffra had promised she would. How? It seemed impossible. More impossible than the alien material itself, or this strange dimension.
For a second, she indulged in a delusional fantasy. Meridian wasn't being overrun by monsters from another dimension. Vivisari Vexaria herself had returned, more powerful than ever, to save the world in its hour of need—as she had many times before. Even now, she was peeling apart threats to rival the Cataclysms by herself, without even a team to support her. A mage of such power the world could barely conceive of it; a full order of magnitude greater than she even was before.
Isabella snorted.
"And she's Saffra's teacher."
That was the silliest part. Enough to almost make her lips twitch in amusement. Almost, but not quite.
She sighed.
She was tired. Lying on her bed, she felt like months of exhaustion crashed down on her all at once. If she was lucky, something would eat her while she slept. She would appreciate a painless death. She deserved that much, didn't she?
She slipped into unconsciousness.
And woke, with a jerk, some indeterminate amount of time later as an influx of mana crashed into the room. Flailing in shock and shooting up, she spun in bed to face the source.
She was met with an image so nonsensical that her brain briefly stopped working.
A demon stood there.
The first impression that struck Isabella was how short the woman was. Shorter than Isabella herself, if she stood. Her face was ambiguously immortal in that way of demons and elves, young by initial impression, but with a certain quality that suggested, conversely, that she might be far older than she seemed.
Isabella might have assumed the woman someone of her own age nevertheless, if not for how, among other reasons, she'd teleported into her bedroom. In the least generous interpretation, that meant obscenely complex ninth-tier magic.
But the even more obvious giveaway was her facial tattoos. Blood-red tear trails going from eyes to chin—an iconic design that other demons refused to imitate, from simple reverence.
Then the long, straight white hair. Black robes and a gray staff, marking her as a mage. Isabella knew who she was looking at, even if she didn't believe it.
The surreality of the situation doubled when the living legend spoke her name.
"Isabella? You're alive. Good."
Isabella gawked at the woman. The desaturation of the world made Vivisari's demonic red eyes ten times as distinctive, bright and vibrant on the backdrop of gray. She looked bored, borderline impatient, even disdainful, as if she were performing some routine errand that she would rather hurry on with.
Which couldn't be true. Considering where she was. What she must have done to get here.
And why?
Isabella struggled to absorb the implications. Vivisari, the Sorceress from the Party of Heroes, had surely not pursued her through the dimensional boundary?
And all of those ridiculous theories she'd been inventing—did this mean they were true?
She…was dreaming. Obviously. She had to be. She moved to pinch herself, but her incredulity was interrupted by a far more shocking event.
An enormous monster crashed into the side of the Institute, ripping out a chunk of the wall and showering the interior with debris.
"[Balefire Eruption]."
Vivisari's response was instantaneous. Isabella felt the spell more than heard it. It vibrated through the room with an explosion more intense than the monster's arrival itself—even if the sensation existed only in her head, her mana-sensing the auditory equivalent of a deafening roar.
Without so much as looking in the direction, a rod of molten red fire burst from Vivisari's staff, erasing a monster Isabella hadn't even glimpsed the general shape of before it had been obliterated, completely and utterly, with contemptuous ease.
"Are you all right?" the demon asked, apparently finding the event so inconsequential that she didn't feel the need to address it. "I feared that I wouldn't—" She cut herself off. "I should have gotten here sooner, but the experience of moving through the boundary incapacitated me, briefly. I shouldn't have kept my eyes open." She grimaced. Or, rather, her lips and nose twitched the barest amount, then returned to the previous passive expression, bored gaze drilling into Isabella. "I'm afraid we have no swift way home. I'll need to find us a more creative way out."
Only when the silence stretched on did Isabella's training finally kick her hard enough to force a response.
"I—ah—y-yes. Lady Vivisari?"
The woman didn't look at her oddly for using the name, which terrified Isabella, because didn't that mean she was right? She couldn't be. It was impossible.
"You're unharmed?" Vivisari asked. "Do you need healing?"
"N-no? No."
A lady of proper upbringing should not be stuttering this much, especially not in front of such a distinguished guest. The most distinguished individual Isabella would ever meet, bar none. Father's disgusted expression appeared in her mind at the breach in etiquette, and her back straightened automatically, stomach sinking with dread.
"No, Lady Vivisari," she said, words coming out more controlled; she had long experience plastering on composure despite the circumstances. "I am fine. Thank you."
Isabella felt like an insect under a magnifying glass. Through Vivisari's unperturbed expression, Isabella could feel how she was being studied, the response she'd given analyzed. She didn't especially enjoy the feeling.
"I'm glad," the woman said, apathetic tone not particularly making the words seem genuine.
Isabella had heard stories about how the Party of Heroes's mage had been the least conventional, and most unnerving presence, of those five legendary figures. Her eccentric behavior and cold demeanor. Nevertheless, everyone knew she was a hero, and that she did care about people—initial impressions just didn't always suggest it. But those abstract historical reports didn't live up to the truth of meeting the woman.
And her appearance. Vivisari didn't look anything like Isabella would have expected. She knew most artistic representations didn't properly portray her…unexpected stature…but when Isabella had been told the Sorceress was shorter than most statues depicted, she hadn't known they meant by this much.
Why was a thirteen-year-old girl having to look down on the world's most powerful mortal caster?
"I contained your father's ritual," Vivisari said when Isabella failed to manage words herself. "There were casualties, but—the city survived. The dimensional tear resolved itself, given time. We just needed to hold the hordes off. The Red Tithe is likely dead. You might want to know that. I needed to employ," she paused, "excessive methods to deal with him, since I hadn't yet learned how to get around voidglass's immunity." She considered her for a moment. "Saffra is fine, too. She seemed very worried for you."
There was too much to digest. Any one of those sentences could have stunned Isabella. All of them together had her struggling to even open her mouth.
"Why?" she finally managed.
Vivisari tilted her head.
"Why are you here?" Isabella clarified.
"To bring you back, of course."
The response hit her like a slap. Isabella stared. Then abruptly shook her head, hair flopping. She took a step backward.
"No, that doesn't make sense," she said accusatorially. She didn't know why her voice had taken that tone.
Vivisari watched her steadily. Several seconds passed as the woman mulled over how to respond. Finally, she sighed and looked away, through the giant hole in the wall into the gray alternate version of Meridian.
"Actually returning may pose a few challenges, but I'll manage it one way or another. I'm sorry this happened to you, Isabella. From here on out, I'll handle everything. You can relax. You'll be fine—I promise it."