A few minutes later, I drop straight through the tower into the middle of the roots below. They shift away from me this time, almost like they’re trying to give me space. I bet that’s another bonus for having control of the tower, but it could just be that I’m a little more recharged than before. A quick glance around doesn’t show anything obviously different, so I look up and motion for Clutter to drop down.

  “You have to…” He makes a pushing motion with his hands.

  “Right. Whoops.” I step to the side, then tilt my head up at him. “Good?”

  He nods. “Good.”

  His legs swing over the edge, then the rest of him. He lands in a crouch where his knees almost touch the floor from how low he bends, and he gives the area a quick once-over before slowly rising to his full height.

  “There’s so much magic here.” He whispers in awe. “And all of it is… just… appearing from the little bit we used in the catalyst.”

  Pearl pushes out of her shell and makes herself comfortable on my shoulder. “The tower is some kind of magical device. But we already knew that, so the question is; why can’t we feel all the work the tower is doing when we’re inside of it? If it’s somehow duplicating the magic from the catalyst, that should take a lot of magical effort.”

  “No idea. Maybe it’s drawing magic from the walls?” I shrug as I brush aside some root-like tentacles to reveal a path. “This place is just weird; there’s obviously magic everywhere, but I can’t feel any of the not obvious stuff.”

  “I can’t feel magic, but nothing here really looked like magic before.” Clutter ducks into the path, then turns to wait for me. “But we’re just touching the walls and doorways appear almost anywhere. For something that magical that works pretty much everywhere, it should leave behind a whole lot of ambient magic.”

  Pearl nods in agreement as we start walking away from the place we spawned. “And we should feel the magic come from somewhere if it’s being sent to the wall right when we touch it. But all I can feel is the door appearing. Kind of like… the magic’s always here, but it’s dormant somehow until someone activates it.”

  I raise an eyebrow. “Is that possible?”

  “Yes or no. If that’s what’s happening here, then yes. According to everything else I know; no.” She taps her feet against my shoulder as she looks around at the roots. “This sensation right now is what I’d expect to always feel here–magic that’s confined to strict boundaries, so it doesn’t leak out everywhere, but that’s still always visible.”

  She leans to the side, grabbing my earlobe to keep herself steady, and stretches her fingertips until she brushes against a strand of thin, blue magic. A tiny blue spark snaps between her finger and the strand, and for a split second, her fingertip goes completely blue. With a shudder and a grimace, she pulls away.

  “Yuck, yeah, that’s connected to some kind of central network. It tried to kick me out and pull me in at the same time.” She shakes her hand, and the blue literally flies out of her finger and splatters against the ground. “I think it’s the tower, but we’re almost out of its detection range already. So what else is it using the roots for?”

  I shrug at the leading question, and Clutter shakes his head. Pearl either doesn't notice or doesn’t care, and just leads right into muttering to herself about how she can take this ‘technology’ for herself. If she hasn’t seen it before, then it’s probably not shellraiser tech or derived from it.

  But if that’s true… what kind of species had this tech? Are they still around? Did the system get rid of them like it did the shellraisers, or did it change them like it did the paindne? Hell, is this actually a city that existed in the world before? People definitely would’ve found… I don’t know… ruins if it just decayed, or a giant anomaly if it suddenly disappeared. Then again, the system could easily just cover that up, too.

  …I guess until we actually find out what this place is, I’ll just have to keep guessing.

  As if to snap me out of my thoughts, Clutter lets out an excited noise and jogs ahead. I watch with a raised eyebrow as he plants his hands on a wall a few dozen steps away, but before he says anything, his tail lowers and he steps away dejected. I start to open my mouth to ask him a question, but his tail starts wagging before I can get a word in and he rushes to the other wall–jumping a thick root and smacking away some tentacles to get there.

  “Find anything interesting?” I ask when he doesn’t instantly run away.

  “I think so. Come take a look at this!” He licks his lips, then takes a step back and proudly gestures at a… scratch on the wall. “Isn’t it neat?”

  I lean in, just in case I’m missing anything, but it just looks like a gouge in stone to me.

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  “I’m not seeing it. Got an explanation loaded?”

  He vigorously nods. “Look at the edges–if this was a normal scratch mark, like the one I thought was abnormal a few seconds ago–what should be there?”

  “...I don’t know. Debris?”

  “Nope! Less!” He taps the edge of the claw, then makes a scraping motion along it. “If you swung something against this wall, you’d impact right here, then dig deeper as you get close to the middle, and then shallow again as you pull away. But right here, this gouge is perfectly even all the way through. And it’s even the exact same width all the way through!”

  From how excited his voice sounds, I feel like I’m missing something here. “Clutter, I don’t know shit about this. Why’s it exciting?”

  “Because! This isn’t something you can make with random debris! Someone was here, and they made this–either on purpose as some kind of marking, or when they were testing something out, or… I can’t think of a third thing right now, but you get what I’m saying, right?”

  I furrow my brow and slowly nod. “Not to burst your bubble, but you… uh… do remember the trapped tiles, right? How we definitely came to the conclusion that someone trapped them after the fact because we could see them, and I could feel the magic under them?”

  He stares blankly at me. Then blinks slowly as a blush creeps up his cheeks. “U-um, I-I, I definitely didn’t forget! This is so much different! Those traps, someone made them to… um… keep people out! But this is… it’s… to show someone something!”

  As Clutter smiles shakily, Pearl and I share a look. Even if he’s making stuff up on the spot to try and downplay his embarrassment, he still makes a good point. The mark was made deliberately–and as far as I can tell, there aren’t any traps in this part of the hall. So whatever it’s marking, if it’s even marking something at all, is meant to be seen.

  “Hum. You might have a point.” I step up to him and gently nudge him out of the way. “I doubt it’s this easy, but what the hell. Takes thirty seconds if I’m wrong.”

  I press my hand to the wall. Magic traces my skin, somehow coming from the surface of the wall where none was before, and… nothing opens. I tilt my head to the side and take a step back, pulling my hand away. The grey glow doesn’t dissipate. It sticks there in a perfect handprint, scraping at my awareness with an almost antagonistic crackle.

  “See? See?” Clutter gestures at my handprint–inside of which is the gouge–with a smile. “I wasn’t just being forgetful! Um, what’s it doing? It… isn’t doing anything. Or going away.”

  Pearl hums deep in thought. “I can’t tell. It’s just under the surface of the material, but it’s… not there. Like how you can see your reflection in glass, but you’re not really there. Um, not that I’m insinuating there’s somewhere else the magic actually is. Just that it’s… well… okay, that was a bad analogy. It’s there, but there’s no space for it to be there. Does that make any sense?”

  “It’s like… trying to stick a photograph inside of a rock?” Clutter suggests.

  “Sure. That’s good enough.” Pearl says with a nod. “Maybe you should check your map, Shelby?”

  I nod and summon my Class Card. There’s a good chance this thing will appear on the map as a new marker. But we’ve only been walking for… maybe ten minutes at most. Not that far at all. Damn, now I wish we’d checked here before the towers got anchored. Then we’d know if this is a brand new addition or if we just missed it before.

  My map pops open, and I push it away just a little so the plastic-y tower doesn’t poke me in the eye. I zoom out a little just in case, but there’s absolutely no change from before. It even looks like the map only shows a birds-eye view–which, now that I think of it, could be why it doesn’t look like anything’s changed. Zooming in as far as I can go doesn’t seem to do anything, either, so the map’s no help.

  “Nothing. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t anything.” I send my Class Card away with a flick of my wrist. “The map only shows a top-down view. If there’s anything in the walls, it doesn’t look like it’ll be any help.”

  Clutter frowns and stares accusingly at the wall. The magic roots hum along to their unknown purpose, and if I listen closely enough, I can hear them growing off into the distance. They’re stretching towards something–that much is obvious–but whether that ‘something’ is important is another question.

  Silence hangs in the air like a static chill, broken only by the soft squelch of Pearl shifting on my shoulder. Something about the handprint is bothering all of us. It feels like it’s supposed to be a marker or a hint–something to let us know we’re on the right path–but we don’t know what we’re even starting to look for. Clutter could be right. Or it could be nothing at all. Or there could be some kind of a… guide to the markings we find. A legend telling us what the gouge means.

  Or the gouge could’ve damaged the magic in the wall, and we’re overthinking about absolutely nothing.

  But… the wall is damaged. I close my eyes and focus on the other scratch that Clutter looked at; to be honest, it doesn’t look like a scratch at all. More like a piece of the grey tentacles broke off and stuck to the wall, since it’s raised up and not scratched in. So aside from the floor traps, this is the first sign of any damage we’ve seen to the material making up this place. Maybe… hell, maybe it’s just weaker here.

  Maybe that’s what the gouge is signaling.

  I flip a projectile into my palm and aim it at the wall. Pearl grabs onto my ear for support, and Clutter yelps as he scurries to run away. I give him a few seconds to get clear, then focus on my coin. Nothing we’ve done so far has even come close to damaging this place. So there’s no reason not to put absolutely everything into power and size.

  “Close your eyes.” I say to Pearl as I take a few steps back and raise my other arm to block my eyes. “Don’t want you getting blinded for no reason.”

  She nods and raises her arm. “Ready.”

  The coin plinks off my thumbnail, and for one heartbeat, destruction exists. A deafening roar of magic that blinks into existence, full of salt and violence and shearing magical annihilation. I stare, eyes full of disbelief and the inability to understand just how much raw power that one projectile managed to create.

  And, through the head-sized hole it ripped into the wall, something peeks out at me. A hexagon of rock–actual rock–that glimmers with my handprint.