The path to the Ruby Castle always made Jadis nervous.

Scattered along the western coast of the continent were a dozen or so pocket dimension accessible to anyone who could find them. Known as the “Fringes”, some of these places had remained populated while the Veil was active, and others were only recently rediscovered. The pocket that contained the Middle Ground, named Ahera, was one of these reclaimed places. Her destination on this day, the Ruby Castle, was one that had remained populated, and it was one of the stranger places she had visited. The bubble it resided in was named Viedau. If it was not for the library there, intact and whole from the ancient days, Jadis would not bother going. 

Though she hadn’t admitted it to anyone, it was the grime that bothered her the most. Apparently there was no spare water for cleaning. At least this was the conclusion Jadis came to when she had witnessed the permanent, filthy, hardened detritus left over by the mutated inhabitants who lived there. The walls were made of pure ruby gemstone, yet the shine and luster inside the walls was ruddy and obscured inside.

She trudged up the  stone staircase, the gateway to this land. It was strange to conceive of a hallway leading up from a field of stony boulders to another field, this one full of flowers with a crystal castle at its center. There were two hundred and fifty steps and each one brought with it a growing sense of disquiet. Something about ascending in the dim light made it seem as if the hallway pressed in closer and closer. Those stones weren’t really shifting, she knew, but she could not shake off the feeling of all that weight. She tried to turn her mind away from the sensation, thinking about the hike that had brought her there. The entrance to Viedau was six kilometers from the entrance to Ahera. It had been an easy enough journey, but the thorn bushes were coming back now that spring had returned. The prickling barbs had been annoying to deal with.

The door finally came into view out of the dimness and Jadis began to rush up the steps. She didn’t like the hallway nor its impenetrable design. On the last step she clipped the edge with her toes and stumbled forward, pushing out through the wooden door and into the fresh air beyond. Luckily she kept her feet beneath her and slid to a stop. The sky above was a shockingly bright blue, bluer than the mortal plane by a wide margin. Cloudless, sunless, the land was still bright as if it were noon on a summers day despite the fact it had been just after dawn in the mortal world. Jadis placed her hand flat above her eyes, looking across the field and breathing in a sigh of relief. The air was warm and comfortable, and all around here were tiny red flowers, shaped like teacups. Off in the distance, shining, was the Ruby Castle. 

From this distance, the disrepair was not so obvious; the bright red crystal was glittering brilliantly. Then again, the filth did not really extend to the exterior of the facade. If she could, Jadis would have simply sat here instead and had the books she needed brought out to her. But that would require communicating with the inhabitants and she simply did not have time to do that. They did not object to her scouring their books or taking a couple at a time, so she did not concern herself with asking them any questions. It was not like the wormlings would ever understand her, nor would she understand any response.

She sighed and began walking towards the castle. It was strange to see what nearly a thousands years separation had done to this place. The Veil had closed all pocket dimensions, and in that isolation, those inside the Castle had changed in many ways. Their language had changed and their forms had changed. What had been angels and demons and humans had shifted into something… else. It never failed to send a shiver down her spine to imagine what powers would need to be brought to bear in order to hammer into shape what had been wrought in the Castle.

The Veil. Dua Pria and the Lord had been frustratingly vague about it. The only thing she knew was that the Gemstone had created it, somehow. She also knew that the Veil had been destroyed, which had made the Gemstone vulnerable. It had been the Lord who had gotten his hands on it first. Despite this, she had read a few books which mentioned the concept. A demon had written an account of her theories, one of which was the idea that the way the cosmos had been shaped included ‘doorways’. She reasoned this meant a mechanism for closing and opening them must be possible.

How right she had been.

Jadis began pondering the Anima as she walked. The life force of sentient creatures and the source of all magic. Ki. Vitali. A force which was harnessed by divine entities, turning will into reality. Yet in their discovery of this power, they had unlocked it for humans as well. She herself had learned to tap into it, though with the aid of a powerful artifact. For most humans, this power might not amount to much, parlor tricks and glints which could be useful, if not subdued. But those touched by the divine, Angel or Demon alike, their powers could become quite formidable indeed. The stone around her neck…

Her hand came up to cradle the Gem. The magic inside of it was wild and untamed, able to be summoned in a heartbeat and without the formality inherent to the use of structured language. She wished for the flame, and it appeared how she needed it. In a way, this was how Dua Pria had described the way Angels used magic, pure manifestation of will. It was also how the Lord seemed to use his magic. But then again, that might be a result of that accursed weapon he wielded. The Black Trident, from what she had read, was a thing of pure malice. Her restored memory of its power and the way the skull-faced Lord used it, was a thing of terror. She was glad that they were on the same side, she would hate to have to fight him.

At last Jadis reached the gate and paused. She did not like being in this place, not even a little bit. The silence was eerie, but it was truly the sight of the the wormlings that bothered her the most. Steeling herself, she pushed on, entering the gate.

There was no special process to entering the Castle. There were no guards, no soldiers or protectors. As she walked by the squirming masses of the inhabitants, clutching their tablets and scrolls with fervor as they read, Jadis once again reminded herself to cool her thoughts. A great tide of disgust rose in her each time she saw what had become of these people, followed by anger. She could tell the differences between the demons and angels and humans by the coloration of their hides and their varied states of change, but some manner of magic had transformed the creatures of this place into elongated, worm like entities with over a dozen arms and no legs. Their heads had melted into their shoulders, making one long form from tail to crown. Faces had faded, replaced with patterned masks on the skin which twitched and shifted with their emotions. They sometimes looked at her and Jadis wondered what it was they actually saw. Was it clear? Blurry? Bright and colorful or as monochrome as an ink drawing? For the most part, though, they left her to her own devices, too enamored by the strange things they held. Glowing stones, scrolls with alien text and images on them that moved across the pages. They were beyond communication, the words they muttered incomprehensible.

She walked up a set of stairs, navigating the piles of hardened filth encrusted in the steps quickly and efficiently. At the top, she hooked around into a hallway, took it to the end, and turned right into the library entrance. 

Unlike the rest of the grounds, this room was kept pristine. The inhabitants here were smaller, more nimble and did not spend their time indulging in the glowing stones. They meticulously kept and maintained the room with their little metal picks and chisels, wiping away any dust with damp rags, their many hands working busily anytime that Jadis saw them. Whatever reasons they had to prioritize protecting the library was beyond her, but Jadis was thankful for it. Already the many bookshelves had been treasure troves of information that had offered useful guidance.

The curators, as she called them, were the only ones of all the inhabitants who wore clothes, white robes embroidered with silver and copper motifs depicting eyes, wings, and teeth. These ones had once been demons, Jadis was sure. They had the same black and orange patterning as some of the others that were in less of a state of transformation. 

It truly was a mystery, and though she had no intention of seeking out the answer, the temptation was so great that it fed into her distaste for the place. Her education had been in history and mythology, she wanted to keep the stories of the past alive so their wisdom would not be forgotten. In her head were a thousand tales that for most of time had only been spoken aloud, not written. She knew the names of a thousand gods, written down in books that had come from the other side of the world. Her professors had been enthusiastic about the trade between her island and the continent, calling this time the Age of Knowledge. It had been the traveling scholars from Antaros, the kingdom at the center of the mountains continent, which had first inspired her to want to go to the new college that had been built on her island. She liked understanding the currents that produced events, the unfolding of time into stories that could be meticulously detailed and yet still be woefully incomplete.

But there were no stories about this place in the library, there were no writings of any kind that she could tell beyond the preserved texts. Perhaps the only knowledge which might offer insight were those glowing stones the creatures liked so much, yet she could not read them. These worm people presented a question she simply had no time to answer, and she resented that fact deeply.

One of the curators came close and she reached out to pat it on the head. It recoiled slightly, but kept moving, allowing her hand to trail over its dry skin as it slunk by. “Good work little wormling.”

Wormling was as good a name as any for referring to them. 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Finding the names of the locations from the story had taken more time than she expected. Dua Pria had been surprisingly unhelpful in that regard, directing her back towards the books and offering no further aid. How the Witch knew of the pocket dimension, she wouldn’t say, but Jadis was rather certain that the woman always knew more than she let on.

During this trip Dua Pria had been quieter than normal. Usually she was offering barbs or unwanted advice regularly. She never hesitated to speak her mind through that mental link. But since Jadis regained her memory of the fight with Kurzo, Dua Pria had been distant, speaking only when needing to. Though it was a change up that brought about a sense of loneliness, Jadis was grateful for it. Hours of living without the intrusion of the pestering comments was a breath of relief. 

Jadis did not pretend to understand the Witch. Even as the ancient woman could see her thoughts and hear her words, she did not rise to the bait of Jadis’ curiosity. So many questions remained between them, or at least for Jadis. Why was Dua Pria in the Gem? What was the timeless space? Could the Witch even leave the place? Yet, even as her mind turned over these questions, there was only quiet from Dua Pria.

So using the blessed silence, Jadis dug into the days research with focus and dedication. Yet still it had taken many hours before she finally decoded the names for her destinations. She knew the names already of course, just in her language rather than in the Ekonian dialects that the divine spoke in. She was relieved to find that her next destination was The Radiance, second of the Heavens. The rest of the order followed and by the time she was feeling the ache in her back from sitting and reading all day, she had a list of names in her mind. She truly wished that she could take notes, it would make things so much easier. But physical manifestations of knowledge were dangerous, could be copied and stolen without even realizing. Even locked in a metal box with no entrance, a written page could be read through solid substances by the strange, penetrating gazes of strong Angels and Demons. 

She looked down at the tome in her hands. It concerned the Dimlight, or Ciemnos, and was bound in dark-red leather, accented with bronze. The pages inside, she was certain, were made of skin. Whose? Hard to determine. But the pages were inked with dark black words in Old Trilloni, the Imperial Speech and predecessor to her language, Trilon. The script was nearly identical with few variations, but the words were entirely different, and the logograms that accompanied words and sentances that changed their meanings. These had stopped being used in the mortal plane nearly 500 years ago. As writing become more common among the peasantry, it was simplified and standardized. The first few times Jadis had come to this library, she had spent more time learning to read the dead language than she had seeking the answers to her questions. The words were still hard to decipher at times, but she was able to get by well enough.

With three books, the maximum the curators would allow her to leave with, Jadis left the library.

As usual, the curators nearest the doorway would reach out and weakly grab onto the silky red robes that enclosed her armor. She did not understand why, it did not seem like they really wanted to stop her. Their malformed hands would tug at the hems, un-tucking the folds from her belt and exposing the shining, diamond shaped plates underneath which locked together like scales. She would yank the fabric from their grasp, scowling, and move on her way, hastily re-wrapping herself as she walked. She had expected it of course, but that did not prevent it from filling her with annoyance. Yet the usual admonishment from Dua Pria didn’t come. Normally she would reprimand Jadis for not stopping and correcting the folds in her robes when this happened. In her day, one did not go outside without their robes and outerwear looking properly folded, tucked, and presentable. Those sensibilities had fallen out fashion nearly 300 years ago and Jadis never failed to remind her. The lack of words, for the first time that day, seemed unpleasant. 

Yet she did not reach out to Dua Pria. The Witch was full of venom and was not afraid to spill it all over the world. Jadis did not want to be burned on this day.

Despite her desire to curl up in her bed and start working on deciphering the tome she had found about the Radiance, Jadis hesitated at the outskirts of the Ruby Palace. She turned, looking back at the fortress to admire the shining crystal that made it. Despite the many hours that had passed in her reading, it still looked bright, as if midday. She closed her eyes, wondering if there was any possibility of staying here. She entertained for just a few moments the thought of protecting the Gem in this place until another such as her might be able to take on the burden of it. She could instead focus on improving the Ruby Castle, cleaning it and attempting to find common ground with the wormlings. Perhaps she might even learn a thing or two about their history.

After an entire day of silence, Dua Pria finally spoke. “Would you be able to live with yourself?”

Jadis jumped at the sudden voice in her head, then tensed. As usual, the Witch had been listening. For a few moments she considered various responses, taunts, and barbs. But instead, Jadis chose silence. 

She would not have been able to live with herself, not really. Not knowing the power of the thing around her neck. 

With a sigh she turned towards the plain, weathered door that sat in the middle of a thick knot of flowers. She was grateful that unlike the Heavens and Hells, these pocket dimensions had no randomness in their exits. She entered the door, pushing down into the dark staircase on the other side, and walked quickly back to her own world. 

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