The Obsidian Shaeth

"The Obsidian Shaeth" is included as prelude No. 14 in *The Juno Contingency (novel).*

## Teaser

An advanced magical civilization undertakes its first voyage to another planet in the hopes of discovering new sources of magic.

## Plot

### 1. The Floating Island

An advanced magical civilization is progressing in their capabilities of space travel. Yules is a young smith working on an island that will be sent into space on the world's first interplanetary mission. While working, Yules meets brilliant young mage Frilia, one of the gravitomancers who will be raising the island into space. Frilia takes an instant liking to Yules, though Yules regards her superciliously. As someone without magical abilities (a naught), he is generally treated as a second-class citizen and resents mages.

The two work to complete preparations for the voyage while the rest of the island's 100-person crew and tons of supplies are embarked. Frilia visits Yules in her free time and observes the smith at work in his greenhouse. While mages can exert and modify fundamental forces, chemical processes are much harder to control, so there is no magical means to replenish breathable air on the space journey. The plants in Yules's greenhouse will fulfill this function, and he also monitors the island's air quality.

Yules asks Frilia to stop bothering him till Frilia confesses that she, too, is annoyed by mages. As a powerful gravitomancer, she will have to produce children with other mages at the Magistry's orders. To even secure her place on this mission, she had to agree to conceive soon after returning. Frilia is being pursued by several mages on board who consider themselves her suitors, which is why she prefers Yules's company.

Gradually Yules warms to Frilia's presence. While Yules moves heavy equipment in the greenhouse, Frilia helps him by using her abilities to nullify gravity, allowing him to experience a zero-g environment and work more easily. Yules wishes he were a mage himself, but Frilia counsels him that magic doesn't come without costs. The planet's mana they channel has a mind of its own, and it can drive mages to act irrationally if they can't control it.

They discuss the pending mission, and Frilia explains that it will take all the power of all 20 advanced gravitomancers aboard to lift the island into space. Yules asks why they don't send a smaller island, such as those that were first lifted to orbit. Frilia explains that mana comes from the planet, but if they separate a piece of the planet, that piece's mana will gradually decay out in the vacuum of space. This is what happened on the first space voyages, and it crippled the mages aboard, as mages who become disconnected from the planet's mana permanently lose their abilities. On this interplanetary voyage, they have calculated they need to bring an island a mile across to ensure the mana won't dissipate over the duration of the mission.

On the day of launch, Frilia and the gravitomancers focus their power and nullify gravity on the island, inducing weightlessness and causing loose material to float away. The earth shakes as they break the island free and raise them skywards. The air pressure and temperature drop quickly until they reach four tenths an atmosphere of pressure, whereupon the aeromancers create a shell around the island to contain the remaining air.

Yules is stunned by their ascent into space, especially once they achieve orbit over their aquamarine world. Afterwards he goes to visit Frilia, but she and the rest of the gravitomancers are resting in comas as they recover from the launch.

### 2. Via Astromancy

The floating island orbits the world for several days as the crew completes preparations. The gravitomancers eventually recover and imbue the island with a tenth of artificial gravity to make locomotion easier. The mages calculate the final course and launch the island off into interplanetary space towards Nysix, the neighboring world of dark volcanic glass. As the mages' knowledge is limited to Newtonian mechanics, they must adjust their course to account for errors introduced by the unmodeled effects of time dilation.

Yules and Frilia continue to meet. Their favorite activity becomes to hike to the peak of their mile-diameter world and stargaze, far above the many buildings below. Yules carries more and more supplies up to the peak to make it more comfortable. The two begin an affair, with Frilia insisting they hide it from the others as fraternization between mages and naughts is forbidden.

Midway through the journey the island is struck by a meteor that destroys the majority of the greenhouses. Large fragments of the island are broken free by the impact and enter orbit around it, later raining down in subsequent collisions until the aeromancers create a defensive bubble around them. With the loss of the plants, the crew is now consuming oxygen faster than it can be replenished, and they will run out in several weeks.

The Lord Commander calls a council to devise a response. Yules and the other smiths need several months to restore the greenhouses back to capacity, but the Commander doesn't wish to abort the mission. Instead he orders most of the mages to enter a shelter in the main keep where Frilia and the other gravitomancers use their powers to slow the flow of time on their pocket of the island down to one hundredth of normal (without knowledge of general relativity, this is thought to be a sui generis ability unconnected to gravity). With most of the crew now consuming negligible oxygen, Yules and the other smiths work to replenish the greenery. The island reaches Nysix and enters orbit for months before the greenhouses are restored and the crew emerges from its time bubble.

Afterwards Yules is reprimanded by the Lord Commander for taking so long in his repairs, but he knows this is really a rebuke for his affair with Frilia. Yet he reconnects with her and misses her after the months of absence.

### 3. The Naught World

They select a landing site on Nysix through telescopic observations, then the gravitomancers nullify the island's gravity attraction and guide it down to the surface. The obsidian landscape grows beneath them as a sea of volcanic glass, glinting sunlight from a myriad shards. The island quakes as it sets down on Nysix, and the aeromancers extend the island's air shell out slightly onto the surface. The Lord Commander ceremoniously descends from the island's edge to take the first steps on another world. Several other mages are allowed to make their own symbolic steps, though none of the naughts are.

The expedition collects samples of Nysix's volcanic glass and ventures progressively farther out onto its surface. After the excitement of the landing wears off, many mages express disappointment that they sense no mana emanating from Nysix as had been expected. They were hoping to discover new forces and magic to harness by traveling here. One mage openly derides Nysix as a "disappointing naught world."

Nonetheless, after the first day the crew celebrates with a feast. During the festivities, Frilia notices that one mage, Absithia, is absent. She is nowhere in any of the buildings, so they conduct a search of the island. They eventually find her curled up at the foot of the island on Nysix's obsidian surface, rocking back and forth in a trance murmuring "What am I … What am I …" Frilia remarks that Abisithia is a powerful medium and may be exhibiting a special reaction to the planet. They take her to the infirmary and use herbs to break the trance, and afterwards she has no memory of the incident.

The next morning the crew is shocked to see a change in Nysix's landscape. The flat volcanic glass has morphed to form gentle valleys and hills, it shimmers along a path resembling a flowing river, and slanted towers of glass appear mimicking trees. Absithia recognizes the landscape as that of her native village, which she was homesick for last night.

The Lord Commander calls another urgent council. Despite their initial impressions that Nysix has no mana, Frilia theorizes that maybe the mages and their island have transplanted the mana from their own planet here by touching down. She suggests the planet may be "waking up" to possessing this strange power. The Lord Commander is thrilled that, beyond merely discovering mana that Nysix already had, now they have an opportunity to shape and cultivate Nysix's mana to their liking. The crew organizes expeditions onto the changing terrain and takes many observations from the island's towers.

While Frilia is busy with the observations, Yules finds her to express his concerns about the planet's rapid changes. Frilia assures him that they understand what is happening. Yules counters that, from his limited knowledge of magical history, mana on their homeworld developed alongside humanity, gaining greater power and sophistication as it was cultivated by the mages. Now that their world's highly advanced mana has been grafted onto a primitive world, no one can foresee the consequences.

### 4. Silent Armada

For the next several days Nysix's landscape continues to morph, conjuring and meshing multiple geographies from the mages' memories. It soon develops simulated fauna, which seem benign until they engage in alarming facsimiles of hunting, fighting, devouring each other, and fornicating. A ring of obelisks also rises in the distance, encircling the island, something that no mage has in their memory.

The mages are unnerved by the developments, and Frilia cautions the Lord Commander that the mana on their homeworld developed slowly over eons, but no one has ever experienced a whole world's mana awakening all at once. Others argue that they have accomplished their mission and should report back, so the Lord Commander acquiesces and orders preparations for departure.

That night a large quake shakes the island and the ring of obelisks starts moving continually closer. Even the samples of Nysix's volcanic glass the crew have collected spontaneously rearrange themselves into rings and cinch tighter. Absithia succumbs to another trance, screaming violently, "What am I?! What am I?!" This time the trance is impossible to break.

The Lord Commander orders an emergency departure. Frilia and the other gravitomancers muster in the island's central keep to begin levitation. They nullify the island's gravity and rise smoothly into the sky. But in response a flock of obsidian birds springs from Nysix and swarms around them. The birds are silent when in Nysix's ultra-thin atmosphere, but they emit piercing, sharded caws when they swoop through the island's air shell. The birds start attacking the keep, so the mages erect a defensive shell while the island continues its ascent.

Nysix births an armada of obsidian birds that rise and blot out the stars. They encircle the island and dive-bomb it, turning into daggers as they fall. Frilia and the other gravitomancers warn that the attack is weighing down the island and diluting its mana. They eventually lose their grip on the levitation and the island free-falls back to the surface, destroying most of its structures in the crash.

The survivors find most of the crew dead, including the Lord Commander. The Nysix landscape is continuing its rapid changes but appears to be quieting down, satisfied that the foreign island can no longer escape. Yules, Frilia, and two dozen other survivors collect in the main keep, the only building to have partially survived. They reconstruct and reinforce it to take shelter.

*Read the conclusion "5. The Obsidian Shaeth" on Amazon.*