Chapter 222 – Thinking in Portals
Forcing open a portal to another world is not an easy task. Or rather, I should say that forcing open a portal to a specific world is no easy task. Ripping tears in reality is disturbingly simple, if you have the raw power to do so. However, those tears almost always end up being unstable, and where that tear leads to is anyone’s guess. Not something one would choose to do, unless you really didn’t care about your well-being, or that of anyone else on the planet.
How bad the results of a tear in the fabric of reality would be depended on where it was going. The elemental planes were hardly safe for mortal creatures, even mages and monsters of that element, since there was a difference between being a Pyromancer and being a creature born of elemental fire. And on the Plane of Death, there were said to be ancient creatures whose power dwarfed my own, and to the point where they literally could not exist inside reality anymore, or anything living on that planet would die, instantly. Even the Plane of Life was not something to take lightly. After all, every bacteria, virus, cancer, and invasive species were products of Life. Such a portal could be very dangerous, indeed.
If the rift was headed to the Void Between? Well, there was Onedeirth’s story of how he had needed to enter the Void Between to hold the line while other dragons sealed the rift behind him, to keep an endless tide of soul-eating monsters from descending upon his world. That was evidence enough that one should not take the Void Between lightly.
Of course, not all portals were made by someone (consciously or not) ripping reality a new asshole. Sometimes, they formed naturally. These portals were typically found in areas rife with certain natural elements. For instance, you may find a portal to the Plane of Fire in the depths of a volcano, or discover a rift to the Plane of Earth in a deep cavern underground. These natural portals were generally small, and relatively stable, since the energies balanced out. You would find more elemental creatures in such areas, obviously, and any monsters in the area would be much stronger, but such portals were usually stable, and rarely a threat, unless someone deliberately tried to destabilize things, trying to make them into rifts.
Portals to the planes of the more spiritual elements, however, were never naturally formed. Those were always made by people, but they were usually made intentionally, which meant that they, like the natural portals to the physical elemental planes, were generally stable. However, since these were made intentionally, typically as a means to empower the ones making the portal, they usually had some kind of threat associated with them. And if they were not shut or managed properly, then the portal could become a rift, which was not good for anyone.
Of course, all of those were just portals to other planes. Portals to other worlds, however, were another story entirely. Given what Murena had revealed when we consecrated her temple in Cairo, the most likely form a portal to another world would take was basically a wormhole, allowing travel from one planet to the other within this same plane. The size of the portal, and the local terrain on each side, would determine how easily people could pass through. A large enough portal could see armies marching through to invade, or allow dragons to make their way through, for instance.
I was not discounting the possibility of there being other worlds, on other timelines, or anything like that. So far, no one in the other world had been able to conclusively prove the existence of alternate timelines. There were occasions when someone saw ‘dark mirrors’ of themselves, however, those events were typically believed to be spells drawing on the individual’s own mind, as a mental trial. In other words, illusions built upon lingering doubts or unfulfilled desires. There had been no documented case of a greedy businessman who lived alone viewing an alternate life where he became a good and charitable person, with a loving family and all that. Such things were the result of fantasy, nothing more.
At any rate, the ritual I was leading was a simple one, at least for someone with my power and knowledge. The portal was going to open, one way or another. With such short notice, the best thing we could do was to force the portal to open as a stable construct, and reduce the size of the opening.
A stable construct was important. Stable portals were easier to close, and keep closed. It was the same as dealing with a door, actually. A door in an actual doorway was less likely to cause problems than busting a random hole in the wall. If you wanted to close the door and lock it, that, too, was easier. And if you wanted to keep that door from ever opening again, you could brick up the doorway, which would keep the stability, and make it much harder for someone to force it open.
Reducing the size was also imperative. While I had the utmost confidence that I could take on anything that came through the portal, there were limits to how much I could do at once. If ten thousand monsters poured through the rift, and I was trying to keep my disciples safe while fighting them? Even if the monsters were all cannon fodder, there would be ones that escaped into the city at large, since quantity had a quality of its own. And if there were any elites or major threats in the bunch, I would have to focus on them, which meant more time for the fodder to spread out and cause damage.
In effect, this ritual was less a counterspell, but more like magical judo. I did not need to seize control of the opposing spellwork, or pump enough power into the ritual to cancel out the portal. Instead, I was going to do the equivalent of a martial artist taking a much larger foe, and using their own punch’s magical momentum to throw them to the ground.
I had not needed to use this skill here on Earth, since my power typically dwarfed those foes I faced, and ‘magical judo’ did nothing to affect the attacks of, say, a shadow dragon. However, on Onerth, being able to turn a caster’s ritual magic against them was a necessary part of any mage’s arsenal, as was the skill to disguise your magic, which is part of the reason why foci were so prized. The key to successfully getting your magic through a mage’s defenses was to either obfuscate the true nature of the spell in layers of camouflage and false flags, to make them have to work harder to understand what you were doing, or in giving them as little time as possible to read the full nature of the spell, so that they could not counter it. That meant cutting down on the casting time, but it also meant increasing the versatility and variability of the spells, making them less formulaic. A mage fighting a thaumaturge would be at a disadvantage for the first couple spells, since the CAD made the spells too ‘dense’ for a mage to easily decipher, but the lack of variability would make it easy for them to counter after that, since the thaumaturge’s spells were locked into the same formula, with only a few variables.
Unfortunately for whoever was on the other side of this ritual, I was able to read enough of the intent of the spell to understand what we were working with. The main thrust of the spell was the portal, obviously, but I could see that the spell intended to use Earth magic as part of the final steps, to create a physical gateway, which would anchor the portal, and make it self-sustaining. They were looking for a permanent passage.
That was both good, and bad. Good, because that meant whoever was on the other side had more of a plan than just punching a hole in reality and running through. That was the kind of thing people looking to escape some horrible situation would do. Or someone who wanted to unleash some unknown force on their enemies. I would have laughed if they had been aiming for the second, since Earth was not really the right kind of world for that.
The bad, of course, was that it meant whoever was on the other side of that portal had a plan, and that plan involved coming through, and making sure the door stayed open. That could mean some kind of trade between worlds, sure. Anything was possible. However, the most likely scenario meant that someone was trying to invade. Or, at the very least, set up long-term resource extraction. After all, forcing a portal between worlds was not ‘friendly trader’ behavior. At its best, it was more ‘sail a fleet of warships into Tokyo Bay and ask if Japan would like to open up trade with America’ behavior.
I could ‘read’ the way the magic was flowing, since my ritual was designed to intercept and reconfigure the other ritual, and knowing what the other side was trying to do was part of that. The ritual wanted to make a gateway that would be a staggering 40 meters tall and 30 meters wide. That was definitely leading me to think ‘invasion’, since you would, literally, be able to march multiple columns of troops through there simultaneously. That would also be enough for siege weapons to get through, as well.
The question was how to restrict it. While I really wanted to just drop it to the size of a normal double door, that wouldn’t be possible. Too much variance would likely cause the portal to start having a ‘lensing’ effect, instead of a restriction effect. Instead of restricting how big an object could go through, the objects would likely be temporarily shrunk, with the magic wearing off over time. So, you’d just have a horde of monsters that came up to your knee, lost none of their power, and were harder to hit because of their small size. Not great. Worse, things would be reversed when people went through to the other side, and becoming bigger targets without an increase in power was foolish.
However, if I kept the ratio the same, then I could eliminate the variables that would lead to possible lensing. Instead of 40m by 30m, I would only let the archway grow to 4m by 3m. And, by injecting my power into the ritual, I could make certain that it would keep the connection from growing, or causing lensing issues. That was probably as good as I was going to get it.
I began to chant, adding the ‘corrections’ to the magical formula taking shape. As I chanted, I paid close attention to how the magic was formulated. Different lineages of magical learning had their own little tells. The spells a mage of the Athelian tradition would have different logic and ‘grammar’, for lack of a better term, than those cast by a mage amongst the dwarven lands, for instance, and both would be different from those cast by dragons. These changes did not have any real effect on the spell’s outcome, but it did give some indication of a spell’s source.
This magic felt elven. I was not expert enough to tell between the different ‘flavors’ of elven magic, since the elven lands that survived the Long War in Onerth were all relatively similar in their casting, with subtle variations. A consequence of their long lives meant that they were slow to change, and slower still to change in any visible way.
Assuming this portal led to Onerth, there were only three elven lands that remained, when I was finished with the Long War. Waselin was located on an archipelago to the north. Nominally part of the Free Kingdoms, they had made an exception to their normally isolationist nature to help secure the seas against Haerth’s navy, preventing them from landing a flanking force to create a beachhead behind the lines. They had been the first to recognize what Risen Athelia was becoming, before I began the Long War. While they did not send troops or offer corpses for me to raise, they did send craftsmen, who taught me and mine much. They were also violently against slavery, and were one of the few countries that had never used the Hero Summoning.
Elthara, to the south, I had less fond memories of. They had used a summoned hero, and then betrayed them, sealing them away like a tool they were done with. They were also very fond of slave collars, and had contributed nothing to my war effort. I even had to sneak into their archives to destroy their copy of the Hero Summoning. No, I was less impressed with them, which is why I ensured that, when I left, my ritual would not just shatter every slave collar on the continent, but also would shatter the seal of the hero they betrayed. Because I could be petty like that.
And then, there was the Blessed Vale, all that was left of the country of Teldan, which the Demon King had overrun. The holy magic of the Vale was strong, and kept them safe for sixteen years, despite the rest of the nation falling and their being besieged. I had struck a bargain with their leader, a mortally wounded elven woman. She willingly became a vampire under my command, and I routed my armies around the Vale, with my people never entering it. Which made the Blessed Vale one of the few places on the eastern half of the continent that still had any weapons more dangerous than a kitchen knife. I had some hope that they would have survived the monsters my leaving would have unleashed.
As the stone gateway rose, I found myself getting excited. Yes, there was no guarantee about what I would find on the other side of that gate. However, other than the guardians of the seals, I had not found anyone who could reasonably challenge me when it came to magic. Since my ascension, I had not found any I could truly test myself against, and see how far I’d grown. This could be the chance I’d been waiting for!
The gateway formed, and then light of all eight elements glowed within the aperture. Then, they began swirling together, mixing, until the magic became clear, with a translucent sheen. There was a flash of white light, and then the portal stabilized, swirling blueish-white. A wormhole connecting this world with another.